Hello, PutriAmalia1991/Archive 1! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages.
Hello, PutriAmalia1991/Archive 1. Your question has been answered at the Teahouse Q&A board. Feel free to reply there! Please note that all old questions are archived after 2-3 days of inactivity. Message added by DES(talk)DESiegel Contribs 03:23, 15 January 2020 (UTC). (You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{teahouse talkback}} template).[reply]
Hi PutriAmalia1991! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission. I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
Hello, PutriAmalia1991!
Having an article declined at Articles for Creation can be disappointing. If you are wondering why your article submission was declined, please post a question at the Articles for creation help desk. If you have any other questions about your editing experience, we'd love to help you at the Teahouse, a friendly space on Wikipedia where experienced editors lend a hand to help new editors like yourself! See you there! David.moreno72 08:17, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, I'm not angry, but still you shouldn't have sent that draft, because it simply wasn't ready. When it is, I will publish it myself, I have experience and don't need to go through the draft evaluation process. Thank you, Victão LopesFala! 15:15, 16 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hi PutriAmalia1991! You created a thread called need an assistance at Wikipedia:Teahouse, but it has been archived because there was no discussion for a few days. You can still find the archived discussion here. If you have any additional questions that weren't answered then, please create a new thread.
Following a request for comment, partial blocks are now enabled on the English Wikipedia. This functionality allows administrators to block users from editing specific pages or namespaces rather than the entire site. A draft policy is being workshopped at Wikipedia:Partial blocks.
The request for comment seeking the community's sentiment for a binding desysop procedure closed with wide-spread support for an alternative desysoping procedure based on community input. No proposed process received consensus.
Technical news
Twinkle now supports partial blocking. There is a small checkbox that toggles the "partial" status for both blocks and templating. There is currently one template: {{uw-pblock}}.
When trying to move a page, if the target title already exists then a warning message is shown. The warning message will now include a link to the target title. [1]
Arbitration
Following a recent arbitration case, the Arbitration Committee reminded administrators that checkuser and oversight blocks must not be reversed or modified without prior consultation with the checkuser or oversighter who placed the block, the respective functionary team, or the Arbitration Committee.
Learn about the use of Wikidata, Wikipedia and sister projects in education, at the Wikimedia in Education UK Summit at Coventry University on 26 February
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: further discussion of labels and aliases; start looking at Google Sheets, 11 February. Agenda
Reasonator offers a visual formatted display of Wikidata information. It is useful for introducing Wikidata to new audiences and can help find missing or incorrect data by presenting a different view than the standard editing interface.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Kensho Derived Wikimedia Dataset is a a cleaned English subset of Wikipedia/Wikidata with 2.3B tokens, 5.3M pages, 51M nodes, and 120M edges for use in natural language processing (NLP) research
Property talk pages now include a link to query for a few random items using the "SERVICE bd:sample" in SPARQL. Example: look for "random list" on d:Property talk:P279
There are now 100,000 people with the name "John" in Wikidata. "Elizabeth" is now the most frequent female given name.
Knowledge Grapher is a new tool to create Wikidata knowledge graphs without needing any knowledge of Wikidata Query or SPARQL code. Developed by Fuzheado, it is currently in early testing mode and helps create graphs as described by MartinPoulter at his 2019 blog post Making Wikidata Visible. Feedback is appreciated.
Sweden report: FindingGLAMs Challenge; Art by Edvard Munch from the Thiel Gallery; More European archives on Wikidata; OpenGLAM now! – watch the presentations; Wikipedia in Libraries
You are requesting a great deal of other editors' time and assistance, but not making constructive contributions to the encyclopedia. I'd suggest that you start making some simple edits, like fixing typos, and learn by doing; I find this usually works better than learning by instruction anyway. If you want explicit guidance, please read some of Wikipedia's truly absurd number of new-editor guides; Help:Getting started links to many of them. You can also look up specific topics you need help with as you go along, or just copy the style and format you see in other articles. Please ask only specific question, about specific edits, not general ones. Please don't ask for help again unless you have put more effort into the editing you want help with than the assisting editor will need to put into replying to you. Otherwise you are a net time sink for Wikipedia; if you are not working to improve the encyclopedia, you may be blocked from editing. Thanks! HLHJ (talk) 20:11, 16 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Science Stories by Kat Thornton and Kenneth Seals-Nutt, an application that tells stories about underrepresented people in STEM using Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, is the winner of the LODLAM 2020 Challenge!
Wikidata Bridge: more work on unsupported edit cases (unsupported datatypes phab:T235753, ambiguous statements phab:T240212, deprecated statements phab:T238660, unknown value or no value statements phab:T242747)
Including the property label in the title of the Data Bridge dialog (phab:T233295)
Making the edit based on the user's fixed/updated choice (phab:T238662)
Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference, one of the themes being how Wikidata can support minority languages, will take place on July 9-10 in Limerick, Ireland. Call for submissions open from February 27th to March 30th.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: More discussion of pseudonyms and historical place names, 25 February. Agenda
QWiki, a mobile game asking geography questions based on Wikidata, now has a new version released as well as a website where one can learn how the game was made and how to contribute;
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 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 February. It will be on all wikis from 27 February (calendar).
Future changes
There will be a reply button after each post on a talk page if you want one. This will soon be a beta feature on the Arabic, French, Dutch and Hungarian Wikipedias. You will have to turn it on if you want to use it. It will come to more wikis later. You can test the reply button. It was briefly shown earlier than planned by mistake on the four first wikis last week.
Following an RfC, the blocking policy was changed to state that sysops must not undo or alter CheckUser or Oversight blocks, rather than should not.
A request for comment confirmed that sandboxes of established but inactive editors may not be blanked due solely to inactivity.
Technical news
Following a discussion, Twinkle's default CSD behavior will soon change, most likely this week. After the change, Twinkle will default to "tagging mode" if there is no CSD tag present, and default to "deletion mode" if there is a CSD tag present. You will be able to always default to "deletion mode" (the current behavior) using your Twinkle preferences.
July 2-4, Lisbon: WikiData Days 2020. Call for proposals is open until April 15.
Program submissions for the Celtic Knot Conference are open until March 30th. Submissions about languages on Wikidata, GLAM or supporting minority languages are very welcome.
Wikidata graph builder is a front-end on top of the Query service, allowing to easily build graphs.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikidata Languages Landscape dashboard provides insights into the ways languages are organized and used in Wikidata and across the Wikimedia projects that reuse Wikidata.
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
Readers who were not logged in briefly saw the interface in a language decided by their browser. It should normally be in the language of the wiki. This happened for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug. [2]
Changes later this week
If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You will now be able to choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This will be a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. [3]
When you asked for a new password you could see if the username didn't exist on Special:PasswordReset. Now the page will show the username you entered and tell you an email has been sent if the username exists. This is for better security. [4]
On Special:WhatLinksHere you can see what other pages link to a page. You can see if the link is from a redirect. You can now see which section the redirect links to. [5]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 March. It will be on all wikis from 5 March (calendar).
There is a vote on the creation of a new user group called abuse filter manager. The vote runs from March 1 to March 31 on Meta.
wgMFSpecialCaseMainPage was used for the mobile site. It was deprecated in 2017. It will stop working in April. Wikis should see if they use it. If they do they should fix it. You can read more and ask for help. This affects 183 wikis. There is a list. [7]
Querying the URL datatype with haswbstatement is now possible (phab:T243693). It will take two to three months before URLs are indexed for all Wikidata items.
Wikidata Bridge: more style fixes, preparing a prototype to show how we will display references
Fixing various production errors
Monitoring the run of wb_terms migration
Fixing an issue with the Commons files search field (phab:T196165)
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 search word called articletopic. You can use it to search for articles on a specific topic. It is available on the Arabic, Czech, English and Vietnamese Wikipedias. It will come to more Wikipedias soon. [8][9][10]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 March. It will be on all wikis from 12 March (calendar).
The Wikipedia Android app will do 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 come later this year. [11]
Indonesia report: Proposing collaboration with museums in Bali; First Wikisource training in the region
Netherlands report: Students write articles about Media artists, Public Domain Day 2020, Wiki Goes Caribbean, WikiFridays at Ihlia - Wikimedia Nederland in January & February 2020
Norway report: Wikipedia editing workshop with the Norwegian Network for Museums
We're hoping many of you will be able to participate by video or by telephone. On our blog (in Norwegian), you can read about how to join the meeting.
Did you remember to pay your membership fees for 2020? Everyone who paid their membership fees for 2020 has the right to vote at the general assembly. The mebership fees for 2020 (NOK 200, 100 for students and others) can be paid by Vipps to 10386 – Wikimedia Norge, or to account number 1503 08 00866.
Note: Due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation, most meetups, including all those funded by Wikimedia Foundation grants, have been cancelled, or moved online, for the foreseeable future.
All identifiers are now sorted mostly alphabetically according to the RfC regarding the sorting of identifiers, which remains open if you have improvement proposals. Feel free to comment here!
Maximilian Klein applied for a project grant to merge and improve WHGI and Denelezh, tools that heavily rely on Wikidata to provide statistics about gender gap and biographical content in Wikimedia projects.
QuickStatements change (4 March). QuickStatements is now executing "run in background" batches with the same priority as direct batches run from the browser. Background batches may now run many times faster than they previously did (discussion), when the WDQS updater can handle this.
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 API module for changing the content model of existing pages. Use action=changecontentmodel to specify the new model. You can read the documentation on mediawiki.org. [12]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 March. It will be on all wikis from 19 March (calendar).
Future changes
If you edit a page at the same time as someone else you can get an edit conflict. There is a new two-column interface to make it easier to solve this. It will soon be active by default on the German, Arabic, and Farsi Wikipedias. It will be on by default on more wikis within the next months. You will be able to opt out of the new interface. [13][14]
You can see a proposed design for replying to comments in an easier way.
Wikidata Lexeme Forms allows quickly generating a new lexeme with all its forms in selected languages; you can also use the tool to add forms to an existing lexeme, or bulk upload many lexemes and forms at once.
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
Some development will be slower than planned. This is because of the current pandemic. You can see the new deployment guidelines. This is to avoid risks when some persons could be unavailable.
There was a problem when adding interwiki links. The tool you use to add interwiki links could suggest the wrong project to link to. This has now been fixed. [15][16]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 March. It will be on all wikis from 26 March (calendar).
Future changes
There is a project to make editing easier for newcomers. The developers are trying to understand what initiatives different Wikipedias have to welcome newcomers. They also want to know which templates are often used for maintenance activities. You can help this project by checking if your wiki's pages are listed on Wikidata.
Upcoming: The Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference will take place fully remotely in July 2020. Call for submissions with remote formats is open until April 30th.
Upcoming: the Wikidata Wochenende (previously in Ulm) will take place fully remote on June 12-14
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 April. It will be on all wikis from 2 April (calendar).
Future changes
The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. The current beta feature will become the video player for everyone. The old player will be removed. [18]
There is a project to make templates easier to use. The next few weeks the developers will present ideas on the project page. You can watch that page if you are interested in giving feedback. [19]
Following the banning of an editor by the WMF last year, the Arbitration Committee resolved to hold a Arbcom RfC regarding on-wiki harassment. A draft RfC has been posted at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Anti-harassment RfC (Draft) and not open to comments from the community yet. Interested editors can comment on the RfC itself on its talk page.
Miscellaneous
The WMF has begun a pilot report of the pages most visited through various social media platforms to help with anti-vandalism and anti-disinformation efforts. The report is updated daily and will be available through the end of May.
Ongoing: covid-19 virtual biohackathon until April 11th. Information on how to participate. Instructions to participate are on the github wiki and join #wikidata room. Several Wikidata-related topics are currently presented, such as: COVID-19 Global Dashboard, sync the ICTV Virus classification and Nomenclature with Wikidata, federate between Wikidata and NextProt, use wikibase to align between (bio)schema.org and Wikidata.
Scholia highlights the scholarly data in Wikidata, including scholarly works, projects, topics, and individual researchers, including their relationships and statistics. It encourages further enrichment of Wikidata through links on the "missing" pages.
Job opportunity: Science Museum, London. Research Developer, "using computational techniques to create links between the SMG collection and Wikidata at scale" (deadline: 19 April).
New tool: Wikidata Complete uses machine learning algorithms to read Wikipedia, identify facts and import them into Wikidata after manual check (blog post)
schema.org announced an extension to allow for special announcements with regards to COVID-19. The way to identify the topic as per the example? By using the Wikidata Q-Identifier, Q81068910: Structured data for special announcements
Interactive map showing the spread of COVID-19, updated daily with data from Wikidata.
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 a problem with user pages not being shown properly on desktop. This was because of a bug. It will soon be fixed. [20]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 April. It will be on all wikis from 9 April (calendar).
Future changes
MediaWiki will use a newer version of Unicode. Some characters that did not have an upper case equivalent before do now. Titles beginning with one of these characters will be moved. A list of these titles can be seen on Phabricator. The titles will be renamed by the user Maintenance script. This will start on 13 April 2020. You can rename them before this if you wish and the new title can be different from the one the script would rename it to. [21]
Indonesia report: Volunteers' meet-up; Wiki Cinta Budaya 2020 structured data edit-a-thon
Ireland report: Video tutorials; Celtic Knot Conference 2020
Kosovo report: WoALUG and NGO Germin call Albanian Diaspora to contribute to Wikipedia
Netherlands report: Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen contributes to Wikimedia Commons again; Student research on GLAM-Wiki at Erasmus University Rotterdam
Serbia report: March Highlights - Everything is postponed
Sweden report: FindingGLAMs; Wikipedia in libraries; Art from the Thiel Gallery Collections; Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete
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 use the articletopic search word on all Wikipedias. It searches articles by topic. [22]
There was a problem with the Wikidata database last week. Some wikis went down for twenty minutes. Wikidata and other projects showed error messages. Interwiki links were not shown, some tools did not work and other problems. Some of this was fixed quickly. The developers are working on fixing the rest. [26][27][28]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 15. It will be on all wikis from April 16 (calendar).
Future changes
Some graphs have not worked on mobile. This will soon be fixed. [29]
The article tab on talk pages of redirects links to the target of the redirect. It could link to the redirect page itself instead. You can leave feedback on this.
For pages using syntax highlighting, the use of the deprecated <source> tag, as well as the use of the deprecated enclose parameter, will add tracking categories.
COVID19 Dashboard is a Wikidata-powered one-stop information/visualization service for COVID19-related topics such as COVID19's outbreak map, deaths, symptoms, taxonomy, and publications.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
A database breakage, also affecting connected sister projects such as Wikipedia, on April 6, 11pm UTC. A fix has been deployed and no data has been lost. However, issues related to sitelinks and bots creating duplicates can still occur.
A call to action directed at the audience of the Weekly Debrief to edit Wikidata YouTube
Propose new identifiers on Wikidata (in Italian) YouTube
The Map of Libraries on Wikidata (in Spanish) YouTube
Tool of the week
Ordia generates statistics from Wikidata lexeme information, and through the "Text to Lexemes" feature allows linking a document to the associated lexemes, and highlighting missing lexemes that can be added.
Prototyping week: the Wikidata team at Wikimedia Germany spent one week working on some quick experiements. The projects developed during this week are not necessarily going to be added to the maintained codebase. Among those projects:
try to use GraphQL for the API providing access to Wikibase/Wikidata data
allow to programmatically access different configuration variables of a Wikibase instance to make it easier for tools to built on top of it
investigate ranking for Items to order them by their relevance in a query result
com up with a workflows for editing statements linking to other Items in the Wikidata Bridge
identify how to improve Wikidata's accessibility
create design system components to continue improving consistency
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 4 May 2020.
Recent changes
The small wiki toolkits is to help smaller wikis that need technical skills. They can learn and share technical skills. [30]
Over-qualified CSS selectors in Wikimedia skins have been removed. div#content is now .mw-body. div.portal is now .portal. div#footer is now #footer. This is so the skins can use HTML5 elements. If your gadgets or user styles used them you will have to update them. [31]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Some things on the wikis might look weird or not work in Internet Explorer 8 in the future. Internet Explorer 8 was replaced in 2011. [32]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 April next week. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 April next week. It will be on all wikis from 30 April next week (calendar).
Editing food items and querying glaciers: YouTube and Facebook
Interactions between VIAF and Wikidata (in Italian) YouTube
Tool of the week
zotkat's exporter for Zotero (a software to manage bibliographic data) allows you to export bibliographies to the QuickStatements format. It is helpful to easily create bibliographical entries, especially as Zotero can read metadata about works from dozens of other websites, and can thus be used as intermediary.
Jon Harald Søby from Wikimedia Norge will explain how to help translating MediaWiki and other software on Translatewiki.net. You can join the meetup by using the same link as the previous online meetup, which is https://meet.google.com/ooj-hpyk-hmp, either via computer or with a smartphone. You don't need a Google account to join. Everyone is welcome to join, and we would like to remind you of Wikimedia Norge's safe space policy. The next meetup after this one will be on May 27th. We have created a page for meetup notifications, so you can be notified on your favourite wiki whenever a new meetup is announced. The link to add yourself to that list is on the top of the meetups page.
The next deadline for wikigrants will be on May 22nd. All Wikimedia contributors can apply for wikigrants. The maximum amount you can apply for is 8 000 NOK. The wikigrant must be used for activities that support one or more Wikimedia projects.
On May 22nd, accesses to Retriever will be redispersed to active Wikimedians. Access to Sámi newspapers for contributors to the Northern Sámi Wikipedia will also be dispersed for the first time on the same date.
In June, Iran will be the subject for the monthly contest. In parallel with this, there will be a contest about Norway in the Persian Wikipedia organized by Iranian Wikipedians.
Those who are interested in the ongoing rebranding process can check out brandingwikipedia.org for updates.
Did you forget to pay your membership fees for 2020? You can always re-register on this page.
Competition for the International Museum Day is about improving data about museums in Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland on Wikidata, from 3 May 2020 to 18 May 2020, more information on Museum Day 2020/Wikidata Competition
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Alex Jung on Wikidata and Wikipedia Infoboxes, 05 May. Agenda
Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing: YouTube
Art+Feminism Office Hours: Introduction to Editing Wikidata: YouTube
Webinar on why and how to contribute to Wikipedia and Wikidata? (in French): YouTube
Tool of the week
ProWD explores completeness for entities and classes.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
MachtSinn, a tool that allows you to easily add Senses to Lexemes, has lately been improved significantly
33,000 values of British Museum person or institution ID (d:Property:P1711) now have a useful target again. After their being mostly inoperative for several years, the new British Museum website now has information pages matching these values, with links to related objects. (Example). To work around bug T112081, a script by Andrew Gray is going through the items making null edits to update the relevant URLs.
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
Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 5 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [34]
Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 7 May. This will also affect CentralAuth. This can for example affect global renames, password changes, changing or confirming your email address and logging in to new wikis. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [35]
Changes later this week
You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can soon turn these notifications off for individual pages. [36]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 May. It will be on all wikis from 7 May (calendar).
Working on Wikidata Lexeme Forms tool by Lucas Werkmeister: Part 1, Part 2
Wikidata: Figure skating workflow, starting from scratch (installing and configuring everything on a new computer) by Harmonia Amanda: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Past: Wikidata local school gathering was organised by Wikidata Taiwan. Link to Event page and dashboard
Webinar introducing Wikidata and adding wikidata=* tags into OpenStreetMap objects for OpenStreetMap contributors in the Philippines (in English and Tagalog): YouTube
Wikidata Course at TAU: Hosting Mark Graham from the Internet Archive
A proposal for a new Wikiproject Wikilambda that allows creating multilingual content in Wikidata that can be used in all Wikipedias. Signatures of support are needed and discussion and questions are welcomed!
Brazil report: GLAMce at Museu Paulista: making things machine-readable
Czech Republic report: WikiGap 2020 in Czech Republic; International event; support for Wikimedia community; edit-a-thon run with the US embassy and the Swedish Embassy
France report: Association des Archivistes Francais; Palladia, a museum collection portal based on Wikimedia resources
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
Everyone can now import photos from Flickr to Commons with the UploadWizard. Before this only autopatrollers on Commons could import photos from Flickr. [37]
Problems
Commons will be on read-only for a few minutes on 12 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [38]
Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [39][40]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 May. It will be on all wikis from 14 May (calendar).
Future changes
JavaScript scripts and gadgets can no longer check multiple keys at once via mw.config.exists() or mw.user.tokens.exists(). You can use exists() or get() to check one at a time instead. [41]
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: João Alexandre Peschanski on Wikidata + Education projects he has worked on in Brazil, 19 May. Agenda
How to use the Wikidata Query Service (in Italian): YouTube
Introduction to Wikidata and data modeling: YouTube
Tool of the week
WikidataTrust.jsP updates the interface with the contributors to each statement, label, description and sitelink. It is similar to the “blame” tool on text-based wikis.
Read-only time for Wikidata on Tuesday 19th May at 05:00 AM UTC for 15 minutes due to upgrade and restart of services. Services targeting Wikidata may not work during the meantime.
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 forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You can choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This is a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. This is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. [42][43]
Problems
There is a bug that creates problems for iPhone users with iOS 13 and Safari. If you use an iPhone to read or edit Wikipedia and see bugs on the mobile site you can report them. [44]
Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [45][46]
Graphs will be rendered in the reader's browser. This will use Javascript. Graphs will hopefully work better for everyone who uses Javascript. It will not work for users who don't use Javascript. This will not affect diagrams in image files. [48]
Some CSS for the skins has been simplified. This affects div#p-personal, div#p-navigation, div#p-interaction, div#p-tb, div#p-lang, div#p-namespaces, div#p-variants and div#footer. They will have to remove div. You will have to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. This is so we can use HTML5. [49]
Some CSS for the Vector skin has been changed. This affects #p-variants, #p-namespaces, #p-personal, #p-views and #p-cactions. They can no longer use > ul. You might need to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. See how.
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 visual editor will now work in the Modern skin. The changes that needed to happen for this to work could cause problems for some scripts or gadgets. [50]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 27. It will be on all wikis from May 28 (calendar).
Past: WikidataLab XXXIII: Wiki-Education and Data Literacy with Shani Evenstein on May 21st. The training in English was organized by Wiki Movement Brazil User Group. (replay)
Past: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #6 (YouTube)
Upcoming: Wikidata Wochenende, event dedicated to the German-speaking Wikidata community, will take place fully remote on June 12-14. If you're interested, don't forget to register. We're looking for speakers to give introductions to Wikidata & tools.
Upcoming #vBIB20 (Q94495218) the first fully remote German library conference: May 26-28. Metadata about all presentations are already stored in Wikidata: Query. Some sessions and presentations are related to Wikidata or other Wikiprojects:
Video: Editing Wikidata: File Candidates tool and World heritage of Visby - Youtube, Facebook
Tool of the week
If you're looking for even more tools, the Tools Directory indexes over 130 Wikidata tools.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
New tool: Structured Search, a tool allowing you to search through Wikimedia Commons using structured data, is now live. This tool by Hay Kranen was demoed at Wikimedia Hackathon 2020.
New tool: script by Tohaomg to easily rearrange the order of values for statements in Wikidata (to be added to your common.js page)
The Wikimedia Foundation announced that they will develop a universal code of conduct for all WMF projects. There is an open local discussion regarding the same.
Arbitration
A motion was passed to enact a 500/30 restriction on articles related to the history of Jews and antisemitism in Poland during World War II (1933–45), including the Holocaust in Poland. Article talk pages where disruption occurs may also be managed with the stated restriction.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Discussion of our Wikidata priorities and needs as we plan for the group's future, 02 June. Agenda
The WikiCite annual report 2019-20 has been published. Describing the "satellite event grants" program that was run (and details of the nine successful proposals); the changes that resulted from the COVID-19 shutdown of all in-person events; and a summary of WikiCite-related news from across the movement. For more details see Meta:WikiCite/Administration. For more information, contact LWyatt (WMF)
Past video: Querying Wikidata with a glimpse of SPARQL - Thorsten Butz - PSCONFEU 2020. YouTube
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network Live Wikidata editing scheduled for 1st June at 7:00 PM UTC: YouTube, Facebook
Upcoming video (in Spanish): Wikidata Online Workshop: "Connecting Authority Resources with the Knowledge Graph" scheduled for 2nd June at 3:00 PM UTC: YouTube
Tool of the week
wdumps allows you to create a limited RDF dump from Wikidata, for those times when your SPARQL queries keep timing out. It is not particularly user-friendly, and it typically takes several hours to get a complete dump, but it is the best way to for example get a list of all English names of humans in Wikidata, or a list of every scientific article with its title and DOI.
As part of a thesis project, the search engine "Lister" has been developed to make it easier for the general public to access data on the Semantic Web in general, and WikiData specifically. It's in a usability test-phase right now, and if you'd like to try it out and help improve it, you can do so at this link. The test should at most 15 minutes.
Follow the discussion about restricting editing of properties to autoconfirmed users.
New domain toolforge.org to be adopted by our Toolforge community. New domain/scheme for Toolforge-hosted webservices will change from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org with the aim to introduce permanent redirects for the legacy URLs on 2020-06-15.
Wikidata development team is currently running a survey until June 9th to understand better how people access and reuse Wikidata’s data from the code of their applications and tools (for example through APIs), and how we can improve the tools to make your workflows easier. If you would like to participate, please use this link (Google Forms, estimated fill-in time 5min).
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 beta version of the Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It has a new zoom function when you look at images. It can also suggest places when you upload geotagged photos. [51]
Problems
There was a problem with the Commons database on 27 May. Commons could not be edited for eight minutes. Because of this problem the database was moved. This caused another short read-only time on 29 May. [52][53][54]
The Vector skin had a problem where you couldn't add links to the article in other languages. You couldn't see the section if there were no links to other languages already. It also removed content translation links and links to language settings. This has now been fixed. [55]
Changes later this week
You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can turn these notifications off for individual pages. You can soon turn them off also in the notifications you get. [56]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 June. It will be on all wikis from 4 June (calendar).
Upcoming: Wikidata Wochenende, June 12-14: online Wikidata workshop and hackathon in German. Don't forget to register to get access to attendees information.
Upcoming: Video: Live Wikidata editing #9: Youtube, Facebook
Part 2 - The residency at the Bodleian Libraries - YouTube
Part 3 - The Astrolabe Explorer & other datasets - YouTube
Tool of the week
QuickStatements lets you edit thousands of Wikidata items at a time. Add labels and descriptions, or statements with sources and qualifiers, add sitelinks, create or merge items, or remove statements that were created in error. Batches can be discussed and, if necessary, reverted in full through the EditGroups tool.
New page Subsetting under WikiProject Schemas for documenting how to define, construct, manage and maintain subsets of Wikidata.
MyCroft, the open digital personal assistant now has a Wikidata skill to answer questions about current and historic facts & information about a person.
Do you know a Wikidata/Wikibase community member who has accomplished something new or has been inspiring in the last year? If so, please take a few minutes and nominate someone in the 2020 Community Spotlight survey.
Wikidata Bridge: Made a number of technical improvements to wrap up the work in the first version.
Reference Hunt: Making final technical improvements and are now running the process to find references on the whole of Wikidata (as opposed to the initial small subset for testing). Once that's done we'll release them as a dump.
Easier access to data for programmers: Researching and interviewing ways to improve the APIs in preparation for working on them.
Query builder: Working on defining the first version and creating mockups based on the feedback we received.
Use modern TypeScript syntax (3.2 -> 3.9) (phab:T253211)
More technical documentation for Federated Properties (phab:T252991) & preparing for the next steps
Convert some properties to external identifiers (phab:T253722)
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 articles have tables that can be sorted in different ways. For example a list of countries can be sorted alphabetically but you can click on the size column to sort them by size. If you clicked on the column a second time it would sort the countries from the bottom to the top instead. A third click will now take you back to the original sorting. [57]
Self-closed tags now work as in the HTML5 specifications. This means you should stop using some of them. <b/> is an example of a self-closed tag that won't work. area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, keygen, link, meta, param, source, track, wbr can be self-closed. Pages with tags that should not be self-closed have been listed in a tracking category since 2016. They will be listed in Special:LintErrors/self-closed-tag. This doesn't affect <references /> or <ref />. [58]
There is a banner called WikidataPageBanner. It is for example used by the Wikivoyages, Wikimedia Russia and the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Turkish Wikipedias. It will now been seen by mobile visitors too. Before this it was only seen on desktop. The wikis should update instructions on MediaWiki:Sitenotice so that editors know to test and style for mobile too. [59][60]
Changes later this week
You can now edit MassMessage descriptions through the API. This is useful for tools and gadgets. [61]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 June. It will be on all wikis from 11 June (calendar).
Future changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use TemplateStyles instead. 118 wikis need to fix this. You can read more and see if your wiki is affected. [62]
Netherlands report: Analysis of Dutch GLAM-Wiki projects in relation to the Dutch Digital Heritage Reference Architecture, Content donation from Utrecht Archives, Detecting Wikipedia articles strongly based on single library collections and Collection highlights of the KB
Sweden report: Free music on Wikipedia; NHB webinars; Wikipedia in libraries – Projekt HBTQI
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Program for Cooperative Cataloging's upcoming Wikidata pilot, June 16. Agenda
Part 1 - Meet Ewan, WiR at the Uni' of Edinburgh - YouTube
Part 2 - the Witch Hunts projects & Wikidata - YouTube
Part 3 - Why Wikidata is important for education - YouTube
Tool of the week
Mix'n'match lets you match lists of external identifiers to Wikidata items, or create new items if necessary. Thousands of catalogs already exist, in dozens of different topic areas, and it's easy to import new ones.
Collecting a lot of feedback and doing research around how to improve our APIs to start making it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers
Finalized the initial feature list for the query builder and working on designs and prototypes for testing
Doing user research on the Merge gadget to prepare for making it part of the proper code-base so that other Wikibase instances also benefit from easier merging
Federated Properties: continued working on the first version of Federation that will make it possible to use Wikidata's Properties in another Wikibase installation
Start of a new project (Wikibase Decoupling & Extension Registration) in order to clean up our codebase a bit and make it easier to extend with new features in the future
More work on the design system to have a set of unified components for Wikidata that will make it easier to develop new features in the future because we don't have to rewrite components that are used in a lot of places
Some MediaWiki skin changes meant broken edit links on Wikipedia and co. Fixed now. (phabricator:T252800)
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
Toolforge hosts several tools created by the Wikimedia community like edit counters or enhanced editors. It is changing the domain from tools.wmflabs.org to toolforge.org. The routing scheme is moving from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org. You can read the details. Tools that use OAuth will have to be updated to keep working. You can ask for help.
Problems
There is a Wikidata item link in the sidebar on many pages. This disappeared for a couple of days for users who have the Monobook skin. This was because of a bug. It has now been fixed. [63]
Editing, logging in and logging out didn't work properly for a short period of time last week. It was soon fixed. [64]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 June. It will be on all wikis from 18 June (calendar).
Future changes
Pywikibot is a Python library to automate work on wikis. It will not support Python 2 after the new version in July. Support for Python 3.4 and MediaWiki below 1.19 will also be dropped. You should migrate to Python 3. You can ask for help. [65]
The selectors .menu and .vectorMenu will no longer work in the Vector skin. This can affect gadgets and user scripts. .menu should be replaced by ul. .vectorMenu should be replaced by .vector-menu. [66]
Upcoming domain name migration on the Wikimedia Toolforge implies that OpenRefine users need to update their Wikidata reconciliation service to the new endpoint which will be available by default in the upcoming release of OpenRefine (3.4). phab:T254172
Wikirecords - proposal for a Wikibase-based sister-project
Apologies for both of the problematic queries ("MWAPI searches in wikidata about people described as slave traders by citizenship" in Weekly Summary #419 and "Monuments named after/commemorating/depicting slave traders” in Weekly Summary #420). The "MWAPI searches in wikidata about people described as slave traders by citizenship” in #419 lists any people with the word "slave" in a label, description or alias, among them several people who are not slave traders. The "Monuments named after/commemorating/depicting slave traders” in #420 incorrectly linked this query for enslaved people instead of this query for slavetraders.
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 are some new tools to make it easier for newcomers to start editing. They are available on some wikis. These wikis had a problem with the visual editor for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug in the new tools. It was soon fixed. [67]
Some user scripts and gadgets stopped working because of a change to CSS selectors. .vectorTabs should be replaced with .vector-menu-tabs to fix this. [68]
Changes later this week
The developers are working on a new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This will be released on 24 June. You can give feedback. [69]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 June. It will be on all wikis from 25 June (calendar).
Future changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use TemplateStyles instead. 91 wikis still need to fix this. You can read more and see if your wiki is affected. [70]
Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reasons left by AngusWOOF were:
This appears to be a duplicate of another submission, Treasure (band), which is also waiting to be reviewed. To save time we will consider the other submission and not this one.
The comment the reviewer left was:
Please update the other draft instead.
Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.
If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:TREASURE and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
If you now believe the draft cannot meet Wikipedia's standards or do not wish to progress it further, you may request deletion. Please go to Draft:TREASURE, click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window, add "{{Db-g7}}" at the top of the draft text and click the blue "publish changes" button to save this edit.
If you do not make any further changes to your draft, in 6 months, it will be considered abandoned and may be deleted.
This draft does not appear to indicate which of the musical notability criteria is satisfied. If at least one of the criteria is satisfied, please revise this draft appropriately, with a reliable source, if necessary stating on the talk page which criterion is met, and resubmit.
This draft or substantial portions of this draft are duplicated. They were probably entered more than once when editing the draft. The duplication must be corrected before resubmitting this draft. If this draft is resubmitted without correcting the errors, it may be Rejected, and may be nominated for deletion.
You may ask for advice about editing this draft at the Teahouse.
This draft has been Rejected by a reviewer in the Articles for Creation review process. DO NOT resubmit this draft or attempt to resubmit this draft or prepare or submit a draft that is substantially the same as this draft without discussing the reasons for the rejection. You may request a discussion with the rejecting reviewer, or you may request a discussion with the community at the Teahouse. A discussion will not necessarily agree to a resubmission.
It should be noted that the reviewer has not decided that the topic is not notable. An article on the topic may be accepted in the future. However, there is no reason to think that this draft will become an article, and there is evidence that this draft will never become an article. If there is to be an article on this topic, this draft must first be blown up and started over.
If this draft is resubmitted without discussion and without starting it over, or if an attempt is made to resubmit this draft or an equivalent draft, without addressing the reasons for the Rejection by starting over, a partial block or a topic-ban may be requested against the submitting editor.
You may ask for advice about Rejection at the Teahouse.
This draft does not address the concerns that have been identified by previous reviewers, and does not address the concerns in the Articles for Deletion. This draft should be blown up and started over after the band starts up.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Merrilee Proffitt, Chris Cyr, and Rob Fernandez on a project to surface library holdings to indicate possible notability for persons, June 30th. Agenda
It is now possible to search for EntitySchema pages using a shortcut “E:”, similar to “P:” for Properties and “L:” for Lexemes. For example: E:E10 or E:kakapo. T245529
Continued working on the first version of Federation, which will allow other Wikibase installations to use Wikidata's Properties - getting closer to a first testable version
More work on consistency of user interface components
Finalizing the click-dummy for the first version of the Query Builder so we can start testing it with some editors soon and get feedback.
Continuing to investigate how to improve our APIs and other ways to improve access to the data in Wikidata for programmers
Discussed the future of the Wikidata Query Service and ideas for next steps we can take to make it scale better. Guillaume will join the next office hour to talk about it.
More work on clearer separation of Wikibase repository and Wikibase client code in order to improve maintainability
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
Everyone was logged out. This was because a few users saw the wikis as if they were logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [71]
Some readers didn't see new edits to pages. If the page had been recently changed they saw an older version of the page instead. This only affected readers who were logged out. It lasted for ten days. It has been fixed. [72]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 July. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (calendar).
Future changes
The Modern and Monobook skins use the ID searchGoButton for the go button. This is searchButton for Vector. To have the same ID for all skins it will change to searchButton in Monobook and Modern too. This will affect gadgets and user scripts. It will happen on 23 July. They should be updated to use searchButton. You can read more and see a list of affected scripts.
The Medicine case was closed, with a remedy authorizing standard discretionary sanctions for all discussions about pharmaceutical drug prices and pricing and for edits adding, changing, or removing pharmaceutical drug prices or pricing from articles.
Ptable displays the periodic table automatically extracted from information provided by Wikidata; it also provides a check that all the elements are there with some basic properties. Additional pages provide charts of the nuclides under different criteria such as half-life. Each element or nuclide is linked to its Wikidata item for more information or to edit if necessary.
Polishing the first step of Federation (using Wikidata's Properties in another Wikibase installation) (incl. preventing users from selecting a federated property with a non-supported data type (phab:T252012) and preventing users from accessing Special:NewProperty when federation is enabled (phab:T255576) and viewing a list of all properties when federation is enabled (phab:T246339))
Continuing research and interviews around the topic of making it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers
Doing first testing of mockups and prototypes of the first version of the Query Builder - coding can start soon
Convert a few properties from string to external identifier: Linguasphere code (P1396), KOATUU identifier (P1077) and ISIN (P946)
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 Score extension has been disabled for now. This is because of a security issue. It will work again as soon as the security issue has been fixed. [73]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 July. It will be on all wikis from 9 July (calendar).
Future changes
Abstract Wikipedia is a new Wikimedia project. It will collect language-independent information that can be easily read in different languages. It builds on Wikidata. The name is preliminary. You can read more. [74]
Some rules for user signatures will soon be enforced. Lint errors and invalid HTML will no longer be allowed in user signatures. Nested substitution will not be allowed. A link to your user page, user talk page or user contributions will be required. You can check if your signature works with the new rules. This is because the signatures can cause problems for tools or other text on the page.
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Translation notification: Trust and Safety/Case Review Committee/Charter[edit]
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Continued building out documentation for Federated Properties (phabricator:T255651) and making interface improvements to the first stage of the feature (incl. phabricator:T246886, changes to special pages that interact with both Items/Properties, and phabricator:T255581, changes to Special:ListDataTypes when federation is enabled)
More work on the consistent design system
More work on decoupling the different Wikibase extensions from each other to make development easier
Finalizing research and interviews to better understand what could be improved in the way developers access Wikidata's data (APIs, SPARQL)
Testing the first prototype of the Simple Query Builder with some editors to get final input before coding starts
Sorting of language links on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects was broken (presumably by a change in MediaWiki core). A fix is being worked on. (phabricator:T257625)
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
Users can thank others for their edits. Checkusers can now see user data related to that action. This can help identify sock puppets who harass others using thanks. [75]
Problems
Everyone was logged out a couple of weeks ago to fix a security problem. The problem was not entirely fixed. Because of this everyone was logged out once again last week. [76][77]
Changes later this week
Wikis that are not for one specific language can translate pages. Sometimes parts of translations are outdated or missing. Outdated translations are marked with a pink background. Missing translations will also be marked in the future. This markup can sometimes break things. It can soon be disabled by using <translate nowrap></translate> on the source page. [78]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 July. It will be on all wikis from 16 July (calendar).
Future changes
Wikimedia code review plans to use GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. [79][80][81][82]
Hello, PutriAmalia1991. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or Draft page you started, "BTS Universe".
In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been nominated for deletion. If you plan on working on it further, or editing it to address the issues raised if it was declined, simply edit the submission and remove the {{db-afc}}, {{db-draft}}, or {{db-g13}} code.
If your submission has already been deleted by the time you get there, and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion by following the instructions at this link. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.
Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia! JMHamo (talk) 15:32, 16 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Upcoming: next Wikidata office hour, July 21st at 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST) in the Wikidata Telegram group. Query Service special with guests from WMF Search Team.
Upcoming: Wikidata Lab XXIV: Posicionamento digital relativo with Ederporto - July 23 17:00 UTC (14:00 BRT). In this technical training, we'll study the possibilities and functionalities of relative digital positioning in images and do practical activities on this topic using historical photographs of the city of São Paulo. The event will be held in Portuguese. Join us!
Upcoming video: July 21 - Wikipedia Weekly Network - Entity Schemas and Shape Expressions (ShEx) FacebookYouTube
Upcoming video: July 25 - Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #13 FacebookYouTube
Upcoming: Kidok-Workshop, online workshop about church building data. In German, non-native users welcome. Currently looking for a date in the upcoming week and people to help!
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
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. The mobile main page special casing stopped working 14 July. 60 wikis now have main pages that don't work well on mobile. You can see which ones, how to fix it and how to get help in Phabricator. This is the same problem that was reported in Tech News 2020/24 and 2020/26.
Problems
There is a problem with the interlanguage links. The interlanguage links are the links that help you find a specific page in a different language. The sorting is broken. The developers are working on a solution. [83]
Some users keep getting the notifications for the same event. Some of these are old events. [84]
Some users have trouble logging in. This is probably a browser cookie problem. The developers are working on understanding the problem. If you have trouble logging in you can see the details on Phabricator. [85]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 July. It will be on all wikis from 23 July (calendar).
Future changes
There is a Printable version link. This will disappear. That is because web browsers today can create a printable version or show how it will look in print anyway. [86]
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 Starter kit is now available for wiki communities. This page lists technical resources, tools, and recommendations. These are essential to operate a wiki project. This is mostly useful for smaller wikis where the community has limited experience with this. [87]
The first features of the Desktop Improvements project are available for logged-in users on all wikis. In order to use them, uncheck Use Legacy Vector in your local or global preferences in section Skin preferences. More improvements are planned. Feedback is welcome.
The deployment train for MediaWiki has been blocked this week. [88][89]
Translation Notification Bot was sending the same message multiple times to every translator. This has been fixed. [90]
Some users were receiving the same notification multiple times. This has been fixed. [91]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from July 29. It will be on all wikis from JUly 30 (calendar).
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Liam Wyatt on WikiCite and its future plans, ways to get involved, and discussions that are happening in the community, 28 July. Agenda
Past: Wikidata and Wikibase office hour with a focus on the Query Service, July 21st. Notes of the discussions
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #14, August 1 FacebookYouTube
Library’s linked-data project gets new grant. "Known as Linked Data for Production, the project is part of a long-term collaboration among Cornell University Library, Stanford Libraries and the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa. Through linked data, information about books and other items in library records will be enhanced by related information from external online sources". By Jose Beduya
Wikidata Training Workshop 1, by Canadian Arts Presenting Association
Part 1 - Introduction to Wikidata - YouTube (En, Fr)
Part 3 - Components of a Wikidata item - YouTube (En, Fr)
Video: Wikidata Lab XXIV on relative digital positioning (in Portuguese). YouTube
Video: Women Writers in Review: Integrating special collections into Wikidata. YouTube
Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - Entity Schemas and Shape Expressions (ShEx) FacebookYouTube
Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #13 FacebookYouTube
Tool of the week
We would love suggestions for tools to include in this section of the weekly summary. Please add your suggestions directly under Status updates/Next#Backlog after checking that the tool isn't already listed.
Changed the size of image previews to 1024 in the gallery view of the query service to avoid some images not loading sometimes (phabricator:T258241)
Added an actual space between the entity title and the name of the fallback language (if any), so that the fallback language isn't selected anymore when double-clicking the entity title for copying (phabricator:T256857)
Fixed the directionality of text pieces in placeholders that mix LTR and RTL (phabricator:T253812)
Continued work on first pieces of design system to make coding new features easier in the future
Continued untangling the code of Wikibase Client and Wikibase Repo to make it easier to develop on them
Finished first piece of research on how to make it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers - more work to be done
Preparing to start coding on the Query Builder to make it easier to create queries without having to know SPARQL
Finished running the scraper that gets potential new references for unreferenced statements and preparing it for publishing
You are receiving this notification because you signed up as a translator to Bahasa Indonesia on Meta.
The page Tech/News/2020/32 is available for translation. You can translate it here:
SQID allows you to analyse, browse and query Wikidata. SQID is inspired by Magnus Manske's Reasonator, but focuses on prominently featuring information about Wikidata classes and properties.
a graph of MPs and parties in the Swedish Parliament and with whom they worked together with to create motions 2018 SPOILER: >95% is just with people in the same party
The last week was our quarterly prototyping week. We worked on the following projects. None of them are ready for prime-time yet but we'll continue with them.
Slices: We've had a lot of requests for accessing dumps of a smaller part of Wikidata's data since rarely anyone needs the complete data in Wikidata. The tricky part is figuring out which part is needed and if any of that can be generalized. We looked into for example how to make dump generation faster so we could potentially produce more smaller dumps that only cover a part of Wikidata's data, either thematically (e.g. humans) or by type of data (e.g. only statements and English labels and aliases but not sitelinks or descriptions).
REST API: As part of our effort to make it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers we looked into a REST API. We tried to see if we could cover the existing action API modules in a REST API. We could. We'll take this as input for our ongoing API work now.
Improving quality ratings through ORES: ORES can judge the quality of an Item automatically. It is currently not very good at it however. We tried a few things to make it more accurate and found some easy wins we'll probably make happen in the next weeks.
Query manipulator: One of the ways we could potentially improve the load situation of the Wikidata Query Service is by automatically analyzing and then redirecting a bunch of queries to other systems that are more suitable for that particular type of query. The nice thing about that would be that the person/program sending the query wouldn't have to care about it but it'd be done automagically for them. We tried to build such a system and the results look very promising but more work/experimenting is needed, especially together with the WMF Search team.
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
All queries to the Wikidata Query Service failed between 17:50 and 17:59 UTC on Thursday 23 July. Some queries failed during a longer period. [92]
Interlanguage links were ordered incorrectly for the past few weeks. This problem was also mentioned in Tech News two weeks ago. The problem is now fixed. [93]
There is a problem with the global preferences for the "Use Legacy Vector" option. Developers are working on fixing it. [94]
A bug in the Wikibase extension had disabled the "move" and "create" types of protection in the main (Gallery) namespace on Wikimedia Commons. New protections could not be added, and existing protections were not enforced, allowing some page moves and page creations that should not have been possible. This has now been fixed. [95]
Changes later this week
The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. This week, the current beta feature will become the video player for everyone on most non-Wikipedia wikis. The old player will be removed. [96]
Users' global.js and global.css pages will now also be loaded on the mobile site. You can read documentation for how to avoid applying styles to the mobile skin. [97]
In the MonoBook skin, the searchGoButton identifier is now searchButton. This may affect CSS and JS gadgets. Migration instructions can be found in T255953. This was previously mentioned in issue 27.
Bot operators can use Pywikibot to regularly archive discussions. The behavior when the bot uses counter to prevent large archives was changed. [98]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 5. It will be on all wikis from August 6 (calendar).
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Daniel Mietchen and Lane Rasberry about Scholia, a project to present bibliographic information and scholarly profiles of authors and institutions, 11 August. [Agenda]
Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - QuickStatements and Distributed Wikidata games Facebook, YouTube
Video: Collaboration, contribution and use of Wikidata and Wikipedia by academic libraries (in Greek). YouTube
Librarians work to broaden Vanderbilt’s research reputation with Wikidata tools. "To speed up the creation of metadata about faculty and their publications, Steven Baskauf, data science and data curation specialist for libraries, developed “VanderBot,” a set of scripts that can read and write to Wikidata, greatly improving the efficiency by which Vanderbilt’s faculty are discoverable through Wikidata".
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
FileImporter and FileExporter became standard features on all Wikis during the first week of August. They help you transfer files from local wikis to Wikimedia Commons with the original file information and history intact. [99]
Problems
The mobile skin displays a message at the bottom of the page about who edited last. This message showed raw wikitext. This has now been fixed. Some messages in Structured Discussions and content translation may still appear as raw wikitext. Developers are working on it. [100]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 12. It will be on all wikis from August 13 (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 in the coming weeks. [101][102]
You are receiving this notification because you signed up as a translator to Bahasa Indonesia on Meta.
The page Tech/Server switch 2020 is available for translation. You can translate it here:
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. [103]
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. [104]
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. [105][106]
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).
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.
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. [107][108]
Wiki Loves Monuments is starting today, and will last through all of September. All photos of registered cultural heritage in Norway is eligible for the contest – and as usual, there is a writing contest on the Norwegian Bokmål and Nynorsk and Northern Sámi Wikipedias in conjunction with the photo contest. Good luck!
Virtual wiki meetup
The next virtual wiki meetup will be on Thursday, October 1st. This time the board chair of Wikimedia Norge, Sigrun Espe, will join us as a guest, and the subject will be the cooperative climate on-wiki. The meet-up will take place on Google Meet as usual, from 17.00 CEST at https://wikitreff.wikimedia.no/. You don't need a Google login to participate. Everyone is welcome and we would like to remind everyone of Wikimedia Norge's safe space policy. See you there!
Arctic Knot, Wikimedia language conference in Norway
In the summer of 2021, Wikimedia Norge will organize Arctic Knot 2021. The conference is a continuation of the Celtic Knot series of conferences organized by Wikimedia UK. We are planning for both an in-person and digital conference. The theme will be small languages and the wiki projects.
For the planning of the conference, we are holding a survey. It's rather short, and we would really appreciate if you would answer it. Thank you!
Wikipedia turns 20 on January 15th, 2021
Wikipedia is turning 20! How should it be celebrated? Wikimedia Norge wants to commemorate the occasion in a good way, and we appreciate all ideas related to the celebration! Feel free to write to Mali if you have any good ideas!
Did you forget to pay your membership fees for 2020? You can always re-register on this page.
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. [109]
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. [110]
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. [111]
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. [112][113]
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)
"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. [114][115]
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. [116][117]
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. [118]
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. [120]
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. [121]
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. [122]
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. [123]
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. [124]
Everyone was logged out. This was because a user reported being logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [125]
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. [126]
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. [127]
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. [128][129][130]
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. [131][132]
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).
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. [134]
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. [135]
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.
The next virtual meet-up is on Wednesday, October 29th. Infoboxes are this month's theme. The meet-up will, as usual, take place on Google Meet from 17:00 CET, https://wikitreff.wikimedia.no/. You don't need to have/use a Google account to participate, and there is no requirement for having a camera or microphone. Everyone is welcome to join, and we would like to remind you of Wikimedia Norge's safe space policy.
In the daytime on November 19th, there will be a small event at the Swedish embassy in Oslo. WikiGap is about minimizing the gender imbalance on Wikipedia. The event will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the UN Security Council's Resolution 1325. Due to infection control, only a small number of participants may join. Send an email to contact@wikimedia.no if you wish to participate!
The next deadline for wikigrants is on November 20th. All contributors to the various Wikimedia projects can apply for our wikigrants. The maximum amount is 8 000 NOK. The wikigrant must be used for activities that support one or more Wikimedia projects.
On November 22nd, accesses to Retriever will again be dispersed to active Wikipedians. Access to Sámi newspapers for contributors to the Northern Sámi Wikipedia will also be dispersed on the same date.
This week, the Sámi Language Week is organized all over Norway. We are marking the language week by launching a cooperation with the National Library and Giellatekno at UiT The Arctic University of Norway about placenames. We have written about it on our blog!
Have you remembered to pay your membership dues for 2020? If not, you can always re-register on this page.
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. [136]
Last week, links to "diffs" from mobile watchlists and recentchanges were linking to page-revisions instead of diffs. This has now been fixed. [137]
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. [138]
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. [139]
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. [140]
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. [141]
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. [142]
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). [143]
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. [144]
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. [145]
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)
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. [146]
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. [147][148]
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. [149][150]
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. [151]
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. [152]
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. [153]
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. [154][155]
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. [156]
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. [157][158]
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. [159][160]
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
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. [161]
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).
You are receiving this notification because you signed up as a translator to Bahasa Indonesia on Meta.
The page Wikimedia CH is available for translation. You can translate it here:
Meta translation coordinators, 07:43, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
Translation notification: Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia[edit]
Hello PutriAmalia1991,
You are receiving this notification because you signed up as a translator to Bahasa Indonesia on Meta.
The page Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia is available for translation. You can translate it here:
Meta translation coordinators, 06:26, 19 December 2020 (UTC)
Translation notification: Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia/Nav[edit]
Hello PutriAmalia1991,
You are receiving this notification because you signed up as a translator to Bahasa Indonesia on Meta.
The page Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia/Nav is available for translation. You can translate it here:
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. [162]
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. [163]
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. [164]
Wishing you a joyful Christmas and a happy New year. We would like to use this occasion for giving thanks for editors like you for your works on editing, maintaining and expanding this encyclopedia. May the glorious message of peace and love fill you with joy during this wonderful season.
One Voice at Christmas-a 2016 Christmas album by the Welsh singer Aled Jones and produced by Classic FM.
"Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas!"
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. [165]
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. [166]
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. [167]
Oversighters can now hide multiple filter log entries at once using checkboxes on Special:AbuseLog. This is how the usual revision deletion works. [168]
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. [170]
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
Happy new year, and congratulations with 20 years of knowledge dugnad!
The English Wikipedia was launched on the 15th of January, 2001. The theme of the 20-year celebration is celebrating the people behind Wikipedia – all of you who have contributed in some way to make us able to celebrate 20 years of free knowledge. Due to the pandemic, we can't celebrate in-person at the moment, but we hope to be able to organize a celebration within the year.
We have made a congratulatory page where anyone can send their regards to Wikipedia. We hope it will be a nice page that shows why Wikipedia is as important as ever. Submit your greeting now!
The next wiki meet-up will be on January 27th. Karl Wettin from Wikimedia Sverige will participate, giving a presentation of Wikispeech… This is an exciting open-source project about crowdsourced voice synthesis. It also has applications well beyond the Wikimedia projects. Any suggestions for future meet-up topics are very welcome at the bottom of the meet-up page!
Events to look forward to in 2021
Wikimedia Norge's general assembly will be held on the 6th of March. It will be held entirely online this year, just like last year. More information coming soon.
We are planning a digital administrator meet-up for all administrators in the Wikipedias in Norwegian Bokmål and Nynorsk, probably in March. If you are interested in helping organize this, please contact Jon Harald.
Arctic Art+Feminism: We will organize four editathons during 2021, where the theme is female artists and indigenous art. More information coming soon.
WikiGap: If the pandemic allows, there will be a WikiGap event at the Swedish Embassy in Oslo. We hope to see you there! This year's theme is female activists from South America.
Arctic Knot: In June, we will organize the Wikimedia language conference, Arctic Knot. This is a continuation of the Celtic Knot series of conferences. More information coming soon!
New membership system
We are implementing a new membership system. What does this mean for you? Hopefully, as little as possible. For us, however, it means better follow-up of our members. Next week, we will send out a newsletter containing information about membership fees for 2021, among other things. They can be paid via Vipps or via AvtaleGiro. If you have already paid your dues for 2021, you can discard this.
The Wikimedia Foundation is asking for answers to this survey from Wikimedians around the world. The WMF has made a Norwegian translation of the survey. You can answer it anonymously without sharing an email address, but if you do, you shouldn't close the browser before you have completed the survey.
Have you already paid your membership fees for 2021? If not, you can always do so by re-registering on this page.
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.
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. [176]
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. [177]
Changes later this week
You can soon use Wikidata to link to pages on the multilingual Wikisource. [178]
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. [179][180]
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. [181]
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. [182][183]
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.
Translation notification: Project wiki representatives[edit]
Hello PutriAmalia1991,
You are receiving this notification because you signed up as a translator to Bahasa Indonesia on Meta.
The page Project wiki representatives is available for translation. You can translate it here:
The deadline for translating this page is 2021-02-14.
The five year old strategy process has resulted in recommendations. After Global Conversations the number one priority is to establish an Interim Global Council, who will draft a Movement Charter, which will lead to the formation of a Global Council.
Please help in translating the concise page "Project wiki representatives" which asks contributor to select for each project wiki a representative, who will help in implementing the first strategic priority.
Your help is greatly appreciated. Translators like you help Meta to function
as a truly multilingual community.
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. [184]
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. [185]
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. [186][187]
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. [188]
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. [189]
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. [191][192]
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. [193]
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.[194]
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. [195]
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. [197]
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. [198]
Some editors may not be logged in to their accounts automatically in the latest versions of Firefox and Safari. [199]
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.[200]
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. [202]
Problems
Many graphs have JavaScript errors. Graph editors can check their graphs in their browser's developer console after editing. [203]
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. [204]
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. [205][206]
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.
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. [207]
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. [208][209]
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. [210]
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. [212][213]
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. [214]
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.[215]
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. [216]
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. [217]
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. [218]
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. [219][220]
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. [221]
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. [222]
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.[223]
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. [224][225]
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. [226][227][228]
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. [229]
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.
This year's general assembly was held on March 6th, and the minutes are available here. Amongst other things, it was decided to give Wikimedia Norge an official name in Southern Sámi, Lule Sámi and Kven. That means that we now have 6 official names: Wikimedia Norge (Norwegian Bokmål), Wikimedia Noreg (Norwegian Nynorsk), Wikimedia Norga (Northern Sámi), Wikimedia Vuodna (Lule Sámi), Wikimedia Nöörje (Southern Sámi) and Wikimedia Norja (Kven).
New board
Hogne Neteland exited the board after many years of service, we would like to thank him for his efforts! Sigrun Espe continues as board chair. The board has two new board members:
Fredrik Ljone, Bergen. Board member, elected for the 2021–2023 term. Ljone is dedicated to sharing knowledge, open data and rule of law. He has taken the initiative to make the law more accessible for everyone through jusleksikon.no and rettspraksis.no.
Stian Amadeus Antonsen, Oslo. Deputy board member, elected for the 2021–2022 term. Antonsen has a lot of experience from different civil society organizations, and works as a political advisor in the Norwegian Students' and Academics' International Assistance Fund (SAIH). He is dedicated to diversity and inclusion, and wants everyone to be able to share in the production and dissemination of knowledge.
Wikipedia is a cornerstone of the digital age, but the knowledge you'll find isn't evenly distributed across languages. The Wikimedia movement is about to implement its 2030 strategy, while UNESCO is working on the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL), which starts in 2022. IDIL shows the potential that technology has in supporting and maintaining indigenous languages. These milestones form a frame for the conference, where we will discuss linguistic diversity in the Wikimedia projects, and how to build good linguistic environments for the users of indigenous and underrepresented language communities.
Arctic Knot is a conference for all Wikipedians and Wikimedians who are interested in indigenous languages, and also for organizations and institutions working in this field. This year's special focus will be on the Sámi languages. If you have any questions, please get in touch with Jon Harald Søby at jhsoby@wikimedia.no.
Administrator meetup
On Saturday, March 20, we held a administrator meetup for the Norwegian-language Wikimedia projects. There were 10 participants, of which one is a Wiktionary administrator, and the rest are administrators on the Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia. The meetup was initiated by Wikimedia Norge on request from the community.
During the meetup there was a walkthrough of "hidden" or little-known administrator tools, like mass deletion, new blocking options and patrolling tools. There was also broad agreement that there is a need to update and centralize rules and guidelines on-wiki.
Wikimedia Enterprise
With its new project Wikimedia Enterprise, the Wikimedia Foundation is working on a way to cooperate with commercial actors like Google and Amazon. A lot of commercial actors are already using Wikimedia content, but without any formal agreements or financial compensation. Wikimedia Enterprise is meant to be a service that will improve the user experience of Wikimedia outside of the Wikimedia platforms, and also be financially self-sustaining.
According to an article in Wired, the Wikimedia Foundation wants to make the effort of the volunteers more visible, and stimulate the tech giants to help contribute to the volunteer community.
Wikipedia 20 years
The Norwegian minister of education, Guri Melby, has sent a video message to all Wikipedians in connection with the 20th anniversary! Go have a look! Remember that you too can send a message!
Have you already paid your membership fees for 2021? If not, you can always do so by re-registering on this page.
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. [230][231][232]
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. [234]
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. [235][236]
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. [237]
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.
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. [243]
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. [244]
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 [245] 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).
On June 24–25, the Arctic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference is finally under way! The conference is fully digital, and we hope you'll find the program interesting! There will be exciting talks and panel debates, and an opportunity to get to know projects like Abstract Wikipedia and Wikisource.
The full program is now available on Meta-Wiki, and you can read more about the conference on our blog.
Registration for the conference has opened, and participation is free of charge.
The program is varied and exciting, and we think everyone will find something interesting in the program.
Du you wish to contribute to the conference as a volunteer? All participation is very welcome!
Maybe you'd like to help test the platform we'll be using beforehand? Or do you have any questions you think should be raised during the panel debate? Maybe you'd like to contribute with entertainment of some sort? Get in touch on arcticknot@wikimedia.no!
The subject of June's monthly contest will be artists. Edits to all articles on artists will yield points, but we hope many would like to write about Sámi and other indigenous artists!
This year's Wikimania will also be fully digital, enabling even more people to participate. The theme will be 20 years of Wikipedia, so it is a time to celebrate what the Wikimedia movement has achieved, and look back on the journey that led us here. You can now propose sessions for Wikimania. If you have an idea for a session, but are not sure about how to angle it, feel free to get in touch with us. We can help with brainstorming and whatever else you need!
It's not long before we can hold in-person meet-ups again, and some plans are already under way. It would be great for more people to be able to join meet-ups. Wikimedia Norge can help financially if you wish to organize a meet-up where you live.
We will still be organizing meet-ups, workshops and admin meet-ups at (ir)regular intervals, either digitally or in-person. If you have any ideas for topics, feel free to get in touch with Jon Harald (jhsoby@wikimedia.no)!
Have you already paid your membership fees for 2021? If not, you can always do so by re-registering on this page.
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.; [246], 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. [247]
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. [248][249][250]
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. [251]
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. [252][253]
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
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. [254]
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. [256]
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. [257][258]
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The page VisualEditor/Newsletter/2021/June is available for translation. You can translate it here:
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The deadline for translating this page is 2021-06-20.
This short newsletter is good news about posting comments on wiki. You can try out the "Discussion tools" in the Beta Features here at Meta-Wiki, too: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures. Thank you!
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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. [259]
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. [260]
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.; [261], 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. [263]
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. [264][265]
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. [266][267]
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The InternetArchiveBot team has come up with a new header for its documentation and user pages designed to make important links as easy to find as possible. We use this header on the bot's global user page, and we have it set up to show the labels in your interface language, meaning that the labels will appear in Russian on Russian Wikipedia (unless you override the interface language).
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Consensus has been reached to delete all books in the book namespace. There was rough consensus that the deleted books should still be available on request at WP:REFUND even after the namespace is removed.
An RfC is open to discuss the next steps following a trial which automatically applied pending changes to TFAs.
Technical news
IP addresses of unregistered users are to be hidden from everyone. There is a rough draft of how IP addresses may be shown to users who need to see them. This currently details allowing administrators, checkusers, stewards and those with a new usergroup to view the full IP address of unregistered users. Editors with at least 500 edits and an account over a year old will be able to see all but the end of the IP address in the proposal. The ability to see the IP addresses hidden behind the mask would be dependent on agreeing to not share the parts of the IP address they can see with those who do not have access to the same information. Accessing part of or the full IP address of a masked editor would also be logged. Comments on the draft are being welcomed at the talk page.
Arbitration
The community authorised COVID-19 general sanctions have been superseded by the COVID-19 discretionary sanctions following a motion at a case request. Alerts given and sanctions placed under the community authorised general sanctions are now considered alerts for and sanctions under the new discretionary sanctions.
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. [268]
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. [269]
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. [270][271]
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. [272]
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”.; [273], 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)
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The page InternetArchiveBot/Problem is available for translation. You can translate it here:
Thank you to everyone who translated "Template:InternetArchiveBot header". The template is now available in 64 languages (including variants)! Now when people visit the bot's user page on those language wikis, they will be greeted with navigation options in their language. (We have since added one more link to the header – "Translate" – translations are appreciated!)
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Welcome to the second issue of Universal Code of Conduct News! This newsletter will help Wikimedians stay involved with the development of the new code and will distribute relevant news, research, and upcoming events related to the UCoC.
If you haven’t already, please remember to subscribe here if you would like to be notified about future editions of the newsletter, and also leave your username here if you’d like to be contacted to help with translations in the future.
Enforcement Draft Guidelines Review - Initial meetings of the drafting committee have helped to connect and align key topics on enforcement, while highlighting prior research around existing processes and gaps within our movement. (continue reading)
Targets of Harassment Research - To support the drafting committee, the Wikimedia Foundation has conducted a research project focused on experiences of harassment on Wikimedia projects. (continue reading)
Functionaries’ Consultation - Since June, Functionaries from across the various wikis have been meeting to discuss what the future will look like in a global context with the UCoC. (continue reading)
Roundtable Discussions - The UCoC facilitation team once again, hosted another roundtable discussion, this time for Korean-speaking community members and participants of other ESEAP projects to discuss the enforcement of the UCoC. (continue reading)
Early Adoption of UCoC by Communities - Since its ratification by the Board in February 2021, situations whereby UCoC is being adopted and applied within the Wikimedia community have grown. (continue reading)
New Timeline for the Interim Trust & Safety Case Review Committee - The CRC was originally expected to conclude by July 1. However, with the UCoC now expected to be in development until December, the timeline for the CRC has also changed. (continue reading)
Wikimania - The UCoC team is planning to hold a moderated discussion featuring representatives across the movement during Wikimania 2021. It also plans to have a presence at the conference’s Community Village. (continue reading)
Diff blogs - Check out the most recent publications about the UCoC on Wikimedia Diff blog. (continue reading)
Thanks for reading - we welcome feedback about this newsletter. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 17:33, 15 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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 tool to find, add and remove templates was updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It was supposed to come to the first wikis on 7 July. It was delayed to 12 July instead. It will come to more wikis later this year. [274][275]
Special:UnconnectedPages lists pages that are not connected to Wikidata. This helps you find pages that can be connected to Wikidata items. Some pages should not be connected to Wikidata. You can use the magic word __EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__ on pages that should not be listed on the special page. [276]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 July. It will be on all wikis from 22 July (calendar).
Future changes
How media is structured in the parser's HTML output will soon change. This can affect bots, gadgets, user scripts and extensions. You can read more. You can test it on Testwiki or Testwiki 2.
The parameters for how you obtain tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can read more.
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”.; July 13th.
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.
The next Wikibase live session is at 16:00 UTC on Thursday 29th July 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). This month, we welcome Luca Mauri to give a presentation about installing Wikibase from scratch.
The next Wikibase live session is at 16:00 UTC on Thursday 29th July 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). This month, we welcome Luca Mauri to give a presentation about installing Wikibase from scratch.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Andra Waagmeester on work with Shape Expressions in Wikidata to describe the genomics of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; [277], July 27th.
COSCUP 2021 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 2020.07.31-08.01 Online website, Meta-wiki
Still mapping!"Our team has been working continuously on improving the number of Welsh place names that appear online since our inception in 2017 as partt of the Welsh Government’s Welsh Government #Cymraeg2050 project"..."we will also use Wikidata to store and share Welsh language information".
Added a tags parameter to the wbmergeitems API so Item merges can now also get an edit tag (T286778)
Mismatch Finder: Continued working on the store part. This week we focused on uploading a file with potential mismatches and the UI for getting a list of all uploaded mismatch files.
Addressing comments from the security review of the Query Builder so we can hopefully soon move it from the test system to its proper place under query.wikidata.org
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
A new version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis the week before last week. This was not in Tech News because there was no newsletter that week.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 July. It will be on all wikis from 29 July (calendar).
Future changes
If you use the Monobook skin you can choose to switch off responsive design on mobile. This will now work for more skins. If ⧼monobook-responsive-label⧽ is unticked you need to also untick the new preferenceEnable responsive mode. Otherwise it will stop working. Interface admins can automate this process on your wiki. You can read more.
An RfC is open to add a delay of one week from nomination to deletion for G13 speedy deletions.
Technical news
Last week all wikis were very slow or not accessible for 30 minutes. This was due to server lag caused by regenerating dynamic lists on the Russian Wikinews after a large bulk import. (T287380)
Translation notification: Wikimedia Foundation elections/2021/Voting[edit]
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Advisory board call for members for the Web2Cit project: Web2Cit: Visual Editor for Citoid Web Translators project is moving! With Diegodlh we are inviting people to apply to be an Advisory Board member. Is this you? Is this someone you know? Check the Call for members and apply to be an Advisory Board member before August 6th!. If you are too busy this time around to apply, don't worry: we get it. You can also help us by spreading the word!
The moveClaim.js user script has been updated using code created by Melderick to support changing a property of a claim within an entity. Please switch to the updated version if you used the other one, and report any bugs.
New tool: Lexemes Party displays lexemes linked to a list of Wikidata items, so you can improve related lexicographical data in the languages you know. You can build your own lists and several examples are available. A weekly challenge is also proposed, theme of the week: Olympic Games.
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 your wiki uses markup like <div class="mw-content-ltr"> or <div class="mw-content-rtl"> without the required dir attribute, then these will no longer work in 2 weeks. There is a short-term fix that can be added to your local wiki's Common.css page, which is explained at T287701. From now on, all usages should include the full attributes, for example: <div class="mw-content-ltr" dir="ltr" lang="en"> or <div class="mw-content-rtl" dir="rtl" lang="he">. This also applies to some other HTML tags, such as span or code. You can find existing examples on your wiki that need to be updated, using the instructions at T287701.
Last week, all wikis had slow access or no access for 30 minutes. There was a problem with generating dynamic lists of articles on the Russian Wikinews, due to the bulk import of 200,000+ new articles over 3 days, which led to database problems. The problematic feature has been disabled on that wiki and developers are discussing if it can be fixed properly. [278][279]
Changes later this week
When adding links to a page using VisualEditor or the 2017 wikitext editor, disambiguation pages will now only appear at the bottom of search results. This is because users do not often want to link to disambiguation pages. [280]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 August. It will be on all wikis from 5 August (calendar).
Future changes
The team of the Wikipedia app for Android is working on communication in the app. The developers are working on how to talk to other editors and get notifications. You can read more. They are looking for users who want to test the plans. Any editor who has an Android phone and is willing to download the app can do this.
The Beta Feature for Discussion tools will be updated in the coming weeks. You will be able to subscribe to individual sections on a talk page at more wikis. You can test this now by adding ?dtenable=1 to the end of the talk page's URL (example).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Wikidata Edit-a-thons highlighting Boston Rock City Edit-a-thon, Wikidata Comics Edit-a-thon, and Wiki-Relays [281], Aug 10th.
LD4 Wikibase Working Hour - Next steps after installing a Wikibase instance -- creating users, items, and properties. Friday, August 27th, 2021 / 1PM (time zone converter). Registration: Please fill in ZOOM Registration Link to register
Wikimania 2021, August 13 to 17, online event. On this page you can find a summary of sessions and community gatherings related to Wikidata and Wikibase.
Mismatch Finder: Finishing work on importing mismatches and moved on to building the API for retrieving mismatches from the mismatch store.
Added tags for all edits done through the UI to more easily distinguish them from edits made through tools and other means (phab:T236893)
Moved regular expression checking for constraints from the SPARQL endpoint to a dedicated service to make it faster and put less stress on the SPARQL endpoint (phab:T176312)
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 can read but not edit 17 wikis for a few minutes on 10 August. This is planned at 05:00 UTC. This is because of work on the database. [282]
Changes later this week
The Wikimania Hackathon will take place remotely on 13 August, starting at 5:00 UTC, for 24 hours. You can participate in many ways. You can still propose projects and sessions.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 August. It will be on all wikis from 12 August (calendar).
The old CSS <div class="visualClear"></div> will not be supported after 12 August. Instead, templates and pages should use <div style="clear:both;"></div>. Please help to replace any existing uses on your wiki. There are global-search links available at T287962.
Future changes
The Wikipedia Library is a place for Wikipedia editors to get access to sources. There is an extension which has a new function to tell users when they can take part in it. It will use notifications. It will start pinging the first users in September. It will ping more users later. [283]
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The page Hack4OpenGLAM is available for translation. You can translate it here:
The deadline for translating this page is 2021-09-20.
Welcome to translate the messages of the Hack4OpenGLAM hackathon, taking place at the Creative Commons Summit 20–24 September! Your work is appreciated!
Your help is greatly appreciated. Translators like you help Meta to function
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Meta translation coordinators, 10:25, 10 August 2021 (UTC)
Translation notification: Wiki Loves Children[edit]
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This is an additional set of messages for Hack4OpenGLAM: instructions (the contents of the newsletter) and latest tweets that can be used in several languages.
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Hello, here are the latest news from Wikimedia Norge!
Arctic Knot – a big success
The final thing we did before the summer holidays was to hold the Arctic Knot Conference. We spent most of 2021 preparing the conference, and the conference lasted for two days with a lot of participation. Most of the videos from the conference are available in this playlist on YouTube.
13–17 August
Wikimania
Wikimania starts tomorrow, and the deadline for registering is midnight UTC tonight. Wikimania lasts for 5 days, and the program is adapted to multiple timezones, so it will take place at various parts of the day. There are plenty of interesting submissions!
Wikimedia Norge is participating with a workshop. The workshop's goal is to further develop the idea of a Wikimedia hub for underrepresented language communities. Everyone is welcome to participate!
Next wiki meet-up
25 August
The first meet-up of the fall will be about Abstract Wikipedia. We will watch Denny Vrandečić's presentation from Arctic Knot together, and discuss afterwards. The meet-up will take place on Google Meet, and start at 17.00 CEST. Simply explained, Abstract Wikipedia is about writing articles as functions in order to make them language-independent.
International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples
9 August marks the International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, and we wrote a blog post based on some of the presentations from the Arctic Knot Conference.
Wikipedia 20 years
Due to Wikipedia's 20 year anniversary, we have received video greetings from government ministers and the President of the Sámi Parliament. You can watch the videos here. The greetings are for everyone who has contributed to Wikipedia during its 20 years of existence – thank you very much for your efforts!
Wikipedia in Norwegian turns 20 in November. This will be celebrated at the November meet-up; further information will come later.
Have you already paid your membership fees for 2021? If not, you can always do so by re-registering on this page.
Mismatch Finder: We are making good progress on the tool. We made it possible to retrieve mismatches that are in the store part of the tool via an API.
Regular expressions in constraints are now no longer checked via the Query Service. The checks have been completely moved over to a dedicated service for regular expression checking. (phab:T204031)
Edits made via the user interface (as opposed to with tools, bots, etc.) are now tagged as such to make them easier to filter (example - edits made to labels, descriptions and aliases on mobile are still missing but will follow soon)
Working on allowing to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
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 add language links in the sidebar in the new Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet. [285]
Problems
There was a problem on wikis which use the Translate extension. Translations were not updated or were replaced with the English text. The problems have been fixed. [286][287][288]
Changes later this week
A revision tag will soon be added to edits that add links to disambiguation pages. This is because these links are usually added by accident. The tag will allow editors to easily find the broken links and fix them. If your wiki does not like this feature, it can be hidden. [289]
Would you like to help improve the information about tools? Would you like to attend or help organize a small virtual meetup for your community to discuss the list of tools? Please get in touch on the Toolhub Quality Signal Sessions talk page. We are also looking for feedback from tool maintainers on some specific questions.
In the past, edits to any page in your user talk space ignored your mute list, e.g. sub-pages. Starting this week, this is only true for edits to your talk page. [290]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 August. It will be on all wikis from 19 August (calendar).
The next Wikibase live session is at 16:00 UTC on Thursday 26th August 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). You're welcome to come and share your work around Wikibase.
BiCIKL Hackathon at the Meise Botanic Garden, September 20 - 24. Theme: adding articles/items about “Hidden women in science” on Wikipedia/Wikidata. If you're interested to participate, please write to maarten.trekelsplantentuinmeise.be
50 cool new things you can now do with KB’s collection highlights - In this series of 5 articles we show the added value of putting images and metadata of digitised collection highlights of the KB, national library of the Netherlands, into the Wikimedia infrastructure. By putting our collection highlights into Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, dozens of new functionalities have been added. As a result of Wikifying this collection in 2020, you can now do things with these highlights that were not possible before. Article by OlafJanssen, DanielleJWiki and 1Veertje_(KB)
The "Wikidata Quickstatements" translator which lets users transfer metadata about citation sources fromZotero into Wikidata, no longer needs to be manually installed. Existing manually-installed versions should update automatically, like other translators.
Edits to labels, descriptions and aliases on mobile are now also tagged as edits made via the user interface. All edits made via the user interface are now tagged as such. (phab:T286775)
ArticlePlaceholder pages will now indicate that they are generated by the ArticlePlaceholder thanks to a patch by Luca (phab:T124191)
Working on making it possible to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
Adding a new constraint type to ensure Items have a label in a certain language (phab:T195178)
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 Score extension (<score> notation) has been re-enabled on public wikis and upgraded to a newer version. Some musical score functionality may no longer work because the extension is only enabled in "safe mode". The security issue has been fixed and an advisory published.
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit some wikis for a few minutes on 25 August. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. During this time, operations on the CentralAuth will also not be possible.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 August. It will be on all wikis from 26 August (calendar).
Also during this time, operations on the CentralAuth will not be possible (GlobalRenames, changing/confirming e-mail addresses, logging into new wikis, password changes).
For more details about the operation and on all impacted services, please check on Phabricator.
A banner will be displayed 30 minutes before the operation.
Please help your community to be aware of this maintenance operation. Thank you!
Welcome to the third issue of Universal Code of Conduct News! This newsletter will help Wikimedians stay involved with the development of the new code and will distribute relevant news, research, and upcoming events related to the UCoC.
If you haven’t already, please remember to subscribe here if you would like to be notified about future editions of the newsletter, and also leave your username here if you’d like to be contacted to help with translations in the future.
The Enforcement Draft Guidelines - The Enforcement Draft Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct has just been published on meta in different languages. These guidelines include some definitions of newly introduced terms and recommendations for local enforcement structures. (continue reading)
Enforcement Draft Guidelines Review - Before the enforcement guidelines are finalized, they must be reviewed and discussed by the community. The facilitation team has set up various discussion means throughout this review period. (continue reading)
Conversation Hours & Roundtables - To listen to community opinions and exchange ideas regarding enforcement draft guidelines proposed by the drafting committee, the UCoC facilitation team will be hosting weekly conversation hours. (continue reading)
Wikimania Wrap-up - The facilitation team hosted a Roundtable at Wikimania 2021, featuring some WMF trustees and staff. The session offered some insights on how the Enforcement Draft Guidelines came about, and what next steps are being imagined. (continue reading)
Translation - Because a considerable number of Wikimedians are not English speakers, and that UCoC applies to all members, projects across the wikimedia movement, it’s of a great importance to provide adequate language support throughout this process. (continue reading)
Diff blogs - Check out some interesting publications about the UCoC on Wikimedia Diff blog. (continue reading)
WMF's 2021 Board of Trustees election - Please read the Candidate Presentations and vote! (continue reading)
Data Quality Days, September 8-15, a series of community-powered events on the topic of data quality. If you're interested in presenting a tool or a topic, feel free to add something to the schedule.
Depictor is a mobile-friendly tool to verify if people depicted on Wikimedia Commons are the same, and adds structured data statements (using Wikidata)
Nicolas Vigneron (User:VIGNERON, User:VIGNERON en résidence) has started a one-year residence at the libraries of Clermont-Ferrand, more info and batch upload to come
WikidataCon update: news about the online conference, grants for affiliates in Latin America and Carribean, glimpse on the keynotes topics and next steps
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 musical score syntax no longer works and may needed to be updated, you can check Category:Pages with score rendering errors on your wiki for a list of pages with errors.
Problems
Musical scores were unable to render lyrics in some languages because of missing fonts. This has been fixed now. If your language would prefer a different font, please file a request in Phabricator. [291]
Changes later this week
The parameters for how you obtain tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can read more about this.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 September. It will be on all wikis from 2 September (calendar).
Future changes
You will be able to read but not edit Commons for a few minutes on 6 September. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 13 September. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [292]
A discussion is open to decide when, if ever, should discord logs be eligible for removal when posted onwiki (including whether to oversight them)
A RfC on the next steps after the trial of pending changes on TFAs has resulted in a 30 day trial of automatic semi protection for TFAs.
Technical news
The Score extension has been re-enabled on public wikis. It has been updated, but has been placed in safe mode to address unresolved security issues. Further information on the security issues can be found on the mediawiki page.
Arbitration
A request for comment is in progress to provide an opportunity to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules. Comments and new proposals are welcome.
Data Quality Days - a week of all things data quality around Wikidata from Septempber 8th to 15th. Check the schedule, join sessions and add more if you would like to facilitate a discussion or workshop!
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: developing Wikidata tools and gadgets with Andrew Lih. [293], Sep 7th.
LIVE Wikidata editing #52 - YouTube, Facebook, September 11 at 18:00 UTC
Template:Generic queries for authors : new generic queries template designed for authors (fiction and non-fiction). Feedback and translations are welcome.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
User:SuccuBot has made its 100.000.000th edit. It is the first user account in Wikidata to reach this milestone.
In the frame of a Google Summer of Code project a new tool, called WikidataComplete was created. The tool smoothly integrates in the Wikidata UI and proposes new statements extracted by machine learning algorithms. Editors are asked to either approve or reject them. To activate it check here for a short tutorial check here. Any feedback is welcome here.
Continued work on the Mismatch Finder. We are now working on creating the page where mismatches will be listed for review.
Worked on support for "separators" parameter for distinct value constraints (phab:T277855)
Made it possible to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
Added a new constraint type to ensure that the Item has a label in a particular language (phab:T195178)
Added a button for the Query Builder to query.wikidata.org to make the Query builder discoverable (phab:T276210) - integration in the example dialog is still in progress (phab:T280229)
We started work on some behind-the-scenes improvements to the way Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects are notified about a change that affects their articles. (They need this notification so the article can be purged and show the latest data from Wikidata again. It is also required for showing the edit in the watchlist and recent changes on those wikis. This should have no visible impact for editors but is needed maintenance work.
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 wikis that have Growth features deployed have been part of A/B testing since deployment, in which some newcomers did not receive the new features. Now, all of the newcomers on 21 of the smallest of those wikis will be receiving the features. [294]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
In 2017, the provided jQuery library was upgraded from version 1 to 3, with a compatibility layer. The migration will soon finish, to make the site load faster for everyone. If you maintain a gadget or user script, check if you have any JQMIGRATE errors and fix them, or they will break. [295][296]
Last year, the Portuguese Wikipedia community embarked on an experiment to make log-in compulsory for editing. The impact report of this trial is ready. Moving forward, the Anti-Harassment Tools team is looking for projects that are willing to experiment with restricting IP editing on their wiki for a short-term experiment. Learn more.
The priority of this page is high.
The deadline for translating this page is 2021-09-07.
This short text (125 words) is meant to announce the results of the board elections on September, 7 to as much communities and volunteers as possible on such short notice in their native tongue. Please help us to make that happen!
Your help is greatly appreciated. Translators like you help Meta to function
as a truly multilingual community.
France report: Wikimedian in residence; Some projects for this autumn
India report: Second proofread competition starts on Bengali Wikisource in collaboration with the British Library
Italy report: Summer school in July and two new WiR in August
Netherlands report: 50 cool new things you can now do with KB’s collection highlights, and New old photographs of Algeria, Mali and Morocco by Angeline van Achterberg
Transbordados: WikidataCon's preconference for Latin America - September 14, 21 and 28 (21h UTC) - with simultaneous translation for Portuguese and Spanish, via YouTube - set of events to discuss Wikidata and decoloniality, knowledge organization and digital dissemination of collections in Latin America contexts. Join us!
14/09 - Towards a decolonial wiki: overflowing knowledge from the Latin American horizon - speakers: Amanda Jurno (Wiki Movimento Brasil), Bianca Santana (journalist, writer and activist) and Silvia Gutiérrez (El Colégio de México) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
21/09 - The universe of libraries: Wikidata and the multiplication of knowledge potencies - speakers: Lilian Viana (GLAM das Bibliotecas da USP) and Maurício Genta (Wikimedia Argentina e Biblioteca Nacional da Argentina) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
28/09 - Digital collections and Wikidata: organizing a network of knowledge - speakers: Evelin Heidel (a.k.a. Scann; Wikimedistas do Uruguai) and Karen Worcman (Museu da Pessoa) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
Demo of the Query Builder live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 14 at 18:00 CEST
Ongoing:
Data Quality Days - several sessions happened over the past days and more are coming this week. Recordings, slides and notes are linked in the program
Wwwyzzerdd for Wikidata is a browser extension that allows you to view and edit Wikidata information from Wikipedia (demo video). Install it in Firefox or Chrome
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Face The Facts mobile app allows you to scan election posters and see the true facts about politicians.
Mismatch Finder: The website part of the tool is taking shape but is not quite functional yet. We worked on creating the results page. You can see the current very much not finished state at https://mismatch-finder.toolforge.org/
Linked the Query Builder from the Query Service so it is discoverable (phab:T280229)
Finished work on normalizing filenames when linking to media files on Commons (phab:T251480)
All new wbstack.com wikis will now be created with elastic search support, including Wikibase indexes! All existing sites will have elastic search soon! (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.
A majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features. The Growth team has published an FAQ page about the features. This translatable FAQ covers the description of the features, how to use them, how to change the configuration, and more.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 September. It will be on all wikis from 16 September (calendar).
Starting this week, Wikipedia in Italian will receive weekly software updates on Wednesdays. It used to receive the updates on Thursdays. Due to this change, bugs will be noticed and fixed sooner. [299]
You can add language links in the sidebar in the new Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet. [300]
The syntax highlight tool marks up code with different colours. It now can highlight 23 new code languages. Additionally, golang can now be used as an alias for the Go programming language, and a special output mode has been added to show a program's output. [301][302]
Translation notification: Movement Charter/Drafting Committee/Set Up Process[edit]
Hello PutriAmalia1991,
You are receiving this notification because you signed up as a translator to Bahasa Indonesia on Meta.
The page Movement Charter/Drafting Committee/Set Up Process is available for translation. You can translate it here:
The priority of this page is high.
The deadline for translating this page is 2021-09-17.
The Movement Charter Drafting Committee election is coming soon. We have just put out a page to inform as many communities on the election. This requires many translations as we want to reach out to as many people as possible in their respective language. So we ask kindly for your support.
Any questions? Please contact User:DBarthel (WMF). Thanks for your help!
Your help is greatly appreciated. Translators like you help Meta to function
as a truly multilingual community.
You are receiving this notification because you signed up as a translator to Bahasa Indonesia on Meta.
The page Lingua Libre is available for translation. You can translate it here:
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Bionomia and maintaining Wikidata synchrony with David Shorthouse (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada). [303], Sep 21st.
Lightning Talk: Wikidata in your Civic Tech project | Summit 2021 - YouTube
Continuing the work on the Mismatch Finder. This week we focused on the remaining groundwork for showing the first mismatches for review.
Continuing to work on improvements to the underlying system of how edits are propagated from Wikidata to the other Wikimedia projects.
Implemented two improvements for constraints: the “distinct values” constraint type now supports the “separator” parameter (phab:T277855) and we no longer check qualifiers on some unusual™ properties (phab:T235292)
Adding tags to some of the remaining UI edits that didn't get them yet for edits on Lexemes (phab:T290950)
Making it possible to add tags to some remaining Lexeme API modules (phab:T290951)
Fixed a bug in the Query Builder where it didn't show labels when opening an existing visual query from a shared link (phab:T280684)
Made the Query Builder more visible in the Query Service UI (phab:T280229)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
MediaWiki had a feature that would highlight local links to short articles in a different style. Each user could pick the size at which "stubs" would be highlighted. This feature was very bad for performance, and following a consultation, has been removed. [304]
A technical change was made to the MonoBook skin to allow for easier maintenance and upkeep. This has resulted in some minor changes to HTML that make MonoBook's HTML consistent with other skins. Efforts have been made to minimize the impact on editors, but please ping Jon (WMF) on wiki or in phabricator if any problems are reported.
Problems
There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of an accidental restart of the search servers. [305]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 September. It will be on all wikis from 23 September (calendar).
The meta=proofreadpage API has changed. The piprop parameter has been renamed to prpiprop. API users should update their code to avoid unrecognized parameter warnings. Pywikibot users should upgrade to 6.6.0. [306]
Future changes
The Reply tool will be deployed to the remaining wikis in the coming weeks. It is currently part of "Discussion tools" in Beta features at most wikis. You will be able to turn it off in Editing Preferences. [307]
The previously announced change to how you obtain tokens from the API has been delayed to September 21 because of an incompatibility with Pywikibot. Bot operators using Pywikibot can follow T291202 for progress on a fix, and should plan to upgrade to 6.6.1 when it is released.
We’re celebrating the 9th birthday of Wikidata on October 29 during the WikidataCon 🎂 Did you know that you can participate in the celebration by preparing a birthday present or attending events? Here’s how you can get involved!
User-level gender statistics for Wikipedia an Observable notebook which computes the share of articles created on fr.wikipedia.org by gender using P21 property through Wikidata's API.
Changed the formatting of low year numbers so that they now show as e.g. “5 CE” instead of “5” to reduce ambiugity in dates like “March 5 (CE)” (phab:T104750)
Working on fixing an issue where two Properties could have the same label in a given language (phab:T289473)
Working on preventing a few more cases where two Items could have the same sitelink (phab:T291377)
Mismatch Finder: Continuing to work on showing mismatches on the results page so that they can be reviewed
Continuing to work on technical improvements to how changes on Wikidata are propagated to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects
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
iOS 15 has a new function called Private Relay (Apple website). This can hide the user's IP when they use Safari browser. This is like using a VPN in that we see another IP address instead. It is opt-in and only for those who pay extra for iCloud. It will come to Safari users on OSX later. There is a technical discussion about what this means for the Wikimedia wikis.
Problems
Some gadgets and user-scripts add items to the portlets (article tools) part of the skin. A recent change to the HTML may have made those links a different font-size. This can be fixed by adding the CSS class .vector-menu-dropdown-noicon. [308]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 September. It will be on all wikis from 30 September (calendar).
The GettingStarted extension was built in 2013, and provides an onboarding process for new account holders in a few versions of Wikipedia. However, the recently developed Growth features provide a better onboarding experience. Since the vast majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features, GettingStarted will be deactivated starting on 4 October. [309]
A small number of users will not be able to connect to the Wikimedia wikis after 30 September. This is because an old root certificate will no longer work. They will also have problems with many other websites. Users who have updated their software in the last five years are unlikely to have problems. Users in Europe, Africa and Asia are less likely to have immediate problems even if their software is too old. You can read more.
You can receive notifications when someone leaves a comment on user talk page or mentions you in a talk page comment. Clicking the notification link will now bring you to the comment and highlight it. Previously, doing so brought you to the top of the section that contained the comment. You can find more information in T282029.
Following an RfC, extended confirmed protection may be used preemptively on certain high-risk templates.
Following a discussion at the Village Pump, there is consensus to treat discord logs the same as IRC logs. This means that discord logs will be oversighted if posted onwiki.
A motion has standardised the 500/30 (extended confirmed) restrictions placed by the Arbitration Committee. The standardised restriction is now listed in the Arbitration Committee's procedures.
Following the closure of the Iranian politics case, standard discretionary sanctions are authorized for all edits about, and all pages related to, post-1978 Iranian politics, broadly construed.
The Arbitration Committee encourages uninvolved administrators to use the discretionary sanctions procedure in topic areas where it is authorised to facilitate consensus in RfCs. This includes, but is not limited to, enforcing sectioned comments, word/diff limits and moratoriums on a particular topic from being brought in an RfC for up to a year.
Miscellaneous
Editors have approved expanding the trial of Growth Features from 2% of new accounts to 25%, and the share of newcomers getting mentorship from 2% to 5%. Experienced editors are invited to add themselves to the mentor list.
The community consultation phase of the 2021 CheckUser and Oversight appointments process is open for editors to provide comments and ask questions to candidates.
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
A more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them has been enabled for the following 10 wikis: mediawiki.org, the Italian, Catalan, Hebrew and Vietnamese Wikipedias, French Wikisource, and English Wikivoygage, Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikinews. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist on those wikis you can let the developers know.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 October. It will be on all wikis from 7 October (calendar).
Some gadgets and bots that use the API to read the AbuseFilter log might break. The hidden property will no longer say an entry is implicit for unsuppressed log entries about suppressed edits. If your bot needs to know this, do a separate revision query. Additionally, the property will have the value false for visible entries; previously, it wasn't included in the response. [311]
A more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them will be enabled for all production wikis. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist you can let the developers know.
Future changes
You can soon get cross-wiki notifications in the iOS Wikipedia app. You can also get notifications as push notifications. More notification updates will follow in later versions. [312]
The JavaScript variables wgExtraSignatureNamespaces, wgLegalTitleChars, and wgIllegalFileChars will soon be removed from mw.config. These are not part of the "stable" variables available for use in wiki JavaScript. [313]
The JavaScript variables wgCookiePrefix, wgCookieDomain, wgCookiePath, and wgCookieExpiration will soon be removed from mw.config. Scripts should instead use mw.cookie from the "mediawiki.cookie" module. [314]
You can also sign up for a slot at the birthday presents lightning talks session at WikidataCon 2021 to present your gift for Wikidata birthday until October 16
Finished preventing a case where the same sitelink could be added to two different Items (phab:T291377)
Continuing work on the Mismatch Finder. Currently focusing on showing the details of the mismatches to the person reviewing mismatches.
Continued work on not allowing two Properties to have the same label after undo/revert (phab:T289473)
Continuing work on improving how changes on Wikidata are propagated to Wikipedia and the other other Wikimedia projects. The new system is being rolled out to all wikis now. It should not change anything for editors and just be a technical improvement in the backend.
Translation notification: Movement Charter/Drafting Committee/Election translation[edit]
Hello PutriAmalia1991,
You are receiving this notification because you signed up as a translator to Bahasa Indonesia on Meta.
The page Movement Charter/Drafting Committee/Election translation is available for translation. You can translate it here:
The deadline for translating this page is 2021-10-08.
2 sentences, 21 words!
Movement Charter Drafting Committee Elections are coming. Translating the voting tool SecurePoll in as many native tongues is crucial for this. But: there are two sentences we need to be translated for this. Please support the effort to make this a global experience. Thank you for helping out!
Your help is greatly appreciated. Translators like you help Meta to function
as a truly multilingual community.
The deadline for translating this page is 2021-10-11.
The Movement Charter Drafting Committee Election starts next Monday. We would like to send eligible voters an email, letting them know that now is the time to vote. Of course this should happen in the respective language of the voter. It is only 195 words, a few minutes of work with a great impact! Any language is highly appreciated, we appreciate your help a lot. Thank you and have a great weekend! :)
Your help is greatly appreciated. Translators like you help Meta to function
as a truly multilingual community.
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 12 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 October. It will be on all wikis from 14 October (calendar).
We’re celebrating the 9th birthday of Wikidata on October 29 during the WikidataCon 🎂 Did you know that you can participate in the celebration by preparing a birthday present or attending events? Here’s how you can get involved!
Upcoming: WMF search platform team office hour, Wednesday, October 13th, 2021 at 15:00-16:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PDT / 11:00-12:00 EDT / 17:00-18:00 CEST. Etherpad, Google Meet. You can come and chat about the Wikidata & Commons Query Service.
LIVE Wikidata editing #57 - YouTube, Facebook, October 16 at 18:00 UTC
Modeling and Documenting Queer Voices and Topics on Wikidata, Panel on Metadata and Gender Diversity, Amber Billey, Clair A Kronk, John Samuel, Rachel Ivy Clarke, Sayward Schoonmaker, DCMI Virtual 2021, October 8, 2021, Slides
Videos
Introduction to Wikidata for beginners. Part 2 (in Italian) - YouTube
You can also sign up for a slot at the birthday presents lightning talks session at WikidataCon 2021 to present your gift for Wikidata birthday until October 16
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on the review part of the system. We are now working on letting reviewers indicate if the mismatch is on Wikidata, the other database, both or neither.
Fixed a bug where it was possible for two Properties to have the same label in a given language by undoing/reverting an edit (phab:T289473)
Fixed a confusing error message that was being shown when trying to save geoshape / tabular data that doesn’t exist (phab:T285758)
Removing some unnecessary entity link formatting in edit summaries and special pages to improve performance (phab:T292203)
Fixing an issue with invalid dates that the API accepts but should not (phab:T289417)
Migrated all Wikimedia wikis to use the new change dispatching system. This system is responsible for notifying the other wikis about edits made on Wikidata that affect their articles so the article is refreshed and edits are added to recent changes and watchlists.
Welcome to the fourth issue of Universal Code of Conduct News! This newsletter will help Wikimedians stay involved with the development of the new code and will distribute relevant news, research, and upcoming events related to the UCoC.
If you haven’t already, please remember to subscribe here if you would like to be notified about future editions of the newsletter, and also leave your username here if you’d like to be contacted to help with translations in the future.
Enforcement Draft Guidelines Review Wrap-up - The Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Draft Guidelines Review will come to a close on 17 October 2021, after more than two months of extensive consultations. (continue reading)
Roundtable Discussions and Conversation Hours - Another successful roundtable session happened on September 18, 2021 to discuss the EDGR. One last conversation hour will be happening on October 15th, 2021. (continue reading)
Movement Charter Drafting Committee Elections - The Movement Charter Drafting Committee selection process has kicked off and will be open until October 25, 2021. Contributors to Wikimedia projects can elect their favorite candidates on to the committee. (continue reading)
New Direction for the Newsletter - As we round-up the consultation processes for the Universal Code of Conduct, the facilitation team is currently envisioning new directions for the newsletter. (continue reading)
Diff Blogs - Check out the most recent publications about the UCoC on Wikimedia Diff. (continue reading)
We’re celebrating the 9th birthday of Wikidata on October 29 during the WikidataCon 🎂 Did you know that you can participate in the celebration by preparing a birthday present or attending events? Here’s how you can get involved!
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Scottish Accused Witches Project with Ewan McAndrew and Emma Carroll (University of Edinburgh). [315], Oct 19th.
Learn Wikidata is an online interactive course created by the Vanderbilt University thanks to a WikiCite grant and available in English, Spanish and Chinese. More information here.
The 3rd edition of the Coolest Tool Award is looking for nominations (see announcement on wikimedia-l). Please submit your favorite tools by October 27th. The awarded projects will be announced and showcased in a virtual ceremony in December.
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on the review part of the system. We are working on letting reviewers submit their decision if the mismatch is on Wikidata, the other database, both or neither.
In the previous week we migrated all Wikimedia wikis to use the new change dispatching system. This system is responsible for notifying the other wikis about edits made on Wikidata that affect their articles so the article is refreshed and edits are added to recent changes and watchlists. This week we monitored the new system and investigated and fixed a few issues that came up.
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
Toolhub is a catalogue to make it easier to find software tools that can be used for working on the Wikimedia projects. You can read more.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 October. It will be on all wikis from 21 October (calendar).
3–5% of editors may be blocked in the next few months. This is because of a new service in Safari, which is similar to a proxy or a VPN. It is called iCloud Private Relay. There is a discussion about this on Meta. The goal is to learn what iCloud Private Relay could mean for the communities.
Wikimedia Enterprise is a new API for those who use a lot of information from the Wikimedia projects on other sites. It is a way to get big commercial users to pay for the data. There will soon be a copy of the Wikimedia Enterprise dataset. You can read more. You can also ask the team questions on Zoom on 22 October 15:00 UTC.
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The page Grants:MSIG/Announcements/2021/Global message is available for translation. You can translate it here:
We want to reach out to as many communities as possible, calling out volunteers globally. Please support us and help translating the announcement in all the languages you speak, it is only 50 words. We will send it out as a mass message later.
Beyond this: if you would like to, please check out the program and spread the word. We would appreciate your help in sharing this news in social media channels of your community.
We are grateful for all your support, you are awesome!
Your help is greatly appreciated. Translators like you help Meta to function
as a truly multilingual community.
User:Bargioni/UseAsRef has now a 2.0 version, allowing to use as references not only external IDs but also some other properties (P1343, P973, P8214 etc.)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
QID ("Initialism of Q-identifier, a unique identifier for an item in Wikidata. [from 2012]") now has an entry in Wiktionary
The 3rd edition of the Coolest Tool Award is looking for nominations (see announcement on wikimedia-l). Please submit your favorite tools by October 27th. The awarded projects will be announced and showcased in a virtual ceremony in December.
The new WDQS Streaming Updater now fully shipped to production. This will help the Query Service better deal with the amount of edits happening on Wikidata. (more information)
Mismatch Finder: Continuing work on the results page where mismatches are shown for review. We are focusing on showing all necessary information for a mismatch to make a good determination if it is a mismatch in Wikidata, the external source or neither.
Finishing the work on the new change dispatching system that improves how Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects are notified about edits happening on Wikidata that affect them. Currently tying up some lose ends.
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 Coolest Tool Award 2021 is looking for nominations. You can recommend tools until 27 October.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 October. It will be on all wikis from 28 October (calendar).
Future changes
Diff pages will have an improved copy and pasting experience. The changes will allow the text in the diff for before and after to be treated as separate columns and will remove any unwanted syntax. [316]
The version of the Liberation fonts used in SVG files will be upgraded. Only new thumbnails will be affected. Liberation Sans Narrow will not change. [317]
The deadline for translating this page is 2021-10-31.
The announcement of the members of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee is coming close. We would like to announce the results in as many languages as possible and kindly ask for your support. It is less than 100 words, we would appreciate your help a lot and it is just a few minutes.
Thank you for your continuous support!
Your help is greatly appreciated. Translators like you help Meta to function
as a truly multilingual community.
Documentation of the sessions are currently ongoing. It may take a few weeks to publish all 80 hours of content but you can already watch some of them (linked from each session's Etherpad).
Wikidatapink pony session (a meetup where participants shared wishes and feature requests about Wikidata to the development team)
Continued the work on the first version of the Mismatch Finder. We are getting closer to the polishing phase now and will have something ready in the next weeks.
Lua access for Lexemes is now ready to test on English Beta Wiktionary.
Concluded work on the improved behind-the-scenes system for notifying Wikipedias and co about Wikidata edits that affect them. Nothing should have changed for you.
Started working on a new implementation of the search box to be ready for the upcoming skin changes the WMF is working on.
Phase 2 of the 2021 RfA review has commenced which will discuss potential solutions to address the 8 issues found in Phase 1. Proposed solutions that achieve consensus will be implemented and you may propose solutions till 07 November 2021.
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 limit on the amount of emails a user can send each day. This limit is now global instead of per-wiki. This change is to prevent abuse. [318]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 November. It will be on all wikis from 4 November (calendar).
Hello, here are the latest news from Wikimedia Norge!
Wikipedia in Norwegian Bokmål is turning 20!
The Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia turns 20 on November 26, and this will be celebrated during the December 1 wiki meet-up. That will be a virtual meet-up with a quiz and other fun. Do you wish to receive a 20th anniversary T-shirt? Send us your address and size (S–XL) to wikimedia@wikimedia.no!
Maybe you've been wondering why there's been so much Sámi stuff in social media lately? The reason is the Sámi language week, Giellavahkku, which aims to make the Sámi languages more visible. The Sámi languages, culture and history are an important part of the diversity of knowledge. We have summarized the work we're doing with regards to Sámi languages in this blog post.
The Lapp Codicil was repatriated to the Sámi Archives this month, after a long process. The Lapp Codicil is still the base of the laws for borders in the North of Scandinavia. It will soon also be available on Wikimedia Commons.
Queer culture year 2022
Througout 2022, the queer culture year (Skeivt kulturår) will be marked in Norway. In preparation for this, we have uploaded 139 interviews by the Queer Archive to Wikimedia Commons. We also have several other projects planned for next year.
– The fact that queer experiences, history and culture aren't reflected online is a blank spot in our common history, says Heide Rohde Rafto, acting academic director of the Queer Archive of Norway. She adds that queer history is not only the history of LGBT+ people, but of the whole of society.
By engaging in the queer cultural year, we are hoping to fill in these blank spots. And we're doing this from a diversity point of view – it's not all about gender and sexuality, but also about individuality and the people who have made an effort to effect change.
Language Diversity Hub
Diversity of knowledge shouldn't just be limited to Norway. Through international cooperations, we are hoping to create a gathering point for those who are working on indigenous and underrepresented languages. In this project we are joined by several participants of the Arctic Knot Conference this summer. You can read more about this work on this page.
Retriever
It will soon be time to disperse access tokens for Retriever again. You can sign up from November 15. Reminders will be posted on Torget and Samfunnshuset when the sign-up opens.
Wikimedia Sverige have a separate deal with the Swedish Retriever. They have many access tokens available, and can share them with Norwegian volunteers as well. Only Swedish media is available through their deal. Sign up on this list on the Swedish Wikipedia if you're interested in getting access to the Swedish Retriever.
Wikigrants
Now that society has reopened, there are more opportunities to go out and about! There are several activities you can apply for a wikigrant for. All Wikimedia contributors can apply for a grant of up to 8,000 NOK. The grant must be used for activities that support one or more Wikimedia projects, and the application deadline is November 20.
Have you already paid your membership fees for 2021? If not, you can always do so by re-registering on this page.
Documentation of the WikidataCon 2021 sessions are currently ongoing. It may take a few weeks to publish all 80 hours of content but you can already watch some of them (from each session's Etherpad)
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
Mobile IP editors are now able to receive warning notices indicating they have a talk page message on the mobile website (similar to the orange banners available on desktop). These notices will be displayed on every page outside of the main namespace and every time the user attempts to edit. The notice on desktop now has a slightly different colour. [319][320]
In the future, unregistered editors will be given an identity that is not their IP address. This is for legal reasons. A new user right will let editors who need to know the IPs of unregistered accounts to fight vandalism, spam, and harassment, see the IP. You can read the suggestions for how that identity could work and discuss on the talk page.
Sweden report: The Constitution of Pylyp Orlyk; More museum data on Wikidata; LGBT edit-a-thon; Local business history in Nyköping; Stockholm City Museum ♥ Wikipedia; Writing about fashion at Nordiska museet
UK report: British Library and Khalili Collections
USA report: Wikiconference North America + Workshops
Content Partnerships Hub report: Needs assessment interviews; Cultural heritage on Wikidata – thousands of monuments in Norway; Structured Data uploads continue
Plantilla:Infotaula persona, infobox for people on Catalan Wikipedia with extensive use of Wikidata, used 175000 times, with Bridge editing. Sample use at ca:Frits Zernike.
Mismatch Finder: Added various dialogs and help texts to make it easier to understand what reviewers need to do and what information they are seeing in the tool
Mismatch Finder: started polishing and bug fixing for release of the first version
Making the order of Lexeme's grammatical features consistent (phab:T232557)
Investigating how to share complex SPARQL queries in Wikidata Query Service via short URL (phab:T295560)
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
Most large file uploads errors that had messages like "stashfailed" or "DBQueryError" have now been fixed. An incident report is available.
Problems
Sometimes, edits made on iOS using the visual editor save groups of numbers as telephone number links, because of a feature in the operating system. This problem is under investigation. [322]
There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of a configuration error. [323]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 November. It will be on all wikis from 18 November (calendar).
This post about the question of the week is showing how questions can be answered over Wikidata. Also it gives some insights on how Google and Siri are using Wikidata.
A new openly accessible book on knowledge graphs has been published by prominent researchers in the field.
Working on displaying the grammatical features of Lexemes in a particular order in the UI (phab:T232557)
Mismatch Finder: continuing polishing before first release. Focusing on making API documentation available and adding a footer to the site
The ongoing work on MediaWiki skin improvements especially for Wikipedia will break the search box for Wikidata. We're working on addressing this. (phab:T275251)
Migrating a number of components to vue 3 to keep up with the rest of MediaWiki (phab:T294465)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Next LD4 Wikibase Working Hour. Thurs. 16 December 2021, 11AM-12PM Eastern, (time zone converter). "We will continue work developing our WBStack sandbox which seeks to explore how Wikibase could help track the usage of alternate labels for terms in vocabularies like LCSH"
LIVE Wikidata editing #64 - YouTube, Facebook, December 4 at 19:00 UTC
Mismatch Finder: Continued working on last remaining tickets for the first version. Added a footer to the site, improved documentation and added ability to delete a batch of mismatches.
Made good progress on migrating our on-wiki Vue apps to support the new Vue.createMwApp compatibility layer in MediaWiki core (phab:T294465)
Continued work on making it possible to define a custom ordering of grammatical features on Lexemes (phab:T232557)
More research and discussion on mul language code (phab:T285156)
Discussing with data re-users about their views on the ontology issue classification we worked on earlier this year to get their input (slides from Data Quality Days session)
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 30 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 December. It will be on all wikis from 2 December (calendar).
Unregistered editors using the mobile website are now able to receive notices to indicate they have talk page messages. The notice looks similar to what is already present on desktop, and will be displayed on when viewing any page except mainspace and when editing any page. (T284642)
The limit on the number of emails a user can send per day has been made global instead of per-wiki to help prevent abuse. (T293866)
The already authorized standard discretionary sanctions for all pages relating to the Horn of Africa (defined as including Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and adjoining areas if involved in related disputes), broadly construed, have been made permanent.
"Knowledge Based Multilingual Language Model" Using the Wikidata to build the language models that not only memorize the factual knowledge but also learn useful logical patterns. (Liu et al, 2021)
Videos
Summary of Transbordados, the pre-WikidataCon conference organized by Wiki Movimento Brasil (in Brazilian Portuguese)
Tool of the week
Weaviate big graph (source) is a vectorised search engine which returns similar items in Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikimedia Deutschland is running a survey to evaluate Wikibase Installation and Updating experience for users. Please answer a few questions so we can continue to identify areas of improvement for users. Survey links
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
MediaWiki 1.38-wmf.11 was scheduled to be deployed on some wikis last week. The deployment was delayed because of unexpected problems.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 December. It will be on all wikis from 9 December (calendar).
At all Wikipedias, a Mentor Dashboard is now available at Special:MentorDashboard. It allows registered mentors, who take care of newcomers' first steps, to monitor their assigned newcomers' activity. It is part of the Growth features. You can learn more about activating the mentor list on your wiki and about the mentor dashboard project.
The predecessor to the current MediaWiki Action API (which was created in 2008), action=ajax, will be removed this week. Any scripts or bots using it will need to switch to the corresponding API module. [324]
An old ResourceLoader module, jquery.jStorage, which was deprecated in 2016, will be removed this week. Any scripts or bots using it will need to switch to mediawiki.storage instead. [325]
Ukraine report: Aricle contest for librarians «Local cultural heritage and prominent people»
USA report: Smithsonian demos new Wiki API Connector tool and other meetups
Content Partnerships Hub report: We continue building for the hub; SDC for fun and profit: detecting bad coordinates; Needs assessment – video recorded interviews; Improving ISA
WMF GLAM report: Wikisource birthday celebration, Community Tech Wishlist, and upcoming conversation about courses for GLAM professionals
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Lightning talks on WikiProject Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, Wikidata use for a site-specific archaeological case study (Dura-Europos, Syria), and round tripping Wikidata into Alma using Alma Refine. Agenda, Dec. 14th.
Lukas Schmelzeisen, Corina Dima, Steffen Staab: "Wikidated 1.0: An Evolving Knowledge Graph Dataset of Wikidata's Revision History", https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05003v1
"ARTchives: a Linked Open Data native catalogue of art historians’ archive" crowdsourcing curated information on notable art historians’ archives (including Wikidata) - paper, tool
embeds.js: This script shows embeds on external identifier statements such as YouTube videos, Twitter tweets, Spotify playlists, Genius lyrics, and more!
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 are now default short aliases for the "Project:" namespace on most wikis. E.g. On Wikibooks wikis, [[WB:]] will go to the local language default for the [[Project:]] namespace. This change is intended to help the smaller communities have easy access to this feature. Additional local aliases can still be requested via the usual process. [326]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 December. It will be on all wikis from 16 December (calendar).
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 GMT on Thursday 30th December 2021 (17:00 Berlin time). This month we will have a guest presentation by the team at The Semantic Lab at Pratt Institute. They will present how they are using Linked Open Data (LOD) in their projects with the help of Wikibase. All are welcome!
The 500th Wikidata weekly summary is 2 issues away. We are putting together interesting things related to the number 500 to include in that issue. Do you know any Wikidata facts or queries or anything cool related to 500? Please add them to Wikidata:Status updates/Next#Welcome to the 500th Weekly Summary!
Wikimedia Deutschland is running a survey to evaluate Wikibase Installation and Updating experience for users. Please answer a few questions so we can continue to identify areas of improvement for users. Survey links
Due to the winter holidays, the development team is taking a break and no deployment is happening for Wikidata at the moment. Happy holidays, everyone :)
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 10 January 2022.
Recent changes
Queries made by the DynamicPageList extension (<DynamicPageList>) are now only allowed to run for 10 seconds and error if they take longer. This is in response to multiple outages where long-running queries caused an outage on all wikis. [327]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
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 February. [328]
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 GMT on Thursday 30th December 2021 (17:00 Berlin time). This month we will have a guest presentation by the team at The Semantic Lab at Pratt Institute. They will present how they are using Linked Open Data (LOD) in their projects with the help of Wikibase. All are welcome!
Wikidata. Lecture - master class in Russian is 16:07 GMT on Sunday 26th December 2021 (19:07 Moscow time) in Minsk Hackerspace. For those who are not familiar and want to know what it is.
Articles created by country of citizenship : a javascript notebook which looks at the distribution of articles created by a user by country of citizenship (P27). It uses Wikidata's API through wikibase-sdk library.
If you are using the Modern Vector skin on Wikidata then search might break for you near the end of January for a few days. To fix it you can temporarily switch back to the Vector skin. A proper fix is being worked on in phab:T275251.
Wikimedia Deutschland is running a survey to evaluate Wikibase Installation and Updating experience for users. Please answer a few questions so we can continue to identify areas of improvement for users. Survey links
or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages.
Hi User:PutriAmalia1991. You really are a special girl. I have seen guys pretending to be girls on discussion forums before, ostensibly trying to cozy up to men online under the guise of needing "help", but you win the prize. Your editing pattern shows that you are far from new to Wikipedia and have nothing to contribute here. Why don't you please just move on with your farce? I try not to personally attack others on Wikipedia, but I'm making an exception just for you. Don't delude yourself, dude. Anyone can see your contributions page. Why waste your time here when catfish abound on other websites? Happy fishing.--Quisqualis (talk) 20:05, 15 January 2020 (UTC)but I really am a girl, I REALLY NEED YOUR HELP, I will prove it to you --the special girl is me (talk) 23:15, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
Guideline and policy news
Technical news
Arbitration
Miscellaneous
Hello, I'm OnePt618. I wanted to let you know that I reverted one of your recent contributions —specifically this edit to Wikipedia:Reference desk/Entertainment—because it did not appear constructive. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. If you have any questions, you can ask for assistance at the Help desk. Thanks. -- φ OnePt618Talk φ 06:40, 2 February 2020 (UTC)
You are requesting a great deal of other editors' time and assistance, but not making constructive contributions to the encyclopedia. I'd suggest that you start making some simple edits, like fixing typos, and learn by doing; I find this usually works better than learning by instruction anyway. If you want explicit guidance, please read some of Wikipedia's truly absurd number of new-editor guides; Help:Getting started links to many of them. You can also look up specific topics you need help with as you go along, or just copy the style and format you see in other articles. Please ask only specific question, about specific edits, not general ones. Please don't ask for help again unless you have put more effort into the editing you want help with than the assisting editor will need to put into replying to you. Otherwise you are a net time sink for Wikipedia; if you are not working to improve the encyclopedia, you may be blocked from editing. Thanks! HLHJ (talk) 20:11, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 February. It will be on all wikis from 27 February (calendar).
Administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Oversight changes
CaptainEek • Creffett • Cwmhiraeth
Anna Frodesiak • Buckshot06 • Ronhjones • SQL
Jackmcbarn
There'sNoTime → TheresNoTime
Interface administrator changes
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Quotations related to Calvin Coolidge at Wikiquote
berd-bw.de
