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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Over the next three weeks, dark mode will become available for all users, both logged-in and logged-out, starting with the mobile web version. This fulfils one of the top-requested community wishes, and improves low-contrast reading and usage in low-light settings. As part of these changes, dark mode will also work on User-pages and Portals. There is more information in the latest Web team update. [1]
Logged-in users can now set global preferences for the text-size and dark-mode, thanks to a combined effort across Foundation teams. This allows Wikimedians using multiple wikis to set up a consistent reading experience easily, for example by switching between light and dark mode only once for all wikis. [2]
If you use a very old web browser some features might not work on the Wikimedia wikis. This affects Internet Explorer 11 and versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari older than 2016. This change makes it possible to use new CSS features and to send less code to all readers. [3][4]
Wikipedia Admins can customize local wiki configuration options easily using Community Configuration. Community Configuration was created to allow communities to customize how some features work, because each language wiki has unique needs. At the moment, admins can configure Growth features on their home wikis, in order to better recruit and retain new editors. More options will be provided in the coming months. [5]
Editors interested in language issues that are related to Unicode standards, can now discuss those topics at a new conversation space in MediaWiki.org. The Wikimedia Foundation is now a member of the Unicode Consortium, and the coordination group can collaboratively review the issues discussed and, where appropriate, bring them to the attention of the Unicode Consortium.
Local administrators can now add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without using JavaScript. Documentation is available on MediaWiki. (T6086)
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-07-08. Please help Translate.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 10th July 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Registration for Wikimania 2024 is open! In-person participants: please register until 26 July, 11:59 p.m., UTC. Virtual participants can register anytime. If you received a scholarship from the Wikimedia Foundation, you will receive an email with a registration code and instructions.
Tool of the week
User:Teester/EntityShape.js - a userscript that adds an input box to a Wikidata page wherein you can enter an EntitySchema (such as E10). When you click "Check", checks whether each statement and property conforms to the schema. It then displays a summary at the top of the Item for each property indicating whether they conform or not. It also adds a badge to each statement and each property on the page indicating whether they conform or not.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata teams' development goals for the third quarter of 2024 have been updated: Wikidata:Development plan
indexer (entity responsible for compiling an index of a book, database, website or other forms of media publications in the form of a methodical arrangement of records designed to enable users to locate information quickly. Example: Hazel K. Bell (Q70226489))
WorldCyclingStats ID (identifier on the website WorldCyclingStats (www.worldcyclingstats.com))
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The CampaignEvents extension is now available on Meta-wiki, Igbo Wikipedia, and Swahili Wikipedia, and can be requested on your wiki. This extension helps in managing and making events more visible, giving Event organizers the ability to use tools like the Event registration tool. To learn more about the deployment status and how to request this extension for your wiki, visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-wiki.
Editors using the iOS Wikipedia app who have more than 50 edits can now use the Add an Image feature. This feature presents opportunities for small but useful contributions to Wikipedia.
A problem with the color of the talkpage tabs always showing as blue, even for non-existent pages which should have been red, affecting the Vector 2022 skin, has been fixed.
Future changes
The Trust and Safety Product team wants to introduce temporary accounts with as little disruption to tools and workflows as possible. Volunteer developers, including gadget and user-script maintainers, are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. The team has created documentation explaining how to do the update. Learn more.
Australia report: Partner Project between Wikimedia Australia, the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers (ANZSI) and the School of Information and Communication Studies at Charles Sturt University (CSU SICS)
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-07-15. Please help Translate.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: SpinachBot - Task/s: AI agent-enabled question answering through the creation and execution of complex SPARQL queries on Wikidata. Users tag the bog with wikidata-related questions, and it tries to come up with an answer by iteratively creating SPARQL queries.
An Intelligent System: What I learned through taking an introductory Wikidata course - The author, Anne-Christine Hoff, dispels misconceptions about Wikidata. She highlights that it is a relational communication system, not solely bot-driven, and allows users worldwide to add localized data in multiple languages, creating a self-structuring repository of information
Merge and diff - blog post by Magnus about adding new properties (taxon data speficially, NCBI, GBIF, and iINaturalist) to the AC2WD tool. If you have the user script installed on Wikidata (see tool below), AC2WD will automatically show up on relevant taxon items.
Online workshop Upskilling in Wikidata for maximum impact IBC 2024 - Recording of the virtual Wikidata workshop given on the 9th of July 2024. An onboarding and introductory event in anticipation of a full in-person workshop to be held at the International Botanical Congress 2024 in Madrid on the 21st of July 2024
User:Magnus Manske/ac2wd.js - This script adds an "AC2WD" link in the tools sidebar. When you click on it, it uses the AC2WD tool to check the item for certain Authority Control IDs (eg VIAF). It then checks these AC datasets for statements (and more AC IDs). It will then add any new information it found as new statements, or add more references to existing statements where possible. A green checkmark will be appended to the link if data was added (reload the page to see), otherwise a "—" if no new data was available.
myfixguide.com (photos about how to disassemble hardware)
indexer (entity responsible for compiling an index of a book, database, website or other forms of media publications in the form of a methodical arrangement of records designed to enable users to locate information quickly)
Newest WikiProjects: Human Cells - dedicated to improve our coverage of information about these fundamental entities that compose organisms. The project focuses mainly on two kinds of cell classes: species-agnostic classes, such as neutrophil (Q188417), and human-specific classes, such as human neutrophil (Q101405102).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Wikimedia developers can now officially continue to use both Gerrit and GitLab, due to a June 24 decision by the Wikimedia Foundation to support software development on both platforms. Gerrit and GitLab are both code repositories used by developers to write, review, and deploy the software code that supports the MediaWiki software that the wiki projects are built on, as well as the tools used by editors to create and improve content. This decision will safeguard the productivity of our developers and prevent problems in code review from affecting our users. More details are available in the Migration status page.
The Wikimedia Foundation seeks applicants for the Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). This group will bring technical contributors and Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform. Council members will evaluate and consult on the movement's product and technical activities, so that we develop multi-generational projects. We are looking for a range of technical contributors across the globe, from a variety of Wikimedia projects. Please apply here by August 10.
Editors with rollback user-rights who use the Wikipedia App for Android can use the new Edit Patrol features. These features include a new feed of Recent Changes, related links such as Undo and Rollback, and the ability to create and save a personal library of user talk messages to use while patrolling. If your wiki wants to make these features available to users who do not have rollback rights but have reached a certain edit threshold, you can contact the team. You can read more about this project on Diff blog.
Next week, functionaries, volunteers maintaining tools, and software development teams are invited to test the temporary accounts feature on testwiki. Temporary accounts is a feature that will help improve privacy on the wikis. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page. [8]
Editors who upload files cross-wiki, or teach other people how to do so, may wish to join a Wikimedia Commons discussion. The Commons community is discussing limiting who can upload files through the cross-wiki upload/Upload dialog feature to users auto-confirmed on Wikimedia Commons. This is due to the large amount of copyright violations uploaded this way. There is a short summary at Commons:Cross-wiki upload and discussion at Commons:Village Pump.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-07-22. Please help Translate.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
DannyS712 bot - Task/s: I want to get approval for a bot with translation admin rights that will automatically mark pages for translations if and only if the latest version is identical to the version that is already in the translation system, i.e. only pages with no "net" changes in the pending edits.
DerIchBot - Task/s: Adding data about schools provided by the German and Austrian governments to wikidata.
DifoolBot 5 - Task/s: Change reference URLs into the related ID property and merge references with the same ID property.
AroundTheBot - Task/s: Automated import of Albanian nouns with IPA from Wiktionary, with the long-term goal of using this data to do pronunciation-based comparison/word evolution between languages.
Past: Wikimedia Indonesia hosted the 2024 Data Visualization Competition from June 5 to 18. The event featured data visualizations (posters and graphics) and short essays using data from Wikidata. Visit the competition page (in Indonesian) to view the winning entries.
Upcoming: Wikidata's 12th birthday decentralized events will take place in October and November 2024. Feel free to browse the documentation pages to learn how to organize an event in your area, get funding, and get in touch with other organizers.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Papers:
Representación de datos abiertos con Wikidata Query Service (Q126917814). This paper details the Wikidata Query Service, for the creation of data visualizations. All visualization options available in the WQS are explored, accompanied by example queries that introduce the implementation of these visualizations. By Ángel Obregón-Sierra and Silvia Cecilia Anselmi.
Paulina, a new tool for exploring public domain works.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
WMF Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) invites interested volunteers to apply. As part of the movement strategy recommendation for "Coordinating Across Stakeholders," the PTAC will bring technical contributors and the Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform.
indexer (entity responsible for compiling an index of a book, database, website or other forms of media publications in the form of a methodical arrangement of records designed to enable users to locate information quickly)
Reference Verification - a research and development project aimed at helping Wikidata editors check the quality of external references based on various types of AI/ML models.
NZWomenPhotographers - aims to improve information about New Zealand women photographers, based on a dataset provided by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
Newest database reports: Items with P569=P570 - Items with instance of (P31) --> human (Q5) and the same year in date of birth (P569) and date of death (P570) (2024-07-22)
Showcase Lexemes: water (L3302) - (S1) common liquid substance (S2) chemical compound of hydrogen and oxygen (H₂O) (S3) a body of water, usually a river, a lake, or an ocean
Development
mul: We fixed the last blocker for the limited MUL rollout to Wikidata on July 29th (phab:T362917)
EntitySchemas:
We fixed a misplaced background color in EntitySchema (phab:T369283)
We’re investigating how to make EntitySchemas searchable by label (phab:T362005)
Query Service: preparation for the graph split is continuing by the Search Platform Team. We started looking into adapting the constraints checks for it (phab:T369079)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature News
Stewards can now globally block accounts. Before the change only IP addresses and IP ranges could be blocked globally. Global account blocks are useful when the blocked user should not be logged out. Global locks (a similar tool logging the user out of their account) are unaffected by this change. The new global account block feature is related to the Temporary Accounts project, which is a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors that are no longer made public.
Later this week, Wikimedia site users will notice that the Interface of FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") is improved and consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface and Wikimedia's design system. The FlaggedRevs interface experience on mobile and Minerva skin was inconsistent before it was fixed and ported to Codex by the WMF Growth team and some volunteers. [9]
Wikimedia site users can now submit account vanishing requests via GlobalVanishRequest. This feature is used when a contributor wishes to stop editing forever. It helps you hide your past association and edit to protect your privacy. Once processed, the account will be locked and renamed. [10]
Have you tried monitoring and addressing vandalism in Wikipedia using your phone? A Diff blog post on Patrolling features in the Mobile App highlights some of the new capabilities of the feature, including swiping through a feed of recent changes and a personal library of user talk messages for use when patrolling from your phone.
Wikimedia contributors and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) organisations can now learn and measure the impact Wikimedia Commons is having towards creating quality encyclopedic content using the Commons Impact Metrics analytics dashboard. The dashboard offers organizations analytics on things like monthly edits in a category, the most viewed files, and which Wikimedia articles are using Commons images. As a result of these new data dumps, GLAM organisation can more reliably measure their return on investment for programs bringing content into the digital Commons. [11]
Project Updates
Come share your ideas for improving the wikis on the newly reopened Community Wishlist. The Community Wishlist is Wikimedia’s forum for volunteers to share ideas (called wishes) to improve how the wikis work. The new version of the wishlist is always open, works with both wikitext and Visual Editor, and allows wishes in any language.
Learn more
Have you ever wondered how Wikimedia software works across over 300 languages? This is 253 languages more than the Google Chrome interface, and it's no accident. The Language and Product Localization Team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports your work by adapting all the tools and interfaces in the MediaWiki software so that contributors in our movement who translate pages and strings can translate them and have the sites in all languages. Read more about the team and their upcoming work on Diff.
How can Wikimedia build innovative and experimental products while maintaining such heavily used websites? A recent blog post by WMF staff Johan Jönsson highlights the work of the WMF Future Audience initiative, where the goal is not to build polished products but test out new ideas, such as a ChatGPT plugin and Add a Fact, to help take Wikimedia into the future.
