Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 21 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: A starting point for newer institutions to think through what is involved in coordinating a Wikidata project, including shared infrastructure, training, and documentation, 22 September. Agenda
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #21 WikiDojo: Facebook, YouTube, September 25
Wikidata Query Service (in French) - (Parts 1, 2 & 3)
Tool of the week
copy-qid is a user script by Abbe98 that allows you to copy the Qid with one click.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikidata development team is seeking to evaluate and improve the process of collecting and reacting to bug reports and feature requests. You can give feedback about your experience using this anonymous form until September 30th or add feedback publically to Wikidata talk:Contact the development team/Process review 2020.
WDQS/WCQS Status update (September 2): "We are planning to spend more time doing some analytics on our data. (1) What are the most expensive queries, what are they trying to achieve and is that reasonable? (2) Do we have performant subgraphs that we could expose independently?"
The language codes lij-mc, ja-Hira, ja-Kana, ja-Hrkt, ja-Hani, ojp, ojp-Hira and ojp-Hani" have been added for use in monolingual text property values (phab:T254968, phab:T195816)
The language codes de-1901, eo-hsistemo and eo-xsistemo, ja-hira, ja-kana and ja-hrkt have been added for Lexemes (phab:T262330,phab:T257422, phab:T250559)
P1438 has been converted from string to external ID datatype (phab:T262198)
Worked on fixing an input issue with invisible characters (phab:T261071)
Investigating what work would be needed to get the new termbox that's available on mobile to also work on desktop
Fixing several issues with Special:Undelete (phab:T261747)
Fixing an error message being shown twice (phab:T260869)
Starting the coding work on the Query Builder
Continuing to write a draft for a REST API specification
Finishing the remaining work needed to get the improved quality scoring for Items deployed to ORES
Continuing work on WikibaseManifest: Determined the essential metadata that will be included in the WikibaseManifest file, added some new features (mostly MediaWiki metadata) to the Manifest that were requested by the OpenRefine team (phab:T262805 and phab:T262804) and set up a test system that will soon be ready for tool builders to use for testing the integration of their tools with WikibaseManifest
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
There is a new tag for reverted edits. For example you can see it in the recent changes feed or in the article history. It is added to edits when they have been undone, rollbacked or manually reverted to an older version of the page. [1][2]
Changes later this week
The number of times you can do something in a period of time on wiki is limited. This could be the number of edits per minute or the number of users you email in a day. Some users are not affected by all limits because of their user rights. They could soon see the limit even if it does not affect them. [3]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 September. It will be on all wikis from 24 September (calendar).
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions [IFLA] have published a series of six videos "discussions with professionals in order to discuss projects, issues, progress of Wikidata, Wikibase and bibliographic data in the field of libraries." Currently available as a playlist on YouTube under CC-By (Wikimedia Commons upload soon), with subtitles in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French (Arabic and Chinese coming soon). The production was made by the IFLA Wikidata Working Group and funded by a WikiCite grant.
The Wikidata development team is seeking to evaluate and improve the process of collecting and reacting to bug reports and feature requests. You can give feedback about your experience using this anonymous formuntil September 30th or add feedback publically to Wikidata talk:Contact the development team/Process review 2020.
Como is a new Android app, that uses Wikidata lexemes and senses to create a word-guessing game. It let's players create new senses and tests them on other players to finally save them in Wikidata. The app is developed as part of a BA thesis, to determine if this concept is useful to create more lexicographical data, and testers would be very welcome.
A long-standing bug has been fixed (T217144) where Items and Lexemes created via OAuth would not be added to the user’s watchlist even if the user had the 将我创建的页面和上传的文件添加到我的监视列表 setting enabled. (The 将我编辑的页面和文件添加到我的监视列表 setting was probably likewise ineffective, but this was not tested specifically.) Affected tools include QuickStatements, Mix'n'Match, and Wikidata Lexeme Forms; users of these and other tools may see more pages being added to their watchlists now. (This only applies to new edits and page creations; previously created or edited pages will not be automatically added to the watchlist retroactively.)
Working on the basic building blocks of the Query Builder towards making it possible to create the first very simple query with it
Talking to people about comparing Wikidata's data against other databases and flagging mismatches
Fixing an issue with Item creations via the API by blocked users leading to skipped entity IDs (phab:T232620)
Fixed an input issue with invisible characters (phab:T261071)
Finishing the draft of the REST API spec to get it ready for feedback
WikibaseManifest: created a separate key for local entities and decided what we do about non-local entity sources based on tool-builder feedback (phab:T263527) and specifying the API in OpenApi format (phab:T262919)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Professor Toby Hudson on Entity Explosion, a browser extension which allows you to get information about entities on the web page you’re visiting, 06 October. Agenda
Video: How to create and edit items on Wikidata (in Spanish) - YouTube
Video: Introduction to Wikidata and wikiprojects of interest to librarians (in Spanish) - YouTube
Tool of the week
IllWill.js is a userscript that searches Wikidata for foreign-language sitelinks, to populate Template:ill and replace plain red links on other Wikimedia projects.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
omeka-s-wikidata is a new module for the open source GLAM collection management software Omeka, that allows cataloguers to use Wikidata as a vocabulary for persons, places, subjects, etc.
Maps of arts and humanities research grants funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council in UK between 2013-2019. Sorted by year, Sorted by budget (Source)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Because of the problems with the MediaWiki version two weeks ago last week's updates are also late. [13][14][15]
Changes later this week
Live previews didn't show the templates used in the preview if you just edited a section. This has now been fixed. You can also test CSS and JavaScript pages even if you have the live preview enabled. Previously this didn't work well. [16][17]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 October. It will be on all wikis from 15 October (calendar).
Future changes
A new stable version of Pywikibot is coming soon. [18]
The new Wikibase/Consultants and Support Providers' directory on Meta lists people/companies that provide professional help with Wikibase -- be it technical support (installation and setup), custom development, or data modeling services.
The 2020 Coolest Tool Award is still accepting nominations until October 14th. Please use this form to recommend tools. You can nominate as many tools as you want by filling out the form multiple times.
Working on enabling JSON dumps for Lexemes (phab:T220883)
Finishing preventing blocked users from making us skip QIDs (phab:T232620)
Continuing work on the Wikibase Manifest extension that allows toolbuilders to easily access configurations of a specific Wikibase instance so it is easier for them to make their tools work with not just Wikidata but also other Wikibase instances
Started analyzing what we consider a mismatch for our work around checking Wikidata's data against other databases
Continued work on the Query Builder to get it to create the first very simple query. It can do that now but not yet visualize the result.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Other: Proposal to spin-off non-Earth coordinates from property P625 (coordinates location), currently only 7000 of 8 million values: see Property proposal/planetary coordinates
Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, October 20 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: hands-on work with Wikidata on creating items for authors of COVID 19 papers and brainstorming for future hands-on work, 20 October. Agenda
Blocked users trying to create new Items no longer make us skip QIDs (phab:T232620)
So far we don't have JSON dumps for Lexemes. We're working on regularly generating them as well now (phab:T264883)
Continuing work on getting the Query Builder to generate the first query. Almost there.
Started the feedback round for the REST API. Please provide your input if you are currently using the action API or plan to develop against Wikidata's API in the future.
Past: Providing sustainable data services through Wikibase and Wikidata, SEMIC Conference 2020 - (replay)
Past: Introduction to Wikidata by Frimelle, Software Freedom Kosova 2020 - (replay)
Past: What's new in Wikidata? by Lea Lacroix, Lydia Pintscher and Mattia Capozzi, ItWikiCon 2020 - (replay)
Ongoing: plenty of Wikidata birthday events, online and onsite! Here's an overview of the upcoming events, you can find the links and details in the main calendar.
WikiCite virtual conference on October 26-28, live-streamed on Youtube and Twitter, with sessions across many timezones and languages – English, French, German, Indonesian, and Portuguese.
24-hours online meetup, on October 28-29: an open discussion with plenty of community members facilitating exchange around the topic "what makes you enthusiastic about Wikidata"
Gene Wiki: how to synchronize and curate primary sources with and in Wikidata, online, on October 29th
Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata (in French) - (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5)
Tool of the week
WikibaseJS-cli allows to edit Wikidata from command line, including creating items from samples ("templates") and do complex transformations of statements
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Server switch: all wikis will be in read-only on Tuesday, October 27th at 14:00 UTC for up to an hour (more information). All services hosted by WMF (e.g. tools hosted on wmcloud.org) are also impacted. Non-essential code deployments will not happen this week.
Got the Query Builder to create the first simple queries. You can follow along the development from now on on the test system.
Preparing regular JSON dumps for Lexemes (phab:T264883)
Analyzed a number of queries to the query service together with the WMF search team to better understand what the queries are doing and what further optimizations we can make to the query service and which queries need different systems to answer them.
Working on creating and tracking implicit usages of Wikidata descriptions so description changes show up in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co (phab:T265897)
Looking into what would be considered a mismatch when comparing WIkidata's data against another database. This is groundwork for potentially automating this in the future to find potential issues in the data to flag to editors.
Working on deploying the new Item quality scoring model for ORES to production so we have improved quality scores
Finished investigating how to handle a restricted list of external Wikibase services. (phab:T265118)
Removed noratelimit on bots for wikidata.org (phab:T258354)
Published Easier Access for Programmers to Wikidata research report
Past: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, October 27 (notes)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Arthur Smith and Daniel Mietchen discussing author items in Wikidata and the Author Disambiguator Tool, 3 November. Agenda
Wikidata Spanish Tutorials Website – a brand new user-friendly (with Dublin Core Metadata!) digital collection of Wikidata slides, tutorials, and manuals in Spanish (Biblioteca Daniel Cosío Villegas, Mexico)
Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #24 - YouTube, Facebook, November 14, 19.00 UTC
Tool of the week
Template:Cite Q on Wikipedia makes it easier to use Wikidata items as Wikipedia references.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 12 November 2020 (Add to calendar). Come and share-out anything new or exciting that’s been happening with your Wikibase instance; what have you been doing recently, what is working well, what has been challenging for you - we would like to hear them all!
Continuing work with the WMF search team to automatically categorize WDQS queries to see how they can better be served
Query Builder work is continuing. Next step is making it possible to create a query with an arbitrary Property instead of the currently hard-coded post code.
Feedback round for the REST API is finishing this week and then we will review all the feedback and make changes to the spec accordingly.
Preparing to release 1.35 version of Wikibase docker image (phab:T264538)
Fixed Math extension to not require JS parser which caused issues creating new Statements for mathematical formulae (phab:T266673)
Made sure there is a meaningful edit summary when deleting a Lexeme (phab:T263435)
Blogpost: Introducing Mapping the Scottish Reformation: Clerics, Manuscripts, and Open Data. "Most of the individuals we have found are obviously relatively obscure and have no item entry in Wikidata...As such, we have created around one thousand new items over the last two months, all of which serve as a framework to record the key parameters of a cleric’s career".
Tool of the week
ALEC (A List of Everything Cool) is a tool to explore biodiversity content in Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Join the upcoming #1Lib1Ref Wikipedia campaign from January 15th to February 5th 2021 and improve Wikidata items by adding references to statements.
Added "Random lexeme" link under dedicated section for lexicographical data in the Wikidata sidebar (phab:T205525). Thanks to Matěj Suchánek!
Working on language/spelling variant selector bug on Special:NewItem and Special:NewLexeme that makes it difficult to continue creating Items or Lexemes (phab:T266638)
Work on the Query Builder continues. We're focusing on making it possible to query for all Items with a specific Property but any value next.
Went over all the feedback we have received for the REST API specification draft. Overall the feedback is positive and really useful. So we will move ahead after thinking more about the remaining points that were raised.
Working on making changes to descriptions show up in the RecentChanges feed and watchlists on Wikipedia and co as well even if they are not explicitly used (phab:T191831)
Fixed a problem adding statements with Properties of datatype mathematical formula (phab:T266496)
Kicked off our new effort to implement a predictable release cycle and release infrastructure for Wikibase suite by creating a prototype build workflow (phab:T267553) and prototype test workflow (phab:T267554)
ANN: A platform to annotate text with Wikidata IDs (report) "Report of the work done by the Ann team at the eLife Sprint 2020. It describes the effort pursued towards a system for universal annotation of biomedical articles using the collaborative knowledge graph of Wikidata".
How the content of Wikidata can be represented in RDF - YouTube
Tool of the week
EntityShape.js is a script that allows you to check an Item against an EntitySchema. On the Item page, it will display various information about the Item, like the properties that should be present on the Item.
Query Builder: We're making it possible to switch between querying for specific values (e.g. all Items with a specific post code) or any value (all Items with a post code statement regardless of which one it is)
Correcting the behaviour of what automatically happens on Wikidata when a page is moved on Wikipedia and co to an excluded namespace with the "suppress redirect" option (phab:T261275)
Making language fallback indicators not show up for language variant fallbacks in a few more places (phab:T267502)
Adding html language attributes for statements linking to Forms and Senses (phab:T267023)
Working on language and lexical category fields turning red on unfocus even though no changes are made after a change in ooui (phab:T266936)
Finished building the 1.35 versions of the Wikibase base and bundle docker images and published to dockerhub (phab:T264538)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: We will have several speakers joining us to discuss their projects in lightning talks, 1 December. Agenda
Upcoming: WMF search platform team office hour, Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020. 16:00-17:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PST / 11:00-12:00 EST / 17:00-18:00 CET. Etherpad, Google Meet. You can come and chat about the Wikidata & Commons Query Service.
Round 2 of the consultation on using Wikidata for curriculum digitization begun on November 24th, and will end on December 7th. You can participate by sharing your ideas in this response form (Google forms)
User:Zvpunry/EntitySchemaHighlighter.js user script highlights the entities in the content of a Schema and shows information when hovering the link. (2020-12-07)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
We now have a central repository for wikibase-cli templates, with the aim to document best practices, offer general purpose request/create/edit templates, but also offer more niche templates as examples of what's possible: contributions and template requests welcome!
Simple Query Builder development continues. We worked on combining different query conditions as well as internationalisation.
Making the precision translatable in geocoordinate and date inputs (phab:T269102)
Changes to descriptions in a specific language now show up on watchlist and recent changes on the Wikipedia and co for that language (phab:T191831)
Finished working on the problem of incorrectly-escaped label being included in a link to Special:NewItem if there are no search results (phab:T263258)
Investigating why we're currently skipping a significant number of Item IDs (phab:T268625)
Wikibase Release Strategy/Infrastructure: We have decided where to host future Docker and tarball releases of Wikibase. You can read about the details and the reasoning in the following ADRs: Docker Image Repository, Tarball Repository
Template:Notebook Given name is a new template which gives for each given name a list of useful SPARQL queries. The template can be used on the talk page of given names. See Alexandre (Q16002466) for an example. Comments are Contributions are welcome.
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 17 December 2020 (Add to calendar). We will have a few people share out about their project in the first half of the call and then continue our conversation from the last session about what will be a better platform for community discussions. Everyone is welcome to attend!
We spend the week doing some exploratory work for the next year. Among other things we looked into how to measure the number of constraint violations on an average Item and what we can learn from it.
Continuing to work on the query builder. It can now have more than one query conditions. One of the next steps is making it possible to query for Item values. You can follow along on the demo system.
Finished working on the problem of values of Statements that link to Forms and Senses not having language attributes associated with them in the HTML code (phab:T267023)
Fixed language selectors covering other input fields when using keyboard navigation for Special:NewItem and Special:NewLexeme (phab:T266638)
Fixed language fallback indicators sometimes still shown for variant fallbacks (phab:T267502)
Working on whitespace stripped while typing when editing lexemes (phab:T250550)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2021.
Recent changes
The {{citation needed}} template shows when a statement in a Wikipedia article needs a source. If you click on it when you edit with the visual editor there is a popup that explains this. Now it can also show the reason and when it was added. [47]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
Future changes
You can propose and discuss what technical improvements should be done for geographic information. This could be coordinates, maps or other related things.
Some wikis use LanguageConverter to switch between writing systems or variants of a language. This can only be done for the entire page. There will be a <langconvert> tag that can convert a piece of text on a page. [48]
Oversighters and stewards can hide entries in Special:AbuseLog. They can soon hide multiple entries at once using checkboxes. This works like hiding normal edits. It will happen in early January. [49]
Ongoing: rC3 (remote Chaos Communication Congress). Several Wikidata-related talks and meetups happening on December 27th, 28th and 29th: introduction to Wikidata, Wikidata for datajournalists, Wikidata meetups in German and English, and a Query Service workshop. (see Wikipaka schedule for more details)
Project Grants open call for proposals in 2021. Changes in the review process for Project Grants in 2021; the open call for community organizing proposals will be from January 11 to February 10 and the open call for software and research proposals will be from February 15 to March 16.
User:Bargioni/WikiBridge.js userscript enables you to add a tabbed section to Wikidata items showing some paragraphs from Wikipedias chosen by the Babel languages of the logged-in user. Demo video (in Italian)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata Lexeme Forms now lists languages on the index page using their autonyms (language name in that language). (Source)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can choose to be reminded when you have not added an edit summary. This can be done in your preferences. This could conflict with the CAPTCHA. This has now been fixed. [50]
You can link to specific log entries. You can get these links for example by clicking the timestamps in the log. Until now, such links to private log entries showed no entry even if you had permission to view private log entries. The links now show the entry. [51]
Admins can use the abuse filter tool to automatically prevent bad edits. Three changes happened last week:
The filter editing interface now shows syntax errors while you type. This is similar to JavaScript pages. It also shows a warning for regular expressions that match the empty string. New warnings will be added later. [52]
Oversighters can now hide multiple filter log entries at once using checkboxes on Special:AbuseLog. This is how the usual revision deletion works. [53]
When a filter matches too many actions after it has been changed it is "throttled". The most powerful actions are disabled. This is to avoid many editors getting blocked when an administrator made a mistake. The administrator will now get a notification about this "throttle".
Bots using the API no longer watch pages automatically based on account preferences. Setting the watchlist to watch will still work. This is to reduce the size of the watchlist data in the database. [55]
There was a new version of MediaWiki last week. You can read a detailed log of all 763 changes. Most of them are very small and will not affect you.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 January. It will be on all wikis from 14 January (calendar).
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Using QuickStatements for bulk uploading archived website data to Wikidata with Peter Chan, 12 January. Agenda
Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #27 on Wikipedia20 - YouTube, Facebook, 16 January
Video: How to use WikiBridge - a userscript that enables you to add a tabbed section to Wikidata items showing some paragraphs from Wikipedias chosen by the Babel languages of the logged-in user. Demo video
Tool of the week
QueryGraph is a web tool for creating queries in SPARQL from graphs.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikibase now has a dedicated Twitter account: Follow @WikibaseHQ for updates on everything Wikibase.
You can now create and curate catalog groups on Mix’n’match, and find the most common unmatched entries between them (Source)
Continued working on the Query Builder. We focused on making it possible to query for Item values and being able to limit the number of Items in the result. We also looked into how to query for quantity values.
Changed P920’s data type from string to external identifier (phab:T269205)
Finished working on the problem of Items that have the page prop wikibase:statements set to 0 but actually do have statements (phab:T145712)
Continued work on the “Publishing” step of the Wikibase release pipeline by building and testing three components of the software suite: Wikibase (phab: T267893), Query Service frontend (phab:T268025), and Query Service backend (phab:T268022)