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Tech News: 2023-30
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).
The deadline for submitting your proposals for WikidataCon 2023 is July 31st (23:59) anywhere in the world. Submit your proposals at https://pretalx.com/wikidatacon2023/
Top scorer (This property is for the best scorer of a single season of a team sport's competition, or even for the best ever scorer of the history of a competition. The qualifiers to be admitted to this property should be: {{p|54}}; {{p|1532}}; {{p|1013}} (es.: goals / tries / points / etc ).)
Project partner (property to list the partners of a project or an event, when different from the organizing body.)
GET /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements (phab:T339356) (new route)
GET /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements/{statement_id} (phab:T338383) (new route)
GET /statements/{statement_id} (now supports statements on Properties)
We started work on a new route for replacing the data of a statement on a Property (phab:T340006)
EntitySchemas:
We worked on improving the termbox (the table of labels, descriptions and aliases) on EntitySchema pages to bring it more in line with the one on Items and Properties
We made sure that EntitySchemas are shown by their label instead of ID when available in Recent Changes and similar lists (phab:T339924)
Mismatch Finder: We added a language selector so you can switch the interface language (phab:T328149)
mul language code: We are working on showing more labels from fallback languags in the termbox (phab:T340832, phab:T338330)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Synchronizer tool is now available to keep Lua modules synced across Wikimedia wikis, along with updated documentation to develop global Lua modules and templates.
The tag filter on Special:NewPages and revision history pages can now be inverted. For example, you can hide edits that were made using an automated tool. [1][2]
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. [3]
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. [4]
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. [5]
WikiShootMe expanded to make it possible to find the Items close to pictures you took so you can upload and add them to them (source)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Template:Synia is a new template which makes it easy to create links to Synia from Wikidata. Template:Synia+ guesses the relevant configuration pages for each entity depending on the values of P31 and P106.
Wikifunctions, Wikidata's newest sibling project, had a soft launch. Welcome to the Wikimedia wikiverse, functioneers!
The ORES service will be decommissioned and replaced by Lift Wing. If you have a tool that relies on ORES scores to judge edits or the quality of an Item please read the migration announcement. We are collecting affected community tools in phab:T343419.
disinherited (someone who received or will receive no or little the subject's property or title even if otherwise eligible, (partially) the opposite of [[Wikidata:Property proposal/heir or beneficiary]])
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Mobile Web editors can now edit a whole page at once. To use this feature, turn on "⧼Mobile-frontend-mobile-option-amc⧽" in your settings and use the "Edit full page" button in the "More" menu. [6]
Wikimania 2023 (16–19 August, Singapore and Online) program is out: wikimania:2023:Program
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour August 18, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to. The first Wikidata Working Hour in the series will cover creating a bibliography of diverse LIS articles and books. We will generate a spreadsheet of sources ready for use during subsequent Working Hours. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page. Event page
Everything is connected - is a knowledge-based puzzle game where players must fit square pieces representing entities in the world together based on their known connections.
Steam Deck compatibility rating (official rating used to determine which games, as a result of the review process, are compatible with Steam Deck and which are not)
name version for other gender (use for when names that are not given name or surnames are gendered (since those two have their own properties), would also be helpful for many noble titles and honorifics as well as affixes)
Curator of (has curated a collection or (art) exhibition)
WikiProject Svenska Grillplatser (WikiProject Swedish Grill Places) - The idea is to see what Wikidata and OSM can contribute when it comes to barbecue sites and connections to municipalities, grillplatser.nu, naturkartan.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Content translation system is no longer using Youdao's machine translation service. The service was in place for several years, but due to no usage, and availability of alternatives, it was deprecated to reduce maintenance overheads. Other services which cover the same languages are still available. [7]
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. [8]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: TiagoLubianaBot 2 (Task: The Open Targets Platform is an important biomedical resource that makes its data available under a CC0 license waiver. The request at hand is to extend the permissions of User:TiagoLubianaBot to import information from Open Targets, initially with a focus on physical interactions between proteins and drugs.)
WHO Aware Classification (The World Health Organization currently classifies 258 antibiotics into "Access", "Watch", and "Reserve" based partly on the risk of resistance developing as a result of such use and critical nature of the antibiotic in question.)
nombre de niveaux (number of levels in a video game or number of stages in a particular sport)
URL du plan du jeu vidéo (URL of the video game detailed map in subject provided by the site CPC-Power)
Positioning (A list of all the satellite navigation system (ex. GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BDS, NavIC etc. ) a mobile device, or a smartphone supports. [https://w.wiki/7HE9 List of all the Satellite Navigation System].)
place on the route (object, station, facility, city, natural formation or other place on a road, track, route, line, watercourse, utility line or other linear route)
simule (the element imitates or makes the value of the property appear real)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
As part of the changes for the better diff handling of paragraph splits, improved detection of splits is being rolled out. Over the last two weeks, we deployed this support to group0 and group1 wikis. This week it will be deployed to group2 wikis. [19]
All Special:Contributions pages now show the user's local edit count and the account's creation date. [20]
Wikisource users can now use the prpbengalicurrency label to denote Bengali currency characters as page numbers inside the <pagelist> tag. [21]
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. [22][23]
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. [24]
Future changes
The removal of the DoubleWiki extension is being discussed. This extension currently allows Wikisource users to view articles from multiple language versions side by side when the <=> symbol next to a specific language edition is selected. Comments on this are welcomed at the phabricator task.
A proposal has been made to merge the second hidden-categories list (which appears below the wikitext editing form) with the main list of categories (which is further down the page). More information is available on Phabricator; feedback is welcome!
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Closed request for permissions/Bot: TiagoLubianaBot 2 (Task: The Open Targets Platform is an important biomedical resource that makes its data available under a CC0 license waiver. The request at hand is to extend the permissions of User:TiagoLubianaBot to import information from Open Targets, initially with a focus on physical interactions between proteins and drugs.)
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #107, Teeth (Challenge started on 2023-08-28 12:01:31)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour August 28, 2023. We will cover adding the articles from our bibliography of diverse LIS resources that we created in our last session to Wikidata! We will learn how to use Zotero, the reference management software, and its browser plugin to automatically extract metadata for articles and convert them to a Wikidata format that can be batch uploaded using QuickStatements. To get a sneak preview of what we will be doing, you can learn more about the Wikidata & Zotero link here: Wikidata:Zotero. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page. Event page
Keynote about Wikidata for the Chinese Confernence on Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Computing 2023, by Denny Vrandečić - YouTube
How to fill an Infobox on Wikipedia using Wikidata - Wikipedia For Beginners - YouTube
The impact of Wikidata-powered inboxes on minority and low-resourced language Wikipedias in Africa (Wikimania 2023) - YouTube
How to create item in Wikidata about a village (in Malayalam) - YouTube
Add Wikidata link to an OpenStreetMap relation (in Guarani) - YouTube
WikiDBs: A Corpus Of Relational Databases From Wikidata - YouTube
Tool of the week
Wikitrivia is a web-based game that challenges your knowledge of historical events, people, and places. The game is a combination of Sudoku and Scrabble, and all the data used in the game is sourced from Wikidata and Wikipedia. The objective of the game is to place the cards on the timeline in the correct order.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Biyanto Rebin is joining the Software Communication team (SCoT) at Wikimedia Deutschland for 2.5 months as an intern. Welcome!
simule (the element imitates or makes the value of the property appear real)
sexe ou genre du protagoniste (regarding the work in question, For human: male, female, non-binary, intersex, transgender female, transgender male, agender. For animal: male organism, female organism. Groups of same gender use subclass of (P279))
unofficial name (name which is widely or rarely used, but not official (for nicknames use P1449, for pseudonymes P742))
Following an RfC, TFAs will be automatically semi-protected the day before it is on the main page and through the day after.
A discussion at WP:VPP about revision deletion and oversight for dead names found that [s]ysops can choose to use revdel if, in their view, it's the right tool for this situation, and they need not default to oversight. But oversight could well be right where there's a particularly high risk to the person. Use your judgment.
The SmallCat dispute case has closed. As part of the final decision, editors participating in XfD have been reminded to be careful about forming local consensus which may or may not reflect the broader community consensus. Regular closers of XfD forums were also encouraged to note when broader community discussion, or changes to policies and guidelines, would be helpful.
Miscellaneous
Tech tip: The "Browse history interactively" banner shown at the top of Special:Diff can be used to easily look through a history, assemble composite diffs, or find out what archive something wound up in.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: FlyingAce (RfP scheduled to end after 8 September 2023 23:32 UTC)
New request for comments: Must 'Serious' WikiData sources be selective? (The disagreement regards the interpretation of WD:N rule number two, which states an item is acceptable if: "It refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity that can be described using serious and publicly available references.")
Job opening: Software Engineer (Wikidata) (m/f/d). For our Team Wikidata, based in Berlin, we are looking for a permanent Software Engineer (m/f/d), full-time or part-time (min. 32h/week), as soon as possible.
Wikidata's eleventh birthday is around the corner! One of our traditions is to prepare birthday presents to the community. Now is a great time to start preparing yours!
has heir or beneficiary (people or organizations that received, or will receive, (all or part of) the subject's property or title)
towing capacity (the maximum sustainable force with which this vehicle can pull or push another object. Alternatively for road- or track-vehicles, the maximum weight of an object on wheels that this vehicle can reliably and safely pull given usual slopes)
learning outcome (specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that students are expected to acquire as a result of participating in a particular education program)
tribe (recognised membership in a society, mainly denoted by shared cultural heritage; for ethnicity use P172)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
EditInSequence, a feature that allows users to edit pages faster on Wikisource has been moved to a Beta Feature based on community feedback. To enable it, you can navigate to the beta features tab in Preferences. [25]
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. [27]
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. [29]
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. [30][31]
Peppercat is a website listing government ministers, and other key political leaders, from all over the world, taking data from Wikidata. More information
state of transmission (state of transmission of a work (as a concept, not as a physical item; for that, use P5816))
describes actor of (predicate sense whose actor (an agent or a cause—basically the instigator of an action) is denoted by this sense)
describes undergoer of (predicate sense whose undergoer (a patient, a theme, or a recipient—basically a non-instigator of an action) is denoted by this sense)
Machine learning: We are migrating some tools that currently use ORES to the new Lift Wing (phab:T343731)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work around the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements
Query Builder: We fixed some issues in the Query Builder language selector (phab:T344231)
We’re making the warning for anonymous editors more useful by letting them return to the page they came from after logging in (phab:T330550); we’re also working on showing those warnings in the first place in WikibaseLexeme (phab:T343979)
Wikibase REST API: We are working on the ability to remove a statement from a Property (phab:T342976) and get the labels of a Property (phab:T342977)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
ORES, the revision evaluation service, is now using a new open-source infrastructure on all wikis except for English Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two will follow this week. If you notice any unusual results from the Recent Changes filters that are related to ORES (for example, "Contribution quality predictions" and "User intent predictions"), please report them. [32]
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. [33]
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. [34]
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. [35]
The Enterprise API is launching a new feature called "breaking news". Currently in BETA, this attempts to identify likely "newsworthy" topics as they are currently being written about in any Wikipedia. Your help is requested to improve the accuracy of its detection model, especially on smaller language editions, by recommending templates or identifiable editing patterns. See more information at the documentation page on MediaWiki or the FAQ on Meta.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour September 15, 2023. We will learn how to use Zotero, the reference management software, and its browser plugin to automatically extract metadata for articles and convert them to a Wikidata format that can be batch uploaded using QuickStatements.More information on the event page
chronological designation (as a typical instance, the stated scholarly journal year to which reference is made by: the reference source being cited to support the statement being made)
We are planning the migration of some of our existing components from the Wikit to the Codex design system in Query Builder, Mismatch Finder and the Special:NewLexeme page.
Warnings about not being logged-in will now have a returnto= parameter attached to their links, so that you can don’t use your flow from logging in (phab:T330550)
We fixed an issue with the LanguageSwitcher in Query Builder where it would open out of the viewport on some tablet screen widths (phab:T344231)
Wikibase REST API: We finished the work on making it possible to remove a statement from a Property (phab:T342976) and getting the labels of a Property (phab:T342977)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
MediaWiki now has a stable interface policy for frontend code that more clearly defines how we deprecate MediaWiki code and wiki-based code (e.g. gadgets and user scripts). Thank you to everyone who contributed to the content and discussions. [36][37]
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).
WikidataCon 2023, the conference dedicated to the Wikidata community, is taking place on October 28-29, online all around the world and onsite in Taipei. You can now register for the conference.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour September 29. This event is part of a series where you can gain hands-on experience with Wikidata by working on a diverse library and information science (LIS) dataset. In this fourth session, we'll introduce the Wikimedia PAWS environment for data gathering and processing in your Wikidata projects. We'll focus on web scraping for article data using Python and the Beautiful Soup package for parsing. You'll learn about data models for making your data accessible to both machines and humans. This session will be recorded and shared on the event page. Event page.
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #110, Ohm's law (Challenge started on 2023-09-25 12:01:32)
User:Luca.favorido/linkypop.js is a script that can be used to search an identifier on an external site. It provides a button to search for an identifier as soon as you type it in the property input field. For example, if you type “ORCID”, an icon with a lens will appear, and when you click it, a new tab will open with the ORCID site looking for the name of the researcher. You can then copy the URL and paste it to Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Want to play a game? Wikidata:Games has some Wikidata-related ones for you.
Citation.js Toolforge is a service to export citations from Wikidata items in various formats (BibTeX, RIS) and various citations formats (Vancouver, APA, etc)
type of musical notation (system of musical notation used on a given music source or composition)
chronological designation (stated scholarly journal year to which reference is made by: source cited in support of a particular statement may not be the same as the publication date or volume)
We worked on making it possible to upload mismatches on qualifiers (phab:T313467)
We are continuing to migrate tools from ORES to Lift Wing (phab:T343731)
We've added Wikifunktions as a new wiki for sitelinks (phab:T342857)
Wikibase REST API: We are working on making it possible to get labels, descriptions and aliases from a Property as well as modify the description of an Item
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Vector 2022 skin will now remember the pinned/unpinned status for the Table of Contents for all logged-out users. [40]
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. [41][42]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 27 October at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
January 12 - 14, 2024, Berlin, Germany (and online) - CFP: Provenance Loves Wiki - A workshop on art history, art science and provenance research in Wikidata/Wikipedia & Wikibase
Ongoing
Weekly Lexemes Challenge #110, Ohm's law (Challenge started on 2023-09-25 12:01:32)
This Week
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call October 3, 2023: Lars Willighagen will discuss on citation.js.org, Wikidata, and plans for more linked data. Agenda
Wikidata for Better Health (in French) - Houcemeddine Turki, Faculty of Sciences SFAX < closing session of "Adapting Wikidata to support clinical practice using Data Science, Semantic Web and Machine Learning"
Swiss Archives is an interactive overview map of the Swiss archives present in Wikidata have corresponding Wikipedia articles and in which language (FR, DE, IT), allowing interested Wikimedians to know where they can contribute or expand. - Michael Gasser (X post)
WikiProject GLAM-BW - a project to connect major collections held by museums in Baden-Württemberg by uploading information on collectors, former collection locations, collecting histories, and objects
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We are finalizing the work on getting the labels, descriptions and aliases of a Property.
We are finishing work on modifying the descriptions of an Item.
You can now add sitelinks to Wikifunctions (phab:T342857)
We improved the “required” marker on Special:NewLexeme, hopefully making its meaning clearer (phab:T322683)
If you are not logged-in, you’ll also get the yellow warning when editing Lexeme’s Lemmas, Forms, and Senses (phab:T343979)
We added the tlh-latn and tlh-piqd codes for monolingual text, so that now you can add the titles to Shakepear’s works in the original Klingon (phab:T286239)
Mismatch Finder:
Failed uploads now no longer offer to download review results (phab:T335864)
We are working on the ability to report mismatches on qualifiers (phab:T313467)
The Mismatch Finder will show a clarifying message when Java Script is disabled (phab:T343344)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new user preference for "Always enable safe mode". This setting will make pages load without including any on-wiki JavaScript or on-wiki stylesheet pages. It can be useful for debugging broken JavaScript gadgets. [43]
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. [44]
An RfC is open regarding amending the paid-contribution disclosure policy to add the following text: Any administrator soliciting clients for paid Wikipedia-related consulting or advising services not covered by other paid-contribution rules must disclose all clients on their userpage.
Technical news
Administrators can now choose to add the user's user page to their watchlist when changing the usergroups for a user. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API. (T272294)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Fon (w:fon:) [45]
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. [46]
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.[47]
In the mobile web skin (Minerva) the CSS ID #page-actions will be replaced with #p-views. This change is to make it consistent with other skins and to improve support for gadgets and extensions in the mobile skin. A few gadgets may need to be updated; there are details and search-links in the task.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 18th October 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour October 13, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to. The fifth Wikidata Working Hour in the series will cover manually adding authors and publishers from our bibliography into Wikidata. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page. Event page
Is AI lying to us? These researchers built an LLM lie detector of sorts to find out - Tiernan Ray, ZDNET ("Step one is to come up with a list of over 20,000 questions and known answers, drawn from sources such as Wikidata, for which the large language model, in this case, OpenAI's GPT-3.5, can be reliably expected to provide the correct answer.")
Data Scraping, Gathering & Annotation (in Ukrainian VO, English text) < lecture on data gathering, Wikidata, SPARQL and structured data from Ukrainian Catholic University
Wikidata: first pragmatic approach - Ismael Olea - OpenSouthCode 2023 < an introduction to Wikidata - the objective of this talk is for the public to leave amazed and addicted to Wikidata.
Tool of the week
https://aletheiafact.org <- is a new fact-checking website using Wikidata for people/concept identification. The website allows users to contribute to fact-checking claims made by public figures, such as politicians, celebrities, and influencers.
Wikibase REST API: We worked on the new routes for PATCHing Property and Item aliases as well as PUTing Property labels and descriptions (phab:T342982, phab:T337371, phab:T337371, phab:T348150)
We are continuing to work on fixing an issue with Lexeme pages missing styles and scripts (phab:T344362)
We’re adding some missing license notes to some javascript UI interfaces (phab:343998, phab:T343999)
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on supporting mismatches for data that is stored in qualifiers (phab:T313467)
WMF GLAM report: Wikisource Loves Manuscripts, ICOM outreach, Flickr Foundation partnership, OpenRefine adoption, new sources in The Wikipedia Library, Image Description Month events, and the GLAM Wiki Conference
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call October 17, 2023: Our scheduled speaker had to unexpectedly cancel, so please join us to transfer group call notes from the Google Drive to the wiki project page (see instructions link in agenda document!) Agenda
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 18th October 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Wikidata Day NYC '23 Join fellow Wikidata-enthusiasts on October 29th at the Butler Library, 114th Street West, NYC for a free Wikidata-celebration with a selection of engaging workshops and presentations to attend.
State of the Map EU 2023 has a session on OSM-Wikidata Map Framework on Sunday, 12th Nov., taking place in Antwerp, Belgium.
Wikidata Days: WM-Peru (in Spanish) attend a 2-day event, with sessions devoted to Wikidata, OpenRefine, QuickStatements and SPARQL.
Wikimedia Chile: Wikidata Training Course Staying in South America, Chilean and all Spanish-speakers can attend a 4-day Course and earn a participation Certificate. Online event - 17 to 20th October.
Press: Indexing news with AI via BroadCast Pro ME ("We are able to create a rich multilingual archive, leveraging translations based on the Wikidata knowledge graph.")
Drag'n'Drop Gadget <-- This handy gadget allows you to click and drag information from a Wikipedia article and add it to a Wikidata-item as a Statement. By Magnus Sälgö.
LIVE Wikidata editing #110 <-- Ainali and Abbe98 do some live editing on Wikidata (in English), and discuss the thought process of what we are doing and why we do it.
User:Nikki/ChecksumCheck.js <-- This script displays a symbol after external identifiers which contain checksums, to indicate whether the checksum in the identifier is correct. Currently only supporting a small number of Identifiers.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Unified login system's edge login should now be fixed for some browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera). This means that if you visit a new sister project wiki, you should be logged in automatically without the need to click "Log in" or reload the page. Feedback on whether it's working for you is welcome. [48]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 October. It will be on all wikis from 19 October (calendar).
Future changes
In 3 weeks, in the Vector 2022 skin, code related to addPortletLink and #p-namespaces that was deprecated one year ago will be removed. If you notice tools that should appear next to the "Discussion" tab are then missing, please tell the gadget's maintainers to see instructions in the Phabricator task.
Edit-A-Thon for LGBTQ+ History Month < Binghamton University Library, New York, Oct. 25th. Help make visible the important contributions of queer figures.
Wikidata Birthday Edit-A-Thon (Albanian) < Albanian language Wikimedians celebrate Wikidata's Birthday with a 2-day event (Oct. 28 - 29, 2023) near the "Aleksandër Xhuvani" University, Elbasan.
Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour October 23, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to. The sixth Wikidata Working Hour in the series will cover batch creating items using OpenRefine.This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the Event page
4th Wikidata Workshop as part of the International Semantic Web Conference. 7th Nov., Athens, Greece.
Live Editing #110 < Develop your SPARQL query-building skills in this follow-along session.
Tutorial on Wikidata for or WikiConnect course (in Portuguese) <-- Explaining the Wiki Movimento Brasil's WikiConecta Wikidata course. The course entails Understanding what Wikidata is and its operating logic, Learning the basics of editing and recovering data, and Understanding why and how to use Wikidata with your students.
Birthday Presents from Data Engineering and Semantics Research Unit:
MedCYN as an intuitive web tool for Wikidata-based clinical decision support.
MeSH2Wikidata as an approach for validating and classifying biomedical relations in Wikidata based on MeSH Keywords of PubMed scholarly publications.
Tool of the week
User:Magnus Manske/annas archive.js is a userscript that automatically links to Anna's Archive from Wikidata items for books and research articles, for title, DOI, ISBN, etc. so that people can easily get access to them.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
There is a new update relative to the Wikidata Query Service scaling of the backend, that explains how the team will experiment with splitting the Wikidata Query Service graph and use federation for the queries that need access to all subgraphs.
Mismatch Finder tool improvements: In the next deployment scheduled for November 1, the tool will let you report mismatches on qualifiers in addition to the main part of a statement.
We are preparing for WikidataCon and the Data Modelling Days.
We are looking more into where Wikibase needs to be adapted to the upcoming IP Masking changes.
We added a notification about the license to all edits to labels, descriptions and aliases that was missing still (phab:T343998) The same for Lexemes is coming next (phab:T343999)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new Language and internationalization newsletter, written quarterly. It contains updates on new feature development, improvements in various language-related technical projects, and related support work.
Source map support has been enabled on all wikis. When you open the debugger in your browser's developer tools, you should be able to see the unminified JavaScript source code. [49]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 October. It will be on all wikis from 26 October (calendar).
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Welcome to the 600th Weekly Summary!
Lydia initiated the weekly newsletter at the start of the Wikidata project, before it even went live, to keep the community in the loop about the developments, the new projects and tools. Léa carried on the newsletter in 2016 and then it was my turn in 2020. The newsletter has been going strong for eleven years, with its content powered by the community, and delivered every week without fail. Thank you to everyone who helped fill in the different sections of the Weekly Summary thus far ❤️ --Mohammed
Today it is time to celebrate Wikidata’s 11th birthday. Let’s take a look back at the past year and what’s coming.
Wikidata’s world - map of Wikidata Items with a geocoordinate
There are now over 12.200 amazing people who are actively editing on Wikidata - 3000 of them even making more than 100 edits a month ♥️ Thank you! Without you Wikidata wouldn’t be what it is today. Thank you for helping give more people more access to more knowledge every single day. This year also marks the year we can welcome a new sister to the Wikimedia projects: Wikifunctions is live, letting us all geek out on functions in anticipation of Abstract Wikipedia. Another big milestone was Wikibase Cloud coming out of private beta. Now you can more easily run your own Wikibase and collect and maintain data that doesn’t fit into Wikidata. 2023 was also the year when the efforts of Wikidata editors were recognized across the Wikimedia movement with the awarding of the Wikimedian of the Year award to Taufik Rosman and the Wikimedia Laureate award to Siobhan Leachman. Over the coming year I want us to find ways how we can bring more people, who are already editing a bit here and there, closer to the community and help them find their place in our community. If you are one of them and have not found your place yet, check out a WikiProject related to your interests. Wikidata has something for everyone 😉
Wikidata now has over 106 Million Items and nearly 1.2 Million Lexemes. We are closing in on 2 Billion edits, making about 20 Million edits per month. All this content is used to create useful, quirky, educational or just fun applications that wouldn’t be possible without Wikidata and all the work you put into it. Check out Notable People for example. Over the coming year we want to make that even easier by building better APIs, lessening the strain on the Query Service, doing more outreach to developers as well as making our data more usable by ironing out ontology issues. In addition there will be increased focus on improving how the other Wikimedia projects integrate Wikidata. With the opening up of Wikibase Cloud we will hopefully also see many new Wikibases pop up that cover more specialized data or be used as playgrounds to prepare data for Wikidata. I am looking forward to a growing Wikibase Ecosystem and excited about more Linked Open Data becoming available to the world, with Wikidata being an entryway to it all.
And last but not least: if you want to learn a bit more about the history and backstory of Wikidata, then you might like Wikidata: The Making Of by Denny, Markus and me.
List of presents gathered by the community for Wikidata's eleventh birthday
Luthor is a multi-lingual tool for adding usage examples to lexemes on Wikidata, from sentences found on Wikisource in the same language. (by Asaf Bartov)
সংকলক একটি সরঞ্জাম যেটা দিয়ে উইকিসংকলনের লেখাগুলির উইকিউপাত্ত আইটেম অনুসারে সে লেখাগুলিকে উন্নত ভাবে অনুসন্ধান করা যায়। - Sangkalak is a tool with which Wikisource works can be searched more readily, using the Wikidata items for those works. (present from Mahir256) (by মাহির২৫৬-এর উপহার)
Creating new Lexemes? For a lot more languages you now no longer need to provide a spelling variant when creating a new Lexeme, making it even easier to contribute data about words in your language. (present from the development team)
The Mismatch Finder, the tool to help review mismatches between Wikidata and other data sources now also has support for mismatches on qualifiers. This allows it to be useful also for issues that are in the data in qualifiers. (present from the development team)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call October 31, 2023: We will hear from Darnelle Melvin, Cory Lampert, and Andre Hulet, University of Nevada-Las Vegas Libraries, on WireframeVG: A Search and Discovery Application for Wikidata Projects. Agenda
How cultural institutions use Wikidata (How cultural heritage institutions sharing their collection data, including implementing Wikidata projects, batch uploading datasets to Wikidata, and how to share successes to a broader audience) - Jackie Rubashkin, Metadata Technician, Barack Obama Presidential Library; Michelle van Lanschot, Project Coordinator at Wikimedia-Netherlands; William Blueher, Associate Museum Librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Will Kent, Wiki Education
(in Chinese) Wikidata基礎編輯教學 (Wikidata basic editor) - Conference for Open Source Coders, Users & Promoters (COSCUP) 2023
Notable People is a map project by Topi Tjukanov that showing birthplaces of the most "notable people" around the world. It uses the combined data of Wikipedia and Wikidata from the paper's "a cross-verified database of notable people, 3500 BC-2018 AD" by Morgane Laouenan, Palaash Bhargava, Jean-Benoît Eyméoud, Olivier Gergaud, Guillaume Plique & Etienne Wasmer. The data shows only one person for each unique geographic location with the highest notability rank.
Wikimedia Research Fund Update update. "You can apply for research funds (USD 2K-50K) until December 15, 2023. While all research proposals related to Wikimedia projects are welcome, we particularly encourage research studies on medium to small size languages and communities, as well as in low resourced languages and projects."
The Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects team is investigating the different ways Wikidata is used in the sister projects. We would like to speak with you about your experiences integrating or connecting Wikidata, if you'd like to tell us, please sign up for an interview on our project page or on our Registration Form.
Wikidata:WikiProject Academic Publisher - a project to display open access shares (among others based on publishers) at the Austrian Datahub for Open Access Negotiations and Monitoring
Development
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing the work on making it possible to remove a description in a given language from an Item, modify the label of an Item and add aliases to an Item (phab:T342986, phab:T342980, phab:T335842)
Lexicographical data: We switched the Property that is used to pre-select the spelling variant on the Special:NewLexeme page from P218 (ISO 639-1 code) to P305 (IETF language tag) to make use of the latter’s larger coverage. (phab:T348923)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing to work on addressing the feedback from the testing of the new datatype in the test system.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Structured Content team, as part of its project of improving UploadWizard on Commons, made some UX improvements to the upload step of choosing own vs not own work (T347590), as well as to the licensing step for own work (T347756).
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (calendar).
Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 2 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for many languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [50][51]
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. [52]
Upcoming: Data Modelling Days, November 30-December 2. You can propose a session until November 19. If you are running another event or meetup and would like to connect it to the Data Modelling Days, you can add it to the satellite events section.
Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web is a collection of preceedings from the 5th Iberoamerican Conference and 4th Indo-American Conference, KGSWC 2023, Nov. 13–15. By F. Ortiz-Rodriguez, B. Villazón-Terrazas, S. Tiwari & C. Bobed.
linguistic family of place name (Relates directly a placename to its original language family. It's not the language in which the toponym is written, but the language from which the word (place name) comes from.)
according to (to be used together with P248 if the statement is taken from an aggregator rather than directly from the source)
counterexample (qualifier for deprecated P279 statements; example instance or subclass of the item class for which a "subclass of" statement does not hold (alias: "item belonging to the subject class but not the value class"))
Newest WikiProjects: Source Reliability "is an effort to identify and aggregate online sources of assessments of the reliability and credibility of sources".
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We have implemented the endpoints for PATCH /entities/items/{item_id}/aliases (phab:T337371), PATCH /entities/properties/{property_id}/aliases (phab:T342982) and PATCH /entities/properties/{property_id}/labels (phab:T342980)
We started working on the new endpoints for POST /entities/items/{item_id}/aliases/{language_code} (phab:T335842) and DELETE /entities/items/{item_id}/descriptions/{lang_code} (phab:T342986)
Language codes:
We made Special:NewLexeme more likely to guess the spelling variant for you by changing the Property we use to get the language code. Now you will see the spelling variant input pop up less often. (phab:T349652)
We started work towards allowing many more languages by default for Wikibase Lexeme and monolingual text statements. This will remove the need for a lot of requests for new language codes to be added. (phab:T341409)
Query Service UI: We’ve fixed a small issue in the Query Service UI that was introduced when updating CSS variables. Content of selected cells in the query result should be readable again. (phab:T350153)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on the new data type for linking to EntitySchemas, working on overcoming architectural issues.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, the default font-size of a number of navigational elements (tagline, tools menu, navigational links, and more) has been increased slightly to match the font size used in page content. [53]
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. [54]
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. [55][56]
On July 18, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a survey about the technical decision making process for people who do technical work that relies on software that is maintained by the Foundation or affiliates. If this applies to you, please take part in the survey. The survey will be open for three weeks, until August 7. You can find more information in the announcement e-mail on wikitech-l.
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).
Administrator changes
Interface administrator changes
Technical news
Arbitration
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. [19]
Guideline and policy news
Miscellaneous
