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.
Black Teacher Archive Wikidata Edit-a-thon - 19 November 2024, 9am - 12pm, Address: Gutman Library, 6 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA. Improve information about individual educators and their relationships with Colored Teachers Associations, HBCUs, the Divine Nine, religious institutions, and political organizations like the NAACP and Urban League.
Wikidata in dance workshop - 3 December 2024, 1pm EST (UTC+5). A step-by-step workshop for members of the Canadian Dance Assembly. A free, expert-led series on how open data can benefit dance companies and artists.
Swiss server helps optimise Wikidata in the field of medicine - Wikimedia CH supporting Houcemeddine Turki in leveraging AI to transform Wikidata into a comprehensive, reliable biomedical resource, to bridge healthcare information gaps, especially in the Global South.
(es) OpenRefine - Wikidata Days 2024 - Conducted by Omar Vega from Wikimedia Peru, learn how to create a project with a list, clean and collate data, create a Wikidata schema and upload using QuickStatements.
Wikidata Edits Heatmap: Real-time map that visualizes recent changes in Wikidata with geospatial markers showing the location of updated Items.
Western world versus the rest of the world: a tool computing the distribution of mentioned entities in Wikipedia articles between Western world and the rest of the world.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Starting ca. today (11 November 2024), tools or bots which use the wiki replicas (such as Quarry) will observe outdated data for up to 8-10 days, as a result of necessary database maintenance (T367856). Tools or bots which use the APIs will not be affected.
Job vacancy Product Manager: Wikibase Suite: Wikibase Suite allows institutions to create and host their own linked knowledge base with maximum customizability, this role will be responsible for the vision and strategy of this exciting product!
WPBSA com player ID (Identifier for an athlete on the main website of WPBSA)
JLPT level (difficulty of word by the level of JLPT)
beer style (classification of a beer based on its style)
has forks (Notable software forks of this software)
most populous settlement (city, town, or other settlement with the largest population in this area (country, state, county, continent, etc.))
rubrique d'une installation classée pour la protection de l'environnement (Industrial or agricultural operations generating risks to health and the environment are regulated in France. The various risks are organized into headings in the nomenclature of installations classified for environmental protection. The dangers, pollution and nuisances of each operation are listed by public authorities.)
prototypical syntactic role of argument (qualifier for {{P|9971}} indicating the most basic/fundamental syntactic position of that argument for that verb sense (that is, when the argument structure is not subject to any alternations))
operating cost (ongoing recurring cost for operating or using an object)
effective life of asset (duration of time which an object/asset is expected to be used before needing to be disposed of or replaced)
Toki Pona headnoun (Toki Pona common noun for which the name serves as a proper modifier)
Provides data for property (the dataset associated with this external id usually contains data applicable to this other wikidata property)
TOPO id (unique code, defined by the {{Q|3029562}}, to identify topographical features of France (regions, departments, citys, hamlet, thoroughfares ...) and elsewhere (Countries, Foreign Cities, ...))
ISCC (International Standard Content Code. Hash code that identifies a media object based on fuzzy hashing.)
romantic orientation (pattern of romantic attraction of this person or fictional character)
Railway station linear reference (line & milestone) (Stations are located on one or more railway routes, each at a given milestone. This makes it possible to situate them in the topology of a railway infrastructure.
A linear reference system can be used to position any object on this topology. In this case, we would add one or more route (or line) number + milestone data pairs.)
Data analysis method (methods used in the main item for inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information)
Use data collection instrument (Tool used by/in the subject to facilitate the collection of qualitative or quantitative data)
French Literary Prizes - Aims to coordinate the development of a database on French literary prizes (prize list, jury members, list of winners). In 2008, Bertrand Labes listed more than 1,500 French-speaking literary prizes. To date, Wikidata has 709, including 24 including the list of winners and awarded works.
Lua: We changed the Wikibase function getAllStatements logic to behave as getBestStatements. When invoked, it was returning mutable direct-values, now it will return a copy of those values (which are immutable). (phab:T270851)
We've finished the work on the create Property endpoint so it is now possible to create Properties via the REST API.
Configuration: We removed 'mainpage' from $wgForceUIMsgAsContentMsg for Wikidata as requested so translations of the main page are available (phab:T184386)
mul language code: We moved it to the top of the termbox so labels and aliases in mul are visible first (phab:T371802)
Revision table size: We are investigating the current state of the revision table of Wikidata's database and what the next steps should be to address its issues.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, users will notice that the FuzzyBot will now automatically create translated versions of categories used on translated pages. [1]
In 1.44.0-wmf-2, the logic of Wikibase function getAllStatements changed to behave like getBestStatements. Invoking the function now returns a copy of values which are immutable. [3]
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. The API will be rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The impacted endpoints include getting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content. These changes will be available on testwiki later this week, with other projects to follow. This change should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints should verify behavior on testwiki, and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket.
In depth
Admins and users of the Wikimedia projects where Automoderator is enabled can now monitor and evaluate important metrics related to Automoderator's actions. This Superset dashboard calculates and aggregates metrics about Automoderator's behaviour on the projects in which it is deployed. Thanks to the Moderator Tools team for this Dashboard; you can visit the documentation page for more information about this work. [4]
Meetings and events
21 November 2024 (8:00 UTC & 16:00 UTC) - Community call with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year. The theme of this call is how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons.
Hello! Voting in the 2024 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 2 December 2024. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
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
Users of Wikimedia sites will now be warned when they create a redirect to a page that doesn't exist. This will reduce the number of broken redirects to red links in our projects. [5]
View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pywikibot, which automates work on MediaWiki sites, was upgraded to 9.5.0 on Toolforge. [6]
Updates for technical contributors
On wikis that use the FlaggedRevs extension, pages created or moved by users with the appropriate permissions are marked as flagged automatically. This feature has not been working recently, and changes fixing it should be deployed this week. Thanks to Daniel and Wargo for working on this. [7][8]
In depth
There is a new Diff post about Temporary Accounts, available in more than 15 languages. Read it to learn about what Temporary Accounts are, their impact on different groups of users, and the plan to introduce the change on all wikis.
Meetings and events
Technical volunteers can now register for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey. Application for travel and accommodation scholarships is open from November 12 to December 10 2024. The registration for the event will close in mid-April 2025. The Wikimedia Hackathon is an annual gathering that unites the global technical community to collaborate on existing projects and explore new ideas.
Join the Wikimedia Commons community calls this week to help prioritize support for Commons which will be planned for 2025–2026. The theme will be how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons. This is an opportunity for volunteers who work on different things to come together and talk about what matters for the future of the project. The calls will take place November 21, 2024, 8:00 UTC and 16:00 UTC.
A Language community meeting will take place November 29, 16:00 UTC to discuss updates and technical problem-solving.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session (Attn: Please fill out Pre-Participation Survey!) 19 November, 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, 19 November, 2024 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter) Wikimedian Mahir Morshed is leading a series of four sessions focused on lexicographical data in Wikidata. We are looking forward to learning more about these Wikibase entities! If you anticipate attending the workshop sessions, please fill out a brief survey linked from our LD4-WDAG Lexicographical Data Series Etherpad to help us prepare relevant materials for you. You only need to fill it out once, no matter how many sessions you plan to attend. Sessions will be held on November 5, November 19, December 3, and December 17, 2024 at our regular time of 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET. Visit the event LD4 Affinity Group WikiPoject page
Wikimedia Hackathon 2025 Registration is open until mid-April 2025 (unless event reahes capacity earlier). Hackathon takes place in Istanbul May 2 - 5, 2025.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
GLAM October Newsletter
(Spanish + En) Colombia Report - exploring uses of Wikidata in the Colombian context.
Population and Exploration of Conference Data in Wikidata using LLMs - to automate addition of scholarly data. By extracting metadata from unstructured sources and adding over 6,000 entities, it demonstrates a scalable method to enhance Wikidata as a scholarly resource. By Mihindukulasooriya et al., 2024.
DBLP to Wikidata: Populating Scholarly Articles in Wikidata Presents a tool and method for adding scholarly articles and related entities, like co-authors and conference proceedings, to Wikidata using DBLP data, promoting the enhancement of Wikidata’s scholarly coverage. By Nandana Mihindukulasooriya.
DBLP to Wikidata - This tool is for adding scholarly articles to Wikidata utilizing data from DBLP. It also provides article authors with a tool to enhance Wikidata with associated entities, such as missing co-authors or conference proceeding entities. Demo video & Github repo
WPBSA com player ID (Identifier for an athlete on the main website of WPBSA)
JLPT level (difficulty of word by the level of JLPT)
beer style (classification of a beer based on its style)
has forks (Notable software forks of this software)
most populous settlement (city, town, or other settlement with the largest population in this area (country, state, county, continent, etc.))
rubrique d'une installation classée pour la protection de l'environnement (Industrial or agricultural operations generating risks to health and the environment are regulated in France. The various risks are organized into headings in the nomenclature of installations classified for environmental protection. The dangers, pollution and nuisances of each operation are listed by public authorities.)
prototypical syntactic role of argument (qualifier for {{P|9971}} indicating the most basic/fundamental syntactic position of that argument for that verb sense (that is, when the argument structure is not subject to any alternations))
operating cost (ongoing recurring cost for operating or using an object)
effective life of asset (duration of time which an object/asset is expected to be used before needing to be disposed of or replaced)
Toki Pona headnoun (Toki Pona common noun for which the name serves as a proper modifier)
Provides data for property (the dataset associated with this external id usually contains data applicable to this other wikidata property)
ISCC (International Standard Content Code. Hash code that identifies a media object based on fuzzy hashing.)
romantic orientation (pattern of romantic attraction of this person or fictional character)
Railway station linear reference (line & milestone) (Stations are located on one or more railway routes, each at a given milestone. This makes it possible to situate them in the topology of a railway infrastructure.
A linear reference system can be used to position any object on this topology. In this case, we would add one or more route (or line) number + milestone data pairs.)
Data analysis method (methods used in the main item for inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information)
Use data collection instrument (Tool used by/in the subject to facilitate the collection of qualitative or quantitative data)
OAI formatter (formatter to generate ID compatible with {{Q|2430433}} services)
Open Library Collection (Link to Open Library Collection which contain manually and automaticallly collections of editions and works on certain topics)
Wikibase REST API: We are looking into how to do search in the REST API.
Special:NewLexeme: We merged the full migration from the Wikit to the Codex design system.
EntitySchemas: We are polishing the patches to make it possible to search for EntitySchemas by label when linking to an EntitySchema in a new statement.
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
A new version of the standard wikitext editor-mode syntax highlighter will be available as a beta feature later this week. This brings many new features and bug fixes, including right-to-left support, template folding, autocompletion, and an improved search panel. You can learn more on the help page.
The 2010 wikitext editor now supports common keyboard shortcuts such Ctrl+B for bold and Ctrl+I for italics. A full list of all six shortcuts is available. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. [9]
Starting November 28, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: bswiki, elwiki, euwiki, fawiki, fiwiki, frwikiquote, frwikisource, frwikiversity, frwikivoyage, idwiki, lvwiki, plwiki, ptwiki, urwiki, viwikisource, zhwikisource. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF).
The CodeEditor, which can be used in JavaScript, CSS, JSON, and Lua pages, now offers live autocompletion. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. The feature can be temporarily disabled on a page by pressing Ctrl+, and un-selecting "Live Autocompletion".
Tool-maintainers who use the Graphite system for tracking metrics, need to migrate to the newer Prometheus system. They can check this dashboard and the list in the Description of the task T350592 to see if their tools are listed, and they should claim metrics and dashboards connected to their tools. They can then disable or migrate all existing metrics by following the instructions in the task. The Graphite service will become read-only in April. [10]
The New PreProcessor parser performance report has been fixed to give an accurate count for the number of Wikibase entities accessed. It had previously been resetting after 400 entities. [11]
Meetings and events
A Language community meeting will take place November 29 at 16:00 UTC. There will be presentations on topics like developing language keyboards, the creation of the Mooré Wikipedia, the language support track at Wiki Indaba, and a report from the Wayuunaiki community on their experiences with the Incubator and as a new community over the last 3 years. This meeting will be in English and will also have Spanish interpretation.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session (Attn: Please fill out Pre-Participation Survey!) 3 December 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, 3 December 2024 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6 pm CET (Time zone converter). Wikimedian Mahir Morshed is leading a series of four sessions focused on lexicographical data in Wikidata. We are looking forward to learning more about these Wikibase entities! If you anticipate attending the workshop sessions, please fill out a brief survey linked from our Series Etherpad to help us prepare relevant materials for you. You only need to fill it out once, no matter how many sessions you plan to attend. Sessions will be held on November 5, November 19, December 3, and December 17, 2024, at our regular time of 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6 pm CET. Event page
Where the data may roam: Bringing Wild West performers to Wikidata. Author Jason Sharp documents their experience adding legendary showman Buffalo Bill to Wikidata.
(Portuguese)Wikidata & OpenRefine - Part of the “Introduction to digital platforms for research” sessions for the Centro Luís Krus of NOVA FCSH. Practical exercises for data reconciliation from the Portuguese Early Music Database using the OpenRefine tool.
Uploading Images From Public Sites - Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata make great bedfellows. Margaret Donald shows how to create Commons categories, create structured data and link categories to Wikidata.
WCNA: LOFESQ Lots of Farmers Empty Silos Quicker: building community through a named entity Wikibase. Experiences of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives setting up the WikiNames Wikibase instance and breaking down knowledge silos
Guess Image from Pronunciation is an Ordia game that uses lexicographic data in Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. The game challenges players to match the correct image with the audio pronunciation of what the image depicts.
ABECTO is a tool that compares #RDF data to spot errors and assess completeness. Recent changes to the tool adjust result export for #Wikidata Mismatch Finder to changed format, add reporting of qualifier mismatches to Wikidata Mismatch Finder export, and suppress illegal empty external values in Wikidata Mismatch Finder export (Tweet)
Wikidata Infernal is an API that allows you to infer new facts from Wikidata. It uses a set of rules to infer new facts from existing ones. The generated statements will have qualifiers to indicate the source and method of the inference. Output is an array of statements in JSON/Wikidata format. (blog)
picture of this person doing their job (picture of a person in action, especially for a sportsperson, visual artist, musican, actor. P18 is normally used for portraits)
ISCC (ISCC hash code that identifies a media object based on fuzzy hashing)
OAI formatter (formatter to generate ID compatible with {{Q|2430433}} services)
Open Library Collection (Link to Open Library Collection which contain manually and automaticallly collections of editions and works on certain topics)
scientific illustration (an illustration of this subject to provide a detailed reference for its appearance. It should be ideally tied to the primary literature on the item.)
thesis submitted for (academic degree for which a thesis or dissertation is submitted)
meeting of (subject is a meeting or session of this body (legislature, committee, convention, etc.))
UMC rating (Age rating category as designated by the UAE Media Council (UMC))
WikiProject Taiwan/Amis - collects information related to the Ami culture, including statistics and activity records.
Rwanda - aims to be a central hub for the curation of any and all items (biographical, cultural, geographical, organizational, etc...) relating to Rwanda Rwanda (Q1037)
Wikibase.cloud now allows personal userscripts (phab:T378627)
EntitySchemas: We continued the work on making it possible to search for EntitySchemas by label and aliases when making a statement linking to an EntitySchema.(phab:T375641)
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2024-12-02. Missed the previous one? See issue #655
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: ThesaurusLinguaeAegyptiaeBot - Task(s): Creating and updating Hieroglyphic Ancient Egyptian and Coptic lexemes and ancient Egyptian text artifact items. It is also to maintain links to the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae project via approved properties.
Closed request for comments: Create items for Property proposals - Despite a spirited discussion with many comments both in favour and opposition, no consensus was reached.
Wikimedia Deutschland is providing a total of 15 participation scholarships for Wikimania 2025 (7 individual and 4 tandem scholarships). Further information is available on this page. An overview of all questions in the application form is here. Apply here. Closes 8 December 2024.
Tomorrow / 3rd December 2024: Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session @ 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm UTC / 6pm CET. If you would like to attend, please fill out the Etherpad form to ensure all necessary materials are provided for you.
Deadline for the Central Asian WikiCon 2025 scholarship application is December 30, 2024. We encourage you to make Wikidata-related submissions (the deadline for submission is March 22, 2025.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Research
Statement Signals: Wikidata usage on other Wikis: A new research report is available. Explores what trace Wikidata data is measurable on other Wiki pages and proposes initial metrics for measuring Wikidata statement usage on Wikimedia content pages. Also suggests methods to improve data analysis and collection. PDF is available on Commons
Blogs
Celebrating Wikidata’s 12th birthday across the world - Wikidata celebrated its 12th birthday in October and November 2024, with a series of global events and activities aimed at commemorating the platform's contributions to the open knowledge movement, engaging its community of volunteers, and highlighting the significant role Wikidata plays in the digital landscape. By Dan Shick
Class Order Disorder in Wikidata and First Fixes analyzes class order violations in Wikidata's ontology using SPARQL, evaluates fixes, and offers solutions through improved tools or community involvement. By P. Patel-Schneider and E. Doğan.
Videos
Edit a Wikidata Item and Lexeme - The Tyap Wikimedia User Group produced this tutorial on editing as part of the Wikidata 12th Birthday celebrations for the Wikidata @12 Data-a-thon.
(正體字, CN Trad.) Getting Started with Wikidata - An introduction and overview to Wikidata and some associated tools such as ORES and LiftWing.
(正體字, CN Trad.) Wikidata Basic Editing Tutorial - This session was given as part of the COSCUP '24 conference on the OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Agenda Track.
the Capacity to Grieve Once More - Alexandros Kosiaris of the Wikimedia Foundation explains changes made to make Wikipedia more stable and prevent outages, including how it calls and fetches data from Wikidata. Session given at SREcon24.
Tool of the week
LoRiS - Generate natural-language descriptions of SPARQL queries via LLM's.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata:WordGraph: Google released the WordGraph dataset as a belated present for Wikidata’s 12th birthday. The dataset contains 968,153 forms in 39 languages.
Tools or bots which use the wiki replicas (such as Quarry) will observe outdated data for up to 8-10 days, as a result of necessary database maintenance (T367856). Tools or bots which use the APIs will not be affected. (This was previously announced 2024-11-11 but didn’t actually take place yet.)
picture of this person doing their job (picture of a person in action, especially for a sportsperson, visual artist, musican, actor. P18 is normally used for portraits)
ISCC (ISCC hash code that identifies a media object based on fuzzy hashing)
OAI formatter (formatter to generate ID compatible with {{Q|2430433}} services)
Open Library Collection (Link to Open Library Collection which contain manually and automaticallly collections of editions and works on certain topics)
scientific illustration (an illustration of this subject to provide a detailed reference for its appearance. It should be ideally tied to the primary literature on the item.)
thesis submitted for (academic degree for which a thesis or dissertation is submitted)
meeting of (subject is a meeting or session of this body (legislature, committee, convention, etc.))
UMC rating (Age rating category as designated by the UAE Media Council (UMC))
extension that populates category (analogous to {{P|4329}} for tracking cat:s populated by extensions of MediaWiki, linking to extension causing the population)
CUATM statistical code (7-digits code attributed to administrative-territorial units of Moldova)
Bibliothek UvA/HvA - documenting, archiving and creating items from collections from the UvA/AUAS Library in Amsterdam, beginning with the works of Allard Pierson.
Ghana - A hub for Ghanaian activities and entities, including regional languages: Dagbanli, Twi and Dagari.
Thao (Taiwan): For collecting information related to Thao cultural themes, including statistics and activity records.
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on making it possible to search for an EntitySchema by its label or alias when making a new statement linking to an EntitySchema.
PropertySuggester: We have updated the script that generates the suggestions and will update the suggestions next.
Lexicographical data: We fixed a visual issue with search results on the Codex-based Special:NewLexeme (phab:T370057)
Vector 2022: We are working on designs to fix the remaining issues with the skin on Wikidata.
Wikibase REST API: We are finishing the prototype for supporting search in the API.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Starting this week, Wikimedia wikis no longer support connections using old RSA-based HTTPS certificates, specifically rsa-2048. This change is to improve security for all users. Some older, unsupported browser or smartphone devices will be unable to connect; Instead, they will display a connectivity error. See the HTTPS Browser Recommendations page for more-detailed information. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [12]
Starting December 16, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: arwiki, cawiki, frwiki, mediawikiwiki, orwiki, wawiki, wawiktionary, wikidatawiki, zhwiki. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF). [13]
This month the Chart extension was deployed to production and is now available on Commons and Testwiki. With the security review complete, pilot wiki deployment is expected to start in the first week of December. You can see a working version on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug with the "Download as PDF" system was fixed. [14]
Updates for technical contributors
In late February, temporary accounts will be rolled out on at least 10 large wikis. This deployment will have a significant effect on the community-maintained code. This is about Toolforge tools, bots, gadgets, and user scripts that use IP address data or that are available for logged-out users. The Trust and Safety Product team wants to identify this code, monitor it, and assist in updating it ahead of the deployment to minimize disruption to workflows. The team asks technical editors and volunteer developers to help identify such tools by adding them to this list. In addition, review the updated documentation to learn how to adjust the tools. Join the discussions on the project talk page or in the dedicated thread on the Wikimedia Community Discord server (in English) for support and to share feedback.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2024-12-09. Missed the previous one? See issue #656
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: KlaraBot - Task(s): Append a human's lifespan to descriptions when they can be authoritatively sourced.
Closed request for comments: Audio transcription (P9533) - Closed with no consensus. The discussion is ongoing on the Property P5933 talk page.
Events
Past: Amical Wikimedia, the Catalan-language and culture focused thematic Wikimedia Organization organized the Celebrem Wikidata (Let's celebrate Wikidata) project to celebrate Wikidata's 12th anniversary, from November 10 - 30. This included a Wikidata introduction workshop to equip participants with the editing skills to tackle the project's main aim. This was presented as a game to delete duplicate info on Wikidata and Catalan Viquipèdia infoboxes, in three areas: protected buildings, officers' positions and data related to sports teams players. At the end of the event, ~200 Wikidata-fed infoboxes and Wikidata items were improved and many Wikipedia editors edited Wikidata for the first time!
(Deutsch)Wikidata for Legal Historians - Tue. 10 December, 3pm - 7pm (UTC+1). This presentation explores Wikidata as a key platform for LOD, explains its Semantic Web foundation, introduces FactGrid (a Wikidata-based platform for historical research). Highlights potential of both platforms using examples and encourages discussion for legal historical research. Register here.
Today (09.12.2024) is the last chance to submit an Abstract for the Wikidata and Research conference (5 - 6 June 2025). If you are interested in participating, please review the submission acceptance format before submitting here.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
MediaWiki Conference Highlights, featuring Wikibase talks including one by Christos Varvantakis and Jon Amar from Wikimedia Deutschland.
Ten years of Philippine local Govt. data for Wikidata's 12th Birthday. Read about SKAP's (Shared Knowledge Asia Pacific) efforts to add 10 years worth of financial data of local Government assets to Wikidata during a Datathon.
Papers
Developing an OCR - Wikibase Pipeline for Place Names in the RGTC Series - introduces a semi-automated workflow for extracting and digitally storing geographically relevant information, including spatial relations and contextual details, from place names in the Répertoire géographique des textes cunéiformes. By Matthew Ong (2024).
Videos
Wikibase4Research - Kolja Bailly presents ways in which the Wikibase4Research tool by the TIB Open Science Lab supports researchers in dealing with Mediawiki software for knowledge bases such as Wikibase and facilitates better and FAIR Research Data Management. Includes a live demonstration and beginner-friendly instructions.
Tool of the week
CAT🐈: Metrics computing simple metrics (number of labels, number of descriptions, number of sitelinks, number of statements) for item matching a simple claim.
Let's Connect invites you to get involved in helping spread awareness and knowledge of Wikidata, potentially help organise a Wikidata Learning Clinic. Are you interested in participating? Please sign-up on this registration form.
reference illustration (an illustration of this subject to provide a detailed reference for its appearance. It should be ideally tied to the primary literature on the item.)
Showcase Items: Das Erste: A German public service television channel broadcasting for more than 70 years.
Showcase Lexemes: Kerzu (L8153) the Breton word for December, directly translates from "totally black", rather appropriate for the cold, dark last month of the year.
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
Technical documentation contributors can find updated resources, and new ways to connect with each other and the Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team, at the Documentation hub on MediaWiki.org. This page links to: resources for writing and improving documentation, a new #wikimedia-techdocs IRC channel on libera.chat, a listing of past and upcoming documentation events, and ways to request a documentation consultation or review. If you have any feedback or ideas for improvements to the documentation ecosystem, please contact the Technical Documentation Team.
Updates for editors
Layout change for the Edit Check feature
Later this week, Edit Check will be relocated to a sidebar on desktop. Edit check is the feature for new editors to help them follow policies and guidelines. This layout change creates space to present people with new Checks that appear while they are typing. The initial results show newcomers encountering Edit Check are 2.2 times more likely to publish a new content edit that includes a reference and is not reverted.
The Chart extension, which enables editors to create data visualizations, was successfully made available on MediaWiki.org and three pilot wikis (Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedias). You can see a working examples on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now discover articles in Wikiproject campaigns of their interest from the "All collection" category in the articles suggestion feature. Wikiproject Campaign organizers can use this feature, to help translators to discover articles of interest, by adding the <page-collection> </page-collection> tag to their campaign article list page on Meta-wiki. This will make those articles discoverable in the Content Translation tool. For more detailed information on how to use the tool and tag, please refer to the step-by-step guide. [15]
The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, now has a multiselect filter for namespace selection. This enables users to select multiple specific namespaces, instead of only one or all, when fetching pages for deletion.
The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions. Thanks to Chlod and the Moderator Tools team for both of these improvements. [16]
The Editing Team is working on making it easier to populate citations from archive.org using the Citoid tool, the auto-filled citation generator. They are asking communities to add two parameters preemptively, archiveUrl and archiveDate, within the TemplateData for each citation template using Citoid. You can see an example of a change in a template, and a list of all relevant templates. [17]
Last week, all wikis had problems serving pages to logged-in users and some logged-out users for 30–45 minutes. This was caused by a database problem, and investigation is ongoing. [19]
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug in the Add Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases. [20][21]
Updates for technical contributors
Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, now has an early-stage implementation in PHP. It is available for general use in MediaWiki extensions and Toolforge apps through Composer, with use in MediaWiki core coming soon. More information is available in the documentation. Thanks to Doğu for the inspiration and many contributions to the library. [22]
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. On December 4, the MediaWiki Interfaces team began rerouting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content endpoints on testwiki from RESTbase to comparable MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The team encourages active users of these endpoints to verify their tool's behavior on testwiki and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket before the end of the year, as they intend to roll out the same change across all Wikimedia projects in early January. These changes are part of the work to replace the outdated RESTBase system.
The 2024 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 3 January 2025, and has an associated privacy statement.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2024-12-16. Missed the previous one? See issue #657
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: PWSBot - Task(s): Is a selfmade chatbot to answer factual questions as part of a final research project for educational purposes.
Closed request for permissions/Bot: CarbonBot - Withdrawn by submitter
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session (Attn: Please fill out Pre-Participation Survey!) 17 December 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, 17 December 2024 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6 pm CET (Time zone converter) Wikimedian Mahir Morshed is leading a series of four sessions focused on lexicographical data in Wikidata. We are looking forward to learning more about these Wikibase entities! If you anticipate attending the workshop sessions, please fill out a brief survey linked from our Series Etherpad to help us prepare relevant materials for you. Sessions will be held on November 5, November 19, December 3, and December 17, 2024 at our regular time of 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET. Event page
Baptiste de Coulon, "Les données liées, Wikidata et les archives : une opportunité de contribution aux communs numériques". In: La Gazette des archives, n°271, 2024-2, p.37-56 (free access online after 3 years).
Tabular Online Validator - checks if SPARQL query results conform to a provided schema by validating data and highlighting potential errors, such as missing properties, invalid values, or too many values, with the option to refine the schema if issues arise. (A major update to the current ShEx validator that is expected to get integrated into the existing validator soon)
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
Wikibase REST API: We prototyped search support for the REST API and would like your feedback on it.
Property Suggestions: We updated the underlying data so you should have more up-to-date suggestions again when making new statements.
EntitySchemas: We continued the work on making it possible to search for EntitySchemas by their label and aliases when linking to them in a statement.
Query Service: We are investigating if we can do something about the issue where not all edgeLabels are shown on a graph visualisation (phab:T381857) and if there are any alternatives to the library used for the graph builder in the Query Service (phab:T381764)
Under the hood: We are optimizing the server setup for the term store to accommodate its growth (phab:T351802)
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
Interested in improving event management on your home wiki? The CampaignEvents extension offers organizers features like event registration management, event/wikiproject promotion, finding potential participants, and more - all directly on-wiki. If you are an organizer or think your community would benefit from this extension, start a discussion to enable it on your wiki today. To learn more about how to enable this extension on your wiki, visit the deployment status page.
Updates for editors
Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in Italy and Mexico on the Italian, Spanish, and English Wikipedias, can see a personalized Year in Review with insights based on their reading and editing history.
Users of the Android Wikipedia App in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia can see the new Rabbit Holes feature. This feature shows a suggested search term in the Search bar based on the current article being viewed, and a suggested reading list generated from the user’s last two visited articles.
The global reminder bot is now active and running on nearly 800 wikis. This service reminds most users holding temporary rights when they are about to expire, so that they can renew should they want to. See the technical details page for more information.
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 13 January 2025 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the Android Wikipedia App which had caused translatable SVG images to show the wrong language when they were tapped.
Updates for technical contributors
There is no new MediaWiki version next week. The next deployments will start on 14 January. [24]
