This is an archive of past discussions with User:Jakesyl. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
An invention is a unique or noveldevice, method, composition or process, and the invention process is a process within an overall engineering and product development process.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Discussion of our Wikidata priorities and needs as we plan for the group's future, 02 June. Agenda
The WikiCite annual report 2019-20 has been published. Describing the "satellite event grants" program that was run (and details of the nine successful proposals); the changes that resulted from the COVID-19 shutdown of all in-person events; and a summary of WikiCite-related news from across the movement. For more details see Meta:WikiCite/Administration. For more information, contact LWyatt (WMF)
Past video: Querying Wikidata with a glimpse of SPARQL - Thorsten Butz - PSCONFEU 2020. YouTube
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network Live Wikidata editing scheduled for 1st June at 7:00 PM UTC: YouTube, Facebook
Upcoming video (in Spanish): Wikidata Online Workshop: "Connecting Authority Resources with the Knowledge Graph" scheduled for 2nd June at 3:00 PM UTC: YouTube
Tool of the week
wdumps allows you to create a limited RDF dump from Wikidata, for those times when your SPARQL queries keep timing out. It is not particularly user-friendly, and it typically takes several hours to get a complete dump, but it is the best way to for example get a list of all English names of humans in Wikidata, or a list of every scientific article with its title and DOI.
As part of a thesis project, the search engine "Lister" has been developed to make it easier for the general public to access data on the Semantic Web in general, and WikiData specifically. It's in a usability test-phase right now, and if you'd like to try it out and help improve it, you can do so at this link. The test should at most 15 minutes.
Follow the discussion about restricting editing of properties to autoconfirmed users.
New domain toolforge.org to be adopted by our Toolforge community. New domain/scheme for Toolforge-hosted webservices will change from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org with the aim to introduce permanent redirects for the legacy URLs on 2020-06-15.
Wikidata development team is currently running a survey until June 9th to understand better how people access and reuse Wikidata’s data from the code of their applications and tools (for example through APIs), and how we can improve the tools to make your workflows easier. If you would like to participate, please use this link (Google Forms, estimated fill-in time 5min).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new beta version of the Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It has a new zoom function when you look at images. It can also suggest places when you upload geotagged photos. [1]
Problems
There was a problem with the Commons database on 27 May. Commons could not be edited for eight minutes. Because of this problem the database was moved. This caused another short read-only time on 29 May. [2][3][4]
The Vector skin had a problem where you couldn't add links to the article in other languages. You couldn't see the section if there were no links to other languages already. It also removed content translation links and links to language settings. This has now been fixed. [5]
Changes later this week
You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can turn these notifications off for individual pages. You can soon turn them off also in the notifications you get. [6]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 June. It will be on all wikis from 4 June (calendar).
Upcoming: Wikidata Wochenende, June 12-14: online Wikidata workshop and hackathon in German. Don't forget to register to get access to attendees information.
Upcoming: Video: Live Wikidata editing #9: Youtube, Facebook
Part 2 - The residency at the Bodleian Libraries - YouTube
Part 3 - The Astrolabe Explorer & other datasets - YouTube
Tool of the week
QuickStatements lets you edit thousands of Wikidata items at a time. Add labels and descriptions, or statements with sources and qualifiers, add sitelinks, create or merge items, or remove statements that were created in error. Batches can be discussed and, if necessary, reverted in full through the EditGroups tool.
New page Subsetting under WikiProject Schemas for documenting how to define, construct, manage and maintain subsets of Wikidata.
MyCroft, the open digital personal assistant now has a Wikidata skill to answer questions about current and historic facts & information about a person.
Do you know a Wikidata/Wikibase community member who has accomplished something new or has been inspiring in the last year? If so, please take a few minutes and nominate someone in the 2020 Community Spotlight survey.
Wikidata Bridge: Made a number of technical improvements to wrap up the work in the first version.
Reference Hunt: Making final technical improvements and are now running the process to find references on the whole of Wikidata (as opposed to the initial small subset for testing). Once that's done we'll release them as a dump.
Easier access to data for programmers: Researching and interviewing ways to improve the APIs in preparation for working on them.
Query builder: Working on defining the first version and creating mockups based on the feedback we received.
Use modern TypeScript syntax (3.2 -> 3.9) (phab:T253211)
More technical documentation for Federated Properties (phab:T252991) & preparing for the next steps
Convert some properties to external identifiers (phab:T253722)
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
Some articles have tables that can be sorted in different ways. For example a list of countries can be sorted alphabetically but you can click on the size column to sort them by size. If you clicked on the column a second time it would sort the countries from the bottom to the top instead. A third click will now take you back to the original sorting. [7]
Self-closed tags now work as in the HTML5 specifications. This means you should stop using some of them. <b/> is an example of a self-closed tag that won't work. area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, keygen, link, meta, param, source, track, wbr can be self-closed. Pages with tags that should not be self-closed have been listed in a tracking category since 2016. They will be listed in Special:LintErrors/self-closed-tag. This doesn't affect <references /> or <ref />. [8]
There is a banner called WikidataPageBanner. It is for example used by the Wikivoyages, Wikimedia Russia and the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Turkish Wikipedias. It will now been seen by mobile visitors too. Before this it was only seen on desktop. The wikis should update instructions on MediaWiki:Sitenotice so that editors know to test and style for mobile too. [9][10]
Changes later this week
You can now edit MassMessage descriptions through the API. This is useful for tools and gadgets. [11]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 June. It will be on all wikis from 11 June (calendar).
Future changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use TemplateStyles instead. 118 wikis need to fix this. You can read more and see if your wiki is affected. [12]
Netherlands report: Analysis of Dutch GLAM-Wiki projects in relation to the Dutch Digital Heritage Reference Architecture, Content donation from Utrecht Archives, Detecting Wikipedia articles strongly based on single library collections and Collection highlights of the KB
Sweden report: Free music on Wikipedia; NHB webinars; Wikipedia in libraries – Projekt HBTQI
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Program for Cooperative Cataloging's upcoming Wikidata pilot, June 16. Agenda
Part 1 - Meet Ewan, WiR at the Uni' of Edinburgh - YouTube
Part 2 - the Witch Hunts projects & Wikidata - YouTube
Part 3 - Why Wikidata is important for education - YouTube
Tool of the week
Mix'n'match lets you match lists of external identifiers to Wikidata items, or create new items if necessary. Thousands of catalogs already exist, in dozens of different topic areas, and it's easy to import new ones.
Collecting a lot of feedback and doing research around how to improve our APIs to start making it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers
Finalized the initial feature list for the query builder and working on designs and prototypes for testing
Doing user research on the Merge gadget to prepare for making it part of the proper code-base so that other Wikibase instances also benefit from easier merging
Federated Properties: continued working on the first version of Federation that will make it possible to use Wikidata's Properties in another Wikibase installation
Start of a new project (Wikibase Decoupling & Extension Registration) in order to clean up our codebase a bit and make it easier to extend with new features in the future
More work on the design system to have a set of unified components for Wikidata that will make it easier to develop new features in the future because we don't have to rewrite components that are used in a lot of places
Some MediaWiki skin changes meant broken edit links on Wikipedia and co. Fixed now. (phabricator:T252800)
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
Toolforge hosts several tools created by the Wikimedia community like edit counters or enhanced editors. It is changing the domain from tools.wmflabs.org to toolforge.org. The routing scheme is moving from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org. You can read the details. Tools that use OAuth will have to be updated to keep working. You can ask for help.
Problems
There is a Wikidata item link in the sidebar on many pages. This disappeared for a couple of days for users who have the Monobook skin. This was because of a bug. It has now been fixed. [13]
Editing, logging in and logging out didn't work properly for a short period of time last week. It was soon fixed. [14]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 June. It will be on all wikis from 18 June (calendar).
Future changes
Pywikibot is a Python library to automate work on wikis. It will not support Python 2 after the new version in July. Support for Python 3.4 and MediaWiki below 1.19 will also be dropped. You should migrate to Python 3. You can ask for help. [15]
The selectors .menu and .vectorMenu will no longer work in the Vector skin. This can affect gadgets and user scripts. .menu should be replaced by ul. .vectorMenu should be replaced by .vector-menu. [16]
You are receiving this notice because you recently edited one or more pages relating to blockchain or cryptocurrencies topics. You have not done anything wrong. We just want to alert you that "general" sanctions are authorized for certain types of edits to those pages.
General sanctions is a system of conduct regulation designed to minimise disruption in controversial topic areas. This means uninvolved administrators can impose sanctions for edits relating to these topics that do not adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, our standards of behaviour, or relevant policies. Administrators may impose sanctions such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks. An editor can only be sanctioned after the editor has been made aware that general sanctions are in effect. It is only effective if it is logged here. Before continuing to edit pages in these topic areas, please familiarise yourself with the general sanctions system. Don't hesitate to contact me or another editor if you have any questions.
William Mariner was an Englishman who lived in Tonga from 29 November 1806 to (probably) 8 November 1810. He later published Tonga Islands, an account of his experiences that is now one of the major sources of information on Tonga before it was significantly influenced by European culture and Christianity. Pictured is Mariner in Tongan attire.
Upcoming domain name migration on the Wikimedia Toolforge implies that OpenRefine users need to update their Wikidata reconciliation service to the new endpoint which will be available by default in the upcoming release of OpenRefine (3.4). phab:T254172
Wikirecords - proposal for a Wikibase-based sister-project
Apologies for both of the problematic queries ("MWAPI searches in wikidata about people described as slave traders by citizenship" in Weekly Summary #419 and "Monuments named after/commemorating/depicting slave traders” in Weekly Summary #420). The "MWAPI searches in wikidata about people described as slave traders by citizenship” in #419 lists any people with the word "slave" in a label, description or alias, among them several people who are not slave traders. The "Monuments named after/commemorating/depicting slave traders” in #420 incorrectly linked this query for enslaved people instead of this query for slavetraders.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
There are some new tools to make it easier for newcomers to start editing. They are available on some wikis. These wikis had a problem with the visual editor for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug in the new tools. It was soon fixed. [17]
Some user scripts and gadgets stopped working because of a change to CSS selectors. .vectorTabs should be replaced with .vector-menu-tabs to fix this. [18]
Changes later this week
The developers are working on a new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This will be released on 24 June. You can give feedback. [19]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 June. It will be on all wikis from 25 June (calendar).
Future changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use TemplateStyles instead. 91 wikis still need to fix this. You can read more and see if your wiki is affected. [20]
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Merrilee Proffitt, Chris Cyr, and Rob Fernandez on a project to surface library holdings to indicate possible notability for persons, June 30th. Agenda
It is now possible to search for EntitySchema pages using a shortcut “E:”, similar to “P:” for Properties and “L:” for Lexemes. For example: E:E10 or E:kakapo. T245529
Continued working on the first version of Federation, which will allow other Wikibase installations to use Wikidata's Properties - getting closer to a first testable version
More work on consistency of user interface components
Finalizing the click-dummy for the first version of the Query Builder so we can start testing it with some editors soon and get feedback.
Continuing to investigate how to improve our APIs and other ways to improve access to the data in Wikidata for programmers
Discussed the future of the Wikidata Query Service and ideas for next steps we can take to make it scale better. Guillaume will join the next office hour to talk about it.
More work on clearer separation of Wikibase repository and Wikibase client code in order to improve maintainability
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
Everyone was logged out. This was because a few users saw the wikis as if they were logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [21]
Some readers didn't see new edits to pages. If the page had been recently changed they saw an older version of the page instead. This only affected readers who were logged out. It lasted for ten days. It has been fixed. [22]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 July. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (calendar).
Future changes
The Modern and Monobook skins use the ID searchGoButton for the go button. This is searchButton for Vector. To have the same ID for all skins it will change to searchButton in Monobook and Modern too. This will affect gadgets and user scripts. It will happen on 23 July. They should be updated to use searchButton. You can read more and see a list of affected scripts.