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Tech News: 2020-26

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

  • There are some new tools to make it easier for newcomers to start editing. They are available on some wikis. These wikis had a problem with the visual editor for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug in the new tools. It was soon fixed. [1]
  • Advanced item Some user scripts and gadgets stopped working because of a change to CSS selectors. .vectorTabs should be replaced with .vector-menu-tabs to fix this. [2]

Changes later this week

  • The developers are working on a new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This will be released on 24 June. You can give feedback. [3]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 June. It will be on all wikis from 25 June (calendar).

Future changes

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:48, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 June 2020

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:53, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #422

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Wikibase Live sessions is coming back with the first call about Data Modeling in the context of Libraries happening on Thursday, July 2nd at 1600 UTC.
  • Development
    • It is now possible to search for EntitySchema pages using a shortcut “E:”, similar to “P:” for Properties and “L:” for Lexemes. For example: E:E10 or E:kakapo. T245529
    • Continued working on the first version of Federation, which will allow other Wikibase installations to use Wikidata's Properties - getting closer to a first testable version
    • More work on consistency of user interface components
    • Finalizing the click-dummy for the first version of the Query Builder so we can start testing it with some editors soon and get feedback.
    • Continuing to investigate how to improve our APIs and other ways to improve access to the data in Wikidata for programmers
    • Discussed the future of the Wikidata Query Service and ideas for next steps we can take to make it scale better. Guillaume will join the next office hour to talk about it.
    • More work on clearer separation of Wikibase repository and Wikibase client code in order to improve maintainability

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:01, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-27

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

  • Everyone was logged out. This was because a few users saw the wikis as if they were logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [5]
  • Some readers didn't see new edits to pages. If the page had been recently changed they saw an older version of the page instead. This only affected readers who were logged out. It lasted for ten days. It has been fixed. [6]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 July. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (calendar).

Future changes

  • The Modern and Monobook skins use the ID searchGoButton for the go button. This is searchButton for Vector. To have the same ID for all skins it will change to searchButton in Monobook and Modern too. This will affect gadgets and user scripts. It will happen on 23 July. They should be updated to use searchButton. You can read more and see a list of affected scripts.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:30, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #3

On 16 March 2020, the 50 millionth edit was made using the visual editor on desktop.

Seven years ago this week, the Editing team made the visual editor available by default to all logged-in editors using the desktop site at the English Wikipedia. Here's what happened since its introduction:

  • The 50 millionth edit using the visual editor on desktop was made this year. More than 10 million edits have been made here at the English Wikipedia.
  • More than 2 million new articles have been created in the visual editor. More than 600,000 of these new articles were created during 2019.
  • Almost 5 million edits on the mobile site have been made with the visual editor. Most of these edits have been made since the Editing team started improving the mobile visual editor in 2018.
  • The proportion of all edits made using the visual editor has been increasing every year.
  • Editors have made more than 7 million edits in the 2017 wikitext editor, including starting 600,000 new articles in it. The 2017 wikitext editor is VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode. You can enable it in your preferences.
  • On 17 November 2019, the first edit from outer space was made in the mobile visual editor.
  • In 2019, 35% of the edits by newcomers, and half of their first edits, were made using the visual editor. This percentage has been increasing every year since the tool became available.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:05, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #423

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Ptable displays the periodic table automatically extracted from information provided by Wikidata; it also provides a check that all the elements are there with some basic properties. Additional pages provide charts of the nuclides under different criteria such as half-life. Each element or nuclide is linked to its Wikidata item for more information or to edit if necessary.
  • Development
    • More work on the consistent design system (Phabricator board)
    • More work on decoupling the different Wikibase extensions from each other
    • Polishing the first step of Federation (using Wikidata's Properties in another Wikibase installation) (incl. preventing users from selecting a federated property with a non-supported data type (phab:T252012) and preventing users from accessing Special:NewProperty when federation is enabled (phab:T255576) and viewing a list of all properties when federation is enabled (phab:T246339))
    • Continuing research and interviews around the topic of making it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers
    • Doing first testing of mockups and prototypes of the first version of the Query Builder - coding can start soon
    • Convert a few properties from string to external identifier: Linguasphere code (P1396), KOATUU identifier (P1077) and ISIN (P946)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2020-28

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

  • The Score extension has been disabled for now. This is because of a security issue. It will work again as soon as the security issue has been fixed. [7]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 July. It will be on all wikis from 9 July (calendar).

Future changes

  • Abstract Wikipedia is a new Wikimedia project. It will collect language-independent information that can be easily read in different languages. It builds on Wikidata. The name is preliminary. You can read more. [8]
  • The iOS Wikipedia app developers are thinking about new experimental tools. If you use an iPhone you can help them by answering the survey.
  • Some rules for user signatures will soon be enforced. Lint errors and invalid HTML will no longer be allowed in user signatures. Nested substitution will not be allowed. A link to your user page, user talk page or user contributions will be required. You can check if your signature works with the new rules. This is because the signatures can cause problems for tools or other text on the page.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:18, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #424

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: New co-facilitator introductions and tools for editathons, 14 July. Agenda
    • Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #12, 18 July Facebook, YouTube
    • Past: Celtic Knot Wikimedia language conference, online, July 9-10. Videos, documentation and slides of sessions are accessible from the program page.
  • Tool of the week
    • DragNDrop.js makes it possible to show a Wikipedia article and drag items to Wikidata.
  • Development
    • Continued building out documentation for Federated Properties (phabricator:T255651) and making interface improvements to the first stage of the feature (incl. phabricator:T246886, changes to special pages that interact with both Items/Properties, and phabricator:T255581, changes to Special:ListDataTypes when federation is enabled)
    • More work on the consistent design system
    • More work on decoupling the different Wikibase extensions from each other to make development easier
    • Finalizing research and interviews to better understand what could be improved in the way developers access Wikidata's data (APIs, SPARQL)
    • Testing the first prototype of the Simple Query Builder with some editors to get final input before coding starts
    • Sorting of language links on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects was broken (presumably by a change in MediaWiki core). A fix is being worked on. (phabricator:T257625)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:27, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-29

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • Users can thank others for their edits. Checkusers can now see user data related to that action. This can help identify sock puppets who harass others using thanks. [9]

Problems

  • Everyone was logged out a couple of weeks ago to fix a security problem. The problem was not entirely fixed. Because of this everyone was logged out once again last week. [10][11]

Changes later this week

  • Wikis that are not for one specific language can translate pages. Sometimes parts of translations are outdated or missing. Outdated translations are marked with a pink background. Missing translations will also be marked in the future. This markup can sometimes break things. It can soon be disabled by using <translate nowrap></translate> on the source page. [12]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 July. It will be on all wikis from 16 July (calendar).

Future changes

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:29, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #425

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming: The First Wikidata Workshop: Second Call for Papers. Papers due: August 10, 2020 | Workshop date: October 29, 2020
    • Upcoming: next Wikidata office hour, July 21st at 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST) in the Wikidata Telegram group. Query Service special with guests from WMF Search Team.
    • Upcoming: Wikidata Lab XXIV: Posicionamento digital relativo with Ederporto - July 23 17:00 UTC (14:00 BRT). In this technical training, we'll study the possibilities and functionalities of relative digital positioning in images and do practical activities on this topic using historical photographs of the city of São Paulo. The event will be held in Portuguese. Join us!
    • Upcoming video: July 21 - Wikipedia Weekly Network - Entity Schemas and Shape Expressions (ShEx) Facebook YouTube
    • Upcoming video: July 25 - Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #13 Facebook YouTube
    • Upcoming: Kidok-Workshop, online workshop about church building data. In German, non-native users welcome. Currently looking for a date in the upcoming week and people to help!
    • Upcoming video: Beyond Wikipedia - Knowledge that even a computer can understand. July 22, 2020 at 17:00 UTC. In this talk, Zbyszko Papierski will present Wikidata Query Service as one way that developers can interact with Wikidata.
  • Development
    • More work on the consistent design system
    • More work on decoupling the different Wikibase extensions from each other to make development easier:
    • Prepare the first development phase for the Simple Query Builder
    • Reference game: run a scraper, work on a dashboard that will gives an overview of the potential references that have already been judged in the game
    • Fix a bug related to maximum limit of search results (phab:T256885)
    • Resolve some configuration issues regarding Entity Sources (phab:T254315)
    • Federated Properties:
      • Changes to special pages that interact with both items/properties when federation is enabled (phab:T246886)
      • Changes to Special:ListDatatypes when federation is enabled (phab:T255581)
    • Add new monolingual language codes: mic (Miꞌkmaq), gil (Kiribati)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2020-30

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. The mobile main page special casing stopped working 14 July. 60 wikis now have main pages that don't work well on mobile. You can see which ones, how to fix it and how to get help in Phabricator. This is the same problem that was reported in Tech News 2020/24 and 2020/26.

Problems

  • There is a problem with the interlanguage links. The interlanguage links are the links that help you find a specific page in a different language. The sorting is broken. The developers are working on a solution. [17]
  • Some users keep getting the notifications for the same event. Some of these are old events. [18]
  • Some users have trouble logging in. This is probably a browser cookie problem. The developers are working on understanding the problem. If you have trouble logging in you can see the details on Phabricator. [19]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 July. It will be on all wikis from 23 July (calendar).

Future changes

  • There is a Printable version link. This will disappear. That is because web browsers today can create a printable version or show how it will look in print anyway. [20]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:13, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-31

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • The Starter kit is now available for wiki communities. This page lists technical resources, tools, and recommendations. These are essential to operate a wiki project. This is mostly useful for smaller wikis where the community has limited experience with this. [21]
  • The first features of the Desktop Improvements project are available for logged-in users on all wikis. In order to use them, uncheck Use Legacy Vector in your local or global preferences in section Skin preferences. More improvements are planned. Feedback is welcome.
  • Advanced item On multiple wikis, a UTCLiveClock gadget is available. For wikis that import the gadget directly from mediawiki.org, end users can now choose a different timezone to show instead of UTC.

Problems

  • Advanced item The deployment train for MediaWiki has been blocked this week. [22][23]
  • Translation Notification Bot was sending the same message multiple times to every translator. This has been fixed. [24]
  • Some users were receiving the same notification multiple times. This has been fixed. [25]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from July 29. It will be on all wikis from JUly 30 (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:51, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #426

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • We would love suggestions for tools to include in this section of the weekly summary. Please add your suggestions directly under Status updates/Next#Backlog after checking that the tool isn't already listed.
  • Development
    • Changed the size of image previews to 1024 in the gallery view of the query service to avoid some images not loading sometimes (phabricator:T258241)
    • Added an actual space between the entity title and the name of the fallback language (if any), so that the fallback language isn't selected anymore when double-clicking the entity title for copying (phabricator:T256857)
    • Fixed the directionality of text pieces in placeholders that mix LTR and RTL (phabricator:T253812)
    • Continued work on first pieces of design system to make coding new features easier in the future
    • Continued untangling the code of Wikibase Client and Wikibase Repo to make it easier to develop on them
    • Finished first piece of research on how to make it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers - more work to be done
    • Preparing to start coding on the Query Builder to make it easier to create queries without having to know SPARQL
    • Finished running the scraper that gets potential new references for unreferenced statements and preparing it for publishing

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:03, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Short description

The short description "founder and first Umayyad Caliph (r.661-680)" only makes sense to people who already know who Hazrat Muawiyah was. If you want to say he is the founder of something, you need to say of what. Do you think it would make more sense to say "first Umayyad Caliph (r.661-680) and founder of the Umayyad Caliphate"?-- Toddy1 (talk) 12:28, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

Toddy1 Good pickup. I have changed the short description to what you suggested. Thank you. Chewings72 (talk) 13:01, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 2 August 2020

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:24, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #427

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Wiki13
  • Tool of the week
    • SQID allows you to analyse, browse and query Wikidata. SQID is inspired by Magnus Manske's Reasonator, but focuses on prominently featuring information about Wikidata classes and properties.
  • Development
    • The last week was our quarterly prototyping week. We worked on the following projects. None of them are ready for prime-time yet but we'll continue with them.
      • Slices: We've had a lot of requests for accessing dumps of a smaller part of Wikidata's data since rarely anyone needs the complete data in Wikidata. The tricky part is figuring out which part is needed and if any of that can be generalized. We looked into for example how to make dump generation faster so we could potentially produce more smaller dumps that only cover a part of Wikidata's data, either thematically (e.g. humans) or by type of data (e.g. only statements and English labels and aliases but not sitelinks or descriptions).
      • REST API: As part of our effort to make it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers we looked into a REST API. We tried to see if we could cover the existing action API modules in a REST API. We could. We'll take this as input for our ongoing API work now.
      • Improving quality ratings through ORES: ORES can judge the quality of an Item automatically. It is currently not very good at it however. We tried a few things to make it more accurate and found some easy wins we'll probably make happen in the next weeks.
      • Query manipulator: One of the ways we could potentially improve the load situation of the Wikidata Query Service is by automatically analyzing and then redirecting a bunch of queries to other systems that are more suitable for that particular type of query. The nice thing about that would be that the person/program sending the query wouldn't have to care about it but it'd be done automagically for them. We tried to build such a system and the results look very promising but more work/experimenting is needed, especially together with the WMF Search team.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:37, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-32

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

  • All queries to the Wikidata Query Service failed between 17:50 and 17:59 UTC on Thursday 23 July. Some queries failed during a longer period. [26]
  • Interlanguage links were ordered incorrectly for the past few weeks. This problem was also mentioned in Tech News two weeks ago. The problem is now fixed. [27]
  • There is a problem with the global preferences for the "Use Legacy Vector" option. Developers are working on fixing it. [28]
  • A bug in the Wikibase extension had disabled the "move" and "create" types of protection in the main (Gallery) namespace on Wikimedia Commons. New protections could not be added, and existing protections were not enforced, allowing some page moves and page creations that should not have been possible. This has now been fixed. [29]

Changes later this week

  • The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. This week, the current beta feature will become the video player for everyone on most non-Wikipedia wikis. The old player will be removed. [30]
  • Users' global.js and global.css pages will now also be loaded on the mobile site. You can read documentation for how to avoid applying styles to the mobile skin. [31]
  • Advanced item In the MonoBook skin, the searchGoButton identifier is now searchButton. This may affect CSS and JS gadgets. Migration instructions can be found in T255953. This was previously mentioned in issue 27.
  • Advanced item Bot operators can use Pywikibot to regularly archive discussions. The behavior when the bot uses counter to prevent large archives was changed. [32]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 5. It will be on all wikis from August 6 (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:43, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Instagram as reliable source for coptic orthodox pedophilia scandal

Hello! I noticed that you removed some edits regarding a leaked report because they had instagram as a reference. The instagram account was first to post the report and the report has been mentioned in many news stories including one by the LA times. I simply included the instagram account as the reference because it includes the report in its entirety. The report is not available in as much detail in other places.

What is your advice getting the information up the proper references. Please comment on my talk page. thank you :)

--Titus Obelisk (talk) 14:15, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Titus Obelisk If the story was in the LA Times then quote the LA Times as your source, not Instagram.Chewings72 (talk) 00:49, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #428

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Past: Wikibase Live Session - August 2020. This session had a few people present on some of their work with modeling GLAM data in Wikibase or Wikidata. (replay)
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Daniel Mietchen and Lane Rasberry about Scholia, a project to present bibliographic information and scholarly profiles of authors and institutions, 11 August. [Agenda]
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #25, August 16
  • Development
    • finalized designs for the query builder to start coding at the beginning of September
    • wrapping up the initial work on the design system so that we can start using the first pieces of it in the query builder development
    • working on properly linking redirects in recent changes, watchlist and co (phabricator:T255387)
    • addressed remaining security review comments about the Wikidata Bridge so that we can deploy it finally on the first Wikipedia
    • fixed a bug where string values had the wrong length limit (phabricator:T259440)
    • finishing the work of untangling Wikibase Client and Wikibase Repository extensions to make development easier

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:06, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-33

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • FileImporter and FileExporter became standard features on all Wikis during the first week of August. They help you transfer files from local wikis to Wikimedia Commons with the original file information and history intact. [33]

Problems

  • The mobile skin displays a message at the bottom of the page about who edited last. This message showed raw wikitext. This has now been fixed. Some messages in Structured Discussions and content translation may still appear as raw wikitext. Developers are working on it. [34]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 12. It will be on all wikis from August 13 (calendar).

Future changes

  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [35][36]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:06, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Short descriptions

Hi. I've notice you change a few short descriptions on articles on my watchlist, and i'm not entirely sure it's necessary or useful. My understanding of the short description (from WP:SHORTDES) that that it "should be brief" and "should not attempt to precisely define the subject" and "should focus on distinguishing the subject from ones with similar titles". To that end, i would argue that adding the birth and death years of Roman emperors is unnecessary ~ i'm not even sure that their regnal years are necessary as they are clearly defined by "Third [or some other number] Roman emperor". If i'm misunderstanding or misinterpreting, please feel free to correct me and explain mine error; happy days, LindsayHello 20:20, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

LindsayH Thank you for your message. I have been correcting a number of short description entries for biographies for some time now. As a principle, I agree with and support the definitions that you quoted in your message. My basic approach is to just provide enough information to help identify the biography based on the country that the person has primarily lived in or carried out their occupation; the primary occupation(s) of the individual during their lifetime ; and some information regarding when they lived. Given that it doesn't take up much space, my preference is to put the date of birth and date of death to help identify when the person was active or flourished . If that is not available or is uncertain, I then refer to the relevant century or part of that century (e.g. early 2nd century AD). For individuals who have ruled an empire or a kingdom or a principality or the like, I have added a second bracket with the period of reign since I believe that is relevant to getting a very brief understanding of when the individual was most influential. However I'm not wedded to that if you think that that is unnecessary information. One key element in my approach is to try and make sure that the short descriptions are not too long e.g. under 100 characters. Happy to discuss further with you regarding my approach to Roman emperors. I don't wish to be pedantic about it -- I just want to try and improve the overall quality of the short descriptions as they are important both in Wikipedia and for Wikidata. Regards Chewings72 (talk) 05:07, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply. To be fair, i'm not wedded to any particular use of the things ~ i scarcely notice them, and don't go seeking them out; my interest is merely that we have a basic consistency with them, and stay in line with what the community wants. My understanding is that the point of the short description is merely to enable the reader to know that they have arrived at the correct article among two or more which may be the same or similar titles. Thus, distinguishing, thus, between London, London, London, London, London, London, and so on, is the key; for that, an appropriate short description might be "A city in England", rather than "An English city, the seat of the Queen, capital of the greatest empire ever seen, population 8 million" ~ obviously, i'm exaggerating for (i hope) humorous effect, but i'm sure you understand. For the emperors (or any other rulers) we surely only need enough to be sure we're on the right page ~ so for Caligula, for example, "Third emperor of Rome" would be sufficient without the dates or, certainly, with only one set of dates (after all, WP:SHORTDESC does suggest 40 characters).
Enough, i'm sure you think i've gone overboard here but, i promise you, i'm not beating this to death, i am done. I really have just written here as a follow up so you'd know i did see your reply and thought it over, and to explain my thinking. Thanks; happy days, LindsayHello 09:52, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #429

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Entity Explosion: a new multilingual Chrome browser extension. "Taking the power of Wikidata with me wherever I go across the web!". Uses API calls to the Wikidata Query Service to match the URL you are browsing on to a Wikidata item, and then displays data and links to other sites about the same entity. (Video)
  • Development
    • Fixed a bug where a length limit for strings seems to have reverted itself back from 1500 to its default 400 (phabricator:T259440)
    • Fixed a bug that Wikibase is not always adding &redirect=no in situations when MediaWiki usually does (phabricator:T255387)
    • Wrapping up the initial work on the design system so it is ready for use in the first new feature (Query Builder)
    • Fixed the serialization of statements on Forms and Senses not containing the datatype (phabricator:T249206)
    • Wrapping up work on the first version of Federated Properties so that other Wikibase installations can use Wikidata's Properties instead of having to maintain their own
    • Worked on ensuring the data from the linked data interface at Special:EntityData is always up to date after an edit has been made (phabricator:T128486)
    • Enabling clients to use Lua to request labels, descriptions and aliases in some (often minority) languages even when they are not content languages (phabricator:T259340, phabricator:T260118)


You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:03, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-34

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • If you revert an edit using the undo link your edit is marked with an undo tag. This will now only happen if you don't change anything in the edit window before publishing the undo. This is to keep users from marking edits as undos when they actually do something else. [37]
  • The new OOUI version will not work with Internet Explorer 8. This means the wikis will look strange and not work well in Internet Explorer 8. This was reported in Tech/News/2020/17. This is because keeping the wikis working with very old browsers creates other problems. [38]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 August. It will be on all wikis from 20 August (calendar).

Future changes

  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis next week. This is a reminder. You can help by translating the announcement message. [39][40]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:41, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #430

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Sophox allows for SPARQL querying of Wikidata and OpenStreetMap in a single query
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Two new grant programs from WikiCite, in support of open citations and linked bibliographic data.
Full documentation, eligibility requirements, selection criteria, program design principles, and contacts at the links. Apply by 1 October.
  1. Project & events [$2-10k]
  2. e-Scholarships [per-diem calculated on your city; 1-5 people (single, or as a 'remote group') for 2-4 days, for COVID-era "stay at home" projects. Paid in advance living allowance, no expense report required.]
  • Development
    • Deployed the first version of the Wikidata Bridge to Catalan Wikipedia
    • Creating Grafana Dashboards for the new Wikidata Bridge so we have some data to help us determine which datatypes to support next for example (phabricator:T260532)
    • Finished working on ensuring Labels of Items in some unusual, often minority, languages are still available on Wikipedia and other clients (phabricator: T259340)
    • Fixed error messages for API modules that will not work with the first version of Federated Properties (phabricator:T258558)
    • Working on improving how ORES judges the quality of an Item to make it more accurate
    • Started coding on Automated Configuration Discovery to make it easier for tool builders to make their tools work for other Wikibase instances as well

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:09, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-35

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 August. It will be on all wikis from 27 August (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:59, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 August 2020

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:32, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
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