This is an archive of past discussions with User:JrandWP. 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.
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.
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.
Wikipedia 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.
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. [3]
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. [4][5]
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 Wikipedia start with Talk:WP: so that their titles start with Wikipedia 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. [6]
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:
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, Wikipedia, 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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia. 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. [7]
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. [8]
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:
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. [10][11]
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. [12]
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. [13]
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 Wikipedia (language code mos). [14]
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/w/index.php?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. [15]
References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia 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. [16]
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. [17]
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. [18]
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. [19]
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.
Hello, JrandWP. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that User:JrandWP/Twenty-twos, 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.
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
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday September 25 at 15:00 UTC. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.
Updates for editors
A screenshot of the interface for the Alt Text suggested-edit feature
Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see the Alt Text suggested-edit experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback on the discussion page.
The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. The most noticeable changes for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes.
It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within <syntaxhighlight> tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax {{…}} are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [20]
Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [21][22]
The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained on the project's blog post. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too.
The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.
In depth
The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of the WDQS Graph Split project, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly" and "main" subgraphs of Wikidata. The query.wikidata.org endpoint will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please see the announcement on Wikidata.
<translate> Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2024-09-30. Please help Translate. Missed the previous one? See issue #646</translate>
<translate>Discussions</translate>
<translate>* Closed request for adminship: Andrei Stroe - Success! Welcome User:Andrei Stroe as Wikidata's latest Admin.
New requests for permissions/Bot: QichwaBot - Task(s): Creating wikidata lexemes for the Quechua languages.
<translate>Events</translate>
<translate>* Wikidata's 12th birthday is coming up on October 29th. Have a look at the birthday parties and more planned around the world.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session 1 October, 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, 1 October, 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.</translate>
<translate>Press, articles, blog posts, videos</translate>
<translate>* Papers
A Systematic Review of Wikidata in GLAM Institutions: a Labs Approach - Presents a systematic review of Wikidata use in GLAM institutions within the context of the work of the International GLAM Labs Community (glamlabs.io). The results summarise academic literature on Wikidata projects. By G. Candela et al.
Using Wikidata for Managing Cultural Heritage Information - The present study uses model wikidata elements as a basis and explores its dynamic formation into a cultural heritage information management tool within a museum. By D. Kyriaki-Manessi and S. Vazaiou.
<translate>Tool of the week</translate>
<translate>* Three new Userscripts for Wikidata - User:Lagewi has written 3 scripts to simplify reading references, explore property-value pairs in use for a statement or attaching a full bibliography to the end of the item page.</translate>
<translate>Other Noteworthy Stuff</translate>
<translate>* OpenSactions:Wikidata Persons in Relevant Categories - Using PETScan, generates a list of profiles of politically exposed persons by querying specific categories on Wikidata and extracting the entities.</translate>
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)
<translate>* New property proposals to review:</translate>
<translate>** General datatypes: </translate>
Larval host plant (Larval host plant - used only for insects - subclass of P1034)
has reading (phonetic reading or pronunciation of the kanji)
chemical formula (Description of chemical compound giving element symbols and counts)
mode of reproduction (ways for living organisms to propagate or produce their offsprings)
health points (health or armor points of this video game, board game or role-playing game character)
damage (damage value of this video game weapon, ability or character)
magazine capacity (In (real or fictional) devices like a firearm, weapon, or engineered thing, this is the default capacity or size of a devices' magazine, clip, or other container typically used to hold ammunition, bolts, cartridges, tools, etc. which pushes those items as needed usually through a spring-based mechanism into a receiver for further use by the device)
male mean age (male mean age in a given place; qualifier of {{P|4442}})
female mean age (female mean age in a given place; qualifier of {{P|4442}})
Western Australian Biographical Index (Card ID from the Western Australian Biographical Index, a set of handwritten index cards compiled in the 1970s.)
leased to (person or organisation that holds or was granted a lease on the subject)
WPBSA com player ID (Identifier for an athlete on the main website of WPBSA)
JLPT level (difficulty of word by the level of JLPT)
Search: The haswbstatement search magic word has been improved by the Search Platform Team. Previously it was limited in which Properties were indexed for it. Going forward haswbstatement:P123 will work for all Properties, regardless of their datatype. This will allow you to filter search results for Items that have a statement with a specific Property. (Searching for a specific complete statement with haswbstatement:P123=xxx will still only work for specific datatypes.) For this to work all Items have to be reindexed and this will take up to 1 month.
Design system migration: We have migrated the Special:NewLexeme page from Wikit to Codex and are working on finishing the migration for the Query Builder.
EntitySchemas: We finished the investigation about how to support search for EntitySchemas by label or alias when linking to an EntitySchema in a statement. (phab:T362005)
Wikibase REST API: We worked on integrating language fallbacks into the API (phab:T371605)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Readers of 42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use the night-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. The recommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding ?veaction=editsource to the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set in your preferences. [23]
For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin. Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences. [24]
The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki. Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progress on Spanish Wikipedia and on Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki should check if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.
In depth
The server switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes. [25]
