This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Constraint violations can now be checked on qualifiers and references (phab:T168532)
Implemented usage tracking deduplication to reduce database load (phab:T178079). This should not have any effect on what users see on recent changes and watchlists.
Redirects on client wikis that are connected to a Wikidata item can have a tracking category, if set up (phab:T185743). Thanks, Matěj!
From the life of Wikidata: with the Wikidata Concepts Monitor we can now begin to discover how our communities use knowledge across the Wikimedia projects, by Goran S. Milovanović
See also: WDCM Journal, several examples of the use of Wikidata on the Wikimedia projects
We are saddened to report that Polish Wikimedian Krzysztof Machocki (who was also active on Wikidata) died on 31 January 2018, aged 36, after a couple of weeks of illness. Our condolences to his family and friends.
The call for submissions for Wikimania (Cape Town, July 2018) is now open. Deadline is March 18th. Ideas of submissions related to Wikidata can be discussed here
Based on community discussions, the ArticlePlaceholder will soon be deployed on Urdu and Estonian Wikipedias.
Statistics
January 2018 brought us 9,770,248 edits, 445,027 new items were created.
The number of users that edited Wikidata per day grew in 2017 from 2439 to 2672 users, 9,6% more compared to 2016. The number of edits by them grew with 18% to 190k edits per day. We also get edited by 542 IP adresses per day, 50% more than in 2016.
In 2017, Wikidata got edited by 46 various bots per day, executing 334k edits per day (63% more than in 2016). The most active bot in 2017 was Emijrpbot, who added 18 million edits to Wikidata.
Hello James Allison, thank you for your efforts in reviewing new pages!The NPP backlog at the end of the drive with the number of unreviewed articles by creation date. Red is older than 90 days, orange is between 90 and 30 days old, and green is younger than 30 days.
Backlog update:
The new page backlog is currently at 3819 unreviewed articles, with a further 6660 unreviewed redirects.
We are very close to eliminating the backlog completely; please help by reviewing a few extra articles each day!
New Year Backlog Drive results:
We made massive progress during the recent four weeks of the NPP Backlog Drive, during which the backlog reduced by nearly six thousand articles and the length of the backlog by almost 3 months!
General project update:
ACTRIAL will end it's initial phase on the 14th of March. Our goal is to reduce the backlog significantly below the 90 day index point by the 14th of March. Please consider helping with this goal by reviewing a few additional pages a day.
Reviewing redirects is an important and necessary part of New Page Patrol. Please read the guideline on appropriate redirects for advice on reviewing redirects. Inappropriate redirects can be re-targeted or nominated for deletion at RfD.
If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. 20:32, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #299
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
The next Weekly Summary (February 19th) will be the 300th edition of the newsletter! To help making it special, you can share your favorite Wikidata tool, so the other readers discover nice tools
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Welcome to the 300th Weekly Summary!
The weekly newsletter was started by Lydia at the very beginning of the Wikidata project, even before the first deployment, to keep the community informed about the developments, the new projects and tools. More than five years later, the newsletter is still there, its content powered by the community, and sent every week all along the years. I wanted to say a warm "thank you!" to each person who helped filling the Weekly Summary <3
Over the past years, as you know, Wikidata has grown a lot. More data, more tools, more editors and reusers, more exciting projects led by the community. The Weekly Summary has evolved with us, and the 300th edition seems a good moment to ask you all your suggestions about the newsletter, how it could continue evolving, and how you would like to improve it.
On that purpose, you can find a feedback page to express all your ideas about the Weekly Summary. We're very interested to know more about your reading habits, the parts you're more or less interested in, the new topics you would like to share with the community. Thanks in advance for filling it.
I stay available anytime to discuss with you, feel free to contact me if you have any question or concern! Cheers, Léa
A selection of cool tools on Wikidata
Here are a few tools that are recommended by some Wikidata community members. External websites, gadgets or scripts, they are very useful for Wikidata editors or users!
QuickStatements is a powerful tool that can edit or add Wikidata item en masse, via a text editor or importing a spreadsheet. (Éder Porto via Facebook)
Mix'n'match (manual), which helps us to interlink Wikidata with the rest of the web and the world :-) (Spinster, Siobhan via Twitter)
WikiShootMe! allows you to see Wikidata items plotted out on a map and shows you whether they have images or not. (Ham II)
Yair Rand's WikidataInfo script adds the QID of the equivalent Wikidata item to the page being viewed (on sister projects), along with its Wikidata label and description. (Andy Mabbett)
Recoin measures the degree of completeness of relevant properties of a Wikidata item and suggests any relevant statements that can be added to the item. (Rachmat04)
DuplicateReferences gadget adds a link to copy references and add them to other statements on the same item. (PKM)
checkConstraints gadget adds notifications on the interface to easily notice the violation of constraints and help people fixing them (Léa)
Resolve authors lists scientific articles with the property author name string (P2093) and groups them on the basis of co-authors and topic, which helps to distinguish people referred to by identical name strings. (Daniel Mietchen)
The Wiki Loves Monuments map is powered by Wikidata. You can look for a city and find the monuments around. (Stefano Sabatini via Facebook)
Fixed incomplete "Label:", "Description:" and "Statement:" entity usage messages in various places (phab:T178090). Thanks, Matěj!
Improved violation messages for ranges involving the current date (e. g. “should not be in the future”).
Continued work on caching constraint check results.
Enabled Lua fine-grained usage tracking for better performance on several more wikis: hywiki, frwiki, svwiki, itwiki, zhwiki, bewiki, nlwiki, glwiki, and Wikimedia Commons (phab:T187265phab:T186714)
Representation and grammatical features of the form can be changed using the UI (WikibaseLexeme) (phab:T173743, phab:T160525)
Did you know that you can now use the visual diff tool on any page?
Sometimes, it is hard to see important changes in a wikitext diff. This screenshot of a wikitext diff (click to enlarge) shows that the paragraphs have been rearranged, but it does not highlight the removal of a word or the addition of a new sentence.
If you enable the Beta Feature for "⧼visualeditor-preference-visualdiffpage-label⧽", you will have a new option. It will give you a new box at the top of every diff page. This box will let you choose either diff system on any edit.
Click the toggle button to switch between visual and wikitext diffs.
In the visual diff, additions, removals, new links, and formatting changes will be highlighted. Other changes, such as changing the size of an image, are described in notes on the side.
This screenshot shows the same edit as the wikitext diff. The visual diff highlights the removal of one word and the addition of a new sentence. An arrow indicates that the paragraph changed location.
You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.
The 2017 wikitext editor is available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices. It has the same toolbar as the visual editor and can use the citoid service and other modern tools. The team have been comparing the performance of different editing environments. They have studied how long it takes to open the page and start typing. The study uses data for more than one million edits during December and January. Some changes have been made to improve the speed of the 2017 wikitext editor and the visual editor. Recently, the 2017 wikitext editor opened fastest for most edits, and the 2010 WikiEditor was fastest for some edits. More information will be posted at mw:Contributors/Projects/Editing performance.
The visual diff tool was developed for the visual editor. It is now available to all users of the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. When you review your changes, you can toggle between wikitext and visual diffs. You can also enable the new Beta Feature for "Visual diffs". The Beta Feature lets you use the visual diff tool to view other people's edits on page histories and Special:RecentChanges. [1]
The citoid service automatically translates URLs, DOIs, ISBNs, and PubMed id numbers into wikitext citation templates. This tool has been used at the English Wikipedia for a long time. It is very popular and useful to editors, although it can be tricky for admins to set up. Other wikis can have this service, too. Please read the instructions. You can ask the team to help you enable citoid at your wiki.
Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and other communities may have the visual editor made available by default to contributors. If your community wants this, then please contact Dan Garry.
The <references /> block can automatically display long lists of references in columns on wide screens. This makes footnotes easier to read. This has already been enabled at the English Wikipedia. If you want columns for a long list of footnotes on this wiki, you can use either <references /> or the plain (no parameters) {{reflist}} template. If you edit a different wiki, you can request multi-column support for your wiki. [3]
If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly. We will notify you when the next issue is ready for translation. Thank you!
Please join us from 10:00 am - 5:00 pm on Saturday, March 31st for Wikipedia Day LA 2018 at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. There will be speakers, panel discussions, a presentation on Wikidata, flash sessions, and a discussion about the formation of an LA User Group. There could be dramatic readings of LA-related talk pages, and there will be truly excellent cake. Please RSVP on the event page if you're thinking of joining us.
