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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
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. [1][2][3]
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. [4]
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. [5][6]
SPARQL Jupyter notebooks in PAWS: PAWS is a wikitech services which allows to run Jupyter notebooks. There is a SPARQL kernel which makes it possible to run SPARQL queries. See this example notebook.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata Community/Diversity 2021 Survey has been published. The results are meant to serve as a baseline to see how the community might (not) change in the future.
WikidataCon 2021: A sustainable future for Wikidata. Information about "the conference theme, its three-day program structure and a special project on diversity taking place before the conference itself".
The call for candidates for 2021 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections has begun on June 9. The last date to apply is June 29, 2021.
Working on no longer using the Query Service to evaluate Constraints Checks regular expressions (this should make our checks faster and allow for further improvements) (phab:T176312)
Changing the rate limits for assigning Item IDs further, which should result in even fewer Q-IDs being skipped in the future (phab:T284538)
Finalizing the concepts for a tool to help work on mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases/websites/...
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
Logged-in users on the mobile web can choose to use the advanced mobile mode. They now see categories in a similar way as users on desktop do. This means that some gadgets that have just been for desktop users could work for users of the mobile site too. If your wiki has such gadgets you could decide to turn them on for the mobile site too. Some gadgets probably need to be fixed to look good on mobile. [7]
German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC. [9]
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 28 June. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [10][11]
When newcomers had the Reply tool and tried to post on a talk page, they were more successful at posting a comment. (Source)
Earlier this year, the Editing team ran a large study of the Reply Tool. The main goal was to find out whether the Reply Tool helped newer editors communicate on wiki. The second goal was to see whether the comments that newer editors made using the tool needed to be reverted more frequently than comments newer editors made with the existing wikitext page editor.
The key results were:
Newer editors who had automatic ("default on") access to the Reply tool were more likely to post a comment on a talk page.
The comments that newer editors made with the Reply Tool were also less likely to be reverted than the comments that newer editors made with page editing.
These results give the Editing team confidence that the tool is helpful.
Looking ahead
The team is planning to make the Reply tool available to everyone as an opt-out preference in the coming months. This has already happened at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 24th June 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). This month we'll have a team member from Wikibase Stakeholders Group talk briefly about their work, and then we'll welcome people to share out about their work around Wikibase. We'll leave some space in the agenda to discuss meta issues related to the Wikibase Community Usergroup.
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in English by Vigneron, June 22 at 18:00 CEST
The call for candidates for 2021 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections has begun on June 9. The last date to apply is June 29, 2021.
Since the beginning of the month, phabricator tickets about language codes (and names of languages) were reviewed and triaged to better reflect their content and current status. Some work was done to better identify the steps for such changes, highlight and address bottlenecks and system issues. Patches for a few codes were contributed and are being released. Phabricator "Language codes" workboard provides an overview, phab:T284856 attempts to identify maintenance steps and phab:T284276 determine turn-around times. phab:T284808 should finally close a gap in termbox language handeling. A way to better address some or all aspects of changes of language codes applicable to Wikipedia editions still needs to be found. Don't hesitate to request the addition or update of language names (e.g. the name of Dutch in Danish) or missing language codes, notably for monolingual strings (see Help:Monolingual text languages).
Fixed a bug that broke the "Add sitelink" popup on Commons (phab:T284854)
Working on a fix for suggesters popping up unexpectedly when tabbing quickly (phab:284219)
Reviewing code for a new Property Suggester by a student (phab:T284820)
Mismatch Finder: Working on a tool to work through mismatching data between Wikidata and external databases. Your feedback is welcome on Wikidata talk:Mismatch Finder
Curious Facts: We developed a tool to help editors check random curious facts on Wikidata. Try it and give us your feedback on Wikidata talk:Curious Facts
Kicked off our continued work on Wikidata-Wikibase federation (Federation v2) with preparatory work, including:
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 otrs-member group name is now vrt-permissions. This could affect abuse filters. [12]
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC. [13]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 June. It will be on all wikis from 24 June (calendar).
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, June 28 at 18:00 CEST
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Robert Chavez (Northeastern University) will provide an introduction to SPARQL and using the Wikidata Query Service.; [14], June 29th.
Wikidata Community/Diversity 2021 Survey has been published. The results are meant to serve as a baseline to see how the community might (not) change in the future. Feel free to give us your feedback on this discussion page.
A new version of the Open Art Browser allows discovering works of art in the new section "Types", which presents you more than 1500 expressions of art. Explore it!
Mismatch Finder: We started building the foundation of the place that will store the mismatches between Wikidata and other databases/catalogs/...
Continued work on migrating the checks of regular expressions for constraints from SPARQL to a better solution to take that load off of the SPARQL endpoint (phab:T176312)
Made it possible to show language links from multilingual Wikisource to the other language versions of Wikisource (phab:T275958)
Added a new constraint type to indicate that a certain Property should only be used on Lexemes with a specific language (phab:T200689)
Fixed a weird issue with suggesters popping back up when they shouldn't (phab:T284219)
Invalid data will not be handled better in RDF outputs (phab:T285131)
Working on lowering the rate limit at which a misbehaving bot can waste new Item IDs to further reduce the percentage of skipped Item IDs (phab:T284538)
Working on not suggesting real Item IDs in the API sandbox to avoid accidental edits by people who think it is not making real edits (phab:T219215)
Working on reducing the time it takes between entering a value in a new statement and being able to save the statement (phab:T281669)
Improved documentation of the usage tracking aspects in API help pages. Usage tracking is an internal mechanism to track which article on Wikipedia etc uses which data from an Item on Wikidata. (phab:T283040)
Language codes for monolingual strings "gsw-fr", "ykg", "wya", "osa-latn" were made available: Alsatian, Tundra Yukaghir, Wendat, Osage (phab:T262922, phab:T252198, phab:T283364, phab:T265297)
The English name for language code "crh" and the Swedish name for "fa" were corrected (phab:T240350, phab:T281702)
Lexeme language codes ha-arab, sux-latn, sux-xsux, gsg, tlh-piqd, tlh-latn, bfi, pwn, enm were added. That is Hausa in Arabic script, Sumerian in cuneiform and Latin-script, German Sign Language, Klingon in pIqaD and Latin script, British Sign Language, Paiwan and Middle English. (phab:T282512, phab:T279557)
It was determined that language codes can be activated for Wikidata while being blocked for use on Incubator (phab:T273705), this to avoid projects such as a "British English Wikipedia"
Language code "es-419" for Latin American Spanish has been available for labels and descriptions for quite some time (phab:T230786)
A possibly confusing Russian mis-translation of the name of the language code for "multiple languages" (mul) is being reviewed (phab:T245927)
"en-simple:" can be used instead of "simple:" to link to Simple Wikipedia. Query Services outputs "en-simple", not "simple" for sitelinks to Simple Wikipedia (phab:T283149).
There was some discussion about the creation of a language code "en-in" for monolingual strings, but "en-in" as interface language seems to be preferred (phab:T212313)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Wikisources have a new OCR tool. If you don't want to see the "extract text" button on Wikisource you can add .ext-wikisource-ExtractTextWidget { display: none; } to your common.css page. [16]
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit the Wikimedia wikis for a few minutes on 29 June. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [17][18]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 June. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (calendar).
Future changes
Threshold for stub link formatting, thumbnail size and auto-number headings can be set in preferences. They are expensive to maintain and few editors use them. The developers are planning to remove them. Removing them will make pages load faster. You can read more and give feedback.
A toolbar will be added to the Reply tool's wikitext source mode. This will make it easier to link to pages and to ping other users. [19][20]
User:Nikki/AnchorLinks.js is a userscript that adds a small link before property labels and statement values on entity pages to provide a clickable/copiable link to that section of the page.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
A job opening for a fullstack developer to work on integrating Wikidata with expert-curated knowledge on invasion biology
Mismatch Finder: We continued the work on building the basic store that in the future will hold mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases/websites/catalogs/... These mismatches will then be used in the Mismatch Finder website and other tools to easily review them.
Improved the namespace behavior of the CommonsLink constraint so that it now produces less false positives (phab:T237920)
Working on adding a magic word to allow pages to be excluded from Special:UnconnectedPages on Wikipedias and co (phab:T97577)
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
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 19 July.
Recent changes
AutoWikiBrowser is a tool to make repetitive tasks easier. It now uses JSON. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPageJSON and Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Config. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/Version has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/VersionJSON. The tool will eventually be configured on the wiki so that you don't have to wait until the new version to add templates or regular expression fixes. [21]
Problems
InternetArchiveBot helps saving online sources on some wikis. It adds them to Wayback Machine and links to them there. This is so they don't disappear if the page that was linked to is removed. It currently has a problem with linking to the wrong date when it moves pages from archive.is to web.archive.org. [22]
Changes later this week
The tool to find, add and remove templates will be updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It will come to the first wikis on 7 July. It will come to more wikis later this year. [23][24]
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Some Wikimedia wikis use Flagged Revisions or pending changes. It hides edits from new and unregistered accounts for readers until they have been patrolled. The auto review action in Flagged Revisions will no longer be logged. All old logs of auto-review will be removed. This is because it creates a lot of logs that are not very useful. [25]
LIBER 2021 - Panel Discussion: Why use Wikidata or not - YouTube
SPARQL Wikidata divers. Session of Tuesday, June 29 (in French) - YouTube
SPARQL Wikidata Wikisource. Tuesday, July 6 session (in French) - YouTube
Upcoming:
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday 28th July 2021 at 16:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. This month we will also be having a guest presentation about Toolhub by Srishti Sethi from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Carlo Bianchini (University of Pavia), Stefano Bargioni (Pontifical University Santa Croce (Rome)), and Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo (University of Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore) will discuss their recent project and article “Beyond VIAF: Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries”.; [26], July 13th.
A Study of the Quality of Wikidata (Q107425133), by Kartik Shenoy et al, published 1 July 2021, explores the use of three indicators - deleted statements that are not replaced; deprecated statements; and constraint violations - as a framework for evaluating data quality.
Wikidata Workshop by Juan Antonio Pastor at the University of Murcia (in Spanish) - YouTube
Tool of the week
Schafe vorm Fenster is a project to build up a calendar for rural villages in Vorpommern-Greifswald using Wikidata to get images and short descriptions for the villages. (See example)
OpenRefine has two Junior Developer job openings (paid contractor positions; part-time, fully remote) for building Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons functionality
Mismatch Finder (a tool to review mismatches between Wikidata and other databases): We continued initial development of the store part of the tool. We focused on the upload of new mismatches. (phab:project/view/5422)
Discussion on how do describe the types of mismatches reviewed in Mismatch Finder (phab:T285849)
We introduced a magic word that can be used to exclude a page from Special:UnconnectedPages on Wikipedia and co. This will make the special page more useful to find pages on Wikipedia and co that should be added to an Item on Wikidata as sitelinks. (phab:T97577).
We reduced the number of Wikidata edits that show up in the watchlist and recent changes of Wikipedia and co by not triggering entries for a number of Wikidata edits that do not influence the article (phab:T286193)
Property Suggester: We are reviewing patches by a student working on an improved Property Suggester.
Working on improving how deprecated statements are handled when checking “type” and “value type” constraints" (phab:T170401)
Working on fixing a bug where the entity suggestions are opened when a valid value is already selected (phab:T285102)