This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
An act is a division or unit of a theatre work, including a play, film, opera, and musical theatre. Pictured is a visual representation of the three-act structure.
Video: Editing Wikidata with information from Son jarocho (in Spanish). YouTube
Tool of the week
Entity Explosion: a new multilingual Chrome browser extension. "Taking the power of Wikidata with me wherever I go across the web!". Uses API calls to the Wikidata Query Service to match the URL you are browsing on to a Wikidata item, and then displays data and links to other sites about the same entity. (Video)
Fixed a bug where a length limit for strings seems to have reverted itself back from 1500 to its default 400 (phabricator:T259440)
Fixed a bug that Wikibase is not always adding &redirect=no in situations when MediaWiki usually does (phabricator:T255387)
Wrapping up the initial work on the design system so it is ready for use in the first new feature (Query Builder)
Fixed the serialization of statements on Forms and Senses not containing the datatype (phabricator:T249206)
Wrapping up work on the first version of Federated Properties so that other Wikibase installations can use Wikidata's Properties instead of having to maintain their own
Worked on ensuring the data from the linked data interface at Special:EntityData is always up to date after an edit has been made (phabricator:T128486)
Enabling clients to use Lua to request labels, descriptions and aliases in some (often minority) languages even when they are not content languages (phabricator:T259340, phabricator:T260118)
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
If you revert an edit using the undo link your edit is marked with an undo tag. This will now only happen if you don't change anything in the edit window before publishing the undo. This is to keep users from marking edits as undos when they actually do something else. [1]
The new OOUI version will not work with Internet Explorer 8. This means the wikis will look strange and not work well in Internet Explorer 8. This was reported in Tech/News/2020/17. This is because keeping the wikis working with very old browsers creates other problems. [2]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 August. It will be on all wikis from 20 August (calendar).
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis next week. This is a reminder. You can help by translating the announcement message. [3][4]
Delivery is the process of transporting goods from a source location to a predefined destination. Pictured is a man delivering charcoal by bicycle in Uganda.
Sarasua, Cristina, & Mietchen, Daniel. (2020, August). Multilingual Structured Climate Research Data in Wikidata - The Community Perspective. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3994272
Mietchen, Daniel, & Sarasua, Cristina. (2020, August). Multilingual Structured Climate Research Data in Wikidata - The Data Perspective. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3994266 (also on YouTube)
Video: How to add missing descriptions to Wikidata using QuickStatments tool (in Arabic) - YouTube
Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #16 Facebook, YouTube
Video: Introduction to Wikidata (in Malayalam) - YouTube
Video: Wikidata editing basics (in Chinese) - YouTube
Tool of the week
Sophox allows for SPARQL querying of Wikidata and OpenStreetMap in a single query
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Two new grant programs from WikiCite, in support of open citations and linked bibliographic data.
Full documentation, eligibility requirements, selection criteria, program design principles, and contacts at the links. Apply by 1 October.
e-Scholarships [per-diem calculated on your city; 1-5 people (single, or as a 'remote group') for 2-4 days, for COVID-era "stay at home" projects. Paid in advance living allowance, no expense report required.]
Finished working on ensuring Labels of Items in some unusual, often minority, languages are still available on Wikipedia and other clients (phabricator: T259340)
Fixed error messages for API modules that will not work with the first version of Federated Properties (phabricator:T258558)
Working on improving how ORES judges the quality of an Item to make it more accurate
Started coding on Automated Configuration Discovery to make it easier for tool builders to make their tools work for other Wikibase instances as well
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 August. It will be on all wikis from 27 August (calendar).
Skurfing as a sport has two common forms: "water skurfing" and "street skurfing". Pictured is an example of water skurfing, water skiing on a surfboard.
Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 1 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming: WMF search platform team office hour, September 2nd at 17:00 CEST (15:00 GMT). Etherpad, Google Meet. You can come and chat about the Wikidata & Commons Query Service.
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #18 Facebook, YouTube, September 5 at 19.00 UTC
Upcoming: Onam label-a-thon (September 1st and 2nd): Online label-a-thon to improve Wikidata items related to Kerala and Malayalam on this Onam holidays.
Wikidata for Firefox is a browser extension that displays Wikidata items while browsing the web, adds missing IDs and extracts information from websites to Wikidata.
More than 300 editors used the Reply tool at these four Wikipedias. They posted more than 7,400 replies during the study period.
Of the people who posted a comment with the Reply tool, about 70% of them used the tool multiple times. About 60% of them used it on multiple days.
Comments from Wikipedia editors are positive. One said, أعتقد أن الأداة تقدم فائدة ملحوظة؛ فهي تختصر الوقت لتقديم رد بدلًا من التنقل بالفأرة إلى وصلة تعديل القسم أو الصفحة، التي تكون بعيدة عن التعليق الأخير في الغالب، ويصل المساهم لصندوق التعديل بسرعة باستخدام الأداة. ("I think the tool has a significant impact; it saves time to reply while the classic way is to move with a mouse to the Edit link to edit the section or the page which is generally far away from the comment. And the user reaches to the edit box so quickly to use the Reply tool.")[5]
The Editing team released the Reply tool as a Beta Feature at eight other Wikipedias in early August. Those Wikipedias are in the Chinese, Czech, Georgian, Serbian, Sorani Kurdish, Swedish, Catalan, and Korean languages. If you would like to use the Reply tool at your wiki, please tell User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF).
The Reply tool is still in active development. Per request from the Dutch Wikipedia and other editors, you will be able to customize the edit summary. (The default edit summary is "Reply".) A "ping" feature is available in the Reply tool's visual editing mode. This feature searches for usernames. Per request from the Arabic Wikipedia, each wiki will be able to set its own preferred symbol for pinging editors. Per request from editors at the Japanese and Hungarian Wikipedias, each wiki can define a preferred signature prefix in the page MediaWiki:Discussiontools-signature-prefix. For example, some languages omit spaces before signatures. Other communities want to add a dash or a non-breaking space.
New requirements for user signatures
The new requirements for custom user signatures began on 6 July 2020. If you try to create a custom signature that does not meet the requirements, you will get an error message.
Existing custom signatures that do not meet the new requirements will be unaffected temporarily. Eventually, all custom signatures will need to meet the new requirements. You can check your signature and see lists of active editors whose custom signatures need to be corrected. Volunteers have been contacting editors who need to change their custom signatures. If you need to change your custom signature, then please read the help page.
Next: New discussion tool
Next, the team will be working on a tool for quickly and easily starting a new discussion section to a talk page. To follow the development of this new tool, please put the New Discussion Tool project page on your watchlist.
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
This is a reminder. All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC. Please check on the details on the announcement message. [6][7]
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Rob Fernandez (Wikimedia District of Columbia) on Listeria, a tool that uses SPARQL queries to define a list, and provides a bot that will update a wiki page containing that list if the results of that SPARQL query change, all based on Wikidata, 08 September. Agenda
Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 8 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #19 Facebook, YouTube, September 10
Added Wikidata support to Japanese Wikivoyage. phab:T261451
Investigating the nature of our training outliers to improve the way ORES automatically scores the quality of an Item.
Working on error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an item. phab:T260869
Completed various investigations to make an informed decision on the output format of WikibaseManifest files (automated configuration detection for toolbuilders) phab:T261285
Completed various bug fixes and wrap-up tasks to conclude the major engineering work on the Federated Properties project
More work on Item Quality Scoring and Federated Properties
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
Normally pages can be moved to a title that has no existing page yet or to a page that has only one revision, which is a redirect to the page to be moved. A new user right allows editors to move pages over one-revision pages that redirect to anywhere. [8]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 September. It will be on all wikis from 10 September (calendar).
All MediaWiki API modules will now use watchlist instead of watch. This was inconsistent before. [9]
Future changes
The Wikipedia Android app team might work on patrolling tools in the future. You can let them know what tools would be useful for you or for less experienced patrollers. See the page on mediawiki.org.
OTRS will be updated to a new version. This will probably take around two days. OTRS agents will not have access to the system during these days. Emails that come in during the update will be delivered when the update is done. The plan is to start around 08:00 UTC on 14 September. This could change. [10]
The Wikipedia Android app will send push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will need Google Play Services to work. It will also be possible to get the app without Google Play Services but push notifications will not work. Google Play Services is also used to make the app work for Android 4.4 users. [11][12]
Wikimedia code review could move to GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. You can take part in the consultation.
Dropdown menus in the Vector skin use a .menu class. This will not work in the future. Scripts can use nav ul instead. .vectorTabs and .vectorMenu will also not work. Some scripts need to be updated. You can read more in Phabricator.
Estonia report: Virtual exhibition about Polish-Estonian relations. Rephotography and cultural heritage
Germany report: KulTour in Swabia and 8000 documents new online
India report: Utilising Occasion for Content donation: A story
Netherlands report: WMIN & WMNL collaboration & Japanese propaganda films
Serbia report: Enriching Wiki projects in different ways
Sweden report: Free music and new recordings of songs in the public domain; Autumn in the libraries; Yes, you can hack the heritage this year – online!
Uganda report: Participating in the African Librarians Week (24-30 May 2020)
The history of Asian art includes a vast range of influences from various cultures and religions. Pictured is Buddhist Temple in the Mountains, 11th century, China, ink on silk, by Li Cheng.
"Our admiration for Wikidata and for the people who work with it knows no bounds. Having a single source of well modelled, massively interlinked, well managed data that anyone can query at the press of a button is a real thing of wonder." - says the UK Parliament data team
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.
WikiMap, a tool by User:DB111 that maps geocoded images from Commons and Wikipedia articles, now supports Wikidata items as well (Q99232292)
Wikidata QID's are approaching 9 digits. Now is the time to fix any code or schemas that assume that Q numbers are smaller than 9 characters.
Fixing an error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an Item instead of just one. (phabricator:T260869)
Development of version one of Federated Properties has concluded! Expect an announcement with timing of the release of this feature soon. Wikibase users who want an early look at the feature are invited to reach out to participate in the pre-release testing round.
Development of the WikibaseManifest extension has continued into its second sprint; we focused on determining a product specification for the Manifest output.
Finishing a draft documentation for a REST API to get it ready for a feedback round before implementation.
Finished improvements to the automated scoring of the quality of Items with ORES. Still need to retrain ORES and deploy the changes before the scores are actually different though.
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
The Wikipedia apps briefly showed pages without CSS last week. This meant they looked wrong. It was quickly fixed but cached pages without CSS were shown for a few hours. [13][14]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 September. It will be on all wikis from 17 September (calendar).
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. [15][16]
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. [17]
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 Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist setting enabled. (The Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist 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)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Editors are automatically added to some user groups. For example editors are added to autoconfirmed users when they have edited enough times and long enough. Abuse filters can hinder users from automatically getting user rights for a period of time. They can also remove rights user have. Wikis can now ask to change how long this period of time is for their wiki in Phabricator. It is currently five days. [19]
Problems
Last year some abuse filters stopped working because of a new change. If they tried to use variables that were unavailable for that action they would fail. This has now been fixed. [20]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 September. It will be on all wikis from 1 October (calendar).
Future changes
You can't see the language links to other language versions from the talk page or history page. They are also not shown when you edit an article. This could change. It is not decided if for example the history page should link to another history page or to the article. You can take part in the discussion in Phabricator.
The link colours could change. This is to make the difference between links and other text more clear. You can read more in Phabricator.
In your preferences you can choose to get different notifications on the web or by email. You will see Apps as one of the alternatives later this week. This is because the Android and iOS Wikipedia apps will use push notifications for those who want them. You can see the preferences on the test wiki. The goal is to have push notifications on Android in October and on iOS in early 2021. [21]
You can soon put pages on your watchlist for a limited time. This could be useful if you want to watch something for a shorter time but don't want it on your watchlist forever. It now works on mediawiki.org and will come to more wikis later. You can read more and see when it will come to other wikis.
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.
Recent changes
There is a new tool where you can see which home wiki users have in discussions on Meta. This can help show which communities are not part of the discussion on wikis where we make decisions that affect many other wikis.
You can now thank users for file uploads or for changing the language of a page. [22]
Problems
There were many errors with the new MediaWiki version last week. The new version was rolled back. Updates that should have happened last week are late. [23]
Everyone was logged out. This was because a user reported being logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [24]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 October. It will be on all wikis from 8 October (calendar).
Letters immediately after a link are shown as part of the link. For example the entire word in [[Child]]ren is linked. On Arabic wikis this works at both the start and end of a word. Previously on Arabic wikis numbers and other non-letter Unicode characters were shown as part of the link at the start of a word but not at the end. Now only Latin and Arabic letters will extend links on Arabic wikis. [25]
Future changes
You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on 27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [26]
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. [27][28][29]
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. [30][31]
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. [32]
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.
France report: AAF training course; Workshops in Strasbourg; European Heritage Days: Rennes; Wiki Loves Monuments
Germany report: Ahoy! Wikipedians set sail to document the reality of modern seafaring
Indonesia report: New GLAM partnerships on data donation; Commons structured data edit-a-thon
Norway report: Students taking on GLAM Wiki women in red
Sweden report: Musikverket: more folk music and photos; Hack for Heritage 2020; Wiki Loves Monuments; Wikipedia in the libraries; Digital Book Fair on Wikipedia
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.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 October. It will be on all wikis from 22 October (calendar).
Future changes
You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on 27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [33]
In the AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function will be updated soon so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [34]
Some gadgets and user-scripts use the HTML div with the ID #jump-to-nav. This div will be removed soon. Maintainers should replace these uses with either #siteSub or #mw-content-text. A list of affected scripts is at the top of phab:T265373.
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
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
You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on October 27 around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [35]
Last week, links to "diffs" from mobile watchlists and recentchanges were linking to page-revisions instead of diffs. This has now been fixed. [36]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Since the introduction of the interface administrators user group in 2018, administrators couldn’t view the deleted history of CSS/JS pages. Now they can. [37]
There was a problem with the Change Tags. The software would apply the "Reverted" tag to any page actions such as page-protection changes if they came directly after a reverted edit. This has now been fixed for new edits. [38]
The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias in November. Another announcement will be made once the date is finalized. [39]
Sysops will once again be able to view the deleted history of JS/CSS pages; this was restricted to interface administrators when that group was introduced.
Twinkle's block module now includes the ability to note the specific case when applying a discretionary sanctions block and/or template.
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 no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser uses very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It could lead to downgrade attacks. Since October 29, 2020, users who use old TLS versions will not be able to connect to Wikimedia projects. A list of browser recommendations is available. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [40]
There is a new automatic tracking category available: Pages with non-numeric formatnum arguments. It collects pages which use the ((formatnum)) parser function with invalid (non-numeric) input, e.g.((formatnum:TECHNEWS)). Note that ((formatnum:123,456)) is also invalid input: as described in the documentation, the argument should be unformatted so that it can be reliably and correctly localised. The tracking category will help identify problematic usage and double-formatting. The new tracking category's name can be translated at translatewiki. [41]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 4. It will be on all wikis from November 5 (calendar).
Administrators and stewards will be able to use a special page (Special:CreateLocalAccount) to force local account creation for a global account. This is useful when account creation is blocked for that user (by a block or a filter). [42]
The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias on November 4. This change excludes the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias, plus a few smaller Wikipedias with special circumstances. You can read the help page and the troubleshooting guide for more information. [43]
Future changes
A discussion has been restarted about using a Unicode minus sign (− U+2212) in the output of ((formatnum)) when it is given a negative argument. [44]
In the future IP addresses of unregistered users will not be shown for everyone. They will get an alias instead. There will be a new user right or an opt-in function for more vandal fighters to see the IPs of unregistered users. There would be some criteria for who gets the user right or opt-in. There will also be other new tools to help handle vandalism. This is early in the process and the developers are still collecting information from the communities before they suggest solutions.
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)
An example of Chinese folklore is The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, a Chinese folk tale. Pictured is a depiction in the tale of the reunion of the couple of The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd on the bridge of magpies. The artwork displayed is in the Long Corridor of the Summer Palace in Beijing.
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)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
You can see reference previews. This shows a preview of the footnote when you hover over it. This has been a beta feature. It will move out of beta and be enabled by default. There will be an option not to use it. The developers are looking for small or medium-sized wikis to be the first ones. You can let them know if your wiki is interested. [45]
From November 16 the categories will not be sorted in order for a short time. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the internationalisation library. They will use a script to fix the existing categories. This can take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [46][47]
Sweden report: Librarians learn about Wikidata; More Swedish literature on Wikidata; Online Edit-a-thon Dalarna; Applications to the Swedish Innovation Agency; Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete; Librarians and Projekt HBTQI; GLAM Statistical Tool
USA report: American Archive of Public Broadcasting; Smithsonian Women in Finance Edit-a-thon; Black Lunch Table; San Diego/October 2020; WikiWednesday Salon
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
Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 16 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for most languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [48][49]
Changes later this week
If you merged two pages in a namespace where pages can't redirect this used to break the merge history. This will now be fixed. [50]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 November. It will be on all wikis from 19 November (calendar).
Future changes
The Community Wishlist Survey is now open for proposals. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals from 16 to 30 November. You can vote on proposals from 8 December to 21 December.
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)
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
Timestamps in Special:Log are now links. They go to Special:Log for only that entry. This is how timestamps work on for example the history page. [51]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
The Wikimedia Cloud VPS hosts technical projects for the Wikimedia movement. Developers need to claim projects they use. This is because old and unused projects are removed once a year. Unclaimed projects can be shut down from 1 December. Unclaimed projects can be deleted from 1 January. [52]
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)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 December. It will be on all wikis from 3 December (calendar).
Future changes
The iOS Wikipedia app will show readers more of the article history. They can see new updates and easier see how the article has changed over time. This is an experiment. It will first be shown only to some iOS app users as a test. [53][54]
The Wiki Replicas can be used for SQL queries. You can use Quarry, PAWS or other ways to do this. To make the Wiki Replicas stable there will be two changes. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work. You can also only query a database if you connect to it directly. This will happen in February 2021. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech. [55]
Voting for proposals in the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey, which determines what software the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team will work on next year, will take place from 8 December through 21 December. In particular, there are sections regarding administrators and anti-harassment.
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 now put pages on your watchlist for a limited period of time. Some wikis already had this function. [56][57]
Changes later this week
Information from Wikidata that is used on a wiki page can be shown in recent changes and watchlists on a Wikimedia wiki. To see this you need to turn on showing Wikidata edits in your watchlist in the preferences. Changes to the Wikidata description in the language of a Wikimedia wiki will then be shown in recent changes and watchlists. This will not show edits to languages that are not relevant to your wiki. [58][59]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all wikis from 10 December (calendar).
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
It has been a productive year for New Page Patrol as we've roughly cut the size of the New Page Patrol queue in half this year. We have been fortunate to have a lot of great work done by Rosguill who was the reviewer of the most pages and redirects this past year. Thanks and credit go to JTtheOG and Onel5969 who join Rosguill in repeating in the top 10 from last year. Thanks to John B123, Hughesdarren, and Mccapra who all got the NPR permission this year and joined the top 10. Also new to the top ten is DannyS712 bot III, programmed by DannyS712 which has helped to dramatically reduce the number of redirects that have needed human patrolling by patrolling certain types of redirects (e.g. for differences in accents) and by also patrolling editors who are on on the redirect whitelist.
John B123 has been named reviewer of the year for 2020. John has held the permission for just over 6 months and in that time has helped cut into the queue by reviewing more than 18,000 articles. His talk page shows his efforts to communicate with users, upholding NPP's goal of nurturing new users and quality over quantity.
NPP Technical Achievement Award
As a special recognition and thank you DannyS712 has been awarded the first NPP Technical Achievement Award. His work programming the bot has helped us patrol redirects tremendously - more than 60,000 redirects this past year. This has been a large contribution to New Page Patrol and definitely is worthy of recognition.
Six Month Queue Data: Today – 2262 Low – 2232 High – 10271
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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.
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 Wikipedia app for KaiOS phones. It was released in India in September. It can now be downloaded in other countries too. [60]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all wikis from 17 December (calendar).
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. [61]
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. [62]
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. [63]
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)
By motion, standard discretionary sanctions have been temporarily authorizedfor all pages relating to the Horn of Africa (defined as including Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and adjoining areas if involved in related disputes). The effectiveness of the discretionary sanctions can be evaluated on the request by any editor after March 1, 2021 (or sooner if for a good reason).
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. [64]
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. [65]
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. [66]
Oversighters can now hide multiple filter log entries at once using checkboxes on Special:AbuseLog. This is how the usual revision deletion works. [67]
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. [69]
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)
Canada report: Branding Toolkit released by the Canadian Museums Association for GLAMs
Finland report: Hundreds of thousands of new photos released
Germany report: The Karl-Preusker-Medal 2020 goes to Wikimedia Deutschland e. V.
Netherlands report: Documentation of workflows for the ingestion of bibliographic data into Wikidata; Wikipedia & Africa: Why contributing to Wikipedia matters
Canada report: Branding Toolkit released by the Canadian Museums Association for GLAMs
Finland report: Hundreds of thousands of new photos released
Germany report: The Karl-Preusker-Medal 2020 goes to Wikimedia Deutschland e. V.
Netherlands report: Documentation of workflows for the ingestion of bibliographic data into Wikidata; Wikipedia & Africa: Why contributing to Wikipedia matters
Continued working on the Query Builder. We continued to set up tracking for the number of queries that result in an error, timeout, etc. (phab:T269224). We als made it possible to query for Item values (phab:T268814). You can always try the current state on the test system.
Finished fixing an issue with whitespace being stripped while typing when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
Worked on no error being shown when trying to save Lemma with invalid language code (phab:T265783)
Working on using Special:MyLanguage feature for more links in the Wikidata Query Service interface to redirect people to documentation in their language (phab:T267656)
Continued interviewing people to better understand how to best compare Wikidata's data against other databases in order to find mismatches that need the editors' attention
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all wikis from 21 January (calendar).
MassMessage posts could be automatically timestamped in the future. This is because MassMessage senders can now send pages using MassMessage. Pages are more difficult to sign. If there are times when a MassMessage post should not be timestamped you can let the developers know.
The Reply tool has been deployed as an opt-out preference to all editors at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.
It is also available as a Beta Feature at almost all Wikipedias except for the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias. If it is not available at your wiki, you can request it by following these simple instructions.
Research notes:
As of January 2021, more than 3,500 editors have used the Reply tool to post about 70,000 comments.
We have preliminary data from the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedia on the Reply tool. Junior Contributors who use the Reply tool are more likely to publish the comments they start writing than those who use full-page wikitext editing.[73]
The Editing and Parsing teams have significantly reduced the number of edits that affect other parts of the page. About 0.3% of edits did this during the last month.[74] Some of the remaining changes are automatic corrections for Special:LintErrors.
A large A/B test will start soon.[75] This is part of the process to offer the Reply tool to everyone. During this test, half of all editors at 24 Wikipedias will have the Reply tool automatically enabled, and half will not. You can still turn it on or off for your own account in Special:Preferences.
During Talk pages consultation 2019, editors said that it should be easier to know about new activity in conversations they are interested in. The Notifications project is just beginning. What would help you become aware of new comments? What's working with the current system? Which pages at your wiki should the team look at? Please post your advice at notifications-talk.
Past: Wikidata+Wikibase office hour happened on January 21st. See notes here (English).
Past: 2021 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Beginner Teaching Workshop (in Chinese). Replay on YouTube 1, 2, 3, 4
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Wikibase, the Integrated Authority File (GND) pilot at the German National Library, and the WikiLibrary Manifesto, 26 January. Agenda
Continued working on the Query Builder: made it possible to limit the number of results in the result set, made it possible to include results from subclasses when querying for Item values, worked on negating queries and started on sharing of queries via URL. As always you can try the current state on the test system.
Making links in the Query Service redirect to the proper translations of their pages on-wiki by using Special:MyLanguage redirects (phab:T267656)
Working on fixing an issue with displaying large numbers for quantity values (phab:T268456)
Fixed a case where no error message was shown when trying to save a Lemma with an invalid language code (phab:T265783)
Talked to a few more people about checking Wikidata's data against other databases to find potential errors
Continuing the Release Strategy project for Wikibase, with the following progress:
Created a “release pipeline” for Wikibase extension (phab:T267627)
Created MediaWiki docker images based off release branches (phab:T270133)
Defined format and contents of Wikibase suite components not maintained by Wikimedia Germany (phab:T271194)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Bracket matching will be added to the CodeMirror syntax highlighter on the first wikis. The first wikis are German and Catalan Wikipedia and maybe other Wikimedia wikis. This will happen on 27 January. [79]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (calendar).
Continuing development on the first version of the Query Builder. It's starting to be able to do the first really meaningful queries now. Latest addition was the ability to negate conditions. Up next is the ability to connect conditions with OR instead of only AND as well as querying for quantities and ranges. You can follow along on the test system.
Exploring possible solutions for how to compare Wikidata's data against other databases to find and highlight mismatches automatically.
Added lexicographical data codes for a few languages: rkt, ctg (phab:T271589), and az-cyrl (phab:T265906)
Finished working on the issue of TypeError on a diff of a Wikidata talk page phab:T271402
Updated Wikidata unit conversion configuration (phab:T267644)
Fixed two last places where links in the the Query Service UI were not using Special:MyLanguage yet to redirect to the documentation page in the user's language (phab:T267656)
Pushing JSON dumps for Lexemes over the finish line (phab:T264883)
Working on showing an error when trying to save lemmas with invalid language codes (phab:T265783)
Wikibase Release Strategy
Investigated the release of Wikibase suite components not maintained by Wikimedia (phab:T271193)
Continued process of adding additional components to the Wikibase release, including OAuth (phab:T272580)
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
IPv6 addresses were written in lowercase letters in diffs. This caused dead links since Special:Contributions only accepted uppercase letters for the IPs. This has been fixed. [80]
Changes later this week
You can soon use Wikidata to link to pages on the multilingual Wikisource. [81]
Often editors use a "non-breaking space" to make a gap between two items when reading but still show them together. This can be used to avoid a line break. You will now be able to add new ones via the special character tool in the 2010, 2017, and visual editors. The character will be shown in the visual editor as a space with a grey background. [82][83]
Wikis use abuse filters to stop bad edits being made. Filter maintainers can now use syntax like 1.2.3.4 - 1.2.3.55 as well as the 1.2.3.4/27 syntax for IP ranges. [84]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).
Future changes
Minerva is the skin Wikimedia wikis use for mobile traffic. When a page is protected and you can't edit it you can normally read the source wikicode. This doesn't work on Minerva on mobile devices. This is being fixed. Some text might overlap. This is because your community needs to update MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext to work on mobile. You can read more. [85][86]
Cloud VPS and Toolforge will change the IP address they use to contact the wikis. The new IP address will be 185.15.56.1. This will happen on February 8. You can read more.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Wikipedia app for Android now has watchlists and talk pages in the app. [87]
Changes later this week
You can see edits to chosen pages on Special:Watchlist. You can add pages to your watchlist on every wiki you like. The GlobalWatchlist extension will come to Meta on 11 February. There you can see entries on watched pages on different wikis on the same page. The new watchlist will be found on Special:GlobalWatchlist on Meta. You can choose which wikis to watch and other preferences on Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings on Meta. You can watch up to five wikis. [88]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (calendar).
Future changes
When admins protect pages the form will use the OOUI look. Special:Import will also get the new look. This will make them easier to use on mobile phones. [89][90]
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [91]
Last week Tech News reported that the IP address Cloud VPS and Toolforge use to contact the wikis will change on 8 February. This is delayed. It will happen later instead. [92]
Video: Wikidata as a PID community. By Simon Cobb - YouTube
Tool of the week
Item documentation has two new features. First, it now includes two predefined SPARQL queries. The first one give the number of statements about the item by property and the second the list of statement about the properties. Second, for items of class award, it includes predefined SPARQL queries from TP award. See Q1624297 for an example.
Ranker lets you edit the ranks of several statements at once.
Made it possible to connect query conditions with OR (instead of only AND) in the Query Builder (phab:T272694)
Making it possible to query only for statements with or without a reference in the Query Builder (phab:T272699)
Continuing to work on adding a rate limit for creating Item IDs to prevent people from allocating a large number of unassigned Item IDs that are then lost (phab:T272032)
Working on the problem of Lexeme merging failing if the source Lexeme has links to its own Senses (phab:T273830)
Working on showing an error when trying to save a Lemma with invalid language code on a Lexeme (phab:T265783)
Fixing an issue in the Property selector fallback where it is not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
Making it possible to add Interwiki links to/from Multilingual Wikisource (phab:T138332)
Video: Wikidata editing #31 Free Software Day - YouTube, Facebook
Video: Knowledge Graphs for AI: Wikidata and beyond - YouTube
Tool of the week
UseAsRef script allows you to add references to statements using one external ID as source (see User:Bargioni/UseAsRef and this YouTube video for more information)
Public Domain Tool, developed by the Flemish Institute for Archives automates the process of determining whether their collection items could be in the public domain.
Sizes of country items (like "Portugal" (Q45)) were recently reduced by 30% to 50% by moving a few economics properties to "economy of"-items (sample: "economy of Portugal" (Q1649355)). The item "economy of Portugal" is currently larger than "Portugal". This can simplify uses of country items that previously timed-out. Infoboxes can still access the properties with the link through "economy of topic" (P8744).
Later this week, the development team will enable a rate limit for assigning new item IDs. Bots and users who successfully create items should notice no change, since the rate limit is equal to the existing limit on all edits. However, bots that often fail to create items may start to see different error messages than usual. This will hopefully reduce the problem of skipped item IDs.
Work on the Simple Query Builder continues. We finished connecting query conditions via OR (phab:T272694). Next we will work on adding the UI for sharing the visual query via a link (phab:T272887)
Improved the deployment process for the Query Service UI to make it easier to deploy
Fixed language code "dag" for Dagbani not working for Lemmas for Lexemes (phab:T272242)
Fixing the bug where the Property selector is not falling back from language variant to major language for Property labels (phab:T272712)
Adding a rate limit for creating Item IDs to avoid skipping so many due to misbehaving bots (phab:T272032)
Fixed the case where no error was shown when trying to save a lemma with an invalid language code (phab:T265783)
Fixed a but where merging two Lexemes fails if the source Lexeme has links to its own Senses (phab:T273830)
Increasing the rate of edits that trigger a check by the constraint checker to 50%. This will increase the number of constraints violations that you can query in the Query Service. (phab:T204031)
Making it possible to add interwiki links to/from Multilingual Wikisource (phab:T138332)
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
There were problems with recent versions of MediaWiki. Because the updates caused problems the developers rolled back to an earlier version. Some updates and new functions will come later than planned. [94][95]
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [96]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (calendar).
Past: Online Talk Show on Fri, Feb 19, 2021, by Wikimedia Indonesia and Fariz Darari - Take a peek into the data warehouse of Wikimedia projects (= Wikidata): Youtube link
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Adding bibliographic data to Wikidata with Jason Evans, Wikimedian in residence at the Wales National Library, Tuesday, February 23rd.[97]
Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #33 - YouTube, Facebook, February 27
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The visual editor will now use MediaSearch to find images. You can search for images on Commons in the visual editor when you are looking for illustrations. This is to help editors find better images. [98]
Editing a timeline might have removed all text from it. This was because of a bug and has been fixed. You might need to edit the timeline again for it to show properly. [100]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 February. It will be on all wikis from 25 February (calendar).
Future changes
There is a user group for developers and users interested in working on Wikimedia wikis with the Rust programming language. You can join or tell others who want to make your wiki better in the future.
Upcoming: Wikidata-based Data Sprint hosted by the University of New Brunswick. One Wikidata data set will be provided on 11th March 2021 and various teams will have 2 hours to run a set of SPARQL queries against the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) and showcase their results.
Video: How to create new Wikidata item (in Dutch) - YouTube
Video: Merging Wikidata items (in Dutch) - YouTube
Tool of the week
EditSum, a new user script which allows to attach custom summary text to any label/statement/sitelink/etc. modification.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
User:Nikki/LexemeInterwikiLinks.js, is a userscript that adds Wiktionary interwiki links in the sidebar on Lexeme pages. (It links to pages corresponding to the first lemma and puts the lexeme language's Wiktionary first, followed by languages in the user's Babel box).
Shared Citations, a proposal arising from the WikiCite project, for a central reference management database supporting all Wikimedia projects, with significant relationship to Wikidata. Seeking feedback.
Modèle:Indice de diversité de genre (Template:Gender diversity index) is a new template in the French Wikipedia which use P21 (gender property) to count the number of people by gender mentioned in an article. It helps to find articles which "forget" to cite women.
Lexeme JSON dumps are now available as a collection of individual lexeme data in the regular JSON format, separate from the regular Wikidata dumps containing Items and Properties. phab:T264883
Working on first version of small tool that lets you get the average ORES quality score for a list of Items and find the lowest-quality Items in the batch so it's easier to improve them.
Taking a closer look at what larger improvements we want to make to Lexemes later this year.
Thinking through different ways how we can technically get mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases so we can later expose them.
Thinking through what the first version of the REST API should contain and what should come later.
Fixed an issue with whitespaces when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
Made sure all languages show up in the language selector for monolingual text Properties at least with their language code because them not showing up was very confusing (phab:T124758)
Fixed an issue with generating correct links for external IDs with + (phab:T271126)
Fixing an issue with Property selector not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
Due to the planned delay of the release of MediaWiki 1.36, the Wikibase team has been working on preparing a Wikibase update that includes new functionality (such as the “Federated Properties” feature) based on v1.35. To that end, we started backporting certain features and fixes into the Wikibase 1.35 release. Follow our progress here.
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
Wikis using the Growth team tools can now show the name of a newcomer's mentor anywhere through a magic word. This can be used for welcome messages or userboxes.
A new version of the VideoCutTool is now available. It enables cropping, trimming, audio disabling, and rotating video content. It is being created as part of the developer outreach programs.
Problems
There was a problem with the job queue. This meant some functions did not save changes and mass messages were delayed. This did not affect wiki edits. [101]
Some editors may not be logged in to their accounts automatically in the latest versions of Firefox and Safari. [102]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 March. It will be on all wikis from 4 March (calendar).
A request for comment is open that proposes a process for the community to revoke administrative permissions. This follows a 2019 RfC in favor of creating one such a policy.
A request for comment is in progress to remove F7 (invalid fair-use claim) subcriterion a, which covers immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
A request for comment asks if sysops may place the General sanctions/Coronavirus disease 2019 editnotice template on pages in scope that do not have page-specific sanctions?
When blocking an IPv6 address with Twinkle, there is now a checkbox with the option to just block the /64 range. When doing so, you can still leave a block template on the initial, single IP address' talkpage.
When protecting a page with Twinkle, you can now add a note if doing so was in response to a request at WP:RfPP, and even link to the specific revision.
By motion, the discretionary sanctions originally authorized under the GamerGate case are now authorized under a new Gender and sexuality case, with sanctions authorized for all edits about, and all pages related to, any gender-related dispute or controversy and associated people. Sanctions issued under GamerGate are now considered Gender and sexuality sanctions.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: OCLC Research’s CONTENTdm Wikibase data model for pilot project to improve collection discoverability, Tuesday, March 9th.[103]
Upcoming: SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, March 9 at 18:00 CET
Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #35 - YouTube, Facebook, March 13
"Giving knowledge back to Wikipedia: Towards a Systematic Approach to Sync Factual Data across Wikipedia, Wikidata and External Data Sources" (by DBPedia)
Fixed an issue where the Property selector is not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
Working on support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via wbeditentity (phab:T199896)
Continuing to work on the Query Builder and making it possible to query for quantities and dates with it.
Putting finishing touches on a small tool that lets you get the average ORES quality score for a list of Items as well as the individual scores for each of the Items
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
Section translation now works on Bengali Wikipedia. It helps mobile editors translate sections of articles. It will come to more wikis later. The first focus is active wikis with a smaller number of articles. You can test it and leave feedback.
When someone links to a Wikipedia article on Twitter this will now show a preview of the article. [105]
Problems
Many graphs have JavaScript errors. Graph editors can check their graphs in their browser's developer console after editing. [106]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 March. It will be on all wikis from 11 March (calendar).
The New Discussion tool will soon be a new discussion tools beta feature for on most Wikipedias. The goal is to make it easier to start new discussions. [107]
Future changes
There will be a number of changes to make it easier to work with templates. Some will come to the first wikis in March. Other changes will come to the first wikis in June. This is both for those who use templates and those who create or maintain them. You can read more.
Reference Previews will become a default feature on some wikis on 17 March. They will share a setting with Page Previews. If you prefer the Reference Tooltips or Navigation-Popups gadget you can keep using them. If so Reference Previews won't be shown. [108][109]
New JavaScript-based functions will not work in Internet Explorer 11. This is because Internet Explorer is an old browser that doesn't work with how JavaScript is written today. Everything that works in Internet Explorer 11 today will continue working in Internet Explorer for now. You can read more.
A hobby is considered to be a regular activity that is done for enjoyment, typically during one's leisure time, not professionally and not for pay. An example of a hobby is rail transport modelling(pictured).
Plant Humanities Lab is a website you can use to explore the cultural histories of plants and their influence on human societies.
DX Lab Art Index is an interactive database of over 18,000 nineteenth century Australian Artworks by over 2000 artists with links to Wikidata & compiled by volunteers over 10 years.
The new WDQS Streaming Updater is live as of March 15, 2021 on a pre-production test server for feedback. Available at https://query-preview.wikidata.org/. Release details here.
Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year - Call for Nominations! The research must be on, about, using data from, and/or of importance to Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons or other Wikimedia projects. Deadline to submit your nomination is no later than 2021-03-22.
Continued working on the Query Builder and focused on querying for quantity values (phab:T268942), handling special cases around sub classes for taxons and locations (phab:T274634) adding tooltips (phab:T275542) and sharing a visual query (phab:T272887)
Making changes to how Cognate handles redirects on Wiktionary to make more pages accessible through interwiki links (phab:T165061)
Creating a dashboard to break down the number of editors by namespace (phab:T275999)
Finishing support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via wbeditentity API module (phab:T199896)
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
Wikis that are part of the desktop improvements project can now use a new search function. The desktop improvements and the new search will come to more wikis later. You can also test it early.
Editors who put up banners or change site-wide JavaScript code should use the client error graph to see that their changes has not caused problems. You can read more. [110]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 March. It will be on all wikis from 18 March (calendar).
Future changes
You can add a newline or carriage return character to a custom signature if you use a template. There is a proposal to not allow them in the future. This is because they can cause formatting problems. [111][112]
You will be able to read but not edit 12 wikis for a short period of time on 23 March at 06:00 (UTC). This could take 30 minutes but will probably be much faster.
You can use Quarry for SQL queries to the Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 23 March. There will be a new field to specify the database to connect to. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech. PAWS and other ways to do SQL queries to the Wiki Replicas will be affected later. [113]
Two charts from an Arabic copy of the Secretum Secretorum for determining whether a person will live or die based on the numerical value of the patient's name.
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 Wikipedia app for KaiOS phones. They don't have a touch screen so readers navigate with the phone keys. There is now a simulator so you can see what it looks like.
You will be able to read but not edit twelve wikis for a short period of time on 23 March at 06:00 (UTC). This can also affect password changes, logging in to new wikis, global renames and changing or confirming emails. This could take 30 minutes but will probably be much faster.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 March. It will be on all wikis from 25 March (calendar).
Flagged revisions will no longer have multiple tags like "tone" or "depth". It will also only have one tier. This was changed because very few wikis used these features and they make the tool difficult to maintain. [115][116]
Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015 this was moved from wg* to mw.config. wg* will soon no longer work. [117]
March 22: Bug triage hour about Lexemes with Lydia Pintscher
March 23: SPARQL querying for Lexemes with Vigneron
March 24: Open discussion in French about Lexemes
March 25: Documentation Q&A with Dan Shick
March 27: Lingua Libre, how you can record words in your language and use them on Wikidata, with Poslovitch
Upcoming: The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 25 March 2021(Add to calendar). This month we will have a team member from Enslaved.org talk to us briefly about how they are using Linked Open Data (LOD) with the help of Wikibase (due of technical challenges they couldn't join us last time). Everyone is welcome to attend the call.
Upcoming: The Arctic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference is taking place remotely on June 24-25, and focusing on indigenous and underrepresented languages on the Wikimedia projects. The call for submissions is now open until April 15th, if you want to present something related to Wikidata and languages, feel free to apply.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Members of the EthicsLD Group will be leading a discussion on ethics in linked data, Tuesday, March 23rd.[118]
Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #37 - YouTube, Facebook, March 27
erinnerungshort.de/kap/ is a data and photo research project and map visualization tool with federated license query from Structured Commons, by Raymond and Elya.
~7500 person items have been enriched with the new property GEPRIS person ID (P4872), imported from a high quality dataset from the Q707283.
Work on the first version of the Query Builder is nearing its end. Doing remaining work on querying for quantities, dates and ranges as well as polishing and bug fixing.
Made Cognate work correctly for redirects on Wiktionary (phab:T165061)
Fixed an issue where the termbox on Item pages used the wrong list of languages on the mobile version (phab:T275611)
Cleaned up deleted Items from the term store database table (phab:T263730)
Got feedback on the initial click-dummies for checking Wikidata's data against other databases to find mismatches
The dev team spent the last week prototyping a few things to learn if some things would be feasible/a good idea. Among other things we tried building a small tool to connect Senses to Items, looked into the different types of ontology issues that can be found on Wikidata and checked what using a document store for data storage would look like.
Note: from March 29th until April 12th, Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) is not available to answer messages. If you have any requests for the development team, please ask on Contact the development team. For any emergency, you can contact Lea Lacroix (WMDE). Because of Easter holidays in Germany, the upcoming newsletter will be issued one day later, on April 6th.
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
Some very old web browsersdon’t work well with the Wikimedia wikis. Some old code for browsers that used to be supported is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. [119]
IRC recent changes feeds have been moved to a new server. Make sure all tools automatically reconnect to irc.wikimedia.org and not to the name of any specific server. Users should also consider switching to the more modern EventStreams. [120]
Problems
When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split. It might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem. [121]
Some translatable pages on Meta could not be edited. This was because of a bug in the translation tool. The new MediaWiki version was delayed because of problems like this. [122][123]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 March. It will be on all wikis from 1 April (calendar).
Following a request for comment, F7 (invalid fair-use claim) subcriterion a has been deprecated; it covered immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
Following a request for comment, page movers were granted the delete-redirect userright, which allows moving a page over a single-revision redirect, regardless of that redirect's target.
Technical news
When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split and it might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem. (T278350)
Code to support some very old web browsers is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. (T277803)
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
Editors can collapse part of an article so you have to click on it to see it. When you click a link to a section inside collapsed content it will now expand to show the section. The browser will scroll down to the section. Previously such links didn't work unless you manually expanded the content first. [124]
Changes later this week
The citoidAPI will use for example 2010-12-XX instead of 2010-12 for dates with a month but no days. This is because 2010-12 could be confused with 2010-2012 instead of December 2010. This is called level 1 instead of level 0 in the Extended Date/Time Format. [125]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 April. It will be on all wikis from 8 April (calendar).
Future changes
PAWS can now connect to the new Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 28 April. There is a new way to connect to the databases. Until 28 April both ways to connect to the databases will work. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech.
April 7: Data import for Lexemes: how to add a lot of content in your language
April 8: Documentation Q&A
April 8: Leveraging text corpora for curating lexicographical data
April 10: Lingua Libre, how you can record words in your language and use them on Wikidata
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Cliff Landis (Digital Initiatives Librarian, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library) on “GaNCH: Using Wikidata for Georgia's Natural, Cultural, and Historic Organizations' Disaster Response.” April 6th.[126]
Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #39 - YouTube, Facebook, April 10
Wikidata Lexeme Forms now supports additional Breton templates (Source)
User:Nikki/LexemeAddIPA.js userscript adds a link in the header for forms on lexeme pages which opens a dialog for adding IPA statements to forms that do not have any yet.
LexSAOB adds Svenska Akademiens ordbok (SAOB) identifiers to Swedish lexemes in Wikidata.
We continued to make improvements to the Query builder. We worked on adding a footer to the Query Builder (phab:T268643) and showing all relevant columns in the query result (phab:T277646) as well as querying for dates (phab:T272697)
Fixed a bug where Item pages scrolls back to "In more languages" block after every change of DOM (phab:T277999, being deployed to Wikidata later this week)
Continued working on a new grafana graph to track editor numbers split by namespace (phab:T275999)
Finished a small tool to get the ORES quality score for a list of Items. Waiting for deployment to toolforge for broader use now.
Defined remaining work for redirect sitelink exceptions (phab:T278962)
Royal Trees, powered by Wikidata is an interactive website that shows royal family trees, for all royal families worldwide. See an example of Philip Duke of Edinburgh.
Started research and collecting material for the work on improvements to the Lexeme UI and prepared the first interviews
Finishing up the work on the first version of the Query Builder. We still need to get the security review before we can deploy it properly. Current state can be tested on the test system.
Finalized the dashboard to see the number of (active/very active) editors split by namespace. See the graphs at the bottom of this dashboard.
Continued working on the remaining pieces needed to fully support editing statements on Senses of a Lexeme (phab:T199896)
Upcoming: SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, April 20 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Alexandra Wong on experiences and workflows for linking archival collections to Wikidata. There will also be a recap of insights from the recent Canadian archivists’ panel on Wikidata by the University and College Archives Special Interest Section (UCASIS) of the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA). Agenda, April 20
Upcoming: Wikipedia Weekley Network - Biodiversity edition: iNaturalist place ID YouTube, Facebook, April 23
Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #41 - YouTube, Facebook, April 24
Upcoming: 25 April - WikidataDays Sessions II, an online editing session dedicated to democracy and political parties, coinciding with the celebration of Freedom Day.
Structured Data on Commons explained, with Andrew Lih, John Cummings and Pharos (Youtube)
Discovering history's notable people (audio). Using Wikidata and Wikipedia as the backbone, this project "construct[s] a new dataset of more than seven million notable individuals across recorded human history".
User:So9q/Gadget-CreateNewEntity.js is a userscript to add a "create new item" link in the dropdown menu for when you want to * add an item to a property, but the item does not exist. (recently modified to support lexemes).
Wikidata Lexeme Forms no longer automatically redirects you to login, so you can now use edit mode to view the forms of a lexeme in the “right” order. Here is an example.
Finished work on the support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via the API (phab:T199896)
Got all feature work done on the first version of the Query Builder. It is now awaiting security review.
Statements linking to deleted Lexemes now indicate this similar to statements linking to deleted Items (phab:T277089)
Fixing a bug with misaligned grammatical features after an OOUI update (phab:T278522)
Finished work on the small tools to get the number of constraints violations and ORES scores for a list of Items. Will publish soon.
Did interviews with a few people about how they work around lexicographical data
Selected focus languages for continued work on lexicographical data and Abstract Wikipedia together with Abstract Wikipedia team. The selected ones are Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam and Dagbani. You can read more about it in the Abstract Wikipedia newsletter.
Gave input to WMF search platform team for a survey draft around the query service in order to better understand how to move forward with improvements
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
Email to the Wikimedia wikis are handled by groups of Wikimedia editors. These volunteer response teams now use Znuny instead of OTRS. The functions and interface remain the same. The volunteer administrators will give more details about the next steps soon. [127][128]
If you use syntax highlighting, you can see line numbers in the 2010 and 2017 wikitext editors when editing templates. This is to make it easier to see line breaks or talk about specific lines. Line numbers will soon come to all namespaces. [129][130][131]
Because of a technical change there could be problems with gadgets and scripts that have an edit summary area that looks similar to this one. If they look strange they should use mw.loader.using('mediawiki.action.edit.styles') to go back to how they looked before. [132]
The latest version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis last week. There was no Tech News issue last week.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in two weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.
Working with Zotero on WiKidata (in Italian) - YouTube
Tool of the week
User:So9q/AddNewLexemeMenu.js is a userscript that adds a section to the sidebar with links for creating new lexemes.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
WMDE built two tools to help editors get a better understanding of the quality of Wikidata's data in a specific area of interest. Try them out and let us know what you think.
Collaborative translation of Cita is now available on translatewiki.net. Cita is a Wikidata addon that adds citations metadata support to Zotero, using cites work (P2860) information from Wikidata, and enabling users to easily contribute missing data. Cita is currently under development with a WikiCite grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, and presentation workshops will be held on May 27th (Spanish) and May 31st (English). More info and pre-registration here.
RaiseWikibase is a tool for speeding up multilingual knowledge graph construction with Wikibase. Among other features, it can be utilized to create a mini Wikibase instance with Wikidata properties in a few minutes.
wbeditentity now supports editing statements on Senses (phab:T199896)
We added syntax highlighting for viewing Entity Schema pages. There is not syntax highlighting for editing of Entity Schemas yet. (phab:T238831)
Improved the way Lua deals with redirects (phab:T238831)
Worked on making it possible to add a title to the top of a query visualization via a comment in the SPARQL code (phab:T225883)
Discussed how to get persistent storage of constraint violations unstuck as this is a prerequisite to making it easier to analyze and query constraint violations (phab:T214362)
Discussed a high-level plan for how to move forward with checking Wikidata's data against 3rd-party databases
Finished work on version 1 of the Query Builder. Not it is awaiting security review before we can deploy it.
Take a list of cities in your country, add ((Item documentation)) in the talk page and have fun looking at people born in this place ordered by number of sitelinks. You may have some surprises!
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
Templates have parameters that can have specific values. It is possible to suggest values for editors with TemplateData. You can soon see them as a drop-down list in the visual editor. This is to help template users find the right values faster. [133][134][135]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 April. It will be on all wikis from 29 April (calendar).
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
Twinkle is a gadget on English Wikipedia. It can help with maintenance and patrolling. It can now be used on other wikis. You can get Twinkle on your wiki using the twinkle-starter GitHub repository.
Some things will not work for about a minute on 5 May. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This will affect the content translation tool and notifications among other things. This is because of an upgrade to avoid crashes. [137]
Changes later this week
Reference Previews will become a default feature on a number of wikis on 5 May. This is later than planned because of some changes. You can use it without using Page Previews if you want to. The earlier plan was to have the preference to use both or none. [138][139]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 May. It will be on all wikis from 6 May (calendar).
Future changes
The CSS classes .error, .warning and .success do not work for mobile readers if they have not been specifically defined on your wiki. From June they will not work for desktop readers. This can affect gadgets and templates. The classes can be defined in MediaWiki:Common.css or template styles instead. [140]
Wikinegata is a platform for browsing interesting negations about Wikidata entities. (Overview video)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Template:Item classification and Template:Item documentation now include more generic queries for classes: it include the number of subclasses, the number of instances, the number of instances by class, the list of instances and the list of most frequent properties for items of this class.
TP organization now includes generic queries for items of class school.
Entity Schemas now have syntax highlighting for viewing (phab:T238831, example)
Reviewing a patch that will make it possible to use templates on d:MediaWiki:Wikibase-SortedProperties. This will for example make it possible to show labels automatically for each Property ID. Thanks, Luca! (phab:T280787)
Evaluated the interviews and other research we did around improvements for lexicographical data
Continuing to work on evaluating and addressing scaling issues of the Query Service
Provided input to a research team working on a potential new and improved Property Suggester
Wikibase: we are completing the final tasks necessary to prepare the Wikibase Spring release and expect to publish new versions of the tarball and Docker images on or before May 15, 2021
Wikinegata is a platform for browsing interesting negations about Wikidata entities. (Overview video)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Template:Item classification and Template:Item documentation now include more generic queries for classes: it include the number of subclasses, the number of instances, the number of instances by class, the list of instances and the list of most frequent properties for items of this class.
TP organization now includes generic queries for items of class school.
Entity Schemas now have syntax highlighting for viewing (phab:T238831, example)
Reviewing a patch that will make it possible to use templates on d:MediaWiki:Wikibase-SortedProperties. This will for example make it possible to show labels automatically for each Property ID. Thanks, Luca! (phab:T280787)
Evaluated the interviews and other research we did around improvements for lexicographical data
Continuing to work on evaluating and addressing scaling issues of the Query Service
Provided input to a research team working on a potential new and improved Property Suggester
Wikibase: we are completing the final tasks necessary to prepare the Wikibase Spring release and expect to publish new versions of the tarball and Docker images on or before May 15, 2021
The user group oversight will be renamed to suppress. This is for technical reasons. You can comment at T112147 if you have objections.
Arbitration
The community consultation on the Arbitration Committee discretionary sanctions procedure was closed, and an initial draft based on feedback from the now closed consultation is expected to be released in early June to early July for community review.
Tattooing among women of the Koita people of Papua New Guinea traditionally began at age five and was added to each year. The V-shaped marks on the chest, with certain others, indicate that the woman is marriageable. Photo taken in 1912.
User:Nikki/Ranker.js adds a link to the Ranker tool next to every property on an entity page.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikibase spring release is now available! This new release is compatible with MediaWiki 1.35 and it contains new features: Federated Properties, WikibaseManifest & Wikibase Pingback.
May 2021 Query Builder updates: We finished usability testing of new features and incorporated feedback from users including people with visual impairments and RTL languages. It is now possible to query for dates and we're also looking into making the Query Builder discoverable from the Wikidata Query Service.
Wikimedia Foundation 2021 Board Elections has been announced. Please sign-up as an Election Volunteer if you'd like to support the elections. Election Volunteers serve as a bridge between the Elections Committee, the facilitation team and the movement.
Omaha-Ponca language is now available for monolingual text properties. (phab:T265296)
Added a meaningful error message when trying to use Special:EntityData with a Lexeme subentity like L123-F1 in cases where the Lexeme L123 was redirected to another Lexeme (phab:T257494)
Changed the “type” and “value type” constraints to ignore deprecated values (phab:T170401)
Working on rendering empty claims in JSON as `claims: {}` instead of `claims: []` (phab:T241422)
Investigating some issues with page_props missing on Commons wiki after adding sitelinks to Commons categories (phab:T280627)
Removed Google Knowledge Graph Id (P2671) and Wolfram Language entity code (P4839) from the Property Suggestions as they are usually not useful suggestions (phab:T280779)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 May. It will be on all wikis from 13 May (calendar).
Future changes
You can see what participants plan to work on at the online Wikimedia hackathon 22–23 May.
France report: Journée Wikimédia Culture et numérique 2021; French open content report
Germany report: Northern Exposure for cultural heritage data
India report: Proofread competition on Bengali Wikisource in collaboration with British Library
Indonesia report: Wikisource Competition 2021; Museum Daerah Deli Serdang is now on Commons
Italy report: A Wikipedian in residence at the Civic Museum of Modena: report
Netherlands report: WikiVrijdagen with Atria and IHLIA, Wikimedians in Residence will increase the visibility of media art on Wikipedia, Wikimedia training: shared heritage, Papiamentu and Papiamento: Wikipedia is up and ready to go!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
An earlier issue of Tech News said that the citoidAPI would handle dates with a month but no days in a new way. This has been reverted for now. There needs to be more discussion of how it affects different wikis first. [146]
Changes later this week
MediaWiki:Pageimages-blacklist will be renamed MediaWiki:Pageimages-denylist. The list can be copied to the new name. It will happen on 19 May for some wikis and 20 May for some wikis. Most wikis don't use it. It lists images that should never be used as thumbnails for articles. [147]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 May. It will be on all wikis from 20 May (calendar).
Data literacy snacks - Talk about "Wikibase knowledge graphs for data management & data science" on 23rd of June. For registration, send e-mail to infoberd-bw.de
Upcoming
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, May 18 at 18:00 CEST
May 21-22, 2021 [148] Boston Rock City: Explore Wikidata and Learn About Local Music: Boston Public Library is partnering with Harvard Library for a guided exploration of Wikidata and local music history. Join us for two days of music and Wikidata editing; no prior experience or punk cred necessary! This public event is free to all and will take place via Zoom; please register in advance. The subject of this project is the Arthur Freedman Collection, and audiovisual archive that captures over four decades of Boston rock music performances. We’ll provide: instructions, tools, data sources, visualizations, optional Discord chat, and a soundtrack. If you have questions, please contact Harvard Library staff member Peter Laurence at laurenc@fas.harvard.edu.
Template:Annotate QID (currently on en. & de.Wikisource) allows names and other terms in texts to be semantically annotated with the equivalent QIDs. sv.Wikisource has a similar template.
Wikimedia Foundation 2021 Board Elections has been announced. Please sign-up as an Election Volunteer if you'd like to support the elections. Election Volunteers serve as a bridge between the Elections Committee, the facilitation team and the movement.
Fixed the entity usage dashboards that no longer showed data due to technical issues. It tracks how much data from Wikidata is used on the other Wikimedia projects. (phab:T279762)
Configured the Property Suggester to not suggest Google Knowledge Graph ID (P2671) and Wolfram Language entity code (P4839) (phab:T280779)
Investigated remaining issue with updating the page_props table on the client wikis, which is confusing some bots making use of that table (phab:T280627)
Fixed an issue in the Query Builder where it got confused when adding several conditions with the same Property (phab:T279945)
Working on tracking the number of edits per namespace over time (phab:T281356)
Working on fixing a bug where old revisions of Items have edit buttons but should not (phab:T281587)
Fixing an issue where value suggestions are not showing all values that are defined in the property constraint (phab:T280650)
#1Lib1Ref Campaign in Italy, as part of the IFLA Wikidata Working Group campaign (May 15 - June 5); more than 10k references have already been added (see the dashboard for more details)
Wikidata-related projects that have been developed/improved during the Wikimedia Hackathon 2021:
User:Lucas_Werkmeister/Ranker - Finished and announced the batch modes for the Ranker tool, allowing users to edit the ranks of statements in Wikidata or Structured Data on Commons in bulk
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Wikimedia movement has been using IRC on a network called Freenode. There have been changes around who is in control of the network. The Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts have decided to move to the new Libera Chat network instead. This is not a formal decision for the movement to move all channels but most Wikimedia IRC channels will probably leave Freenode. There is a migration guide and ongoing Wikimedia discussions about this.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 May. It will be on all wikis from 27 May (calendar).
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, June 1 at 18:00 CEST
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Affinity Group Co-facilitators will recap the last year, introduce plans for the coming year, and receive suggestions from the community for future sessions.; [149], June 1st.
Italian Wikiversity used Lua on their Recent Changes SpecialPage via overwriting a MediaWiki message. Our code used to not expect that, now it does. (phab:T283240)
Updating the panel that tracks Wikidata edits over time in different namespaces to include all namespaces (phab:T281356)
Working on adding a new constraints type for Lexemes (phab:T200689)
Working on designs for improving Special:NewLexeme
Working on designs for the system to find mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases
Fixing some malformed globe-coordinate precisions in the database (phab:T283576)
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
There was an issue on the Vector skin with the text size of categories and notices under the page title. It was fixed last Monday. [150]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 June. It will be on all wikis from 10 June (calendar).
Future changes
The Wikimedia movement uses Phabricator for technical tasks. This is where we collect technical suggestions, bugs and what developers are working on. The company behind Phabricator will stop working on it. This will not change anything for the Wikimedia movement now. It could lead to changes in the future. [151][152][153]
Searching on Wikipedia will find more results in some languages. This is mainly true for when those who search do not use the correct diacritics because they are not seen as necessary in that language. For example searching for Bedusz doesn't find Będusz on German Wikipedia. The character ę isn't used in German so many would write e instead. This will work better in the future in some languages. [154]
The CSRF token parameters in the action API were changed in 2014. The old parameters from before 2014 will stop working soon. This can affect bots, gadgets and user scripts that still use the old parameters. [155][156]
Wikimedia previously used the IRC network Freenode. However, due to changes over who controlled the network with reports of a forceful takeover by several ex-staff members, the Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts decided to move to the new Libera Chat network. It has been reported that Wikimedia related channels on Freenode have been forcibly taken over if they pointed members to Libera. There is a migration guide and Wikimedia discussions about this.
Sweden report: Working with UN Human Rights; Aftermath to the fiddler competition; Music manuscripts from the 18th century; Digital visions; Should museums work with Wikipedia?; Wikidata project with museums has results