The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC on Wednesday, 18th January 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.
Thank you for attending! Wiki World's Fair - Your complimentary shirt!
Thank youUser:Wil540 art for attending the Wiki World's Fair at the Queens Museum in August! A round of applause to all who attended, socialized, gave lightning talks, edited, listened, and toured the Panorama of the City of New York. Thank you to Xavier Robles-Armas and the Queens Museum for having us. For the first time in Wikimania history, we held a T-shirt designcontest during the event to generate a shirt for the conference. We are excited to announce we have produced a shirt with the winning design by User:Bagelpigeon. As previously announced, the shirts will be given, free of charge, to those that attended the conference. You are a confirmed attendee and now is your chance to claim your free shirt! If you want a shirt, we need your size!
What size are you? Please fill out this Google form or email: Wil@Wikimedianyc.org (One "L") Once we have everyone's size and we will order them and distribute them at local meet-ups or via mail. If you are out of town, please include your mailing address. The shirts will be available Feb or later.
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our Wikipedia Day 2023 at Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village, a Wikipedia and Public Domain Day celebration and mini-conference as part of birthday festivities marking the project's founding in 2001. In addition to the party, the event features presentations by Jason Scott of the Internet Archive and Anne Hunnell Chen of the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive, panels, and, of course, lightning talks. Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues!
After 5PM, migration to afterparty at Ace Hotel, 20 West 29th St
Livestreaming is likely, watch the wiki meetup page
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate. New York Public Library encourages the wearing of masks when indoors, and especially be mindful of those in your proximity.
Andriy.vBot (approved). Task/s: I need to connect a lot of pages (more than 10 thousand) about russian villages that were created with interwiki links in ukwiki.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call January 10, 2023: Egon Willighagen will be introducing us to SARS-CoV-2 queries, a well-documented series of Wikidata queries around the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the pandemic. This work contributes to Wikiproject COVID-19 and documentation is currently available in Japanese, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese. Agenda
The full version of View it! Tool is out! The new user script uses structured data to display related media in any Wikimedia content pages—including Wikidata items—in an on-wiki image panel or gallery view. Please join the public launch and demo of the full version of this new tool on Thursday, January 12th, 5:00 UTC via Zoom (Meeting ID: 160 454 5329) to learn more and discuss forthcoming editing features.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC on Wednesday, 18th January 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.
About 2 months left to register for the first digital@IANLS workshop: Learn the basics of Wikidata and how to use it in your Neo-Latin research. Event is online, free, and open to all. More info on event and registration.
REST API: Preparing the first release to test.wikidata.org on January 17th and to Wikidata on January 24th
Entity Schemas: Continuing to investigate and prototype technical approaches for version 2
Mismatch Finder: Working on giving mismatch providers access to the reviews of the mismatches they uploaded (phab:T304794)
Investigated how to best do language switching for the Query Builder and Mismatch Finder. So far they only support it by specifying the language via a URL parameter and not yet via the UI (phab:T324653)
Query Service:
Lexeme IDs now have tooltips so you can see the Lemma in the SPARQL code, similar as for Items and Properties (phab:T255245)
Fixed a bug where the y-axis label on a graph were misaligned and hard to read (phab:T325808)
Lexicographical data:
Statements linking to a Sense now also show the language of the Lexeme to make it easier to see for example which language a translation statement refers to (phab:T207392)
Fixed a bug in the language dropdown on Special:NewLexeme (phab:T324743)
The Lemma of a Lexeme is now shown in the title of the revision history of the Lexeme as well (phab:T312660)
Vector 2022 theme: worked on making the search on Wikidata work in this new theme. You can test it on test.wikidata.org now and next week on Wikidata. (phab:T316093)
mul language code:
Continued investigation around how to handle language fallbacks on mobile, which is a blocker for adding this language code (phab:T323098)
Preventing the addition of descriptions for mul (phab:T313027)
Constraint violations: Working on also showing them to non-logged in users (phab:T272132)
New Zealand report: The Great Macron War, Critter of the Week, and West Couast Wikisource
Nigeria report: WikiLovesLibraries Nigeria:An initiative beyond 1Lib1Ref for Librarians in Nigeria
Poland report: The first European GLAM Coordinators online meet-up; New articles on the collection of Wawel Royal Castle; Results of Wiki Loves Monuments 2022
Portugal report: Wikibase in social sciences and Public Domain Day celebrations
Spain report: Wikidata Birthday and ongoing projects
Sweden report: Musikverket; Media literacy graphics; Reports for project and to project partners
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC on Wednesday, 18th January 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.
General datatypes: does not use: item or concept not used by the subject but that could have been expected, member of Roman tribe: Roman tribe in which one was inscribed
Vector 2020 skin: the search that works properly with Wikidata has been deployed
Entity Schemas: Making progress on the proof of concept that will help us figure out the technical way forward
REST API: getting ready to deploy the first version to test.wikidata.org on February 17th
Lexicographical data: When linking to a Sense in a statement the language of the Lexeme for that Sense is now also shown. This makes it easier to understand translation statements for example (phab:T207392)
Constraints: Constraint violations are now also shown to logged out users (phab:T272132)
Fixing a regression where Wikipedia and co are no longer notified about a disconnected sitelink when the Item that contains the sitelink is deleted (phab:T326082)
thanks! by the way, just an FYI, as of now, a state of {{War}} now exists on behalf of myself and Wikipedia!! of course, I mean a pretty good state of {{War}}, not "war"!!I I just hope the community will help me to keep {{War}} in a state of high usefulness! lol! cheers! Sm8900 (talk) 18:17, 19 January 2023 (UTC)Reply
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call January 24, 2023: We will be discussing plans for 2023, and requesting feedback and ideas for future programming. Based on a previous recommendation to host a discussion on advocacy for Wikidata within libraries, we will introduce and provide time to complete a short survey to foster conversation in a future Group Call. Please come ready to share your thoughts Agenda
Introductions to Wikidata, online meetings organized by Wikimedia Australia on January 25, 26 and 31
General datatypes: attracts (organisms attracted by this taxon), salary level (level of someone's salary), change of (property this process changes), database contains records about (indicate the types of items that the database has records about)
Ontology issues: We finalized and published the survey to better understand which types of ontology issues are most problematic for reusers of our data.
Wikipedia and co: Fixing a regression where there is no entry in recent changes and watchlist when an Item is deleted that was connected to an article on that wiki (phab:T326082)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, for ~15 minutes, all wikis were unreachable for logged-in users and non-cached pages. This was caused by a timing issue. [1]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 January. It will be on all wikis from 26 January (calendar).
If you have the Beta Feature for DiscussionTools enabled, the appearance of talk pages will add more information about discussion activity. [2][3]
The 2023 edition of the Community Wishlist Survey (CWS), which invites contributors to make technical proposals and vote for tools and improvements, starts on Monday 23 January 2023 at 18:00 UTC.
A citation hunt program was organized for secondary school students at IIS School in Dubai as part of the 74th Republic Day celebration of India. 16 students participated, with different mother tongues and from different states of India living as expatriates in Dubai. The goal was to increase references for Wikidata statements based on research. The students were introduced to the importance of protecting India's history on the internet, and were taught how to edit Wikipedia and Wikidata. They were given a special event page on Wikidata with instructions and a list of Wikidata items to add citations to, and they searched for references in their textbooks and search engines to add to the Wikidata items.More details are given here.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour January 30, 2023: The #1Lib1Ref campaign is afoot, so we will be working on adding references to Wikidata statements. We'll have some data for you to work with, but you're welcome to bring your own. We'll be mainly working with adding webpages as sources, but if you want to get experience using books or articles as sources, we recommend bringing some to the session to use as references for Wikidata items you have identified. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own project to work on Event page
theyrule.net is a website that helps to explore the boardroom connections of the largest US companies.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
AfLIA's online course Wikidata is open. Participation is free for all librarians, museums, archives and other information professionals in Africa. Call is open until 7th February 2023 (12 midnight GMT).
LetsQuiz is a new website generating quizzes using data from Wikidata.
Building cool apps and services on top of Wikidata's data but running into ontology issues? We'd love to hear from you in this survey to make things better for you.
General datatypes: place of resident registration at death (the place or administrative unit where the deceased person was registered as having his or her residence at the time of their death), has instance (thing(s) which this subject describes or encompasses, inverse property of P31), Norwegian media rating (In short, the Norwegian version of Denmark's Medierådet rating (P5970), an age rating system for motion pictures, video, internet and tv content), iconically alludes to (item that is iconically represented in the execution of this lexeme), credits URL (URL of an official webpage with a list of credits and roles attributed to various people, organizations or applications that contribute(d) to this item's existence), alternate universe counterpart (this fictional character/entity is an alternate universe counterpart of the subject), number of penalty kicks scored, precedes/follows various things (this lexeme form appears only when preceding another lexeme form with this phonological feature)
Property Suggester: We updated the data for the Property Suggester so suggestions for new statements to add to an Item should be more in line with current Property usage on other similar Items again.
Fixed an issue with Item deletions not showing up on Wikipedia and co if they affect an article on that wiki (phab:T326082)
Vector 2022: Made it possible to add a new sitelink on Wikipedia and co in the new Vector 2022 language selector (phab:T310259)
Lua: Working on two new Lua functions, getDescriptionByLang (phab:T230839) and getBadges (phab:T305378)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, for ~15 minutes, some users were unable to log in or edit pages. This was caused by a problem with session storage. [4]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 February. It will be on all wikis from 2 February (calendar).
Future changes
Wikis that use localized numbering schemes for references need to add new CSS. This will help to show citation numbers the same way in all reading and editing modes. If your wiki would prefer to do it yourselves, please see the details and example CSS to copy from, and also add your wiki to the list. Otherwise, the developers will directly help out starting the week of February 5.
The Growth team partnered with other WMF teams to conduct several experiments around increasing account creation and new editor retention.
Results from four of these experiments are now available:
Thank you pages & banners - Encourage donors to create accounts through thank you pages and banners.
Marketing experiment - Run ads on-wiki and off-wiki to see how this impacts account activation.
Several communities suggested improving "add a link", by suggesting underlinked articles first. We released this change to Growth pilot wikis. We will review the data and collect feedback before considering releasing it to more wikis. [5]
The deployment of the "add a link" to all Wikipedias is still in progress. Suggested links use a prediction model, which has to be trained. The deployments will resume after we finish training all models. [6]
When someone wants to signup as a mentor, they are now informed if they don't meet the defined criteria. [7]
Workshop hosts asked us to have workshop attendees assigned to them. They can soon use a custom URL parameter. This way, workshop hosts will continue mentoring the event's attendees after the workshop. It will be available in February. [8]
Have you considered to help new editors on your wiki, by signing up to be a Mentor?
Please visit Special:MentorDashboard to check on the conditions to be a mentor, and sign up.
If your wiki does not have Mentorship enabled, consider setting it up. The Growth team can provide advice and assist as needed. Please ping Trizek (WMF) for assistance.
Newsletter translation: We are looking for translators for this newsletter. If you are interested and have the needed English language proficiency to assist, then please add your name to this list. You will receive an invite on your talk page to translate the newsletter when it is ready.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Belgian waffles cooked in a Krampouz cast-iron waffle iron, in a Montreal restaurant during the gastronomy competition of the Montreal Highlights Festival
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, logged-out users using the full-width toggle will be able to see the setting of their choice even after refreshing pages or opening new ones. This only applies to wikis where Vector 2022 is the default. [10]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 February. It will be on all wikis from 9 February (calendar).
Previously, we announced when some wikis would be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. These switches will not be announced any more, as the read-only time has become non-significant. Switches will continue to happen at 7AM UTC on Tuesdays and Thursdays. [11]
Across all the wikis, in the Vector 2022 skin, logged-in users will see the page-related links such as "What links here" in a new side menu. It will be displayed on the other side of the screen. This change had previously been made on Czech, English, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. [12]
Gadgets and user scripts will be changing to load on desktop and mobile sites. Previously they would only load on the desktop site. It is recommended that wiki administrators audit the gadget definitions prior to this change, and add skins=… for any gadgets which should not load on mobile. More details are available.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
BiodiversityBot 3 Task/s: TreatmentBank (Q54857867) is a CC0 resource that contains data on taxonomic treatments, treatment citations, figures, tables, material citations and bibliographic reference. It contains valuables links mapping scholarly articles, taxa and taxonomic treatments. This bot task involves linking research papers on taxa to taxa and related taxonomic treatments.
Closed request for permissions/Bot:
Bean49Bot 4 Task/s: Add Springer Nature person ID and Springer Nature article ID by moving from exact match property.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call February 7, 2023: We thought we'd try something different next week, in honor of Valentine's Day month: What's Your Wikidata Passion? What is your central Wikidata interest right now? It can be a work or personal project or just what you like to edit when you have time. We'd love to have an open mic session, completely informal. Please add yourselves to the list on our agenda here if you would like to talk for 5 minutes or so and share your screen, with no need for formal slides. Or just show up and talk on the spur of the moment. This will be a community session where we welcome all to participate! Agenda
Let's Quiz is a game that generates random quizzes to test your knowledge & learn something new every day.
User:Nikki/AddTermboxLanguage.js - makes it easier to add/edit labels to an item in a language other than the ones shown by default.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Building cool apps and services on top of Wikidata's data but running into ontology issues? We'd love to hear from you in this survey to make things better for you.
General datatypes: Happy Planet Index score (The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is an index of human well-being and environmental impact that was introduced by the New Economics Foundation in 2006), credits URL (URL of an official webpage with a list of credits and roles attributed to various people, organizations or applications that contribute(d) to this item's existence), digital equivalent of (the subject is the digital equivalent of what?)
General datatypes: precedes/follows various things (this lexeme form appears only when preceding another lexeme form with this phonological feature), footnote (for use in the references section of statements: to state which footnote of the source material supports the claim in question), agent of action (thing that does the action), natural enemy (One of the causes of death of this living creatures referred to in this item, which is eaten by that creature), change of (property this process changes), object of action (thing an action is done to), variety of sense (dialect, variety or register of language that the sense applies to), bust/waist/hip measurements (chest measurement; aliases: bust measurement), usage label (list of sets of context label property (Q116547761) (language style (P6191), field of usage (P9488), has quality (P1552), variety of form (P7481), location of sense usage (P6084)). Other individual context label property (Q116547761) statement will be treated as and with this statement.), thesaurus' properties (primary topic of the subject Wikimedia thesaurus)
REST API: adding a new GET /entities/items/{item_id}/descriptions endpoint (phab:T327881)
Lua: added two Lua functions, getDescriptionByLang (phab:T230839) and getBadges (phab:T305378) that make it easier to get this data on Wikipedia and co
Action API: fixed a bug that prevented the wblistentityusage API module from being used as a generator (phab:T254334)
Dates: working together with Matěj Suchánek to fix date parsing issues in Czech (phab:T221097)
Constraints: working on showing constraint clarification messages to make it easier to understand why a constraint violation is happening and how to fix it (phab:T219037)
SYMBIOSIS: The lichen task force newsletter — February 2023 A look at what we've accomplished, working together
Did you know that lichens can grow on glass, plastic and metals, as well as their more typical wood, stone, leaf and dirt substrates? Did you know that scientists have done experiments on the International Space Station where lichens have been exposed to space for weeks at a time — enduring the vacuum, solar radiation, and frigid temperatures outside of the station — and that these lichens have then photosynthesized normally when returned to earth? Did you know that lichens cover more than 7 percent of the earth's surface, and that some live permanently submerged underwater? Join us to help improve Wikipedia's coverage of these amazing organisms. There's plenty to write about!
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our WikiWednesday Salon, with in-person at Brooklyn Public Library by Grand Army Plaza, in the Central Library's Info Commons Lab, as well as an online-based participation option. No experience of anything at all is required. All are welcome!
We are proud to announce that monthly PIZZA has returned!
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate. Brooklyn Public Library encourages the wearing of masks when indoors, and especially be mindful of those in your proximity.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Campaign for the Norwegian Centre Party at Nærbø: like its Finnish and Swedish counterparts, the party has a strong focus on decentralisation, rural and agrarian issues. Ideologically, the Centre Party is positioned in the centre on the political spectrum.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
CJMbot (CJMbot lets users upload a CSV file in a certain format. The data inside this file is then validated and processed. New items wil be created based on the data in the CSV file and existing items wil updated by adding statements and references).
RPI2026F1Bot 5 Task/s: Import dependency and version data from PyPi
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikibase Working Hour February 13, 2023. The February Working Hour will feature a presentation by Steve Baskauf on using VanderBot with Wikibase: The Wikibase API provides a mechanism for programmatic control of uploads, and its behavior is consistent across instances (Wikidata, Structured Data in Commons, and those that are established privately). In this session, Steve will discuss basic interactions with the API and demonstrate using the VanderBot Python application to rapidly upload tabular data to a wikibase.cloud instance. After performing a mass deletion, Steve will conclude by describing how he's used the Wikibase API to facilitate addition of structured data to Commons. Registration link
Wikidata Graph Builder released a major update, introducing new layouts and visualization ideas. You can read the full changelog here.
The new Service Level Objective for the Wikidata Query Service has been implemented: the current aim is to maintain a 95% uptime based on a 90 day rolling window. You can read the full announcement here.
a.gup.pe provides group features for Mastodon. @wikidata@a.gup.pe is a group about Wikidata in general. @querywikidata@a.gup.pe is a group about Wikidata queries. Anyone can join those groups simply by following them in Mastodon. Anyone can share a message with all members of those groups by mentioning them in a publication in Mastodon or any other application of the Fediverse.
The hashtag #Wikidata can be used to tag all publications related to Wikidata in Mastodon. Anyone can find recent publications using this tag using the search feature: https://wikis.world/tags/Wikidata.
Went over the feedback on the first release and deciding on the next routes to add
Added a new endpoint for getting descriptions (phab:T327881)
Worked on throwing exceptions when something goes wrong (validation failed, Item not found, etc.) instead of returning an error response object (phab:T327527)
Entity Schemas: Finished the technical exploration that will unblock the next steps for actual development
Query Service: Changed URLs with URL-encoded characters to be shown un-encoded for better line-breaks and readability (phab:T327514)
Query Builder:
Adding support for a few additional datatypes (phab:T328528)
Adding a basic language selector to make it easier to switch the language of the page (phab:T328764)
Constraint checks: Working on showing constraint clarification messages to make it easier to understand how to fix a violation on a statement (phab:T219037)
Search: Exploring design options for how to make it easier to search for entities other than Items (phab:T327507)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
On wikis where patrolled edits are enabled, changes made to the mentor list by autopatrolled mentors are not correctly marked as patrolled. It will be fixed later this week. [13]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [15][16][17]
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi. I want to let you know that I am reactivating the WikiProject below. it is marked as semi-active for now.
would you like to visit the page and join? I saw your helpful work in setting up Wikipedia:WikiProject New York City/Environment Task Force. we could definitely use input from an editor like yourself. I hope you will consider joining. thanks!
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
Cmtqwikibot 2 (Task/s: Add credits (cast and crew) for audiovisual work produced in Quebec based on the Cinémathèque québécoise's catalogue data. Adds reference. Deletes redundant, more general existing statements in certain circumstances.)
Gabrabot (Bulk upload Maltese lexeme data to wikidata from Gabra.)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call February 21, 2023: Jim Hahn and John Mark Ockerbloom will be presenting on Penn Libraries' Linked Data Vision. They will discuss their framework for activities and goals around linked data, which includes both existing standards and new functionality. Additionally, they will share successes and areas where progress has not yet been made. The presentation will cover projects with Wikidata tie-ins, such as the Digital Scriptorium Wikibase project and the Deep Backfile copyright information project. The presenters also plan to have ample time for conversation with those interested in using linked data to bring new functionality to their libraries. Agenda
Wikidata and Wikibase - SEMIC workshop 2 physical hands-on workshop in Brussels on the 23rd of February (Register here)
If you are interested in organizing or joining the Wikimedia Hackathon 2023 satellite events, you can apply for funds by March 20 via the Rapid Grants maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, during planned maintenance of Cloud Services, unforeseen complications forced the team to turn off all tools for 2–3 hours to prevent data corruption. Work is ongoing to prevent similar problems in the future. [18]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [19][20][21]
The Editing team is beginning a project to help new editors of Wikipedia. It will help people identify some problems before they click "Publish changes". The first tool will encourage people to add references when they add new content. Please watch that page for more information. You can join a conference call on 3 March 2023 to learn more.
ScikingBot (Task/s: The bot is going to fix interwiki links for the Lombard Wikipedia)
fromCrossrefBot (Task/s: Importing licenses for 1.45 million CC licensed papers from the Crossref April 2022 dump.)
Closed requests for permissions/Bot:
Cmtqwikibot 2 (Task/s: Add credits (cast and crew) for audiovisual work produced in Quebec based on the Cinémathèque québécoise's catalogue data. Adds reference. Deletes redundant, more general existing statements in certain circumstances.)
Bug Triage Hour on dates input, March 13th: Following up on an issue on date parsing in the Czech language (T221097), fixed earlier in February, we would like to look at the changes induced by this fix together, check how the date input parsing works in your language, and identify some possibly remaining issues.
Eager to discover the potential of Wikidata and Wikibase for semantics? SEMIC is organising a series of workshops that are very much hands-on. Join the first workshop online on 24 January 2023 from 14:00 to 16:00 (CET) via Webex. Register for the first event via this link!
Wikibase Suite Survey is now open! The goal is to understand what role Wikibase plays in your organization and identify what you need from Wikibase based on how you currently make use of it.
rebuilt (year or date when the structure was reconstructed, rebuilt, repurposed or replaced by similar one (if the new and old structures have separate items, use P167/P1398 links instead))
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, in some areas of the world, there were problems with loading pages for 20 minutes and saving edits for 55 minutes. These issues were caused by a problem with our caching servers due to unforseen events during a routine maintenance task. [22][23]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 March. It will be on all wikis from 2 March (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. [24]
This is somewhat of a sequel to last year's Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/Brunch in terms of the participants, though this time it is an evening event in a different borough.
We may leaven the event with a few impromptu lightning talks, a Wiki-fashion show (yes, really!), and likely an afterparty tour.
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.
Biondibot (Task/s: Import us patent from a csv file)
bitbotje (Task/s: Property MovieMeter film ID (P1970) has a suggested constraint that the item should have a Dutch ('nl') label. The MovieMeter website has suitable labels and provides an API for structured data access. I have a script that reads the relevant section in Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations/P1970 and for each listed item does an API call to moviemeter.nl and adds a label.)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call March 7, 2023: Lydia Pintscher and Silvan Heintze will tell us about the new Wikidata REST API and Silvan will demonstrate some of its aspects. Agenda
Bug Triage Hour on dates input, March 13th: Following up on an issue on date parsing in the Czech language (T221097), fixed earlier in February, we would like to look at the changes induced by this fix together, check how the date input parsing works in your language, and identify some possibly remaining issues.
Open Data Day Taiwan 2023 recorded livestreams: Day 1; Day 2
Wikidata for History of Science projects, by Martin Poulter - YouTube
How to add Wikidata properties using PetScan in Finnish Wikipedia via categories - YouTube
How to add Wikidata properties using PetScan in Finnish Wikipedia 2 - YouTube
LD4P3 - Browsing Across Music With Obtainable Wikidata - YouTube
Extracting political data & relations from Wikidata - YouTube
Operation of Wikidata and its centralized management of metadata linked to multiple databases (in French) - YouTube
Wikidata and higher education and research libraries (in French) - YouTube
Wikidata supporting open student research projects in plant chemistry - YouTube
Tool of the week
wikidata-todo is a tool that helps you find Commons categories with files, where none of the files are used on Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The WMDE Wikibase.Cloud team is currently seeking individuals who are interested in participating in interviews regarding the pressing issue of data modeling. Please reach out if you'd like to participate.
Search: We are looking deeper into how we can make it possible to search for Properties, Lexemes and EntitySchemas in the search box, not just Items (phab:T321543)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Community Wishlist Survey 2023 edition has been concluded. Community Tech has published the results of the survey and will provide an update on what is next in April 2023.
On wikis which use LanguageConverter to handle multiple writing systems, articles which used custom conversion rules in the wikitext (primarily on Chinese Wikipedia) would have these rules applied inconsistently in the table of contents, especially in the Vector 2022 skin. This has now been fixed. [25]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 March. It will be on all wikis from 9 March (calendar).
A search system has been added to the Preferences screen. This will let you find different options more easily. Making it work on mobile devices will happen soon. [26]
Brazil report: GLAM-Wiki initiatives in Brazil spark academic investigation
Croatia report: Activities during first two months of 2023
Indonesia report: Launching of Wikisource Loves Manuscripts; Bincang GLAM continues
Italy report: New project and collaboration in February
Kosovo report: I Edit Wikipedia Online Campaign 2023
New Zealand report: Wikidata and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Wellington WikiCon 2023 and Auckland Museum local suburb project funding
Poland report: The European GLAM Coordinators online meet-up; GLAM-Wiki workshop at the Wawel Royal Castle State Art Collection; Wikimedians-in-residence online meet up
Sweden report: 100 000 Bildminnen; Report from The Association of Swedish Museums; Wikipedia for all of Sweden; ArkDes edit-a-thons
UK report: In Memoriam Jo Pugh / Cultural Diversity
bitbotje (Task/s: Property MovieMeter film ID (P1970) has a suggested constraint that the item should have a Dutch ('nl') label. The MovieMeter website has suitable labels and provides an API for structured data access. I have a script that reads the relevant section in Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations/P1970 and for each listed item does an API call to moviemeter.nl and adds a label.)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 March (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Chavacano de Zamboanga Wikipedia, Min Dong Chinese Wikipedia, Chechen Wikipedia, Cebuano Wikipedia, Chamorro Wikipedia, Cherokee Wikipedia, Cheyenne Wikipedia, Central Kurdish Wikipedia, Corsican Wikipedia, Kashubian Wikipedia, Church Slavic Wikipedia, Chuvash Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [27][28]
Hello and welcome to the March 2023 newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since December and our Annual Report for 2022. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below. We extend a warm welcome to all of our new members, including those who have signed up for our current March Backlog Elimination Drive. We wish you all happy copy-editing.
Election results: In our December 2022 coordinator election, Reidgreg and Tenryuu stepped down as coordinators; we thank them for their service. Incumbents Baffle gab1978, Dhtwiki, Miniapolis and Zippybonzo were returned as coordinators until 1 July. For the second time, no lead coordinator was chosen. Nominations for our mid-year Election of Coordinators open on 1 June (UTC).
Drive: 21 editors signed up for our January Backlog Elimination Drive, 14 of whom claimed at least one copy-edit. Between them, they copy-edited 170 articles totaling 389,737 words. Barnstars awarded are here.
Blitz: Our February Copy Editing Blitz focused on October and November 2022 requests, and the March and April 2022 backlogs. Of the 14 editors who signed up, nine claimed at least one copy-edit; and between them, they copy-edited 39,150 words in 22 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Progress report: As of 12:08, 19 March 2023 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have processed 73 requests since 1 January 2023, all but five of them from 2022, and the backlog stands at 1,872 articles.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Baffle gab1978, Dhtwiki, Miniapolis and Zippybonzo.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Upcoming: WikiCite Monthly Meeting, online on 28 March 2023 at 16:00 UTC. Information and notes
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
In this week's update by the Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions team, they are asking where the right place to store and maintain Abstract Wikipedia should be. All of the options involve Wikidata to some extent, some more, some less. If the content of Abstract Wikipedia is hosted on Wikidata, that would lead to an increased scope for the Wikidata community (and likely more contributors joining). But that is a decision the Wikidata community needs to be involved in as well. (Also, if you are interested, the Abstract Wikipedia updates might be worth to follow.)
EntitySchemas: We are preparing for adding a new datatype and other changes by improving tests, documentation, etc.
Date input: We did a bug triage hour around issues with date parsing and improved it for Japanese dates (phab:T214002)
Ontology issues: We started evaluating the survey responses for the survey about different types of ontology issues reusers are facing. More work is needed before we have results.
REST API: We finished work on including the URL of an article in sitelink data (phab:T330252) as well as providing all aliases of an Item (phab:T327882)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, some users experienced issues loading image thumbnails. This was due to incorrectly cached images. [29]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (calendar).
There will be a new option for Administrators when they are unblocking a user, to add the unblocked user’s user page to their watchlist. This will work both via Special:Unblock and via the API. [30]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 24 March at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour March 27, 2023: We will be creating items related to notable book podcasts. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own project to work on.Event page
WikiCite Monthly Meeting, online on 28 March 2023 at 16:00 UTC. Information and notes
ISCED Attainment (ISCED attainment is the UNESCO main classification of educational level, it is used to map each level to the global classification used by UNESCO. This is useful because the same local level can mean different things in different countries. It identifies the specific levels of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) Attainment model. Has two sub qualifiers - code and label.)
first performance by (performer or performing group for the first performance of a work)
EntitySchemas: We started working on the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements (phab:T214884)
Query Builder: We finished the work on the language selector so you can swithc the interface language of the tool (phab:T328148) It will be available on the site in the next days.
Wikibase REST API: We implemented the functionality to provide an Item's label, description or aliases in a specific language (phab:T323173)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The AbuseFilter condition limit was increased from 1000 to 2000. [31]
Desktop users are now able to subscribe to talk pages by clicking on the Subscribe link in the Tools menu. If you subscribe to a talk page, you receive notifications when new topics are started on that talk page. This is separate from putting the page on your watchlist or subscribing to a single discussion. [33]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 March. It will be on all wikis from 30 March (calendar).
The legacy Mobile Content Service is going away in July 2023. Developers are encouraged to switch to Parsoid or another API before then to ensure service continuity. [35]
In this test, we use post-edit dialogs (pop-ups shown after publishing an edit) and notifications to encourage new editors to try new types of newcomer-friendly suggested edits.
Community Ambassadors completed an initial evaluation that confirmed that prioritizing underlinked articles resulted in better article suggestions. We then evaluated the change on Growth pilot wikis, and results suggest that more newcomers are successfully completing the task and experiencing fewer reverts. We have now deployed the new prioritization model to all wikis with "add a link" enabled. [36][37]
We continue the deployment of "add a link" to more wikis. These changes are regularly announced in Tech News. To know if newcomers at your wiki have access to this feature, please visit your Homepage.
The Impact module was deployed on our pilot wikis, where we conducted an A/B test. We published initial findings, and a data scientist is now completing experiment analysis. [38]
Donor Thank you page experiment – Donors land on a “thank you” page after donation, and that landing page now includes a call to action to try editing: Example Thank you page in French. This promising feature is tested at several Wikipedias (French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call April 4, 2023: Magnus Manske will discuss Wikidata editing tools and tools that use linked data from other sources (eg GND, VIAF) to integrate in Wikidata. Agenda
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The system for automatically creating categories for the Babel extension has had several important changes and fixes. One of them allows you to insert templates for automatic category descriptions on creation, allowing you to categorize the new categories. [43][44][45][46][47]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 April. It will be on all wikis from 6 April (calendar).
Some older Web browsers will stop being able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. This mainly affects users of Internet Explorer 11. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can try to upgrade to a newer version. [48]
The deprecated jquery.hoverIntent module has been removed. This module could be used by gadgets and user scripts, to create an artificial delay in how JavaScript responds to a hover event. Gadgets and user scripts should now use jQuery hover() or on() instead. Examples can be found in the migration guide. [49]
Some of the links in Special:SpecialPages will be re-arranged. There will be a clearer separation between links that relate to all users, and links related to your own user account. [50]
You will be able to hide the Reply button in archived discussion pages with a new __ARCHIVEDTALK__ magic word. There will also be a new .mw-archivedtalk CSS class for hiding the Reply button in individual sections on a page. [51][52][53]
Future changes
The Vega software that creates data visualizations in pages, such as graphs, will be upgraded to the newest version in the future. Graphs that still use the very old version 1.5 syntax may stop working properly. Most existing uses have been found and updated, but you can help to check, and to update any local documentation. Examples of how to find and fix these graphs are available.
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our WikiWednesday Salon, with in-person at Brooklyn Public Library by Grand Army Plaza, in the Central Library's Info Commons Lab, as well as an online-based participation option. No experience of anything at all is required. All are welcome!
We are proud to announce that monthly PIZZA has returned!
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate. Brooklyn Public Library encourages the wearing of masks when indoors, and especially be mindful of those in your proximity.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
There was a problem with all types of CentralNotice banners still being shown to logged-in users even if they had turned off specific banner types. This has now been fixed. [56]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia, Danish Wikipedia, Dinka Wikipedia, Lower Sorbian Wikipedia, Ewe Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Emiliano-Romagnolo Wikipedia, Esperanto Wikipedia, Estonian Wikipedia, Basque Wikipedia, Extremaduran Wikipedia, Tumbuka Wikipedia, Fulah Wikipedia, Finnish Wikipedia, Võro Wikipedia, Fijian Wikipedia, Faroese Wikipedia, Arpitan Wikipedia, Northern Frisian Wikipedia, Friulian Wikipedia, Irish Wikipedia, Guianan Creole Wikipedia, Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia, Galician Wikipedia, Gilaki Wikipedia, Guarani Wikipedia, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Gothic Wikipedia, Gujarati Wikipedia, Manx Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [57][58]
BotFunast (Task: The bot is already operational in the Tachelhit Wikipedia. One of its main tasks is editing template tags and categories, and creating new ones when necessary, based on a csv database (that you can find in github) . When adding new pages though, a common problem is to link those to Wikidata. This can be unfeasible by hand in a reasonable amount of time, when hundreds of pages, e.g. categories, are added at once. The idea is to have the bot approved for Wikidata, so it can link the pages to their counterparts in other languages automatically.)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 19th April 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
orchestration (the instruments used in a musical composition or arrangement in notated form)
part of other combined lexeme (qualifier on P5238 to indicate that a component appearing in a compound lexeme actually comes from the appearance of another compound lexeme)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 19th April 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call, Tuesday, April 14, 2023 - Indigenous Artists and Wikidata: Report launch and discussion. Agenda.
Christos started a Wikibase to collect and organise existing research-related resources about Wikibase. Feel free to add to it. researchwb.wikibase.cloud
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on creating the new datatype that allows linking to EntitySchemas in statements. It will be available on test systems next. (phab:T332139)
QueryBuilder: We are putting finishing touches on the language selector so you can switch the UI language of the Query Builder. (phab:T328764)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on making it possible to create or replace labels and descriptions in a iven language. (phab:T323813)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
At Wikimedia Commons, some thumbnails have not been getting replaced correctly after a new version of the image is uploaded. This should be fixed later this week. [62][63]
For the last few weeks, some external tools had inconsistent problems with logging-in with OAuth. This has now been fixed. [64]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 April. It will be on all wikis from 20 April (calendar).
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for a pair of special events this weekend as we wrap up Earth Week! No experience of anything at all is required. All are welcome.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour April 24, 2023: Would you like to know how to join and use Telegram? Two regular Wikidata Telegram users will provide an introduction to Telegram and its available Wikidata channels. They will discuss how they use it, how it can provide help with Wikidata work, and how it can facilitate connections with other Wikidata users Event page
User:Nikki/colour icons.css - is a Userscript to add colour to the editing icons. It uses green for add/save, yellow for edit, red for remove, orange for cancel and blue for help.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikibase newbie docs are here (to help to onboard new Wikibase users easier).
REST API: We continued work on making it possible to create or replace a label, or a description in a given language (phab:T323813)
EntitySchemas: We continued working on the new datatype for linking to EntitySchemas. It is now available on beta in a very bare-bones version but not ready for wider testing yet. (phab:T332139)
Ontology issues: We are evaluating the results of the survey we ran earlier this year.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Due to security issues with the Graph extension, graphs have been disabled in all Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Foundation teams are working to respond to these vulnerabilities. [66]
For a few days, it was not possible to save some kinds of edits on the mobile version of a wiki. This has been fixed. [67][68][69]
Changes later this week
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on April 26. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. [70]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (calendar).
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Tillie Berger, which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created.
Congratulations, and thank you for helping expand the scope of Wikipedia! We hope you will continue making quality contributions.
The article has been assessed as Stub-Class, which is recorded on its talk page. It is commonplace for new articles to start out as stubs and then attain higher grades as they develop over time. You may like to take a look at the grading scheme to see how you can improve the article.
Since you have made at least 10 edits over more than four days, you can now create articles yourself without posting a request. However, you may continue submitting work to Articles for creation if you prefer.
If you have any questions, you are welcome to ask at the help desk. Once you have made at least 10 edits and had an account for at least four days, you will have the option to create articles yourself without posting a request to Articles for creation.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Alice Withrow, which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created.
Congratulations, and thank you for helping expand the scope of Wikipedia! We hope you will continue making quality contributions.
The article has been assessed as Start-Class, which is recorded on its talk page. Most new articles start out as Stub-Class or Start-Class and then attain higher grades as they develop over time. You may like to take a look at the grading scheme to see how you can improve the article.
Since you have made at least 10 edits over more than four days, you can now create articles yourself without posting a request. However, you may continue submitting work to Articles for creation if you prefer.
If you have any questions, you are welcome to ask at the help desk. Once you have made at least 10 edits and had an account for at least four days, you will have the option to create articles yourself without posting a request to Articles for creation.
SYMBIOSIS: The Lichen task force newsletter — May 2023 A look at what we've accomplished, working together
It's been a few months since the last newsletter, primarily because there hasn't been much to report! We continue to make slow progress on turning red links to blue in the outline of lichens, mostly through the addition of articles about lichen taxa. The glossary of lichen terms has also continued to grow, with dozens of definitions added over the past few months. However, given that there are more than 1000 lichen genera (we have articles on just under 900 of them), and more than 20,000 lichen species (90% of which have no article yet), there's plenty more to write about. All hands on deck!
The number of articles on our cleanup listing has grown, with 4% of the task force's articles showing some sort of issue. These range from missing or unreliable sources to dead external links and orphaned articles. Some of these could probably be sorted relatively quickly, if you're looking for a fast way to help the project improve its coverage.
Got a suggestion? A correction? Something you'd like to see included in a future issue? Drop a note at the Tip Line with your ideas!
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The Video2commons tool has been updated. This fixed several bugs related to YouTube uploads. [74]
The Special:Preferences page has been redesigned on mobile web. The new design makes it easier to browse the different categories and settings at low screen widths. You can also now access the page via a link in the Settings menu in the mobile web sidebar. [75]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 May. It will be on all wikis from 4 May (calendar).
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
ForgesBot (Task: Add licensing information to software forges entries in accordance to what is found in the corresponding Wikipedia page. It is used as a helper in the context of the Forges project)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 2, 2023: Fudie Zhao will be presenting on Wikidata in Digital Humanities projects. Agenda
WeChangEd is an ERC-funded research project and online database by Ghent University, about women editors in Europe. The database shows stories about women editors and their publications, and is powered by Wikidata and Sciencestories.io.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Last week, Community Tech released the first update for providing better diffs, the #1 request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. This update adds legends and tooltips to inline diffs so that users unfamiliar with the blue and yellow highlights can better understand the type of edits made.
When you close an image that is displayed via MediaViewer, it will now return to the wiki page instead of going back in your browser history. This feature request was voted #65 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [76]
The SyntaxHighlight extension now supports wikitext as a selected language. Old alternatives that were used to highlight wikitext, such as html5, moin, and html+handlebars, can now be replaced. [77]
Graph Extension update: Foundation developers have completed upgrading the visualization software to Vega5. Existing community graphs based on Vega2 are no longer compatible. Communities need to update local graphs and templates, and shared lua modules like de:Modul:Graph. The Vega Porting guide provides the most comprehensive detail on migration from Vega2 and here is an example migration. Vega5 has currently just been enabled on mediawiki.org to provide a test environment for communities. [79]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (calendar).
Until now, all new OAuth apps went through manual review. Starting this week, apps using identification-only or basic authorizations will not require review. [80]
There will be an A/B test on 10 Wikipedias where the Vector 2022 skin is the default skin. Half of logged-in desktop users will see an interface where the different parts of the page are more clearly separated. You can read more. [82][83]
jquery.tipsy will be removed from the MediaWiki core. This will affect some user scripts. Many lines with .tipsy( can be commented out. OO.ui.PopupWidget can be used to keep things working like they are now. You can read more and read about how to find broken scripts. [84]
Indonesia report: GLAM Mini Grants; Structured Data Marathon VIII; Wikisource Online Workshop
Italy report: Bridges between Wikimedia and culture
New Zealand report: BHL Whitepaper and outreach for Citizen Science Month and WeDigBio, Auckland Museum suburbs project update, New Zealand Women in Architecture Wikidata Project
Poland report: Another meeting of EU GLAM Coordinators; Guided tours for Wikipedians in museums in Krakow; Presentation on Art in Wikipedia; Online training on the basics of copyright law; Polish monuments among the top winners of WLM
Sweden report: ISOF workshop; More articles from students; SAAB veterans shared their knowledge during metadata edit-a-thon; ArkDes edit-a-thons
UK report: Democratising knowledge and cultural diversity
USA report: Into the Wikiverse; Earth Day 2023 Bushwick
EntitySchemas: We've continued work on the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements. (phab:T214884)
Converted a number of Properties from string to external ID datatype (phab:T334450)
mul language code: We've worked on preparing the special pages related to labels, descriptions and aliases for the new language code. (phab:T330193, phab:T329626)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the ability to modify labels of an Item using the HTTP PATCH method. (phab:T332739).
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our WikiWednesday Salon, with in-person at Brooklyn Public Library by Grand Army Plaza, in the Central Library's Info Commons Lab, as well as an online-based participation option. No experience of anything at all is required. All are welcome!
We are proud to announce that monthly PIZZA has returned!
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate. Brooklyn Public Library encourages the wearing of masks when indoors, and especially be mindful of those in your proximity.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Citations that are automatically generated based on ISBN are currently broken. This affects citations made with the VisualEditor Automatic tab, and the use of the citoid API in gadgets and user scripts. Work is ongoing to restore this feature. [85]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 May. It will be on all wikis from 18 May (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Gorontalo Wikipedia, Hausa Wikipedia, Hakka Chinese Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Fiji Hindi Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Upper Sorbian Wikipedia, Haitian Creole Wikipedia, Interlingua Wikipedia, Interlingue Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Iloko Wikipedia, Ingush Wikipedia, Ido Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Inuktitut Wikipedia, Jamaican Patois Wikipedia, Javanese Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [86]
Gadget and userscript developers should replace jquery.cookie with mediawiki.cookie. The jquery.cookie library will be removed in ~1 month, and staff developers will run a script to replace any remaining uses at that time. [87]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Issue 21—June 2023
WikiProject Medicine Newsletter
Hello all. Another irregular edition of the newsletter; pardon the six-month gap. I was inspired to collect this after seeing how much activity there is in the GA space on the medicine front. Please review a GAN if you have time, and help to welcome more medicine editors into the fold:
Wikipedia:Good article reassessment is back in business, with a new process and new coordinators. If you see medicine-related GAs that may no longer meet the GA criteria, feel free to nominate them for attention/reassessment (please, not too many at once, lest we get overwhelmed). I'll incorporate them into the listings above.
Major depressive disorder, Schizophrenia, and Dengue fever are featured articles that need updating. Feel free to chime in at the talk pages or WT:MED if you have the time/bandwidth to help update. They'll likely go to featured article review for more feedback in the near(ish) future (probably in the order listed).
Newsletter ideas, comments, and criticisms welcome here.
You are receiving this because you added your name to the WikiProject Medicine mailing list. If you no longer wish to receive the newsletter, please remove your name.
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments1 person in discussion
Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by S0091 was:
This submission's references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article—that is, they do not show significant coverage (not just passing mentions) about the subject in published, reliable, secondary sources that are independent of the subject (see the guidelines on the notability of people). Before any resubmission, additional references meeting these criteria should be added (see technical help and learn about mistakes to avoid when addressing this issue). If no additional references exist, the subject is not suitable for Wikipedia.
The comment the reviewer left was:
Interviews, his comments or what he has written is not independent so cannot be used to establish notability. Other sources are primary which is fine to use for verifiability but not useful for notability.
Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit after they have been resolved.
If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Allan Wernick and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
If you do not edit your draft in the next 6 months, it will be considered abandoned and may be deleted.
Hello, Wil540 art!
Having an article draft declined at Articles for Creation can be disappointing. If you are wondering why your article submission was declined, please post a question at the Articles for creation help desk. If you have any other questions about your editing experience, we'd love to help you at the Teahouse, a friendly space on Wikipedia where experienced editors lend a hand to help new editors like yourself! See you there! S0091 (talk) 15:00, 21 May 2023 (UTC)Reply
Wikimedia Deutschland is launching a laptop donation program to support Wikidata contributors with limited access to technology. If you've been actively contributing to Wikidata for at least a year, you can request a free laptop to support your work. WMDE Hardware Donation Program#Applying
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
An improved impact module will be available at Wikipedias. The impact module is a feature available to newcomers at their personal homepage. It will show their number of edits, how many readers their edited pages have, how many thanks they have received and similar things. It is also accessible by accessing Special:Impact. [89]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).
The Wikipedia Library: #1Lib1Ref - May 15th to June 5th
Tip of the month:
Looking for new red links? Keep an eye out for interesting and notable friends, family, or associates of your last article subject, and re-examine group photos for other women who may still need an article.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 30, 2023: We will discuss results from our community survey on advocacy for Wikidata in libraries and hear from community members Mary Aycock, Steve Baskauf and Eric Willey about their experiences with advocacy and gaining support for Wikidata work within their respective libraries. Agenda
TalkPageHeader.js shows the talk page header for languages other than English.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The libraries of the London School of Economics and the University of York have collaborated to produce a toolkit for uploading research theses metadata to Wikidata. Full announcement and access to the toolkit
The contents of most Wikimedia Cloud Services Wiki Replicas are out-of-date owing to large & increasing replication lag; see https://replag.toolforge.org/ & Phab T337446. Exercise caution using data from any tools that have a dependency on these databases.
ISCED category orientation (International Standard Classification of Education category (based on focus/orientation) applicable to an educational program)
Learning outcome (specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that students are expected to acquire as a result of participating in a particular education program)
We passed the 1 million Suggested edits milestone in late April!
The Suggested edits feature (AKA Newcomer tasks) increase newcomer activation by ~12%, which flows on through to increased retention. (source)
Suggested edits increase the number of edits newcomers complete in their first two weeks and have a relatively low revert rate. (source)
Suggested edits are available on all Wikipedia language editions.
Newer Suggested edits, like Add a link and Add an image, aren’t yet deployed to all wikis, but these structured tasks further increase the probability that newcomers will make their first edit. (source)
The new Impact module was released to Growth pilot wikis in December 2022, and we are now scaling the feature to another ten wikis. [90]
The Leveling up features are deployed at our pilot wikis.
The Personalized praise features were deployed at our pilot wikis on May 24. Mentors at pilot wikis will start to receive notifications weekly when they have “praise-worthy” mentees. Mentors can configure their notification preferences or disable these notifications.
We are progressively releasing Add a link to more wikis. [92]
After adding Thanks to Recent Changes, Watchlist and Special:Contributions, we investigated Thanks usage on the wikis. There is no evidence that thanks increased after the feature was added on more pages.
We shared an overview of Growth annual planning ideas, and have started community discussion about these potential projects. We would love to hear your feedback on these ideas!
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Citations can once again be added automatically from ISBNs, thanks to Zotero's ISBN searches. The current data sources are the Library of Congress (United States), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (French National Library), and K10plus ISBN (German repository). Additional data source searches can be proposed to Zotero. The ISBN labels in the VisualEditor Automatic tab will reappear later this week. [94]
For a few days earlier this month, the "Add interlanguage link" item in the Tools menu did not work properly. This has now been fixed. [96]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 May. It will be on all wikis from 1 June (calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on small and medium wikis this week. Large wikis will follow in the coming weeks. This is part of the effort to move Parsoid into MediaWiki core. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here. [97]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The RealMe extension allows you to mark URLs on your user page as verified for Mastodon and similar software.
Previously, clicking on someone else's link to Recent Changes with filters applied within the URL could unintentionally change your preference for "Group results by page". This has now been fixed. [99]
Problems
For a few days last week, some tools and bots returned outdated information due to database replication problems, and may have been down entirely while it was being fixed. These issues have now been fixed. [100]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).
Bots will no longer be prevented from making edits because of URLs that match the spam blacklist. [101]
Hello and welcome to the June 2023 newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since March. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below.
Election news: Fancy helping out at the Guild? Nominations for our half-yearly Election of Coordinators are open until 23:59 on 15 June (UTC)*. Starting immediately after, the voting phase will run until 23:59 on 30 June. All Wikipedians in good standing are eligible and self-nominations are welcomed; it's your Guild and it doesn't organize itself!
Blitz: Of the 17 editors who signed up for our April Copy Editing Blitz, nine editors completed at least one copy-edit. Between them, they copy-edited 24 articles totaling 53,393 words. Barnstars awarded are here.
Drive: 51 editors signed up for the month-long May Backlog Elimination Drive, and 31 copy-edited at least one article. 180 articles were copy-edited. Barnstars awarded are posted here.
Blitz:Sign up here for our week-long June Copy Editing Blitz, which runs from 11 to 17 June. Barnstars awarded will be posted here.
Progress report: As of 03:09 on 6 June 2023, GOCE copyeditors have processed 91 requests since 1 January and the backlog stands at 1,887 articles.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Baffle gab1978, Dhtwiki, Miniapolis and Zippybongo.
*All times and dates in this newsletter are in UTC, and may significantly vary from your local time.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Introduction workshop about Wikidata for employees of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB, national library of the Netherlands), to make them more familiar and self-reliant with Wikidata - 6 June 2023, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, The Netherlands - Slides (in Dutch) on Commons.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour June 5, 2023: In collaboration with the Black Bibliography Project, we will be adding metadata for undescribed or under-described African-American women authors listed in The Pen Is Ours: a Listing of Writings by and about African-American Women before 1910, compiled by Jean Fagan Yellin and Cynthia D. Bond.Event page
Registration has opened for the workshop on mathematical research data taking place on 9-11 October 2023 in Leipzig. Talks, demos and lightning talks can be suggested, including Wikidata-related ones.
Tool of the week
IdentifierInput makes it easier to add identifier properties by letting you put in the full url and then stripping it down to just the identifier for you.
beforehand owned by (person or institution that owned the subject just before stated event. Meant to be used as qualifier of "significant event (P793)" for events like sales, auctions, gifts, etc)
afterward owned by (person or institution that owned the subject after stated event. Meant to be used as qualifier of "significant event (P793)" for events like sales, auctions, gifts, etc)
solubility product constant (equilibrium constant for a sparingly soluble solid chemical substance dissolved in an aqueous solution)
funded by grant (title or name of the grant funding this item)
Wikibase REST API: We finished the new endpoint for patching labels (phab:T332739). We also started work on the new endpoint for retrieving Property data (phab:T337720)
Client wikis: We drastically reduced the size of a ResourceLoader module that’s loaded on most Wikipedia page views (phab:334682)
Language code: With awesome help from Nikki, we improved documentation for how to add language codes to Wikibase/Wikidata (phab:T335857)
EntitySchemas: We are getting the new datatype ready for testing.
UK report: Promoting cultural diversity on Wikipedia
USA report: A Spotlight on Black Women Birders; DC Nobel Solution Sessions; Women of Color in the Renwick Gallery; Anthropology and Community Connections; SAGE edit-a-thon; WikiWednesday Salon; Into the Wikiverse: AANHPIs in Science Fiction and Pop Culture; Queering Wikipedia 2023
Special story: Help Wikimedia Map Your Efforts to Improve Copyright!
GLAM Wiki conference report: GLAM Wiki Conference 2023: Announcing the venue & scholarship application process open
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call June 13, 2023: Helen Williams will discuss her work with Wikidata at the London School of Economics Agenda
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The Search Preview panel has been deployed on four Wikipedias (Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian and Norwegian). The panel will show an image related to the article (if existing), the top sections of the article, related images (coming from MediaSearch on Commons), and eventually the sister projects associated with the article. [103]
The RealMe extension now allows administrators to verify URLs for any page, for Mastodon and similar software. [104]
The default project license has been officially upgraded to CC BY-SA 4.0. The software interface messages have been updated. Communities should feel free to start updating any mentions of the old CC BY-SA 3.0 licensing within policies and related documentation pages. [105]
Problems
For three days last month, some Wikipedia pages edited with VisualEditor or DiscussionTools had an unintended __TOC__ (or its localized form) added during an edit. There is a listing of affected pages sorted by wiki, that may still need to be fixed. [106]
Currently, the "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is broken. Existing {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords incorrectly appear as missing templates in VisualEditor. Developers are exploring how to fix this. In the meantime, those wishing to edit the default sortkey of a page are advised to switch to source editing. [107]
Last week, an update to the delete form may have broken some gadgets or user scripts. If you need to manipulate (empty) the reason field, replace #wpReason with #wpReason > input. See an example fix. [108]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on English Wikipedia on Monday, and all other large wikis on Thursday. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here. [109]
Future changes
From 5 June to 17 July, the Foundation's Security team is holding a consultation with contributors regarding a draft policy to govern the use of third-party resources in volunteer-developed gadgets and scripts. Feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome at Third-party resources policy on meta-wiki.
We are proud to announce that monthly food has returned!
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate. Prime Produce encourages the wearing of masks when indoors, and especially be mindful of those in your proximity.
Redirect drive: In response to an unusually high redirect backlog, we held a redirect backlog drive in May. The drive completed with 23851 reviews done in total, bringing the redirect backlog to 0 (momentarily). Congratulations to Hey man im josh who led with a staggering 4316 points, followed by Meena and Greyzxq with 2868 and 2546 points respectively. See this page for more details. The redirect queue is steadily rising again and is steadily approaching 4,000. Please continue to help out, even if it's only for a few or even one review a day.
Redirect autopatrol: All administrators without autopatrol have now been added to the redirect autopatrol list. If you see any users who consistently create significant amounts of good quality redirects, consider requesting redirect autopatrol for them here.
WMF work on PageTriage: The WMF Moderator Tools team, consisting of Sam, Jason and Susana, and also some patches from Jon, has been hard at work updating PageTriage. They are focusing their efforts on modernising the extension's code rather than on bug fixes or new features, though some user-facing work will be prioritised. This will help make sure that this extension is not deprecated, and is easier to work on in the future. In the next month or so, we will have an opt-in beta test where new page patrollers can help test the rewrite of Special:NewPagesFeed, to help find bugs. We will post more details at WT:NPPR when we are ready for beta testers.
Articles for Creation (AFC): All new page reviewers are now automatically approved for Articles for Creation draft reviewing (you do not need to apply at WT:AFCP like was required previously). To install the AFC helper script, visit Special:Preferences, visit the Gadgets tab, tick "Yet Another AFC Helper Script", then click "Save". To find drafts to review, visit Special:NewPagesFeed, and at the top left, tick "Articles for Creation". To review a draft, visit a submitted draft, click on the "More" menu, then click "Review (AFCH)". You can also comment on and submit drafts that are unsubmitted using the script.
You can review the AFC workflow at WP:AFCR. It is up to you if you also want to mark your AFC accepts as NPP reviewed (this is allowed but optional, depends if you would like a second set of eyes on your accept). Don't forget that draftspace is optional, so moves of drafts to mainspace (even if they are not ready) should not be reverted, except possibly if there is conflict of interest.
Pro tip: Did you know that visual artists such as painters have their own SNG? The most common part of this "creative professionals" criteria that applies to artists is WP:ARTIST 4b (solo exhibition, not group exhibition, at a major museum) or 4d (being represented within the permanent collections of two museums).
Reminders
Newsletter feedback - please take this short poll about the newsletter.
The role of Wikidata within the research lifecycle, Wednesday 21 June, 10am BST (UTC+1), online event hosted by the University of York, UK. International participation is welcome, despite "available to White Rose institutions only" on the booking page.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour June 23, 2023: Returning to Podcasts, we will be working on creating podcast episode pages. We will discuss how this episodic content can be transferred to other serialized items. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own project to work on Event page
Webinar: Common European Data Space for cultural heritage (The ontology of Wikidata, how to interact with it for a better quality). Tuesday 20th June 2023, from 3.00 p,.m. to 5.00 p.m. CET. Register
Mapping Diversity is a platform that utilizes Wikidata to discover key facts about diversity and representation in street names across Europe. E.g. 59% of the streets and squares in Paris are named after people. Of those, 8.9% are named after women.
mul language code: We've continued working on making the mobile termbox (labels, descriptions, aliases) ready for the new language code. (phab:T329644, phab:T338302, phab:T329655, phab:T316767)
Vector 2022 skin: We are fixing an issue with the bolding of results in the main search suggester. (phab:T327510)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Flame graphs are now available in WikimediaDebug. [110][111]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
There is now a toolbar search popup in the visual editor. You can trigger it by typing \ or pressing ctrl + shift + p. It can help you quickly access most tools in the editor. [112][113]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Action API modules and Special:LinkSearch will now add a trailing / to all prop=extlinks responses for bare domains. This is part of the work to remove duplication in the externallinks database table. [114]
Problems
Last week, search was broken on Commons and Wikidata for 23 hours. [115][116]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
The Minerva skin now applies more predefined styles to the .mbox-text CSS class. This enables support for mbox templates that use divs instead of tables. Please make sure that the new styles won't affect other templates in your wiki. [117][118]
Gadgets will now load on both desktop and mobile by default. Previously, gadgets loaded only on desktop by default. Changing this default using the |targets= parameter is also deprecated and should not be used. You should make gadgets work on mobile or disable them based on the skin (with the |skins= parameter in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition) rather than whether the user uses the mobile or the desktop website. Popular gadgets that create errors on mobile will be disabled by developers on the Minerva skin as a temporary solution. [119]
All namespace tabs now have the same browser access key by default. Previously, custom and extension-defined namespaces would have to have their access keys set manually on-wiki, but that is no longer necessary. [120]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: Wolverène (RfP scheduled to end after 2 July 2023 18:46 UTC)
Closed request for adminship: Vargenau (successful) Welcome onboard \o/
New requests for permissions/Bot: RomesfulImporterBot (Task: Creating and updating Russian Lexemes by transferring information from the Russian Wiktionary)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 12th July 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
re:publica 2023 - Peer learning methods and Open Educational Resources (OER) on Wikidata for a viable digital culture of remembrance (in German) - YouTube
Workshop - Aligning Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry ontologies with Wikidata - YouTube
Managing conflations and duplications of personal items in Wikidata, National Library of Greece - YouTube
Why Wikidata in Linked Data and Libraries (in Greek)- YouTube
Adding metadata utilities in the Koha staff interface based on Wikidata - YouTube
From authority control to identity management - YouTube
DSI Webinar - The ontology of Wikidata: how to interact with it for a better quality - YouTube
Wikidata as a tool for biocuration of cell types, Biocuration Conference 2023 - YouTube
Webinar: Wikidata, a useful knowledge base for any study - YouTube
KGC '23 Talk — The Error Is The Message: Extracting Insights From Deceptive Data for Nazi-Looted Art - YouTube
TU Berlin research group "The Restitution of Knowledge" are exploring the use of Wikidata to build a Linked Open Data (LOD) project that maps German colonial military expeditions into Africa. Interested in getting involved or learning more about their project? Reach out on the project's talk page: Wikidata:WikiProject TheRoK/Data Models.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
New pages awaiting review as of June 30th, 2023.
Hello Wil540 art,
The New Page Patrol team is sending you this impromptu message to inform you of a steeply rising backlog of articles needing review. If you have any extra time to spare, please consider reviewing one or two articles each day to help lower the backlog. You can start reviewing by visiting Special:NewPagesFeed. Thank you very much for your help.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: koavf 3 (RfP scheduled to end after 8 July 2023 13:16 UTC)
Closed request for adminship: Wolverène Welcome onboard \o/
New requests for permissions/Bot: UrbanBot (Task: UrbanBot's task is to mass-add English descriptions to items that don't have one)
Closed request for permissions/Bot: RomesfulImporterBot (Task: Creating and updating Russian Lexemes by transferring information from the Russian Wiktionary)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour July 7, 2023: Let's collaborate to upgrade our community infrastructure! We'll transfer notes and content from Google Docs to our WikiProject subpages. We'll be practicing our Wiki markup skills and learning to manage Wikidata Project pages Event page
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #99, Breast milk (Challenge started on 2023-07-03 12:01:21)
m:User:Base/Scripts/HaveWikibaseLabelLowercased.js - is a Userscript that adds an arrow next to the main label (page title) which upon double click (a tap and a confirmation on touch devices) automatically makes the label's first letter lowercase for the current interface language. If there was already a matching alias it gets removed.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The WikidataCon 2023 call for proposals is running until July 31st. If you have questions or need advice before sending a program proposal, join the program team during one of the office hour sessions (online or in Taiwan, in Chinese or in English). More information
Nigerian registered company (RC) id (RC number (Registration Number), identifier assigned to a business by the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) in Nigeria)
Cent cols (A property to link Wikidata entries to the dedicated pages of each pass by the Cent Cols)
WikiProject Scotland's Accused Witches aims at producing structured data documenting witchhunts, and prosecuted Scotland's accused witches on Wikidata using the University of Edinburgh's landmark Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database (1563 to 1736).
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the GetProperty endpoint with fields filter and Conditional headers (phab:T338141, phab:T338138)
We started working on the endpoints for reading statement data of Properties (both a single statement, and a list of all of a Property’s statement) (phab:T339356), phab:T338383)
Ontology issue survey: We put together an overview of solutions for the various types of issues and will share them this week.
mul language code: We are continuing to work through the language fallback issues that were uncovered.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
From this week all gadgets automatically load on mobile and desktop sites. If you see any problems with gadgets on your wikis, please adjust the gadget options in your gadget definitions file. [124]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 July. It will be on all wikis from 6 July (calendar).
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
On 8 July 2023, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Leonard Abrams, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that Leonard Abrams founded the arts and culture magazine East Village Eye, which he claimed was the first publication to print a comprehensive definition of hip-hop? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Leonard Abrams. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Leonard Abrams), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.
Kosovo report: CEE Spring Campaign 2023, Albania and Kosovo
Netherlands report: A new book, new Wikipedia articles, videos and further images on Africa
New Zealand report: Report on the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections Conference 2023 and Auckland suburb updates
Philippines report: GLAM outreach activity at University of Nueva Caceres: Digitization, workshops and proofread-a-thons as future collaboration
Poland report: GLAM-Wiki workshops for the Czartoryski Library; Work on the GLAM-Wiki Project Page Continues; End of Internship within the "Praktykuj w Kulturze" Program
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Closed request for adminship: koavf 3 Welcome onboard \o/
New requests for permissions/Bot: FromCrossrefBot 1: Publication dates (Task/s: Using information from Crossref: 1 - Add publication date to items where they are not present in Wikidata 2 - Fix publication dates where they are erroneous)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 12th July 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
How to create a Wikidata Lexeme with ease - Beginner's Guide (in Twi and English) YouTube
Tool of the week
Duplicity is a tool on Toolforge that helps find articles on Wikipedia that do not have a Wikidata Item, and match them to an existing Item, or create a new one. (example for English Wikipedia)
HasProperty.js displays presence/absence of specific properties (configurable) after the Statements heading. Clicking a property name will jump to that properties section. For absent property, clicking property name will jump to the end of the page.
mul language code: We continued work on it focusing on showing it in the right place in the desktop termbox (phab:T316767)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the endpoints for reading statement data of Properties (both a single statement, and a list of all of a Property’s statement) (phab:T339356, phab:T338383)
Vector 2022 skin: We continued work on improving the search display (phab:T327510)
WMF Governance wiki is now connected to Wikidata so can be linked to in the sitelink section under multilingual sites (phab:T321967)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Section-level Image Suggestions feature has been deployed on seven Wikipedias (Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Catalan, Hungarian, Finnish and Norwegian Bokmål). The feature recommends images for articles on contributors' watchlists that are a good match for individual sections of those articles.
Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool for administrators to help fight spam. It provides a clearer interface for blocking plain domains (and their subdomains), is more easily searchable, and is faster for the software to process for each edit on the wiki. It does not support regex (for complex cases), nor URL path-matching, nor the MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist, but otherwise it replaces most of the functionalities of the existing MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. There is a Python script to help migrate all simple domains into this tool, and more feature details, within the tool's documentation. It is available at all wikis except for Meta-wiki, Commons, and Wikidata. [126]
The WikiEditor extension was updated. It includes some of the most frequently used features of wikitext editing. In the past, many of its messages could only be translated by administrators, but now all regular translators on translatewiki can translate them. Please check the state of WikiEditor localization into your language, and if the "Completion" for your language shows anything less than 100%, please complete the translation. See a more detailed explanation.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).
The default protocol of Special:LinkSearch and API counterparts has changed from http to both http and https. [127]
Special:LinkSearch and its API counterparts will now search for all of the URL provided in the query. It used to be only the first 60 characters. This feature was requested fifteen years ago. [128]
Future changes
There is an experiment with a ChatGPT plugin. This is to show users where the information is coming from when they read information from Wikipedia. It has been tested by Wikimedia Foundation staff and other Wikimedians. Soon all ChatGPT plugin users can use the Wikipedia plugin. This is the same plugin which was mentioned in Tech News 2023/20. [129]
There is an ongoing discussion on a proposed Third-party resources policy. The proposal will impact the use of third-party resources in gadgets and userscripts. Based on the ideas received so far, policy includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, some best practices and exemption requirements such as code transparency and inspectability. Your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on on the policy talk page.
We are proud to announce that monthly free food has returned!
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate. Prime Produce encourages the wearing of masks when indoors, and especially be mindful of those in your proximity.
Bring your own laptop if you can, the Library can only provide laptops on a first-come, first-served basis. Entrance to the Library is free; when you arrive, alert Security that you are here for the event. Please enter through the Mosholu Entrance at 2950 Southern Boulevard.
Wikidata Recent Changes API (simple front-end to the actual API) lets you query Wikidata edits by either properties, or labels/aliases/descriptions/sitelinks. You can retrieve any changes, or specify added/changed/removed. Current lag to Wikidata: 1 seconds. (blog)
autosuggest value (qualifier for P1963 that suggests which values should be autosuggested to the user that uses the property for items that are instances of the subject)
WikiProject Antiquity (aims to gather all contributors working in an aspect or another of Antiquity)
WikiProject Lodging (aims at creating, improving, and organizing Wikidata items related to lodging, such as hotels, motels, inns, guest houses and lodging-related topics)
Development
Vector 2022 skin: We finished working on removing the strange bolding pattern of the Search Results on Wikidata. Should be rolled out in the next train (phab:T327510)
EntitySchemas: We are working on showing the Label of EntitySchema in Statements and Special pages (phab:T339924)
Mismatch Finder: We are working on adding the Language Selector to the Mismatch Finder (phab:T328149)
mul: We trying out changing how placeholders in Wikibase termboxes work: They’ll soon start falling back across the fallback chain of the language until they hit mul (phab:T340832)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (calendar).
MediaWiki system messages will now look for available local fallbacks, instead of always using the default fallback defined by software. This means wikis no longer need to override each language on the fallback chain separately. For example, English Wikipedia doesn't have to create en-ca and en-gb subpages with a transclusion of the base pages anymore. This makes it easier to maintain local overrides. [130]
The action=growthsetmentorstatus API will be deprecated with the new MediaWiki version. Bots or scripts calling that API should use the action=growthmanagementorlist API now. [131]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Women in Red 8th Anniversary
In July 2015 around 15.5% of the English Wikipedia's biographies were about women. As of July 2023, 19.61% of the English Wikipedia's biographies are about women. That's a lot of biographies created in the effort to close the gender gap. Happy 8th Anniversary! Join us for some virtual cake and add comments or memories and please keep on editing to close the gap!
Missed the initial office hour sessions for preparing a WikidataCon 2023 submission? Join the next sessions on 20th, 22nd, and 26th and bring all your questions. Wikidata:WikidataCon 2023#Office hours (available in both Mandarin and English)
Live Wikidata editing in Italian, July 25 at 9:00 PM CEST on YouTube
Ongoing
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #102, Money (Challenge started on 2023-07-24 12:01:19)
Images near items - helps to find Wikimedia Commons images near Wikidata items without image. It can load a category tree of Commons images with coodrinates, and then find Wikidata items of a certain P31 with coordinates but without images. Then, it will try to find nearby (<50 meters) pairs. (example link for UK red phone booths)
Top scorer (This property is for the best scorer of a single season of a team sport's competition, or even for the best ever scorer of the history of a competition. The qualifiers to be admitted to this property should be: {{p|54}}; {{p|1532}}; {{p|1013}} (es.: goals / tries / points / etc ).)
EntitySchemas: We expanded the new datatype that is in testing. When a statement links to an EntitySchema it will now show its label when available (phab:T338613). We are also working on showing them by their label in recent changes and similar places (phab:T214885).
mul language code: we are working on improving the termbox to integrate this new language code better (phab:T340644)
Mismatch Finder: We are working on adding a language selector to it so you can switch the language of the tool (phab:T328149)
Wikibase REST API: We completed two new endpoint for the Wikibase REST API:
Retrieve all statements from a Property - /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements
Retrieve a single statement from a Property - /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements/{statement_id}
You can also retrieve a single statement from a Property from the existing /statements/{statement_id} endpoint
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).
The deadline for submitting your proposals for WikidataCon 2023 is July 31st (23:59) anywhere in the world. Submit your proposals at https://pretalx.com/wikidatacon2023/
Top scorer (This property is for the best scorer of a single season of a team sport's competition, or even for the best ever scorer of the history of a competition. The qualifiers to be admitted to this property should be: {{p|54}}; {{p|1532}}; {{p|1013}} (es.: goals / tries / points / etc ).)
Project partner (property to list the partners of a project or an event, when different from the organizing body.)
GET /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements (phab:T339356) (new route)
GET /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements/{statement_id} (phab:T338383) (new route)
GET /statements/{statement_id} (now supports statements on Properties)
We started work on a new route for replacing the data of a statement on a Property (phab:T340006)
EntitySchemas:
We worked on improving the termbox (the table of labels, descriptions and aliases) on EntitySchema pages to bring it more in line with the one on Items and Properties
We made sure that EntitySchemas are shown by their label instead of ID when available in Recent Changes and similar lists (phab:T339924)
Mismatch Finder: We added a language selector so you can switch the interface language (phab:T328149)
mul language code: We are working on showing more labels from fallback languags in the termbox (phab:T340832, phab:T338330)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Synchronizer tool is now available to keep Lua modules synced across Wikimedia wikis, along with updated documentation to develop global Lua modules and templates.
The tag filter on Special:NewPages and revision history pages can now be inverted. For example, you can hide edits that were made using an automated tool. [132][133]
The Wikipedia ChatGPT plugin experiment can now be used by ChatGPT users who can use plugins. You can participate in a video call if you want to talk about this experiment or similar work. [134]
Problems
It was not possible to generate a PDF for pages with non-Latin characters in the title, for the last two weeks. This has now been fixed. [135]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (calendar).
Starting on Tuesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [136]
We shared our annual plan, for the period July 2023 - June 2024.
Our first project of the year will be Community configuration 2.0, which helps editors with extended rights transparently and easily configure important on-wiki functionality.
After we finish work on Community configuration 2.0, we will hope to fit in one of the following projects:
Article creation: This project aims to provide new editors with better guidance and guardrails in the article creation process, with the intention of lightening the load of new page reviewers.
Non-editing participation: This project aims to create low-risk ways for readers to participate in Wikipedia with the intention of funneling more readers into contributing to the Wikimedia movement.
Suggested Edits are now receiving topic predictions via the new Language-Agnostic Topic Classification. This change affects non-English Wikipedia wikis. It will ensure newcomers receive a greater diversity of task recommendations. Before, as this feature was a test, English Wikipedia was used to select topics. The change is gradual as lists of topics are refreshed when they become empty. The Research team will evaluate the impact in a few months. [137]
Starting on August 1, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link": Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia.
The Growth team provides dedicated features to establish a mentorship program for newcomers. Every newcomer gets a volunteer mentor who provides encouragement and answers questions. Communities can set up or join this mentorship system by visiting Special:ManageMentors. This mentorship system is configurable by the community at Special:EditGrowthConfig.
More communities have implemented mentorship. A Wikimedia Foundation data scientist will be looking at the impact of Mentorship. We will look at the impact on Spanish and English Wikipedia. [138]
The Growth team will also host a Mentoring new editors on Wikipedia session at Wikimania 2023 in Singapore. Workshop attendees will help brainstorm improvements to Growth’s mentorship features.
We will share more complete experiment analysis for all the three parts of the Positive reinforcement project soon. At the moment, the new Impact module, Leveling up, and Personalized praise are still being A/B tested on the Growth team's pilot wikis.
In the meantime, initial leading indicators for the Personalized praise project have been published. Although this is still a relatively small sample, results seem healthy. They show that Mentors are indeed receiving notifications and clicking through to view their praise-worthy mentees.
The Growth team is currently focusing on IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation. It is a project that touches many different Wikimedia Foundation teams. The Growth team will focus on temporary accounts through two main points:
the user experience of a logged-out user, that switches to a temporary account,
change Growth-owned extensions and features, so that they work as expected with temporary accounts. [139]
WikiShootMe expanded to make it possible to find the Items close to pictures you took so you can upload and add them to them (source)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Template:Synia is a new template which makes it easy to create links to Synia from Wikidata. Template:Synia+ guesses the relevant configuration pages for each entity depending on the values of P31 and P106.
Wikifunctions, Wikidata's newest sibling project, had a soft launch. Welcome to the Wikimedia wikiverse, functioneers!
The ORES service will be decommissioned and replaced by Lift Wing. If you have a tool that relies on ORES scores to judge edits or the quality of an Item please read the migration announcement. We are collecting affected community tools in phab:T343419.
disinherited (someone who received or will receive no or little the subject's property or title even if otherwise eligible, (partially) the opposite of [[Wikidata:Property proposal/heir or beneficiary]])
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Mobile Web editors can now edit a whole page at once. To use this feature, turn on "⧼Mobile-frontend-mobile-option-amc⧽" in your settings and use the "Edit full page" button in the "More" menu. [143]
Wikimania 2023 (16–19 August, Singapore and Online) program is out: wikimania:2023:Program
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour August 18, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to. The first Wikidata Working Hour in the series will cover creating a bibliography of diverse LIS articles and books. We will generate a spreadsheet of sources ready for use during subsequent Working Hours. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page. Event page
Everything is connected - is a knowledge-based puzzle game where players must fit square pieces representing entities in the world together based on their known connections.
Steam Deck compatibility rating (official rating used to determine which games, as a result of the review process, are compatible with Steam Deck and which are not)
name version for other gender (use for when names that are not given name or surnames are gendered (since those two have their own properties), would also be helpful for many noble titles and honorifics as well as affixes)
Curator of (has curated a collection or (art) exhibition)
WikiProject Svenska Grillplatser (WikiProject Swedish Grill Places) - The idea is to see what Wikidata and OSM can contribute when it comes to barbecue sites and connections to municipalities, grillplatser.nu, naturkartan.
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person, you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.
This is the first big summer Wiknic since the 2019 edition and will feature an edit-a-thon focused on Governors Island and ArtCrawl Harlem, Depths of Wikipedia (recently of perpetual stew fame), as well as plenty more food topics drawing on the potluck ethos. All are welcome, new and experienced!
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Content translation system is no longer using Youdao's machine translation service. The service was in place for several years, but due to no usage, and availability of alternatives, it was deprecated to reduce maintenance overheads. Other services which cover the same languages are still available. [144]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Latin Wikipedia, Ladino Wikipedia, Luxembourgish Wikipedia, Lak Wikipedia, Lezghian Wikipedia, Lingua Franca Nova Wikipedia, Ganda Wikipedia, Limburgish Wikipedia, Ligurian Wikipedia, Lombard Wikipedia, Lingala Wikipedia, Latgalian Wikipedia, Latvian Wikipedia, Maithili Wikipedia, Basa Banyumasan Wikipedia, Moksha Wikipedia, Malagasy Wikipedia, Armenian Wikipedia, Kyrgyz Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [145]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: TiagoLubianaBot 2 (Task: The Open Targets Platform is an important biomedical resource that makes its data available under a CC0 license waiver. The request at hand is to extend the permissions of User:TiagoLubianaBot to import information from Open Targets, initially with a focus on physical interactions between proteins and drugs.)
WHO Aware Classification (The World Health Organization currently classifies 258 antibiotics into "Access", "Watch", and "Reserve" based partly on the risk of resistance developing as a result of such use and critical nature of the antibiotic in question.)
nombre de niveaux (number of levels in a video game or number of stages in a particular sport)
URL du plan du jeu vidéo (URL of the video game detailed map in subject provided by the site CPC-Power)
Positioning (A list of all the satellite navigation system (ex. GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BDS, NavIC etc. ) a mobile device, or a smartphone supports. [https://w.wiki/7HE9 List of all the Satellite Navigation System].)
place on the route (object, station, facility, city, natural formation or other place on a road, track, route, line, watercourse, utility line or other linear route)
simule (the element imitates or makes the value of the property appear real)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).
This is the first summer Wiknic since the 2019 edition and will feature an edit-a-thon focused Governors Island and ArtCrawl Harlem, Depths of Wikipedia and perpetual stew, as well as plenty more food. All are welcome, new and experienced!
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
As part of the changes for the better diff handling of paragraph splits, improved detection of splits is being rolled out. Over the last two weeks, we deployed this support to group0 and group1 wikis. This week it will be deployed to group2 wikis. [156]
All Special:Contributions pages now show the user's local edit count and the account's creation date. [157]
Wikisource users can now use the prpbengalicurrency label to denote Bengali currency characters as page numbers inside the <pagelist> tag. [158]
Two preferences have been relocated. The preference "Enable the visual editor" is now shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis. Previously it was shown on the "Beta features" tab at some wikis. The preference "Use the wikitext mode inside the visual editor, instead of a different wikitext editor" is now also shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis, instead of the "Beta features" tab. [159][160]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).
All right-to-left language wikis, plus Korean, Armenian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Bulgarian Wikipedias, will have a link in the sidebar that provides a short URL of that page, using the Wikimedia URL Shortener. This feature will come to more wikis in future weeks. [161]
Future changes
The removal of the DoubleWiki extension is being discussed. This extension currently allows Wikisource users to view articles from multiple language versions side by side when the <=> symbol next to a specific language edition is selected. Comments on this are welcomed at the phabricator task.
A proposal has been made to merge the second hidden-categories list (which appears below the wikitext editing form) with the main list of categories (which is further down the page). More information is available on Phabricator; feedback is welcome!
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Closed request for permissions/Bot: TiagoLubianaBot 2 (Task: The Open Targets Platform is an important biomedical resource that makes its data available under a CC0 license waiver. The request at hand is to extend the permissions of User:TiagoLubianaBot to import information from Open Targets, initially with a focus on physical interactions between proteins and drugs.)
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #107, Teeth (Challenge started on 2023-08-28 12:01:31)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour August 28, 2023. We will cover adding the articles from our bibliography of diverse LIS resources that we created in our last session to Wikidata! We will learn how to use Zotero, the reference management software, and its browser plugin to automatically extract metadata for articles and convert them to a Wikidata format that can be batch uploaded using QuickStatements. To get a sneak preview of what we will be doing, you can learn more about the Wikidata & Zotero link here: Wikidata:Zotero. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page. Event page
Keynote about Wikidata for the Chinese Confernence on Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Computing 2023, by Denny Vrandečić - YouTube
How to fill an Infobox on Wikipedia using Wikidata - Wikipedia For Beginners - YouTube
The impact of Wikidata-powered inboxes on minority and low-resourced language Wikipedias in Africa (Wikimania 2023) - YouTube
How to create item in Wikidata about a village (in Malayalam) - YouTube
Add Wikidata link to an OpenStreetMap relation (in Guarani) - YouTube
WikiDBs: A Corpus Of Relational Databases From Wikidata - YouTube
Tool of the week
Wikitrivia is a web-based game that challenges your knowledge of historical events, people, and places. The game is a combination of Sudoku and Scrabble, and all the data used in the game is sourced from Wikidata and Wikipedia. The objective of the game is to place the cards on the timeline in the correct order.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Biyanto Rebin is joining the Software Communication team (SCoT) at Wikimedia Deutschland for 2.5 months as an intern. Welcome!
simule (the element imitates or makes the value of the property appear real)
sexe ou genre du protagoniste (regarding the work in question, For human: male, female, non-binary, intersex, transgender female, transgender male, agender. For animal: male organism, female organism. Groups of same gender use subclass of (P279))
unofficial name (name which is widely or rarely used, but not official (for nicknames use P1449, for pseudonymes P742))
This month has seen an incredible amount of activity creating high quality content, with 3 FAs, 3 FACs, and a veritable flood of GAs and GANs, not to mention the FLs and FLCs. To help maintain this high level of activity going forward, WikiProject Tree of Life is starting a new monthly rolling contest, inspired by the contest run by WikiProject Military History. This contest should hopefully help incentivize editors to contribute in ways that are less daunting than writing articles that are GA and FA-quality. Even improving articles from stub to start class, or helping other editors by reviewing their work at GAN, FAC, or FLC, gets you points, with bonus points for articles with especially high page views. Make sure to participate in any way you can, and help improve the 'pedia while having fun and winning Barnstars!
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: FlyingAce (RfP scheduled to end after 8 September 2023 23:32 UTC)
New request for comments: Must 'Serious' WikiData sources be selective? (The disagreement regards the interpretation of WD:N rule number two, which states an item is acceptable if: "It refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity that can be described using serious and publicly available references.")
Job opening: Software Engineer (Wikidata) (m/f/d). For our Team Wikidata, based in Berlin, we are looking for a permanent Software Engineer (m/f/d), full-time or part-time (min. 32h/week), as soon as possible.
Wikidata's eleventh birthday is around the corner! One of our traditions is to prepare birthday presents to the community. Now is a great time to start preparing yours!
has heir or beneficiary (people or organizations that received, or will receive, (all or part of) the subject's property or title)
towing capacity (the maximum sustainable force with which this vehicle can pull or push another object. Alternatively for road- or track-vehicles, the maximum weight of an object on wheels that this vehicle can reliably and safely pull given usual slopes)
learning outcome (specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that students are expected to acquire as a result of participating in a particular education program)
tribe (recognised membership in a society, mainly denoted by shared cultural heritage; for ethnicity use P172)
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
EditInSequence, a feature that allows users to edit pages faster on Wikisource has been moved to a Beta Feature based on community feedback. To enable it, you can navigate to the beta features tab in Preferences. [162]
There is a new option for Administrators when they are changing the usergroups for a user, to add the user’s user page to their watchlist. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API. [164]
The LoginNotify extension was not sending notifications since January. It has now been fixed, so going forward, you may see notifications for failed login attempts, and successful login attempts from a new device. [166]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Eastern Mari Wikipedia, Maori Wikipedia, Minangkabau Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Mongolian Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Western Mari Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Maltese Wikipedia, Mirandese Wikipedia, Erzya Wikipedia, Mazanderani Wikipedia, Nāhuatl Wikipedia, Neapolitan Wikipedia, Low German Wikipedia, Low Saxon Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Newari Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Novial Wikipedia, N'Ko Wikipedia, Nouormand Wikipedia, Northern Sotho Wikipedia, Navajo Wikipedia, Nyanja Wikipedia, Occitan Wikipedia, Livvi-Karelian Wikipedia, Oromo Wikipedia, Oriya Wikipedia, Ossetic Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Pangasinan Wikipedia, Pampanga Wikipedia, Papiamento Wikipedia, Picard Wikipedia, Pennsylvania German Wikipedia, Palatine German Wikipedia, Norfuk / Pitkern Wikipedia, Piedmontese Wikipedia, Western Punjabi Wikipedia, Pontic Wikipedia, Pashto Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [167][168]
The Members' Meeting is similar to other WikiWednesday meetups, except that its primary function is to elect a new Board of Directors. We will elect five board seats. After being elected, those elected can potentially appoint more seats. We will also have a fun WikiWednesday!
Election info:
To run for election or to vote, you must be a dues-paying member of Wikimedia New York City, having renewed in the past 12 months.
Voting will be both online, via emailed ballots from the ElectionBuddy service, and in-person.
The poll will be open for the 48 hours between 8pm EDT on September 18 and 8pm EDT on September 20.
For additional information, please consult the Election FAQ.
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person, you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
Hello and welcome to the September 2023 newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since June. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below.
David Thomsen: Prolific Wikipedian and Guild member David Thomsen (Dthomsen8) died in November 2022. He was a regular copy editor who took part in many of our Drives and Blitzes. An obituary was published in the mid-July issue of The Signpost. Tributes can be left on David's talk page.
Election news: In our mid-year Election of Coordinators, Dhtwiki was chosen as lead coordinator, Miniapolis and Zippybonzo continue as assistant coordinators, and Baffle gab1978 stepped down from the role. If you're interested in helping out at the GOCE, please consider nominating yourself for our next election in December; it's your WikiProject and it doesn't organize itself!
June Blitz: Of the 17 editors who signed up for our June Copy Editing Blitz, 12 copy-edited at least one article. 70,035 words comprising 26 articles were copy-edited. Barnstars awarded are here.
July Drive: 34 of the 51 editors who took part in our July Backlog Elimination Drive copy-edited at least one article. They edited 276 articles and 683,633 words between them. Barnstars awarded are here.
August Blitz: In our August Copy Editing Blitz, 13 of the 16 editors who signed up worked on at least one article. Between them, they copy-edited 79,608 words comprising 57 articles. Barnstars awarded are available here.
September Drive:Sign up here for our month-long September Backlog Elimination Drive, which is now underway. Barnstars awarded will be posted here.
Progress report: As of 14:29, 9 September 2023 (UTC), GOCE copy editors have processed 245 requests since 1 January. The backlog of tagged articles stands at 2,066.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators, Dhtwiki, Miniapolis and Zippybonzo.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Peppercat is a website listing government ministers, and other key political leaders, from all over the world, taking data from Wikidata. More information
state of transmission (state of transmission of a work (as a concept, not as a physical item; for that, use P5816))
describes actor of (predicate sense whose actor (an agent or a cause—basically the instigator of an action) is denoted by this sense)
describes undergoer of (predicate sense whose undergoer (a patient, a theme, or a recipient—basically a non-instigator of an action) is denoted by this sense)
Machine learning: We are migrating some tools that currently use ORES to the new Lift Wing (phab:T343731)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work around the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements
Query Builder: We fixed some issues in the Query Builder language selector (phab:T344231)
We’re making the warning for anonymous editors more useful by letting them return to the page they came from after logging in (phab:T330550); we’re also working on showing those warnings in the first place in WikibaseLexeme (phab:T343979)
Wikibase REST API: We are working on the ability to remove a statement from a Property (phab:T342976) and get the labels of a Property (phab:T342977)
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
ORES, the revision evaluation service, is now using a new open-source infrastructure on all wikis except for English Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two will follow this week. If you notice any unusual results from the Recent Changes filters that are related to ORES (for example, "Contribution quality predictions" and "User intent predictions"), please report them. [169]
When you are logged in on one Wikimedia wiki and visit a different Wikimedia wiki, the system tries to log you in there automatically. This has been unreliable for a long time. You can now visit the login page to make the system try extra hard. If you feel that made logging in better or worse than it used to be, your feedback is appreciated. [170]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
As part of the changes for the Better diff handling of paragraph splits wishlist proposal, the inline switch widget in diff pages is being rolled out this week to all wikis. The inline switch will allow viewers to toggle between a unified inline or two-column diff wikitext format. [171]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 20 September. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [172]
The Enterprise API is launching a new feature called "breaking news". Currently in BETA, this attempts to identify likely "newsworthy" topics as they are currently being written about in any Wikipedia. Your help is requested to improve the accuracy of its detection model, especially on smaller language editions, by recommending templates or identifiable editing patterns. See more information at the documentation page on MediaWiki or the FAQ on Meta.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour September 15, 2023. We will learn how to use Zotero, the reference management software, and its browser plugin to automatically extract metadata for articles and convert them to a Wikidata format that can be batch uploaded using QuickStatements.More information on the event page
chronological designation (as a typical instance, the stated scholarly journal year to which reference is made by: the reference source being cited to support the statement being made)
We are planning the migration of some of our existing components from the Wikit to the Codex design system in Query Builder, Mismatch Finder and the Special:NewLexeme page.
Warnings about not being logged-in will now have a returnto= parameter attached to their links, so that you can don’t use your flow from logging in (phab:T330550)
We fixed an issue with the LanguageSwitcher in Query Builder where it would open out of the viewport on some tablet screen widths (phab:T344231)
Wikibase REST API: We finished the work on making it possible to remove a statement from a Property (phab:T342976) and getting the labels of a Property (phab:T342977)
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
MediaWiki now has a stable interface policy for frontend code that more clearly defines how we deprecate MediaWiki code and wiki-based code (e.g. gadgets and user scripts). Thank you to everyone who contributed to the content and discussions. [173][174]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (calendar).
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello Wil540 art,
New Page Review article queue, March to September 2023
Backlog update:
At the time of this message, there are 11,300 articles and 15,600 redirects awaiting review. This is the highest backlog in a long time. Please help out by doing additional reviews!
October backlog elimination drive:
A one-month backlog drive for October will start in one week! Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled. Articles will earn 4x as many points compared to redirects. You can sign up here.
PageTriage code upgrades:
Upgrades to the PageTriage code, initiated by the NPP open letter in 2022 and actioned by the WMF Moderator Tools Team in 2023, are ongoing. More information can be found here. As part of this work, the Special:NewPagesFeed now has a new version in beta! The update leaves the NewPagesFeed appearance and function mostly identical to the old one, but updates the underlying code, making it easier to maintain and helping make sure the extension is not decommissioned due to maintenance issues in the future. You can try out the new Special:NewPagesFeed here - it will replace the current version soon.
Notability tip:
Professors can meet WP:PROF #1 by having their academic papers be widely cited by their peers. When reviewing professor articles, it is a good idea to find their Google Scholar or Scopus profile and take a look at their h-index and number of citations. As a very rough rule of thumb, for most fields, articles on people with a h-index of twenty or more, a first-authored paper with more than a thousand citations, or multiple papers each with more than a hundred citations are likely to be kept at AfD.
Reviewing tip:
If you would like like a second opinion on your reviews or simply want another new page reviewer by your side when patrolling, we recommend pair reviewing! This is where two reviewers use Discord voice chat and screen sharing to communicate with each other while reviewing the same article simultaneously. This is a great way to learn and transfer knowledge.
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person, you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
WikidataCon 2023, the conference dedicated to the Wikidata community, is taking place on October 28-29, online all around the world and onsite in Taipei. You can now register for the conference.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour September 29. This event is part of a series where you can gain hands-on experience with Wikidata by working on a diverse library and information science (LIS) dataset. In this fourth session, we'll introduce the Wikimedia PAWS environment for data gathering and processing in your Wikidata projects. We'll focus on web scraping for article data using Python and the Beautiful Soup package for parsing. You'll learn about data models for making your data accessible to both machines and humans. This session will be recorded and shared on the event page. Event page.
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #110, Ohm's law (Challenge started on 2023-09-25 12:01:32)
User:Luca.favorido/linkypop.js is a script that can be used to search an identifier on an external site. It provides a button to search for an identifier as soon as you type it in the property input field. For example, if you type “ORCID”, an icon with a lens will appear, and when you click it, a new tab will open with the ORCID site looking for the name of the researcher. You can then copy the URL and paste it to Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Want to play a game? Wikidata:Games has some Wikidata-related ones for you.
Citation.js Toolforge is a service to export citations from Wikidata items in various formats (BibTeX, RIS) and various citations formats (Vancouver, APA, etc)
type of musical notation (system of musical notation used on a given music source or composition)
chronological designation (stated scholarly journal year to which reference is made by: source cited in support of a particular statement may not be the same as the publication date or volume)
We worked on making it possible to upload mismatches on qualifiers (phab:T313467)
We are continuing to migrate tools from ORES to Lift Wing (phab:T343731)
We've added Wikifunktions as a new wiki for sitelinks (phab:T342857)
Wikibase REST API: We are working on making it possible to get labels, descriptions and aliases from a Property as well as modify the description of an Item
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Vector 2022 skin will now remember the pinned/unpinned status for the Table of Contents for all logged-out users. [177]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September (calendar).
Gadget definitions will have a new "namespaces" option. The option takes a list of namespace IDs. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages in the given namespaces.
Future changes
New variables will be added to AbuseFilter: global_account_groups and global_account_editcount. They are available only when an account is being created. You can use them to prevent blocking automatic creation of accounts when users with many edits elsewhere visit your wiki for the first time. [178][179]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 27 October at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
When creating an article, check to see if there is an entry in the sister project Wikidata. If your subject is listed, the Wikidata information can be useful
The first edition of our new monthly contest had perhaps a little less participation than I hoped for, but it still resulted in a huge amount of content work, mainly focussed on de-stubbing articles on little-known species, although we did also see two GAs for Holozoa and Hypericum perforatum. Overall, over 60 articles were improved, with most going from stubs or redlinks to fully fleshed out articles. The winner this month was Simongraham, who improved 21 articles about spiders, mainly to B and C class, and racked up 70 points, over twice the next highest. Hopefully, we'll continue to see such great work next month, with even more participants and even more articles improved.
Also anyone who wants to help coordinate the contest can just drop by at the talk page, I really need help.
September DYKs
Republicopteron douseae fossil
Male Phallichthys fish
Mimodactylus reconstruction
Adult ashy flycatcher
... that with all known Palaeorehniidae fossils (example pictured) being incomplete, the relationships of the family are uncertain? (September 2)
... that butterfly collector Ian Heslop was once required to supervise an execution? (September 3)
... that Phallichthys (literally 'penis fish') species are so called because the males (example pictured) have "comparatively huge" sex appendages? (September 8)
... that merry widows like soft bottoms? (September 10)
... that Mimodactylus(reconstruction pictured) is the first complete pterosaur from the Afro-Arabian continent? * ... that small Poecilia gillii males have longer sex organs than larger males, to facilitate mating with females that flee from them? (September 12)
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 comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new user preference for "Always enable safe mode". This setting will make pages load without including any on-wiki JavaScript or on-wiki stylesheet pages. It can be useful for debugging broken JavaScript gadgets. [180]
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. [181]
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Fon (w:fon:) [182]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Swahili Wikipedia, Walloon Wikipedia, Waray Wikipedia, Wolof Wikipedia, Kalmyk Wikipedia, Xhosa Wikipedia, Mingrelian Wikipedia, Yiddish Wikipedia, Yoruba Wikipedia, Zhuang Wikipedia, Zeelandic Wikipedia, Min Nan Wikipedia, Zulu Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [183]
At some wikis, newcomers are suggested images from Commons to add to articles without any images. Starting on Tuesday, newcomers at these wikis will be able to add images to unillustrated article sections. The specific wikis are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table. You can learn more about this feature.[184]
In the mobile web skin (Minerva) the CSS ID #page-actions will be replaced with #p-views. This change is to make it consistent with other skins and to improve support for gadgets and extensions in the mobile skin. A few gadgets may need to be updated; there are details and search-links in the task.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 18th October 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour October 13, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to. The fifth Wikidata Working Hour in the series will cover manually adding authors and publishers from our bibliography into Wikidata. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page. Event page
Is AI lying to us? These researchers built an LLM lie detector of sorts to find out - Tiernan Ray, ZDNET ("Step one is to come up with a list of over 20,000 questions and known answers, drawn from sources such as Wikidata, for which the large language model, in this case, OpenAI's GPT-3.5, can be reliably expected to provide the correct answer.")
Data Scraping, Gathering & Annotation (in Ukrainian VO, English text) < lecture on data gathering, Wikidata, SPARQL and structured data from Ukrainian Catholic University
Wikidata: first pragmatic approach - Ismael Olea - OpenSouthCode 2023 < an introduction to Wikidata - the objective of this talk is for the public to leave amazed and addicted to Wikidata.
Tool of the week
https://aletheiafact.org <- is a new fact-checking website using Wikidata for people/concept identification. The website allows users to contribute to fact-checking claims made by public figures, such as politicians, celebrities, and influencers.
Wikibase REST API: We worked on the new routes for PATCHing Property and Item aliases as well as PUTing Property labels and descriptions (phab:T342982, phab:T337371, phab:T337371, phab:T348150)
We are continuing to work on fixing an issue with Lexeme pages missing styles and scripts (phab:T344362)
We’re adding some missing license notes to some javascript UI interfaces (phab:343998, phab:T343999)
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on supporting mismatches for data that is stored in qualifiers (phab:T313467)
WMF GLAM report: Wikisource Loves Manuscripts, ICOM outreach, Flickr Foundation partnership, OpenRefine adoption, new sources in The Wikipedia Library, Image Description Month events, and the GLAM Wiki Conference
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
Hi Wil540,
Many thanks for the Barnstar, very seldom I get a thank you for contributions, even if this particular one was very small. I will look in on the article you mentioned. I notice from your page you like artists, I have been working on artists lately too. I feel they have a valuable contribution to this planet. As do we! James Kevin McMahon (talk) 19:45, 12 October 2023 (UTC)Reply
Wiki.NYC Pavilion for Open House New York (Oct 21–22) and Wikidata Day (Oct 29)
At both events, all attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person, you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Sm8900 has given you a cookie! Cookies promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. You can spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a cookie, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend.
To spread the goodness of cookies, you can add {{subst:Cookie}} to someone's talk page with a friendly message, or eat this cookie on the giver's talk page with {{subst:munch}}!
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.
Community Configuration 2.0 is a feature that will enable Wikimedia communities to easily customize and configure features to meet their unique needs. This approach provides non-technical moderators with more independence and control over enabling/disabling and customizing features for their communities.
Initial designs are drafted for two different approaches (see images). We will soon demo interactive prototypes to interested admins, stewards, and experienced editors (T346109). Please let us know if you have feedback on the design approach, or want to participate in prototype testing.
The Growth team has been working on several updates to ensure Growth maintained features will be compatible with future IP Masking changes. This work has included code changes to: Recent Changes (T343322), Echo notifications (T333531), the Thanks extension (T345679) and Mentorship (T341390).
Before December, the Growth team will initiate community discussions with the goal of migrating communities from Flow to DiscussionTools. This move aims to minimize the necessity for additional engineering work to make Flow compatible with IP Masking. (T346108)
We continue the deployment of the structured task "add a link" to all Wikipedias. We plan to scale the task to all Wikipedias that have link suggestions available by the end of 2023.
We plan to scale the new Impact Module to all Wikipedias soon, but first we are investigating a bug with the job that refreshes the Impact Module data. (T344428)
At some wikis, newcomers have access to the "add an image" structured task. This task suggests images that may be relevant to add to unillustrated articles. Newcomers at these wikis can now add images to unillustrated articles sections. (T345940) The wikis that have this task are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table.
After a 2.5 years-long collaboration with Bangala Wikipedia, we have decided to start a collaboration with another wiki. Swahili Wikipedia is now a pilot wiki for Growth experiments.
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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. [185]
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.
In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been deleted. When you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.
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 comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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. [186]
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).
Latest comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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 comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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. [187][188]
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. [189]
Latest comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello Wil540 art:
WikiProject Articles for creation is holding a month long Backlog Drive!
The goal of this drive is to reduce the backlog of unreviewed drafts to less than 2 months outstanding reviews from the current 4+ months. Bonus points will be given for reviewing drafts that have been waiting more than 30 days. The drive is running from 1 November 2023 through 30 November 2023.
SYMBIOSIS: The lichen task force newsletter — November 2023 A look at what we've accomplished, working together
Our tiny task force is working to improve coverage of the world's lichens – unique symbiotic organisms composed of one or more fungal partners with one or more photosynthetic partners. They're found around the world, covering more than 7% of the earth's surface – from frigid polar areas to the steamy equator, from the edges of lapping seas to the highest mountains, and from city walls to the most pristine wilderness areas. They provide food and nesting material for myriad animal species, may be major players in the creation of soil from rock, and produce substances which may prove beneficial in our fight against pathogenic organisms. Want to learn more? Join us!
"Year of description" categories have been added to all genus and species articles.
The number of genus and species articles continues to grow. We now have 935 articles about lichen genera and more than 2100 (including redirects) about lichen species.
It's not all good news: The number of articles on our cleanup listing has also grown, with 5% of the task force's articles showing some sort of potential issue. These range from missing or unreliable sources to dead external links and orphaned articles. Some of these could probably be sorted relatively quickly, if you're looking for a fast way to help the project improve the quality of its coverage.
Newsletter challenge
The "Phytochemistry" section in our Stereocaulon ramulosum is convoluted and virtually unreadable – and has had a "clarification needed" tag since July of 2022. The editor who whips this short section into shape (and the one who cleans up the associated references) will get public kudos in the next newsletter.
Got a suggestion? A correction? Something you'd like to see included in a future issue? Drop a note at the Tip Line with your ideas!
The second edition of our monthly contest was even better than the last month, with 80 articles improved spanning the entire tree of life. The winner this month was Quetzal1964, who contributed to 47 articles, mainly relating to marine fish, and racked up 81 points in the process. In second place was simongraham, who got 60 points from 14 articles on various species of jumping spiders. simongraham is still at the top of our overall standings, with 130 points, and Quetzal1964's close behind on 108. The November edition of the contest is now open: feel free to drop by and participate if you work on any TOL-related articles this month.
October DYKs
Illustration of swordtail mollies
Lycorma meliae
Illustrations of the front foot (A) and hind foot (B) of Diplobune quercyi
... that the swordtail molly(examples pictured) and the Petén molly have been named and renamed so often, one even ending up with the other's name at one point, that the swordtail molly's current scientific name means 'confusion'? (October 8)
... that the early big cat Pachypanthera may have weighed as much as 142 kilograms (313 lb) and had teeth similar to a hyena's? (October 9)
... that ancient Greek philosopher Xenophon thought the alopekis was part dog, part fox? (October 11)
... that the wings of Lycorma meliae(example pictured) undergo multiple color changes throughout their lives? (October 16)
... that the three-toed species of Diplobune(fossils pictured) were mammals of the order of "even-toed ungulates"? (October 17)
... that although fossils of the extinct mammal Asiavorator were first found in 1922, the genus was not named until 73 years later, in 1995? (October 18)
... that in aquariums, the humpbacked limia is known to cannibalise the young? (October 21)
Upcoming: Data Modelling Days, November 30-December 2. You can propose a session until November 19. If you are running another event or meetup and would like to connect it to the Data Modelling Days, you can add it to the satellite events section.
Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web is a collection of preceedings from the 5th Iberoamerican Conference and 4th Indo-American Conference, KGSWC 2023, Nov. 13–15. By F. Ortiz-Rodriguez, B. Villazón-Terrazas, S. Tiwari & C. Bobed.
linguistic family of place name (Relates directly a placename to its original language family. It's not the language in which the toponym is written, but the language from which the word (place name) comes from.)
according to (to be used together with P248 if the statement is taken from an aggregator rather than directly from the source)
counterexample (qualifier for deprecated P279 statements; example instance or subclass of the item class for which a "subclass of" statement does not hold (alias: "item belonging to the subject class but not the value class"))
Newest WikiProjects: Source Reliability "is an effort to identify and aggregate online sources of assessments of the reliability and credibility of sources".
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We have implemented the endpoints for PATCH /entities/items/{item_id}/aliases (phab:T337371), PATCH /entities/properties/{property_id}/aliases (phab:T342982) and PATCH /entities/properties/{property_id}/labels (phab:T342980)
We started working on the new endpoints for POST /entities/items/{item_id}/aliases/{language_code} (phab:T335842) and DELETE /entities/items/{item_id}/descriptions/{lang_code} (phab:T342986)
Language codes:
We made Special:NewLexeme more likely to guess the spelling variant for you by changing the Property we use to get the language code. Now you will see the spelling variant input pop up less often. (phab:T349652)
We started work towards allowing many more languages by default for Wikibase Lexeme and monolingual text statements. This will remove the need for a lot of requests for new language codes to be added. (phab:T341409)
Query Service UI: We’ve fixed a small issue in the Query Service UI that was introduced when updating CSS variables. Content of selected cells in the query result should be readable again. (phab:T350153)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on the new data type for linking to EntitySchemas, working on overcoming architectural issues.
Latest comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, the default font-size of a number of navigational elements (tagline, tools menu, navigational links, and more) has been increased slightly to match the font size used in page content. [190]
Problems
Last week, there was a problem displaying some recent edits on a few wikis, for 1-6 hours. The edits were saved but not immediately shown. This was due to a database problem. [191]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).
The Growth team will reassign newcomers from former mentors to the currently active mentors. They have also changed the notification language to be more user-friendly. [192][193]
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person, you should be vaccinated and be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.
South Africa report: Edit-a-thon for Librarians at the annual Library and Information Association of South Africa 2023 Conference
Sweden report: Wikipedia for all of Sweden; Museums and Wikidata – why and how?; Photo memories from Stockholm and Rome; Negotiating Knowledge on Wikipedia
Latest comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: S8321414 (RfP scheduled to end after 13 November 2023 14:50 UTC)
New requests for permissions/Bot:
DiFoolBot 2 (Task: import VIAF ID based on Union List of Artist Names ID)
KizuleBot (Task: Adding sitelinks to Serbian Wikipedia for maintenance categories (see contributions of account) based on items for English Wikipedia's ones)
KormiSKbot (Task: Linking newly created pages on SKWiki to the appropriate Wikidata items.)
Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call November 14, 2023: We will hear from Diego Saez-Trumper on Wikidata Revert Risk and Annotool. Agenda
Latin America in Wikidata Challenge (Spanish) < Nov. 14 - Dec. 14. Play the game and help highlight the region hosting the GLAM Wiki conference! (Prizes available).
Edit-a-thon "Women in sciences" < 17 Nov. 12:00 - 18 Nov. 03:00 (UTC). A live edit-a-thon to improve the quality and variety of articles of women who have won the prestigious L'Oréal-UNESCO National Award "For Women in Science". (Prizes available).
Language community meetings: A new initiative by WMF language team to organize quarterly gatherings to encourage collaboration among individuals and communities interested in language-related technical topics. First meeting: Friday, November 17, 2023, 16:00 to 17:00 (UTC)
Glam Wiki Program - 16 - 18 November, Montevideo, Uruguay. Want to attend in person? - Register here. Wikidata Related Sessions:
Knowledge Graphs - Foundations and Applications course by Prof. Dr. Harald Sack. October 11, 2023 - November 21, 2023. Enrol here if you have not done so yet.
GSOC ‘23: Automating Area Management in MusicBrainz <-- Prathamesh, in their Google Summer of Code project, developed a data pipeline to automate the synchronization of area metadata between MusicBrainz and Wikidata.
Papers
Wikidata for authority control: sharing museum knowledge with the world <-- The project “Usable Authorities for Data-driven Cultural Heritage Research” aims to link museum authority data to Wikidata, enhancing the visibility, accessibility, and relevance of information across different museum collections, and encouraging cultural heritage institutions in Sweden to contribute to and utilize the Wikimedia platforms.
The 4th Wikidata Workshop for the scientific Wikidata community happened on 07 November 2023. You can find a full list of presented papers here
Videos
Connecting Entomological Collectors ECN2023 <-- A presentation for the Entomological Collections Network 2023 conference by Siobhan Leachman, this presentation explains how Wikidata can be used to create an identifier for entomological collectors, empowering the collation & linking of biographical data as well as the ability to link to other databases & catalogs relating to those collectors.
Wikidata projects in Wikimedia Spain <-- part of the online sessions organized by Wikimedia España to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Wikidata. In this session, Ángel Obregón, a member of Wikimedia España, presents some of the projects driven by Wikidata by the members of WMES.
Notebooks:
Subclass of... <-- Wikidata's ontology is complex. This tool aims at finding if an item is a subclass of another one.
The Wednesday Index <-- A longitudinal analysis of gender diversity in Wikipedia articles.
Tool of the week
OpenFlights.org is now getting some of its airline data from Wikidata. It is a free open-source tool that allows you to log, map, calculate, and share your flights and trips.
WikiProject IDEA - This Wikiproject serves as a working group and process documentation archive for the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), a project generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and in development at Bard College and Yale University.
WikiProject Interwiki - The goal of this project is linking Wikidata items with wiki articles outside of the Wikimedia ecosystem. Niche wikis frequently offer more in-depth content compared to general online dictionary articles, although their quality can vary significantly.
WikiProject SrpKor - The main aim of this project is building Wikidata entities for the novels from SrpKor: Corpus of the contemporary Serbian language.
WikiProject Echinodermata - A repository for information pertaining to the NSF Grant Echinoderm Project.
Development
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the new endpoints for POST /entities/items/{item_id}/aliases/{language_code} (phab:T335842) and DELETE /entities/items/{item_id}/descriptions/{lang_code} (phab:T342986)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on the new data type for linking to EntitySchemas, working on overcoming architectural issues.
Language codes: We continued work towards allowing many more languages by default for Wikibase Lexeme and monolingual text statements. This will remove the need for a lot of requests for new language codes to be added. (phab:T341409)
Latest comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Last week, users who previously visited Meta-Wiki or Wikimedia Commons and then became logged out on those wikis could not log in again. The problem is now resolved. [198]
Last week, some pop-up dialogs and menus were shown with the wrong font size. The problem is now resolved. [199]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).
Future changes
Reference Previews are coming to many wikis as a default feature. They are popups for references, similar to the PagePreviews feature. You can opt out of seeing them. If you are using the gadgets Reference Tooltips or Navigation Popups, you won’t see Reference Previews. Deployment is planned for November 22, 2023.
Canary (also known as heartbeat) events will be produced into Wikimedia event streams from December 11. Streams users are advised to filter out these events, by discarding all events where meta.domain == "canary". Updates to Pywikibot or wikimedia-streams will discard these events by default. [200]
Data Modelling Days, from November 30th to December 2nd: 3 days of online events to address data modelling challenges, discuss how to improve the way we structure data together, and discover the point of view of external reusers. Feel free to have a look at the program (under construction) and to sign up as a participant.
Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour November 20th, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to. The seventh Wikidata Working Hour will cover the Author Disambiguator tool, which helps users assign authors to articles.During the session we will demonstrate how to use the tool on an author who was created during a previous working hour, and another who doesn't exist in Wikidata yet. After the demonstration, participants are encouraged to try the tool themselves during the rest of the working hour. This session will build on the work done in previous Working Hours by connecting authors to the articles they have written. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page
ItWikiCon '23 (Italian) was hosted in Bari, Italy between the 17th - 19th November. Check the Programme for details on sessions and check for recordings or slidedecks of presentations.
GLAM Wiki 2023 took place in Montevideo, Uruguay. There were several Wikidata-related sessions some of which are linked in the Videos section.
Can you trust Wikidata? - is a paper exploring Wikidata's veracity and trustability for providing values to Knowledge Graphs. Written by V. Santos et al.
User-level gender statistics for Wikipedia - a tool that computes the number of articles created by gender has been repaired after some months of unavailability. It relies on xtools and P21 property.
Luthor - tool for finding usage examples from Wikisource and adding them to lexemes on Wikidata.
WikiProject Manuscripts - This WikiProject coordinates efforts on Wikidata to gather and curate structured data on manuscripts.
WikiProject Grove Hall Black Women Lead - aims to shed light on the lives and stories of Black women leaders who have shaped Boston’s history from the colonial era to the present day.
Newest database reports: User:Pasleim/projectmerge/enwiki-svwiki - 3875 merge candidates in English Wikipedia and Swedish Wikipedia based on same sitelink name.
Latest comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [201][202]
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Quechua Wikipedia, Romansh Wikipedia, Romani Wikipedia, Rundi Wikipedia, Aromanian Wikipedia, Tarandíne Wikipedia, Rusyn Wikipedia, Kinyarwanda Wikipedia, Sanskrit Wikipedia, Sakha Wikipedia, Santali Wikipedia, Sardinian Wikipedia, Sicilian Wikipedia, Scots Wikipedia, Sindhi Wikipedia, Northern Sami Wikipedia, Sango Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, Sinhala Wikipedia, Slovak Wikipedia, Slovenian Wikipedia, Samoan Wikipedia, Somali Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Serbian Wikipedia, Sranan Tongo Wikipedia, Swati Wikipedia, Southern Sotho Wikipedia, Saterland Frisian Wikipedia, Sundanese Wikipedia, Silesian Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Tulu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tetum Wikipedia, Tajik Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkmen Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia, Tswana Wikipedia, Tongan Wikipedia, Tok Pisin Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Tsonga Wikipedia, Tatar Wikipedia, Twi Wikipedia, Tahitian Wikipedia, Tuvinian Wikipedia, Udmurt Wikipedia, Uyghur Wikipedia, Uzbek Wikipedia, Venda Wikipedia, Venetian Wikipedia, Veps Wikipedia, West Flemish Wikipedia, Volapük Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [203][204][205]
The Vector 2022 skin will have some minor visual changes to drop-down menus, column widths, and more. These changes were added to four Wikipedias last week. If no issues are found, these changes will proceed to all wikis this week. These changes will make it possible to add new menus for readability and dark mode. Learn more. [206]
Hi @Andrybak, thank you for being thoughtful about spamming and you make a good point re:usefulness. Some of the zero edit users, such as User:Icppublicprograms, came from event dashboards. Other sparingly active user were added due to their NYC focused edits. The past year or two, I've been expanding the list; however, as of Nov 1, 2023, I am not adding anymore users to it. I anticipate that in early 2024, the WMNYC board and newly hired executive director will develop a policy and edit the talkpage invite list down. Thank you again for thinking about this, it's been on my mind too. Are you in NYC? Have you been to a WMNYC event? If yes, say hi next time. - Wil540 art (talk) 19:08, 26 November 2023 (UTC)Reply
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call November 28, 2023: As a satellite event for Data Modeling Days, we will facilitate community discussion around data modeling in Wikidata for library collections in a variety of formats, including people, books, serials, scholarly articles, rare materials, music, media, and realia. Agenda
Linked Open Data and Wikidata < Alan Ang (WMDE) talks about the importance of Linked Open Data and forming mutually beneficial partnerships between the Foundation and Institutions.
Notebooks
Explore new ways of visualising your data with a Circular Dendrogam, illustrated here with Association Football players broken down by Country and Team.
Tool of the week
Harvest Templates - is a tool that helps transfer data from Wikimedia projects to Wikidata.
User:MichaelSchoenitzer/Updown - is a userscript used for faster navigation. If there are a lot of values for one property it will add arrows that allow you to jump to the first/last value.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
WMDE is researching ways to improve the editing experience in different languages and would love to hear your feedback. We would like to talk to a few of you in online interviews to learn about your experiences, expectations, and concerns. Please let us know in this sign-up form if you are interested in taking part.
The Research team at WMF is running a second labeling campaign to evaluate the Revert Risk model for Wikidata. This is part of ongoing work on creating a new generation of Machine Learning models to support patrolling work on Wikimedia projects. Please help by going to this link, and labeling each revision in one of these three categories: Keep, Not Sure, Revert. Notice that "Not Sure" should be used in all cases where the Keep or Revert labels are not clear to you.
COR SEM (The Danish central word registry identifier)
UPOC ({{TranslateThis
| de = Ist eine eindeutige id zur Identifizierung von Organisationen/Sendungen/... zu einem Dienstleister.
<!-- | xx = Beschreibungen in anderen Sprachen -->
}})
WikiProject Heritage Collections - The aim of the present project is to create the world’s most comprehensive high quality database of archival fonds and heritage collections (including contemporary scientific collections or documentation holdings) and to ensure the interlinking of respective catalogues, finding aids, or collection databases with Wikidata.
WikiProject Events and Role Frames - The primary aims of WikiProject Events and Role Frames is to define a set of properties that consistently model event occurrences and their participants; to fill gaps in Wikidata regarding items for events and actions; and to encourage use of the proposed model and newly introduced items across Wikidata.
We continued to make a lot more language codes available (phab:341409)
EntitySchemas: We are experimenting with how to work around some technical blockers for the new datatype
Wikibase REST API: We've been working on the ability to remove an Item's label in a specific language and modify the descriptions on a Property (phab:T342981, phab:T342981)
Latest comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [207][208]
MediaWiki's JavaScript system will now allow async/await syntax in gadgets and user scripts. Gadget authors should remember that users' browsers may not support it, so it should be used appropriately. [209]
The deployment of "Add a link" announced last week was postponed. It will resume this week.
Latest comment: 8 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello! Voting in the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 11 December 2023. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
SYMBIOSIS: The lichen task force newsletter — December 2023 A look at what we've accomplished, working together
As 2023 draws to a close, we can look back with more than a modicum of pride on the progress we've made this year. We've added a few stars to our showcase with our first featured list and a handful of new good articles, created a plethora of new taxa articles, and added biographies for more than a dozen important lichenologists. We've resolved dozens of outstanding "cleanup" issues, and begun to polish some existing articles about various lichen structures. All in all, it's been a fairly productive year! Here's hoping that the coming holidays are happy ones, whichever you choose to celebrate.
Kazamzam cleaned up the references for our Stereocaulon ramulosum article to meet part of the challenge issued in the last newletter.
Unfortunately, the Phytochemistry section of that article is still a mess, just in case anybody feels motivated to complete the rest of the challenge!
This month, we're looking for someone to take a look at the Malmidea article, which hasn't been updated since 2020. Since then, the number of species assigned to the genus has grown from the 52 listed in our article to the 68 listed by Species Fungorum (via the Catalogue of Life). The editor who updates the list will receive public kudos in the next newsletter.
Got a suggestion? A correction? Something you'd like to see included in a future issue? Drop a note at the Tip Line with your ideas!
The third edition of our monthly contest saw Quetzal1964 win for the second month in a row, scoring 68 points from 39 articles about a variety of marine fishes. In second place for the month is Olmagon, who scored 45 points from 10 articles on extinct crustaceans and geckoes. In the overall standings, Quetzal1964 leapfrogged over simongraham into first place, with 176 points from 109 articles; simongraham is now in second place with 136 points from 37 articles. The December edition of the contest is now open: feel free to drop by and participate if you work on any TOL-related articles this month.
New newsletter!
Now, this newsletter is technically not new, but I have only recently become aware of its existence and am only a month late, so it still counts. Wikiproject Fungi's Lichen task force has a new newsletter that is very nicely formatted and also features much better writing than this newsletter. Anyone interested in receiving the newsletter can add their name here.
November DYKs
A bacterium that thrives in the deep ocean
Georges Cuvier's reconstruction of Anoplotherium commune
Paroedura maingoka
Field of Wyethia amplexicaulis in bloom
An adult dwarf pufferfish
Adult Balkan terrapin
Planocarina marginata, a hyalospheniid amoeba
... that a variety of the Connecticut field pumpkin is known as "the original commercial jack-o'-lantern pumpkin"? (November 1)
... that insects not only destroyed the personal plant collection of John Hunter Thomas, but also bear his name? (November 3)
... that life exists in every part of the biosphere, from the deepest parts of the ocean (bacterium pictured) to altitudes of up to 64 km (40 miles) in the atmosphere? (November 6)
... that Sivapardus was larger than a leopard, smaller than a lion, and had a face like a cheetah? (November 7)
... that in 1822, the Paleogene mammal Anoplotherium commune(reconstruction pictured) was the first fossil species to be subjected to a brain cast study? (November 12)
... that the gecko Paroedura maingoka(pictured) imitates venomous scorpions to discourage predators? (November 13)
... that the scenic fields of northern wyethia(pictured) found in the western United States are sometimes a sign that an area has been overgrazed? (November 15)
... that at a maximum standard length of roughly 2 cm (0.8 in), dwarf pufferfish are some of the smallest pufferfish in the world? (November 18)
... that the authors of The Neanderthals Rediscovered learned that their book proposal had been accepted on the same day they took their twin sons home from hospital? (November 20)
... that hatchling Balkan terrapins are only 3 to 4 centimetres (1.2 to 1.6 in) in length, while adults (example pictured) can grow as long as 25 cm (9.8 in)? (November 21)
This first meeting language will be English, but we plan to host conversations in other languages, and about other topics. Please visit the conversation page on-wiki for the details on how to join. You can also watch the page, or suggest ideas for upcoming conversations there.
At the beginning of November 2023, the Growth team deployed the New Impact Module to all Wikipedias. We recently released a follow up improvement to how edit data was displayed based on editor feedback. [210]
When a mentor marked themselves as "Away", they were not getting their name assigned to new accounts when they returned. This has been fixed. [214]
We improved the message received by newcomers when their mentor quits, to reduce confusion. [215]
We worked on ensuring that all mentees are assigned to an active mentor. This required reassigning mentees with no mentors to a new mentor. We paused this as the clean-up script confused some editors. We will resume it when the identified blockers are resolved. [216]
It is now possible to create an Abuse Filter to prevent one user from signing up as a mentor. [217]
Around 250 war-threatened architectural monuments documented (German) - Wikidata, Wikibase and Commons are helping preserve and plan the restoration of culturally-significant Monuments damaged or destroyed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
ZotWb < export records in a Zotero group library to a custom Wikibase, prepare datasets to send to OpenRefine, feed OpenRefine reconciliaton results back to the Wikibase. Wikidata is envolved in the entity reconciliation. Here's a short explanation and demo video Tool is written and provided by David Lindermann with support from WMF Rapid Grant.
Montana Plant Life URL (URL for a plant family, genus, or species on the Montana Plant Life website)
event role (item that describes a role in an event class)
role in event (event class for which the item describes a role)
selectional preference ((to be used only with the subclasses of Q_event_role) an item that plays this role in an event instance should descend from this item via a combination of P31 and P279)
event arguments and types (item that plays a role in an event instance; used with a qualifier "argument type")
BnF archives and manuscripts ID (identifier for a manuscript in the archives and manuscripts catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). Do not include the initial "cc")
clerked for (this person has held a clerkship with the judge)
battery life (the length of time a device can continue to work before it needs its battery to be recharged)
Showcase Lexemes: läsa - 'read' about this Swedish word with many pronounciations and grammatical features.
Feel free to suggest next week's Showcase Item and Lexeme!
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the endpoint for removing an Item's label in a specific language (phab:T335841) and the endpoint for modifying descriptions on a Property (phab:T342981)
We are working on the endpoint for adding aliases in a given language for a Property (phab:T343721) and removing a Property's label in a given language (phab:T342983)
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on moving the tool over to the new design system Codex
We adjusted the styling for the values of monolingual text statements to make the language easier to distinguish from the value (phab:T280774)
mul language code: We made some final adjustments to get it ready for testing.
Lexemes: We are adding a license note for anon users when editing a Lexeme’s lemma, a Form or Sense (phab:T343999)
Latest comment: 8 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The spacing between paragraphs on Vector 2022 has been changed from 7px to 14px to match the size of the text. This will make it easier to distinguish paragraphs from sentences. [218]
The "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is working again. You no longer need to switch to source editing to edit {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords. [219]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [220][221]
Registration & Scholarship applications are now open for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 that will take place from 3–5 May in Tallinn, Estonia. Scholarship applications are open until 5 January 2024.
Hello, and welcome to the December 2023 newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since September. Don't forget that you can unsubscribe at any time; see below.
Election news: The Guild needs coordinators! If you'd like to help out, you may nominate yourself or any suitable editor—with their permission—for the Election of Coordinators for the first half of 2024. Nominations will close at 23:59 on 15 December (UTC). Voting begins immediately after the close of nominations and closes at 23:59 on 31 December. All editors in good standing (not under current sanctions) are eligible, and self-nominations are welcome. Coordinators normally serve a six-month term that ends at 23:59 on 30 June.
Drive: Of the 69 editors who signed up for the September Backlog Elimination Drive, 40 copy-edited at least one article. Between them, they copy-edited 661,214 words in 290 articles. Barnstars awarded are listed here.
Blitz: Of the 22 editors who signed up for the October Copy Editing Blitz, 13 copy-edited at least one article. Between them, they copy-edited 109,327 words in 52 articles. Barnstars awarded are listed here.
Drive: During the November Backlog Elimination Drive, 38 of the 58 editors who signed up copy-edited at least one article. Between them, they copy-edited 458,620 words in 234 articles. Barnstars awarded are listed here.
Progress report: As of 20:33, 10 December 2023 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have processed 344 requests since 1 January, and the backlog stands at 2,191 articles.
Other news: Our Annual Report for 2023 is planned for release in the new year.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Dhtwiki, Miniapolis and Zippybonzo.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Portugal report: Catalan culture and showcasing Wikimedia on both side of the Atlantic
Serbia report: Wikipedians in Residence, GLAM Wiki Conference
Sweden report: National Historical Museums of Sweden contributions; Photo memories from all over the world engage the community; Museum of medieval photo safari
Latest comment: 8 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: LccnBot (Task: Adds P244 to bibliographic entities base on library authority records.)
New request for comments: Duplicate References Data Model and UI < During Data Modelling Days '23, 2 proposals emerged trying to answer the question of how to handle duplicate References on Wikidata Items.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call December 12, 2023: Several members of the Chinese Culture and Heritage Wikidata group will provide an overview of the group's Wikidata projects as well as the challenges they have encountered. Agenda
Data-SHS Bordeaux Week: Processing and Analyzing Quantitative Data in Human and Social Sciences 2023. Dec. 11 - 15, Bordeaux, FR.
OpenRefine - a open source tool for working with data < This session explores the advantages of using OR to wrangle, clean, transform and standardise data for Wikidata. Presented by Jinoy Tom Jacob at the IndiaFOSS3.0 Conference.
QLever SPARQl Engine < If you attended Data Modeling Days '23, you may have seen an extraordinary Session given by Hannah Bast and Johannes Kalmbach showcasing the power and advantages of the QLever engine. QLever can handle queries that cause the WDQS to timeout or allowing Federated queries and Geospatial!
(QLEver has already featured in Tool of the Week but we wanted to showcase it again after experiencing it at DMD '23)
counterexample (qualifier for deprecated P279 statements; example instance or subclass of the item class for which a "subclass of" statement does not hold)
WikiProject Heritage Collections: database of archival fonds and heritage collections (including contemporary scientific collections or documentation holdings) and to ensure the interlinking of respective catalogues, finding aids, or collection databases with Wikidata.
WikiProject Source Reliability: is an effort to identify and aggregate online sources of assessments of the reliability and credibility of sources.
Wikibase REST API: We continued work on the routes for adding aliases in a given language for a Property (phab:T343721) and removing a Property's label in a given language (phab:T342983)
Monolingual text values can now use many more languages than before. We’re still working on doing the same for Lexemes. (phab:T341409)
Latest comment: 8 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
On Wikimedia Commons, there are some minor user-interface improvements for the "choosing own vs not own work" step in the UploadWizard. This is part of the Structured Content team's project of improving UploadWizard on Commons. [223][224]
Problems
There was a problem showing the Newcomer homepage feature with the "impact module" and their page-view graphs, for a few days in early December. This has now been fixed. [225][226]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 December. It will be on all wikis from 14 December (calendar). [227][228]
Future changes
The 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 5 January 2024, and has an associated privacy statement.
Latest comment: 8 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2024 because of the holidays.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 December. It will be on all wikis from 21 December (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [229][230]
Starting December 18, it won't be possible to activate Structured Discussions on a user's own talk page using the Beta feature. The Beta feature option remains available for users who want to deactivate Structured Discussions. This is part of Structured Discussions' deprecation work. [231]
There will be full support for redirects in the Module namespace. The "Move Page" feature will leave an appropriate redirect behind, and such redirects will be appropriately recognized by the software (e.g. hidden from Special:UnconnectedPages). There will also be support for manual redirects. [232]
Future changes
The MediaWiki JavaScript documentation is moving to a new format. During the move, you can read the old docs using version 1.41. Feedback about the new site is welcome on the project talk page.
The Wishathon is a new initiative that encourages collaboration across the Wikimedia community to develop solutions for wishes collected through the Community Wishlist Survey. The first community Wishathon will take place from 15–17 March. If you are interested in a project proposal as a user, developer, designer, or product lead, you can register for the event and read more.
Other discussions: How to handle concepts of trans people on Wikidata? Should {privacy at wikidata.org} be redirected to {privacy at wikimedia.org} or should it be monitored by Wikidata volunteers? Join the discussion!
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour December 18th, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to.The ninth and final Wikidata Working Hour in the series will be using SPARQL and Scholia to query and visualize the data we’ve added to Wikidata during our series. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page
Blogs: #LD42023. Part I: The Future of Wikidata + Libraries (A Workshop) - This blog series explores how libraries engage with Wikidata and Linked Data in the face of AI challenges. Led by Silvia Gutiérrez and Giovanna Fontenelle from the Wikimedia Foundation, the series summarizes insights from a collaborative session at the 2023 LD4 Conference, using Design Thinking strategies to connect the Library-Wikidata community with WMF, focusing on Wikidata, Wikibase, and Structured Data on Commons (SDC) in libraries. By Silvia Gutiérrez & Giovanna Fontenelle
Papers
Wikipedia gender gap: a scoping review - This review analyzes Wikipedia's gender gap from 2007 to 2022, revealing a slight majority of female authors, addressing key themes, and exploring strategies to mitigate the gap, providing valuable insights into the research landscape in this domain. By Núria Ferran-Ferrer, Juan-José Boté-Vericad and Julia Minguillón.
Ten years of Wikidata: A bibliometric study - This research delves into scholarly publications about Wikidata from its inception in 2012 to late 2022, revealing 945 relevant papers, primarily from conferences. The analysis highlights a concentration of experts and contributors from the Global North, as well as governmental institutions as predominant funders. The study calls for enhanced networking and outreach to promote diversity and inclusion within the Wikidata research community. Emphasizing computer science perspectives, the research focuses on methods for developing and utilizing open knowledge graphs, notably Wikidata, with a narrower but significant interest in application-oriented studies in digital humanities, biology, and healthcare. (Turki, et al)
Videos
Duplicating Everywhere All at Once | Cebuano Wikipedia - Five years ago, Lsjbot's Wikipedia articles caused duplicate Wikidata items, notably impacting geographic places on Cebuano Wikipedia. This video by User:Canley at Wikimania 2023 delves into the history, visualizes the issue, and suggests cleanup strategies for Wikidata and Wikipedia, emphasizing Aotearoa New Zealand and parts of Australia, with implications for the global challenge of bot-created duplicates.
Useful Authorities for Data-Driven Collection Research with Alicia Fagerving - Alicia Fagerving, Wikimedia Sverige, introduces the project "Useful Authorities for Data-Driven Collection Research" and Wikidata. The project, spanning 2021-2023, links vocabularies from the databases of Nationalmuseum and Statens historiska museer to Wikidata, exploring it as a platform for semantic interoperability among cultural heritage institutions and providing tools and visualizations for similar projects.
2023: OSM-Wikidata Map Framework. Combining OpenStreetMap and Wikidata allows to leverage the strengths of the two projects to create richer maps. This talk explores how OSM-Wikidata Map Framework simplifies this process. By Daniele Santini
It's not bad! Measuring Gérard Depardieu's mark on French cinema (in French) - The analysis centers on Gérard Depardieu's impact on French cinema amid legal issues and sexual assault allegations. Despite difficulties in addressing these accusations, the author leverages Wikidata to measure Depardieu's influence by querying films from directors born after 1930 to assess his involvement.
How to Become a Billionaire: A Billionaire's Occupations Network Analysis - This network analysis investigates billionaires’ primary sources of income with a network graph—based on their occupations—connecting billionaires from all over the world and uncovering some of the biggest industries in the world.
Drama Corpora Project (DraCor) is a digital database of plays, primarily from Europe. It collects and organizes texts of plays in a way that allows researchers and others to extract and analyze information from those texts. This could include details about the characters, the dialogue, the stage directions, and more. The data is being pulled from Wikidata.
We finished adding the endpoints for adding aliases in a given language for a Property (phab:T343721) and removing a Property's label in a given language (phab:T342983)
We started working on the endpoint for removing a Property's description in a given language (phab:T342985)
We are fixing an issue with incorrect handling of lowercase statement IDs in edit requests (phab:T352644)
Special:PrefixIndex now shows label/lemma for Properties and Lexemes (phab:T343115)
Language codes: We changed where Wikidata is getting its languages from for Lexemes and Monolingual text statements and thereby resolved many tasks requesting another language being added to them (phab:T341409)
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for NYC Hacking Night at Prime Produce in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. This event is a successor to our inaugural December 2023 Hacking Night. It is intended primarily for technical contributors, though newcomers are welcome as well!
Latest comment: 8 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Cycle between autotrophs and heterotrophs: autotrophs use light, carbon dioxide, and water to form oxygen and organic compounds, mainly through the process of photosynthesis (green arrow).
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Welcome to 2023’s Final Weekly Summary!
A big thank you to everyone who contributed to the newsletter this year!👏🙏 As we step into 2024, we'd love to hear what changes you would like to see in the newsletter. Share your wishlist here: What changes would you like to see in the newsletter in 2024?"
Discussions
Open request for adminship: EPIC (RfP scheduled to end after 26 December 2023 20:34 UTC)
New requests for permissions/Bot: Balyozbot. Tasks:
Import sitelinks, labels, descriptions from ku wikipedia pages which use the template w:ku:Template:Înterwîkî etîket û danasîn. (There are over 1800 articles that use this template waiting to be connected to Wikidata at the moment.)
Add sitelinks to kuwiktionary / kuwikipedia categories / create an item for the category if necessary. I have been doing this manually for quite some time using Quickstatements but since I need to get permission for the first task, I will be handling them using a bot as well.
Upcoming: Introducing WMF Wishathon for Wikimedia’s Community Wishlist! "focused on bringing together people who already contribute to technical aspects of the Wikimedia projects, who know how to find their way on the technical ecosystem, and who are able to work or collaborate on projects rather autonomously." March 15th to 17th, 2024.
African Librarians empowered to share knowledge and enhance information visibility through AfLIA Wikidata Online Course --> The "Promoting Open Knowledge Practices in African Libraries through Wikidata" project, executed by AfLIA with support from the Wikimedia Foundation, trained African librarians on using Wikidata to enhance the visibility of library collections and close the knowledge and gender gap on Africa. The course was facilitated by experienced African Wikimedian editors and included diverse strategies for learner engagement and support.
Papers: Increasing Coverage and Precision of Textual Information in Multilingual Knowledge Graphs by (Conia et al, 2023) --> This paper introduces a novel task of automatic Knowledge Graph Enhancement (KGE) to bridge the gap in the quantity and quality of textual information between English and non-English languages in Wikidata. It presents M-NTA, an unsupervised approach that combines Machine Translation, Web Search, and Large Language Models to generate high-quality textual information, and studies its impact on Entity Linking, Knowledge Graph Completion, and Question Answering tasks.
Videos
Wikidata, Wikisource and Wiktionary: Wikisource for DH (WiSe 2023) --> The lecture "Fundamentals and application-oriented methods of the Digital Humanities" by Kay-Michael Würzner is designed as a series of lectures in which teachers in the "Digital Humanities" course present their fields of work and key topics and present them for discussion.
Empowering Open-Source Generative AI by Integrating the Wikidata knowledge graph --> Generative AI has changed the information ecosystem, and open-source knowledge graphs like Wikidata can become invaluable assets, propelling a myriad of applications forward. Jonathan Fraine & Lydia Pintscher present the practical integration of Wikidata's open-source, open-access knowledge graph to empower Generative AI applications. Harnessing the real-time updated, structured data encapsulated within Wikidata, they explore automated content creation, data augmentation, and semantic analysis, underpinning the generative paradigms. Through a blend of theoretical insights and real-world applications, they elucidate how to leverage Wikidata to elevate generative AI applications, breaking down existing data silos, and fostering a collaborative ecosystem within our global community of developers and contributors.
Wiki Indaba 2023 - African content on Wikidata --> Discussion with Alice Kibombo, Georges Fodouop and Jesse Asiedu-Akrofi, about Wikidata for African Librarians during the Wiki Indaba conference, that took place between 3-5 November 2023 in Agadir, Morocco.
No Time to Wait - S07E10 - ACMI // Wikidata - Paul Duchesne + Simon Loffler --> Report on recent residency program to extensively link together collection data from ACMI with Wikidata. This work has allowed the organisation to import vast quantities of data and media to enrich their own internet collection experience, as well enable writing information back to source and federating with other linked institutions.
Map of K-Pop Idols --> An interactive map where each red dot represents a K-pop Idol (a singer or musician in South Korean Pop music) you are able to click on.
Disney as the Mega Corporation it is Today --> Disney has greatly evolved from the simple animation company that first debuted in 1923 with its signature Steamboat Willie animation. This analysis details some of the major acquisitions Disney has chosen to help expand its reach as a media and entertainment company.
State of statues in the US --> Map of how many statues there are, who is depicted in the statues, their genders, and where the statues are concentrated.
An Analysis on Nepo Babies: Net Worths and Fame --> This work uses Wikidata to analyze the influence and success of children of famous actors (nepo babies) in the entertainment industry, and compares the careers and net worth of these children with their parents to understand the impact of nepotism on their success.
Tool of the week
Cersei - is a tool designed for importing or scraping data from various third-party sources, using source-specific Python code. It can use a "headless browser" to scrape complicated websites that rely on eg JavaScript to navigate. It can therefore access data sources that can not be accessed via eg Mix'n'match. The data from sources can be updated regularly, either for everything, or just changed entries (if the source has a "recent changes" equivalent).
Wikidata:Zotero/Cita - is a Wikidata addon for Zotero that adds citations (i.e., what other items an item cites) metadata support to this open source reference management software, using cites work (P2860) information available from Wikidata, and enabling users to easily contribute missing data.
production manager (manager that is responsible for the administration of a feature film or television production; oversees production plans, controls resources, initiates production, ensures ongoing operations, monitors schedules and expenditures, and creates a detailed production schedule and budget)
Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Städel Museum Wikidata Clean-Up - This WikiProject from the Städel Museum aims to actively participate in the Wikimedia community by maintaining and updating the quality of its data. This includes their collection of public domain art, which has been digitized and made freely available for public use. The project focuses on ensuring that the most current and high-quality data, including high-resolution images and improved metadata, are available on platforms like Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.
Latest comment: 7 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
New year, new scripts. Welcome to the 23rd issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering around 39% of our favorite new and updated user scripts since 24 December 2021. That’s right, we haven’t published in two years! Can you believe it? Did you miss us?
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
User:Alexander Davronov/HistoryHelper has now become stable with some bugfixes and features such as automatically highlighting potentially uncivil edit summaries and automatically pinging all the users selected.
To a lesser extent, the same goes for User:PrimeHunter/Search sort.js. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
Aaron Liu: Watchlyst Greybar Unsin is a rewrite of Ais's Watchlist Notifier with modern APIs and several new features such as not displaying watchlist items marked as seen (hence the name), not bolding diffs of unseen watchlist elements which doesn’t work properly anyways, displaying the rendered edit summary, proper display of log and creation actions and more links.
Alexis Jazz: Factotum is a spiritual successor to reply-link with a host of extra features like section adding, link rewriting, regular expressions and more.
User:Aveaoz/AutoMobileRedirect: This script will automatically redirect MobileFrontend (en.m.wikipedia) to normal Wikipedia. Unlike existing scripts, this one will actually check if your browser is mobile or not through its secret agent string, so you can stay logged in on mobile! Hooray screen estate!
Deputy is a first-of-its-kind copyright cleanup toolkit. It overrides the interface for Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations for easy case processing. It also includes the functionality of the following (also new) scripts:
User:Elominius/gadget/diff arrow keys allows navigation between diffs with the arrow keys. It also has a version that requires holding Ctrl with the arrow key.
Frequently link to Wikipedia on your websites yet find generating CC-BY credits to be such a hassle? Say no more! User:Luke10.27/attribute will automatically do it for ya and copy the credit to yer clipboard.
User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft, a spiritual successor (i.e. fork) to Evad37's script, with a few bugs solved, and a host of extra features like check-boxes for choosing draftification reasons, multi-contributor notification, and appropriate warnings based on last edit time.
/CopyCodeBlock: one of the most important operations for any scripter and script-user is to copy and paste. This script adds a copy button in the top right of every code block (not to be confused with <code>) that will, well, copy it to your clipboard!
m:User:NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AceForLuaDebugConsole.js adds the Ace editor (a.k.a. the editor you see when editing JS, CSS and Lua on Wikimedia wikis) to the Lua debug console. "In my opinion, whoever designed it to be a plain <textarea> needs to seriously reconsider their decision."
GANReviewTool quickly and easily closes good article nominations.
ReviewStatus displays whether or not a mainspace page is marked as reviewed.
SpeciesHelper tries to add the correct speciesbox, category, taxonbar, and stub template to species articles.
User:Opencooper/svgReplace and Tol's fork replaces all rasterized SVGs with their original SVG codes for your loading pleasures. Tell us which one is better!
ArticleInfo displays page information at the top of the page, directly below the title.
/HeaderIcons takes away the Vector 2022 user dropdown and replaces it with all of the icons within, top level, right next to the Watchlist. One less click away! There's also an alternate version that uses text links instead of icons.