This 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.
Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee rescinded the restrictions on the page name move discussions for the two Ireland pages that were enacted in June 2009.
Wikimedians for Sustainable Development - December 2023 Newsletter
This is our twenty-seventh newsletter, a sort of year-in-review for 2023.
Dear Wikimedians for Sustainable Development,
As we bid farewell to 2023, we reflect on a year that has been an uneven year for our user group. While the journey has been marked by some truly inspiring events, most of our efforts have been largely uncoordinated and the user group hasn't been the support it could have been. Yet, there's a glimmer of hope and a world of potential for 2024.
Highlights of 2023:
Newsletters Galore
We kicked off the year with zeal, sharing updates and inspiration through four newsletters. The number of things happening in the movement is astounding, but we need to rethink the format of the newsletter going into the next year.
Growing Strong
The Wikimedians for Sustainable Development family welcomed 33 new members in 2023. Your passion and dedication continue to inspire us, and we look forward to nurturing this community spirit in the year ahead.
Wikimania Talks
Our voices echoed far and wide at Wikimania, where several members of our community took the virtual stage to share insights and ideas about everything from Wikipedians-in-Residence's to open data. Your contributions showcased our commitment to sustainable development on a global scale.
Content Creation Magic
Throughout the year, our extended community demonstrated incredible dedication to expanding the knowledge base on Wikipedia. Countless hours were spent creating and curating content that aligns with our mission, contributing to a more sustainable digital ecosystem.
Campaigning hard
We saw a large variety of campaigns, from writing challenges to editathons. The willingness to experiment with new formats and partners, as well as learning from past efforts, shows great promise for the future.
Acknowledging Challenges:
While we celebrate these achievements, we acknowledge that 2023 presented its fair share of challenges. A lack of global coordination reminded us that the road to sustainable development is not always linear. However, it is precisely these challenges that fuel our determination to work together more cohesively in the coming year and proof that the user group is needed.
Hopeful Anticipation for 2024:
As we turn the page to 2024, let's carry forward the lessons learned and the successes celebrated. We are optimistic that, with renewed energy and a collective commitment, we will overcome obstacles and create an even more impactful and connected Wikimedians for Sustainable Development community.
Here's to a year of collaboration, growth, and making a lasting impact on the world through our shared passion for sustainability. Together, we can turn challenges into opportunities and pave the way for a brighter future.
Wishing you all a joyous holiday season and a Happy New Year!
Upcoming: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC, 17th January 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Papers: Improving maintenance of community-based knowledge graphs. This paper by Nicolas Ferranti addresses the critical issue of data quality in open knowledge graphs, with a specific focus on Wikidata. It aims to formalize Wikidata's unique approaches to assess and resolve data inconsistencies, proposing a semi-automatic refinement pipeline to empower the Wikidata user community in maintaining and enhancing the reliability of this extensive collaborative knowledge graph.
Videos: WikidataCon 2023 Day 1.5 - The past and future of Wikidata. In this video Lydia Pintscher takes a moment to review the major events of Wikidata over the past few years. Then turns to look forward and predict what Wikidata's prospects will be over the next year.
Tool of the week
WICA: Wikidata's insights for created articles is an updated version of an old tool. It now includes many new features to analyse your list of created articles using Wikidata properties.
Nonprofit Status (Indicating the legal and tax status of a non-profit organization (specific to served legal areas, aka. Countries). Addition to ((P|1454)). ((P|1628)) to [https://schema.org/nonprofitStatus nonprofitStatus] from schema.org. Organizations can have multiple Nonprofit Status from different countries.)
creative director (person who makes high-level creative decisions, oversees the creation of creative assets such as adverts, products, events or logos and guides and directs the creative people who create the end result)
A "bare URL and missing title" error. References show this error when they do not have a title. Please edit the article to add the appropriate title parameter to the reference. (Fix | Ask for help)
Paxairship disaster was the explosion of the Pax airship on May 12, 1902, in Paris, which killed the Brazilian inventor Augusto Severo and the French mechanic Georges Saché.
(Please update the interwiki links on Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
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
mediawiki2latex is a tool that converts wiki content into the formats of LaTeX, PDF, ODT, and EPUB. The code now runs many times faster due to recent improvements. There is also an optional Docker container you can install on your local machine.
The way that Random pages are selected has been updated. This will slowly reduce the problem of some pages having a lower chance of appearing. [1]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar). [2][3]
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 17th January 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Blogs: PubChem on Wikidata – What is the state of coverage? by Tiago Lubiana. In summary, Wikidata has good coverage of the structured chemical data in PubChem, though there are improvement points. PubChem displays, and will always display, textual information and vendor-specific data that do not fit Wikidata, but they are complementary tools in the ecosystem of open chemical data.
LIS Journals’ Lack of Participation in Wikidata Item Creation by Eric Willey & Susan Radovsky, discusses the gap of Wikidata items being created for scholarly articles by the scholar's themselves and if this can lead to inconsistent or inaccurate data model.
Quantifying Americanization: Coverage of American Topics in Different Wikipedias: this paper asks whether there is an americanisation bias in the content created by the communities. By Piotr Konieczny & Włodzimierz Lewoniewski.
Videos
Map Kerala Initiative is an opendata portal geospatial map powered by Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, introduced by Manoj Karingamadathil.
Notebooks: Wikipedia article as a timeline - This tool transforms a Wikipedia article in a timeline by parsing all internal links in a Wikipedia article and retrieving the date corresponding to each internal link using the point in time (P585) property in Wikidata.
Tool of the week Map your list of created articles - a notebook display of geolocated articles on a map created by a user per chosen project and batch (featured/good article).
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikimedia Indonesia and Wikimedia Deutschland ended their partnership within the project Software Collaboration for Wikidata prematurely. Read their joint statement here.
IP masking/temporary accounts: We are adjusting Wikibase to be prepared for the upcoming changes to no longer expose IP addresses for non-logged-in users (phab:T351968)
Dumps/lex. data: We’re adjusting how empty lists of Forms and Senses are represented in JSON dumps (phab:T305660)
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the work on making it possible to get all sitelinks of an Item (phab:T344041)
We are working on getting a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344039)
Conversion to Islam is accepting Islam as a religion or faith and rejecting any other religion or irreligion.
(Please update the interwiki links on Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New request for comments: Community request for the development team to access inverse properties on client wikis. (Summary: We currently cannot access inverse property values on Wikipedia. This can be a data management issue on Wikipedia as we must always ask ourself if we must introduce an inverse property for cases where we need them. So I think it’s useful to gather the usecases community would want and draft a request for an API to the devteam to do that.)
Upcoming: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 17th January 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Past
Provenance Loves Wiki (PLW24), Jan 12th - 14th, research and data on the origin of artworks and cultural heritage and how Wikibase and Wikidata can support this.
WikiLovesWomen #SheSaid campaign wrapped up the 2023 campaign by visiting Kinshasha and Kisangani, where local Wikimedians improved quotes from women on FR Wikipedia and Wikidata.
QLever: a new way to query OpenStreetMap --> Discussion of the new opportunities offered by QLever to query OpenStreetMap and to run federated queries with Wikidata
Wikidata for authority control: 3 years of work --> The three-year Wikidata for authority control project, a collaboration between Wikimedia Sverige and Swedish museums, concluded in December 2023. It equipped museum staff with tools and skills to integrate their authority databases with Wikidata, resulting in added identifiers, SPARQL query proficiency, and enhanced knowledge sharing within the GLAM sector.
Go-ahead for Wikidata Project of GLAM institutions from Baden-Württemberg --> The GLAM-BW project, under "GLAM goes OpenData," connects major collections in Baden-Württemberg, focusing on the württembergische Kunstkammer. With over 3,000 objects, the project integrates information on collectors, histories, and objects into a knowledge graph for semantic searches, contributing to the broader realm of linked open data, akin to Wikidata.
Swiss GLAM Programme --> Wikimedia CH imported the Museum of Natural History of Neuchâtel's urchin fossil casts to Wikimedia Commons, connecting structured data on Wikidata. The project involved data cleaning, adding missing elements, and file imports via OpenRefine, highlighting seamless integration between Wikidata and Commons.
Papers
Reflections on the PCC Wikidata Pilot at UCLA Library: --> Undertaking the PCC Learning Objectives. Discusses the 14-month Pilot programme for cooperative cataloguing of UCLA Library and Museum Collections. By E. Zhang, P. Biswas & I. Dagher.
SMWCon 2023: Semantics, Wikis, and AI --> Day 1, Keynote by Prof. Markus Krötzsch who explores origins and principles of semantic wikis and key challenges that lie ahead in managing knowledge.
Brian M Sperlongano released US boundary QA checker, a quality assurance tool for finding issues with boundary data in the United States by using Wikidata, OpenStreetMap, and US Census Bureau data.
The Surrounding Ocean (available at vrandezo.github.io/TheSurroundingOcean) - is a tool that allows you to browse lexicographical data. You can use the tool to explore words and their meanings, translations, and synonyms. The tool is currently under development, and the developer, Danny, would appreciate feedback to fix any issues with the tool. More info: Wikidata:The Surrounding Ocean.
WikiProject Highlights: Ontology Cleaning Task Force: A group of people have started a task force to discuss problems with the Wikidata ontology and how to clean them up. Anyone interested in participating is welcome. The task force maintains Wikidata:WikiProject Ontology/Cleaning Task Force as a record of its activities. You can add yourself to the participants list there and find out how to join group meetings or otherwise participate in the group. (Got something noteworthy happening in your WikiProject? Share it in the upcoming issue!)
IP masking: We are working on adjusting Wikibase to handle the upcoming introduction of IP masking, which will give editors who are not logged in a temporary account name instead of using their IP to attribute edits to (phab:T351968)
Lexicographical data: We are changing how empty Senses and Forms are represented in the dumps (phab:T305660)
mul language code: We are doing user testing for the current implementation to see if it is understandable for people.
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on migrating it to the Codex design system.
REST API:
We improved the handling of lower-case statement IDs (phab:T354262)
We are working on getting a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344039)
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
Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. [4]
Gadgets and personal user scripts may now use JavaScript syntax introduced in ES6 (also known as "ES2015") and ES7 ("ES2016"). MediaWiki validates the source code to protect other site functionality from syntax errors, and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. Previously, Gadgets could use the requiresES6 option. This option is no longer needed and will be removed in the future. [5]
An update on the status of the Community Wishlist Survey for 2024 has been published. Please read and give your feedback.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar). [8][9]
Starting on January 17, it will not be possible to login to Wikimedia wikis from some specific old versions of the Chrome browser (versions 51–66, released between 2016 and 2018). Additionally, users of iOS 12, or Safari on Mac OS 10.14, may need to login to each wiki separately. [10]
The jquery.cookie module was deprecated and replaced with the mediawiki.cookie module last year. A script has now been run to replace any remaining uses, and this week the temporary alias will be removed. [11]