SYMBIOSIS: The lichen task force newsletter — January 2024 A look at what we've accomplished, working together
Happy New Year! The colour-coded list to the right shows the status of the project as of the end of 2023; compare it with the list in last January's newsletter to see how far we've come. It's clearly an improvement, but equally, it shows how much we still have to do. There are scores of articles about lichen genera still to write, thousands of lichen species are missing, and there are reams of information still to add about the effects of climate change, air pollution and more on lichen diversity and survival. It's more than enough to keep us occupied for decades to come. Here's to a productive year!
Lichen task force articles by quality and importance
Project news
Buellia frigida
The task force's first collaboration article, Lichens and air pollution was started in Draft space last month. Everyone is invited to add whatever bits they can, or to make suggestions about what needs clarifying, expanding, cutting, etc.
A Draft:Lichen page has also been added, to allow for a complete rewrite of the current lichen article, which needs a major overhaul and update. We anticipate this one will take most of 2024! Plans are to develop a solid outline before starting any writing.
Esculenta accepted last month's challenge and updated the Malmidea article with 14 additional species now recognised by Species Fungorum as being in the genus.
This month, we're looking for someone to update the Gassicurtia article, last updated in January of 2021. According to Species Fungorum, there are now four additional species in the genus. The editor who updates the article 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!
And so ends the fourth edition of the monthly rolling contest, as well as the 2023 Tree of Life Contest as a whole. This month saw simongraham win with a very impressive 120 points from 27 articles. Quetzal1964 was second with 74 points from 37 articles. The annual contest was a close race between simongraham and Quetzal1964; simongraham won first place with 256 points from 64 articles, and Quetzal1964 was second with 250 points from 146 articles. Snoteleks was third with 79 points from 33 articles. Congratulations to everyone who won this year and my gratitude to everyone else who helped raise the quality of articles in our little corner of Knowledge (XXG) this year. Additionally, a very Happy New Year to everyone in the project and here's looking forward to continuing our good work in 2024!
... that the green colour of bofedales(examples pictured) stands out in the yellow surrounding landscape? (December 6)
... that Desulfovibrio vulgaris can remove toxic heavy metals from the environment? (December 8)
... that Varroa destructor(example pictured), the Varroa mite, is an external parasitic mite that attacks and feeds on honey bees and is one of the most harmful honey-bee pests in the world? (December 11)
... that the Antarctic lichen Buellia frigida has been to outer space? (December 22)
... that the closest modern fern relatives to Dennstaedtia christophelii(fossil pictured) of the Pacific Northwest are tropical species from South America? (December 24)
... that in Icelandic folklore, the Yule cat eats people who do not receive new clothing for Christmas? (December 25)
Wikimedians for Sustainable Development - December 2023 Newsletter
This is our twenty-seventh newsletter, a sort of year-in-review for 2023.
Dear Wikimedians for Sustainable Development,
As we bid farewell to 2023, we reflect on a year that has been an uneven year for our user group. While the journey has been marked by some truly inspiring events, most of our efforts have been largely uncoordinated and the user group hasn't been the support it could have been. Yet, there's a glimmer of hope and a world of potential for 2024.
Highlights of 2023:
Newsletters Galore
We kicked off the year with zeal, sharing updates and inspiration through four newsletters. The number of things happening in the movement is astounding, but we need to rethink the format of the newsletter going into the next year.
Growing Strong
The Wikimedians for Sustainable Development family welcomed 33 new members in 2023. Your passion and dedication continue to inspire us, and we look forward to nurturing this community spirit in the year ahead.
Wikimania Talks
Our voices echoed far and wide at Wikimania, where several members of our community took the virtual stage to share insights and ideas about everything from Wikipedians-in-Residence's to open data. Your contributions showcased our commitment to sustainable development on a global scale.
Content Creation Magic
Throughout the year, our extended community demonstrated incredible dedication to expanding the knowledge base on Knowledge (XXG). Countless hours were spent creating and curating content that aligns with our mission, contributing to a more sustainable digital ecosystem.
Campaigning hard
We saw a large variety of campaigns, from writing challenges to editathons. The willingness to experiment with new formats and partners, as well as learning from past efforts, shows great promise for the future.
Acknowledging Challenges:
While we celebrate these achievements, we acknowledge that 2023 presented its fair share of challenges. A lack of global coordination reminded us that the road to sustainable development is not always linear. However, it is precisely these challenges that fuel our determination to work together more cohesively in the coming year and proof that the user group is needed.
Hopeful Anticipation for 2024:
As we turn the page to 2024, let's carry forward the lessons learned and the successes celebrated. We are optimistic that, with renewed energy and a collective commitment, we will overcome obstacles and create an even more impactful and connected Wikimedians for Sustainable Development community.
Here's to a year of collaboration, growth, and making a lasting impact on the world through our shared passion for sustainability. Together, we can turn challenges into opportunities and pave the way for a brighter future.
Wishing you all a joyous holiday season and a Happy New Year!
Upcoming: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC, 17th 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.
Papers: Improving maintenance of community-based knowledge graphs. This paper by Nicolas Ferranti addresses the critical issue of data quality in open knowledge graphs, with a specific focus on Wikidata. It aims to formalize Wikidata's unique approaches to assess and resolve data inconsistencies, proposing a semi-automatic refinement pipeline to empower the Wikidata user community in maintaining and enhancing the reliability of this extensive collaborative knowledge graph.
Videos: WikidataCon 2023 Day 1.5 - The past and future of Wikidata. In this video Lydia Pintscher takes a moment to review the major events of Wikidata over the past few years. Then turns to look forward and predict what Wikidata's prospects will be over the next year.
Tool of the week
WICA: Wikidata's insights for created articles is an updated version of an old tool. It now includes many new features to analyse your list of created articles using Wikidata properties.
Nonprofit Status (Indicating the legal and tax status of a non-profit organization (specific to served legal areas, aka. Countries). Addition to {{P|1454}}. {{P|1628}} to from schema.org. Organizations can have multiple Nonprofit Status from different countries.)
creative director (person who makes high-level creative decisions, oversees the creation of creative assets such as adverts, products, events or logos and guides and directs the creative people who create the end result)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 17th January 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Blogs: PubChem on Wikidata – What is the state of coverage? by Tiago Lubiana. In summary, Wikidata has good coverage of the structured chemical data in PubChem, though there are improvement points. PubChem displays, and will always display, textual information and vendor-specific data that do not fit Wikidata, but they are complementary tools in the ecosystem of open chemical data.
LIS Journals’ Lack of Participation in Wikidata Item Creation by Eric Willey & Susan Radovsky, discusses the gap of Wikidata items being created for scholarly articles by the scholar's themselves and if this can lead to inconsistent or inaccurate data model.
Quantifying Americanization: Coverage of American Topics in Different Wikipedias: this paper asks whether there is an americanisation bias in the content created by the communities. By Piotr Konieczny & Włodzimierz Lewoniewski.
Videos
Map Kerala Initiative is an opendata portal geospatial map powered by Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, introduced by Manoj Karingamadathil.
Notebooks: Knowledge (XXG) article as a timeline - This tool transforms a Knowledge (XXG) article in a timeline by parsing all internal links in a Knowledge (XXG) article and retrieving the date corresponding to each internal link using the point in time (P585) property in Wikidata.
Tool of the week Map your list of created articles - a notebook display of geolocated articles on a map created by a user per chosen project and batch (featured/good article).
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikimedia Indonesia and Wikimedia Deutschland ended their partnership within the project Software Collaboration for Wikidata prematurely. Read their joint statement here.
IP masking/temporary accounts: We are adjusting Wikibase to be prepared for the upcoming changes to no longer expose IP addresses for non-logged-in users (phab:T351968)
Dumps/lex. data: We’re adjusting how empty lists of Forms and Senses are represented in JSON dumps (phab:T305660)
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the work on making it possible to get all sitelinks of an Item (phab:T344041)
We are working on getting a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344039)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
mediawiki2latex is a tool that converts wiki content into the formats of LaTeX, PDF, ODT, and EPUB. The code now runs many times faster due to recent improvements. There is also an optional Docker container you can install on your local machine.
The way that Random pages are selected has been updated. This will slowly reduce the problem of some pages having a lower chance of appearing.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar).
Off the waitlist, but still "sold out" on Eventbrite
@Wil540 art@User:Pharos I got an email from Eventbrite that said I was off the waitlist and had until 4 pm today to claim my ticket. Alas, when I clicked on "Claim my spot" at about 7 am this morning (1/10/24) Eventbrite said the event was "sold out".
Not sure what to do. I just turned on my email so if you want to email me or even call, we can work it out. Nowa (talk) 13:13, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
Sorry about that, we are experiencing a high level of interest. I will make sure you can gain entry. email me at (one L) and we will figure it out. Wil540 art (talk) 16:13, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
Hey Wil, All set! Mark H. of the Brown Center got me hooked up. I have tickets now. Thanks for the follow up. Nowa (talk) 18:43, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
Poland report: Intense end to a year of GLAM-Wiki activities in Poland
Sweden report: Photo memories project concludes; Sörmlands museum passes 1000 uploads to Wikimedia Commons; Wikimedian in Residence supports an upload of music content; Subject terms from Queerlit; Wikidata for authority control: 3 years of work
USA report: WikiConference North America 2023; TSU and USF; Philadelphia WikiSalon; Wikimedia DC Annual Membership Meeting; Knowledge (XXG) Editing 101 for All; NYC Hacking Night; Upstate NY workshop; Wikiquote She Said Project
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New request for comments: Community request for the development team to access inverse properties on client wikis. (Summary: We currently cannot access inverse property values on Knowledge (XXG). This can be a data management issue on Knowledge (XXG) as we must always ask ourself if we must introduce an inverse property for cases where we need them. So I think it’s useful to gather the usecases community would want and draft a request for an API to the devteam to do that.)
Upcoming: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 17th January 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Past
Provenance Loves Wiki (PLW24), Jan 12th - 14th, research and data on the origin of artworks and cultural heritage and how Wikibase and Wikidata can support this.
WikiLovesWomen #SheSaid campaign wrapped up the 2023 campaign by visiting Kinshasha and Kisangani, where local Wikimedians improved quotes from women on FR Knowledge (XXG) and Wikidata.
QLever: a new way to query OpenStreetMap --> Discussion of the new opportunities offered by QLever to query OpenStreetMap and to run federated queries with Wikidata
Wikidata for authority control: 3 years of work --> The three-year Wikidata for authority control project, a collaboration between Wikimedia Sverige and Swedish museums, concluded in December 2023. It equipped museum staff with tools and skills to integrate their authority databases with Wikidata, resulting in added identifiers, SPARQL query proficiency, and enhanced knowledge sharing within the GLAM sector.
Go-ahead for Wikidata Project of GLAM institutions from Baden-Württemberg --> The GLAM-BW project, under "GLAM goes OpenData," connects major collections in Baden-Württemberg, focusing on the württembergische Kunstkammer. With over 3,000 objects, the project integrates information on collectors, histories, and objects into a knowledge graph for semantic searches, contributing to the broader realm of linked open data, akin to Wikidata.
Swiss GLAM Programme --> Wikimedia CH imported the Museum of Natural History of Neuchâtel's urchin fossil casts to Wikimedia Commons, connecting structured data on Wikidata. The project involved data cleaning, adding missing elements, and file imports via OpenRefine, highlighting seamless integration between Wikidata and Commons.
Papers
Reflections on the PCC Wikidata Pilot at UCLA Library: --> Undertaking the PCC Learning Objectives. Discusses the 14-month Pilot programme for cooperative cataloguing of UCLA Library and Museum Collections. By E. Zhang, P. Biswas & I. Dagher.
SMWCon 2023: Semantics, Wikis, and AI --> Day 1, Keynote by Prof. Markus Krötzsch who explores origins and principles of semantic wikis and key challenges that lie ahead in managing knowledge.
Brian M Sperlongano released US boundary QA checker, a quality assurance tool for finding issues with boundary data in the United States by using Wikidata, OpenStreetMap, and US Census Bureau data.
The Surrounding Ocean (available at vrandezo.github.io/TheSurroundingOcean) - is a tool that allows you to browse lexicographical data. You can use the tool to explore words and their meanings, translations, and synonyms. The tool is currently under development, and the developer, Danny, would appreciate feedback to fix any issues with the tool. More info: Wikidata:The Surrounding Ocean.
Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Decolonise Wiki --> intends to focus on decolonising text, depictions and media within all relevant Knowledge (XXG) articles.
WikiProject Highlights: Ontology Cleaning Task Force: A group of people have started a task force to discuss problems with the Wikidata ontology and how to clean them up. Anyone interested in participating is welcome. The task force maintains Wikidata:WikiProject Ontology/Cleaning Task Force as a record of its activities. You can add yourself to the participants list there and find out how to join group meetings or otherwise participate in the group. (Got something noteworthy happening in your WikiProject? Share it in the upcoming issue!)
IP masking: We are working on adjusting Wikibase to handle the upcoming introduction of IP masking, which will give editors who are not logged in a temporary account name instead of using their IP to attribute edits to (phab:T351968)
Lexicographical data: We are changing how empty Senses and Forms are represented in the dumps (phab:T305660)
mul language code: We are doing user testing for the current implementation to see if it is understandable for people.
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on migrating it to the Codex design system.
REST API:
We improved the handling of lower-case statement IDs (phab:T354262)
We are working on getting a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344039)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size.
Gadgets and personal user scripts may now use JavaScript syntax introduced in ES6 (also known as "ES2015") and ES7 ("ES2016"). MediaWiki validates the source code to protect other site functionality from syntax errors, and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. Previously, Gadgets could use the requiresES6 option. This option is no longer needed and will be removed in the future.
An update on the status of the Community Wishlist Survey for 2024 has been published. Please read and give your feedback.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar).
Starting on January 17, it will not be possible to login to Wikimedia wikis from some specific old versions of the Chrome browser (versions 51–66, released between 2016 and 2018). Additionally, users of iOS 12, or Safari on Mac OS 10.14, may need to login to each wiki separately.
The jquery.cookie module was deprecated and replaced with the mediawiki.cookie module last year. A script has now been run to replace any remaining uses, and this week the temporary alias will be removed.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Translations are available.
Discussions
New request for comments: Domain name as data (Summary: How should Wikidata store the domain name associated with an item? There are many properties for URLs, but a domain name is a different value.)
PLW 2024: Provenance loves Wiki - Fri. 12th - Sun. 14th January. If you missed the event, catch up by reading the slides, Notes and watching the recordings on the Project page
Next: Linked Open Data in Heritage Workshop > Jan. 23rd, 13:00 - 15:00 CET. If you are in the Maastricht University Faculty and want to know enhance heritage research, improve data management, connectivity and visualisation, register for the Workshop.
AskWikidata: Natural language queries to Wikidata, a naive prototype created by Senior Software Engineer for Wikidata, Robert Timm. Want to try? (Google Colab)
IP Masking: We are continuing to adapt Wikibase to the upcoming IP Masking feature. We worked on hiding warnings about IP addresses being saved when they don’t apply (phab:T353807, phab:T352006) and creating temporary accounts when editing (phab:T354730)
Wikibase REST API:
We continued working on the ability to get a sitelink for a given site (phab:T344039)
We started working on the ability to remove a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344685)
We worked on fixing a bug where the REST API PUT request does not handle statement on Items with lowercase statement IDs (phab:T352644)
mul language code: We did user testing to find any remaining issue before release
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
A bug in UploadWizard prevented linking to the userpage of the uploader when uploading. It has now been fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 January. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 January. It will be on all wikis from 25 January (calendar).
Citations needed for plot and characters of a book?
Hi, I see you added Citation Needed tags to the Plot and Characters sections of Rumble Fish (novel). Should supporting refs from reliable third parties be needed for a plot synopsis or character list? This info is surely derived from the work itself. Interpretation or evaluation should definitely be sourced, but much or all of the info in these sections is not asserting any more than the work itself offers, so refs are a rarity in these sections of comparable articles. Yours, Guffydrawers (talk) 08:06, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
@Guffydrawers you make a good point. I have little experience with editing articles on novels, so I did not know the convention. Thank you for informing me, I have removed the Citation needed templates. - Wil540 art (talk) 05:11, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #613
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Translations are available.
Discussions
Closed request for adminship: ROBERTSHST requested adminship to be able to link protected Knowledge (XXG) pages to Wikidata. The request has been denied and closed.
New request for comments: Frettiebot block? - Bovlb has requested community input about the edit behaviour of this bot, with more discussion found on the Frettiebot Discussion page.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Books: Banned books, Knowledge (XXG) and Wikidata - Volume 54, Number 2, 2023 of the focus on International Library and Information Work. Professor Núria Ferran of Women and Knowledge (XXG).
Papers
Assisted Knowledge Graph Authoring: Human-Supervised Knowledge Graph Construction from Natural Language - a Web app allowing domain experts to create natural language Wikidata-based knowledge graphs. By Gohsen & Stein (2024).
Narrowing the Knowledge Evaluation Gap: Open-Domain Question Answering with Multi-Granularity Answers - evaluating predicted answers against a set of multi-granularity answers based on Wikidata. By Yona et al, (2024).
Videos
Introduction to Wikidata Query Tool - Learn A Wiki Skill (LAWS). If you are a Wikidata beginner, enjoy this video provided by Open Foundation West Africa.
Notebooks: GLAM2: Geolocated and Labeled Articles Map - much like the previously shared GLAM1 visually representing distribution of Good & Featured Articles but in a different visualisation.
The Wikidata Development team needs your feedback! We are currently evaluating a new feature for the Wikidata Query Service. Fancy sharing your thoughts? We would greatly appreciate it if you could complete this survey on Lamapoll. It should take you around 10–15 minutes. Your input means a lot to us. Thank you!
Wikidata:WikiProject IBC 2024 - The International Botanical Congress (IBC) takes place once every six years. The organisers of this WikiProject see this conference as an ideal opportunity to engage with the wider botanical community, educate them about the potential of Wikidata and to train them in its use. We will also use this opportunity to improve the data held in Wikidata about the participants, presenters and their contributions to botany.
WikiProject Health Data Space - This project is about organising data related to health data spaces, in particular the efforts to create a European Health Data Space. Initially it will focus on Sweden.
Showcase Lexemes: šťastný (L204262) (Czech) - having luck, fortune, happy. This is our first Czech showcase lexeme and it just so happens to be the largest Lexeme on Wikidata!
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
Starting Monday January 29, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they are looking for, even if this comment was moved elsewhere. This will affect all wikis except for the English Knowledge (XXG). You can read more about this change on Diff or on Mediawiki.org.
There are some improvements to the CAPTCHA to make it harder for spam bots and scripts to bypass it. If you have feedback on this change, please comment on the task. Staff are monitoring metrics related to the CAPTCHA, as well as secondary metrics such as account creations and edit counts.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 January. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 January. It will be on all wikis from 1 February (calendar).
On February 1, a link will be added to the "Tools" menu to download a QR code that links to the page you are viewing. There will also be a new Special:QrCode page to create QR codes for any Wikimedia URL. This addresses the #19 most-voted wish from the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
Gadgets which only work in some skins have sometimes used the targets option to limit where you can use them. This will stop working this week. You should use the skins option instead.
Upcoming meeting: on 9 February, we'll have a call about roles and responsibilities in the user group. This is an attempt to make more opportunities to engage more of the user groups members in its activities. If you want to help out in some way, but don't know how, this is a meeting for you to get help creating that opportunity. If you know how you would like to help, but don't know how to get started, this is also the meeting for you.
WikiWednesday is back this month! You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our WikiWednesday Salon at Prime Produce in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, with an online-based participation option also available. No experience of anything at all is required. All are welcome!
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.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call February 6, 2024: Wikimedia user Dnshitobu will discuss Wikidata for Education, the Dagbani NLP project, and the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group/sister communities. In the last part of the meeting, Dnshitobu will lead a discussion of your ideas for Wikidata Affinity Group activities in 2024 using Jamboard. Agenda
Wikidata 101 is a clinic, part of the #LoveDataWeek hosted at Toronto Metropolitan University; February 13th 11:00 - 12:30 EST in LIB 387 - Library Collaboratory building.
Connecting People, Connecting Archives Project (CACP) – Wikidata Workshop (Arabic). Archivists and scholars collaborated to align objectives and methods for the Connecting Archives Connecting People (CACP) Project. The aim of the workshop was to understand biographical data in archives.
Wikibase SPARQL Demo A live demo of the SPARQL MediaWiki extension during the February 2024 Wikibase Stakeholder Group meetup.
We are finishing the endpoint for adding/replacing a sitelink on an Item for a given wiki (phab:T342987) and have finished the ones for getting and removing a sitelink from an Item (phab:T344039, phab:T344685)
We have documented the differences in sitelink data structure between Wikibase REST API and Action API responses (phab:T355659)
We fixed the bug where sitelink data was not including badges even when available (phab:T355293)
IP masking: We are continuing the work on adapting Wikibase so we don't show IP addresses for non-logged-in users.
mul: We finished the user testing and will now work on the remaining blockers for the first release.
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 mobile site history pages now use the same HTML as the desktop history pages. If you hear of any problems relating to mobile history usage please point them to the phabricator task.
On most wikis, admins can now block users from making specific actions. These actions are: uploading files, creating new pages, moving (renaming) pages, and sending thanks. The goal of this feature is to allow admins to apply blocks that are adequate to the blocked users' activity. Learn more about "action blocks".
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 February. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 February. It will be on all wikis from 8 February (calendar).
Talk pages permalinks that included diacritics and non-Latin script were malfunctioning. This issue is fixed.
Future changes
24 Wikipedias with Reference Tooltips as a default gadget are encouraged to remove that default flag. This would make Reference Previews the new default for reference popups, leading to a more consistent experience across wikis. For 46 Wikipedias with less than 4 interface admins, the change is already scheduled for mid-February, unless there are concerns. The older Reference Tooltips gadget will still remain usable and will override this feature, if it is available on your wiki and you have enabled it in your settings.
An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Adi Gevins, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Community broadcasting.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Translations are available.
Discussions
New request for permissions/Bot:
CJMBot - let users upload a CSV file in a certain format. The data inside is validated and processed, creating new items or updating existing items by adding statements and references.
Love Data Week - My Kind of Data by Ali Smith. Shared relevant links to learn about data equity and inclusion, disciplinary communities, and creating a kinder world through data.
Wikidata for Teaching Biology: Coloration in Felines (Spanish) - a paper that showcases Wikidata as a learning tool for students through the use of properties and statements applied to biological entities can enhance students computational and informational skills, by Marín1 D. & Michán L.
Advancing Drinking Water Justice at the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Conference discusses how Wikidata and Wikibase Cloud can help address differences in data quality (at the 55:00 minute mark)
Au bord de l'eau Mapping Wikidata's items next to a body of water using P206 property.
Tool of the week
MediaWiki:Gadget-dataDrainer.js - this userscript allows you to delete the data of an item. You can choose what you want to delete: labels and/or descriptions and/or aliases and or sitelinks.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
There is a new update relative to the experiment with splitting the Wikidata Query Service graph. A project page for the experiment has also been published.
WMDE is currently conducting a research on Knowledge Equity in Linked Open Data. The goal is to try to better understand how the use of Wikidata, Wikibase Suite, and Wikibase Cloud both support knowledge equity and create barriers to knowledge equity when people are contributing historically and structurally marginalized knowledge and perspectives. If you are interested in participating in this project, please fill out this survey!
Library and Information Science - this new Wikiproject aims to identify and fill gaps in LIS-related content. If you are interested in the areas of librarianship, information studies, metadata and indexing; then please consider joining!
Political murders in the Weimar Republic - Collect historic political murders in the Weimar Republic e.g. through historic newspaper articles or scientific articles.
The graph split testing for the Wikidata Query Service has started. Please find more details in the "Other Noteworthy Stuff" section above.
IP Masking: We are continuing the work on adapting Wikibase for the upcoming IP Masking feature, so that IP addresses for non-logged-in users are no longer published.
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the route for getting and removing a sitelink from an Item (phab:T344039, phab:T344685) and we continue work on the one for adding/ replacing and modifying a sitelink on an Item (phab:T342987, phab:T342988)
We now handle of case sensitive statement IDs in GET, PUT, PATCH and DELETE requests as HTTP redirect (phab:T354261)
We documented the differences in sitelink data structure between Wikibase REST API and Action API responses (phab:T355659)
We fixed the bug where sitelink data did not include badges (phab:T355293)
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 WDQS Graph Split experiment is working and loaded onto 3 test servers. The team in charge is testing the split's impact and requires feedback from WDQS users through the UI or programmatically in different channels. Users' feedback will validate the impact of various use cases and workflows around the Wikidata Query service.
Problems
There was a bug that affected the appearance of visited links when using mobile device to access wiki sites. It made the links appear black; this issue is fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (calendar).
As work continues on the grid engine deprecation, tools on the grid engine will be stopped starting on February 14th, 2024. If you have tools actively migrating you can ask for an extension so they are not stopped.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
If you have the "Email me when a page or a file on my watchlist is changed" option enabled, edits by bot accounts no longer trigger notification emails. Previously, only minor edits would not trigger the notification emails.
There are changes to how user and site scripts load for Vector 2022 on specific wikis. The changes impacted the following Wikis: all projects with Vector legacy as the default skin, Wikivoyage, and Wikibooks. Other wikis will be affected over the course of the next three months. Gadgets are not impacted. If you have been affected or want to minimize the impact on your project, see this ticket. Please coordinate and take action proactively.
Newly auto-created accounts (the accounts you get when you visit a new wiki) now have the same local notification preferences as users who freshly register on that wiki. It is effected in four notification types listed in the task's description.
The maximum file size when using Upload Wizard is now 5 GiB.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (calendar).
Selected tools on the grid engine have been stopped as we prepare to shut down the grid on March 14th, 2024. The tool's code and data have not been deleted. If you are a maintainer and you want your tool re-enabled reach out to the team. Only tools that have asked for extension are still running on the grid.
The CSS filter property can now be used in HTML style attributes in wikitext.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Translations are available.
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Discussions
Open request for adminship: WT2O_2 - (RfP deadline: February 22, 2024 17:46 UTC)
Other: Project chat: PI Bot is an interesting conversation about the function of PI Bot in creating Stub articles and evolves into discussing ways of matching articles, categories and templates in sibling projects with their Wikidata items. Contribute to the discussion or even better, use one of the many tools posted and get linking!
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call February 20, 2024: In honor of Valentine's Day month, we are bringing back the popular program from last February: What's Your Wikidata Passion? What is your central Wikidata interest right now? It can be a work or personal project, even if you’re just beginning to think about it, or just what you like to edit when you have time. This is a great way to share your ideas, solicit community input and ask questions about resources or tools. This will be 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. You can share your screen if you like, but there’s no need for 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
Dancing Digital Project with Rebecca Salzer is a Wikibase instance sharing LOD between itself, video archives and Commons.
WikiPod AI - try listening to last week's Status Updates with AI-generated speaking, an experiment by Tiago Lubiana.
Notebooks: TTTTRPG - Timeline Tree of Tabletop Role-Playing Games queried using SPARQL from Wikidata.
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Tool of the week
User:Yair rand/DiffLists.js - this userscript changes the appearance of Recent Changes, Watchlist, Contributions, History pages, and Related Changes. It also adds filter options.
Wikidata Topic Curator (a rewrite of ItemSubjector into a webapp) help wikimedians add relevant topics to items. Based on a given topic QID it fetches articles matching the label, aliases or a custom user-provided term of that QID that is currently missing the main subject property.
Author Disambiguator - is a tool for editing the authors of works recorded in Wikidata, e.g. for finding Wikidata Items for the authors (P50 instead of 'author name string').
Castradenumber (number for a registred subject in a Castrade)
latest end date ((qualifier) latest date on which the statement could have ceased to be true (i.e., latest date beyond which the statement could no longer be true))
anthesis start (time of the year when a plant normally starts flowering)
leaf morphology (characterization of aspects of the shape of a plant’s leaves)
Newest WikiProjects: Looted heritage - aims to use Wikidata to document looted cultural heritage. Its primary focus is on the colonial era, but it also encompasses other relevant historical periods. It's scope includes artworks, sacred items, human remains, and other forms of tangible and intangible artifacts that may be considered a part of a people's heritage.
WikiProject Highlights: Staedel Museum Wikidata Clean-up The Staedul Museum comprises 24,000+ works of art spanning more than 700 years. They have generously opened up digital surrogates of their collection to the Wikimedia community. This project improves the metadata quality and create Wikidata items for works of art.
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 mobile visual editor is now the default editor for users who never edited before, at a small group of wikis. Research shows that users using this editor are slightly more successful publishing the edits they started, and slightly less successful publishing non-reverted edits. Users who defined the wikitext editor as their default on desktop will get the wikitext editor on mobile for their first edit on mobile as well.
The mw.config value wgGlobalGroups now only contains groups that are active in the wiki. Scripts no longer have to check whether the group is active on the wiki via an API request. A code example of the above is: if (/globalgroupname/.test(mw.config.get("wgGlobalGroups"))).
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 29 February (calendar).
Future changes
The right to change edit tags (changetags) will be removed from users in Wikimedia sites, keeping it by default for admins and bots only. Your community can ask to retain the old configuration on your wiki before this change happens. Please indicate in this ticket to keep it for your community before the end of March 2024.
The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE), in partnership with social practice artist Shoshana Gugenheim and as part of the Art+Feminism Project, will host an International Women's Day Knowledge (XXG) Edit-a-thon to edit and/or create Knowledge (XXG) articles for Jewish women artists. The event will be held at the museum on Sunday, March 10 from 11am-3pm PDT. Pre-registration is preferred but not required. Members of the public are invited to come to the museum to learn about the editing process, its history, its impact, and how to do it. We aim to collaboratively edit/enter Jewish women artists into the canon. An experienced regional Wikipedian will provided will be on site to teach, support, and guide the process. Participants can select artists ahead of time or on site.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 24th issue of the Knowledge (XXG) Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 24 December 2021. Uh-huh, we're finally covering the good ones among the rest! Aren't you excited? Remember to include a link in double brackets to the script's .js page when you install the script, so that we can see who uses the script in WhatLinksHere! The ScriptInstaller gadget automatically does this. Aaron Liu (talk) 01:00, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
Making user scripts load faster by SD0001 is this month's featured script, which caches userscripts every day to eliminate the overhead caused by force-downloading the newest version of scripts every time you open a Knowledge (XXG) page. Despite being released in April 2021, our best script scouters have failed to locate it due to its omission from the US of L. For security reasons, the script only supports loading JavaScript pages.
Newly maintained scripts
After earthly attempts at improving the original have failed...
Ahecht has created a fork of SiBr4/TemplateSearch, which adds the "TP:" shortcut for "Template:" in the search box, and updated it to be compatible with Vector 2022.
AquilaFasciata/goToTopFast is a much faster fork of the classic goToTop script that also adds compatibility for Minerva and Vector 2022.
Without caching. Each script takes 400–500ms. A particularly large script takes 1.11 s! Internet download speed is 50 Mbps.With caching enabled. Each script takes just 1-2 ms to load.
Improve a script
Unfortunately, this section has remained nearly identical. Help us out here!
To a lesser extent, the same goes for PrimeHunter/Search sort. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
Dragoniez/SuppressEnterInForm stops you from accidentally submitting anything due to pressing enter while in the smaller box, and works on almost anything... except the InputBox element itself, used in subscription lists and the Signpost Crossword! Oh, the humanity!
Doǵu/Adiutor(pictured) provides a nice, integrated interface to do some twinkley tasks such as copyvio detection, CSD tagging, and viewing the most recent diff.
Eejit43 has quite the aesthetically pleasing scripts, all made in TypeScript.
/afcrc-helper is a replacement for the unmaintained Enterprisey/AFCRHS and processes Redirects for Creation and Categories for Creation requests.
/ajax-undo stops the "undo" button from taking you to another page while providing a text box to provide a reason for the revert.
/redirect-helper(pictured) adds a much better interface for editing and redirects, including categorization, for which valid categories are dictated by /redirect-helper.json.
/rmtr-helper helps process technical requested moves without being able to actually move them.
Guycn2/UserInfoPopup(pictured) adds a flyout after the watchlist star on userspace pages that displays the common information you might use about a user.
Jeeputer/editCounter, under userspace, adds a portlet link to count your edits by namespace, put them in a table, and put that table in a hardcoded subpage, all in the background.
Hilst/Scripts/sectionLinks converts all section links to use the § sign, which are known to be preferred over the ugly # by 99% of the devils I've met.
PrimeHunter/Category source.js adds portlet links to tell you where a category for an article comes from and supports those from template transclusions.
Sophivorus's MiniEdit adds some nice, li'l buttons next to paragraphs to edit their wikitext with a minimal interface.
Edit-listings
Dragoniez/ToollinkTweaks adds more and customizable links next to users in page history, logs, watchlist, recent changes, etc.
Firefly/more-block-info optimizes the display of rangeblocks in contribution pages. Doesn't work outside the English locale of any wiki, unfortunately.
NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AjaxLoader makes paging links (e.g. older 50, 500, newest) load without refreshing and makes you realize how slow your internet actually is.
Appearance-ricing
Ahecht/RedirectID adds the redirect target to all redirects. For all the WP:NAVPOPS haters. (Do these exist?)
Dragoniez/MarkBLockedGlobal: Remember the "strike blocked usernames" gadget? Now you can use a red, dotted line to highlight rangeblocks and global locks!
Jonesey/common(pictured) has some styles to overhaul your Vector 2022 experience. It reduces padding everywhere, and makes the top bar animation faster.
Aaron Liu/V22 is a fork that narrows the sidebars instead of upheaving them, reverts the January 2024 dropdown changes, and restores the old page-link color for links that don't go outside the current wiki.
Nardog: SmartDiff is a spiritual successor to Enterprisey/fancy-diffs. It makes the page title part of links in diffs clickable, along with template and parser function calls. Unnamed parameters can be configured per template to also be linked. All links are styled based on the normal CSS classes of rendered links.
For the paranoid: Rublov/anonymize replaces your username at the top of the screen with the generic "User page" text. Remember, it is your duty to persuade everyone that editing is an honor.
/AjaxBlock provides a dialog box for easy input of reasons while blocking users.
/Selective Rollback(pictured) provides a dialog box to customize rollback edit summaries and does them without reloading the page. Seriously, why doesn't MediaWiki already do this?
/flickrsearch adds a portlet link to search for uploadable flickr images about the subject.
/randomincategory adds a portlet link when on Category pages to go to a random page in the current category.
Vghfr/EasyTemplates adds a portlet link to automatically insert some of the most common inline {{fix}} templates.
Yes, we're just doing 'em as we go now. Thanks for reading through this looong issue, if you did! I'm sure this'll send a record for the longest issue ev-ah. You may need to wait even longer for the last issue, as our reserve of old-y and goodie scripts have ran out... We encourage you to try and do some of the requests or improvement tasks. See you in Summer, hopefully!
The event will feature lightning talks and a Wiki-fashion show, for which you are encouraged to dress in your finest Wikimedia clothing and accessories (bags, buttons, even books), or clothing connected to the topics you edit on wiki projects.
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.
Our first double issue in almost four years, although we will try to return to a monthly schedule henceforth (incidentally, the last double issue saw Markham's storm petrel at GAN, and this one sees it finally pass FAC).
The March 2024 GAN Backlog Drive starts today; everyone is welcome to participate and help reduce the backlog of GANs.
The January edition of our monthly rolling contest was won by Quetzal1964 with 100 points from 40 articles, mainly related to various species of marine fish. simongraham was second with 80 points from 14 articles on jumping spiders.
The February edition saw Quetzal1964 win for the second time in a row, with 114 points from 43 articles. In second place was Snoteleks, with 21 points from 7 seven articles on various unicellular eukaryotes, including the GA Telonemia.
January DYKs
... that Dacrytherium, literally meaning 'tear beast', was named after its "tear-pit"? (3 January)
... that the wood-pasture hypothesis posits that semi-open wood pastures and not primeval forests are the natural vegetation of temperate Europe? (5 January)
... that until April 2023, when the genusTriassosculda was discovered, the mantis shrimp fossil record contained a gap of more than a hundred million years? (5 January)
... that although Olga Hartman believed that her basic research on marine worms had no practical value, it was applied to experimental studies of oysters? (6 January)
... that Oxford ivy grows towards the light to bloom and then towards the darkness when going to seed? (17 January)
... that S. F. Light(pictured) disliked using his full name? (20 January)
... that the fossil turtle Acherontemys was named for a "river of the fabled lower world"? (26 January)
... that having lived in Central Park for more than a year after becoming homeless, Flaco(pictured) has been accused of being a peeping tom? (19 February)
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: Mike Peel (scheduled to end after 9 March 2024 13:08 (UTC))
Closed request for adminship: Madamebiblio requested for admintool to fight against vandalism, and the request was closed as successful.
New requests for permissions/Bot:
Mfchris84-Bot - Task: Will run scripts on toolforge to automate and schedule edits on bibliographic items. Starting with Swiss online magazine Syntopia Alpina (Q112206291), then continuing by adding swisscovery edition ID (P9907) to version/edition items.
BorkedBot_12 - Task: Update number of viewers/listeners (P5436) with the qualifier YouTube channel ID (P2397) for YouTuber content creators and influencers.
LocodeBot - Task: Match UN/LOCODE (Q499348) to Wikidata entries by ISO 3166-2 region code, name and distance (if defined), important for UN organisations.
Join the Queensbridge Tech Lab edit-a-thon - create and enrich local diverse heroes in Queens, NYC as part of the NYC Open Data Week. March 16, 10:00 - 16:00 EST (UTC -5).
Empowering BHL Staff with Wiki Education’s Wikidata Certificate Course - The Biodiversity Heritage Library blog celebrates committee members completing a Wikidata Certification course led by Will Kent, as part of the Wiki Education. Participants levelled up SPARQL queries, visualisations, federation, modelling and bulk loading and editing.
WiQuizz - from Nuxt and SPARQL WiQuizz allows you to create or play quiz games where content is generated from Wikidata. It could be a fun way to get people interacting with Wikidata!
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Claim Analysis Toolkit, collection of Observable notebooks to visualize simple Wikidata claims
date popularized (point in time the subject became well known to the public, if different from its inception)
Bild der Person bei der Tätigkeit (picture of a person in action, especially for a sportsperson, visual artist, musican, actor. P18 is normally used for portraits)
Newest WikiProjects: Te Papa Research Expeditions - create and enrich metadata and trial research expeditions schema for Te Papa, Dominion and Colonial Museums.
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 Special:Book page (as well as the associated "Create a book" functionality) provided by the old Collection extension has been removed from all Wikisource wikis, as it was broken. This does not affect the ability to download normal books, which is provided by the Wikisource extension.
Maintenance on etherpad is completed. If you encounter any issues, please indicate in this ticket.
Gadgets allow interface admins to create custom features with CSS and JavaScript. The Gadget and Gadget_definition namespaces and gadgets-definition-edit user right were reserved for an experiment in 2015, but were never used. These were visible on Special:Search and Special:ListGroupRights. The unused namespaces and user rights are now removed. No pages are moved, and no changes need to be made.
A usability improvement to the "Add a citation" in Knowledge (XXG) workflow has been made, the insert button was moved to the popup header.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (calendar).
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. 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.
The HTML markup of headings and section edit links will be changed later this year to improve accessibility. See Heading HTML changes for details. The new markup will be the same as in the new Parsoid wikitext parser. You can test your gadget or stylesheet with the new markup if you add ?useparsoid=1 to your URL (more info) or turn on Parsoid read views in your user options (more info).
February 2024 WikiProject Unreferenced articles backlog drive – award
Citation Barnstar
This award is given in recognition to Wil540 art for collecting more than 50 points during the WikiProject Unreferenced articles's FEB24 backlog drive. Your contributions played a crucial role in sourcing 14,300 unsourced articles during the drive. Thank you so much for participating and helping to reduce the backlog! – – DreamRimmer (talk) 18:39, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
WikiNYC: 3/14 Hacking Night + 3/16 Queens Name Explorer
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.
New Zealand report: WikiProject Te Papa Research Expeditions, wrapping up the Auckland / Tāmaki Makaurau local histories project, and the Aotearoa Wikipedian at Large
Poland report: WikiMatejko editing action; The eighth European GLAM Wiki coordinators meet up
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-03-11. Translations are available.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: Zafer - (RfP scheduled to end after 12 March 2024 20:03 (UTC))
Closed request for adminship: Mike Peel 2 - Adminship re-granted, welcome back Mike!
New requests for permissions/Bot:
Mfchris84-Bot 1 - Task: Add swisscovery edition ID (P9907) to instance of (P31) version, edition or translation (Q3331189) based on checking ISBN-13 (P212) or ISBN-10 (P957).
NinoBot - Task: Semi-automatically create version, edition or translation (Q3331189) entries for Spanish Wikisource Index pages from Commons files.
Emijrpbot 10 - Task: Create a written work (Q47461344) and version, edition or translation (Q3331189) item for works and editions in the National Library of Spain datos.bne.es project.
Queer Data Days - Wikidata Gender Diversity Project Event, a pair of virtual events welcoming a range of speakers investigating queer approaches to data and technology. Sign up for March 15 or March 16, 15:00 (CET).
Wikidata Leveling Up Days, an online event and a collection of resources to welcome new people to Wikidata. The online event takes place on April 5-7 and 12-14 with presentations, workshops and discussions. The program is open to contributions. Learn more about the project at the website WiGeDi.
Wikibase Intro (Dutch) - Bart Magnus writes an article about the benefits of Wikibase for the Flemish Association for Library, Archives & Documentation (VVBAD).
Multilingual entity linking and global insights - Ontotext are developing AI products that can read text and establish of the same concept in different languages (MEL) and between knowledge graphs and plaintext.
Bosnia and Herzegovina - This project aims to be a central hub for the curation of all items (biographical, cultural, geographical, organizational, etc.) related to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Te Papa Research Expeditions - aims to create or enrich Wikidata with data on research expeditions undertaken by Te Papa/ Dominion Museum/Colonial Museum and institutional staff
WikiProject Highlights: Looted heritage - this WikiProject is calling for Item suggestions to work on. The scope includes all forms of looted heritage; artworks, sacred items, human remains, and other forms of tangible and intangible artifacts that may be considered a part of a people's heritage.
Newest database reports: unmarked supercentenarians - contains instance of (P31) human (Q5) with period of life greater than 110 years and not marked with subject has role (P2868) supercentenarian (Q1200828) or subject has role (P2868) alleged supercentenarian (Q106991708).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 March. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (calendar).
After consulting with various communities, the line height of the text on the Minerva skin will be increased to its previous value of 1.65. Different options for typography can also be set using the options in the menu, as needed.
The active link color in Minerva will be changed to provide more consistency with our other platforms and best practices.
Structured data on Commons will no longer ask whether you want to leave the page without saving. This will prevent the “information you’ve entered may not be saved” popups from appearing when no information have been entered. It will also make file pages on Commons load faster in certain cases. However, the popups will be hidden even if information has indeed been entered. If you accidentally close the page before saving the structured data you entered, that data will be lost.
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. 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.
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Wikidata weekly Summary #620
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-03-18.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: KonstantinaG07 3 (RfP scheduled to end after 20 March 2024 17:37 UTC)
Closed request for adminship: Zafer Adminship granted, welcome Zafer!
New requests for permissions/Bot:
PagesBot - Task: Adds no. of pages statements based on page(s) on items of type: scholarly article. Then adds a reference with based on heuristic equal to inferred from page(s).
Wicci'o'Bot - Task: Import identifiers of new properties created for TheTVDB (Q15616250), nientepopcorn (Q123434360) (and more properties I plan to request to be added shortly) inherent in the film and TV industry, using IMDb ID (P345) as source.
Closed request for comments: Duplicate Refs, Data Model and UI - (RfC closed 15 March 2024 18:57 UTC). The Community showed support for the proposal to change data model and UI for duplicated references. A Phabricator ticket has been opened: T360224
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call March 19, 2024: Please join us on March 19 for a community discussion about how GLAM professionals can incorporate Wikidata/linked data into their work week. Bring your success stories about institutional buy-in and how you’ve communicated the value of linked data to managers and colleagues. We hope to share some strategies that you can take back and use in your own workplace. This will be a followup of sorts to our call last May, and you can review some of what we talked about then, plus slides from our survey here: Notes from May 30, 2023 Meeting on Advocacy for Wikidata & Linked Data in Libraries.Agenda
Connecting Local Archive Data to Wikidata: Focusing on the Archives of National Debt Redemption Movement. By Yun, J., & Oh, S.G. Documents the findings of connecting Wikidata with the Korean NDRM.
Wikidata Lab: Dear Diary (Portugese) - Aims to share resources and capabilities for integration of Wikidata with other free knowledge projects, in particular the Querido Diário project, from Open Knowledge Brasil. Hosted by Porto, É. & Giulio Carvalho, G.
ORCID Scraper - helps users get DOIs from orcid.org for a specific author and curate them using Scholia. It gives users an overview of which DOIs are missing and helps them easily import missing articles one by one.
Newest WikiProjects: Polish Socialist Party - aims to document and enrich data and items (Leadership, sports clubs, commemorated buildings, art, publications etc.) that are connected with the Polish Socialist party.
WikiProject Highlights:
RfC: Slowking4 (2) - Comments are required on actions against the named editor.
Showcase Items: Mahatma Gandhi - The "Great Soul", lawyer, political ethicist and leader of the non-violent resistance to end Imperial British occupation of India.
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 notice "Language links are at the top of the page" that appears in the Vector 2022 skin main menu has been removed now that users have learned the new location of the Language switcher.
IP info feature displays data from Spur, an IP addresses database. Previously, the only data source for this feature was MaxMind. Now, IP info is more useful for patrollers.
The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes.
RevisionSlider is an interface to interactively browse a page's history. Users in right-to-left languages reported RevisionSlider reacting wrong to mouse clicks. This should be fixed now.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 March. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 March. It will be on all wikis from 21 March (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC.
2024 Women's Wiki Month Datathon (Indonesian) Between 24 - 26 March 2024, Wikimedia Indonesia is hosting a competitive Data-thon with Prizes available for editing and enriching Wikidata items on the topic of Women's Health. Full details on the project page.
Levelling Up Days 2024 is an online event designed to welcome new people to Wikidata, upgrade their editing skills and find out about useful tools and apps. Join us for a series of videos and discussions regarding Wikidata and its uses in and outside of the Wikimedia projects.
Program - the live portions of the event take place across the weekends 5-7 and 12-14 April
Ontology Explorer, also an Observable notebook, explore the subclasses in front or behind a Wikidata Item.
Tool of the week
Members of European Parliament by pac02. Explore visualisations of MEP's in the European Parliament. Country of origin, gender, political alignment and other properties from Wikidata can be explored.
Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year 2023 - We encourage you to nominate and vote for research papers published in 2023 that focused on or benefited the Wikimedia projects (we're not biased but hope you vote for Wikidata-based Papers). Please submit your nominations by April 18, 2024.
In preparation for the Research Track of the 11th Wiki Workshop, there is now a Call for Contributions for the event scheduled virtually on June 20, 2024 (tentatively 12:00-19:00 UTC). The Wiki Workshop aims to bring together researchers who study all aspects of the Wikimedia Projects. We hope Wikidata and Wikibase are well represented! Submission deadline: April 22, 2024 (23:59 AoE)
Showcase Lexemes: अग्नि -the Sanskrit word for 'fire' and also the Hindu God of fire 'Agni'
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We worked on the ability to create Items via POST /entities/items (phab:T342990)
We worked on making it possible to modify the data of a Property via PATCH /entities/properties/{property_id} (phab:T347394)
EntitySchemas: We are getting back to making architecture improvements to enable the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements.
IP masking: We wrapped up the work on adapting Wikibase for the upcoming IP masking changes.
Query Service: We added the ability to stop a query in the UI in order to not have to wait for a broken query to finish or run into a time-out. You can find the stop button below the run button in the query UI now.
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
An update was made on March 18th 2024 to how various projects load site, user JavaScript and CSS in Vector 2022 skin. A checklist is provided for site admins to follow.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 March. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 March. It will be on all wikis from 28 March (calendar).
SYMBIOSIS: The lichen task force newsletter — April 2024 A look at what we've accomplished, working together
It's been a busy first quarter for the project, with a staggering 12 new good articles added since the beginning of the year. Esculenta has led the charge, with assistance from an editor who is thus far unaffiliated with the project. Many thanks to them and to the reviewers who worked with them to help improve the articles. As ever, there's still plenty to do...
Teloschistaceae appeared on Knowledge (XXG)'s main page as the featured article on 19 February. Kudos to Esculenta, who shepherded the article to its FA star at the end of last year.
All articles (plus lists, categories, redirects, etc.) currently listed under the project's purview have been assessed for their importance and quality. That's nearly 6,000 in total!
We're still working on the outline for the updated lichen article. Once the bare bones have been established and the references collected, we'll start a complete rewrite of this keystone article. Feel free to contribute your ideas!
Newsletter challenge
MariahKRogers accepted the last issue's challenge and updated our Gassicurtia article with four additional species now recognised by Species Fungorum as being in the genus.
This time around, we're looking for someone willing to update the species listed in the Byssoloma article, last checked in April of 2021. Species Fungorum now shows five additional species in the genus. The editor who updates the article 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!
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
Users of the reading accessibility beta feature will notice that the default line height for the standard and large text options has changed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 April. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 April. It will be on all wikis from 4 April (calendar).
Future changes
The Wikimedia Foundation has an annual plan. The annual plan decides what the Wikimedia Foundation will work on. You can now read the draft key results for the Product and Technology department. They are suggestions for what results the Foundation wants from big technical changes from July 2024 to June 2025. You can comment on the talk page.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-03-11. Translations are available.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: MONA.artpublic.bot (Task: The bot's function is to add information about artists specializing in public artwork in Québec, Canada. The bot will initially only add that an artist's genre of work is public art for a set of known public artists in Québec compiled by MONA Montréal from open data sets.)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call April 2, 2024: Come join us for fun data modeling discussions! We'll create breakout rooms in Zoom for people to discuss 4 examples of cultural heritage items to contribute to Wikidata. Each group will choose categories, brainstorm properties for basic and enhanced description, and discuss challenges. Then we'll have some quality time at the end to compare notes and discuss our processes! Agenda
Wikidata Leveling Up Days, everything you need to know about Wikidata: 5, 6, 7, 12, 13 and 14 April. The event is taking place online and the videos are already available on the program page.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs: Galerij der Groten op Wikidata (Dutch) - Wikimedia NL hosted an Edit-A-Thon on the Baroeg project, the task was to document and archive on Wikidata all of the bands that have played at the live music venue, the idea born from a stack of band flyers and posters hung in the bathroom(!) Join the next one Sunday April 14th.
Papers: Understanding Wikidata - Wikidata is extremely valuable as a data source to supplement, validate and extend existing knowledge bases and applications. To effectively utilize Wikidata in a Semantic Web application, one must understand its design, terminology and correspondence with ontological concepts (especially RDF and OWL). This paper attempts to explain and position this information. (by AWesterinen)
Videos
Knowledge (XXG) Weekly: Ep. 255 (Swedish) - Hosted by Jan Ainali and Magnus. This week covers scarcely clicked sources, API uses and wave at beautiful images.
Mapping Linguistic territories using Wikidata and SPARQL - a topic presented by Camilo Fique, shows how to use Wikidata and the WDQS as tools for mapping linguistics. In this example, Camilo uses toponyms, specifically Human Settlements.
Wikidatalite : Search, browse, and navigate Wikidata items with a mobile-friendly, simplified user interface.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
MEPs: Sitelinks and Gender differences - this Notebook by PAC explores the completeness or lack of content differentiated by gender of MEP's in the Wikimedia Projects, helping highlight lack of representation and information.
Azerbaijan - aims to organize data related to Azerbaijan.
WikiProject Paralympics - The goal of WikiProject Paralympics is to improve items about Paralympic Games, Paralympians, and Paralympic events.
Lieder - This project aims to collect all Lieder, Lieder cycles and Poems as well as Composers and Poets related to them.
Cultural venues - The aim of the present project is to create the world’s most complete high-quality database of cultural venues, such as theatres, concert halls, etc.
Cal State University Building/San Bernardino - Aims to document and lists guidelines for the California State University San Bernardino's participation in the California State University Wikidata Building Project.
Epigraphy - Aims to create Items of epigraphs on Wikidata.
Newest database reports: This query shows that there are 8000 botanists with a standard botanical abbreviation, IPNI code, and little else. Help expand, merge, and otherwise help us know who these folks are! (source)
Backlog update: The October drive reduced the article backlog from 11,626 to 7,609 and the redirect backlog from 16,985 to 6,431! Congratulations to Schminnte, who led with over 2,300 points.
Following that, New Page Patrol organized another backlog drive for articles in January 2024. The January drive started with 13,650 articles and reduced the backlog to 7,430 articles. Congratulations to JTtheOG, who achieved first place with 1,340 points in this drive.
Looking at the graph, it seems like backlog drives are one of the only things keeping the backlog under control. Another backlog drive is being planned for May. Feel free to participate in the May backlog drive planning discussion.
It's worth noting that both queues are gradually increasing again and are nearing 14,034 articles and 22,540 redirects. We encourage you to keep contributing, even if it's just a single patrol per day. Your support is greatly appreciated!
2023 Awards
Onel5969 won the 2023 cup with 17,761 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 50/day. There was one Platinum Award (10,000+ reviews), 2 Gold Awards (5000+ reviews), 6 Silver (2000+), 8 Bronze (1000+), 30 Iron (360+) and 70 more for the 100+ barnstar. Hey man im josh led on redirect reviews by clearing 36,175 of them. For the full details, see the Awards page and the Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone for their efforts in reviewing!
Recruitment: A couple of the coordinators have been inviting editors to become reviewers, via mass-messages to their talk pages. If you know someone who you'd think would make a good reviewer, then a personal invitation to them would be great. Additionally, if there are Wikiprojects that you are active on, then you can add a post there asking participants to join NPP. Please be careful not to double invite folks that have already been invited.
Reviewing tip: Reviewers who prefer to patrol new pages within their most familiar subjects can use the regularly updated NPP Browser tool.
Additionally, you are invited to City Tech Library LGBTQIA edit-a-thon at the New York City College of Technology Library in Downtown Brooklyn! Join us in person on April 11th to learn about these great new materials at City Tech Library; to learn about editing Knowledge (XXG); and to help increase representation of LGBTQIA individuals and issues online. All are welcome, new and experienced!
Interested in attending, but not a CUNY student or faculty? Please get in touch; we'll help you navigate City Tech building security. Email Jen: jennifer.hoyer18 (at) citytech.cuny.edu.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-04-08. Translations are available.
Did you manage to see the first weekend and sessions of the Leveling Up Days 2024, well fret not as there is another weekend of Wikidata-related sessions to come. Day 4 begins Friday April 12, join via Jitsi - see you there!
Wikidata - collect and use open data (Italian) - April 19 at the University of Catania, Léa Lacroix and Luca Martinelli (WMIT) will give an overview of Wikidata's use for sharing data, querying data and some of its main applications.
Build Open Data through Wikidata: a database integration model (Taiwanese) - April 9 19:00 - 20:00. Wang Wenyue (WMTW) will lead this discussion on how Wikidata can re-connect and index a topic that may be documented in multiple various places online.
Wikidata editing #113 (English) at Wikidata Leveling Up Days. Ainali and Abbe98 do some live editing on biographies of climate scientists and glaciologists.
Anti-Pattern Analyzer is a static website capable of checking the existence of 'anti-pattern 1' (AP1) occurrences given an entity from Wikidata. It can also check if a new statement would introduce new violations.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Only 13 more days to go! The deadline to submit your project proposal to Wikimedia Deutschland's Open Call for Software Contributions is coming closer and closer. With this call, Wikimedia Deutschland aims to support projects that make Wikidata's data more accessible and usable for a wider audience.
API formatter URL (URI template from which "$1" can automatically be replaced with the effective property value on items; for API access and other machine-readable data)
Type of representation (Property to indicate the '''type of representation''' as a qualifier for Wikimedia Commons SDC Depicts statements of such Wikidata items, indicating the media type of the media file as can be derived from its registered property in Wikidata, being different from P18 (image).)
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
Web browsers can use tools called extensions. There is now a Chrome extension called Citation Needed which you can use to see if an online statement is supported by a Knowledge (XXG) article. This is a small experiment to see if Knowledge (XXG) can be used this way. Because it is a small experiment, it can only be used in Chrome in English.
A new Edit Recovery feature has been added to all wikis, available as a user preference. Once you enable it, your in-progress edits will be stored in your web browser, and if you accidentally close an editing window or your browser or computer crashes, you will be prompted to recover the unpublished text. Please leave any feedback on the project talk page. This was the #8 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
Readers using the Minerva skin on mobile will notice there has been an improvement in the line height across all typography settings.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 April. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 April. It will be on all wikis from 11 April (calendar).
New accounts and logged-out users will get the visual editor as their default editor on mobile. This deployment is made at all wikis except for the English Knowledge (XXG).
WMF GLAM report: Learn to upload to Commons with OpenRefine and get up to date on the International Museum Day, GLAM CSI, WiLMa Network, and WikiWorkshop
Hello and welcome to the April 2024 newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since December. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below. We extend a warm welcome to all of our new members. We wish you all happy copy-editing.
Election results: In our December 2023 coordinator election, Zippybonzo stepped down as coordinator; we thank them for their service. Incumbents Dhtwiki and Miniapolis were reelected coordinators, and Wracking was newly elected coordinator, to serve through 30 June. Nominations for our mid-year Election of Coordinators will open on 1 June (UTC).
Drive: 46 editors signed up for our January Backlog Elimination Drive, 32 of whom claimed at least one copy-edit. Between them, they copy-edited 289 articles totaling 626,729 words. Barnstars awarded are here.
Blitz: 23 editors signed up for our February Copy Editing Blitz. 18 claimed at least one copy-edit and between them, they copy-edited 100,293 words in 32 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Drive: 53 editors signed up for our March Backlog Elimination Drive, 34 of whom claimed at least one copy-edit. Between them, they copy-edited 300 articles totaling 587,828 words. Barnstars awarded are here.
Blitz: Sign up for our April Copy Editing Blitz, which runs from 14 to 20 April. Barnstars will be awarded here.
Progress report: As of 23:17, 11 April 2024 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have processed 109 requests since 1 January 2024, and the backlog stands at 2,480 articles.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from Baffle gab1978 and your GOCE coordinators Dhtwiki, Miniapolis and Wracking.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-04-15. Translations are available.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
AzBot - Task: adding a space in over 7k malformed Dutch descriptions per this request.
DifoolBot 3 - Task: fill in empty English/French/German labels and basic statements for persons with VIAF ID (P214) and a VIAF authority source GND ID (P227), IdRef ID (P269), Bibliothèque nationale de France ID (P268) or Library of Congress authority ID (P244)
The Leveling Up Days 2024 was concluded, you can watch the videos available on the program page and contribute to the captions on Wikimedia Commons.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call April 16, 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call on Tuesday, 16 April, 2024 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter). The LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group is, amazingly, 5 years old this month, and we are planning a very Zoomy celebration befitting our virtual community. We are hoping you can join and share some reflections. Feel free to sign our anniversary card and update your Zoom background to something festive!Agenda
Documenting Nigeria's Supreme Court Cases - this online event is a contest to enrich and connect the verdicts and sitting Judges of Nigerian Supreme Court cases. Points will be awarded for contributions. Event ends: 28 April 00:00 UTC.
Working towards a Brazilian History Knowledge Graph - Mike Young describes the progress towards building a KG on Brazilian history and how Wikidata supported this endeavour, especially for linking poiticians, movements, constitutions, laws and events that may not be notable for individual Knowledge (XXG) articles.
Reimagining cultural heritage data - this article by Jason Evans documents the efforts of the Llyfgrell Genedlaethol Cymru (National Library of Wales) to open their archives and datasets to Wikidata and the creation of their Wikibase-powered SNARC Tool (Semantic Name Authority Repository Cymru).
Wikidata: your friendly (University's) knowledge graph - Christian Erlinger on behalf of the University of Innsbruck has produced this slidedeck showing how Wikidata can be used for science and research communication.
Demonstration of the XML-TEI Wikidata Geocoder Tool (French) - This tool from PhilippGam will showcase how the Wikidata Geocoder tool can extract information such as PersName, PlaceName, geographic coordinates and images from XML-TEI files. Try it here.
Wikidata for open museum data sharing - Rhonda Yearwood explains how Wikidata can facilitate and provide a platform for the open sharing of Museum and Gallery datasets.
Join the Wikidata Open Online Course starting April 22, 2024! Whether you're a beginner taking your first steps, an individual in need of a refresher on Wikidata concepts, or a seasoned trainer looking to level up your skills - this course is right for you. Register here: Wikidata:Open Online Course
Only 6 more days to submit your project proposal to Wikimedia Deutschland's Open Call for Software Contributions. With this call, Wikimedia Deutschland aims to support projects that make Wikidata's data more accessible and usable for a wider audience.
RTE substation ID (identifier of electrical substations operated by RTE in France)
API formatter URL (URI template from which "$1" can automatically be replaced with the effective property value on items; for API access and other machine-readable data)
Type of representation (Property to indicate the '''representation type''' as a qualifier for Wikimedia Commons SDC Depicts statements of such Wikidata items, indicating the media type of the media file as can be derived from its registered property in Wikidata, being different from P18 (image).)
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
Between 2 April and 8 April, on wikis using Flagged Revisions, the "Reverted" tag was not applied to undone edits. In addition, page moves, protections and imports were not autoreviewed. This problem is now fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 April. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 April. It will be on all wikis from 18 April (calendar).
Default category sort keys will now affect categories added by templates placed in footnotes. Previously footnotes used the page title as the default sort key even if a different default sort key was specified (category-specific sort keys already worked).
A new variable page_last_edit_age will be added to abuse filters. It tells how many seconds ago the last edit to a page was made.
Future changes
Volunteer developers are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. Learn more.
Four database fields will be removed from database replicas (including Quarry). This affects only the abuse_filter and abuse_filter_history tables. Some queries might need to be updated.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-04-22. Translations are available.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
OpeninfoBot - Task: Importing financial data (assets, equity, revenue, EBIT, net profit) from openinfo.uz to entries on public Uzbek companies in Wikidata.
IntegrationBot - Task: retrieve information from Wikidata and contribute data back
Mishramilan (মিশ্রমিলন), a tool listing words/phrases in different language catalogs and allowing users to match the entries in those catalogs to existing Wikidata lexemes or to create new lexemes based on those entries.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
It's not too late to join the Wikidata Open Online Course, open from April 22 to May 31! Whether you're a beginner taking your first steps, an individual in need of a refresher on Wikidata concepts, or a seasoned trainer looking to level up your skills - this course is right for you. Register here: Wikidata:Open Online Course
There is a new update relative to the experiment with splitting the Wikidata Query Service graph. A new proposal for the split has also been published, feedback will be open until May 15th 2024.
RTE substation ID (identifier of electrical substations operated by RTE in France)
API formatter URL (URI template from which "$1" can automatically be replaced with the effective property value on items; for API access and other machine-readable data)
leaf morphology (characterization of aspects of the shape of a plant’s leaves)
Type of representation (Property to indicate the '''representation type''' as a qualifier for Wikimedia Commons SDC Depicts statements of such Wikidata items, indicating the media type of the media file as can be derived from its registered property in Wikidata, being different from P18 (image).)
is fake of (the kind (class) of elements this item falsifies / is a fake for)
image decay (image decay suffered by an old photograph)
risk group (risk group of a biological agent guiding its initial handling in labs according to the risk group classification defined by the WHO laboratory biosafety manual)
tartan (item's tartan; Tartan is a Scottish cloth pattern symbolizing a clan, region, or group.)
hasFeldpostNumber (Property to link German military units to their respective Feldpost numbers, referencing the specific identifier used during the military communications in the world wars.)
total deposits (total value of deposits held by a bank or financial institution)
Total loans (total value of loans given out by a bank or financial institution)
source of transfer & destination of transfer (entity that a transferred item is initially associated with, before this process associates it with another entity (the destination of transfer) )
type of deterioration (to indicate types of deterioration presented by an artwork, building, artifact, etc.)
rythme narratif (video game mechanic based on the rhythm of the player's actions)
event role (item that describes a role in an event class)
WikiProject NZThesisProject Wikidata library training Christchurch 2024 - The aim is to organize an event to show participants how adding New Zealand collections to Wikidata can be useful, and to train participants to improve Wikidata Items so that tools such as Scholia, which builds academic profiles, will be demonstrated.
WikiProject Algerian History - The goal of this project is to ensure the completeness of the history of Algeria (Q473761) during its historic period to modern time in Wikidata.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
You can nominate your favorite tools for the fifth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations will be open until May 10.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 April. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 April. It will be on all wikis from 25 April (calendar).
Future changes
This is the last warning that by the end of May 2024 the Vector 2022 skin will no longer share site and user scripts/styles with old Vector. For user-scripts that you want to keep using on Vector 2022, copy the contents of Special:MyPage/vector.js to Special:MyPage/vector-2022.js. There are more technical details available. Interface administrators who foresee this leading to lots of technical support questions may wish to send a mass message to your community, as was done on French Knowledge (XXG).
The Growth team will now send quarterly reports to keep you in the loop. Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work.
If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.
Community Configuration
Growth features are currently configurable at Special:EditGrowthConfig. This quarter we are working on making Community Configuration accessible for other MediaWiki developers while also moving Growth feature configuration to the new CommunityConfiguration extension.
An early version of Community Configuration can be tested at Spanish Beta Knowledge (XXG). We plan to release the new Community Configuration extension to pilot wikis (Arabic and Spanish Knowledge (XXG)) in early May, 2024. The first non-Growth team feature to utilize Community Configuration will be Automoderator.
In parallel with the development, the Growth team will propose Community Configuration usage guidelines, Community Configuration design guidelines, and provide technical documentation.
The Growth team conducted an experiment to assess the impact of the “Add an Image” structured task on the Newcomer Homepage's "Suggested Edits" module. This analysis finds that the Add an Image structured task leads to an increase in newcomer participation on the mobile web platform, particularly by making constructive (non-reverted) article edits:
The likelihood that mobile web newcomers make their first article edit (+17.0% over baseline)
The likelihood that they are retained as newcomers (+24.3% over baseline)
The number of edits they make during their first two weeks on the wiki (+21.8% over baseline)
A lower probability of the newcomers' edits will be reverted (-3.3% over baseline).
This feature was developed for Mentors as part of the Growth team's Positive Reinforcement project. When A/B testing on Spanish Knowledge (XXG), we found no significant impact on retention, but we found a significant positive impact on newcomer productivity. However, we concluded that the results weren’t positive enough to justify the time investment from Mentors. We plan to discuss this feature with our pilot wikis, and consider further improvements before scaling this feature further. Meanwhile, communities willing to test the feature can ask to have it deployed. (T361763)
As in previous years, donors were directed to a Thank you page after donation (example). However, this year we tested a new “Try editing Knowledge (XXG),” call to action on the Thank You page. This call to action linked to a unique account creation page. From this account creation page we were able to track Registrations and Activation (editing for the first time). During the English banner campaign, the Donor Thank you page led to 4,398 new accounts, and 441 of those accounts went on to constructively edit within 24 hours. (T352900)
Future work
Annual Plan
The Growth team and the Editing team will work on the WE1.2 Key Result in the coming fiscal year. We will start initial discussions with communities soon to help finalize our plans. (T361657)
We plan to A/B test adding a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We are early in the planning phase of this project that will take place first at our pilot wikis and wikis volunteering. We welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at our project talk page.
Nubuke Wikidata Workshop - Sat. 27 April 1100 - 1400 GMT at the Nubuke Foundation, Lome Close Accra, Ghana.
There's still time for nominating your favorite tool in the Coolest Tool Award! To nominate, follow this link. Deadline: 10 May 2024 - winners unveiled at Wikimania 2024
Coordinate Me 2024 - an international Wikidata competition around content with geodata. The competition starts on 1 May 2024 and ends on 31 May 2024.
Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 is just around the corner, taking place in Tallinn, Estonia from 02 - 06 May. We hope there will be lots of Wikidata hacking projects worked on.
Bringing PanglaoDB to 5-star Linked Open Data using Wikidata - This paper documents the experiences mapping PanglaoDB's free text cell types and genes i Wikidata to improve reusability and fairness. By Tiago Lubiana & João Vitor F. Cavalcante.
Exploring Wikidata for Social Science Research (Portugese) - Highlights the relevance of open resources such as Wikidata for the Social Sciences, providing access to information that facilitates research in the social, economic and cultural areas. By Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado.
MWCon Spring 2024 (Day 3) - This session of the MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference explores the different extensions you can use with Wikibase. See the rest of the program here
Getting Started with OpenRefine - Introducing OpenRefine, importing data, filtering and faceting and bulk editing, as well as how to connect to other data sources for reconciling your data. By Margaret Heller & Diana Rusch.
RTE substation ID (identifier of electrical substations operated by RTE in France)
API formatter URL (URI template from which "$1" can automatically be replaced with the effective property value on items; for API access and other machine-readable data)
leaf morphology (characterization of aspects of the shape of a plant’s leaves)
risk group (risk group of a biological agent guiding its initial handling in labs according to the risk group classification defined by the WHO laboratory biosafety manual)
timetable/schedule URL (link to the timetable or the schedule (in PDF, HTML, image format) for the given service or the event schedule. The current timetable/schedule should have preferred rank.)
deterioration (to indicate types of deterioration presented by an artwork, building, artifact, etc.)
Type of representation (Property to indicate the '''representation type''' as a qualifier for Wikimedia Commons SDC Depicts statements of such Wikidata items, indicating the media type of the media file as can be derived from its registered property in Wikidata, being different from P18 (image).)
is fake of (the kind (class) of elements this item falsifies / is a fake for)
tartan (item's tartan; Tartan is a Scottish cloth pattern symbolizing a clan, region, or group.)
hasFeldpostNumber (Property to link German military units to their respective Feldpost numbers, referencing the specific identifier used during the military communications in the world wars.)
total deposits (total value of deposits held by a bank or financial institution)
Total loans (total value of loans given out by a bank or financial institution)
source of transfer & destination of transfer (entity that a transferred item is initially associated with, before this process associates it with another entity (the destination of transfer) )
rythme narratif (video game mechanic based on the rhythm of the player's actions)
event role (item that describes a role in an event class)
Explore data about Tabakalera participants - find biographical information of film director's that have participate din the San Sebastian Film Festival Tabalakera cultural centre.
Mothers on Wikidata - explore the mother and child relationships of Wikidata items.
Presidents of French Universities - curious about which individuals have presided at French Universities and Higher education institutions? This query explores that!
Showcase Items: Jerzy Spława-Neyman - A polish Statistician, the first to introduce a confidence interval to statistical hypothesis testing.
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
Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.
The appearance of talk pages changed for the following wikis: Azerbaijani Knowledge (XXG), Bengali Knowledge (XXG), German Knowledge (XXG), Persian Knowledge (XXG), Hebrew Knowledge (XXG), Hindi Knowledge (XXG), Indonesian Knowledge (XXG), Korean Knowledge (XXG), Dutch Knowledge (XXG), Portuguese Knowledge (XXG), Romanian Knowledge (XXG), Thai Knowledge (XXG), Turkish Knowledge (XXG), Ukrainian Knowledge (XXG), Vietnamese Knowledge (XXG). These wikis participated to a test, where 50% of users got the new design, for one year. As this test gave positive results, the new design is deployed on these wikis as the default design. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at all wikis in the coming weeks.
Kartographer maps can use an alternative visual style without labels, by using mapstyle="osm". This wasn't working in previews, creating the wrong impression that it wasn't supported. This has now been fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 April. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 May. It will be on all wikis from 2 May (calendar).
This special WikiWednesday will feature a welcome session and beginning of a listening tour by the newly appointed executive director of Wikimedia NYC, the first staff member leading our local non-profit.
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct.
Meeting info:
The newsletter will not be returning to a monthly format (mainly because the author is busy failing every exam imaginable) and is on a bimonthly schedule for the foreseeable future.
The second round of the WikiCup was very competitive, requiring the highest points total to advance since 2014. Two TOL editors, AryKun and Fritzmann2002, advanced to the third round.
The March edition of our monthly rolling contest was won by simongraham, who amassed 118 points from 21 articles on various species of jumping spider; in second place was Quetzal1964 with 109 points from 53 articles on marine ray-finned fish.
Quetzal1964 and simongraham were also the top two in the April edition, although Quetzal was ahead this time, with 68 points to simongraham's 48. In the annual leaderboard, Quetzal and simongraham are in first and second place respectively, with 291 and 246 points; in third place is Snotoleks, with 76 points.
... that the cherry blossom was used symbolically in Japanese World War II propaganda, with falling petals representing "young soldiers' sacrifice for the emperor"? (8 March)
... that the Kīlauea lava cricket disappears from a lava field as soon as any plants start to grow there? (13 March)
... that Julian Assange's lawyer argued that the rules set by the Ecuadorian embassy requiring Assange to take care of his pet cat Michi were "denigrating"? (13 March)
... that mule deer sometimes prefer the flavor of one Rocky Mountain juniper tree, like "ice cream", over another? (21 March)
... that the skeleton panda sea squirt was known on the Internet for its skeleton-like appearance years before its formal description? (26 March)
... that only one fruit but several thousand seeds were known when Allenbya collinsonae was named? (26 March)
... that while named for alliums, the fossil Paleoallium(pictured) was not necessarily directly related to any allium species? (27 March)
... that the extinct genus Mixtotherium, meaning 'mixed beast', has traits of both extinct primates and hyraxes? (28 March)
... that the fossil fern Dickwhitea was described from a single block of chert? (28 March)
... that only six years after its 2016 discovery, the Meratus blue flycatcher(pictured) was found being sold in Indonesian songbird markets? (30 March)
... that the spirit liverwort is called such because of its proximity to the Māori afterlife? (31 March)
... that cultures of the fungus Lentinus brumalis have been flown on three different satellites? (31 March)
... that the English herbalist Nicholas Culpeper claimed that eating alkanet leaves would make a person's spit deadly to serpents? (31 March)
Eufriesea purpurata
Korowai gecko
Paleoallium billgenseli fossil
Male Meratus blue flycatcher
April DYKs
... that despite its name meaning 'unscented', Hypericum × inodorum can smell strongly of goat? (1 April)
... that color-changing cats(artist's impression pictured) could help us communicate with the future? (2 April)
... that the white-tailed jay(example pictured) found in Ecuador and Peru was once thought to have been brought to Mexico by pre-Columbian trade? (5 April)
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
Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.
The appearance of talk pages changed for all wikis, except for Commons, Wikidata and most Wikipedias (a few have already received this design change). You can read the detail of the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at remaining wikis in the coming weeks.
Interface admins now have greater control over the styling of article components on mobile with the introduction of the SiteAdminHelper. More information on how styles can be disabled can be found at the extension's page.
Wikimedia Enterprise has added article body sections in JSON format and a curated short description field to the existing parsed Infobox. This expansion to the API is also available via Wikimedia Cloud Services.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 May. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 May. It will be on all wikis from 9 May (calendar).
When you look at the Special:Log page, the first view is labelled "All public logs", but it only shows some logs. This label will now say "Main public logs".
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-05-06. Translations are available.
The Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 took place in Tallinn, Estonia. Wikimedians from all over came together to hack on a huge variety of topics, including Wikidata and Wikibase topics. See the entire Program
Papers: MisgenderMender - A community-informed approach to interventions of misgendering.
Videos
Intro to Wikidata Query Service - hosted by User:Gnoeee, this comprehensive video will equip newcomers to Wikidata with the skills to effectively start querying Wikidata.
Siobhan Leachman, NZ Citizen Scientist and Wikipedian - CitSciOz23 Keynote Speaker, this prolific editor discusses her passions and workflows for contributing and enriching Wikidata on topics as diverse as women scientists, scientific illustrators, artworks and citation data, moths and more.
WikiSearch from Wikibase Data - Wout Geveart shows how the WikiSearch extension is using Wikibase data to explore and visualise the data in new ways.
WikimediaAPIs: a WM Technology Training Session - Mr. Neechalkaran of the WM Indic MediaWiki Developers Usergroup introduces the function and utility of WM projects APIs, including the REST AOI, the Wikidata API and more.
Wikidata periodic table - Tool by User:Ricordisamoa, to browse all chemical elements available on Wikidata, with atomic number, chemical symbol, and localized label. It also includes two charts of the nuclides, with links to every isotope in Wikidata, colored by half-life or decay mode.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
A new UI mode is available for the online validator for EntitySchemas. It represents validation reports as a table rather than a very long string, and replaces most links with hyperlinks with some of the text behind them; making them easier to read. Currently being tested at https://shex-validator.toolforge.org/packages/shex-webapp/doc/shex-simple-improved.html, we are looking for participants to evaluate this tool. Some experience with editing Wikidata is appreciated, but no experience working with Schemas is required. If you are interested, you can sign up here. We hope to begin interviews around May 13. For more details, visit User:M.alten.tue
Albania report: International Roma Day Editathon in Albania and Kosovo, 2024
Australia report: New images from Central Australia on Wikimedia Commons, Library Science WikiProject students edit Knowledge (XXG) & 1Lib1Ref in Australia and New Zealand
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-05-13. Please help Translate.
using Open Data to Automatically Generate Localised Analogies - Sofia Spatharioti explains how information from Wikidata and Knowledge (XXG) can be used to provide more contextual comparisons when dealing with large numbers, dimensions or statistics.
Thesaurus INAPP in Wikidata (Italian) - Camillo Carlo Pellizzari shows INAPP thesaurus usage on Wikidata and how to normalise keywords assigned to publications.
Authors INAPP on Wikidata (Italian) - Camillo also presents how Wikidata can record biographical data and the presence of authors affiliated with INAPP.
Tool of the week
Wikidata:Projector - is a tool that shows maps and lists with Wikidata items for a specific topic, usually a location. As an example, see the Projector for Corfu
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 Wikisource there is a special page listing pages of works without corresponding scan images. Now you can use the new magic word __EXPECTWITHOUTSCANS__ to exclude certain pages (list of editions or translations of works) from that list.
If you use the user-preference "Show preview without reloading the page", then the template-page feature "Preview page with this template (what's this?)" will now also work without reloading the page.
Kartographer maps can now specify an alternative text via the alt= attribute. This is identical in usage to the alt= attribute in the image and gallery syntax. An exception for this feature is wikis like Wikivoyage where the miniature maps are interactive.
The old Guided Tour for the "New Filters for Edit Review" feature has been removed. It was created in 2017 to show people with older accounts how the interface had changed, and has now been seen by most of the intended people.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 May. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 May. It will be on all wikis from 16 May (calendar).
The Special:Search results page will now use CSS flex attributes, for better accessibility, instead of a table. If you have a gadget or script that adjusts search results, you should update your script to the new HTML structure.
Future changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, main pages will be displayed at full width (like special pages). The goal is to keep the number of characters per line large enough. This is related to the coming changes to typography in Vector 2022. Learn more.
Two columns of the pagelinks database table (pl_namespace and pl_title) are being dropped soon. Users must use two columns of the new linktarget table instead (lt_namespace and lt_title). In your existing SQL queries:
Replace JOIN pagelinks with JOIN linktarget and pl_ with lt_ in the ON statement
Below that add JOIN pagelinks ON lt_id = pl_target_id
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 Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title.
New changes have been made to the UploadWizard in Wikimedia Commons: the overall layout has been improved, by following new styling and spacing for the form and its fields; the headers and helper text for each of the fields was changed; the Caption field is now a required field, and there is an option for users to copy their caption into the media description.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 May. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 May. It will be on all wikis from 23 May (calendar).
The HTML used to render all headings is being changed to improve accessibility. It will change on 22 May in some skins (Timeless, Modern, CologneBlue, Nostalgia, and Monobook). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in all other skins. The developers are also considering the introduction of a Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-05-20. Please help Translate.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
Browse9ja Bot - Task: Automated data retrieval focusing on Nigerian / African-based information, integrating a chatbot, NLP API, knowledge graph, and machine learning model.
DhlizBot - Task: add Dhliz ID (P12696) for persons/films/TV series that exist in Dhliz (Q125594802) database.
Reconciling Shira: Wikibase Cloud and OpenRefine - as part of the Shira project to document and digitise Penn University's Jewish music collections, the author gives a step-by-step process on installing OpenRefine for Wikibase Cloud instances.
Papers
Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo, Storia della collaborazione tra Wikidata e le biblioteche della Rete URBE nel controllo di autorità. Abstract: "The contribution draws a history of the presence of the identifiers of the authority records of the URBE network libraries in Wikidata, and of the collaboration that has evolved since 2020 between the Wikidata community and the cataloguers of the URBE network libraries, relating to the harmonisation of these authority records with Wikidata and the improvement of the quality of the respective data. The first part of the contribution traces the main stages of collaboration in chronological order, while the second part of the contribution presents the main areas in which the collaboration materialises (or can materialise) in the daily authority work carried out by cataloguers in theme-based groupings".
Using Open Data to Automatically Generate Localized Analogies. Numerical analogies that translate unfamiliar measurements into familiar reference objects (e.g., “275k sq miles is roughly as large as Texas”). By "Sofia Eleni Spatharioti, Daniel G. Goldstein, Jake M. Hofman"
Patrimoine spolié : le projet ProvEnhance (French) - A seminae on the looted heritage project on the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium. At timestamp: 55:02 onwards, Wikibase is discussed as a platform to host the Looted Heritage and Provenance research project.
Tool of the week
Wikidata GenderStats measures gender bias at the user level by computing stats on created items.
Created items : a list of items created by a user with labels. This not new but this has been repaired.
taxon synonym of (taxon item (considered a preferred name according to a given reference) of which this taxon name is a synonym - the new property will be the inverse property of {{P|1420}})
Hello all. Another irregular edition of the newsletter. I was inspired to collect this after seeing several medicine-interested editors nominate their first good article. Please review a GA nomination if you have time, and help support our colleagues' efforts:
Knowledge (XXG):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.
Note for the curious: 24,211 of the 57,554 articles (42%) tagged as part of WP:MED have some maintenance tag.
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.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-05-27. Please help Translate.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 28, 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call on Tuesday, 28 May, 2024 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter). Please join us for a community discussion on the LCCN Wikidata Bot with Mary Campany, Steven Folsom, and Matt Miller. 2024-05-28: Wikidata Affinity Group Call Agenda
Coordinate Me 2024 (Spanish): An international Wikidata competition around geolocation content, from towns, hospitals, public art and natural monuments to improve or create Wikidata elements with a coordinate location (P625) in focus countries. Contest ends 31 May 2024.
Libraries using Wikidata: 11 examples - following on from the previous post, this Diff blog highlights 11 projects where Libraries and Librarians are using Wikidata in their projects.
Enhancing KG's with LLM's: A novel approach to keyword extraction and synonym merging. This blog post shows an example of using a Wikidata subgraph with AI to discover new connections and relationships.
ParaNames 1.0: Creating an Entity Name Corpus for 400+ Languages Using Wikidata - ParaNames is a multilingual parallel name resource consisting of 140 million names spanning over 400 languages. Names are provided for 16.8 million entities, and each entity is mapped from a complex type hierarchy to a standard type (PER/LOC/ORG). Using Wikidata as a source, the authors created the largest resource of this type to date.
Knowledge (XXG):WE-Framework: WE-Framework is a tool developed by Sergey Vladimirov that allows editing related Wikidata elements in an article without having to go to Wikidata. When you save your Wikidata edit, it will reference the utility in the edit summary.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikimedia Deutschland is looking for a machine learning project manager to make it easier to use Wikidata's data in machine learning settings.
taxon synonym of (taxon item (considered a preferred name according to a given reference) of which this taxon name is a synonym - the new property will be the inverse property of {{P|1420}})
protonym of (taxon item of which this taxon name is a protonym (original name, for zoological taxa) - inverse property of {{P|1403}})
replaced synonym of (taxon item which replaced this taxon name (now only a synonym) - inverse property of {{P|694}})
student count by gender (I think there should be a way to document the number of students at a university by their gender, as data for student counts (at least if they come from GENESIS Online - german universities) contain that data divided in male and female students. I think it would make more sense to implement that as a qualifier for {{P|2196}} than implementing it as a new property as that wouldn't make old data obsolete, but also it could interfere with tools that retrieve that data automated and are then confused by having multiple counts at the same time.)
Newest database reports: Items without Labels - explore Wikidata Items that are missing a Label. This list is handy for finding abandoned, incomplete or vandalised Items.
EntitySchemas: We continued work on the new datatype for linking to EntitySchemas in statements. We focused on the input so it shows the label of the EntitySchema when entering the ID. Search by label and aliases will follow. (phab:T362004)
Wikibase REST API:
We looked into how to improve error messages.
We wrapped up the route for modifying the data of a Property. (phab:T347394
We are nearing the finish line for the route for creating a new Item. (phab:T342990)
We are continuing work on the route for modifying an Item. (phab:T342993)
Developer advocacy: We are collecting content for a new landing page for developers who want to build applications with Wikidata's data.
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
Several bugs related to the latest updates to the UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons have been fixed. For more information, see T365107 and T365119.
In March 2024 a new addPortlet API was added to allow gadgets to create new portlets (menus) in the skin. In certain skins this can be used to create dropdowns. Gadget developers are invited to try it and give feedback.
Some CSS in the Minerva skin has been removed to enable easier community configuration. Interface editors should check the rendering on mobile devices for aspects related to the classes: .collapsible, .multicol, .reflist, .coordinates, .topicon. Further details are available on replacement CSS if it is needed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 May. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 May. It will be on all wikis from 30 May (calendar).
When you visit a wiki where you don't yet have a local account, local rules such as edit filters can sometimes prevent your account from being created. Starting this week, MediaWiki takes your global rights into account when evaluating whether you can override such local rules.
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our Hacking Sunday at Prime Produce in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. It is intended primarily for technical contributors, though newcomers are welcome as well! The event runs for the whole day, though you are welcome to come by for as little or as long as you'd like.
A documentary filmmaker will be in attendance, working on Rabbit Hole, which aims to document Knowledge (XXG)'s community to showcase how our network tackles important questions about how history is recorded. They will be in attendance to film snippets of this gathering for the documentary. It is completely optional to be a part of the film and there will be protocols in place if you wish to not be filmed. If there are any questions about the filming please reach out to the filmmaker, Meg Vatterott ().
Eat, drink, and bask in the glory of Los Angeles in early June at the 9th not-annual Wiknic!
Saturday, June 8 from 11:30 to 2:30 pm Pan Pacific Park
7600 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90036
Get the details and RSVP here.
(It's a potluck. There's a wish list on the meetup page.)
Get the details and join WikiLA here.
To opt out of future mailings about LA meetups, please remove your name from this list.
<translate> Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-06-03. Please help Translate.</translate>
<translate>
Discussions
Open request for adminship: The Squirrel Conspiracy - RfP scheduled to end after 9 June 2024 06:47 (UTC).
New requests for permissions/Bot: TongcyBot - Task: Linking the Chinese and English Wiktionary, specifically in categories using Template:auto cat, and pages in the Template, Module, Appendix, Reconstruction, and Rhymes namespaces.
Open request for permissions/Bot: IliasChoumaniBot - Task: Automatic updating of data from JSON files on German scientists.
Closed request for comments: IP Masking Engagement - The RfC was closed due to inactivity. Discussions are still welcomed on Meta.
Lexicodays 2024, June 28-30, online event dedicated to Lexicographical Data on Wikidata with a focus on languages of Indonesia. Proposals for the program open until June 20th.
Taxonomies and Ontologies in Knowledge (XXG) and Wikidata: In-Depth Examination of Knowledge Organization Systems. This paper explores the Knowledge Organisation System (KOS) of Knowledge (XXG), Wikidata and gender-related biases contained within. By M. Centelles & N.Ferran-Ferrer.
Wiquizz a quiz generator based on Wikidata and Query.wikidata.org
</translate>
<translate>
Tool of the week
WikiTwister - RoloWiki: Replace the interwiki links of a Knowledge (XXG) article with a pop-up card full of useful Wikidata, & Wikidata Quick Dip: Browse the Wikidata properties used by the pages in a category.
Wikidata:Tools/Potential gadgets is a new page where you can propose to turn CSS and JS scripts into gadgets, so that the can be activated from Preferences instead of through user common.css and common.js pages.
student count by gender (I think there should be a way to document the number of students at a university by their gender, as data for student counts (at least if they come from GENESIS Online - german universities) contain that data divided in male and female students. I think it would make more sense to implement that as a qualifier for {{P|2196}} than implementing it as a new property as that wouldn't make old data obsolete, but also it could interfere with tools that retrieve that data automated and are then confused by having multiple counts at the same time.)
model for (2) (what the subject is a conceptual or scientific model/theory for)
Dynasty (A dynasty is a sequence of rulers from the same family, usually in the context of a monarchy or imperial system but sometimes also appearing in republics. A dynasty can be used to describe the time period in which a person lived, an event happened, a work was created, or a place existed.)
showrunner (person who is responsible for the day-to-day operation of a television show)
antonomasia (epithet or phrase that takes the place of a proper name)
screen size (Size of a display screen as measured along the diagonal)
Who has worked with this Celebrity? - this query looks for co-stars, colleagues and co-actors of Seth Rogen. Adjust this value for other celebrities or professionals.
Schema examples: Tamkang University location - building and location entities associated with Tamkang University, Taiwan.
Showcase Items: Ferdinand Magellan - 15th Century Portugese explorer who led the first expedition to circumnavigate the Globe (despite his death in the Philippines).
Showcase Lexemes: Be - The english copular verb that helps express all of existence.
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
It is now possible for local administrators to add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without JavaScript. Documentation is available.
The message name for the definition of the tracking category of WikiHiero has changed from "MediaWiki:Wikhiero-usage-tracking-category" to "MediaWiki:Wikihiero-usage-tracking-category".
One new wiki has been created: a Knowledge (XXG) in Kadazandusun (w:dtp:)
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 June. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 June. It will be on all wikis from 6 June (calendar).
Future changes
Next week, on wikis with the Vector 2022 skin as the default, logged-out desktop users will be able to choose between different font sizes. The default font size will also be increased for them. This is to make Wikimedia projects easier to read. Learn more.
This is a sequel event to the 2023 Governors Island Wiknic and will feature a workshop led by AfroCrowd at the ArtCrawl Harlem house. We'll also encourage collaboration for wiki-coverage of ArtCrawl Harlem's current exhibition at Governors Island.
All are welcome, new and experienced!
Bring a picnic blanket and some potluck, as well as some sunscreen! We'll also provide sandwiches for everyone, and maybe some NYC pizza too, but we encourage you to bring your own favorite dishes to share, especially for those food cultural topics you would like to improve on Knowledge (XXG).
Hello and welcome to the June 2024 newsletter, a quarterly-ish digest of Guild activities since April. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below.
Election news: Wanted: new Guild coordinators! If you value and enjoy the GOCE, why not help out behind the scenes? Nominations for our mid-year coordinator election are now open until 23:59 on 15 June (UTC). Self-nominations are welcome. Voting commences at 00:01 on 16 June and continues until 23:50 on 30 June. Results will be announced at the election page.
Blitz: Nine of the fourteen editors who signed up for the April 2024 Copy Editing Blitz copy edited at least one article. Between them, they copy edited 55,853 words comprising twenty articles. Barnstars awarded are available here.
Drive: 58 editors signed up for our May 2024 Backlog Elimination Drive and 33 of those completed at least one copy edit. 251 articles and 475,952 words were copy edited. Barnstars awarded are here.
Progress report: As of 05:23, 8 June 2024 (UTC) , GOCE copyeditors have completed 161 requests since 1 January and the backlog stands at 2,779 articles.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from Baffle gab1978 and your GOCE coordinators Dhtwiki, Miniapolis and Wracking.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Albania report: Summer of Wikivoyage Edit-a-thon in Kruja; Traditional Albanian food photography competition
Brazil report: Open licensing guide from Midiateca Capixaba; Activities in Rio de Janeiro; First batch from LabDOC; New batch from NeuroMat; Hercule Florence photowalk
Czech Republic report: International discussion on the role of media and new GLAM partnership on the horizon
India report: Digitization concludes for Behar Herald and a digitization workshop held for libraries in Maharashtra
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-06-10. Please help Translate.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: Kadı - RfP scheduled to end after 14 June 2024 17:51 (UTC)
Closed request for adminship: The Squirrel Conspiracy - Closed as successful. Welcome back Squirrel!
New requests for permissions/Bot:
MDanielsBot 2 Task(s) - Replace translations of descriptions and labels.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call June 11, 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call on Tuesday, 11 June, 2024 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter). Please join us for a community discussion on SMALL GLAM SLAM Pilot 1 with Ismael Olea. Link to agenda.
Celtic Knot Wikimedia Conference, September 25-27, 2024 in Waterford City, Ireland. This conference usually hosts Wikidata-related sessions. You can now propose your contributions to the program until July 14th, and apply for a scholarship until June 30th (full announcement and links)
WikiIndaba conference 2024, 4 - 6 October 2024 in Johannesburg, South Africa. This conference typically hosts Wikidata-related sessions. Program submissions 05 - 30 June 2024.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
100,000 video games on Wikidata - Wikidata’s WikiProject Video games has just passed a major milestone: 100,000 video game (Q7889) items on Wikidata.
Videos
(es) How to strengthen the public domain with Wikidata? - This is a Spanish-speaking Wikitools workshop exploring Paulina (see: Tool of the Week), a search interface powered by Wikidata for finding and exploring author's and whether their works are in the public domain.
Notebooks
Radio France meets Wikidata 😘: Extracting IDs from radio France and matching them with Wikidata using P10780 property
Paulina: Data for the Public Domain - Explore the cultural heritage of humanity. Search Paulina by author and discover if they have freely accessible works in the Public Domain.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Propose to transform an existing CSS or Javascript script (i.e. scripts that you can enable in your common.css and common.js pages) into a gadget: Wikidata:Tools/Potential gadgets
construction time ({{Construction time refers to the time which was needed to build a certain building, which sometimes took more than one year, especially in former times
| de = <!-- Die Bauzeit bezieht sich auf die Zeit, die benötigt wurde, um ein Gebäude zu errichten, was manchmal länger, gerade früher, als ein Jahr brauchte -->
<!-- | xx = Beschreibungen in anderen Sprachen -->
}})
Honoris Causa France - aims to coordinate the actions carried out in terms of reporting the attributions of honorary doctorate (Q11415564) by French universities.
HolyWells - aims to organize Items around Holy Wells.
OghamStones - aims to organise Items around Ogham Stones
Visibilizando el dominio público colombiano - to help the unique, permanent and visible identification, worldwide, of Colombian authors in the public domain, within the framework of Colombian legislation.
The UnpatrolledEdits gadget now shows a notice when there are older and multiple unpatrolled edits, previously it only showed the notice when the most recent edit was unpatrolled. Please help translate the messages here.
Query Service: We are fixing a bug where no examples are shown in the example dialog (phab:T366871)
EntitySchemas: We have enabled the new datatype for testing on test.wikidata.org and are preparing the rollout to Wikidata (phab:T365686)
Item UI: We fixed an issue where labels were not shown for badges or after making an edit (phab:T366236)
Wikibase REST API: We have continued the work on the route for modifying the data of an Item (phab:T342993)
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 software used to render SVG files has been updated to a new version, fixing many longstanding bugs in SVG rendering.
The HTML used to render all headings is being changed to improve accessibility. It was changed last week in some skins (Vector legacy and Minerva). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in Vector-2022. The developers are still considering the introduction of a Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.
The HTML markup used for citations by Parsoid changed last week. In places where Parsoid previously added the mw-reference-text class, Parsoid now also adds the reference-text class for better compatibility with the legacy parser. More details are available.
Problems
There was a bug with the Content Translation interface that caused the tools menus to appear in the wrong location. This has now been fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 June. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 June. It will be on all wikis from 13 June (calendar).
The new version of MediaWiki includes another change to the HTML markup used for citations: Parsoid will now generate a <span class="db-bXctY2l0ZS1iYQ"> wrapper for both named and unnamed references for better compatibility with the legacy parser. Interface administrators should verify that gadgets that interact with citations are compatible with the new markup. More details are available.
On multilingual wikis that use the <translate> system, there is a feature that shows potentially-outdated translations with a pink background until they are updated or confirmed. From this week, confirming translations will be logged, and there is a new user-right that can be required for confirming translations if the community requests it.
Lexico Days 2024 is coming up. June 28 - 30, there will be a packed programme of presentations, discussions and workshops on Lexicographical data. This is an online event.
Diff Blog: Why Wikimedia (and Wikidata) is an antidote to disinformation - Wiki Movimento Brasil discuss how Wikidata has equipped researchers, activists and the public the ability to safeguard truths about human rights abuses during the civic-military Brazilian dictatorship between 1964 - 1985.
(de) 20 Years of WMDE - scroll down the timeline and see what Wikimedia Deutschland has done in its 20 years of existence!
Papers
Linking Named Entities in Diderot's Encyclopédie to Wikidata - This paper describes the annotation of more than 10,300 of the Encyclopédie entries with Wikidata identifiers enabling them to be connect to the graph of structured data. By Piere Nugues.
Towards a linking between WordNet and Wikidata - The authors propose linking the 2 described reosurces through hapax legomenon and natural language processing techniques to create new connections and uses. By J. McCrae & D. Cillessen.
What is Wikidata? How to use Wikidata? - Asaf Bartov hosts this informative session on Wikidata at the Wikimania Singapore 2023. If you're attending Wikimania 2024, this session will prepare you for other Wikidata-related sessions.
Creating a Lexeme Database from Scratch - The runup to Wikimania Katowice has begun. Refresh yourself for upcoming sessions with this Wikidata basics workshop hosted by Leon Liesener.
Music mood (qualifier carrying an emotion (mood) relevant to an audio recording (musical or not))
ecosystem type (type of ecosystem that the item represents)
construction time (Construction time refers to the time which was needed to build a certain building, which sometimes took more than one year, especially in former times)
ARS3D - statements and properties for an African Red Slip ware 3D artifact data model.
WikiProject Highlights:
(de)Theorie und Praxis in Wikidata - User:Matthiasb uses examples of Highway intersection classification on Wikidata of locations in and around Berlin to highlight inconsistencies between the data model and legal classification. By highlighting a considerable number of differences in a relatively small geographic area, these comments provide further context on an earlier discussion within the German Knowledge (XXG) community on integrating Wikidata further into Knowledge (XXG) articles.
Newest database reports: Badge Stats - How are badges being applied in Wikidata, which items have the most Good or Featured Articles? Savvy editors can use this to enrich said articles in their own Wiki.
Showcase Items: Mordor - A desolate volcanic plain of nauseous gases and shadows. J.R.R Tolkien's blighted land is this week's showcase.
Showcase Lexemes: вода - A Russian word for a clear, vitality-giving liquid, of course it's Water.
Development
EntitySchemas: We are preparing for the rollout of the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements.
Wikibase REST API:
We are continuing the work on the route for modifying an Item (phab:T342993)
We are working on improving errors and error messages in the API
Query Service UI: We fixed a bug. The example dialog was empty and not showing any examples (phab:T366871)
We changed the datatype of two Properties to external ID as requested (phab:T367174)
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
People who attempt to add an external link in the visual editor will now receive immediate feedback if they attempt to link to a domain that a project has decided to block. Please see Edit check for more details.
The dark mode beta feature is now available on category and help pages, as well as more special pages. There may be contrast issues. Please report bugs on the project talk page.
Problems
Cloud Services tools were not available for 25 minutes last week. This was caused by a faulty hardware cable in the data center.
Last week, styling updates were made to the Vector 2022 skin. This caused unforeseen issues with templates, hatnotes, and images. Changes to templates and hatnotes were reverted. Most issues with images were fixed. If you still see any, report them here.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 June. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 June. It will be on all wikis from 20 June (calendar).
Starting June 18, the Reference Edit Check will be deployed to a new set of Wikipedias. This feature is intended to help newcomers and to assist edit-patrollers by inviting people who are adding new content to a Knowledge (XXG) article to add a citation when they do not do so themselves. During a test at 11 wikis, the number of citations added more than doubled when Reference Check was shown to people. Reference Check is community configurable.
Mailing lists will be unavailable for roughly two hours on Tuesday 10:00–12:00 UTC. This is to enable migration to a new server and upgrade its software.
This special online-only WikiWednesday will be dedicated to the Wikimedia Movement Charter referendum, and also to exploring future options of other online-centric events for our Wikimedia NYC chapter.
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct.
Meeting info:
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-06-24. Please help Translate.
Upcoming: Lexicodays, online event dedicated to Lexemes on Wikidata, will take place on June 28-30. It takes place across time zone and both in English and Indonesian. Check the program and find the access links on the event page.
Wikidata in Prometheus - Prometheus is a non-commercial image archive for art and cultural studies. It hosts images from a variety of image and media databases and now works can be connected with Wikidata.
New Mix'n'match feature: For lists of (full or auto) matches where both the MnM entry and the Wikidata Item have coordinates, it now shows the distance between them in the description. (source)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikidata development team at Wikimedia Deutschland is planning a brief survey to understand the various ways people contribute to the project and identify user contribution patterns. A request has been made for a CentralNotice banner to deploy the survey to a broad audience. Your feedback, comments, and questions on this request are welcome: m:CentralNotice/Request/Wikidata Community Survey 2024
The second iteration of the Wikidata:Open Online Course will begin from July 1 until August 11. Whether you're a beginner taking your first steps, an individual in need of a refresher on Wikidata concepts, or a seasoned trainer looking to level up your skills - this course is right for you.
Multilingualism - organizes work around achieving 100% Wikidata multilingualism for every language with MediaWiki internationalization support. It is initiated, developed & supported by Wikimedia Language Diversity community volunteers.
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
Editors will notice that there have been some changes to the background color of text in the diff view, and the color of the byte-change numbers, last week. These changes are intended to make text more readable in both light mode and dark mode, and are part of a larger effort to increase accessibility. You can share your comments or questions on the project talkpage.
The text colors that are used for visited-links, hovered-links, and active-links, were also slightly changed last week to improve their accessibility in both light mode and dark mode.
Problems
You can copy permanent links to talk page comments by clicking on a comment's timestamp. This feature did not always work when the topic title was very long and the link was used as a wikitext link. This has been fixed. Thanks to Lofhi for submitting the bug.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 June. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 June. It will be on all wikis from 27 June (calendar).
Starting 26 June, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link at English Knowledge (XXG), making this feature available for you to use at all wikis. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they were linked to, even if this comment has since been moved elsewhere. You can read more about this feature on Diff or on Mediawiki.org.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-07-01. Please help Translate.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
DifoolBot 4 Task(s) - Split single references containing multiple reference URLs into multiple references.
Bot Bozze Task(s) - Add sitelinks to itwiki draft articles after they've been moved to the main namespace.
New request for comments: Spelling convention for labels and descriptions in English - RfC started 2024-06-25. This RfC requests feedback and input for finding consistency in spelling convention as English has multiple regional variations.
Past: The Lexicodays 2024 was an online event designed to offer a discussion space for the Wikidata community about Lexicographical Data. An archive of some of the slides and session recordings are here c:Category:Lexicodays 2024. More will be added as they become available.
Upcoming:
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 10th July 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Botany-focused Wikidata online workshop online as part of the #IBC2024. Date: Tuesday 9th July at 9pm NZST (GMT+12) / 11 am central Europe. Register here!
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
Querying for audio on Wikidata - This blog post discusses using SPARQL queries on Wikidata to find audio recordings, focusing on musical compositions and their associated genres.
Diff Blog: Imagining a Wikidata future for librarians together - the sixth and final blog post from the LD42023 conference. Silvia Gutiérrez (WMF) and Giovanna Fontenelle (WMF) document the results of the collaborative session on building a bridge between the Library-Wikidata community and WMF.
Library Knowledge as Linked Data: A Wikidata Approach: Contributing to a shared data commons. David Erlandson describes the experiences of using Wikidata for the pilot Program for Cooperative Cataloging to "accelerate the movement towards ubiquitous identifier creation and identity management at the network level".
User:Zvpunry/CreateNewItem - This is a User script to easily add a new Item while editing a Statement and noticing that the desired Item is missing.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The second iteration of the Wikidata:Open Online Course has begun. Class will continue until August 11. Whether you're a beginner taking your first steps, an individual in need of a refresher on Wikidata concepts, or a seasoned trainer looking to level up your skills - this course is right for you.
Newest WikiProjects: Inuktitut - This is the space to organize work to assure that the sum of all knowledge and the supporting infrastructure for necessary services are available in Inuktitut (ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ, Inuktitut).
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
Over the next three weeks, dark mode will become available for all users, both logged-in and logged-out, starting with the mobile web version. This fulfils one of the top-requested community wishes, and improves low-contrast reading and usage in low-light settings. As part of these changes, dark mode will also work on User-pages and Portals. There is more information in the latest Web team update.
Logged-in users can now set global preferences for the text-size and dark-mode, thanks to a combined effort across Foundation teams. This allows Wikimedians using multiple wikis to set up a consistent reading experience easily, for example by switching between light and dark mode only once for all wikis.
If you use a very old web browser some features might not work on the Wikimedia wikis. This affects Internet Explorer 11 and versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari older than 2016. This change makes it possible to use new CSS features and to send less code to all readers.
Knowledge (XXG) Admins can customize local wiki configuration options easily using Community Configuration. Community Configuration was created to allow communities to customize how some features work, because each language wiki has unique needs. At the moment, admins can configure Growth features on their home wikis, in order to better recruit and retain new editors. More options will be provided in the coming months.
Editors interested in language issues that are related to Unicode standards, can now discuss those topics at a new conversation space in MediaWiki.org. The Wikimedia Foundation is now a member of the Unicode Consortium, and the coordination group can collaboratively review the issues discussed and, where appropriate, bring them to the attention of the Unicode Consortium.
One new wiki has been created: a Knowledge (XXG) in Mandailing (w:btm:)
Problems
Editors can once again click on links within the visual editor's citation-preview, thanks to a bug fix by the Editing Team.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-07-08. Please help Translate.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 10th July 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Registration for Wikimania 2024 is open! In-person participants: please register until 26 July, 11:59 p.m., UTC. Virtual participants can register anytime. If you received a scholarship from the Wikimedia Foundation, you will receive an email with a registration code and instructions.
Tool of the week
User:Teester/EntityShape.js - a userscript that adds an input box to a Wikidata page wherein you can enter an EntitySchema (such as E10). When you click "Check", checks whether each statement and property conforms to the schema. It then displays a summary at the top of the Item for each property indicating whether they conform or not. It also adds a badge to each statement and each property on the page indicating whether they conform or not.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata teams' development goals for the third quarter of 2024 have been updated: Wikidata:Development plan
indexer (entity responsible for compiling an index of a book, database, website or other forms of media publications in the form of a methodical arrangement of records designed to enable users to locate information quickly. Example: Hazel K. Bell (Q70226489))
WorldCyclingStats ID (identifier on the website WorldCyclingStats (www.worldcyclingstats.com))
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 CampaignEvents extension is now available on Meta-wiki, Igbo Knowledge (XXG), and Swahili Knowledge (XXG), and can be requested on your wiki. This extension helps in managing and making events more visible, giving Event organizers the ability to use tools like the Event registration tool. To learn more about the deployment status and how to request this extension for your wiki, visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-wiki.
Editors using the iOS Knowledge (XXG) app who have more than 50 edits can now use the Add an Image feature. This feature presents opportunities for small but useful contributions to Knowledge (XXG).
A problem with the color of the talkpage tabs always showing as blue, even for non-existent pages which should have been red, affecting the Vector 2022 skin, has been fixed.
Future changes
The Trust and Safety Product team wants to introduce temporary accounts with as little disruption to tools and workflows as possible. Volunteer developers, including gadget and user-script maintainers, are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. The team has created documentation explaining how to do the update. Learn more.
Australia report: Partner Project between Wikimedia Australia, the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers (ANZSI) and the School of Information and Communication Studies at Charles Sturt University (CSU SICS)
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for the inaugural event of the beginner-focused Wikicurious series at Civic Hall! All are welcome, and newcomers and aspiring editors are especially encouraged to attend.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-07-15. Please help Translate.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: SpinachBot - Task/s: AI agent-enabled question answering through the creation and execution of complex SPARQL queries on Wikidata. Users tag the bog with wikidata-related questions, and it tries to come up with an answer by iteratively creating SPARQL queries.
An Intelligent System: What I learned through taking an introductory Wikidata course - The author, Anne-Christine Hoff, dispels misconceptions about Wikidata. She highlights that it is a relational communication system, not solely bot-driven, and allows users worldwide to add localized data in multiple languages, creating a self-structuring repository of information
Merge and diff - blog post by Magnus about adding new properties (taxon data speficially, NCBI, GBIF, and iINaturalist) to the AC2WD tool. If you have the user script installed on Wikidata (see tool below), AC2WD will automatically show up on relevant taxon items.
Online workshop Upskilling in Wikidata for maximum impact IBC 2024 - Recording of the virtual Wikidata workshop given on the 9th of July 2024. An onboarding and introductory event in anticipation of a full in-person workshop to be held at the International Botanical Congress 2024 in Madrid on the 21st of July 2024
User:Magnus Manske/ac2wd.js - This script adds an "AC2WD" link in the tools sidebar. When you click on it, it uses the AC2WD tool to check the item for certain Authority Control IDs (eg VIAF). It then checks these AC datasets for statements (and more AC IDs). It will then add any new information it found as new statements, or add more references to existing statements where possible. A green checkmark will be appended to the link if data was added (reload the page to see), otherwise a "—" if no new data was available.
myfixguide.com (photos about how to disassemble hardware)
indexer (entity responsible for compiling an index of a book, database, website or other forms of media publications in the form of a methodical arrangement of records designed to enable users to locate information quickly)
Newest WikiProjects: Human Cells - dedicated to improve our coverage of information about these fundamental entities that compose organisms. The project focuses mainly on two kinds of cell classes: species-agnostic classes, such as neutrophil (Q188417), and human-specific classes, such as human neutrophil (Q101405102).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Wikimedia developers can now officially continue to use both Gerrit and GitLab, due to a June 24 decision by the Wikimedia Foundation to support software development on both platforms. Gerrit and GitLab are both code repositories used by developers to write, review, and deploy the software code that supports the MediaWiki software that the wiki projects are built on, as well as the tools used by editors to create and improve content. This decision will safeguard the productivity of our developers and prevent problems in code review from affecting our users. More details are available in the Migration status page.
The Wikimedia Foundation seeks applicants for the Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). This group will bring technical contributors and Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform. Council members will evaluate and consult on the movement's product and technical activities, so that we develop multi-generational projects. We are looking for a range of technical contributors across the globe, from a variety of Wikimedia projects. Please apply here by August 10.
Editors with rollback user-rights who use the Knowledge (XXG) App for Android can use the new Edit Patrol features. These features include a new feed of Recent Changes, related links such as Undo and Rollback, and the ability to create and save a personal library of user talk messages to use while patrolling. If your wiki wants to make these features available to users who do not have rollback rights but have reached a certain edit threshold, you can contact the team. You can read more about this project on Diff blog.
Next week, functionaries, volunteers maintaining tools, and software development teams are invited to test the temporary accounts feature on testwiki. Temporary accounts is a feature that will help improve privacy on the wikis. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page.
Editors who upload files cross-wiki, or teach other people how to do so, may wish to join a Wikimedia Commons discussion. The Commons community is discussing limiting who can upload files through the cross-wiki upload/Upload dialog feature to users auto-confirmed on Wikimedia Commons. This is due to the large amount of copyright violations uploaded this way. There is a short summary at Commons:Cross-wiki upload and discussion at Commons:Village Pump.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-07-22. Please help Translate.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
DannyS712 bot - Task/s: I want to get approval for a bot with translation admin rights that will automatically mark pages for translations if and only if the latest version is identical to the version that is already in the translation system, i.e. only pages with no "net" changes in the pending edits.
DerIchBot - Task/s: Adding data about schools provided by the German and Austrian governments to wikidata.
DifoolBot 5 - Task/s: Change reference URLs into the related ID property and merge references with the same ID property.
AroundTheBot - Task/s: Automated import of Albanian nouns with IPA from Wiktionary, with the long-term goal of using this data to do pronunciation-based comparison/word evolution between languages.
Past: Wikimedia Indonesia hosted the 2024 Data Visualization Competition from June 5 to 18. The event featured data visualizations (posters and graphics) and short essays using data from Wikidata. Visit the competition page (in Indonesian) to view the winning entries.
Upcoming: Wikidata's 12th birthday decentralized events will take place in October and November 2024. Feel free to browse the documentation pages to learn how to organize an event in your area, get funding, and get in touch with other organizers.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Papers:
Representación de datos abiertos con Wikidata Query Service (Q126917814). This paper details the Wikidata Query Service, for the creation of data visualizations. All visualization options available in the WQS are explored, accompanied by example queries that introduce the implementation of these visualizations. By Ángel Obregón-Sierra and Silvia Cecilia Anselmi.
Paulina, a new tool for exploring public domain works.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
WMF Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) invites interested volunteers to apply. As part of the movement strategy recommendation for "Coordinating Across Stakeholders," the PTAC will bring technical contributors and the Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform.
indexer (entity responsible for compiling an index of a book, database, website or other forms of media publications in the form of a methodical arrangement of records designed to enable users to locate information quickly)
Reference Verification - a research and development project aimed at helping Wikidata editors check the quality of external references based on various types of AI/ML models.
NZWomenPhotographers - aims to improve information about New Zealand women photographers, based on a dataset provided by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
Newest database reports: Items with P569=P570 - Items with instance of (P31) --> human (Q5) and the same year in date of birth (P569) and date of death (P570) (2024-07-22)
Showcase Lexemes: water (L3302) - (S1) common liquid substance (S2) chemical compound of hydrogen and oxygen (H₂O) (S3) a body of water, usually a river, a lake, or an ocean
Development
mul: We fixed the last blocker for the limited MUL rollout to Wikidata on July 29th (phab:T362917)
EntitySchemas:
We fixed a misplaced background color in EntitySchema (phab:T369283)
We’re investigating how to make EntitySchemas searchable by label (phab:T362005)
Query Service: preparation for the graph split is continuing by the Search Platform Team. We started looking into adapting the constraints checks for it (phab:T369079)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature News
Stewards can now globally block accounts. Before the change only IP addresses and IP ranges could be blocked globally. Global account blocks are useful when the blocked user should not be logged out. Global locks (a similar tool logging the user out of their account) are unaffected by this change. The new global account block feature is related to the Temporary Accounts project, which is a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors that are no longer made public.
Later this week, Wikimedia site users will notice that the Interface of FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") is improved and consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface and Wikimedia's design system. The FlaggedRevs interface experience on mobile and Minerva skin was inconsistent before it was fixed and ported to Codex by the WMF Growth team and some volunteers.
Wikimedia site users can now submit account vanishing requests via GlobalVanishRequest. This feature is used when a contributor wishes to stop editing forever. It helps you hide your past association and edit to protect your privacy. Once processed, the account will be locked and renamed.
Have you tried monitoring and addressing vandalism in Knowledge (XXG) using your phone? A Diff blog post on Patrolling features in the Mobile App highlights some of the new capabilities of the feature, including swiping through a feed of recent changes and a personal library of user talk messages for use when patrolling from your phone.
Wikimedia contributors and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) organisations can now learn and measure the impact Wikimedia Commons is having towards creating quality encyclopedic content using the Commons Impact Metrics analytics dashboard. The dashboard offers organizations analytics on things like monthly edits in a category, the most viewed files, and which Wikimedia articles are using Commons images. As a result of these new data dumps, GLAM organisation can more reliably measure their return on investment for programs bringing content into the digital Commons.
Project Updates
Come share your ideas for improving the wikis on the newly reopened Community Wishlist. The Community Wishlist is Wikimedia’s forum for volunteers to share ideas (called wishes) to improve how the wikis work. The new version of the wishlist is always open, works with both wikitext and Visual Editor, and allows wishes in any language.
Learn more
Have you ever wondered how Wikimedia software works across over 300 languages? This is 253 languages more than the Google Chrome interface, and it's no accident. The Language and Product Localization Team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports your work by adapting all the tools and interfaces in the MediaWiki software so that contributors in our movement who translate pages and strings can translate them and have the sites in all languages. Read more about the team and their upcoming work on Diff.
How can Wikimedia build innovative and experimental products while maintaining such heavily used websites? A recent blog post by WMF staff Johan Jönsson highlights the work of the WMF Future Audience initiative, where the goal is not to build polished products but test out new ideas, such as a ChatGPT plugin and Add a Fact, to help take Wikimedia into the future.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-07-29. Please help Translate.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
GergesBot 2 - Task/s: Edit label when order is added in ar:ويكيبيديا:طلبات نقل عبر البوت (Transfer requests by Bot).
UmisBot - Task/s: This bot will add string representations of units of measurement to units of measurement Wikidata pages.
Wikimania starts on August 7. Here is a list of sessions focused around Wikidata, or have *some* connection to Wikidata: 2024:Program/Wikidata. If something is missing, feel free to add to it, including any Wikidata meetups you may be hosting.
WikiEdu: What I learned taking an introductory Wikidata Course - Anne-Christine Hoff, associate professor of English at Jarvis Christian University, describes her experiences and learnings from taking an intro to Wikidata course, provided by the WikiEdu.org, a project of the Wiki Education Foundation.
A Wikidata-Based Framework for Integrating Heterogeneous Knowledge Sources - This paper presents KIF, a Wikidata-based framework for virtually integrating heterogeneous knowledge sources and discuss how it was used to solve a real integration problem in the domain of chemistry (involving Wikidata, PubChem, and IBM CIRCA). By G. Lima et al.
Intro to Wikidata - This intro to Wikidata was provided for participants of the International Linguistics Olympiad 2024, held in Brasília. Presented by Artur Corrêa Souza and Éder Porto, organised by Wiki Movimento Brasil.
Mining and Modeling Text using Wikibase - the University of Trier is building a knowledge graph on French Enlightenment novels 1751 - 1800 with the use of Wikibase.
The Wikibase REST API, introduced last year on Wikidata, is progressing towards version 1, aiming for a comprehensive release by the end of 2024. We're seeking community feedback to enhance the current API and plan future developments. Please share your thoughts on this page: Feedback on the Wikibase REST API (July/August 2024).
indexer (entity responsible for compiling an index of a book, database, website or other forms of media publications in the form of a methodical arrangement of records designed to enable users to locate information quickly)
object of action (specific object to which an action or class of actions occurs)
object class of action (class of objects (including substances) to which an action or class of actions may occur)
Military Equipment in Policing - Project to connect police equipment defined as military equipment to capabilities, uses, manufacturers, descriptions, etc.
Quran - to collaborate on Quran-related topics and organise Quran Wikidatans; help others and get help whenever needed to improve Quran-related items (and properties); create Quran-specific tools' libraries, queries, and resources;
IP masking: The feature was rolled out to test wikis and we fixed a few issues uncovered by this.
EntitySchemas: We are working to make it possible to search for the EntitySchema by its label and aliases when making a new statement linking to an EntitySchema (phab:T362005)
Integration in other Wikimedia projects: We are working on moving the Wikidata Item link from the tools section of the sidebar (phab:T66315)
REST API:
We changed the data-type field to data_type in JSON responses (phab:T368130)
We are continuing the work on improving error handling and messages
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Editors using the Visual Editor in languages that use non-Latin characters for numbers, such as Hindi, Manipuri and Eastern Arabic, may notice some changes in the formatting of reference numbers. This is a side effect of preparing a new sub-referencing feature, and will also allow fixing some general numbering issues in Visual Editor. If you notice any related problems on your wiki, please share details at the project talkpage.
Bugs status
Some logged-in editors were briefly unable to edit or load pages last week. These errors were mainly due to the addition of new linter rules which led to caching problems. Fixes have been applied and investigations are continuing.
Editors can use the IP Information tool to get information about IP addresses. This tool is available as a Beta Feature in your preferences. The tool was not available for a few days last week, but is now working again. Thank you to Shizhao for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Project updates
There are new features and improvements to Phabricator from the Release Engineering and Collaboration Services teams, and some volunteers, including: the search systems, the new task creation system, the login systems, the translation setup which has resulted in support for more languages (thanks to Pppery), and fixes for many edge-case errors. You can read details about these and other improvements in this summary.
There is an update on the Charts project. The team has decided which visualization library to use, which chart types to start focusing on, and where to store chart definitions.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in Czech (voy:cs:)
The Growth team released Community Configuration at all Wikipedias. You can access it at Special:CommunityConfiguration.
This new special page replaces Special:EditGrowthConfig. For now, all Growth features can be configured using Community Configuration. Configuration for AutoModerator (T365046) and other features will be available in the future.
We will add a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We have released a simple version available to beta wikis. We will conduct an A/B test at our pilot wikis using the new Metrics Platform. We still welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at our project talk page.
As part of the Growth team 2024/2025 Annual Plan, the Growth team will explore various ways to increase the percentage of newcomers who successfully start editing.
Editing a Knowledge (XXG) page requires too much context and patience. It means many trial and error for newcomers to contribute, meaning a steeper learning curve and potential discouraging reverts. To support a new generation of volunteers, we will increase the number and availability of smaller, structured, and more task-specific editing workflows (E.g. Edit Check and Structured Tasks). The Growth team will primarily focus on Structured Tasks, while working closely with the Editing team to ensure our work integrates well with Edit Check.
Stay informed
Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work. If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.
Hello, Wil540 art. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:Michael Couzens, a page you created, has not been edited in at least 5 months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.
If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.
Hey there, welcome to the 25th issue of the Knowledge (XXG) Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 March 2024. We've got a ton of wonderful editors taking back their pitchforks today. Don't worry, for they come in peace, to forcibly fix and extend existing scripts you use with sheer passion. There's so many, them forks have got what's basically their own column now! gift us with some rows before it's too late Aaron Liu (talk) 04:01, 1 August 2024 (UTC)
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
To a lesser extent, the same goes for PrimeHunter/Search sort. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
An easily configurable script to add a link to the #p-vector-user-menu-overflow portlet with a name, target, and icon. This one should be a relatively easier one. I would do it myself, but I'm too busy rotting away on Celeste (video game).
After the ＲＩＩＪ update, Aaron Liu: Watchlyst Greybar Unsin has a dismiss button that allows you to mark an item as read in one click and cycle to the next Watchlist item.
Lordseriouspig/StatusChangerImproved is just like Enterprisey's script, except you select your status from a dropdown instead of cycling through them with a button. The WMF operates out of car-centric infrastructure anyway. Shame!
Newly maintained scripts
Aaron Liu has created Duplinks from Evad37/duplinks-alt; his fork adds a config variable to automatically highlight duplicate links on the loading of any page where the portlet link would've appeared.
Tired of staring at a bunch of filtering text and waiting for darn filter logs to load? Msz2001/AbuseFilter analyzer can parse abuse filters into a visual syntax tree and evaluate locally on-demand!
Polygnotus/DuplicateReferences finds references with the same link and displays the number of them along with a button to add the {{duplicated citations}} tag under the references section. Being lazy has never been easier!
fastest gun on the net Ponor/really-quick-block really quick add to contribution lists three buttons awesome
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-08-05. Please help Translate.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
Numberguy6Bot - Task: Add links to Wiktionary categories in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Russian.
UmisBot - Task: This bot will add string representations of units of measurement to units of measurement Wikidata pages.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call 6 August, 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call on Tuesday, 6 August, 2024 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter). Please join us for a Busy Summer Fun Wikidata Editing Hour, an hour of uninterrupted Wikidata editing time to work on your own Wikidata projects. Agenda.
Wikimania is August 7-10. Here is a curated a list of Wikimania sessions focused around Wikidata, or have *some* connection to Wikidata: 2024:Program/Wikidata. Please add to the list if something is missing.
SPINACH: SPARQL-Based Information Navigation for Challenging Real-World Questions - The SPINACH dataset, derived from Wikidata's "Request a Query" forum, offers a more complex and challenging KBQA dataset with 320 question-SPARQL pairs, designed to test the capabilities of KBQA systems in navigating large and incomplete knowledge base schemas.
Forage - a user script that provides an additional editing interface that makes editing easier, by showing the expected properties for a page (based on its "instance of" values), and providing simple inputs to let users add values for any such property. To install Forage, just add the following line to the common.js subpage under your user page on Wikidata, i.e. wikidata.org/User:Your username here/common.js: importScript('User:Techwizzie/forage.js');
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikibase REST API, introduced last year on Wikidata, is progressing towards version 1, aiming for a comprehensive release by the end of 2024. We're seeking community feedback to enhance the current API and plan future developments. Please share your thoughts on this page: Feedback on the Wikibase REST API (July/August 2024).
Abdulai Yorli Iddrisu (WMDE) has joined the Software Communication team (SCoT) at Wikimedia Deutschland as an intern until the end of September 2024. Welcome Yorli!
indexer (entity responsible for compiling an index of a book, database, website or other forms of media publications in the form of a methodical arrangement of records designed to enable users to locate information quickly)
object of action (specific object to which an action or class of actions occurs)
object class of action (class of objects (including substances) to which an action or class of actions may occur)
public funding (amount of public funding an organisation receives)
mul language code: The new language code has been rolled out in a limited way. We are looking through feedback now.
mul release: The full release of the "mul" language code feature to Wikidata, originally scheduled for August 12, may be delayed as we have uncovered a few issues during testing that could potentially block the scheduled release.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Two new parser functions will be available this week: {{#dir}} and {{#bcp47}}. These will reduce the need for Template:Dir and Template:BCP47 on Commons and allow us to drop 100 million rows from the "what links here" database. Editors at any wiki that use these templates, can help by replacing the templates with these new functions. The templates at Commons will be updated during the Hackathon at Wikimania.
Communities can request the activation of the visual editor on entire namespaces where discussions sometimes happen (for instance Knowledge (XXG): or Wikisource: namespaces) if they understand the known limitations. For discussions, users can already use DiscussionTools in these namespaces.
The tracking category "Pages using Timeline" has been renamed to "Pages using the EasyTimeline extension" in TranslateWiki. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match.
Project updates
Editors who help to organize WikiProjects and similar on-wiki collaborations, are invited to share ideas and examples of successful collaborations with the Campaigns and Programs teams. You can fill out a brief survey or share your thoughts on the talkpage. The teams are particularly looking for details about successful collaborations on non-English wikis.
The new parser is being rolled out on Wikivoyage wikis over the next few months. The English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikivoyage were switched to Parsoid last week. For more information, see Parsoid/Parser Unification.
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New design previews for Translatable pages; Updates about MinT for Wiki Readers; the release of Translation dumps; and more.
Germany report: The flight over the "Rosinenbomber" - drone deployment for Free Knowledge; Kicking off a German-language community of practice for building cultural heritage linked open data with the wikimedia projects
India report: GLAM partner ventures into 'Digitisation Plus' programs with Wikimedians
Kosovo report: Prompting what's most important - our community in Albania and Kosovo
New Zealand report: WikiProject International Botanical Congress 2024, a presentation to the Natural History Museum, London & Kew Gardens staff and a Research expeditions edit-a-thon
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-08-12. Please help Translate.
Wikimania 2024 took place in Katowice, Poland. You can watch replays of the sessions on YouTube. Additionally, recordings of individual sessions are linked to each item on the Eventyay schedule.
FOSS4GE 2024 | Bridging Worlds: Integration of Wikidata and OpenStreetMap - Discover the synergy between Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, two monumental open data repositories. This talk unveils innovative web-based tools facilitating the linking of these platforms, enhancing the richness and accuracy of geospatial data.
New Q5 - is a form that quickly sets up a Wikidata Item for an individual by generating a QuickStatement with the basic parameters such as name and age.
indexer (entity responsible for compiling an index of a book, database, website or other forms of media publications in the form of a methodical arrangement of records designed to enable users to locate information quickly)
object of action (specific object to which an action or class of actions occurs)
object class of action (class of objects (including substances) to which an action or class of actions may occur)
public funding (amount of public funding an organisation receives)
lifespan (duration of a person's known or recorded lifespan)
APPF registration status (status of registration of this entity with the Authority for European political parties and European political foundation)
exponent of base unit (a qualifier of {{Q|P12571}} used to describe the exponent of the unit)
Javanese registers (suggest the relationship between similar Javanese lexemes, between its various registers (social variants), mainly {{Q|12500634}} register (plain Javanese), {{Q|12492493}} register (high/polite Javanese), and {{Q|13091955}} register (middle Javanese))
Newest WikiProjects: Redundancy - The primary aim of WikiProject Redundancy is to reduce the amount of Wikidata's data—without reducing the amount of information in Wikidata!—for the well-being of Wikidata, its community, and its downstream users.
Showcase Lexemes: kpanjɔɣu (L651052) - A Dagbani noun described in English as hampers, baskets, or similar containers made from woven materials like reeds, grasses, or wicker, traditionally used for carrying or storing clothing.
Development
Not much happened this past week because the team was attending Wikimania.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Stewards can now specify if global blocks should prevent account creation. Before this change by the Trust and Safety Product Team, all global blocks would prevent account creation. This will allow stewards to reduce the unintended side-effects of global blocks on IP addresses.
August 24: Not just an edit-a-thon, an edit-a-thon in Manhattan Beach.
Please join WikiLA at an edit-a-thon to improve and create articles related to marine life and the ocean in the Los Angeles area. Inspiration courtesy of the public library in Manhattan Beach, one of SoCal's most beautiful coastal communities.
Saturday, August 24 from 10:00 AM - 2:00 PM Manhattan Beach Public Library, 1320 Highland Ave., Manhattan Beach 90266 Get the details and RSVP here To opt out of future mailings about LA meetups remove.your name, from this list.
Wikidata Days Bologna - November 8 - 9, 2024. Dario Nobili Library (CNR). A conference dedicated to the Italian-speaking Wikidata community, with a focus on libraries and research.
Ongoing
Like Soccer? Did you know the Uganda Wiki Soccerthon 2024 is still running and aims to create over 300 Wikidata items on Ugandan clubs, players, coaches, leagues, associations and leagues related to Ugandan soccer.
In case you missed it...
Catch up on all the Wikimania 2024 sessions with these YouTube replays. Or check the Eventyay schedule for recordings of individual sessions linked to each item.
Discovering Relationships Among Properties in Wikidata Knowledge Graph - Authors Emetis Niazmand and Maria-Esther Vidal use class-based relationship discovery to study and explore distribution and frequency of predicates across six domains. Pp 388–394 of Big Data Analytics and Knowledge Discovery.
Videos
(pt) Wikidata Lab XLII: OpenRefine Éder Porto and Luca Belo host a workshop covering the newest features for loading media and Structured Data (SDC) on Commons, as well as metadata on Wikidata through OpenRefine.
Medals count by continent Combining data from the International Olympic Committee and Wikidata, this notebook computes medals count by continent.
Winners of the Tour de France Femmes The Tour de France Femmes 2024 just ended on Sunday 18th of August. The cycling stage race explorer notebook shows all stage winners of the Tour de France Femmes.
(fr) WikidataESR: Tenter d’y voir clair dans l’ESR : exploring French higher education and research institutional landscape with the help of Wikidata. French higher education and research landscape is highly complex. Wikidata can help to better understand the landscape.
Tool of the week
Anvesha is a drill-down browser for any Wikibase installation (incl. Wikidata). A prominent example of it in use is the Wikidata Walkabout.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata: For Developers - We have a shiny new portal for developers wanting to build applications using Wikidata's data. Visit it for inspiration with showcase examples, resources, information and support.
APPF registration status (status of registration of this entity with the Authority for European political parties and European political foundation)
exponent of base unit (a qualifier of {{Q|P12571}} used to describe the exponent of the unit)
Javanese registers (suggest the relationship between similar Javanese lexemes, between its various registers (social variants), mainly {{Q|12500634}} register (plain Javanese), {{Q|12492493}} register (high/polite Javanese), and {{Q|13091955}} register (middle Javanese))
objects of action have role (role that objects of this action take on in the context of this action. (For selectional restrictions, use {{P|12913}} instead.))
ConLang Code Registry code (3-letter identifier for language defined in the ConLang Code Registry, using codes reserved for private use in ISO 639-3)
dénomination (value of a currency or type of currency)
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing to improve error messages and handling.
Knowledge (XXG) and co: We are working on moving the Wikidata Item link out of the sidebar (phab:T66315)
Wikidata Query Service graph split: The WMF Search Platform team is setting up the servers for the split graphs. We hope to have them ready for use soon. We also prepared the constraints checks for this.
Bring a picnic blanket and some potluck, as well as some sunscreen! We'll also provide a little something for everyone, but we encourage you to bring your own favorite dishes to share, especially for those food cultural topics you would like to improve on Knowledge (XXG).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Editors who want to re-use references but with different details such as page numbers, will be able to do so by the end of 2024, using a new sub-referencing feature. You can read more about the project and how to test the prototype.
Editors using tracking categories to identify which pages use specific extensions may notice that six of the categories have been renamed to make them more easily understood and consistent. These categories are automatically added to pages that use specialized MediaWiki extensions. The affected names are for: DynamicPageList, Kartographer, Phonos, RSS, Score, WikiHiero. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match. Thanks to Pppery for these improvements.
Technical volunteers who edit modules and want to get a list of the categories used on a page, can now do so using the categories property of mw.title objects. This enables wikis to configure workflows such as category-specific edit notices. Thanks to SD001 for these improvements.
Bugs status
Your help is needed to check if any pages need to be moved or deleted. A maintenance script was run to clean up unreachable pages (due to Unicode issues or introduction of new namespaces/namespace aliases). The script tried to find appropriate names for the pages (e.g. by following the Unicode changes or by moving pages whose titles on Knowledge (XXG) start with Talk:WP: so that their titles start with Knowledge (XXG) talk:), but it may have failed for some pages, and moved them to Special:PrefixIndex/T195546/ instead. Your community should check if any pages are listed there, and move them to the correct titles, or delete them if they are no longer needed. A full log (including pages for which appropriate names could be found) is available in phab:P67388.
Editors who volunteer as mentors to newcomers on their wiki are once again able to access lists of potential mentees who they can connect with to offer help and guidance. This functionality was restored thanks to a bug fix. Thank you to Mbch331 for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 18 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Project updates
The application deadline for the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has been extended to September 16. Members will help by providing advice to Foundation Product and Technology leadership on short and long term plans, on complex strategic problems, and help to get feedback from more contributors and technical communities. Selected members should expect to spend roughly 5 hours per month for the Council, during the one year pilot. Please consider applying, and spread the word to volunteers you think would make a positive contribution to the committee.
Learn more
The 2024 Coolest Tool Awards were awarded at Wikimania, in seven categories. For example, one award went to the ISA Tool, used for adding structured data to files on Commons, which was recently improved during the Wiki Mentor Africa Hackathon. You can see video demonstrations of each tool at the awards page. Congratulations to this year's recipients, and thank you to all tool creators and maintainers.
The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available, and includes some highlights from Wikimania, an upcoming Language community meeting, and other news from the movement.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-08-26. Please help Translate.
Discussions
Open request for adminship:
Gwanki - RfP scheduled to end after 26 August 2024 05:54 (UTC)
Putnik 2 - RfP scheduled to end after 27 August 2024 23:17 (UTC)
Audio Transcription (P9533) from Author: Yug. P9533 is described as transcription of the word/text being spoken in this file. Does this exclude other communications modalities?
Wikidata's 12th Birthday is fast approaching. Do you need financial support to organize a birthday event? Here is some useful information about how to get funding: Wikidata:Twelfth Birthday/Run an event/Funding. The deadline to apply is September 1st.
WikiLibCon25 The Wikimedia+Libraries International Convention 2025 takes place in Mexico City, Mexico between 15 - 17 January 2025 - Call for Scholarships (ends 31 August0 and Proposals (ends 15 September) are open. WikiLibCon25 brings together Wikimedians, Wikibrarians, information professionals, library workers and mission-aligned partners from around the globe to create a vivid community and promote cooperative projects in the Library & Wikimedia sphere.
Slides: Giving metabolites (and lipids) a chemical and biological context with open science. This talk discusses the role of open science in providing chemical and biological context for metabolites and lipids, highlighting open-source cheminformatics, open standards, and open data to facilitate linking knowledge across databases and publications, as well as describing chemical interactions in biological pathway databases. By Egon Willighagen.
Wikidata distributed/#game=94 - Help adding missing information related to artists on BNU's catalog (Select the option that fits best).
Other Noteworthy Stuff
New AI Project Manager to join Wikimedia Deutschland: We’re pleased to announce that a new AI project manager will be joining our team next week. Lydia and Jonathan (Director of Engineering) have been prototyping in this area and recently presented their work at the AI_dev summit (YouTube link). Our goal is to bring knowledge graphs and generative AI closer together, making AI more equitable, truthful, participatory, and open. More updates to come soon!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Administrators can now test the temporary accounts feature on test2wiki. This was done to allow cross-wiki testing of temporary accounts, for when temporary accounts switch between projects. The feature was enabled on testwiki a few weeks ago. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Temporary Accounts is a project to create a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors which are no longer made public. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page.
Later this week, editors at wikis that use FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") may notice that the indicators at the top of articles have changed. This change makes the system more consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface.
Bugs status
Editors who use the 2010 wikitext editor, and use the Character Insert buttons, will no longer experience problems with the buttons adding content into the edit-summary instead of the edit-window. You can read more about that, and 26 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Project updates
Please review and vote on Focus Areas, which are groups of wishes that share a problem. Focus Areas were created for the newly reopened Community Wishlist, which is now open year-round for submissions. The first batch of focus areas are specific to moderator workflows, around welcoming newcomers, minimizing repetitive tasks, and prioritizing tasks. Once volunteers have reviewed and voted on focus areas, the Foundation will then review and select focus areas for prioritization.
Do you have a project and are willing to provide a three (3) month mentorship for an intern? Outreachy is a twice a year program for people to participate in a paid internship that will start in December 2024 and end in early March 2025, and they need mentors and projects to work on. Projects can be focused on coding or non-coding (design, documentation, translation, research). See the Outreachy page for more details, and a list of past projects since 2013.
Learn more
If you're curious about the product and technology improvements made by the Wikimedia Foundation last year, read this recent highlights summary on Diff.
To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
In accordance with our policy that Knowledge (XXG) is not for the indefinite hosting of material, 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.
Wikimedians for Sustainable Development - August 2024 Newsletter
This is our thirty fourth newsletter. This issue has news related to SDGs 5, 11, 15, and 16.
User group news
Next user group meeting, 15 September, will be focused on starting to develop a strategy for the group. If you cannot attend, you can leave your input on the ideas page.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-09-02.
Discussions
Project chat: Wikidata:Project chat#Mass-import policy - A new mass-import policy has been proposed, focusing on improving the quality of existing items rather than importing new ones, with a suggested limit of 100 new items before requiring community approval.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session 3 September, 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, 3 September, 2024 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter). Christa Strickler will be our first Project Series lead with her joint project with the Wikidata Religion & Theology Community of Practice to contribute biographical data to Wikidata from the IRFA database using the Mix’n’Match tool. We are excited to learn more about this project, provide a forum for discussion and shared learning, and lend a hand while building new skills. Event page: Wikidata:WikiProject LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group/Affinity Group Calls/First Project Series
(id) Registration is open for the Wikimedia Indonesia Research Grant 2024 program. Open until 30 September 2024. This program opens funding opportunities for research on topics related to Wikidata, Knowledge (XXG), or other Wiki projects, and Linked Open Data.
Blogs: (de) Wikibase4Research - Easily manage, share and visualize knowledge data, tailored for academic purposes, WB4R simplifies the installation and use of MedaWiki software. By Kolja Bailly.
Display Wikidata Info on sister projects by User:Yair rand. This user-script will add the articles corresponding Wikidata item Label, Q-ID, Description and Short Desc. neatly under the article title. If no Wikidata item is linked, option to CreateNewItem page on Wikidata is provided.
Showcase Items: Wikimedia disambiguation page (Q4167410): type of wiki page usually in main namespace (article namespace, ns=0) containing links to articles with similar names, and very little details only, use with P31 "instance of" (2024-09-02)
The WMF Search Platform team is putting the finishing touches on the new Query Service servers that contain the two parts of the split graph.
We are analyzing which percentage of current queries are better served by other systems like the REST API or search.
Wikimedia projects integration:
We have worked on moving the Wikidata Item link out of the toolbox section of the sidebar of an article. It has been rolled out to the first wikis: ukwiki, hewiki, fawiki (phab:T66315)
We are working on decreasing the amount of irrelevant changes from Wikidata in the watchlist and recent changes on Knowledge (XXG) and co by correcting the tracking behaviour of the Lua function mw.wikibase.entity:getSitelink() (phab:T295356)
Wikibase REST API: We continued improving errors and error messages.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
Editors and volunteer developers interested in data visualisation can now test the new software for charts. Its early version is available on beta Commons and beta Knowledge (XXG). This is an important milestone before making charts available on regular wikis. You can read more about this project update and help to test the charts.
Feature news
Editors who use the Special:UnusedTemplates page can now filter out pages which are expected to be there permanently, such as sandboxes, test-cases, and templates that are always substituted. Editors can add the new magic word __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ to a template page to hide it from the listing. Thanks to Sophivorus and DannyS712 for these improvements.
Editors who use the New Topic tool on discussion pages, will now be reminded to add a section header, which should help reduce the quantity of newcomers who add sections without a header. You can read more about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Last week, some Toolforge tools had occasional connection problems. The cause is still being investigated, but the problems have been resolved for now.
Translation administrators at multilingual wikis, when editing multiple translation units, can now easily mark which changes require updates to the translation. This is possible with the new dropdown menu.
Project updates
A new draft text of a policy discussing the use of Wikimedia's APIs has been published on Meta-Wiki. The draft text does not reflect a change in policy around the APIs; instead, it is an attempt to codify existing API rules. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome on the proposed update’s talk page until September 13 or until those discussions have concluded.
Learn more
To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2024-09-02. Please help Translate. Missed the previous one? See issue #643
Discussions
Open request for adminship: أمين - RfP scheduled to end 9 September 2024 11:18 (UTC).
Upcoming: The program for the Celtic Knot Conference 2024 is now available to view! Whether you're interested in language preservation, digital tools for minority languages, or simply connecting with like-minded individuals, there's something for everyone. The conference will take place in Waterford City from September 25-27, 2024
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
(de) TIB Blog:The TIB project WikiRemembrance - The aim of the project was to develop a handout on digital culture of remembrance in a collaborative and participatory process. The project will be ending soon and you can register for the closing event (9 Oct 2024).
Correcting outdated facts in Wikidata - Anj Simmons takes us through an example of finding an outdated or inaccurate fact and correcting it with supporting references.
Wikidata Quality Toolkit: Empowering Wikidata editors and content. Albert Meroño introduces a suite of tools to assist editors by recommending items to edit, detect poorly-supported item references and generating EntitySchemas to find items missing information.
User:Teester/CheckShex.js - a Userscript that adds an input box to a Wikidata page wherein you can enter an EntitySchema (such as E10). When you click "Check", it uses pyshexy to validate the entity against the schema and displays whether the entity passes or fails.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
🔥 Big changes are coming to the #WikidataQueryService. If you query for scholarly articles, please take a look at this announcement!
Is Shakespeare in German something for you? A digital version of the Schlegel/Tieck edition (Aufbau-Verlag 1975) was released with Wikidata connections. (source)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Starting this week, the standard syntax highlighter will receive new colors that make them compatible in dark mode. This is the first of many changes to come as part of a major upgrade to syntax highlighting. You can learn more about what's to come on the help page.
Editors of wikis using Wikidata will now be notified of only relevant Wikidata changes in their watchlist. This is because the Lua functions entity:getSitelink() and mw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid) will have their logic unified for tracking different aspects of sitelinks to reduce junk notifications from inconsistent sitelinks tracking.
Project updates
Users of all Wikis will have access to Wikimedia sites as read-only for a few minutes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
Contributors of 11 Wikipedias, including English will have a new MOS namespace added to their Wikipedias. This improvement ensures that links beginning with MOS: (usually shortcuts to the Manual of Style) are not broken by Mooré Knowledge (XXG) (language code mos).
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 three board seats, half of the elected seats on the board. After being elected, those elected can potentially appoint more seats.
We will also focus on the Wikimedia NYC Strategic Plan, our Financial Report, and Annual and Monthly event teams for the coming year.
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 23 and 8pm EDT on September 25.
For additional information, please consult the Election FAQ.
Hello and welcome to the September newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since June. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below.
Election news: Project coordinators play an important role in our WikiProject. Following the mid-year Election of Coordinators, we welcomed Mox Eden to the coordinator team. Dhtwiki remains as Lead Coordinator, and Miniapolis and Wracking returned as assistant coordinators. If you'd like to help out behind the scenes, please consider taking part in our December election – watchlist our ombox for updates. Information about the role of coordinators can be found here.
Blitz: 13 of the 24 editors who signed up for the June 2024 Copy Editing Blitz copy edited at least one article. Between them, they copy edited 169,404 words comprising 41 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Drive: 38 of the 59 editors who signed up for the July 2024 Backlog Elimination Drive copy edited at least one article. Between them, they copy edited 482,133 words comprising 293 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Blitz: 10 of the 15 editors who signed up for the August 2024 Copy Editing Blitz copy edited at least one article. Between them, they copy edited 71,294 words comprising 31 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Drive:Sign up here to earn barnstars in our month-long, in-progress September Backlog Elimination Drive.
Progress report: As of 05:14, 11 September 2024 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have processed 233 requests since 1 January, and the backlog of tagged articles stands at 2,824 articles.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we do without you! Cheers from Baffle gab1978 and your GOCE coordinators Dhtwiki, Miniapolis, Mox Eden and Wracking.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Czech Republic report: Cooperation between National Library and Wikimedia CR was presented at Wikimania 2024
India report: Wikimedians-in-residence assigned to add lexicographical data of 5 endangered languages of West Bengal
Netherlands report: 10 reasons why the National Library of the Netherlands moved its Wikimedia-related publications from SlideShare to Zenodo, and keeps them on Wikimedia Commons
New Zealand report: Looking for Aotearoa's next roving Wikipedian, a Wikidata Te Papa research expeditions publication & the Wikidata WikiProject IBC follow-up workshop
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for the "Editing to the Beat" event of the beginner-focused Wikicurious series at Lehman College. This is the second event of the series, following the inaugural event at Civic Hall in July. Led by a 9-person live band demonstrating Caribbean and Latin musical genres, we'll engage with efforts such as WikiProject Latin Music, and will encourage editing on both English and Spanish Knowledge (XXG). All are welcome, and newcomers and aspiring editors are especially encouraged to attend. Registration via Eventbrite is required for building entry, and is also encouraged on the event page on Meta.
The Wikicurious series is supported by Craig Newmark Philanthropies. Wikimedia NYC is an official affiliate and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Also supporting this event are Equis, The Celia Cruz Foundation, and the International Museum of Salsa. In association with WikiCari and AfroCrowd.
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct.
Meeting info:
Date: Saturday, September 21, 2024
Time: 1:00–7:00 p.m.
Location:Lehman College (CUNY) 250 Bedford Park Blvd W, Bronx, NY
Equipment: Please bring your own computer. We are not yet able to provide loaner laptops.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2024-09-16. Please help Translate. Missed the previous one? See issue #644
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: Framabot 5 - Task: update a typography error in the French description of homonym pages, seen on 1.
New request for comments: Additional rights for bureaucrats - The proposal suggests allowing Wikidata bureaucrats to remove admin rights, which they currently cannot do, to streamline processes, reduce reliance on stewards, and align with practices of other wikis.
Proposal: Mul labels - proposal of massive addition - The proposal suggests massively adding "mul" labels to Wikidata items for given and family names, using a bot to streamline the process and reduce redundant labels.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session 17 September, 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, 17 September, 2024 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter). Christa Strickler will be our first Project Series lead with her joint project with the Wikidata Religion & Theology Community of Practice to contribute biographical data to Wikidata from the IRFA database using the Mix’n’Match tool. We are excited to learn more about this project, provide a forum for discussion and shared learning, and lend a hand while building new skills. Event page: Session 2 (September 17) - Working session using Mix‘n’Match to add Wikidata items
Wikidata Day 2024 (Seattle) - Agenda: Wikidata Twelfth Birthday, Training and Edit-a-thon. When: Saturday, October 26, from 12:30–4:30pm PDT
Cooperation between National Library and Wikimedia CR was presented at Wikimania 2024 - Wikimedia Czech Republic presented their long-standing collaboration with the National Library at Wikimania 2024, highlighting joint educational and community initiatives, along with additional sessions on media education and successful campaigns during the event.
User:Lagewi/references.js - "Sometimes, the data on Wikidata does not answer all your questions. Some types of information are difficult to encode in statements, or simply has not been encoded on Wikidata yet. In such cases, it might be useful to go through the references attached to claims of the entity, for additional information. To simplify this process, this user script lists all unique references based on stated in (P248) and reference URL (P854). The references are listed in a collapsible list below the table of labels and descriptions, collapsed by default to not be obtrusive." To enable it, include the following line in your common.js: mw.loader.load('//www.wikidata.org/search/?title=User:Lagewi/references.js&oldid=2039248554&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
objects of occurrence have role (role that objects of this occurrence take on in the context of this occurrence. (For selectional restrictions, use "object class of occurrence" (P12913) instead.))
agents of action have role (role that agents of this action take on in the context of this action. (For selectional restrictions, use "agent class of action" (P12994) instead. ))
agent class of action (class of items that may initiate this action or class of actions (For roles filled by agents of an action, use "agents of action have role" (P12993) instead))
agent of action (particular item that initiates this action or class of actions)
characteristic of ((qualifier only) statement value is a characteristic, quality, property, or state of this item)
Political foundation (The property allows a link between a political party (usually) and its related political foundation, as is common in Germany, in the Netherlands or at the European level. The reverse property ("political party" or "political party affiliation", still different from P102 which is for individual membership) would be useful too.)
WikiProject Highlights: Ontology/Cleaning Task Force/Changes - Significant actual and proposed changes to the Wikidata ontology that have come out of the cleaning task force efforts.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Improvements and Maintenance
Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes.
The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements.
References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Knowledge (XXG) article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed.
It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order.
Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases from both Quarry and Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes mw-message-box need to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newer cdx-message group of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation, and an example update), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best.
Technical project updates
Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible.
Tech in depth
The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
Hackathon Showcase (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available in the Phabricator task.
Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.
The way that Random pages are selected has been updated. This will slowly reduce the problem of some pages having a lower chance of appearing. 
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Knowledge (XXG) wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar). 
On February 1, a link will be added to the "Tools" menu to download a QR code that links to the page you are viewing. There will also be a new Special:QrCode page to create QR codes for any Wikimedia URL. This addresses the #19 most-voted wish from the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. 
Cascadia Wikimedians placed this banner at 22:50, 29 February 2024 (UTC) by using the Knowledge (XXG):Meetup/Portland/Participants list.
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The redirect Fbclid parameter has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Knowledge (XXG):Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 April 9 § Fbclid parameter until a consensus is reached. Utopes (talk / cont) 21:59, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
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The Return of the LA Wiknic
Hello, Wil540 art. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:Michael Couzens, a page you created, has not been edited in at least 5 months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.
Updated scripts
of TV series, seasons, and episodes from vertically adjacent levels.
