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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.
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. [1]
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. [2]
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. [3]
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)
Women in Religion have a monthly virtual edit-a-thon and the next session is December 2nd 4:00 - 5:00 p.m. CST. For Zoom meeting details, contact Dzingle1 or RosPost. Women in Red members are welcome to join the Zoom Meeting here
Tip of the month:
Think of rewarding contributors, especially newcomers, with a barnstar.
Greyhound Lines has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 02:44, 1 December 2024 (UTC)
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. [4]
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). [5]
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. [6]
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.
Following an RFC, the policy on restoration of adminship has been updated. All former administrators may now only regain the tools following a request at the Wikipedia:Bureaucrats' noticeboard within 5 years of their most recent admin action. Previously this applied only to administrators deysopped for inactivity.
Following a request for comment, a new speedy deletion criterion, T5, has been enacted. This applies to template subpages that are no longer used.
Hello, and welcome to the December newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since September. If you no longer want this newsletter, you can unsubscribe at any time; see below. If you'd like to be notified of upcoming drives and blitzes, and other GOCE activities, the best method is to add our announcements box to your watchlist.
Election news: The Guild's coordinators play an important role in the WikiProject, making sure nearly everything runs smoothly and on time. Editors in good standing (unblocked and without sanctions) are invited to nominate themselves or another editor to be a Guild coordinator (with their permission, of course) until 23:59 on 15 December (UTC). The voting phase begins at 00:01 on 16 December and runs until 23:59 on 31 December. Questions may be asked of candidates at any stage in the process. Elected coordinators will serve a six-month term from 1 January through 30 June.
Drive: In our September Backlog Elimination Drive, 67 editors signed up, 39 completed at least one copy edit, and between them they edited 682,696 words comprising 507 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Blitz: The October Copy Editing Blitz saw 16 editors sign-up, 15 of whom completed at least one copy edit. They edited 76,776 words comprising 35 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Drive: In our November Backlog Elimination Drive, 432,320 words in 151 articles were copy edited. Of the 54 users who signed up, 33 copy edited at least one article. Barnstars awarded are posted here.
Blitz: The December Blitz will begin at 00:00 on 15 December (UTC) and will end on 21 December at 23:59. Sign up here. Barnstars awarded will be posted here.
Progress report: As of 22:12, 7 December 2024 (UTC), GOCE copy editors have completed 333 requests since 1 January, and the backlog of tagged articles stands at 2,401 articles.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators, Dhtwiki, Miniapolis, Mox Eden and Wracking.
To stop receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
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. [7]
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. [8]
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. [9]
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. [11]
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. [12][13]
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. [14]
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.
