soweego links Wikidata to large third-party catalogs. Together with its friend Mix'n'match, it helps Wikidata to become the universal linking hub of open data.
Two Wikidata users were nominated for a “WikiEule”, the German Wikipedia community’s annual awards: MisterSynergy (nomination) for an “EngagementEule” (special commitment to the wiki projects) and Tobias1984 (nomination) for an “OrgaEule” (organizational work).
You can nominate projects for the WikidataCon award until October 7th at 23:59 UTC (today).
During the summer, WikidataJS became WikibaseJS! More specifically:
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 is a problem in the visual editor when you copy or delete text with footnotes. It will be fixed soon. [2]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 October. It will be on all wikis from 10 October (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 9 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
The Community Wishlist Survey has a new format. It will focus on wikis that typically get less support. It will probably go back to the normal format next year. It is not decided exactly how it will work this year. You can leave feedback.
There is a new technical community newsletter. You can read more about the work of Wikimedia's technical community. Subscribe to get the information in the future.
Outreachy is an internship program for groups who are underrepresented in free and open-source software. There are seven Wikimedia projects about coding, documentation and quality assurance in the next round. Persons who fit the criteria can apply. The last day to apply is 5 November.
Sweden report: Open cultural heritage; More libraries in Africa on Wikidata; Global MIL Week 2019 Feature Conference; Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete; Wiki Loves Monuments
UK report: Oxford, Khalili Collections and Endangered Archives
USA report: Hispanic Heritage and Disability Awareness Month
Special story: Help the Movement Learn about Content Campaigns & Supporting newcomers in Wikidata training courses!
Lei (Nico) Zheng, et al. (2019) The Roles Bots Play in Wikipedia. Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 3, Issue CSCW, Article 215 (November 2019), 20 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3359317 (also blog post).
Lina M. Rojas-Barahona, et al. (2019) Spoken Conversational Search for General Knowledge. Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue. ACL Anthology ID: W19-5914 + arXiv:1909.11980
Tool of the week
ShowTalkLabels: with this script enabled, when a talk page is shown on your watchlist or similar pages, the label of the related entity is shown.
Other noteworthy stuff
We now have d:Q70000000 (3,5-dimethyl-3H-pyrazole, chemical compound) and Lexeme:L200000 (spiritualistically, English adverb)
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 now use more advanced editing tools on the mobile web. You can turn them on and off in your preferences in the mobile version. [3]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 October. It will be on all wikis from 17 October (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 16 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are no longer supported. This means the browsers might start looking a bit weird. They will not get security support. You can't read Wikimedia wikis in Internet Explorer on Windows XP or Windows versions that are older than Windows XP. This is because almost no one uses the browsers anymore. Supporting them made the wikis less secure for everyone else. [4]
In the future section headings might have a share link. This is to make it easier to link to the section. You can read more and discuss.
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 API sandbox and help pages now show more clearly when API modules are marked as internal. API modules marked as internal were probably internal before. It was easier to miss. You should look for non-internal alternatives. [5]
Problems
There is a translation tool we use on wikis with more than one language. For a few days it did not create pages for new languages when someone translated a page. The languages did not show in the language bar. This has been fixed. [6]
The history and diffs can show wrong content. This is because of a cache problem. It will soon be fixed. [7]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 October. It will be on all wikis from 24 October (calendar).
Reference Previews will be a beta feature on all Wikipedias and some Wikivoyages. It shows you a preview of the footnote when you hover over or click on the number. It has been a beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia since April.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 October. See how to join.
The Wikidata Wor(l)dmap is showing translations of the same concept on a world map. To use it, type a word (for example "water") in the search field, then observe the map. You can zoom in the map. The data comes from Wikidata item labels and the coordinate location property of the language.
Panandâ, a mobile app powered by Wikidata (and Wikimedia Commons), was selected as one of the five finalists in the App for Social Good category in the Android Masters 2019 competition organized by Google Developer Group Philippines. The final event will be held on November 16.
Issue with Wikidata Query Service: aggregate variables can no longer reuse the names of other variables (T235540).
You can translate labels in the background image of Wikidata front page by adding translation to this file
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 post proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals until 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can read more about the format for this year.
Mobile users now have a specific design for their Watchlist. [8][9]
You can share feedback and ideas on the Desktop Improvements project. The goal is to make the interface easier to use for readers and editors without removing any functionality. The Foundation's Readers Web team will work on this over the next two years.
OOUI now allows using px (pixels) instead of em (em) for some specific cases. [10][11]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 oktober. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 oktober. It will be on all wikis from 31 oktober (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 30 oktober at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
There will be no software changes from 19 December to 2 January. The first MediaWiki version next year will come the week of 6 January. [12]
Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015, this information was moved from global variables named wg* to mw.config. The old global variables will be removed later this year. You can know more about it and tell the developers if you want to try this out on your wiki first.
Laatste bericht: 4 jaar geleden1 bericht1 persoon in overleg
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Happy birthday, Wikidata!
Today, on October 29th, it’s Wikidata’s 7th birthday. Time to reflect and celebrate and to look forward to see where we are going from here. Message from the Wikidata development team
The Community Wishlist Survey 2020 from Wikimedia Foundation started. This year, it is focused on small projects and Wikidata-related wishes will not be included.
You can help expanding the list of databases, encyclopedias, etc. which could be added to Mix'n'match. Can be used for property creation too.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Professor Toby Hudson on Entity Explosion, a browser extension which allows you to get information about entities on the web page you’re visiting, 06 October. Agenda
Video: How to create and edit items on Wikidata (in Spanish) - YouTube
Video: Introduction to Wikidata and wikiprojects of interest to librarians (in Spanish) - YouTube
Tool of the week
IllWill.js is a userscript that searches Wikidata for foreign-language sitelinks, to populate Template:ill and replace plain red links on other Wikimedia projects.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
omeka-s-wikidata is a new module for the open source GLAM collection management software Omeka, that allows cataloguers to use Wikidata as a vocabulary for persons, places, subjects, etc.
Maps of arts and humanities research grants funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council in UK between 2013-2019. Sorted by year, Sorted by budget (Source)
Het laatste technieuws van de technische gemeenschap van Wikimedia. Vertel anderen over deze wijzigingen. Niet alle wijzigingen hebben een merkbaar effect op alle projecten. Vertalingen zijn beschikbaar.
Recente wijzigingen
Er is een nieuwe tool waarin je snel kan zien wat de thuiswiki is van de participanten in een discussie op Metawiki. Hiermee kan je vaststellen of leden van alle wiki's waarop de discussie invloed kan hebben ook daadwerkelijk deelnemen aan de discussie.
Je kan gebruikers nu bedanken voor het uploaden van bestanden of het veranderen van de taal van een pagina. [13]
Problemen en onderhoud
Er waren diverse problemen met de nieuwe MediaWiki versie afgelopen week. De oude versie is daarom teruggezet, de beschikbaarheid van vernieuwingen van de nieuwe versie is dus vertraagd. [14]
Iedereen was uitgelogd. Een gebruiker had gemeld plots te zijn ingelogd op andermans account, zodoende is iedereen geforceerd uitgelogd om veiligheidsredenen. Het probleem zou nu verholpen moeten zijn. [15]
De nieuwe versie van MediaWiki zal op 6 oktober uitgerold worden op testwiki's en op MediaWiki.org. De nieuwe versie zal op 7 oktober uitgerold worden op sommige Wikipedias en alle projecten die geen Wikipedia zijn. Op 8 oktober zal de nieuwe versie op alle overige projecten uitgerold worden. (kalender)
Het gedrag van de linkweergave op Arabische wiki's is aangepast. [16]
Toekomstige wijzigingen
Voor maximaal een uur zijn de wiki's niet te bewerken op 27 oktober rond 14:00 (UTC), waarschijnlijk korter. Je kan pagina's wel gewoon lezen. [17]
Het laatste technieuws van de technische gemeenschap van Wikimedia. Niet alle wijzigingen hebben een merkbaar effect op alle projecten. Meer vertalingen zijn beschikbaar.
Problemen en onderhoud
Vanwege problemen met de MediaWiki versie van twee weken geleden komen de updates van afgelopen week ook later dan verwacht. [18][19][20]
Wijzigingen later deze week
Live previews lieten de gebruikte sjablonen niet zien in de voorbeeldweergave (preview) als je net een sectie had bewerkt. Dit is nu verholpen. Tevens zijn live previews nu uitgeschakeld voor CSS en JavaScript pagina's zoals Special:MyPage/common.js omdat je je aanpassingen niet kon testen in de voorbeeldweergave met met live previews. [21][22]
De nieuwe versie van MediaWiki zal op 13 oktober uitgerold worden op testwiki's en op MediaWiki.org. De nieuwe versie zal op 14 oktober uitgerold worden op sommige Wikipedias en alle projecten die geen Wikipedia zijn. Op 15 oktober zal de nieuwe versie op alle overige projecten uitgerold worden. (kalender)
Toekomstige wijzigingen
Een nieuwe stabiele versie van Pywikibot komt binnenkort uit. [23]
The new Wikibase/Consultants and Support Providers' directory on Meta lists people/companies that provide professional help with Wikibase -- be it technical support (installation and setup), custom development, or data modeling services.
The 2020 Coolest Tool Award is still accepting nominations until October 14th. Please use this form to recommend tools. You can nominate as many tools as you want by filling out the form multiple times.
Working on enabling JSON dumps for Lexemes (phab:T220883)
Finishing preventing blocked users from making us skip QIDs (phab:T232620)
Continuing work on the Wikibase Manifest extension that allows toolbuilders to easily access configurations of a specific Wikibase instance so it is easier for them to make their tools work with not just Wikidata but also other Wikibase instances
Started analyzing what we consider a mismatch for our work around checking Wikidata's data against other databases
Continued work on the Query Builder to get it to create the first very simple query. It can do that now but not yet visualize the result.
France report: AAF training course; Workshops in Strasbourg; European Heritage Days: Rennes; Wiki Loves Monuments
Germany report: Ahoy! Wikipedians set sail to document the reality of modern seafaring
Indonesia report: New GLAM partnerships on data donation; Commons structured data edit-a-thon
Norway report: Students taking on GLAM Wiki women in red
Sweden report: Musikverket: more folk music and photos; Hack for Heritage 2020; Wiki Loves Monuments; Wikipedia in the libraries; Digital Book Fair on Wikipedia
Laatste bericht: 3 jaar geleden1 bericht1 persoon in overleg
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Other: Proposal to spin-off non-Earth coordinates from property P625 (coordinates location), currently only 7000 of 8 million values: see Property proposal/planetary coordinates
Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, October 20 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: hands-on work with Wikidata on creating items for authors of COVID 19 papers and brainstorming for future hands-on work, 20 October. Agenda
Blocked users trying to create new Items no longer make us skip QIDs (phab:T232620)
So far we don't have JSON dumps for Lexemes. We're working on regularly generating them as well now (phab:T264883)
Continuing work on getting the Query Builder to generate the first query. Almost there.
Started the feedback round for the REST API. Please provide your input if you are currently using the action API or plan to develop against Wikidata's API in the future.
Het laatste technieuws van de technische gemeenschap van Wikimedia. Niet alle wijzigingen hebben een merkbaar effect op alle projecten. Meer vertalingen zijn beschikbaar.
Wijzigingen later deze week
De nieuwe versie van MediaWiki zal op 20 oktober uitgerold worden op testwiki's en op MediaWiki.org. De nieuwe versie zal op 21 oktober uitgerold worden op sommige Wikipedias en alle projecten die geen Wikipedia zijn. Op 22 oktober zal de nieuwe versie op alle overige projecten uitgerold worden. (kalender)
Toekomstige wijzigingen
Voor maximaal een uur zijn de wiki's niet te bewerken op 27 oktober rond 14:00 (UTC), waarschijnlijk korter. Je kan pagina's wel gewoon lezen. [24]
In de AbuseFilter extensie zal de rmspecials() functie binnenkort worden aangepast zodat die niet langer het "spatie" karakter zal verwijderen. Wiki's worden aanbevolen om waar nodig code aan te passen zodat rmspecials() binnen rmwhitespace() wordt gebruikt zodat het gedrag van filters hetzelfde blijft. Je kan de zoekfunctie van Special:AbuseFilter gebruiken om instanties van rmspecials() te vinden. [25]
Een aantal gadgets en userscripts gebruiken de HTML div met het ID #jump-to-nav. Deze div zal binnenkort verwijderd worden. In scripts en gadgets zal #jump-to-nav vervangen moeten worden door #siteSub of #mw-content-text. Een lijst van scripts die mogelijk aangepast moeten is te vinden op phab:T265373.
Past: Providing sustainable data services through Wikibase and Wikidata, SEMIC Conference 2020 - (replay)
Past: Introduction to Wikidata by Frimelle, Software Freedom Kosova 2020 - (replay)
Past: What's new in Wikidata? by Lea Lacroix, Lydia Pintscher and Mattia Capozzi, ItWikiCon 2020 - (replay)
Ongoing: plenty of Wikidata birthday events, online and onsite! Here's an overview of the upcoming events, you can find the links and details in the main calendar.
WikiCite virtual conference on October 26-28, live-streamed on Youtube and Twitter, with sessions across many timezones and languages – English, French, German, Indonesian, and Portuguese.
24-hours online meetup, on October 28-29: an open discussion with plenty of community members facilitating exchange around the topic "what makes you enthusiastic about Wikidata"
Gene Wiki: how to synchronize and curate primary sources with and in Wikidata, online, on October 29th
Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata (in French) - (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5)
Tool of the week
WikibaseJS-cli allows to edit Wikidata from command line, including creating items from samples ("templates") and do complex transformations of statements
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Server switch: all wikis will be in read-only on Tuesday, October 27th at 14:00 UTC for up to an hour (more information). All services hosted by WMF (e.g. tools hosted on wmcloud.org) are also impacted. Non-essential code deployments will not happen this week.
Got the Query Builder to create the first simple queries. You can follow along the development from now on on the test system.
Preparing regular JSON dumps for Lexemes (phab:T264883)
Analyzed a number of queries to the query service together with the WMF search team to better understand what the queries are doing and what further optimizations we can make to the query service and which queries need different systems to answer them.
Working on creating and tracking implicit usages of Wikidata descriptions so description changes show up in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co (phab:T265897)
Looking into what would be considered a mismatch when comparing WIkidata's data against another database. This is groundwork for potentially automating this in the future to find potential issues in the data to flag to editors.
Working on deploying the new Item quality scoring model for ORES to production so we have improved quality scores
Finished investigating how to handle a restricted list of external Wikibase services. (phab:T265118)
Removed noratelimit on bots for wikidata.org (phab:T258354)
Published Easier Access for Programmers to Wikidata research report
Het laatste technieuws van de technische gemeenschap van Wikimedia. Niet alle wijzigingen hebben een merkbaar effect op alle projecten. Meer vertalingen zijn beschikbaar.
Problemen en onderhoud
Voor maximaal een uur zijn de wiki's niet te bewerken op 27 oktober rond 14:00 (UTC), waarschijnlijk korter. Je kan pagina's wel gewoon lezen. [26]
Afgelopen week lieten de links naar paginawijzigingen op mobiele sites (Speciaal:MobielVerschillen) een paginarevisie zien in plaats van de wijziging. Dit is nu verholpen. [27]
Wijzigingen later deze week
Er is geen nieuwe MediaWiki-versie deze week.
Toekomstige wijzigingen
Sinds de introductie van de interfacemoderatoren gebruikersgroep in 2018 konden "gewone" moderatoren de verwijderde geschiedenis van CSS- en JS-pagina's niet meer zien. Nu kunnen ze dit weer wel. [28]
Er was een probleem met de wijzigingslabels. De software voegde het "Ongedaan gemaakt" label toe aan pagina-acties zoals het beveiligen van een pagina als die actie direct volgde op een teruggedraaide wijziging. Dit is voor nieuwe wijzingen/acties verholpen. [29]
De Reply tool zal binnenkort worden aangeboden als Beta Feature op de meeste Wikipedia's. Op de Nederlandstalige Wikipedia is deze al beschikbaar, zie "Overleghulpmiddelen" onder voorkeuren.[30]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
A more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them has been enabled for the following 10 wikis: mediawiki.org, the Italian, Catalan, Hebrew and Vietnamese Wikipedias, French Wikisource, and English Wikivoygage, Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikinews. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist on those wikis you can let the developers know.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 October. It will be on all wikis from 7 October (calendar).
Some gadgets and bots that use the API to read the AbuseFilter log might break. The hidden property will no longer say an entry is implicit for unsuppressed log entries about suppressed edits. If your bot needs to know this, do a separate revision query. Additionally, the property will have the value false for visible entries; previously, it wasn't included in the response. [31]
A more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them will be enabled for all production wikis. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist you can let the developers know.
Future changes
You can soon get cross-wiki notifications in the iOS Wikipedia app. You can also get notifications as push notifications. More notification updates will follow in later versions. [32]
The JavaScript variables wgExtraSignatureNamespaces, wgLegalTitleChars, and wgIllegalFileChars will soon be removed from mw.config. These are not part of the "stable" variables available for use in wiki JavaScript. [33]
The JavaScript variables wgCookiePrefix, wgCookieDomain, wgCookiePath, and wgCookieExpiration will soon be removed from mw.config. Scripts should instead use mw.cookie from the "mediawiki.cookie" module. [34]
You can also sign up for a slot at the birthday presents lightning talks session at WikidataCon 2021 to present your gift for Wikidata birthday until October 16
Finished preventing a case where the same sitelink could be added to two different Items (phab:T291377)
Continuing work on the Mismatch Finder. Currently focusing on showing the details of the mismatches to the person reviewing mismatches.
Continued work on not allowing two Properties to have the same label after undo/revert (phab:T289473)
Continuing work on improving how changes on Wikidata are propagated to Wikipedia and the other other Wikimedia projects. The new system is being rolled out to all wikis now. It should not change anything for editors and just be a technical improvement in the backend.
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 12 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 October. It will be on all wikis from 14 October (calendar).
We’re celebrating the 9th birthday of Wikidata on October 29 during the WikidataCon 🎂 Did you know that you can participate in the celebration by preparing a birthday present or attending events? Here’s how you can get involved!
Upcoming: WMF search platform team office hour, Wednesday, October 13th, 2021 at 15:00-16:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PDT / 11:00-12:00 EDT / 17:00-18:00 CEST. Etherpad, Google Meet. You can come and chat about the Wikidata & Commons Query Service.
LIVE Wikidata editing #57 - YouTube, Facebook, October 16 at 18:00 UTC
Modeling and Documenting Queer Voices and Topics on Wikidata, Panel on Metadata and Gender Diversity, Amber Billey, Clair A Kronk, John Samuel, Rachel Ivy Clarke, Sayward Schoonmaker, DCMI Virtual 2021, October 8, 2021, Slides
Videos
Introduction to Wikidata for beginners. Part 2 (in Italian) - YouTube
You can also sign up for a slot at the birthday presents lightning talks session at WikidataCon 2021 to present your gift for Wikidata birthday until October 16
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on the review part of the system. We are now working on letting reviewers indicate if the mismatch is on Wikidata, the other database, both or neither.
Fixed a bug where it was possible for two Properties to have the same label in a given language by undoing/reverting an edit (phab:T289473)
Fixed a confusing error message that was being shown when trying to save geoshape / tabular data that doesn’t exist (phab:T285758)
Removing some unnecessary entity link formatting in edit summaries and special pages to improve performance (phab:T292203)
Fixing an issue with invalid dates that the API accepts but should not (phab:T289417)
Migrated all Wikimedia wikis to use the new change dispatching system. This system is responsible for notifying the other wikis about edits made on Wikidata that affect their articles so the article is refreshed and edits are added to recent changes and watchlists.
We’re celebrating the 9th birthday of Wikidata on October 29 during the WikidataCon 🎂 Did you know that you can participate in the celebration by preparing a birthday present or attending events? Here’s how you can get involved!
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Scottish Accused Witches Project with Ewan McAndrew and Emma Carroll (University of Edinburgh). [35], Oct 19th.
Learn Wikidata is an online interactive course created by the Vanderbilt University thanks to a WikiCite grant and available in English, Spanish and Chinese. More information here.
The 3rd edition of the Coolest Tool Award is looking for nominations (see announcement on wikimedia-l). Please submit your favorite tools by October 27th. The awarded projects will be announced and showcased in a virtual ceremony in December.
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on the review part of the system. We are working on letting reviewers submit their decision if the mismatch is on Wikidata, the other database, both or neither.
In the previous week we migrated all Wikimedia wikis to use the new change dispatching system. This system is responsible for notifying the other wikis about edits made on Wikidata that affect their articles so the article is refreshed and edits are added to recent changes and watchlists. This week we monitored the new system and investigated and fixed a few issues that came up.
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
Toolhub is a catalogue to make it easier to find software tools that can be used for working on the Wikimedia projects. You can read more.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 October. It will be on all wikis from 21 October (calendar).
3–5% of editors may be blocked in the next few months. This is because of a new service in Safari, which is similar to a proxy or a VPN. It is called iCloud Private Relay. There is a discussion about this on Meta. The goal is to learn what iCloud Private Relay could mean for the communities.
Wikimedia Enterprise is a new API for those who use a lot of information from the Wikimedia projects on other sites. It is a way to get big commercial users to pay for the data. There will soon be a copy of the Wikimedia Enterprise dataset. You can read more. You can also ask the team questions on Zoom on 22 October 15:00 UTC.
User:Bargioni/UseAsRef has now a 2.0 version, allowing to use as references not only external IDs but also some other properties (P1343, P973, P8214 etc.)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
QID ("Initialism of Q-identifier, a unique identifier for an item in Wikidata. [from 2012]") now has an entry in Wiktionary
The 3rd edition of the Coolest Tool Award is looking for nominations (see announcement on wikimedia-l). Please submit your favorite tools by October 27th. The awarded projects will be announced and showcased in a virtual ceremony in December.
The new WDQS Streaming Updater now fully shipped to production. This will help the Query Service better deal with the amount of edits happening on Wikidata. (more information)
Mismatch Finder: Continuing work on the results page where mismatches are shown for review. We are focusing on showing all necessary information for a mismatch to make a good determination if it is a mismatch in Wikidata, the external source or neither.
Finishing the work on the new change dispatching system that improves how Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects are notified about edits happening on Wikidata that affect them. Currently tying up some lose ends.
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 Coolest Tool Award 2021 is looking for nominations. You can recommend tools until 27 October.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 October. It will be on all wikis from 28 October (calendar).
Future changes
Diff pages will have an improved copy and pasting experience. The changes will allow the text in the diff for before and after to be treated as separate columns and will remove any unwanted syntax. [36]
The version of the Liberation fonts used in SVG files will be upgraded. Only new thumbnails will be affected. Liberation Sans Narrow will not change. [37]
Laatste bericht: 1 jaar geleden1 bericht1 persoon in overleg
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
Kartographer maps can now show geopoints from Wikidata, via QID or SPARQL query. Previously, this was only possible for geoshapes and geolines. [38][39]
The Coolest Tool Award 2022 is looking for nominations. You can recommend tools until 12 October.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 October. It will be on all wikis from 6 October (calendar).
Talk pages on the mobile site will change at the Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. They should be easier to use and provide more information. (Last week's release was delayed) [40][41]
The scribunto-console API module will require a CSRF token. This module is documented as internal and use of it is not supported. [5]
The Vector 2022 skin will become the default across the smallest Wikimedia projects. Learn more.
October 4, 2022: Lana Soglasnova and Roman Tashlitskyy will talk about their preliminary work in creating and editing items for Slavic people and some of the complications involved in this work, especially around transliterating names in various languages. Agenda
Wikibase Working Hour! 25 October 2022, 2pm Eastern (Time zone converter) Amy Ruskin of Northeastern University Library, will speak on the topic of Wikidata vs. custom Wikibases: Community history case studies, Boston’s Chinatown. The Boston Research Center (BRC) is a digital community history and archives lab based in the Northeastern University Library. One of our current projects involves taking an inventory of historical materials related to Boston’s Chinatown, and we have been using Wikibase to store multilingual data about the linked collections, organizations, and people. In this presentation, we will discuss our experience of getting started with a custom Wikibase and give an overview of our progress so far on the Chinatown Collections project. Amy Ruskin is the Data Engineer in the Digital Scholarship Group in the Northeastern University Library. She has a Master's degree in Information Studies from McGill University and a background in computer science and statistics. Registration link
Wikidata Office Hour GLAM-Hack − online meet-up about the "library world" with Wikidata. October 5th, 12.00 UTC (online via Zoom)
Ongoing
Wikimedia Österreich, in cooperation with Wikimedia Deutschland, started the DACH Culture Contest as a Börthday present for Wikidata 10th anniversary! It features two categories: "libraries in Austria, Germany and Switzerland" and "Culture in Austria, Germany and Switzerland". So if you would like to improve data about libraries, books, music, art, video games, cinema etc as a börthday treat, join us and get the chance to win some nice prizes! The contest will last until October 16, 2022.
The fourth edition of the Coolest Tool Award is looking for nominations. Please submit your favorite tools by October 12, 2022. The awarded projects will be announced and showcased in a virtual ceremony in December.
Australia report: Behind the scenes with Australia's Wiki Loves Earth 2022 winner
Austria report: A Börthday present for Wikidata - the DACH Culture Contest
Brazil report: Reopening of Museu Paulista and other news
France report: Meeting with Prime minister cultural adviser; Residence at the Brittany Museum
India report: Digitisation of O Bharat, a bilingual biweekly published in Goa from 1912 to 1949
Indonesia report: GLAM Socialization; Wikistories for GLAM Competition
Italy report: September month of results and planning
Netherlands report: Wiki Loves Monuments Suriname first edition: 554 photos
New Zealand report: New Zealand Thesis Project and Te Papa Forget-me-nots
Poland report: The results of GLAM editing contest; GLAM Coordinators Meeting
Serbia report: External projects, great results and high level of independence
Sweden report: Bookfair back on site; Cultural history in High Schools; More identifiers from National Historical Museums of Sweden on Wikidata; Swedish general election 2022
USA report: Advocacy and Invention; New Smithsonian WiR; Called to Create; DC Statehood and Home Rule; Annual meeting; Wikipedian in Residence Opportunity at the Pérez Art Museum Miami
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 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 October. It will be on all wikis from 13 October (calendar).
On some wikis, Kartographer maps in full size view will be able to display nearby articles. After a feedback period, more wikis will follow. [42][43]
Wikidata Tenth Birthday Speaker Series Week 1 (n part one we learn how Wikidata is (or is not) integrated into Wikipedia, how it helps an enormous cultural institution like the Smithsonian achieve its goals)
The fourth edition of the Coolest Tool Award is looking for nominations. Please submit your favorite tools by October 12, 2022. The awarded projects will be announced and showcased in a virtual ceremony in December.
MUL language code: fixed the order of languages shown in the termbox on desktop, especially when mul is used (phab:T311617)
Lexicographical data:
Made Special:NewLexemeAlpha use the same font as the rest of the wiki (phab:T313166) – this should be the last blocker for replacing the old special page
Disallowed *-x-qid with lowercase Q as Lexeme language codes in favor of *-x-Qid (phab:T317863)
REST API: worked on handling conditional HTTP request headers
Changed the unexpectedUnconnectedPage page prop so that Special:UnconnectedPages can show the latest pages first, which should finally resolve this old security task in production (phab:T300770)
Cleaned up the Wikibase and WikibaseLexeme ontology files (phab:T314360)
Added a few more globes for geocoordinates (phab:T314611) - Thanks, Mike!
Task/s: I'm using Openrefine to edit items related to Wikidata:Wikiproject_Lieder, beginning by adding the new subclass lyrico-musical work (Q114586269) to the actual lieder in WD. I hope to gain some experience before going with further edits.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call October 18th: session where community members can share their favorite Wikidata gadgets, user scripts, or SPARQL queries Agenda
Learn Wikidata and celebrate #WikidataBirthday in Sydney! (An introduction to wikidata: how worlds of wikimedia link). Saturday 22 October from 11am to 2pm. Sign up.
The Welsh Government's new mapping platform Data Map Wales (for publishing public geo data) now has an optional base layer entirely in Welsh. This is largely based on OSM data with additional place names from Wikidata.
Laatste bericht: 1 jaar geleden1 bericht1 persoon in overleg
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
A bug that caused problems in loading article thumbnails in Special:Search has been fixed. Further details are in T320406.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 October. It will be on all wikis from 20 October (calendar).
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, November 9th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (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 Wikidata Working Hour October 24, 2022: ninth Wikidata Working Hour in the series will be batch loading data using QuickStatements to create items for works and editions in Wikidata. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. All sessions in our project series will be recorded for those who cannot attend. Links will be added to the event page when available. Event page
The Biodiversity Information Standards annual conference (TDWG 2022) took place from 17-21 October in Sofia, Bulgaria, and online. It included a session about the role of the Wikimedia ecosystem in linking biodiversity data, which featured six talks, all of which with strong Wikidata components. Slides and/ or video recordings are already available for some (more to follow):
Laatste bericht: 1 jaar geleden1 bericht1 persoon in overleg
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 have been some minor visual fixes in Special:Search, regarding audio player alignment and image placeholder height. Further details are in T319230.
On Wikipedias, a new preference has been added to hide article thumbnails in Special:Search. Full details are in T320337.
Problems
Last week, three wikis (French Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Russian Wikipedia) had read-only access for 25 minutes. This was caused by a hardware problem. [48]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 October. It will be on all wikis from 27 October (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 25 October at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 27 October at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Assamese Wikipedia, Bashkir Wikipedia, Balinese Wikipedia, Bavarian Wikipedia, Samogitian Wikipedia, Bikol Central Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Belarusian (Taraškievica) Wikipedia, Bulgarian Wikipedia, Bhojpuri Wikipedia, Bislama Wikipedia, Banjar Wikipedia, Bambara Wikipedia, Bishnupriya Wikipedia, Breton Wikipedia, Bosnian Wikipedia, Buginese Wikipedia, Buryat Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [49]
Pages with titles that start with a lower-case letter according to Unicode 11 will be renamed or deleted. There is a list of affected pages at m:Unicode 11 case map migration. More information can be found at T292552.
The Vector 2022 skin will become the default across the smallest Wikipedias. Learn more.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call November 1, 2022: Egon Willighagen (d:User:Egonw) on SARS-CoV-2 queries, a a well-documented series of Wikidata queries around the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the pandemic. This work contributes to d:Wikidata:Wikiproject COVID-19 and documentation is currently available in Japanese, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese. Agenda.
Some additional materials have been made available from the Wikimedia session at the Biodiversity Information Standards annual conference (TDWG 2022) that took place from 17-21 October in Sofia, Bulgaria, and online:
sparklis (source) : query builder in natural language that allows people to explore and query SPARQL endpoints with all the power of SPARQL and without any knowledge of SPARQL, nor of the endpoint vocabulary.
✨ Other Noteworthy Stuff
Word Finder is a tool based on Wikidata Lexemes that solves anagrams and find missing letters in crosswords.
Laatste bericht: 1 jaar geleden1 bericht1 persoon in overleg
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
When using keyboard navigation on a Kartographer map, the focus will become more visible. [54]
In Speciaal:RecenteWijzigingen, you can now hide the log entries for new user creations with the filter for "⧼rcfilters-filter-newuserlogactions-label⧽". [55]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 November. It will be on all wikis from 3 November (calendar).
The maps dialog in VisualEditor now has some help texts. [56]
It is now possible to select the language of a Kartographer map in VisualEditor via a dropdown menu. [57]
It is now possible to add a caption to a Kartographer map in VisualEditor. [58]
It is now possible to hide the frame of a Kartographer map in VisualEditor. [59]
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 "Veilige modus altijd inschakelen". 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. [60]
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. [61]
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. [62]
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. [63]
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. [64][65]
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. [66]