While editing OpenStreetMap from the iD editor, it will now be possible to match map data with Wikidata by typing in names and getting an autocompleted label.
OpenStreetMap is participating in this year's Google Summer of Code, and quite a few of the project ideas involve Wikidata integration.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
Notifications tell you about things that happen on the wiki. You can turn on notifications about new links to pages you created. For performance reasons you can no longer get e-mails about this. [1]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 April. It will be on all wikis from 4 April (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 3 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Bring your idea for Wikimedia in Education to life! Launch of the Wikimedia Education Greenhouse
Apply for Education Greenhouse
Are you passionate about open education? Do you have an idea to apply Wikimedia projects to an education initiative but don’t know where to start? Join the the Wikimedia & Education Greenhouse! It is an immersive co-learning experience that lasts 9 months and will equip you with the skills, knowledge and support you need to bring your ideas to life. You can apply as a team or as an individual, by May 12th. Find out more Education Greenhouse. For more information reachout to mguadalupewikimedia.org
The Wikimedia Foundation's Community health initiative plans to design and build a new user reporting system to make it easier for people experiencing harassment and other forms of abuse to provide accurate information to the appropriate channel for action to be taken. Please see meta:Community health initiative/User reporting system consultation 2019 to provide your input on this idea.
Two more administrator accounts were compromised. Evidence has shown that these attacks, like previous incidents, were due to reusing a password that was used on another website that suffered a data breach. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately. All admins are strongly encouraged to enable two-factor authentication, please consider doing so. Please always practice appropriate account security by ensuring your password is secure and unique to Wikimedia.
As a reminder, according to WP:NOQUORUM, administrators looking to close or relist an AfD should evaluate a nomination that has received few or no comments as if it were a proposed deletion (PROD) prior to determining whether it should be relisted.
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
The Wikimedia URL shortener will be launched on 11 April; see Wikidata:URLShortener. It will not be immediately incorporated into the Query Service but the feature is planned.
The Library of the African Studies Centre in Leiden compiled an experimental web dossier which combines the components of a classical ASCL web dossier with features offered by Wikidata.
The gender gap tool Delenezh is online again and now hosted by Wikimedia France
More work on documenting and preparing the announcement for the Wikidata External Landscape dashboard (phab:T204440)
Improved the documentation of WMDE analytic documents (phab:T219844)
Set up translatable schema edit summaries using the FormatAutocomments hook (phab:T218893)
Improved right-to-left support on schema pages (phab:T219298)
Protected schemas against imports (phab:T218181) and page moves (phab:T219313) and disabled the useless “move” and “create” protections for them (phab:T219980)
Improved schema edit conflict detection to allow merging of non-conflicting edits (phab:T218300, phab:T219173)
Improved the Extension:WikibaseSchema documentation on mediawiki.org (phab:T219979)
Fixed a bug on Lexicographical Data when editing existing grammatical features (phab:T219318)
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
More wikis are now testing visual editor section editing for mobile users. You can read more.
A map update caused some problems on 29 March and 30 March. It was rolled back. [5]
Pages on some Wikivoyages had problems with the top headline. This has been fixed. [6]
Changes later this week
When you add an edit summary the VisualEditor will search your recent edit summaries in case you want to re-use one. This works in both the visual and wikitext modes on desktop. It also works on the mobile site. [7]
The {{REVISIONID}} magic word will no longer work. This is for performance reasons. When you preview a page it will return "" (empty string). When you read a page it will return "-" (dash). For now this will only affect content namespaces. [9]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 April. It will be on all wikis from 11 April (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 10 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
You will be able to preview references. This means that when you hover over the link you will get a popup that shows you a preview of the reference. It will work much like page previews. This is so you don't have to go to the bottom of the page to see a reference. This will now be available as a beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia. [10][11]
The Wikidata JSON output will change. Empty containers will be serialised as empty objects. This is a breaking change that will affect tools that use JSON outputs and APIs. It will happen on 30 April. You can read more and see how to test your code.
An article you created on 26 February 2019, Ali Maiga Halidu, does not have enough sources and citations as written to remain published. It needs more citations from reliable, independent sources. (?) Information that can't be referenced should be removed (verifiability is of central importance on Wikipedia). I've moved your draft to draftspace (with a prefix of "Draft:" before the article title) where you can incubate the article with minimal disruption. When you feel the article meets Wikipedia's general notability guideline and thus is ready for mainspace, please click on the "Submit your draft for review!" button at the top of the page. JoeHebda (talk) 16:20, 12 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
The page Wikidata:Wikimania 2019 is here to help you coordinating with other people regarding your submissions for Wikimania 2019. The opening of submissions is planned for late April.
Reminder: you can apply to participate to the WikidataCon 2019 before April 29th
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
All wikis now have the TemplateWizard for the wikitext editor.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 April. It will be on all wikis from 18 April (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 17 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Wikidata will get a new constraint status called suggestion. This will change how the WikibaseQualityConstraints constraint checking API works. [12][13]
You can test the depicts property for structured data on Commons.
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The advanced search function URL now shows which namespaces you search in. The namespace field is collapsed by default on the search page. You can also add new fields to the search interface through a hook. [14][15][16]
The wikis now look slightly different in the mobile web version. [17]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Wikipedia articles will have the sameAsmeta property. It adds structured data. This makes it easier for search engines to find Wikipedia articles. It also makes it easier to reuse content. There will an A/B test. [18][19]
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
Past: WikiNusantara 2019, the first Wikimedia Indonesia conference was successfully held in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, on Apr 27-28, 2019. The conference included two Wikidata talks:
New tool: Wikimedia Related Projects provides statistics about Wikimedia projects and the relations between them, using the number of sitelinks they have in common
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Wikipedia app for Android now invites users to add Wikidata descriptions to Wikidata objects that have Wikipedia articles but no Wikidata descriptions. It will only invite users who have added a number of Wikidata descriptions in the app without being reverted. This is to avoid spam and bad edits. [20][21]
Problems
Tech News was late last week because of a MassMessage bug. Other newsletters had the same problem. [22]
Changes later this week
You will see when you last refreshed the recent changes page. This is so you can see how recent the changes are. [23]
When you write a comment in Structured Discussions but have not posted it yet your web browser will save it in local storage instead of session storage. This means you do not lose them even if you close your web browser. Structured Discussions used to be called Flow. [24]
You will be able to turn off milestone notifications. Milestone notifications congratulate you when you have made certain numbers of edits. [25]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 May. It will be on all wikis from 2 May (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 1 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
The Wikidata wb_terms table will be dropped. This will affect some Wikidata tools. They need to be updated. The table has become too big which is causing problems. This will happen on 29 May. You can read more. You can ask for help if you need it.
Wikimedia wikis will soon use a token when you log out. This changes how the API works. Some tools might need to be updated. [26]