This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
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 11 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 May. It will be on all wikis from 13 May (calendar).
Future changes
You can see what participants plan to work on at the online Wikimedia hackathon 22–23 May.
France report: Journée Wikimédia Culture et numérique 2021; French open content report
Germany report: Northern Exposure for cultural heritage data
India report: Proofread competition on Bengali Wikisource in collaboration with British Library
Indonesia report: Wikisource Competition 2021; Museum Daerah Deli Serdang is now on Commons
Italy report: A Wikipedian in residence at the Civic Museum of Modena: report
Netherlands report: WikiVrijdagen with Atria and IHLIA, Wikimedians in Residence will increase the visibility of media art on Wikipedia, Wikimedia training: shared heritage, Papiamentu and Papiamento: Wikipedia is up and ready to go!
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 earlier issue of Tech News said that the citoidAPI would handle dates with a month but no days in a new way. This has been reverted for now. There needs to be more discussion of how it affects different wikis first. [6]
Changes later this week
MediaWiki:Pageimages-blacklist will be renamed MediaWiki:Pageimages-denylist. The list can be copied to the new name. It will happen on 19 May for some wikis and 20 May for some wikis. Most wikis don't use it. It lists images that should never be used as thumbnails for articles. [7]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 May. It will be on all wikis from 20 May (calendar).
Data literacy snacks - Talk about "Wikibase knowledge graphs for data management & data science" on 23rd of June. For registration, send e-mail to infoberd-bw.de
Upcoming
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, May 18 at 18:00 CEST
May 21-22, 2021 [8] Boston Rock City: Explore Wikidata and Learn About Local Music: Boston Public Library is partnering with Harvard Library for a guided exploration of Wikidata and local music history. Join us for two days of music and Wikidata editing; no prior experience or punk cred necessary! This public event is free to all and will take place via Zoom; please register in advance. The subject of this project is the Arthur Freedman Collection, and audiovisual archive that captures over four decades of Boston rock music performances. We’ll provide: instructions, tools, data sources, visualizations, optional Discord chat, and a soundtrack. If you have questions, please contact Harvard Library staff member Peter Laurence at laurenc@fas.harvard.edu.
Template:Annotate QID (currently on en. & de.Wikisource) allows names and other terms in texts to be semantically annotated with the equivalent QIDs. sv.Wikisource has a similar template.
Wikimedia Foundation 2021 Board Elections has been announced. Please sign-up as an Election Volunteer if you'd like to support the elections. Election Volunteers serve as a bridge between the Elections Committee, the facilitation team and the movement.
Fixed the entity usage dashboards that no longer showed data due to technical issues. It tracks how much data from Wikidata is used on the other Wikimedia projects. (phab:T279762)
Configured the Property Suggester to not suggest Google Knowledge Graph ID (P2671) and Wolfram Language entity code (P4839) (phab:T280779)
Investigated remaining issue with updating the page_props table on the client wikis, which is confusing some bots making use of that table (phab:T280627)
Fixed an issue in the Query Builder where it got confused when adding several conditions with the same Property (phab:T279945)
Working on tracking the number of edits per namespace over time (phab:T281356)
Working on fixing a bug where old revisions of Items have edit buttons but should not (phab:T281587)
Fixing an issue where value suggestions are not showing all values that are defined in the property constraint (phab:T280650)
#1Lib1Ref Campaign in Italy, as part of the IFLA Wikidata Working Group campaign (May 15 - June 5); more than 10k references have already been added (see the dashboard for more details)
Wikidata-related projects that have been developed/improved during the Wikimedia Hackathon 2021:
User:Lucas_Werkmeister/Ranker - Finished and announced the batch modes for the Ranker tool, allowing users to edit the ranks of statements in Wikidata or Structured Data on Commons in bulk
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 Wikimedia movement has been using IRC on a network called Freenode. There have been changes around who is in control of the network. The Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts have decided to move to the new Libera Chat network instead. This is not a formal decision for the movement to move all channels but most Wikimedia IRC channels will probably leave Freenode. There is a migration guide and ongoing Wikimedia discussions about this.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 May. It will be on all wikis from 27 May (calendar).
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, June 1 at 18:00 CEST
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Affinity Group Co-facilitators will recap the last year, introduce plans for the coming year, and receive suggestions from the community for future sessions.; [9], June 1st.
Italian Wikiversity used Lua on their Recent Changes SpecialPage via overwriting a MediaWiki message. Our code used to not expect that, now it does. (phab:T283240)
Updating the panel that tracks Wikidata edits over time in different namespaces to include all namespaces (phab:T281356)
Working on adding a new constraints type for Lexemes (phab:T200689)
Working on designs for improving Special:NewLexeme
Working on designs for the system to find mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases
Fixing some malformed globe-coordinate precisions in the database (phab:T283576)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
There was an issue on the Vector skin with the text size of categories and notices under the page title. It was fixed last Monday. [10]
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 8 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 June. It will be on all wikis from 10 June (calendar).
Future changes
The Wikimedia movement uses Phabricator for technical tasks. This is where we collect technical suggestions, bugs and what developers are working on. The company behind Phabricator will stop working on it. This will not change anything for the Wikimedia movement now. It could lead to changes in the future. [11][12][13]
Searching on Wikipedia will find more results in some languages. This is mainly true for when those who search do not use the correct diacritics because they are not seen as necessary in that language. For example searching for Bedusz doesn't find Będusz on German Wikipedia. The character ę isn't used in German so many would write e instead. This will work better in the future in some languages. [14]
The CSRF token parameters in the action API were changed in 2014. The old parameters from before 2014 will stop working soon. This can affect bots, gadgets and user scripts that still use the old parameters. [15][16]
Wikimedia previously used the IRC network Freenode. However, due to changes over who controlled the network with reports of a forceful takeover by several ex-staff members, the Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts decided to move to the new Libera Chat network. It has been reported that Wikimedia related channels on Freenode have been forcibly taken over if they pointed members to Libera. There is a migration guide and Wikimedia discussions about this.
Sweden report: Working with UN Human Rights; Aftermath to the fiddler competition; Music manuscripts from the 18th century; Digital visions; Should museums work with Wikipedia?; Wikidata project with museums has results
SPARQL Jupyter notebooks in PAWS: PAWS is a wikitech services which allows to run Jupyter notebooks. There is a SPARQL kernel which makes it possible to run SPARQL queries. See this example notebook.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata Community/Diversity 2021 Survey has been published. The results are meant to serve as a baseline to see how the community might (not) change in the future.
WikidataCon 2021: A sustainable future for Wikidata. Information about "the conference theme, its three-day program structure and a special project on diversity taking place before the conference itself".
The call for candidates for 2021 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections has begun on June 9. The last date to apply is June 29, 2021.
Working on no longer using the Query Service to evaluate Constraints Checks regular expressions (this should make our checks faster and allow for further improvements) (phab:T176312)
Changing the rate limits for assigning Item IDs further, which should result in even fewer Q-IDs being skipped in the future (phab:T284538)
Finalizing the concepts for a tool to help work on mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases/websites/...
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
Logged-in users on the mobile web can choose to use the advanced mobile mode. They now see categories in a similar way as users on desktop do. This means that some gadgets that have just been for desktop users could work for users of the mobile site too. If your wiki has such gadgets you could decide to turn them on for the mobile site too. Some gadgets probably need to be fixed to look good on mobile. [17]
German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC. [19]
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 28 June. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [20][21]
When newcomers had the Reply tool and tried to post on a talk page, they were more successful at posting a comment. (Source)
Earlier this year, the Editing team ran a large study of the Reply Tool. The main goal was to find out whether the Reply Tool helped newer editors communicate on wiki. The second goal was to see whether the comments that newer editors made using the tool needed to be reverted more frequently than comments newer editors made with the existing wikitext page editor.
The key results were:
Newer editors who had automatic ("default on") access to the Reply tool were more likely to post a comment on a talk page.
The comments that newer editors made with the Reply Tool were also less likely to be reverted than the comments that newer editors made with page editing.
These results give the Editing team confidence that the tool is helpful.
Looking ahead
The team is planning to make the Reply tool available to everyone as an opt-out preference in the coming months. This has already happened at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 24th June 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). This month we'll have a team member from Wikibase Stakeholders Group talk briefly about their work, and then we'll welcome people to share out about their work around Wikibase. We'll leave some space in the agenda to discuss meta issues related to the Wikibase Community Usergroup.
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in English by Vigneron, June 22 at 18:00 CEST
The call for candidates for 2021 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections has begun on June 9. The last date to apply is June 29, 2021.
Since the beginning of the month, phabricator tickets about language codes (and names of languages) were reviewed and triaged to better reflect their content and current status. Some work was done to better identify the steps for such changes, highlight and address bottlenecks and system issues. Patches for a few codes were contributed and are being released. Phabricator "Language codes" workboard provides an overview, phab:T284856 attempts to identify maintenance steps and phab:T284276 determine turn-around times. phab:T284808 should finally close a gap in termbox language handeling. A way to better address some or all aspects of changes of language codes applicable to Wikipedia editions still needs to be found. Don't hesitate to request the addition or update of language names (e.g. the name of Dutch in Danish) or missing language codes, notably for monolingual strings (see Help:Monolingual text languages).
Fixed a bug that broke the "Add sitelink" popup on Commons (phab:T284854)
Working on a fix for suggesters popping up unexpectedly when tabbing quickly (phab:284219)
Reviewing code for a new Property Suggester by a student (phab:T284820)
Mismatch Finder: Working on a tool to work through mismatching data between Wikidata and external databases. Your feedback is welcome on Wikidata talk:Mismatch Finder
Curious Facts: We developed a tool to help editors check random curious facts on Wikidata. Try it and give us your feedback on Wikidata talk:Curious Facts
Kicked off our continued work on Wikidata-Wikibase federation (Federation v2) with preparatory work, including:
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 otrs-member group name is now vrt-permissions. This could affect abuse filters. [22]
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC. [23]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 June. It will be on all wikis from 24 June (calendar).
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, June 28 at 18:00 CEST
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Robert Chavez (Northeastern University) will provide an introduction to SPARQL and using the Wikidata Query Service.; [24], June 29th.
Wikidata Community/Diversity 2021 Survey has been published. The results are meant to serve as a baseline to see how the community might (not) change in the future. Feel free to give us your feedback on this discussion page.
A new version of the Open Art Browser allows discovering works of art in the new section "Types", which presents you more than 1500 expressions of art. Explore it!
Mismatch Finder: We started building the foundation of the place that will store the mismatches between Wikidata and other databases/catalogs/...
Continued work on migrating the checks of regular expressions for constraints from SPARQL to a better solution to take that load off of the SPARQL endpoint (phab:T176312)
Made it possible to show language links from multilingual Wikisource to the other language versions of Wikisource (phab:T275958)
Added a new constraint type to indicate that a certain Property should only be used on Lexemes with a specific language (phab:T200689)
Fixed a weird issue with suggesters popping back up when they shouldn't (phab:T284219)
Invalid data will not be handled better in RDF outputs (phab:T285131)
Working on lowering the rate limit at which a misbehaving bot can waste new Item IDs to further reduce the percentage of skipped Item IDs (phab:T284538)
Working on not suggesting real Item IDs in the API sandbox to avoid accidental edits by people who think it is not making real edits (phab:T219215)
Working on reducing the time it takes between entering a value in a new statement and being able to save the statement (phab:T281669)
Improved documentation of the usage tracking aspects in API help pages. Usage tracking is an internal mechanism to track which article on Wikipedia etc uses which data from an Item on Wikidata. (phab:T283040)
Language codes for monolingual strings "gsw-fr", "ykg", "wya", "osa-latn" were made available: Alsatian, Tundra Yukaghir, Wendat, Osage (phab:T262922, phab:T252198, phab:T283364, phab:T265297)
The English name for language code "crh" and the Swedish name for "fa" were corrected (phab:T240350, phab:T281702)
Lexeme language codes ha-arab, sux-latn, sux-xsux, gsg, tlh-piqd, tlh-latn, bfi, pwn, enm were added. That is Hausa in Arabic script, Sumerian in cuneiform and Latin-script, German Sign Language, Klingon in pIqaD and Latin script, British Sign Language, Paiwan and Middle English. (phab:T282512, phab:T279557)
It was determined that language codes can be activated for Wikidata while being blocked for use on Incubator (phab:T273705), this to avoid projects such as a "British English Wikipedia"
Language code "es-419" for Latin American Spanish has been available for labels and descriptions for quite some time (phab:T230786)
A possibly confusing Russian mis-translation of the name of the language code for "multiple languages" (mul) is being reviewed (phab:T245927)
"en-simple:" can be used instead of "simple:" to link to Simple Wikipedia. Query Services outputs "en-simple", not "simple" for sitelinks to Simple Wikipedia (phab:T283149).
There was some discussion about the creation of a language code "en-in" for monolingual strings, but "en-in" as interface language seems to be preferred (phab:T212313)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Wikisources have a new OCR tool. If you don't want to see the "extract text" button on Wikisource you can add .ext-wikisource-ExtractTextWidget { display: none; } to your common.css page. [26]
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit the Wikimedia wikis for a few minutes on 29 June. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [27][28]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 June. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (calendar).
Future changes
Threshold for stub link formatting, thumbnail size and auto-number headings can be set in preferences. They are expensive to maintain and few editors use them. The developers are planning to remove them. Removing them will make pages load faster. You can read more and give feedback.
A toolbar will be added to the Reply tool's wikitext source mode. This will make it easier to link to pages and to ping other users. [29][30]
Consensus has been reached to delete all books in the book namespace. There was rough consensus that the deleted books should still be available on request at WP:REFUND even after the namespace is removed.
An RfC is open to discuss the next steps following a trial which automatically applied pending changes to TFAs.
Technical news
IP addresses of unregistered users are to be hidden from everyone. There is a rough draft of how IP addresses may be shown to users who need to see them. This currently details allowing administrators, checkusers, stewards and those with a new usergroup to view the full IP address of unregistered users. Editors with at least 500 edits and an account over a year old will be able to see all but the end of the IP address in the proposal. The ability to see the IP addresses hidden behind the mask would be dependent on agreeing to not share the parts of the IP address they can see with those who do not have access to the same information. Accessing part of or the full IP address of a masked editor would also be logged. Comments on the draft are being welcomed at the talk page.
Arbitration
The community authorised COVID-19 general sanctions have been superseded by the COVID-19 discretionary sanctions following a motion at a case request. Alerts given and sanctions placed under the community authorised general sanctions are now considered alerts for and sanctions under the new discretionary sanctions.
User:Nikki/AnchorLinks.js is a userscript that adds a small link before property labels and statement values on entity pages to provide a clickable/copiable link to that section of the page.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
A job opening for a fullstack developer to work on integrating Wikidata with expert-curated knowledge on invasion biology
Mismatch Finder: We continued the work on building the basic store that in the future will hold mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases/websites/catalogs/... These mismatches will then be used in the Mismatch Finder website and other tools to easily review them.
Improved the namespace behavior of the CommonsLink constraint so that it now produces less false positives (phab:T237920)
Working on adding a magic word to allow pages to be excluded from Special:UnconnectedPages on Wikipedias and co (phab:T97577)
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 19 July.
Recent changes
AutoWikiBrowser is a tool to make repetitive tasks easier. It now uses JSON. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPageJSON and Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Config. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/Version has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/VersionJSON. The tool will eventually be configured on the wiki so that you don't have to wait until the new version to add templates or regular expression fixes. [31]
Problems
InternetArchiveBot helps saving online sources on some wikis. It adds them to Wayback Machine and links to them there. This is so they don't disappear if the page that was linked to is removed. It currently has a problem with linking to the wrong date when it moves pages from archive.is to web.archive.org. [32]
Changes later this week
The tool to find, add and remove templates will be updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It will come to the first wikis on 7 July. It will come to more wikis later this year. [33][34]
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Some Wikimedia wikis use Flagged Revisions or pending changes. It hides edits from new and unregistered accounts for readers until they have been patrolled. The auto review action in Flagged Revisions will no longer be logged. All old logs of auto-review will be removed. This is because it creates a lot of logs that are not very useful. [35]
LIBER 2021 - Panel Discussion: Why use Wikidata or not - YouTube
SPARQL Wikidata divers. Session of Tuesday, June 29 (in French) - YouTube
SPARQL Wikidata Wikisource. Tuesday, July 6 session (in French) - YouTube
Upcoming:
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday 28th July 2021 at 16:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. This month we will also be having a guest presentation about Toolhub by Srishti Sethi from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Carlo Bianchini (University of Pavia), Stefano Bargioni (Pontifical University Santa Croce (Rome)), and Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo (University of Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore) will discuss their recent project and article “Beyond VIAF: Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries”.; [36], July 13th.
A Study of the Quality of Wikidata (Q107425133), by Kartik Shenoy et al, published 1 July 2021, explores the use of three indicators - deleted statements that are not replaced; deprecated statements; and constraint violations - as a framework for evaluating data quality.
Wikidata Workshop by Juan Antonio Pastor at the University of Murcia (in Spanish) - YouTube
Tool of the week
Schafe vorm Fenster is a project to build up a calendar for rural villages in Vorpommern-Greifswald using Wikidata to get images and short descriptions for the villages. (See example)
OpenRefine has two Junior Developer job openings (paid contractor positions; part-time, fully remote) for building Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons functionality
Mismatch Finder (a tool to review mismatches between Wikidata and other databases): We continued initial development of the store part of the tool. We focused on the upload of new mismatches. (phab:project/view/5422)
Discussion on how do describe the types of mismatches reviewed in Mismatch Finder (phab:T285849)
We introduced a magic word that can be used to exclude a page from Special:UnconnectedPages on Wikipedia and co. This will make the special page more useful to find pages on Wikipedia and co that should be added to an Item on Wikidata as sitelinks. (phab:T97577).
We reduced the number of Wikidata edits that show up in the watchlist and recent changes of Wikipedia and co by not triggering entries for a number of Wikidata edits that do not influence the article (phab:T286193)
Property Suggester: We are reviewing patches by a student working on an improved Property Suggester.
Working on improving how deprecated statements are handled when checking “type” and “value type” constraints" (phab:T170401)
Working on fixing a bug where the entity suggestions are opened when a valid value is already selected (phab:T285102)
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 tool to find, add and remove templates was updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It was supposed to come to the first wikis on 7 July. It was delayed to 12 July instead. It will come to more wikis later this year. [37][38]
Special:UnconnectedPages lists pages that are not connected to Wikidata. This helps you find pages that can be connected to Wikidata items. Some pages should not be connected to Wikidata. You can use the magic word __EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__ on pages that should not be listed on the special page. [39]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 July. It will be on all wikis from 22 July (calendar).
Future changes
How media is structured in the parser's HTML output will soon change. This can affect bots, gadgets, user scripts and extensions. You can read more. You can test it on Testwiki or Testwiki 2.
The parameters for how you obtain tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can read more.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Carlo Bianchini (University of Pavia), Stefano Bargioni (Pontifical University Santa Croce (Rome)), and Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo (University of Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore) will discuss their recent project and article “Beyond VIAF: Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries”.; July 13th.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday 28th July 2021 at 16:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. This month we will also be having a guest presentation about Toolhub by Srishti Sethi from the Wikimedia Foundation.
The next Wikibase live session is at 16:00 UTC on Thursday 29th July 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). This month, we welcome Luca Mauri to give a presentation about installing Wikibase from scratch.
The next Wikibase live session is at 16:00 UTC on Thursday 29th July 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). This month, we welcome Luca Mauri to give a presentation about installing Wikibase from scratch.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Andra Waagmeester on work with Shape Expressions in Wikidata to describe the genomics of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; [40], July 27th.
COSCUP 2021 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 2020.07.31-08.01 Online website, Meta-wiki
Still mapping!"Our team has been working continuously on improving the number of Welsh place names that appear online since our inception in 2017 as partt of the Welsh Government’s Welsh Government #Cymraeg2050 project"..."we will also use Wikidata to store and share Welsh language information".
Added a tags parameter to the wbmergeitems API so Item merges can now also get an edit tag (T286778)
Mismatch Finder: Continued working on the store part. This week we focused on uploading a file with potential mismatches and the UI for getting a list of all uploaded mismatch files.
Addressing comments from the security review of the Query Builder so we can hopefully soon move it from the test system to its proper place under query.wikidata.org
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
A new version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis the week before last week. This was not in Tech News because there was no newsletter that week.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 July. It will be on all wikis from 29 July (calendar).
Future changes
If you use the Monobook skin you can choose to switch off responsive design on mobile. This will now work for more skins. If ⧼monobook-responsive-label⧽ is unticked you need to also untick the new preferenceEnable responsive mode. Otherwise it will stop working. Interface admins can automate this process on your wiki. You can read more.
An RfC is open to add a delay of one week from nomination to deletion for G13 speedy deletions.
Technical news
Last week all wikis were very slow or not accessible for 30 minutes. This was due to server lag caused by regenerating dynamic lists on the Russian Wikinews after a large bulk import. (T287380)
Advisory board call for members for the Web2Cit project: Web2Cit: Visual Editor for Citoid Web Translators project is moving! With Diegodlh we are inviting people to apply to be an Advisory Board member. Is this you? Is this someone you know? Check the Call for members and apply to be an Advisory Board member before August 6th!. If you are too busy this time around to apply, don't worry: we get it. You can also help us by spreading the word!
The moveClaim.js user script has been updated using code created by Melderick to support changing a property of a claim within an entity. Please switch to the updated version if you used the other one, and report any bugs.
New tool: Lexemes Party displays lexemes linked to a list of Wikidata items, so you can improve related lexicographical data in the languages you know. You can build your own lists and several examples are available. A weekly challenge is also proposed, theme of the week: Olympic Games.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
If your wiki uses markup like <div class="mw-content-ltr"> or <div class="mw-content-rtl"> without the required dir attribute, then these will no longer work in 2 weeks. There is a short-term fix that can be added to your local wiki's Common.css page, which is explained at T287701. From now on, all usages should include the full attributes, for example: <div class="mw-content-ltr" dir="ltr" lang="en"> or <div class="mw-content-rtl" dir="rtl" lang="he">. This also applies to some other HTML tags, such as span or code. You can find existing examples on your wiki that need to be updated, using the instructions at T287701.
Last week, all wikis had slow access or no access for 30 minutes. There was a problem with generating dynamic lists of articles on the Russian Wikinews, due to the bulk import of 200,000+ new articles over 3 days, which led to database problems. The problematic feature has been disabled on that wiki and developers are discussing if it can be fixed properly. [41][42]
Changes later this week
When adding links to a page using VisualEditor or the 2017 wikitext editor, disambiguation pages will now only appear at the bottom of search results. This is because users do not often want to link to disambiguation pages. [43]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 August. It will be on all wikis from 5 August (calendar).
Future changes
The team of the Wikipedia app for Android is working on communication in the app. The developers are working on how to talk to other editors and get notifications. You can read more. They are looking for users who want to test the plans. Any editor who has an Android phone and is willing to download the app can do this.
The Beta Feature for Discussion tools will be updated in the coming weeks. You will be able to subscribe to individual sections on a talk page at more wikis. You can test this now by adding ?dtenable=1 to the end of the talk page's URL (example).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Wikidata Edit-a-thons highlighting Boston Rock City Edit-a-thon, Wikidata Comics Edit-a-thon, and Wiki-Relays [44], Aug 10th.
LD4 Wikibase Working Hour - Next steps after installing a Wikibase instance -- creating users, items, and properties. Friday, August 27th, 2021 / 1PM (time zone converter). Registration: Please fill in ZOOM Registration Link to register
Wikimania 2021, August 13 to 17, online event. On this page you can find a summary of sessions and community gatherings related to Wikidata and Wikibase.
Mismatch Finder: Finishing work on importing mismatches and moved on to building the API for retrieving mismatches from the mismatch store.
Added tags for all edits done through the UI to more easily distinguish them from edits made through tools and other means (phab:T236893)
Moved regular expression checking for constraints from the SPARQL endpoint to a dedicated service to make it faster and put less stress on the SPARQL endpoint (phab:T176312)
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
You can read but not edit 17 wikis for a few minutes on 10 August. This is planned at 05:00 UTC. This is because of work on the database. [45]
Changes later this week
The Wikimania Hackathon will take place remotely on 13 August, starting at 5:00 UTC, for 24 hours. You can participate in many ways. You can still propose projects and sessions.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 August. It will be on all wikis from 12 August (calendar).
The old CSS <div class="visualClear"></div> will not be supported after 12 August. Instead, templates and pages should use <div style="clear:both;"></div>. Please help to replace any existing uses on your wiki. There are global-search links available at T287962.
Future changes
The Wikipedia Library is a place for Wikipedia editors to get access to sources. There is an extension which has a new function to tell users when they can take part in it. It will use notifications. It will start pinging the first users in September. It will ping more users later. [46]
Mismatch Finder: We are making good progress on the tool. We made it possible to retrieve mismatches that are in the store part of the tool via an API.
Regular expressions in constraints are now no longer checked via the Query Service. The checks have been completely moved over to a dedicated service for regular expression checking. (phab:T204031)
Edits made via the user interface (as opposed to with tools, bots, etc.) are now tagged as such to make them easier to filter (example - edits made to labels, descriptions and aliases on mobile are still missing but will follow soon)
Working on allowing to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
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
You can add language links in the sidebar in the new Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet. [48]
Problems
There was a problem on wikis which use the Translate extension. Translations were not updated or were replaced with the English text. The problems have been fixed. [49][50][51]
Changes later this week
A revision tag will soon be added to edits that add links to disambiguation pages. This is because these links are usually added by accident. The tag will allow editors to easily find the broken links and fix them. If your wiki does not like this feature, it can be hidden. [52]
Would you like to help improve the information about tools? Would you like to attend or help organize a small virtual meetup for your community to discuss the list of tools? Please get in touch on the Toolhub Quality Signal Sessions talk page. We are also looking for feedback from tool maintainers on some specific questions.
In the past, edits to any page in your user talk space ignored your mute list, e.g. sub-pages. Starting this week, this is only true for edits to your talk page. [53]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 August. It will be on all wikis from 19 August (calendar).
The next Wikibase live session is at 16:00 UTC on Thursday 26th August 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). You're welcome to come and share your work around Wikibase.
BiCIKL Hackathon at the Meise Botanic Garden, September 20 - 24. Theme: adding articles/items about “Hidden women in science” on Wikipedia/Wikidata. If you're interested to participate, please write to maarten.trekelsplantentuinmeise.be
50 cool new things you can now do with KB’s collection highlights - In this series of 5 articles we show the added value of putting images and metadata of digitised collection highlights of the KB, national library of the Netherlands, into the Wikimedia infrastructure. By putting our collection highlights into Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, dozens of new functionalities have been added. As a result of Wikifying this collection in 2020, you can now do things with these highlights that were not possible before. Article by OlafJanssen, DanielleJWiki and 1Veertje_(KB)
The "Wikidata Quickstatements" translator which lets users transfer metadata about citation sources fromZotero into Wikidata, no longer needs to be manually installed. Existing manually-installed versions should update automatically, like other translators.
Edits to labels, descriptions and aliases on mobile are now also tagged as edits made via the user interface. All edits made via the user interface are now tagged as such. (phab:T286775)
ArticlePlaceholder pages will now indicate that they are generated by the ArticlePlaceholder thanks to a patch by Luca (phab:T124191)
Working on making it possible to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
Adding a new constraint type to ensure Items have a label in a certain language (phab:T195178)
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 Score extension (<score> notation) has been re-enabled on public wikis and upgraded to a newer version. Some musical score functionality may no longer work because the extension is only enabled in "safe mode". The security issue has been fixed and an advisory published.
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit some wikis for a few minutes on 25 August. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. During this time, operations on the CentralAuth will also not be possible.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 August. It will be on all wikis from 26 August (calendar).