Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Lightning talks on WikiProject Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, Wikidata use for a site-specific archaeological case study (Dura-Europos, Syria), and round tripping Wikidata into Alma using Alma Refine. Agenda, Dec. 14th.
Lukas Schmelzeisen, Corina Dima, Steffen Staab: "Wikidated 1.0: An Evolving Knowledge Graph Dataset of Wikidata's Revision History", https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05003v1
"ARTchives: a Linked Open Data native catalogue of art historians’ archive" crowdsourcing curated information on notable art historians’ archives (including Wikidata) - paper, tool
embeds.js: This script shows embeds on external identifier statements such as YouTube videos, Twitter tweets, Spotify playlists, Genius lyrics, and more!
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 GMT on Thursday 30th December 2021 (17:00 Berlin time). This month we will have a guest presentation by the team at The Semantic Lab at Pratt Institute. They will present how they are using Linked Open Data (LOD) in their projects with the help of Wikibase. All are welcome!
The 500th Wikidata weekly summary is 2 issues away. We are putting together interesting things related to the number 500 to include in that issue. Do you know any Wikidata facts or queries or anything cool related to 500? Please add them to Wikidata:Status updates/Next#Welcome to the 500th Weekly Summary!
Wikimedia Deutschland is running a survey to evaluate Wikibase Installation and Updating experience for users. Please answer a few questions so we can continue to identify areas of improvement for users. Survey links
Due to the winter holidays, the development team is taking a break and no deployment is happening for Wikidata at the moment. Happy holidays, everyone :)
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 GMT on Thursday 30th December 2021 (17:00 Berlin time). This month we will have a guest presentation by the team at The Semantic Lab at Pratt Institute. They will present how they are using Linked Open Data (LOD) in their projects with the help of Wikibase. All are welcome!
Wikidata. Lecture - master class in Russian is 16:07 GMT on Sunday 26th December 2021 (19:07 Moscow time) in Minsk Hackerspace. For those who are not familiar and want to know what it is.
Articles created by country of citizenship : a javascript notebook which looks at the distribution of articles created by a user by country of citizenship (P27). It uses Wikidata's API through wikibase-sdk library.
If you are using the Modern Vector skin on Wikidata then search might break for you near the end of January for a few days. To fix it you can temporarily switch back to the Vector skin. A proper fix is being worked on in phab:T275251.
Wikimedia Deutschland is running a survey to evaluate Wikibase Installation and Updating experience for users. Please answer a few questions so we can continue to identify areas of improvement for users. Survey links
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, January 19th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group.
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, January 4 at 19:00 CEST
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, January 19th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group.
Next Wikidata Bug Triage Hour on January 13th at 18:00 Central Europe Time (17:00 UTC/GMT), in this Jitsi room. This edition will be an open discussion without a specific theme: you can bring 1-2 Phabricator tickets that you really care about, and we will look at them together and see how we can add relevant information and triage them.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Review Wikimedia Foundation’s Linked Open Data Strategy 2021 and community discussion. Agenda, January 11th. to local time!
Upcoming Search Platform Office Hours. Date: Wednesday, January 12th, 2022. Time: 16:00-17:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PST / 11:00-12:00 EST / 17:00-18:00 CET & WAT
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, January 12 at 19:00 CEST (exceptionally on Wednesday)
Introduction to the interwiki links between Wikidata and Wikipedia (in French) - YouTube
Exploring Wikipedia infobox from Wikidata (in French) - YouTube
WIkimedia CEE Online Meeting 2021
Implementing Wikidata in Educational Institutions — CEE Challenges and Opportunities - YouTube
Add your country to the Wikidata Govdirectory - YouTube
Wikidata automatization and integration with web resources - YouTube
Tool of the week
OneZoom "tree of life explorer" is an interactive map of the evolutionary links between all living things known to science using Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Celtic Knot Conference (dedicated to underserved languages on the Wikimedia project, with a strong focus on Wikidata and lexicographical data) will take place online in 2022. You can help the organizers with giving input on topics you'd like to see at the conference. Feel free to fill in the survey before January 17.
if you want to declare that you are available for merging duplicate articles in one or more given Wikipedias, please add your name to this page
if you want to find some user able to merge articles in a certain Wikipedia, you can see if there are already available users for that Wikipedia and contact them directly
New open positions at Wikimedia Deutschland (Wikidata/Wikibase teams)
New updater for the Wikidata Query Service to help it keep up with the large number of edits on Wikidata
Query Builder to make it easier for people to create SPARQL queries without having to know SPARQL
Item Quality Evaluator to make it easy to find the highest and lowest quality Items in a topic area
Constraints Violations Checker is a small command-line tool that gives constraint violation statistics for a set of Items to make it easier to find the Items that need more work
Curious Facts finds anomalies in the data in Wikidata and offers them up for review and amusement
Wikidata Map to see the distribution of Wikidata's Items across the world and the connections between them
Current Events to make it easy to see what's currently a hot topic in the world and being edited a lot on Wikidata
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, January 19th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team present 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.
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, January 18 at 19:00 CEST
LIVE Wikidata editing #67 - YouTube, Facebook, January 22 at 19:00 UTC
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 27th January 2022 (17:00 Berlin time). What are you working on around Wikibase? You're welcome to come and share your project with the community.
Editing with OpenRefine live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, January 25 at 19:00 CET (UTC+1)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Professor Pascal Martinolli speaking on tabletop role-playing game citations practices and Wikidata, January 25th.
LIVE Wikidata editing #68 - YouTube, Facebook, January 29 at 19:00 UTC
Implementing basic version of mul language code and deploying it to Test Wikidata (phab:T297393)
Preparing an event centered on reusing Wikidata's data
Mismatch Finder: Been in touch with people who can potentially provide the first mismatches to load into the new tool for the launch. Finalized the statistics part.
Talk to the Search Platform Team about anything related to Wikimedia search, Wikidata Query Service, Wikimedia Commons Query Service, etc.! February 2nd, 2022. Etherpad.
LIVE Wikidata editing #69 - YouTube, Facebook, February 5 at 19:00 UTC
Continuing work on adding the mul language code for labels, descriptions and aliases. (phab:T297393)
Enabled statement usage tracking for Cebuano, Armenian and Warai Warai to ensure fine-grained notifications about edits on Wikidata on those Wikipedias (phab:T296383, phab:T296382, phab:T296384)
Continuing work on fixing a bug where Wikidata changes do not get sent to Wikipedia and co for the first sitelink adding leading to missing information in the page_props table (phab:T233520)
Continuing work on making sure the Wikidata search box works with the new Vector skin improvements (phab:T296202)
Mismatch Finder: Debugging some issues with the first files we got with mismatches that we can load into the Mismatch Finder
The Data Reuse Days will bring together Wikidata editors and data reusers on March 14-24 - we're currently building the schedule. Join us and discover many cool projects!
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Andy Mabbett on the "Cite Q" template that uses data from Wikidata in Wikipedia citations and Crystal Clements on setting the framework for a future discussion on addressing ethical concerns surrounding representation of gender for living persons in Wikidata, February 8th. Agenda
Wikidata Query Service scaling: You can join 2 calls and provide feedback at the 2 WDQS scaling community meetings on Thursday, 17 Feb 2022 18:00 UTC, and Monday 21 Feb 2022 18:00 UTC. Full details here.
Live on Twitch and in French about Academic bibliographical data and Scholia by Vigneron and Jsamwrites, February 8 at 19:00 CET (UTC+1)
LIVE Wikidata editing #70 - YouTube, Facebook, February 12 at 19:00 UTC
Wikidata has 2,540,891 items for people with both date of birth and date of death. There are 9 redirects for every 100 such items. (source). 2000 people share dates of birth and death with another person.
Krbot's constraint reports are now generally updated daily, after code optimizations and hardware upgrades.
Call for Mentors: Wiki Mentor Africa is a mentorship project for tool creators/contributors. Interested to become a mentor (experienced tool creators/contributors), please visit this page!
Wikidata ESR is a tool to visualize evolutions of universities and schools, such as creations, mergers, deletions and relations. Feedback and help to develop this project further is requested.
The Data Reuse Days will bring together Wikidata editors and data reusers on March 14-24 - we're currently building the schedule. Join us and discover many cool projects!
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 24th February 2022 (17:00 Berlin time). What are you working on around Wikibase? You're welcome to come and share your project with the community.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Huda Khan and Astrid Usong on their Linked Data for Production 3 (LD4P3) grant work to use Wikidata in knowledge panels in Cornell’s library catalog Agenda - 2022-02-22 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter)
Call for Mentors: Wiki Mentor Africa is a mentorship project for tool creators/contributors. Interested to become a mentor (experienced tool creators/contributors), please visit this page!
Mismatch Finder, the tool that lets you review mismatches between the data in Wikidata and other databases, is now ready to be used for checking potential mismatches and uploading lists of new potential mismatches.
Job opening: The Search Platform team is looking for someone to maintain and develop WDQS. Apply here!
Job opening: 柏林自然博物馆 (Q233098) is looking for someone for project- and data management especially for Wikidata related stuff about the museums collections Job Description (German)
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: EnvlhBot 3. Task/s: add dictionaries IDs to French lexemes
Closed request for permissions/Bot: IndoBot (Approved). Task/s: I would like to import all Indonesian schools, more than 100000. The data includes school type, location, and coordinates as well as external identifiers
LIVE Wikidata editing #74 - YouTube, Facebook, March 12th at 19:00 UTC
LD4 Wikibase Working Hour. Presentation and discussion: "Introduction to Linked Open Data Strategy with Lea Voget, Head, Product Management WMDE". Lea is not only the team lead of product, project and program managers at WMDE, she is also one of the main thinkers behind the Linked Open Data strategy. When: 11 March 2022, 11AM-12PM Eastern US (Time zone converter). Registration: Registration link
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Associate Librarian Stacy Allison-Cassin and her students on Wikidata in the classroom. Agenda
Creating a new item on Wikidata (in Italian) - YouTube
Connecting Wikidata with OpenStreetMap (in Italian) - YouTube
Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons (in French) - YouTube: 1, 2, 3.
Tool of the week
Wikxhibit is a tool that allows anyone, even non-programmers, to create cool presentations of Wikidata, and other sources of data on the web, only using HTML and without any additional programming. Are you interested in creating presentations of Wikidata? We would like to understand your experience with Wikidata to better improve our tool. It would help if you can fill out our survey https://mit.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cvZKKlRu2S7C9Fk
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata dumps: Due to technical issues the JSON and RDF dumps for the week of March 1st couldn't be properly generated (phab:T300255#7746418). The situation is expected to get back to normal this week.
The development team at WMDE is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to develop and improve the software behind the Wikidata project. Apply here!
The WMF Search Platform team is looking for someone to maintain and develop Wikidata Query Service. Apply here!
柏林自然博物馆 (Q233098) is looking for someone for project- and data management especially for Wikidata related stuff about the museums collections Job Description (German)
Data Reuse Days, on March 14-24: you can select the sessions you'd like to join among the many presentations, workshops and discussions in the schedule. You can also look at a selection of sessions based on your areas of interest.
LIVE Wikidata editing #75 - YouTube, Facebook, March 19th at 19:00 UTC
Mismatch Finder: Discussing the next batches of potential mismatches with MusicBrainz data and some remaining Freebase data
Lexicographical data: Continuing work on the basic version of the new Special:NewLexeme page, focusing on putting in the base data about the new Lexeme
REST API: Continuing coding on the basic version of the GET Item endpoint
Welcome to the twentieth newsletter from the Growth team!
The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in Wikimedia projects.
Suggested edits
As of February, 300,000 suggested edits have been completed since the feature was first deployed in December 2019.
Add a link is the team's first structured task, deployed in May 2021. It has improved outcomes for newcomers. The team is now working on a second iteration based on community feedback and data analysis. Improvements will include: improved algorithmic suggestions, guardrails to prevent too many similar links to be added, and clearer encouragement for users to continue making edits. After adding these improvements, we will deploy this task to more Wikipedias.
Add an image is the second structured task built by our team. It was deployed in November 2021 to four pilot Wikipedias. This is a more challenging task for newcomers. However, it adds more value to articles (so far, over 1,000 images have been added). We are currently learning from communities and from the data on what is working well and what needs improvements. The project page contains links to interactive prototypes. We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. We will soon deploy this task to more Wikipedias as a test.
"Add a link" and "Add an image" now both have a limitation on how many of these tasks newcomers can do per day. It is meant to discourage careless newcomers from making too many problematic edits.
Positive reinforcement
Over the last two years, the Growth team has focused on building suggested edits: easy tasks for newcomers to start with. We have learned with this experience that these tasks help many newcomers to make their first edits. Now, the team is starting a new project : "positive reinforcement". Its goal is to make newcomers proud of their editing and to make them want to come back for more of them. With the positive reinforcement project, we are considering three kinds of features:
Impact stats: give newcomers the ability to see how many people read the articles they edit.
Leveling up: encourage newcomers to progress from easier tasks to harder tasks.
Personalized praise: encourage mentors and other editors to "thank" and award newcomers for good work.
This project is just beginning, and we hope for community thoughts on the direction. We know that things can wrong if we offer the wrong incentives to newcomers, so we want to be careful. Please visit the talk page to help guide the project!
News for mentors
The mentor dashboard is available at all wikis. It helps mentors see who their mentees are and keep track of their activity. It is automatically activated where a list of mentors has been created. If you need assistance to create a list of mentors, please contact us.
The mentor dashboard has a new module: settings. It is now possible for mentors to define their status (active or away). They can specify the volume of questions they want to receive, and they can claim mentees in an easier way. It is also possible for mentors to quit, which will automatically reassign their mentees to other mentors.
We are working on an ability for a mentee to opt-out (and back in) to having a mentor.
Previously, in the table that displays mentees activity, the filters displayed all mentees, even the ones with zero edits or lots of edits. We have changed this so that only mentees with between 1 and 500 edits are visible by default. Mentors can change this value in their filters.
Some wikis have created userboxes that mentors can display on the user pages. If your wiki has one, please link it to Wikidata!
Scaling
Previously, at most Wikipedias, only 80% of newcomers were getting the Growth features. This was done for experimentation, to have a control group. We have changed this setting. Now 100% of new accounts at all Wikipedias get the Growth features (except a few, kept as test wikis). We invite communities to update their onboarding documentation and tutorials. Please include the Growth features in it. To help you, we have created an help page that can be translated and adapted to your wiki.
How to help
Do you have questions about the Growth features? This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work. We regularly update it.
Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, by translating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
PodcastBot. Task/s: Upload new podcast episodes, extract: title, part of the series, has quality (explicit episode), full work available at (mp3), production code, apple podcast episode id, spotify episode ID. Regex extraction: talk show guest, recording date (from description)
AradglBot. Task/s: Create between 100,000 and 200,000 new lexemes in Aragonese language Q8765
Closed request for permissions/Bot: EnvlhBot 3 (approved). Task/s: add dictionaries IDs to French lexemes
Data Reuse Days, on March 14-24: you can select the sessions you'd like to join among the many presentations, workshops and discussions in the schedule. For a recap of the event so far:
a selection of sessions are recorded, you can find the videos here or below
speakers will progressively add their slides in this Commons category
Cartographier des données de Wikidata avec Umap (in French) - YouTube
Mapping Einstein Researchers on Wikidata (in Portuguese) - YouTube
Tool of the week
Linked People project let's you explore the family trees of all known people at Wikipedia/Wikidata.
Gene of the Day (gene-wordle) uses Wikidata for gene names and crafting an answer list by number of sitelinks.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
There are Rapid Grants available for local meetups during the Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 from May 20-May 22. Apply to host a social for your local community. The deadline to apply is March 27, 2022.
The proposed config change to remove the changetags right from users – so that they can apply change tags to their own actions as they are made, but not change the tags of other actions after the fact anymore – has been deployed.
Lexicographical data: We're continuing with the work on the new Special:NewLexeme page. We worked on saving a valid new Lexeme with the new page. We are now focusing on the suggesters for language and lexical category so editors can select the right Item for them.
Data Reuse Days: We ran sessions on how to use Wikidata's data programmatically and the best practices around it. Slides and videos are available already (see above).
REST API: Continuing coding on the basic version of the GET Item endpoint. We have the very initial version of the get item endpoint ready and are now adding more parameters to it.
The next Wikibase live session is 15:00 UTC on Thursday 31st March 2022 (17:00 Berlin time). What are you working on around Wikibase? You're welcome to come and share your project with the community.
ArtandFeminism 2022 editathon by Achiri Bitamsimli. Theme: Add Dagbani labels and descriptions of female lawyers in West Africa. Date: April 1st, 2022 - March 8th, 2022. Location: Tamale College of Education, Ghana. Time: 9:00am — 9:00pm UTC. Register.
LIVE Wikidata editing #77 - YouTube, Facebook, April 2nd at 18:00 UTC
Cultural Venues Datathon: April 25 - May 2, 2022. This online editing event is organized by the Canadian Association for the Performing Arts, LaCogency and many partners, with support from Wikimedia Foundation Alliances Fund. Guided editing sessions will be facilitated in English and in French.
The Celtic Knot Conference, dedicated to underrepresented languages on the Wikimedia projects, with a focus on Wikidata, will take place online and onsite on July 1-2, 2022.
Ongoing:
Wikimedia Indonesia's Datathon program under 2022 Wiki Women's Month started on March 18th 18:00 UTC+7 and will last until March 25th 23:59 UTC+7. 70+ users enrollled. Page.
Call for Mentors: Wiki Mentor Africa is a mentorship project for tool creators/contributors. Interested to become a mentor (experienced tool creators/contributors), please visit this page!
Wikidata now has over 1,600,000,000 edits! The milestone edit was made by Ruky Wunpini.
Lexicographical data: Working on the lookup for language and lexical category and displaying potential errors during Lexeme creation
Improved the API response of the wbsearchentities endpoint by adding the language to the labels and descriptions in the API response (phab:T104344)
Data Reuse Days: Second and final week - organized, attended and held a few sessions incl. bug triage hour and pink pony session
REST API: Continuing work on getting the the data of an Item, we almost have filtering of the data returned by the API and basic error handling is in place. Next up: not returning the data if the client already has the most recent data, and authentication
