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Wikidata weekly summary #559
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
CJMbot (CJMbot lets users upload a CSV file in a certain format. The data inside this file is then validated and processed. New items wil be created based on the data in the CSV file and existing items wil updated by adding statements and references).
RPI2026F1Bot 5 Task/s: Import dependency and version data from PyPi
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikibase Working Hour February 13, 2023. The February Working Hour will feature a presentation by Steve Baskauf on using VanderBot with Wikibase: The Wikibase API provides a mechanism for programmatic control of uploads, and its behavior is consistent across instances (Wikidata, Structured Data in Commons, and those that are established privately). In this session, Steve will discuss basic interactions with the API and demonstrate using the VanderBot Python application to rapidly upload tabular data to a wikibase.cloud instance. After performing a mass deletion, Steve will conclude by describing how he's used the Wikibase API to facilitate addition of structured data to Commons. Registration link
Wikidata Graph Builder released a major update, introducing new layouts and visualization ideas. You can read the full changelog here.
The new Service Level Objective for the Wikidata Query Service has been implemented: the current aim is to maintain a 95% uptime based on a 90 day rolling window. You can read the full announcement here.
a.gup.pe provides group features for Mastodon. @wikidata@a.gup.pe is a group about Wikidata in general. @querywikidata@a.gup.pe is a group about Wikidata queries. Anyone can join those groups simply by following them in Mastodon. Anyone can share a message with all members of those groups by mentioning them in a publication in Mastodon or any other application of the Fediverse.
The hashtag #Wikidata can be used to tag all publications related to Wikidata in Mastodon. Anyone can find recent publications using this tag using the search feature: https://wikis.world/tags/Wikidata.
Went over the feedback on the first release and deciding on the next routes to add
Added a new endpoint for getting descriptions (phab:T327881)
Worked on throwing exceptions when something goes wrong (validation failed, Item not found, etc.) instead of returning an error response object (phab:T327527)
Entity Schemas: Finished the technical exploration that will unblock the next steps for actual development
Query Service: Changed URLs with URL-encoded characters to be shown un-encoded for better line-breaks and readability (phab:T327514)
Query Builder:
Adding support for a few additional datatypes (phab:T328528)
Adding a basic language selector to make it easier to switch the language of the page (phab:T328764)
Constraint checks: Working on showing constraint clarification messages to make it easier to understand how to fix a violation on a statement (phab:T219037)
Search: Exploring design options for how to make it easier to search for entities other than Items (phab:T327507)
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
On wikis where patrolled edits are enabled, changes made to the mentor list by autopatrolled mentors are not correctly marked as patrolled. It will be fixed later this week. [1]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [3][4][5]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
Cmtqwikibot 2 (Task/s: Add credits (cast and crew) for audiovisual work produced in Quebec based on the Cinémathèque québécoise's catalogue data. Adds reference. Deletes redundant, more general existing statements in certain circumstances.)
Gabrabot (Bulk upload Maltese lexeme data to wikidata from Gabra.)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call February 21, 2023: Jim Hahn and John Mark Ockerbloom will be presenting on Penn Libraries' Linked Data Vision. They will discuss their framework for activities and goals around linked data, which includes both existing standards and new functionality. Additionally, they will share successes and areas where progress has not yet been made. The presentation will cover projects with Wikidata tie-ins, such as the Digital Scriptorium Wikibase project and the Deep Backfile copyright information project. The presenters also plan to have ample time for conversation with those interested in using linked data to bring new functionality to their libraries. Agenda
Wikidata and Wikibase - SEMIC workshop 2 physical hands-on workshop in Brussels on the 23rd of February (Register here)
If you are interested in organizing or joining the Wikimedia Hackathon 2023 satellite events, you can apply for funds by March 20 via the Rapid Grants maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation.
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
Last week, during planned maintenance of Cloud Services, unforeseen complications forced the team to turn off all tools for 2–3 hours to prevent data corruption. Work is ongoing to prevent similar problems in the future. [6]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [7][8][9]
The Editing team is beginning a project to help new editors of Wikipedia. It will help people identify some problems before they click "Publish changes". The first tool will encourage people to add references when they add new content. Please watch that page for more information. You can join a conference call on 3 March 2023 to learn more.
ScikingBot (Task/s: The bot is going to fix interwiki links for the Lombard Wikipedia)
fromCrossrefBot (Task/s: Importing licenses for 1.45 million CC licensed papers from the Crossref April 2022 dump.)
Closed requests for permissions/Bot:
Cmtqwikibot 2 (Task/s: Add credits (cast and crew) for audiovisual work produced in Quebec based on the Cinémathèque québécoise's catalogue data. Adds reference. Deletes redundant, more general existing statements in certain circumstances.)
Bug Triage Hour on dates input, March 13th: Following up on an issue on date parsing in the Czech language (T221097), fixed earlier in February, we would like to look at the changes induced by this fix together, check how the date input parsing works in your language, and identify some possibly remaining issues.
Eager to discover the potential of Wikidata and Wikibase for semantics? SEMIC is organising a series of workshops that are very much hands-on. Join the first workshop online on 24 January 2023 from 14:00 to 16:00 (CET) via Webex. Register for the first event via this link!
Wikibase Suite Survey is now open! The goal is to understand what role Wikibase plays in your organization and identify what you need from Wikibase based on how you currently make use of it.
rebuilt (year or date when the structure was reconstructed, rebuilt, repurposed or replaced by similar one (if the new and old structures have separate items, use P167/P1398 links instead))
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
Last week, in some areas of the world, there were problems with loading pages for 20 minutes and saving edits for 55 minutes. These issues were caused by a problem with our caching servers due to unforseen events during a routine maintenance task. [10][11]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 March. It will be on all wikis from 2 March (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. [12]
Following a request for comment, the Portal CSD criteria (P1 (portal subject to CSD as an article) and P2 (underpopulated portal)) have been deprecated.
The Terms of Use update cycle has started, which includes a [p]roposal for better addressing undisclosed paid editing. Feedback is being accepted until 24 April 2023.
Biondibot (Task/s: Import us patent from a csv file)
bitbotje (Task/s: Property MovieMeter film ID (P1970) has a suggested constraint that the item should have a Dutch ('nl') label. The MovieMeter website has suitable labels and provides an API for structured data access. I have a script that reads the relevant section in Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations/P1970 and for each listed item does an API call to moviemeter.nl and adds a label.)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call March 7, 2023: Lydia Pintscher and Silvan Heintze will tell us about the new Wikidata REST API and Silvan will demonstrate some of its aspects. Agenda
Bug Triage Hour on dates input, March 13th: Following up on an issue on date parsing in the Czech language (T221097), fixed earlier in February, we would like to look at the changes induced by this fix together, check how the date input parsing works in your language, and identify some possibly remaining issues.
Open Data Day Taiwan 2023 recorded livestreams: Day 1; Day 2
Wikidata for History of Science projects, by Martin Poulter - YouTube
How to add Wikidata properties using PetScan in Finnish Wikipedia via categories - YouTube
How to add Wikidata properties using PetScan in Finnish Wikipedia 2 - YouTube
LD4P3 - Browsing Across Music With Obtainable Wikidata - YouTube
Extracting political data & relations from Wikidata - YouTube
Operation of Wikidata and its centralized management of metadata linked to multiple databases (in French) - YouTube
Wikidata and higher education and research libraries (in French) - YouTube
Wikidata supporting open student research projects in plant chemistry - YouTube
Tool of the week
wikidata-todo is a tool that helps you find Commons categories with files, where none of the files are used on Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The WMDE Wikibase.Cloud team is currently seeking individuals who are interested in participating in interviews regarding the pressing issue of data modeling. Please reach out if you'd like to participate.
Search: We are looking deeper into how we can make it possible to search for Properties, Lexemes and EntitySchemas in the search box, not just Items (phab:T321543)
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 Community Wishlist Survey 2023 edition has been concluded. Community Tech has published the results of the survey and will provide an update on what is next in April 2023.
On wikis which use LanguageConverter to handle multiple writing systems, articles which used custom conversion rules in the wikitext (primarily on Chinese Wikipedia) would have these rules applied inconsistently in the table of contents, especially in the Vector 2022 skin. This has now been fixed. [13]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 March. It will be on all wikis from 9 March (calendar).
A search system has been added to the Preferences screen. This will let you find different options more easily. Making it work on mobile devices will happen soon. [14]
Brazil report: GLAM-Wiki initiatives in Brazil spark academic investigation
Croatia report: Activities during first two months of 2023
Indonesia report: Launching of Wikisource Loves Manuscripts; Bincang GLAM continues
Italy report: New project and collaboration in February
Kosovo report: I Edit Wikipedia Online Campaign 2023
New Zealand report: Wikidata and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Wellington WikiCon 2023 and Auckland Museum local suburb project funding
Poland report: The European GLAM Coordinators online meet-up; GLAM-Wiki workshop at the Wawel Royal Castle State Art Collection; Wikimedians-in-residence online meet up
Sweden report: 100 000 Bildminnen; Report from The Association of Swedish Museums; Wikipedia for all of Sweden; ArkDes edit-a-thons
UK report: In Memoriam Jo Pugh / Cultural Diversity
bitbotje (Task/s: Property MovieMeter film ID (P1970) has a suggested constraint that the item should have a Dutch ('nl') label. The MovieMeter website has suitable labels and provides an API for structured data access. I have a script that reads the relevant section in Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations/P1970 and for each listed item does an API call to moviemeter.nl and adds a label.)
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
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 March (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Chavacano de Zamboanga Wikipedia, Min Dong Chinese Wikipedia, Chechen Wikipedia, Cebuano Wikipedia, Chamorro Wikipedia, Cherokee Wikipedia, Cheyenne Wikipedia, Central Kurdish Wikipedia, Corsican Wikipedia, Kashubian Wikipedia, Church Slavic Wikipedia, Chuvash Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [15][16]
Upcoming: WikiCite Monthly Meeting, online on 28 March 2023 at 16:00 UTC. Information and notes
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
In this week's update by the Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions team, they are asking where the right place to store and maintain Abstract Wikipedia should be. All of the options involve Wikidata to some extent, some more, some less. If the content of Abstract Wikipedia is hosted on Wikidata, that would lead to an increased scope for the Wikidata community (and likely more contributors joining). But that is a decision the Wikidata community needs to be involved in as well. (Also, if you are interested, the Abstract Wikipedia updates might be worth to follow.)
EntitySchemas: We are preparing for adding a new datatype and other changes by improving tests, documentation, etc.
Date input: We did a bug triage hour around issues with date parsing and improved it for Japanese dates (phab:T214002)
Ontology issues: We started evaluating the survey responses for the survey about different types of ontology issues reusers are facing. More work is needed before we have results.
REST API: We finished work on including the URL of an article in sitelink data (phab:T330252) as well as providing all aliases of an Item (phab:T327882)
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
Last week, some users experienced issues loading image thumbnails. This was due to incorrectly cached images. [17]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (calendar).
There will be a new option for Administrators when they are unblocking a user, to add the unblocked user’s user page to their watchlist. This will work both via Special:Unblock and via the API. [18]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 24 March at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour March 27, 2023: We will be creating items related to notable book podcasts. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own project to work on.Event page
WikiCite Monthly Meeting, online on 28 March 2023 at 16:00 UTC. Information and notes
ISCED Attainment (ISCED attainment is the UNESCO main classification of educational level, it is used to map each level to the global classification used by UNESCO. This is useful because the same local level can mean different things in different countries. It identifies the specific levels of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) Attainment model. Has two sub qualifiers - code and label.)
first performance by (performer or performing group for the first performance of a work)
EntitySchemas: We started working on the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements (phab:T214884)
Query Builder: We finished the work on the language selector so you can swithc the interface language of the tool (phab:T328148) It will be available on the site in the next days.
Wikibase REST API: We implemented the functionality to provide an Item's label, description or aliases in a specific language (phab:T323173)
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 AbuseFilter condition limit was increased from 1000 to 2000. [19]
Desktop users are now able to subscribe to talk pages by clicking on the Subscribe link in the Tools menu. If you subscribe to a talk page, you receive notifications when new topics are started on that talk page. This is separate from putting the page on your watchlist or subscribing to a single discussion. [21]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 March. It will be on all wikis from 30 March (calendar).
The legacy Mobile Content Service is going away in July 2023. Developers are encouraged to switch to Parsoid or another API before then to ensure service continuity. [23]
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call April 4, 2023: Magnus Manske will discuss Wikidata editing tools and tools that use linked data from other sources (eg GND, VIAF) to integrate in Wikidata. Agenda
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 system for automatically creating categories for the Babel extension has had several important changes and fixes. One of them allows you to insert templates for automatic category descriptions on creation, allowing you to categorize the new categories. [24][25][26][27][28]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 April. It will be on all wikis from 6 April (calendar).
Some older Web browsers will stop being able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. This mainly affects users of Internet Explorer 11. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can try to upgrade to a newer version. [29]
The deprecated jquery.hoverIntent module has been removed. This module could be used by gadgets and user scripts, to create an artificial delay in how JavaScript responds to a hover event. Gadgets and user scripts should now use jQuery hover() or on() instead. Examples can be found in the migration guide. [30]
Some of the links in Special:SpecialPages will be re-arranged. There will be a clearer separation between links that relate to all users, and links related to your own user account. [31]
You will be able to hide the Reply button in archived discussion pages with a new __ARCHIVEDTALK__ magic word. There will also be a new .mw-archivedtalk CSS class for hiding the Reply button in individual sections on a page. [32][33][34]
Future changes
The Vega software that creates data visualizations in pages, such as graphs, will be upgraded to the newest version in the future. Graphs that still use the very old version 1.5 syntax may stop working properly. Most existing uses have been found and updated, but you can help to check, and to update any local documentation. Examples of how to find and fix these graphs are available.
The rollback of Vector 2022 RfC has found no consensus to rollback to Vector legacy, but has found rough consensus to disable "limited width" mode by default.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
There was a problem with all types of CentralNotice banners still being shown to logged-in users even if they had turned off specific banner types. This has now been fixed. [37]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia, Danish Wikipedia, Dinka Wikipedia, Lower Sorbian Wikipedia, Ewe Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Emiliano-Romagnolo Wikipedia, Esperanto Wikipedia, Estonian Wikipedia, Basque Wikipedia, Extremaduran Wikipedia, Tumbuka Wikipedia, Fulah Wikipedia, Finnish Wikipedia, Võro Wikipedia, Fijian Wikipedia, Faroese Wikipedia, Arpitan Wikipedia, Northern Frisian Wikipedia, Friulian Wikipedia, Irish Wikipedia, Guianan Creole Wikipedia, Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia, Galician Wikipedia, Gilaki Wikipedia, Guarani Wikipedia, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Gothic Wikipedia, Gujarati Wikipedia, Manx Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [38][39]
BotFunast (Task: The bot is already operational in the Tachelhit Wikipedia. One of its main tasks is editing template tags and categories, and creating new ones when necessary, based on a csv database (that you can find in github) . When adding new pages though, a common problem is to link those to Wikidata. This can be unfeasible by hand in a reasonable amount of time, when hundreds of pages, e.g. categories, are added at once. The idea is to have the bot approved for Wikidata, so it can link the pages to their counterparts in other languages automatically.)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 19th April 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
orchestration (the instruments used in a musical composition or arrangement in notated form)
part of other combined lexeme (qualifier on P5238 to indicate that a component appearing in a compound lexeme actually comes from the appearance of another compound lexeme)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 19th April 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call, Tuesday, April 14, 2023 - Indigenous Artists and Wikidata: Report launch and discussion. Agenda.
Christos started a Wikibase to collect and organise existing research-related resources about Wikibase. Feel free to add to it. researchwb.wikibase.cloud
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on creating the new datatype that allows linking to EntitySchemas in statements. It will be available on test systems next. (phab:T332139)
QueryBuilder: We are putting finishing touches on the language selector so you can switch the UI language of the Query Builder. (phab:T328764)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on making it possible to create or replace labels and descriptions in a iven language. (phab:T323813)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
At Wikimedia Commons, some thumbnails have not been getting replaced correctly after a new version of the image is uploaded. This should be fixed later this week. [43][44]
For the last few weeks, some external tools had inconsistent problems with logging-in with OAuth. This has now been fixed. [45]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 April. It will be on all wikis from 20 April (calendar).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour April 24, 2023: Would you like to know how to join and use Telegram? Two regular Wikidata Telegram users will provide an introduction to Telegram and its available Wikidata channels. They will discuss how they use it, how it can provide help with Wikidata work, and how it can facilitate connections with other Wikidata users Event page
User:Nikki/colour icons.css - is a Userscript to add colour to the editing icons. It uses green for add/save, yellow for edit, red for remove, orange for cancel and blue for help.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikibase newbie docs are here (to help to onboard new Wikibase users easier).
REST API: We continued work on making it possible to create or replace a label, or a description in a given language (phab:T323813)
EntitySchemas: We continued working on the new datatype for linking to EntitySchemas. It is now available on beta in a very bare-bones version but not ready for wider testing yet. (phab:T332139)
Ontology issues: We are evaluating the results of the survey we ran earlier this year.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Due to security issues with the Graph extension, graphs have been disabled in all Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Foundation teams are working to respond to these vulnerabilities. [47]
For a few days, it was not possible to save some kinds of edits on the mobile version of a wiki. This has been fixed. [48][49][50]
Changes later this week
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on April 26. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. [51]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The Video2commons tool has been updated. This fixed several bugs related to YouTube uploads. [55]
The Special:Preferences page has been redesigned on mobile web. The new design makes it easier to browse the different categories and settings at low screen widths. You can also now access the page via a link in the Settings menu in the mobile web sidebar. [56]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 May. It will be on all wikis from 4 May (calendar).
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
ForgesBot (Task: Add licensing information to software forges entries in accordance to what is found in the corresponding Wikipedia page. It is used as a helper in the context of the Forges project)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 2, 2023: Fudie Zhao will be presenting on Wikidata in Digital Humanities projects. Agenda
WeChangEd is an ERC-funded research project and online database by Ghent University, about women editors in Europe. The database shows stories about women editors and their publications, and is powered by Wikidata and Sciencestories.io.
A request for comment about removing administrative privileges in specified situations is open for feedback.
Technical news
Progress has started on the Page Triage improvement project. This is to address the concerns raised by the community in their 2022 WMF letter that requested improvements be made to the tool.
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
Last week, Community Tech released the first update for providing better diffs, the #1 request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. This update adds legends and tooltips to inline diffs so that users unfamiliar with the blue and yellow highlights can better understand the type of edits made.
When you close an image that is displayed via MediaViewer, it will now return to the wiki page instead of going back in your browser history. This feature request was voted #65 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [57]
The SyntaxHighlight extension now supports wikitext as a selected language. Old alternatives that were used to highlight wikitext, such as html5, moin, and html+handlebars, can now be replaced. [58]
Graph Extension update: Foundation developers have completed upgrading the visualization software to Vega5. Existing community graphs based on Vega2 are no longer compatible. Communities need to update local graphs and templates, and shared lua modules like de:Modul:Graph. The Vega Porting guide provides the most comprehensive detail on migration from Vega2 and here is an example migration. Vega5 has currently just been enabled on mediawiki.org to provide a test environment for communities. [60]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (calendar).
Until now, all new OAuth apps went through manual review. Starting this week, apps using identification-only or basic authorizations will not require review. [61]
There will be an A/B test on 10 Wikipedias where the Vector 2022 skin is the default skin. Half of logged-in desktop users will see an interface where the different parts of the page are more clearly separated. You can read more. [63][64]
jquery.tipsy will be removed from the MediaWiki core. This will affect some user scripts. Many lines with .tipsy( can be commented out. OO.ui.PopupWidget can be used to keep things working like they are now. You can read more and read about how to find broken scripts. [65]
Indonesia report: GLAM Mini Grants; Structured Data Marathon VIII; Wikisource Online Workshop
Italy report: Bridges between Wikimedia and culture
New Zealand report: BHL Whitepaper and outreach for Citizen Science Month and WeDigBio, Auckland Museum suburbs project update, New Zealand Women in Architecture Wikidata Project
Poland report: Another meeting of EU GLAM Coordinators; Guided tours for Wikipedians in museums in Krakow; Presentation on Art in Wikipedia; Online training on the basics of copyright law; Polish monuments among the top winners of WLM
Sweden report: ISOF workshop; More articles from students; SAAB veterans shared their knowledge during metadata edit-a-thon; ArkDes edit-a-thons
UK report: Democratising knowledge and cultural diversity
USA report: Into the Wikiverse; Earth Day 2023 Bushwick
EntitySchemas: We've continued work on the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements. (phab:T214884)
Converted a number of Properties from string to external ID datatype (phab:T334450)
mul language code: We've worked on preparing the special pages related to labels, descriptions and aliases for the new language code. (phab:T330193, phab:T329626)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the ability to modify labels of an Item using the HTTP PATCH method. (phab:T332739).
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
Citations that are automatically generated based on ISBN are currently broken. This affects citations made with the VisualEditor Automatic tab, and the use of the citoid API in gadgets and user scripts. Work is ongoing to restore this feature. [66]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 May. It will be on all wikis from 18 May (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Gorontalo Wikipedia, Hausa Wikipedia, Hakka Chinese Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Fiji Hindi Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Upper Sorbian Wikipedia, Haitian Creole Wikipedia, Interlingua Wikipedia, Interlingue Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Iloko Wikipedia, Ingush Wikipedia, Ido Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Inuktitut Wikipedia, Jamaican Patois Wikipedia, Javanese Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [67]
Gadget and userscript developers should replace jquery.cookie with mediawiki.cookie. The jquery.cookie library will be removed in ~1 month, and staff developers will run a script to replace any remaining uses at that time. [68]
Wikimedia Deutschland is launching a laptop donation program to support Wikidata contributors with limited access to technology. If you've been actively contributing to Wikidata for at least a year, you can request a free laptop to support your work. WMDE Hardware Donation Program#Applying
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
An improved impact module will be available at Wikipedias. The impact module is a feature available to newcomers at their personal homepage. It will show their number of edits, how many readers their edited pages have, how many thanks they have received and similar things. It is also accessible by accessing Special:Impact. [70]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 30, 2023: We will discuss results from our community survey on advocacy for Wikidata in libraries and hear from community members Mary Aycock, Steve Baskauf and Eric Willey about their experiences with advocacy and gaining support for Wikidata work within their respective libraries. Agenda
TalkPageHeader.js shows the talk page header for languages other than English.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The libraries of the London School of Economics and the University of York have collaborated to produce a toolkit for uploading research theses metadata to Wikidata. Full announcement and access to the toolkit
The contents of most Wikimedia Cloud Services Wiki Replicas are out-of-date owing to large & increasing replication lag; see https://replag.toolforge.org/ & Phab T337446. Exercise caution using data from any tools that have a dependency on these databases.
ISCED category orientation (International Standard Classification of Education category (based on focus/orientation) applicable to an educational program)
Learning outcome (specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that students are expected to acquire as a result of participating in a particular education program)
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
Citations can once again be added automatically from ISBNs, thanks to Zotero's ISBN searches. The current data sources are the Library of Congress (United States), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (French National Library), and K10plus ISBN (German repository). Additional data source searches can be proposed to Zotero. The ISBN labels in the VisualEditor Automatic tab will reappear later this week. [71]
For a few days earlier this month, the "Add interlanguage link" item in the Tools menu did not work properly. This has now been fixed. [73]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 May. It will be on all wikis from 1 June (calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on small and medium wikis this week. Large wikis will follow in the coming weeks. This is part of the effort to move Parsoid into MediaWiki core. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here. [74]
Following an RfC, editors indefinitely site-banned by community consensus will now have all rights, including sysop, removed.
As a part of the Wikimedia Foundation's IP Masking project, a new policy has been created that governs the access to temporary account IP addresses. An associated FAQ has been created and individual communities can increase the requirements to view temporary account IP addresses.
Technical news
Bot operators and tool maintainers should schedule time in the coming months to test and update their tools for the effects of IP masking. IP masking will not be deployed to any content wiki until at least October 2023 and is unlikely to be deployed to the English Wikipedia until some time in 2024.
Arbitration
The arbitration case World War II and the history of Jews in Poland has been closed. The topic area of Polish history during World War II (1933-1945) and the history of Jews in Poland is subject to a "reliable source consensus-required" contentious topic restriction.
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 RealMe extension allows you to mark URLs on your user page as verified for Mastodon and similar software.
Previously, clicking on someone else's link to Recent Changes with filters applied within the URL could unintentionally change your preference for "Group results by page". This has now been fixed. [76]
Problems
For a few days last week, some tools and bots returned outdated information due to database replication problems, and may have been down entirely while it was being fixed. These issues have now been fixed. [77]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).
Bots will no longer be prevented from making edits because of URLs that match the spam blacklist. [78]
Introduction workshop about Wikidata for employees of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB, national library of the Netherlands), to make them more familiar and self-reliant with Wikidata - 6 June 2023, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, The Netherlands - Slides (in Dutch) on Commons.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour June 5, 2023: In collaboration with the Black Bibliography Project, we will be adding metadata for undescribed or under-described African-American women authors listed in The Pen Is Ours: a Listing of Writings by and about African-American Women before 1910, compiled by Jean Fagan Yellin and Cynthia D. Bond.Event page
Registration has opened for the workshop on mathematical research data taking place on 9-11 October 2023 in Leipzig. Talks, demos and lightning talks can be suggested, including Wikidata-related ones.
Tool of the week
IdentifierInput makes it easier to add identifier properties by letting you put in the full url and then stripping it down to just the identifier for you.
beforehand owned by (person or institution that owned the subject just before stated event. Meant to be used as qualifier of "significant event (P793)" for events like sales, auctions, gifts, etc)
afterward owned by (person or institution that owned the subject after stated event. Meant to be used as qualifier of "significant event (P793)" for events like sales, auctions, gifts, etc)
solubility product constant (equilibrium constant for a sparingly soluble solid chemical substance dissolved in an aqueous solution)
funded by grant (title or name of the grant funding this item)
Wikibase REST API: We finished the new endpoint for patching labels (phab:T332739). We also started work on the new endpoint for retrieving Property data (phab:T337720)
Client wikis: We drastically reduced the size of a ResourceLoader module that’s loaded on most Wikipedia page views (phab:334682)
Language code: With awesome help from Nikki, we improved documentation for how to add language codes to Wikibase/Wikidata (phab:T335857)
EntitySchemas: We are getting the new datatype ready for testing.
UK report: Promoting cultural diversity on Wikipedia
USA report: A Spotlight on Black Women Birders; DC Nobel Solution Sessions; Women of Color in the Renwick Gallery; Anthropology and Community Connections; SAGE edit-a-thon; WikiWednesday Salon; Into the Wikiverse: AANHPIs in Science Fiction and Pop Culture; Queering Wikipedia 2023
Special story: Help Wikimedia Map Your Efforts to Improve Copyright!
GLAM Wiki conference report: GLAM Wiki Conference 2023: Announcing the venue & scholarship application process open
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call June 13, 2023: Helen Williams will discuss her work with Wikidata at the London School of Economics Agenda
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The Search Preview panel has been deployed on four Wikipedias (Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian and Norwegian). The panel will show an image related to the article (if existing), the top sections of the article, related images (coming from MediaSearch on Commons), and eventually the sister projects associated with the article. [80]
The RealMe extension now allows administrators to verify URLs for any page, for Mastodon and similar software. [81]
The default project license has been officially upgraded to CC BY-SA 4.0. The software interface messages have been updated. Communities should feel free to start updating any mentions of the old CC BY-SA 3.0 licensing within policies and related documentation pages. [82]
Problems
For three days last month, some Wikipedia pages edited with VisualEditor or DiscussionTools had an unintended __TOC__ (or its localized form) added during an edit. There is a listing of affected pages sorted by wiki, that may still need to be fixed. [83]
Currently, the "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is broken. Existing {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords incorrectly appear as missing templates in VisualEditor. Developers are exploring how to fix this. In the meantime, those wishing to edit the default sortkey of a page are advised to switch to source editing. [84]
Last week, an update to the delete form may have broken some gadgets or user scripts. If you need to manipulate (empty) the reason field, replace #wpReason with #wpReason > input. See an example fix. [85]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on English Wikipedia on Monday, and all other large wikis on Thursday. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here. [86]
Future changes
From 5 June to 17 July, the Foundation's Security team is holding a consultation with contributors regarding a draft policy to govern the use of third-party resources in volunteer-developed gadgets and scripts. Feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome at Third-party resources policy on meta-wiki.
The role of Wikidata within the research lifecycle, Wednesday 21 June, 10am BST (UTC+1), online event hosted by the University of York, UK. International participation is welcome, despite "available to White Rose institutions only" on the booking page.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour June 23, 2023: Returning to Podcasts, we will be working on creating podcast episode pages. We will discuss how this episodic content can be transferred to other serialized items. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own project to work on Event page
Webinar: Common European Data Space for cultural heritage (The ontology of Wikidata, how to interact with it for a better quality). Tuesday 20th June 2023, from 3.00 p,.m. to 5.00 p.m. CET. Register
Mapping Diversity is a platform that utilizes Wikidata to discover key facts about diversity and representation in street names across Europe. E.g. 59% of the streets and squares in Paris are named after people. Of those, 8.9% are named after women.
mul language code: We've continued working on making the mobile termbox (labels, descriptions, aliases) ready for the new language code. (phab:T329644, phab:T338302, phab:T329655, phab:T316767)
Vector 2022 skin: We are fixing an issue with the bolding of results in the main search suggester. (phab:T327510)
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
Flame graphs are now available in WikimediaDebug. [87][88]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
There is now a toolbar search popup in the visual editor. You can trigger it by typing \ or pressing ctrl + shift + p. It can help you quickly access most tools in the editor. [89][90]
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 Action API modules and Special:LinkSearch will now add a trailing / to all prop=extlinks responses for bare domains. This is part of the work to remove duplication in the externallinks database table. [91]
Problems
Last week, search was broken on Commons and Wikidata for 23 hours. [92][93]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
The Minerva skin now applies more predefined styles to the .mbox-text CSS class. This enables support for mbox templates that use divs instead of tables. Please make sure that the new styles won't affect other templates in your wiki. [94][95]
Gadgets will now load on both desktop and mobile by default. Previously, gadgets loaded only on desktop by default. Changing this default using the |targets= parameter is also deprecated and should not be used. You should make gadgets work on mobile or disable them based on the skin (with the |skins= parameter in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition) rather than whether the user uses the mobile or the desktop website. Popular gadgets that create errors on mobile will be disabled by developers on the Minerva skin as a temporary solution. [96]
All namespace tabs now have the same browser access key by default. Previously, custom and extension-defined namespaces would have to have their access keys set manually on-wiki, but that is no longer necessary. [97]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: Wolverène (RfP scheduled to end after 2 July 2023 18:46 UTC)
Closed request for adminship: Vargenau (successful) Welcome onboard \o/
New requests for permissions/Bot: RomesfulImporterBot (Task: Creating and updating Russian Lexemes by transferring information from the Russian Wiktionary)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 12th July 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
re:publica 2023 - Peer learning methods and Open Educational Resources (OER) on Wikidata for a viable digital culture of remembrance (in German) - YouTube
Workshop - Aligning Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry ontologies with Wikidata - YouTube
Managing conflations and duplications of personal items in Wikidata, National Library of Greece - YouTube
Why Wikidata in Linked Data and Libraries (in Greek)- YouTube
Adding metadata utilities in the Koha staff interface based on Wikidata - YouTube
From authority control to identity management - YouTube
DSI Webinar - The ontology of Wikidata: how to interact with it for a better quality - YouTube
Wikidata as a tool for biocuration of cell types, Biocuration Conference 2023 - YouTube
Webinar: Wikidata, a useful knowledge base for any study - YouTube
KGC '23 Talk — The Error Is The Message: Extracting Insights From Deceptive Data for Nazi-Looted Art - YouTube
TU Berlin research group "The Restitution of Knowledge" are exploring the use of Wikidata to build a Linked Open Data (LOD) project that maps German colonial military expeditions into Africa. Interested in getting involved or learning more about their project? Reach out on the project's talk page: Wikidata:WikiProject TheRoK/Data Models.
The New Page Patrol team is sending you this impromptu message to inform you of a steeply rising backlog of articles needing review. If you have any extra time to spare, please consider reviewing one or two articles each day to help lower the backlog. You can start reviewing by visiting Special:NewPagesFeed. Thank you very much for your help.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: koavf 3 (RfP scheduled to end after 8 July 2023 13:16 UTC)
Closed request for adminship: Wolverène Welcome onboard \o/
New requests for permissions/Bot: UrbanBot (Task: UrbanBot's task is to mass-add English descriptions to items that don't have one)
Closed request for permissions/Bot: RomesfulImporterBot (Task: Creating and updating Russian Lexemes by transferring information from the Russian Wiktionary)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour July 7, 2023: Let's collaborate to upgrade our community infrastructure! We'll transfer notes and content from Google Docs to our WikiProject subpages. We'll be practicing our Wiki markup skills and learning to manage Wikidata Project pages Event page
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #99, Breast milk (Challenge started on 2023-07-03 12:01:21)
m:User:Base/Scripts/HaveWikibaseLabelLowercased.js - is a Userscript that adds an arrow next to the main label (page title) which upon double click (a tap and a confirmation on touch devices) automatically makes the label's first letter lowercase for the current interface language. If there was already a matching alias it gets removed.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The WikidataCon 2023 call for proposals is running until July 31st. If you have questions or need advice before sending a program proposal, join the program team during one of the office hour sessions (online or in Taiwan, in Chinese or in English). More information
Nigerian registered company (RC) id (RC number (Registration Number), identifier assigned to a business by the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) in Nigeria)
Cent cols (A property to link Wikidata entries to the dedicated pages of each pass by the Cent Cols)
WikiProject Scotland's Accused Witches aims at producing structured data documenting witchhunts, and prosecuted Scotland's accused witches on Wikidata using the University of Edinburgh's landmark Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database (1563 to 1736).
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the GetProperty endpoint with fields filter and Conditional headers (phab:T338141, phab:T338138)
We started working on the endpoints for reading statement data of Properties (both a single statement, and a list of all of a Property’s statement) (phab:T339356), phab:T338383)
Ontology issue survey: We put together an overview of solutions for the various types of issues and will share them this week.
mul language code: We are continuing to work through the language fallback issues that were uncovered.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
From this week all gadgets automatically load on mobile and desktop sites. If you see any problems with gadgets on your wikis, please adjust the gadget options in your gadget definitions file. [101]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 July. It will be on all wikis from 6 July (calendar).
Kosovo report: CEE Spring Campaign 2023, Albania and Kosovo
Netherlands report: A new book, new Wikipedia articles, videos and further images on Africa
New Zealand report: Report on the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections Conference 2023 and Auckland suburb updates
Philippines report: GLAM outreach activity at University of Nueva Caceres: Digitization, workshops and proofread-a-thons as future collaboration
Poland report: GLAM-Wiki workshops for the Czartoryski Library; Work on the GLAM-Wiki Project Page Continues; End of Internship within the "Praktykuj w Kulturze" Program
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Closed request for adminship: koavf 3 Welcome onboard \o/
New requests for permissions/Bot: FromCrossrefBot 1: Publication dates (Task/s: Using information from Crossref: 1 - Add publication date to items where they are not present in Wikidata 2 - Fix publication dates where they are erroneous)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 12th July 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
How to create a Wikidata Lexeme with ease - Beginner's Guide (in Twi and English) YouTube
Tool of the week
Duplicity is a tool on Toolforge that helps find articles on Wikipedia that do not have a Wikidata Item, and match them to an existing Item, or create a new one. (example for English Wikipedia)
HasProperty.js displays presence/absence of specific properties (configurable) after the Statements heading. Clicking a property name will jump to that properties section. For absent property, clicking property name will jump to the end of the page.
mul language code: We continued work on it focusing on showing it in the right place in the desktop termbox (phab:T316767)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the endpoints for reading statement data of Properties (both a single statement, and a list of all of a Property’s statement) (phab:T339356, phab:T338383)
Vector 2022 skin: We continued work on improving the search display (phab:T327510)
WMF Governance wiki is now connected to Wikidata so can be linked to in the sitelink section under multilingual sites (phab:T321967)
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 Section-level Image Suggestions feature has been deployed on seven Wikipedias (Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Catalan, Hungarian, Finnish and Norwegian Bokmål). The feature recommends images for articles on contributors' watchlists that are a good match for individual sections of those articles.
Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool for administrators to help fight spam. It provides a clearer interface for blocking plain domains (and their subdomains), is more easily searchable, and is faster for the software to process for each edit on the wiki. It does not support regex (for complex cases), nor URL path-matching, nor the MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist, but otherwise it replaces most of the functionalities of the existing MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. There is a Python script to help migrate all simple domains into this tool, and more feature details, within the tool's documentation. It is available at all wikis except for Meta-wiki, Commons, and Wikidata. [103]
The WikiEditor extension was updated. It includes some of the most frequently used features of wikitext editing. In the past, many of its messages could only be translated by administrators, but now all regular translators on translatewiki can translate them. Please check the state of WikiEditor localization into your language, and if the "Completion" for your language shows anything less than 100%, please complete the translation. See a more detailed explanation.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).
The default protocol of Special:LinkSearch and API counterparts has changed from http to both http and https. [104]
Special:LinkSearch and its API counterparts will now search for all of the URL provided in the query. It used to be only the first 60 characters. This feature was requested fifteen years ago. [105]
Future changes
There is an experiment with a ChatGPT plugin. This is to show users where the information is coming from when they read information from Wikipedia. It has been tested by Wikimedia Foundation staff and other Wikimedians. Soon all ChatGPT plugin users can use the Wikipedia plugin. This is the same plugin which was mentioned in Tech News 2023/20. [106]
There is an ongoing discussion on a proposed Third-party resources policy. The proposal will impact the use of third-party resources in gadgets and userscripts. Based on the ideas received so far, policy includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, some best practices and exemption requirements such as code transparency and inspectability. Your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on on the policy talk page.
Wikidata Recent Changes API (simple front-end to the actual API) lets you query Wikidata edits by either properties, or labels/aliases/descriptions/sitelinks. You can retrieve any changes, or specify added/changed/removed. Current lag to Wikidata: 1 seconds. (blog)
autosuggest value (qualifier for P1963 that suggests which values should be autosuggested to the user that uses the property for items that are instances of the subject)
WikiProject Antiquity (aims to gather all contributors working in an aspect or another of Antiquity)
WikiProject Lodging (aims at creating, improving, and organizing Wikidata items related to lodging, such as hotels, motels, inns, guest houses and lodging-related topics)
Development
Vector 2022 skin: We finished working on removing the strange bolding pattern of the Search Results on Wikidata. Should be rolled out in the next train (phab:T327510)
EntitySchemas: We are working on showing the Label of EntitySchema in Statements and Special pages (phab:T339924)
Mismatch Finder: We are working on adding the Language Selector to the Mismatch Finder (phab:T328149)
mul: We trying out changing how placeholders in Wikibase termboxes work: They’ll soon start falling back across the fallback chain of the language until they hit mul (phab:T340832)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (calendar).
MediaWiki system messages will now look for available local fallbacks, instead of always using the default fallback defined by software. This means wikis no longer need to override each language on the fallback chain separately. For example, English Wikipedia doesn't have to create en-ca and en-gb subpages with a transclusion of the base pages anymore. This makes it easier to maintain local overrides. [107]
The action=growthsetmentorstatus API will be deprecated with the new MediaWiki version. Bots or scripts calling that API should use the action=growthmanagementorlist API now. [108]
Missed the initial office hour sessions for preparing a WikidataCon 2023 submission? Join the next sessions on 20th, 22nd, and 26th and bring all your questions. Wikidata:WikidataCon 2023#Office hours (available in both Mandarin and English)
Live Wikidata editing in Italian, July 25 at 9:00 PM CEST on YouTube
Ongoing
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #102, Money (Challenge started on 2023-07-24 12:01:19)
Images near items - helps to find Wikimedia Commons images near Wikidata items without image. It can load a category tree of Commons images with coodrinates, and then find Wikidata items of a certain P31 with coordinates but without images. Then, it will try to find nearby (<50 meters) pairs. (example link for UK red phone booths)
Top scorer (This property is for the best scorer of a single season of a team sport's competition, or even for the best ever scorer of the history of a competition. The qualifiers to be admitted to this property should be: {{p|54}}; {{p|1532}}; {{p|1013}} (es.: goals / tries / points / etc ).)
EntitySchemas: We expanded the new datatype that is in testing. When a statement links to an EntitySchema it will now show its label when available (phab:T338613). We are also working on showing them by their label in recent changes and similar places (phab:T214885).
mul language code: we are working on improving the termbox to integrate this new language code better (phab:T340644)
Mismatch Finder: We are working on adding a language selector to it so you can switch the language of the tool (phab:T328149)
Wikibase REST API: We completed two new endpoint for the Wikibase REST API:
Retrieve all statements from a Property - /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements
Retrieve a single statement from a Property - /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements/{statement_id}
You can also retrieve a single statement from a Property from the existing /statements/{statement_id} endpoint
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).
The deadline for submitting your proposals for WikidataCon 2023 is July 31st (23:59) anywhere in the world. Submit your proposals at https://pretalx.com/wikidatacon2023/
Top scorer (This property is for the best scorer of a single season of a team sport's competition, or even for the best ever scorer of the history of a competition. The qualifiers to be admitted to this property should be: {{p|54}}; {{p|1532}}; {{p|1013}} (es.: goals / tries / points / etc ).)
Project partner (property to list the partners of a project or an event, when different from the organizing body.)
GET /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements (phab:T339356) (new route)
GET /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements/{statement_id} (phab:T338383) (new route)
GET /statements/{statement_id} (now supports statements on Properties)
We started work on a new route for replacing the data of a statement on a Property (phab:T340006)
EntitySchemas:
We worked on improving the termbox (the table of labels, descriptions and aliases) on EntitySchema pages to bring it more in line with the one on Items and Properties
We made sure that EntitySchemas are shown by their label instead of ID when available in Recent Changes and similar lists (phab:T339924)
Mismatch Finder: We added a language selector so you can switch the interface language (phab:T328149)
mul language code: We are working on showing more labels from fallback languags in the termbox (phab:T340832, phab:T338330)
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 Synchronizer tool is now available to keep Lua modules synced across Wikimedia wikis, along with updated documentation to develop global Lua modules and templates.
The tag filter on Special:NewPages and revision history pages can now be inverted. For example, you can hide edits that were made using an automated tool. [109][110]
The Wikipedia ChatGPT plugin experiment can now be used by ChatGPT users who can use plugins. You can participate in a video call if you want to talk about this experiment or similar work. [111]
Problems
It was not possible to generate a PDF for pages with non-Latin characters in the title, for the last two weeks. This has now been fixed. [112]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (calendar).
Starting on Tuesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [113]
WikiShootMe expanded to make it possible to find the Items close to pictures you took so you can upload and add them to them (source)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Template:Synia is a new template which makes it easy to create links to Synia from Wikidata. Template:Synia+ guesses the relevant configuration pages for each entity depending on the values of P31 and P106.
Wikifunctions, Wikidata's newest sibling project, had a soft launch. Welcome to the Wikimedia wikiverse, functioneers!
The ORES service will be decommissioned and replaced by Lift Wing. If you have a tool that relies on ORES scores to judge edits or the quality of an Item please read the migration announcement. We are collecting affected community tools in phab:T343419.
disinherited (someone who received or will receive no or little the subject's property or title even if otherwise eligible, (partially) the opposite of [[Wikidata:Property proposal/heir or beneficiary]])
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
Mobile Web editors can now edit a whole page at once. To use this feature, turn on "⧼Mobile-frontend-mobile-option-amc⧽" in your settings and use the "Edit full page" button in the "More" menu. [114]
Wikimania 2023 (16–19 August, Singapore and Online) program is out: wikimania:2023:Program
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour August 18, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to. The first Wikidata Working Hour in the series will cover creating a bibliography of diverse LIS articles and books. We will generate a spreadsheet of sources ready for use during subsequent Working Hours. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page. Event page
Everything is connected - is a knowledge-based puzzle game where players must fit square pieces representing entities in the world together based on their known connections.
Steam Deck compatibility rating (official rating used to determine which games, as a result of the review process, are compatible with Steam Deck and which are not)
name version for other gender (use for when names that are not given name or surnames are gendered (since those two have their own properties), would also be helpful for many noble titles and honorifics as well as affixes)
Curator of (has curated a collection or (art) exhibition)
WikiProject Svenska Grillplatser (WikiProject Swedish Grill Places) - The idea is to see what Wikidata and OSM can contribute when it comes to barbecue sites and connections to municipalities, grillplatser.nu, naturkartan.
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 Content translation system is no longer using Youdao's machine translation service. The service was in place for several years, but due to no usage, and availability of alternatives, it was deprecated to reduce maintenance overheads. Other services which cover the same languages are still available. [115]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Latin Wikipedia, Ladino Wikipedia, Luxembourgish Wikipedia, Lak Wikipedia, Lezghian Wikipedia, Lingua Franca Nova Wikipedia, Ganda Wikipedia, Limburgish Wikipedia, Ligurian Wikipedia, Lombard Wikipedia, Lingala Wikipedia, Latgalian Wikipedia, Latvian Wikipedia, Maithili Wikipedia, Basa Banyumasan Wikipedia, Moksha Wikipedia, Malagasy Wikipedia, Armenian Wikipedia, Kyrgyz Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [116]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: TiagoLubianaBot 2 (Task: The Open Targets Platform is an important biomedical resource that makes its data available under a CC0 license waiver. The request at hand is to extend the permissions of User:TiagoLubianaBot to import information from Open Targets, initially with a focus on physical interactions between proteins and drugs.)
WHO Aware Classification (The World Health Organization currently classifies 258 antibiotics into "Access", "Watch", and "Reserve" based partly on the risk of resistance developing as a result of such use and critical nature of the antibiotic in question.)
nombre de niveaux (number of levels in a video game or number of stages in a particular sport)
URL du plan du jeu vidéo (URL of the video game detailed map in subject provided by the site CPC-Power)
Positioning (A list of all the satellite navigation system (ex. GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BDS, NavIC etc. ) a mobile device, or a smartphone supports. [https://w.wiki/7HE9 List of all the Satellite Navigation System].)
place on the route (object, station, facility, city, natural formation or other place on a road, track, route, line, watercourse, utility line or other linear route)
simule (the element imitates or makes the value of the property appear real)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).
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
As part of the changes for the better diff handling of paragraph splits, improved detection of splits is being rolled out. Over the last two weeks, we deployed this support to group0 and group1 wikis. This week it will be deployed to group2 wikis. [127]
All Special:Contributions pages now show the user's local edit count and the account's creation date. [128]
Wikisource users can now use the prpbengalicurrency label to denote Bengali currency characters as page numbers inside the <pagelist> tag. [129]
Two preferences have been relocated. The preference "Enable the visual editor" is now shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis. Previously it was shown on the "Beta features" tab at some wikis. The preference "Use the wikitext mode inside the visual editor, instead of a different wikitext editor" is now also shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis, instead of the "Beta features" tab. [130][131]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).
All right-to-left language wikis, plus Korean, Armenian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Bulgarian Wikipedias, will have a link in the sidebar that provides a short URL of that page, using the Wikimedia URL Shortener. This feature will come to more wikis in future weeks. [132]
Future changes
The removal of the DoubleWiki extension is being discussed. This extension currently allows Wikisource users to view articles from multiple language versions side by side when the <=> symbol next to a specific language edition is selected. Comments on this are welcomed at the phabricator task.
A proposal has been made to merge the second hidden-categories list (which appears below the wikitext editing form) with the main list of categories (which is further down the page). More information is available on Phabricator; feedback is welcome!
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Closed request for permissions/Bot: TiagoLubianaBot 2 (Task: The Open Targets Platform is an important biomedical resource that makes its data available under a CC0 license waiver. The request at hand is to extend the permissions of User:TiagoLubianaBot to import information from Open Targets, initially with a focus on physical interactions between proteins and drugs.)
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #107, Teeth (Challenge started on 2023-08-28 12:01:31)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour August 28, 2023. We will cover adding the articles from our bibliography of diverse LIS resources that we created in our last session to Wikidata! We will learn how to use Zotero, the reference management software, and its browser plugin to automatically extract metadata for articles and convert them to a Wikidata format that can be batch uploaded using QuickStatements. To get a sneak preview of what we will be doing, you can learn more about the Wikidata & Zotero link here: Wikidata:Zotero. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page. Event page
Keynote about Wikidata for the Chinese Confernence on Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Computing 2023, by Denny Vrandečić - YouTube
How to fill an Infobox on Wikipedia using Wikidata - Wikipedia For Beginners - YouTube
The impact of Wikidata-powered inboxes on minority and low-resourced language Wikipedias in Africa (Wikimania 2023) - YouTube
How to create item in Wikidata about a village (in Malayalam) - YouTube
Add Wikidata link to an OpenStreetMap relation (in Guarani) - YouTube
WikiDBs: A Corpus Of Relational Databases From Wikidata - YouTube
Tool of the week
Wikitrivia is a web-based game that challenges your knowledge of historical events, people, and places. The game is a combination of Sudoku and Scrabble, and all the data used in the game is sourced from Wikidata and Wikipedia. The objective of the game is to place the cards on the timeline in the correct order.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Biyanto Rebin is joining the Software Communication team (SCoT) at Wikimedia Deutschland for 2.5 months as an intern. Welcome!
simule (the element imitates or makes the value of the property appear real)
sexe ou genre du protagoniste (regarding the work in question, For human: male, female, non-binary, intersex, transgender female, transgender male, agender. For animal: male organism, female organism. Groups of same gender use subclass of (P279))
unofficial name (name which is widely or rarely used, but not official (for nicknames use P1449, for pseudonymes P742))
Following an RfC, TFAs will be automatically semi-protected the day before it is on the main page and through the day after.
A discussion at WP:VPP about revision deletion and oversight for dead names found that [s]ysops can choose to use revdel if, in their view, it's the right tool for this situation, and they need not default to oversight. But oversight could well be right where there's a particularly high risk to the person. Use your judgment.
The SmallCat dispute case has closed. As part of the final decision, editors participating in XfD have been reminded to be careful about forming local consensus which may or may not reflect the broader community consensus. Regular closers of XfD forums were also encouraged to note when broader community discussion, or changes to policies and guidelines, would be helpful.
Miscellaneous
Tech tip: The "Browse history interactively" banner shown at the top of Special:Diff can be used to easily look through a history, assemble composite diffs, or find out what archive something wound up in.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: FlyingAce (RfP scheduled to end after 8 September 2023 23:32 UTC)
New request for comments: Must 'Serious' WikiData sources be selective? (The disagreement regards the interpretation of WD:N rule number two, which states an item is acceptable if: "It refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity that can be described using serious and publicly available references.")
Job opening: Software Engineer (Wikidata) (m/f/d). For our Team Wikidata, based in Berlin, we are looking for a permanent Software Engineer (m/f/d), full-time or part-time (min. 32h/week), as soon as possible.
Wikidata's eleventh birthday is around the corner! One of our traditions is to prepare birthday presents to the community. Now is a great time to start preparing yours!
has heir or beneficiary (people or organizations that received, or will receive, (all or part of) the subject's property or title)
towing capacity (the maximum sustainable force with which this vehicle can pull or push another object. Alternatively for road- or track-vehicles, the maximum weight of an object on wheels that this vehicle can reliably and safely pull given usual slopes)
learning outcome (specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that students are expected to acquire as a result of participating in a particular education program)
tribe (recognised membership in a society, mainly denoted by shared cultural heritage; for ethnicity use P172)
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
EditInSequence, a feature that allows users to edit pages faster on Wikisource has been moved to a Beta Feature based on community feedback. To enable it, you can navigate to the beta features tab in Preferences. [133]
There is a new option for Administrators when they are changing the usergroups for a user, to add the user’s user page to their watchlist. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API. [135]
The LoginNotify extension was not sending notifications since January. It has now been fixed, so going forward, you may see notifications for failed login attempts, and successful login attempts from a new device. [137]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Eastern Mari Wikipedia, Maori Wikipedia, Minangkabau Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Mongolian Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Western Mari Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Maltese Wikipedia, Mirandese Wikipedia, Erzya Wikipedia, Mazanderani Wikipedia, Nāhuatl Wikipedia, Neapolitan Wikipedia, Low German Wikipedia, Low Saxon Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Newari Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Novial Wikipedia, N'Ko Wikipedia, Nouormand Wikipedia, Northern Sotho Wikipedia, Navajo Wikipedia, Nyanja Wikipedia, Occitan Wikipedia, Livvi-Karelian Wikipedia, Oromo Wikipedia, Oriya Wikipedia, Ossetic Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Pangasinan Wikipedia, Pampanga Wikipedia, Papiamento Wikipedia, Picard Wikipedia, Pennsylvania German Wikipedia, Palatine German Wikipedia, Norfuk / Pitkern Wikipedia, Piedmontese Wikipedia, Western Punjabi Wikipedia, Pontic Wikipedia, Pashto Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [138][139]
Peppercat is a website listing government ministers, and other key political leaders, from all over the world, taking data from Wikidata. More information
state of transmission (state of transmission of a work (as a concept, not as a physical item; for that, use P5816))
describes actor of (predicate sense whose actor (an agent or a cause—basically the instigator of an action) is denoted by this sense)
describes undergoer of (predicate sense whose undergoer (a patient, a theme, or a recipient—basically a non-instigator of an action) is denoted by this sense)
Machine learning: We are migrating some tools that currently use ORES to the new Lift Wing (phab:T343731)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work around the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements
Query Builder: We fixed some issues in the Query Builder language selector (phab:T344231)
We’re making the warning for anonymous editors more useful by letting them return to the page they came from after logging in (phab:T330550); we’re also working on showing those warnings in the first place in WikibaseLexeme (phab:T343979)
Wikibase REST API: We are working on the ability to remove a statement from a Property (phab:T342976) and get the labels of a Property (phab:T342977)
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
ORES, the revision evaluation service, is now using a new open-source infrastructure on all wikis except for English Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two will follow this week. If you notice any unusual results from the Recent Changes filters that are related to ORES (for example, "Contribution quality predictions" and "User intent predictions"), please report them. [140]
When you are logged in on one Wikimedia wiki and visit a different Wikimedia wiki, the system tries to log you in there automatically. This has been unreliable for a long time. You can now visit the login page to make the system try extra hard. If you feel that made logging in better or worse than it used to be, your feedback is appreciated. [141]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
As part of the changes for the Better diff handling of paragraph splits wishlist proposal, the inline switch widget in diff pages is being rolled out this week to all wikis. The inline switch will allow viewers to toggle between a unified inline or two-column diff wikitext format. [142]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 20 September. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [143]
The Enterprise API is launching a new feature called "breaking news". Currently in BETA, this attempts to identify likely "newsworthy" topics as they are currently being written about in any Wikipedia. Your help is requested to improve the accuracy of its detection model, especially on smaller language editions, by recommending templates or identifiable editing patterns. See more information at the documentation page on MediaWiki or the FAQ on Meta.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour September 15, 2023. We will learn how to use Zotero, the reference management software, and its browser plugin to automatically extract metadata for articles and convert them to a Wikidata format that can be batch uploaded using QuickStatements.More information on the event page
chronological designation (as a typical instance, the stated scholarly journal year to which reference is made by: the reference source being cited to support the statement being made)
We are planning the migration of some of our existing components from the Wikit to the Codex design system in Query Builder, Mismatch Finder and the Special:NewLexeme page.
Warnings about not being logged-in will now have a returnto= parameter attached to their links, so that you can don’t use your flow from logging in (phab:T330550)
We fixed an issue with the LanguageSwitcher in Query Builder where it would open out of the viewport on some tablet screen widths (phab:T344231)
Wikibase REST API: We finished the work on making it possible to remove a statement from a Property (phab:T342976) and getting the labels of a Property (phab:T342977)
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
MediaWiki now has a stable interface policy for frontend code that more clearly defines how we deprecate MediaWiki code and wiki-based code (e.g. gadgets and user scripts). Thank you to everyone who contributed to the content and discussions. [144][145]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (calendar).
New Page Review article queue, March to September 2023
Backlog update:
At the time of this message, there are 11,300 articles and 15,600 redirects awaiting review. This is the highest backlog in a long time. Please help out by doing additional reviews!
October backlog elimination drive:
A one-month backlog drive for October will start in one week! Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled. Articles will earn 4x as many points compared to redirects. You can sign up here.
PageTriage code upgrades:
Upgrades to the PageTriage code, initiated by the NPP open letter in 2022 and actioned by the WMF Moderator Tools Team in 2023, are ongoing. More information can be found here. As part of this work, the Special:NewPagesFeed now has a new version in beta! The update leaves the NewPagesFeed appearance and function mostly identical to the old one, but updates the underlying code, making it easier to maintain and helping make sure the extension is not decommissioned due to maintenance issues in the future. You can try out the new Special:NewPagesFeed here - it will replace the current version soon.
Notability tip:
Professors can meet WP:PROF #1 by having their academic papers be widely cited by their peers. When reviewing professor articles, it is a good idea to find their Google Scholar or Scopus profile and take a look at their h-index and number of citations. As a very rough rule of thumb, for most fields, articles on people with a h-index of twenty or more, a first-authored paper with more than a thousand citations, or multiple papers each with more than a hundred citations are likely to be kept at AfD.
Reviewing tip:
If you would like like a second opinion on your reviews or simply want another new page reviewer by your side when patrolling, we recommend pair reviewing! This is where two reviewers use Discord voice chat and screen sharing to communicate with each other while reviewing the same article simultaneously. This is a great way to learn and transfer knowledge.
WikidataCon 2023, the conference dedicated to the Wikidata community, is taking place on October 28-29, online all around the world and onsite in Taipei. You can now register for the conference.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour September 29. This event is part of a series where you can gain hands-on experience with Wikidata by working on a diverse library and information science (LIS) dataset. In this fourth session, we'll introduce the Wikimedia PAWS environment for data gathering and processing in your Wikidata projects. We'll focus on web scraping for article data using Python and the Beautiful Soup package for parsing. You'll learn about data models for making your data accessible to both machines and humans. This session will be recorded and shared on the event page. Event page.
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #110, Ohm's law (Challenge started on 2023-09-25 12:01:32)
User:Luca.favorido/linkypop.js is a script that can be used to search an identifier on an external site. It provides a button to search for an identifier as soon as you type it in the property input field. For example, if you type “ORCID”, an icon with a lens will appear, and when you click it, a new tab will open with the ORCID site looking for the name of the researcher. You can then copy the URL and paste it to Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Want to play a game? Wikidata:Games has some Wikidata-related ones for you.
Citation.js Toolforge is a service to export citations from Wikidata items in various formats (BibTeX, RIS) and various citations formats (Vancouver, APA, etc)
type of musical notation (system of musical notation used on a given music source or composition)
chronological designation (stated scholarly journal year to which reference is made by: source cited in support of a particular statement may not be the same as the publication date or volume)
We worked on making it possible to upload mismatches on qualifiers (phab:T313467)
We are continuing to migrate tools from ORES to Lift Wing (phab:T343731)
We've added Wikifunktions as a new wiki for sitelinks (phab:T342857)
Wikibase REST API: We are working on making it possible to get labels, descriptions and aliases from a Property as well as modify the description of an Item
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 Vector 2022 skin will now remember the pinned/unpinned status for the Table of Contents for all logged-out users. [148]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September (calendar).
Gadget definitions will have a new "namespaces" option. The option takes a list of namespace IDs. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages in the given namespaces.
Future changes
New variables will be added to AbuseFilter: global_account_groups and global_account_editcount. They are available only when an account is being created. You can use them to prevent blocking automatic creation of accounts when users with many edits elsewhere visit your wiki for the first time. [149][150]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 27 October at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
January 12 - 14, 2024, Berlin, Germany (and online) - CFP: Provenance Loves Wiki - A workshop on art history, art science and provenance research in Wikidata/Wikipedia & Wikibase
Ongoing
Weekly Lexemes Challenge #110, Ohm's law (Challenge started on 2023-09-25 12:01:32)
This Week
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call October 3, 2023: Lars Willighagen will discuss on citation.js.org, Wikidata, and plans for more linked data. Agenda
Wikidata for Better Health (in French) - Houcemeddine Turki, Faculty of Sciences SFAX < closing session of "Adapting Wikidata to support clinical practice using Data Science, Semantic Web and Machine Learning"
Swiss Archives is an interactive overview map of the Swiss archives present in Wikidata have corresponding Wikipedia articles and in which language (FR, DE, IT), allowing interested Wikimedians to know where they can contribute or expand. - Michael Gasser (X post)
WikiProject GLAM-BW - a project to connect major collections held by museums in Baden-Württemberg by uploading information on collectors, former collection locations, collecting histories, and objects
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We are finalizing the work on getting the labels, descriptions and aliases of a Property.
We are finishing work on modifying the descriptions of an Item.
You can now add sitelinks to Wikifunctions (phab:T342857)
We improved the “required” marker on Special:NewLexeme, hopefully making its meaning clearer (phab:T322683)
If you are not logged-in, you’ll also get the yellow warning when editing Lexeme’s Lemmas, Forms, and Senses (phab:T343979)
We added the tlh-latn and tlh-piqd codes for monolingual text, so that now you can add the titles to Shakepear’s works in the original Klingon (phab:T286239)
Mismatch Finder:
Failed uploads now no longer offer to download review results (phab:T335864)
We are working on the ability to report mismatches on qualifiers (phab:T313467)
The Mismatch Finder will show a clarifying message when Java Script is disabled (phab:T343344)
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
There is a new user preference for "Always enable safe mode". This setting will make pages load without including any on-wiki JavaScript or on-wiki stylesheet pages. It can be useful for debugging broken JavaScript gadgets. [151]
Gadget definitions now have a new "contentModels" option. The option takes a list of page content models, like wikitext or css. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages with the given content models.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (calendar).
Future changes
The Vector 2022 skin will no longer use the custom styles and scripts of Vector legacy (2010). The change will be made later this year or in early 2024. See how to adjust the CSS and JS pages on your wiki. [152]
An RfC is open regarding amending the paid-contribution disclosure policy to add the following text: Any administrator soliciting clients for paid Wikipedia-related consulting or advising services not covered by other paid-contribution rules must disclose all clients on their userpage.
Technical news
Administrators can now choose to add the user's user page to their watchlist when changing the usergroups for a user. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API. (T272294)
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
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Fon (w:fon:) [153]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Swahili Wikipedia, Walloon Wikipedia, Waray Wikipedia, Wolof Wikipedia, Kalmyk Wikipedia, Xhosa Wikipedia, Mingrelian Wikipedia, Yiddish Wikipedia, Yoruba Wikipedia, Zhuang Wikipedia, Zeelandic Wikipedia, Min Nan Wikipedia, Zulu Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [154]
At some wikis, newcomers are suggested images from Commons to add to articles without any images. Starting on Tuesday, newcomers at these wikis will be able to add images to unillustrated article sections. The specific wikis are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table. You can learn more about this feature.[155]
In the mobile web skin (Minerva) the CSS ID #page-actions will be replaced with #p-views. This change is to make it consistent with other skins and to improve support for gadgets and extensions in the mobile skin. A few gadgets may need to be updated; there are details and search-links in the task.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 18th October 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour October 13, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to. The fifth Wikidata Working Hour in the series will cover manually adding authors and publishers from our bibliography into Wikidata. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page. Event page
Is AI lying to us? These researchers built an LLM lie detector of sorts to find out - Tiernan Ray, ZDNET ("Step one is to come up with a list of over 20,000 questions and known answers, drawn from sources such as Wikidata, for which the large language model, in this case, OpenAI's GPT-3.5, can be reliably expected to provide the correct answer.")
Data Scraping, Gathering & Annotation (in Ukrainian VO, English text) < lecture on data gathering, Wikidata, SPARQL and structured data from Ukrainian Catholic University
Wikidata: first pragmatic approach - Ismael Olea - OpenSouthCode 2023 < an introduction to Wikidata - the objective of this talk is for the public to leave amazed and addicted to Wikidata.
Tool of the week
https://aletheiafact.org <- is a new fact-checking website using Wikidata for people/concept identification. The website allows users to contribute to fact-checking claims made by public figures, such as politicians, celebrities, and influencers.
Wikibase REST API: We worked on the new routes for PATCHing Property and Item aliases as well as PUTing Property labels and descriptions (phab:T342982, phab:T337371, phab:T337371, phab:T348150)
We are continuing to work on fixing an issue with Lexeme pages missing styles and scripts (phab:T344362)
We’re adding some missing license notes to some javascript UI interfaces (phab:343998, phab:T343999)
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on supporting mismatches for data that is stored in qualifiers (phab:T313467)
WMF GLAM report: Wikisource Loves Manuscripts, ICOM outreach, Flickr Foundation partnership, OpenRefine adoption, new sources in The Wikipedia Library, Image Description Month events, and the GLAM Wiki Conference
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call October 17, 2023: Our scheduled speaker had to unexpectedly cancel, so please join us to transfer group call notes from the Google Drive to the wiki project page (see instructions link in agenda document!) Agenda
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 18th October 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Wikidata Day NYC '23 Join fellow Wikidata-enthusiasts on October 29th at the Butler Library, 114th Street West, NYC for a free Wikidata-celebration with a selection of engaging workshops and presentations to attend.
State of the Map EU 2023 has a session on OSM-Wikidata Map Framework on Sunday, 12th Nov., taking place in Antwerp, Belgium.
Wikidata Days: WM-Peru (in Spanish) attend a 2-day event, with sessions devoted to Wikidata, OpenRefine, QuickStatements and SPARQL.
Wikimedia Chile: Wikidata Training Course Staying in South America, Chilean and all Spanish-speakers can attend a 4-day Course and earn a participation Certificate. Online event - 17 to 20th October.
Press: Indexing news with AI via BroadCast Pro ME ("We are able to create a rich multilingual archive, leveraging translations based on the Wikidata knowledge graph.")
Drag'n'Drop Gadget <-- This handy gadget allows you to click and drag information from a Wikipedia article and add it to a Wikidata-item as a Statement. By Magnus Sälgö.
LIVE Wikidata editing #110 <-- Ainali and Abbe98 do some live editing on Wikidata (in English), and discuss the thought process of what we are doing and why we do it.
User:Nikki/ChecksumCheck.js <-- This script displays a symbol after external identifiers which contain checksums, to indicate whether the checksum in the identifier is correct. Currently only supporting a small number of Identifiers.
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 Unified login system's edge login should now be fixed for some browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera). This means that if you visit a new sister project wiki, you should be logged in automatically without the need to click "Log in" or reload the page. Feedback on whether it's working for you is welcome. [156]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 October. It will be on all wikis from 19 October (calendar).
Future changes
In 3 weeks, in the Vector 2022 skin, code related to addPortletLink and #p-namespaces that was deprecated one year ago will be removed. If you notice tools that should appear next to the "Discussion" tab are then missing, please tell the gadget's maintainers to see instructions in the Phabricator task.
Edit-A-Thon for LGBTQ+ History Month < Binghamton University Library, New York, Oct. 25th. Help make visible the important contributions of queer figures.
Wikidata Birthday Edit-A-Thon (Albanian) < Albanian language Wikimedians celebrate Wikidata's Birthday with a 2-day event (Oct. 28 - 29, 2023) near the "Aleksandër Xhuvani" University, Elbasan.
Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour October 23, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to. The sixth Wikidata Working Hour in the series will cover batch creating items using OpenRefine.This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the Event page
4th Wikidata Workshop as part of the International Semantic Web Conference. 7th Nov., Athens, Greece.
Live Editing #110 < Develop your SPARQL query-building skills in this follow-along session.
Tutorial on Wikidata for or WikiConnect course (in Portuguese) <-- Explaining the Wiki Movimento Brasil's WikiConecta Wikidata course. The course entails Understanding what Wikidata is and its operating logic, Learning the basics of editing and recovering data, and Understanding why and how to use Wikidata with your students.
Birthday Presents from Data Engineering and Semantics Research Unit:
MedCYN as an intuitive web tool for Wikidata-based clinical decision support.
MeSH2Wikidata as an approach for validating and classifying biomedical relations in Wikidata based on MeSH Keywords of PubMed scholarly publications.
Tool of the week
User:Magnus Manske/annas archive.js is a userscript that automatically links to Anna's Archive from Wikidata items for books and research articles, for title, DOI, ISBN, etc. so that people can easily get access to them.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
There is a new update relative to the Wikidata Query Service scaling of the backend, that explains how the team will experiment with splitting the Wikidata Query Service graph and use federation for the queries that need access to all subgraphs.
Mismatch Finder tool improvements: In the next deployment scheduled for November 1, the tool will let you report mismatches on qualifiers in addition to the main part of a statement.
We are preparing for WikidataCon and the Data Modelling Days.
We are looking more into where Wikibase needs to be adapted to the upcoming IP Masking changes.
We added a notification about the license to all edits to labels, descriptions and aliases that was missing still (phab:T343998) The same for Lexemes is coming next (phab:T343999)
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
There is a new Language and internationalization newsletter, written quarterly. It contains updates on new feature development, improvements in various language-related technical projects, and related support work.
Source map support has been enabled on all wikis. When you open the debugger in your browser's developer tools, you should be able to see the unminified JavaScript source code. [157]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 October. It will be on all wikis from 26 October (calendar).
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Welcome to the 600th Weekly Summary!
Lydia initiated the weekly newsletter at the start of the Wikidata project, before it even went live, to keep the community in the loop about the developments, the new projects and tools. Léa carried on the newsletter in 2016 and then it was my turn in 2020. The newsletter has been going strong for eleven years, with its content powered by the community, and delivered every week without fail. Thank you to everyone who helped fill in the different sections of the Weekly Summary thus far ❤️ --Mohammed
Today it is time to celebrate Wikidata’s 11th birthday. Let’s take a look back at the past year and what’s coming.
Wikidata’s world - map of Wikidata Items with a geocoordinate
There are now over 12.200 amazing people who are actively editing on Wikidata - 3000 of them even making more than 100 edits a month ♥️ Thank you! Without you Wikidata wouldn’t be what it is today. Thank you for helping give more people more access to more knowledge every single day. This year also marks the year we can welcome a new sister to the Wikimedia projects: Wikifunctions is live, letting us all geek out on functions in anticipation of Abstract Wikipedia. Another big milestone was Wikibase Cloud coming out of private beta. Now you can more easily run your own Wikibase and collect and maintain data that doesn’t fit into Wikidata. 2023 was also the year when the efforts of Wikidata editors were recognized across the Wikimedia movement with the awarding of the Wikimedian of the Year award to Taufik Rosman and the Wikimedia Laureate award to Siobhan Leachman. Over the coming year I want us to find ways how we can bring more people, who are already editing a bit here and there, closer to the community and help them find their place in our community. If you are one of them and have not found your place yet, check out a WikiProject related to your interests. Wikidata has something for everyone 😉
Wikidata now has over 106 Million Items and nearly 1.2 Million Lexemes. We are closing in on 2 Billion edits, making about 20 Million edits per month. All this content is used to create useful, quirky, educational or just fun applications that wouldn’t be possible without Wikidata and all the work you put into it. Check out Notable People for example. Over the coming year we want to make that even easier by building better APIs, lessening the strain on the Query Service, doing more outreach to developers as well as making our data more usable by ironing out ontology issues. In addition there will be increased focus on improving how the other Wikimedia projects integrate Wikidata. With the opening up of Wikibase Cloud we will hopefully also see many new Wikibases pop up that cover more specialized data or be used as playgrounds to prepare data for Wikidata. I am looking forward to a growing Wikibase Ecosystem and excited about more Linked Open Data becoming available to the world, with Wikidata being an entryway to it all.
And last but not least: if you want to learn a bit more about the history and backstory of Wikidata, then you might like Wikidata: The Making Of by Denny, Markus and me.
List of presents gathered by the community for Wikidata's eleventh birthday
Luthor is a multi-lingual tool for adding usage examples to lexemes on Wikidata, from sentences found on Wikisource in the same language. (by Asaf Bartov)
সংকলক একটি সরঞ্জাম যেটা দিয়ে উইকিসংকলনের লেখাগুলির উইকিউপাত্ত আইটেম অনুসারে সে লেখাগুলিকে উন্নত ভাবে অনুসন্ধান করা যায়। - Sangkalak is a tool with which Wikisource works can be searched more readily, using the Wikidata items for those works. (present from Mahir256) (by মাহির২৫৬-এর উপহার)
Creating new Lexemes? For a lot more languages you now no longer need to provide a spelling variant when creating a new Lexeme, making it even easier to contribute data about words in your language. (present from the development team)
The Mismatch Finder, the tool to help review mismatches between Wikidata and other data sources now also has support for mismatches on qualifiers. This allows it to be useful also for issues that are in the data in qualifiers. (present from the development team)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call October 31, 2023: We will hear from Darnelle Melvin, Cory Lampert, and Andre Hulet, University of Nevada-Las Vegas Libraries, on WireframeVG: A Search and Discovery Application for Wikidata Projects. Agenda
How cultural institutions use Wikidata (How cultural heritage institutions sharing their collection data, including implementing Wikidata projects, batch uploading datasets to Wikidata, and how to share successes to a broader audience) - Jackie Rubashkin, Metadata Technician, Barack Obama Presidential Library; Michelle van Lanschot, Project Coordinator at Wikimedia-Netherlands; William Blueher, Associate Museum Librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Will Kent, Wiki Education
(in Chinese) Wikidata基礎編輯教學 (Wikidata basic editor) - Conference for Open Source Coders, Users & Promoters (COSCUP) 2023
Notable People is a map project by Topi Tjukanov that showing birthplaces of the most "notable people" around the world. It uses the combined data of Wikipedia and Wikidata from the paper's "a cross-verified database of notable people, 3500 BC-2018 AD" by Morgane Laouenan, Palaash Bhargava, Jean-Benoît Eyméoud, Olivier Gergaud, Guillaume Plique & Etienne Wasmer. The data shows only one person for each unique geographic location with the highest notability rank.
Wikimedia Research Fund Update update. "You can apply for research funds (USD 2K-50K) until December 15, 2023. While all research proposals related to Wikimedia projects are welcome, we particularly encourage research studies on medium to small size languages and communities, as well as in low resourced languages and projects."
The Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects team is investigating the different ways Wikidata is used in the sister projects. We would like to speak with you about your experiences integrating or connecting Wikidata, if you'd like to tell us, please sign up for an interview on our project page or on our Registration Form.
Wikidata:WikiProject Academic Publisher - a project to display open access shares (among others based on publishers) at the Austrian Datahub for Open Access Negotiations and Monitoring
Development
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing the work on making it possible to remove a description in a given language from an Item, modify the label of an Item and add aliases to an Item (phab:T342986, phab:T342980, phab:T335842)
Lexicographical data: We switched the Property that is used to pre-select the spelling variant on the Special:NewLexeme page from P218 (ISO 639-1 code) to P305 (IETF language tag) to make use of the latter’s larger coverage. (phab:T348923)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing to work on addressing the feedback from the testing of the new datatype in the test system.
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 Structured Content team, as part of its project of improving UploadWizard on Commons, made some UX improvements to the upload step of choosing own vs not own work (T347590), as well as to the licensing step for own work (T347756).
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (calendar).
Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 2 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for many languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [158][159]
Starting November 1, the impact module (Special:Impact) will be upgraded by the Growth team. The new impact module shows newcomers more data regarding their impact on the wiki. It was tested by a few wikis during the last few months. [160]
WikiProject Articles for creation is holding a month long Backlog Drive!
The goal of this drive is to reduce the backlog of unreviewed drafts to less than 2 months outstanding reviews from the current 4+ months. Bonus points will be given for reviewing drafts that have been waiting more than 30 days. The drive is running from 1 November 2023 through 30 November 2023.
Barnstars will be given out as awards at the end of the drive.
There is a backlog of over 2400 pages, so start reviewing drafts. We're looking forward to your help! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:24, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
Upcoming: Data Modelling Days, November 30-December 2. You can propose a session until November 19. If you are running another event or meetup and would like to connect it to the Data Modelling Days, you can add it to the satellite events section.
Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web is a collection of preceedings from the 5th Iberoamerican Conference and 4th Indo-American Conference, KGSWC 2023, Nov. 13–15. By F. Ortiz-Rodriguez, B. Villazón-Terrazas, S. Tiwari & C. Bobed.
linguistic family of place name (Relates directly a placename to its original language family. It's not the language in which the toponym is written, but the language from which the word (place name) comes from.)
according to (to be used together with P248 if the statement is taken from an aggregator rather than directly from the source)
counterexample (qualifier for deprecated P279 statements; example instance or subclass of the item class for which a "subclass of" statement does not hold (alias: "item belonging to the subject class but not the value class"))
Newest WikiProjects: Source Reliability "is an effort to identify and aggregate online sources of assessments of the reliability and credibility of sources".
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We have implemented the endpoints for PATCH /entities/items/{item_id}/aliases (phab:T337371), PATCH /entities/properties/{property_id}/aliases (phab:T342982) and PATCH /entities/properties/{property_id}/labels (phab:T342980)
We started working on the new endpoints for POST /entities/items/{item_id}/aliases/{language_code} (phab:T335842) and DELETE /entities/items/{item_id}/descriptions/{lang_code} (phab:T342986)
Language codes:
We made Special:NewLexeme more likely to guess the spelling variant for you by changing the Property we use to get the language code. Now you will see the spelling variant input pop up less often. (phab:T349652)
We started work towards allowing many more languages by default for Wikibase Lexeme and monolingual text statements. This will remove the need for a lot of requests for new language codes to be added. (phab:T341409)
Query Service UI: We’ve fixed a small issue in the Query Service UI that was introduced when updating CSS variables. Content of selected cells in the query result should be readable again. (phab:T350153)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on the new data type for linking to EntitySchemas, working on overcoming architectural issues.
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
In the Vector 2022 skin, the default font-size of a number of navigational elements (tagline, tools menu, navigational links, and more) has been increased slightly to match the font size used in page content. [161]
Problems
Last week, there was a problem displaying some recent edits on a few wikis, for 1-6 hours. The edits were saved but not immediately shown. This was due to a database problem. [162]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).
The Growth team will reassign newcomers from former mentors to the currently active mentors. They have also changed the notification language to be more user-friendly. [163][164]
Following a motion, the contentious topic designation of Prem Rawat has been struck. Actions previously taken using this contentious topic designation are still in force.
Following several motions, multiple topic areas are no longer designated as a contentious topic. These contentious topic designations were from the Editor conduct in e-cigs articles, Liancourt Rocks, Longevity, Medicine, September 11 conspiracy theories, and Shakespeare authorship question cases.
Following a motion, remedies 3.1 (All related articles under 1RR whenever the dispute over naming is concerned), 6 (Stalemate resolution) and 30 (Administrative supervision) of the Macedonia 2 case have been rescinded.
Following a motion, remedy 6 (One-revert rule) of the The Troubles case has been amended.
An arbitration case named Industrial agriculture has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case close 8 November.
Miscellaneous
The Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in November 2023, with 700+ drafts pending reviews for in the last 4 months or so. In addition to the AfC participants, all administrators and New Page Patrollers can conduct reviews using the helper script, Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!
South Africa report: Edit-a-thon for Librarians at the annual Library and Information Association of South Africa 2023 Conference
Sweden report: Wikipedia for all of Sweden; Museums and Wikidata – why and how?; Photo memories from Stockholm and Rome; Negotiating Knowledge on Wikipedia
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: S8321414 (RfP scheduled to end after 13 November 2023 14:50 UTC)
New requests for permissions/Bot:
DiFoolBot 2 (Task: import VIAF ID based on Union List of Artist Names ID)
KizuleBot (Task: Adding sitelinks to Serbian Wikipedia for maintenance categories (see contributions of account) based on items for English Wikipedia's ones)
KormiSKbot (Task: Linking newly created pages on SKWiki to the appropriate Wikidata items.)
Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call November 14, 2023: We will hear from Diego Saez-Trumper on Wikidata Revert Risk and Annotool. Agenda
Latin America in Wikidata Challenge (Spanish) < Nov. 14 - Dec. 14. Play the game and help highlight the region hosting the GLAM Wiki conference! (Prizes available).
Edit-a-thon "Women in sciences" < 17 Nov. 12:00 - 18 Nov. 03:00 (UTC). A live edit-a-thon to improve the quality and variety of articles of women who have won the prestigious L'Oréal-UNESCO National Award "For Women in Science". (Prizes available).
Language community meetings: A new initiative by WMF language team to organize quarterly gatherings to encourage collaboration among individuals and communities interested in language-related technical topics. First meeting: Friday, November 17, 2023, 16:00 to 17:00 (UTC)
Glam Wiki Program - 16 - 18 November, Montevideo, Uruguay. Want to attend in person? - Register here. Wikidata Related Sessions:
Knowledge Graphs - Foundations and Applications course by Prof. Dr. Harald Sack. October 11, 2023 - November 21, 2023. Enrol here if you have not done so yet.
GSOC ‘23: Automating Area Management in MusicBrainz <-- Prathamesh, in their Google Summer of Code project, developed a data pipeline to automate the synchronization of area metadata between MusicBrainz and Wikidata.
Papers
Wikidata for authority control: sharing museum knowledge with the world <-- The project “Usable Authorities for Data-driven Cultural Heritage Research” aims to link museum authority data to Wikidata, enhancing the visibility, accessibility, and relevance of information across different museum collections, and encouraging cultural heritage institutions in Sweden to contribute to and utilize the Wikimedia platforms.
The 4th Wikidata Workshop for the scientific Wikidata community happened on 07 November 2023. You can find a full list of presented papers here
Videos
Connecting Entomological Collectors ECN2023 <-- A presentation for the Entomological Collections Network 2023 conference by Siobhan Leachman, this presentation explains how Wikidata can be used to create an identifier for entomological collectors, empowering the collation & linking of biographical data as well as the ability to link to other databases & catalogs relating to those collectors.
Wikidata projects in Wikimedia Spain <-- part of the online sessions organized by Wikimedia España to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Wikidata. In this session, Ángel Obregón, a member of Wikimedia España, presents some of the projects driven by Wikidata by the members of WMES.
Notebooks:
Subclass of... <-- Wikidata's ontology is complex. This tool aims at finding if an item is a subclass of another one.
The Wednesday Index <-- A longitudinal analysis of gender diversity in Wikipedia articles.
Tool of the week
OpenFlights.org is now getting some of its airline data from Wikidata. It is a free open-source tool that allows you to log, map, calculate, and share your flights and trips.
WikiProject IDEA - This Wikiproject serves as a working group and process documentation archive for the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), a project generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and in development at Bard College and Yale University.
WikiProject Interwiki - The goal of this project is linking Wikidata items with wiki articles outside of the Wikimedia ecosystem. Niche wikis frequently offer more in-depth content compared to general online dictionary articles, although their quality can vary significantly.
WikiProject SrpKor - The main aim of this project is building Wikidata entities for the novels from SrpKor: Corpus of the contemporary Serbian language.
WikiProject Echinodermata - A repository for information pertaining to the NSF Grant Echinoderm Project.
Development
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the new endpoints for POST /entities/items/{item_id}/aliases/{language_code} (phab:T335842) and DELETE /entities/items/{item_id}/descriptions/{lang_code} (phab:T342986)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on the new data type for linking to EntitySchemas, working on overcoming architectural issues.
Language codes: We continued work towards allowing many more languages by default for Wikibase Lexeme and monolingual text statements. This will remove the need for a lot of requests for new language codes to be added. (phab:T341409)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Last week, users who previously visited Meta-Wiki or Wikimedia Commons and then became logged out on those wikis could not log in again. The problem is now resolved. [169]
Last week, some pop-up dialogs and menus were shown with the wrong font size. The problem is now resolved. [170]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).
Future changes
Reference Previews are coming to many wikis as a default feature. They are popups for references, similar to the PagePreviews feature. You can opt out of seeing them. If you are using the gadgets Reference Tooltips or Navigation Popups, you won’t see Reference Previews. Deployment is planned for November 22, 2023.
Canary (also known as heartbeat) events will be produced into Wikimedia event streams from December 11. Streams users are advised to filter out these events, by discarding all events where meta.domain == "canary". Updates to Pywikibot or wikimedia-streams will discard these events by default. [171]
Data Modelling Days, from November 30th to December 2nd: 3 days of online events to address data modelling challenges, discuss how to improve the way we structure data together, and discover the point of view of external reusers. Feel free to have a look at the program (under construction) and to sign up as a participant.
Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour November 20th, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to. The seventh Wikidata Working Hour will cover the Author Disambiguator tool, which helps users assign authors to articles.During the session we will demonstrate how to use the tool on an author who was created during a previous working hour, and another who doesn't exist in Wikidata yet. After the demonstration, participants are encouraged to try the tool themselves during the rest of the working hour. This session will build on the work done in previous Working Hours by connecting authors to the articles they have written. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page
ItWikiCon '23 (Italian) was hosted in Bari, Italy between the 17th - 19th November. Check the Programme for details on sessions and check for recordings or slidedecks of presentations.
GLAM Wiki 2023 took place in Montevideo, Uruguay. There were several Wikidata-related sessions some of which are linked in the Videos section.
Can you trust Wikidata? - is a paper exploring Wikidata's veracity and trustability for providing values to Knowledge Graphs. Written by V. Santos et al.
User-level gender statistics for Wikipedia - a tool that computes the number of articles created by gender has been repaired after some months of unavailability. It relies on xtools and P21 property.
Luthor - tool for finding usage examples from Wikisource and adding them to lexemes on Wikidata.
WikiProject Manuscripts - This WikiProject coordinates efforts on Wikidata to gather and curate structured data on manuscripts.
WikiProject Grove Hall Black Women Lead - aims to shed light on the lives and stories of Black women leaders who have shaped Boston’s history from the colonial era to the present day.
Newest database reports: User:Pasleim/projectmerge/enwiki-svwiki - 3875 merge candidates in English Wikipedia and Swedish Wikipedia based on same sitelink name.
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
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [172][173]
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Quechua Wikipedia, Romansh Wikipedia, Romani Wikipedia, Rundi Wikipedia, Aromanian Wikipedia, Tarandíne Wikipedia, Rusyn Wikipedia, Kinyarwanda Wikipedia, Sanskrit Wikipedia, Sakha Wikipedia, Santali Wikipedia, Sardinian Wikipedia, Sicilian Wikipedia, Scots Wikipedia, Sindhi Wikipedia, Northern Sami Wikipedia, Sango Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, Sinhala Wikipedia, Slovak Wikipedia, Slovenian Wikipedia, Samoan Wikipedia, Somali Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Serbian Wikipedia, Sranan Tongo Wikipedia, Swati Wikipedia, Southern Sotho Wikipedia, Saterland Frisian Wikipedia, Sundanese Wikipedia, Silesian Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Tulu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tetum Wikipedia, Tajik Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkmen Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia, Tswana Wikipedia, Tongan Wikipedia, Tok Pisin Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Tsonga Wikipedia, Tatar Wikipedia, Twi Wikipedia, Tahitian Wikipedia, Tuvinian Wikipedia, Udmurt Wikipedia, Uyghur Wikipedia, Uzbek Wikipedia, Venda Wikipedia, Venetian Wikipedia, Veps Wikipedia, West Flemish Wikipedia, Volapük Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [174][175][176]
The Vector 2022 skin will have some minor visual changes to drop-down menus, column widths, and more. These changes were added to four Wikipedias last week. If no issues are found, these changes will proceed to all wikis this week. These changes will make it possible to add new menus for readability and dark mode. Learn more. [177]
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call November 28, 2023: As a satellite event for Data Modeling Days, we will facilitate community discussion around data modeling in Wikidata for library collections in a variety of formats, including people, books, serials, scholarly articles, rare materials, music, media, and realia. Agenda
Linked Open Data and Wikidata < Alan Ang (WMDE) talks about the importance of Linked Open Data and forming mutually beneficial partnerships between the Foundation and Institutions.
Notebooks
Explore new ways of visualising your data with a Circular Dendrogam, illustrated here with Association Football players broken down by Country and Team.
Tool of the week
Harvest Templates - is a tool that helps transfer data from Wikimedia projects to Wikidata.
User:MichaelSchoenitzer/Updown - is a userscript used for faster navigation. If there are a lot of values for one property it will add arrows that allow you to jump to the first/last value.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
WMDE is researching ways to improve the editing experience in different languages and would love to hear your feedback. We would like to talk to a few of you in online interviews to learn about your experiences, expectations, and concerns. Please let us know in this sign-up form if you are interested in taking part.
The Research team at WMF is running a second labeling campaign to evaluate the Revert Risk model for Wikidata. This is part of ongoing work on creating a new generation of Machine Learning models to support patrolling work on Wikimedia projects. Please help by going to this link, and labeling each revision in one of these three categories: Keep, Not Sure, Revert. Notice that "Not Sure" should be used in all cases where the Keep or Revert labels are not clear to you.
COR SEM (The Danish central word registry identifier)
UPOC ({{TranslateThis
| de = Ist eine eindeutige id zur Identifizierung von Organisationen/Sendungen/... zu einem Dienstleister.
<!-- | xx = Beschreibungen in anderen Sprachen -->
}})
WikiProject Heritage Collections - The aim of the present project is to create the world’s most comprehensive high quality database of archival fonds and heritage collections (including contemporary scientific collections or documentation holdings) and to ensure the interlinking of respective catalogues, finding aids, or collection databases with Wikidata.
WikiProject Events and Role Frames - The primary aims of WikiProject Events and Role Frames is to define a set of properties that consistently model event occurrences and their participants; to fill gaps in Wikidata regarding items for events and actions; and to encourage use of the proposed model and newly introduced items across Wikidata.
We continued to make a lot more language codes available (phab:341409)
EntitySchemas: We are experimenting with how to work around some technical blockers for the new datatype
Wikibase REST API: We've been working on the ability to remove an Item's label in a specific language and modify the descriptions on a Property (phab:T342981, phab:T342981)
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --16:15, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-48
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
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [178][179]
MediaWiki's JavaScript system will now allow async/await syntax in gadgets and user scripts. Gadget authors should remember that users' browsers may not support it, so it should be used appropriately. [180]
The deployment of "Add a link" announced last week was postponed. It will resume this week.
Around 250 war-threatened architectural monuments documented (German) - Wikidata, Wikibase and Commons are helping preserve and plan the restoration of culturally-significant Monuments damaged or destroyed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
ZotWb < export records in a Zotero group library to a custom Wikibase, prepare datasets to send to OpenRefine, feed OpenRefine reconciliaton results back to the Wikibase. Wikidata is envolved in the entity reconciliation. Here's a short explanation and demo video Tool is written and provided by David Lindermann with support from WMF Rapid Grant.
Montana Plant Life URL (URL for a plant family, genus, or species on the Montana Plant Life website)
event role (item that describes a role in an event class)
role in event (event class for which the item describes a role)
selectional preference ((to be used only with the subclasses of Q_event_role) an item that plays this role in an event instance should descend from this item via a combination of P31 and P279)
event arguments and types (item that plays a role in an event instance; used with a qualifier "argument type")
BnF archives and manuscripts ID (identifier for a manuscript in the archives and manuscripts catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). Do not include the initial "cc")
clerked for (this person has held a clerkship with the judge)
battery life (the length of time a device can continue to work before it needs its battery to be recharged)
Showcase Lexemes: läsa - 'read' about this Swedish word with many pronounciations and grammatical features.
Feel free to suggest next week's Showcase Item and Lexeme!
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the endpoint for removing an Item's label in a specific language (phab:T335841) and the endpoint for modifying descriptions on a Property (phab:T342981)
We are working on the endpoint for adding aliases in a given language for a Property (phab:T343721) and removing a Property's label in a given language (phab:T342983)
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on moving the tool over to the new design system Codex
We adjusted the styling for the values of monolingual text statements to make the language easier to distinguish from the value (phab:T280774)
mul language code: We made some final adjustments to get it ready for testing.
Lexemes: We are adding a license note for anon users when editing a Lexeme’s lemma, a Form or Sense (phab:T343999)
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 spacing between paragraphs on Vector 2022 has been changed from 7px to 14px to match the size of the text. This will make it easier to distinguish paragraphs from sentences. [181]
The "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is working again. You no longer need to switch to source editing to edit {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords. [182]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [183][184]
Registration & Scholarship applications are now open for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 that will take place from 3–5 May in Tallinn, Estonia. Scholarship applications are open until 5 January 2024.
Following a talk page discussion, the Administrators' accountability policy has been updated to note that while it is considered best practice for administrators to have notifications (pings) enabled, this is not mandatory. Administrators who do not use notifications are now strongly encouraged to indicate this on their user page.
Arbitration
Following a motion, the Extended Confirmed Restriction has been amended, removing the allowance for non-extended-confirmed editors to post constructive comments on the "Talk:" namespace. Now, non-extended-confirmed editors may use the "Talk:" namespace solely to make edit requests related to articles within the topic area, provided that their actions are not disruptive.
The Arbitration Committee has announced a call for Checkusers and Oversighters, stating that it will currently be accepting applications for CheckUser and/or Oversight permissions at any point in the year.
Portugal report: Catalan culture and showcasing Wikimedia on both side of the Atlantic
Serbia report: Wikipedians in Residence, GLAM Wiki Conference
Sweden report: National Historical Museums of Sweden contributions; Photo memories from all over the world engage the community; Museum of medieval photo safari
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: LccnBot (Task: Adds P244 to bibliographic entities base on library authority records.)
New request for comments: Duplicate References Data Model and UI < During Data Modelling Days '23, 2 proposals emerged trying to answer the question of how to handle duplicate References on Wikidata Items.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call December 12, 2023: Several members of the Chinese Culture and Heritage Wikidata group will provide an overview of the group's Wikidata projects as well as the challenges they have encountered. Agenda
Data-SHS Bordeaux Week: Processing and Analyzing Quantitative Data in Human and Social Sciences 2023. Dec. 11 - 15, Bordeaux, FR.
OpenRefine - a open source tool for working with data < This session explores the advantages of using OR to wrangle, clean, transform and standardise data for Wikidata. Presented by Jinoy Tom Jacob at the IndiaFOSS3.0 Conference.
QLever SPARQl Engine < If you attended Data Modeling Days '23, you may have seen an extraordinary Session given by Hannah Bast and Johannes Kalmbach showcasing the power and advantages of the QLever engine. QLever can handle queries that cause the WDQS to timeout or allowing Federated queries and Geospatial!
(QLEver has already featured in Tool of the Week but we wanted to showcase it again after experiencing it at DMD '23)
counterexample (qualifier for deprecated P279 statements; example instance or subclass of the item class for which a "subclass of" statement does not hold)
WikiProject Heritage Collections: database of archival fonds and heritage collections (including contemporary scientific collections or documentation holdings) and to ensure the interlinking of respective catalogues, finding aids, or collection databases with Wikidata.
WikiProject Source Reliability: is an effort to identify and aggregate online sources of assessments of the reliability and credibility of sources.
Wikibase REST API: We continued work on the routes for adding aliases in a given language for a Property (phab:T343721) and removing a Property's label in a given language (phab:T342983)
Monolingual text values can now use many more languages than before. We’re still working on doing the same for Lexemes. (phab:T341409)
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
On Wikimedia Commons, there are some minor user-interface improvements for the "choosing own vs not own work" step in the UploadWizard. This is part of the Structured Content team's project of improving UploadWizard on Commons. [186][187]
Problems
There was a problem showing the Newcomer homepage feature with the "impact module" and their page-view graphs, for a few days in early December. This has now been fixed. [188][189]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 December. It will be on all wikis from 14 December (calendar). [190][191]
Future changes
The 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 5 January 2024, and has an associated privacy statement.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2024 because of the holidays.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 December. It will be on all wikis from 21 December (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [192][193]
Starting December 18, it won't be possible to activate Structured Discussions on a user's own talk page using the Beta feature. The Beta feature option remains available for users who want to deactivate Structured Discussions. This is part of Structured Discussions' deprecation work. [194]
There will be full support for redirects in the Module namespace. The "Move Page" feature will leave an appropriate redirect behind, and such redirects will be appropriately recognized by the software (e.g. hidden from Special:UnconnectedPages). There will also be support for manual redirects. [195]
Future changes
The MediaWiki JavaScript documentation is moving to a new format. During the move, you can read the old docs using version 1.41. Feedback about the new site is welcome on the project talk page.
The Wishathon is a new initiative that encourages collaboration across the Wikimedia community to develop solutions for wishes collected through the Community Wishlist Survey. The first community Wishathon will take place from 15–17 March. If you are interested in a project proposal as a user, developer, designer, or product lead, you can register for the event and read more.
Other discussions: How to handle concepts of trans people on Wikidata? Should {privacy at wikidata.org} be redirected to {privacy at wikimedia.org} or should it be monitored by Wikidata volunteers? Join the discussion!
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour December 18th, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to.The ninth and final Wikidata Working Hour in the series will be using SPARQL and Scholia to query and visualize the data we’ve added to Wikidata during our series. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page
Blogs: #LD42023. Part I: The Future of Wikidata + Libraries (A Workshop) - This blog series explores how libraries engage with Wikidata and Linked Data in the face of AI challenges. Led by Silvia Gutiérrez and Giovanna Fontenelle from the Wikimedia Foundation, the series summarizes insights from a collaborative session at the 2023 LD4 Conference, using Design Thinking strategies to connect the Library-Wikidata community with WMF, focusing on Wikidata, Wikibase, and Structured Data on Commons (SDC) in libraries. By Silvia Gutiérrez & Giovanna Fontenelle
Papers
Wikipedia gender gap: a scoping review - This review analyzes Wikipedia's gender gap from 2007 to 2022, revealing a slight majority of female authors, addressing key themes, and exploring strategies to mitigate the gap, providing valuable insights into the research landscape in this domain. By Núria Ferran-Ferrer, Juan-José Boté-Vericad and Julia Minguillón.
Ten years of Wikidata: A bibliometric study - This research delves into scholarly publications about Wikidata from its inception in 2012 to late 2022, revealing 945 relevant papers, primarily from conferences. The analysis highlights a concentration of experts and contributors from the Global North, as well as governmental institutions as predominant funders. The study calls for enhanced networking and outreach to promote diversity and inclusion within the Wikidata research community. Emphasizing computer science perspectives, the research focuses on methods for developing and utilizing open knowledge graphs, notably Wikidata, with a narrower but significant interest in application-oriented studies in digital humanities, biology, and healthcare. (Turki, et al)
Videos
Duplicating Everywhere All at Once | Cebuano Wikipedia - Five years ago, Lsjbot's Wikipedia articles caused duplicate Wikidata items, notably impacting geographic places on Cebuano Wikipedia. This video by User:Canley at Wikimania 2023 delves into the history, visualizes the issue, and suggests cleanup strategies for Wikidata and Wikipedia, emphasizing Aotearoa New Zealand and parts of Australia, with implications for the global challenge of bot-created duplicates.
Useful Authorities for Data-Driven Collection Research with Alicia Fagerving - Alicia Fagerving, Wikimedia Sverige, introduces the project "Useful Authorities for Data-Driven Collection Research" and Wikidata. The project, spanning 2021-2023, links vocabularies from the databases of Nationalmuseum and Statens historiska museer to Wikidata, exploring it as a platform for semantic interoperability among cultural heritage institutions and providing tools and visualizations for similar projects.
2023: OSM-Wikidata Map Framework. Combining OpenStreetMap and Wikidata allows to leverage the strengths of the two projects to create richer maps. This talk explores how OSM-Wikidata Map Framework simplifies this process. By Daniele Santini
It's not bad! Measuring Gérard Depardieu's mark on French cinema (in French) - The analysis centers on Gérard Depardieu's impact on French cinema amid legal issues and sexual assault allegations. Despite difficulties in addressing these accusations, the author leverages Wikidata to measure Depardieu's influence by querying films from directors born after 1930 to assess his involvement.
How to Become a Billionaire: A Billionaire's Occupations Network Analysis - This network analysis investigates billionaires’ primary sources of income with a network graph—based on their occupations—connecting billionaires from all over the world and uncovering some of the biggest industries in the world.
Drama Corpora Project (DraCor) is a digital database of plays, primarily from Europe. It collects and organizes texts of plays in a way that allows researchers and others to extract and analyze information from those texts. This could include details about the characters, the dialogue, the stage directions, and more. The data is being pulled from Wikidata.
We finished adding the endpoints for adding aliases in a given language for a Property (phab:T343721) and removing a Property's label in a given language (phab:T342983)
We started working on the endpoint for removing a Property's description in a given language (phab:T342985)
We are fixing an issue with incorrect handling of lowercase statement IDs in edit requests (phab:T352644)
Special:PrefixIndex now shows label/lemma for Properties and Lexemes (phab:T343115)
Language codes: We changed where Wikidata is getting its languages from for Lexemes and Monolingual text statements and thereby resolved many tasks requesting another language being added to them (phab:T341409)
Cycle between autotrophs and heterotrophs: autotrophs use light, carbon dioxide, and water to form oxygen and organic compounds, mainly through the process of photosynthesis (green arrow).
Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee rescinded the restrictions on the page name move discussions for the two Ireland pages that were enacted in June 2009.
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
mediawiki2latex is a tool that converts wiki content into the formats of LaTeX, PDF, ODT, and EPUB. The code now runs many times faster due to recent improvements. There is also an optional Docker container you can install on your local machine.
The way that Random pages are selected has been updated. This will slowly reduce the problem of some pages having a lower chance of appearing. [196]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar). [197][198]
Poland report: Intense end to a year of GLAM-Wiki activities in Poland
Sweden report: Photo memories project concludes; Sörmlands museum passes 1000 uploads to Wikimedia Commons; Wikimedian in Residence supports an upload of music content; Subject terms from Queerlit; Wikidata for authority control: 3 years of work
USA report: WikiConference North America 2023; TSU and USF; Philadelphia WikiSalon; Wikimedia DC Annual Membership Meeting; Wikipedia Editing 101 for All; NYC Hacking Night; Upstate NY workshop; Wikiquote She Said Project
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New request for comments: Community request for the development team to access inverse properties on client wikis. (Summary: We currently cannot access inverse property values on Wikipedia. This can be a data management issue on Wikipedia as we must always ask ourself if we must introduce an inverse property for cases where we need them. So I think it’s useful to gather the usecases community would want and draft a request for an API to the devteam to do that.)
Upcoming: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 17th January 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Past
Provenance Loves Wiki (PLW24), Jan 12th - 14th, research and data on the origin of artworks and cultural heritage and how Wikibase and Wikidata can support this.
WikiLovesWomen #SheSaid campaign wrapped up the 2023 campaign by visiting Kinshasha and Kisangani, where local Wikimedians improved quotes from women on FR Wikipedia and Wikidata.
QLever: a new way to query OpenStreetMap --> Discussion of the new opportunities offered by QLever to query OpenStreetMap and to run federated queries with Wikidata
Wikidata for authority control: 3 years of work --> The three-year Wikidata for authority control project, a collaboration between Wikimedia Sverige and Swedish museums, concluded in December 2023. It equipped museum staff with tools and skills to integrate their authority databases with Wikidata, resulting in added identifiers, SPARQL query proficiency, and enhanced knowledge sharing within the GLAM sector.
Go-ahead for Wikidata Project of GLAM institutions from Baden-Württemberg --> The GLAM-BW project, under "GLAM goes OpenData," connects major collections in Baden-Württemberg, focusing on the württembergische Kunstkammer. With over 3,000 objects, the project integrates information on collectors, histories, and objects into a knowledge graph for semantic searches, contributing to the broader realm of linked open data, akin to Wikidata.
Swiss GLAM Programme --> Wikimedia CH imported the Museum of Natural History of Neuchâtel's urchin fossil casts to Wikimedia Commons, connecting structured data on Wikidata. The project involved data cleaning, adding missing elements, and file imports via OpenRefine, highlighting seamless integration between Wikidata and Commons.
Papers
Reflections on the PCC Wikidata Pilot at UCLA Library: --> Undertaking the PCC Learning Objectives. Discusses the 14-month Pilot programme for cooperative cataloguing of UCLA Library and Museum Collections. By E. Zhang, P. Biswas & I. Dagher.
SMWCon 2023: Semantics, Wikis, and AI --> Day 1, Keynote by Prof. Markus Krötzsch who explores origins and principles of semantic wikis and key challenges that lie ahead in managing knowledge.
Brian M Sperlongano released US boundary QA checker, a quality assurance tool for finding issues with boundary data in the United States by using Wikidata, OpenStreetMap, and US Census Bureau data.
The Surrounding Ocean (available at vrandezo.github.io/TheSurroundingOcean) - is a tool that allows you to browse lexicographical data. You can use the tool to explore words and their meanings, translations, and synonyms. The tool is currently under development, and the developer, Danny, would appreciate feedback to fix any issues with the tool. More info: Wikidata:The Surrounding Ocean.
WikiProject Highlights: Ontology Cleaning Task Force: A group of people have started a task force to discuss problems with the Wikidata ontology and how to clean them up. Anyone interested in participating is welcome. The task force maintains Wikidata:WikiProject Ontology/Cleaning Task Force as a record of its activities. You can add yourself to the participants list there and find out how to join group meetings or otherwise participate in the group. (Got something noteworthy happening in your WikiProject? Share it in the upcoming issue!)
IP masking: We are working on adjusting Wikibase to handle the upcoming introduction of IP masking, which will give editors who are not logged in a temporary account name instead of using their IP to attribute edits to (phab:T351968)
Lexicographical data: We are changing how empty Senses and Forms are represented in the dumps (phab:T305660)
mul language code: We are doing user testing for the current implementation to see if it is understandable for people.
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on migrating it to the Codex design system.
REST API:
We improved the handling of lower-case statement IDs (phab:T354262)
We are working on getting a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344039)
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
Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. [199]
Gadgets and personal user scripts may now use JavaScript syntax introduced in ES6 (also known as "ES2015") and ES7 ("ES2016"). MediaWiki validates the source code to protect other site functionality from syntax errors, and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. Previously, Gadgets could use the requiresES6 option. This option is no longer needed and will be removed in the future. [200]
An update on the status of the Community Wishlist Survey for 2024 has been published. Please read and give your feedback.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar). [203][204]
Starting on January 17, it will not be possible to login to Wikimedia wikis from some specific old versions of the Chrome browser (versions 51–66, released between 2016 and 2018). Additionally, users of iOS 12, or Safari on Mac OS 10.14, may need to login to each wiki separately. [205]
The jquery.cookie module was deprecated and replaced with the mediawiki.cookie module last year. A script has now been run to replace any remaining uses, and this week the temporary alias will be removed. [206]
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
A bug in UploadWizard prevented linking to the userpage of the uploader when uploading. It has now been fixed. [207]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 January. It will be on all wikis from 25 January (calendar). [208][209]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Translations are available.
Discussions
Closed request for adminship: ROBERTSHST requested adminship to be able to link protected Wikipedia pages to Wikidata. The request has been denied and closed.
New request for comments: Frettiebot block? - Bovlb has requested community input about the edit behaviour of this bot, with more discussion found on the Frettiebot Discussion page.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Books: Banned books, Wikipedia and Wikidata - Volume 54, Number 2, 2023 of the focus on International Library and Information Work. Professor Núria Ferran of Women and Wikipedia.
Papers
Assisted Knowledge Graph Authoring: Human-Supervised Knowledge Graph Construction from Natural Language - a Web app allowing domain experts to create natural language Wikidata-based knowledge graphs. By Gohsen & Stein (2024).
Narrowing the Knowledge Evaluation Gap: Open-Domain Question Answering with Multi-Granularity Answers - evaluating predicted answers against a set of multi-granularity answers based on Wikidata. By Yona et al, (2024).
Videos
Introduction to Wikidata Query Tool - Learn A Wiki Skill (LAWS). If you are a Wikidata beginner, enjoy this video provided by Open Foundation West Africa.
Notebooks: GLAM2: Geolocated and Labeled Articles Map - much like the previously shared GLAM1 visually representing distribution of Good & Featured Articles but in a different visualisation.
The Wikidata Development team needs your feedback! We are currently evaluating a new feature for the Wikidata Query Service. Fancy sharing your thoughts? We would greatly appreciate it if you could complete this survey on Lamapoll. It should take you around 10–15 minutes. Your input means a lot to us. Thank you!
Wikidata:WikiProject IBC 2024 - The International Botanical Congress (IBC) takes place once every six years. The organisers of this WikiProject see this conference as an ideal opportunity to engage with the wider botanical community, educate them about the potential of Wikidata and to train them in its use. We will also use this opportunity to improve the data held in Wikidata about the participants, presenters and their contributions to botany.
WikiProject Health Data Space - This project is about organising data related to health data spaces, in particular the efforts to create a European Health Data Space. Initially it will focus on Sweden.
Showcase Lexemes: šťastný (L204262) (Czech) - having luck, fortune, happy. This is our first Czech showcase lexeme and it just so happens to be the largest Lexeme on Wikidata!
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (calendar).
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Guideline and policy news
Technical news
Arbitration
Miscellaneous
A link to the user's Special:CentralAuth page will appear on Special:Contributions — some user scripts which previously added this link may cause conflicts. This feature request was voted #17 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
The legacy Mobile Content Service is going away in July 2023. Developers are encouraged to switch to Parsoid or another API before then to ensure service continuity. [23]
The deprecated 
Administrator changes
Bureaucrat changes
Interface administrator changes
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![[89]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Visual_editor_toolbar_search_feature.png){kind=link}
CheckUser changes
Oversighter changes
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