This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the
current talk page.
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.
[1]
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.
[2]
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.
[3]
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.
[4][5]
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.
[6]
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.
[7]
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.
[8]
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)
Hi everyone. As I noted in the last issue, I received a grant last year from the WMF to develop the global watchlist script into an extension.
That extension has now been deployed on Meta. Visit
m:Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings to get started.
That grant has ended, and I have requested another grant to continue development of the extension, and figured subscribers of the newsletter about the user script might be interested. You can see and comment on the grant request at
m:Grants:Project/DannyS712/Continued work on GlobalWatchlist extension - if you support this, I hope you'll consider endorsing the request.
Thanks, --
DannyS712 (
talk) 00:28, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
Past: Wikidata - HackaLOD Online sessions (
replay in Dutch)
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.
[9][10]
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.
[11][12][13]
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.
[14]
The
latest version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis last week. There was no Tech News issue last week.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for
technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in two weeks. You can comment
in Phabricator if you have objections.
Working with Zotero on WiKidata (in Italian) -
YouTube
Tool of the week
User:So9q/AddNewLexemeMenu.js is a userscript that adds a section to the sidebar with links for creating new lexemes.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
WMDE built two tools to help editors get a better understanding of the quality of Wikidata's data in a specific area of interest. Try them out and let us know what you think.
Collaborative translation of Cita is now
available on translatewiki.net.
Cita is a Wikidata addon that adds citations metadata support to Zotero, using
cites work (P2860) information from Wikidata, and enabling users to easily contribute missing data. Cita is currently under development with a WikiCite grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, and presentation workshops will be held on May 27th (Spanish) and May 31st (English). More info and pre-registration
here.
RaiseWikibase is a tool for speeding up multilingual knowledge graph construction with Wikibase. Among other features, it can be utilized to create a mini Wikibase instance with Wikidata properties in a few minutes.
wbeditentity now supports editing statements on Senses (
phab:T199896)
We added syntax highlighting for viewing Entity Schema pages. There is not syntax highlighting for editing of Entity Schemas yet. (
phab:T238831)
Improved the way Lua deals with redirects (
phab:T238831)
Worked on making it possible to add a title to the top of a query visualization via a comment in the SPARQL code (
phab:T225883)
Discussed how to get persistent storage of constraint violations unstuck as this is a prerequisite to making it easier to analyze and query constraint violations (
phab:T214362)
Discussed a high-level plan for how to move forward with checking Wikidata's data against 3rd-party databases
Finished work on version 1 of the Query Builder. Not it is awaiting security review before we can deploy it.
Take a list of cities in your country, add {{
Item documentation}} in the talk page and have fun looking at people born in this place ordered by number of sitelinks. You may have some surprises!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Templates have parameters that can have specific values. It is possible to suggest values for editors with
TemplateData. You can soon see them as a drop-down list in the visual editor. This is to help template users find the right values faster.
[15][16][17]
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.
[19]
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.
[20][21]
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.
[22]
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.
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.
[28]
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.
[29]
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
[30] Boston Rock City: Explore Wikidata and Learn About Local Music: Boston Public Library is partnering with Harvard Library for a guided exploration of Wikidata and local music history. Join us for two days of music and Wikidata editing; no prior experience or punk cred necessary! This public event is free to all and will take place via Zoom; please register in advance. The subject of this project is the Arthur Freedman Collection, and audiovisual archive that captures over four decades of Boston rock music performances. We’ll provide: instructions, tools, data sources, visualizations, optional Discord chat, and a soundtrack. If you have questions, please contact Harvard Library staff member Peter Laurence at laurenc@fas.harvard.edu.
Template:Annotate QID (currently on en. & de.Wikisource) allows names and other terms in texts to be semantically annotated with the equivalent QIDs. sv.Wikisource has
a similar template.
Wikimedia Foundation
2021 Board Elections has been announced. Please sign-up as an
Election Volunteer if you'd like to support the elections. Election Volunteers serve as a bridge between the Elections Committee, the facilitation team and the movement.
Fixed the
entity usage dashboards that no longer showed data due to technical issues. It tracks how much data from Wikidata is used on the other Wikimedia projects. (
phab:T279762)
Configured the Property Suggester to not suggest Google Knowledge Graph ID (P2671) and Wolfram Language entity code (P4839) (
phab:T280779)
Investigated remaining issue with updating the page_props table on the client wikis, which is confusing some bots making use of that table (
phab:T280627)
Fixed an issue in the Query Builder where it got confused when adding several conditions with the same Property (
phab:T279945)
Working on tracking the number of edits per namespace over time (
phab:T281356)
Working on fixing a bug where old revisions of Items have edit buttons but should not (
phab:T281587)
Fixing an issue where value suggestions are not showing all values that are defined in the property constraint (
phab:T280650)
#1Lib1Ref Campaign in Italy, as part of the IFLA Wikidata Working Group campaign (May 15 - June 5); more than 10k references have already been added (see the
dashboard for more details)
Wikidata-related projects that have been developed/improved during the
Wikimedia Hackathon 2021:
User:Lucas_Werkmeister/Ranker - Finished and announced the batch modes for the Ranker tool, allowing users to edit the ranks of statements in Wikidata or Structured Data on Commons in bulk
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Wikimedia movement has been using
IRC on a network called
Freenode. There have been changes around who is in control of the network. The
Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts have
decided to move to the new
Libera Chat network instead. This is not a formal decision for the movement to move all channels but most Wikimedia IRC channels will probably leave Freenode. There is a
migration guide and ongoing Wikimedia
discussions about this.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 May. It will be on all wikis from 27 May (
calendar).
SPARQL queries
live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, June 1 at 18:00 CEST
Next Linked Data for Libraries
LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Affinity Group Co-facilitators will recap the last year, introduce plans for the coming year, and receive suggestions from the community for future sessions.;
[31], 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.
[32]
FoldArchives collapses archived talk page threads in order to reduce screen space
GoToTitle converts the page title into an input field for navigating to other pages
UserHighlighter adds highlighting to links to the userpages, talk pages, and contributions of administrators and other user groups as well as tooltips to indicate which groups a user is in
filterDiff: Adds a "Show changes" button to the filter editor.
filterNotes: Parses filter notes as wikitext (so links are clickable), and signs and dates new comments for you.
filterTest: Adds a "Test changes" button. Opens
Special:AbuseFilter/test with what's currently in the edit form, not with what's saved in the database, so you don't have to copy-paste your changes.
Twinkle has a number of improvements, including that most watchlist defaults now make use of the new
temporary watchlist feature. Other changes include rollbacks treating consecutive IPv6 editors in the same /64 range as the same user, adding a preview for shared IP tagging, a preference for watching users after CSD notification, and for sysops, the ability to
block the /64 and link to a
WP:RfPP request, and new copyright blocks default to indefinite.
Wikipedia:Shortdesc helper now v3.4.17, changes include minor fixes and preventing edits that don't change the description.
Joeytje50's JWB now version 4.1.0, includes the ability to generate page lists from the search tool, major updates to the handling of regular expressions, the storing of user settings, the addition of upload protection, and an option to skip pages that belong to a specific category, among other changes. See
User:Joeytje50/JWB/Changelog for a full list of recent changes.
Wikipedia:User scripts/List has been revamped to make it easier to find scripts suited for your needs. If you know of a cool script that is missing on the list, or a script on the list that is no longer working, please edit the list or let us know on
the talk page.
My apologies for this long-overdue issue, and if I missed any scripts. Hopefully going forward we can go back to monthly releases - any help would be appreciated. Thanks, --
DannyS712 (
talk) 13:04, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
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.
[33][34][35]
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.
[36]
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.
[37][38]
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the
current talk page.
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.
[1]
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.
[2]
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.
[3]
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.
[4][5]
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.
[6]
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.
[7]
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.
[8]
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)
Hi everyone. As I noted in the last issue, I received a grant last year from the WMF to develop the global watchlist script into an extension.
That extension has now been deployed on Meta. Visit
m:Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings to get started.
That grant has ended, and I have requested another grant to continue development of the extension, and figured subscribers of the newsletter about the user script might be interested. You can see and comment on the grant request at
m:Grants:Project/DannyS712/Continued work on GlobalWatchlist extension - if you support this, I hope you'll consider endorsing the request.
Thanks, --
DannyS712 (
talk) 00:28, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
Past: Wikidata - HackaLOD Online sessions (
replay in Dutch)
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.
[9][10]
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.
[11][12][13]
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.
[14]
The
latest version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis last week. There was no Tech News issue last week.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for
technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in two weeks. You can comment
in Phabricator if you have objections.
Working with Zotero on WiKidata (in Italian) -
YouTube
Tool of the week
User:So9q/AddNewLexemeMenu.js is a userscript that adds a section to the sidebar with links for creating new lexemes.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
WMDE built two tools to help editors get a better understanding of the quality of Wikidata's data in a specific area of interest. Try them out and let us know what you think.
Collaborative translation of Cita is now
available on translatewiki.net.
Cita is a Wikidata addon that adds citations metadata support to Zotero, using
cites work (P2860) information from Wikidata, and enabling users to easily contribute missing data. Cita is currently under development with a WikiCite grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, and presentation workshops will be held on May 27th (Spanish) and May 31st (English). More info and pre-registration
here.
RaiseWikibase is a tool for speeding up multilingual knowledge graph construction with Wikibase. Among other features, it can be utilized to create a mini Wikibase instance with Wikidata properties in a few minutes.
wbeditentity now supports editing statements on Senses (
phab:T199896)
We added syntax highlighting for viewing Entity Schema pages. There is not syntax highlighting for editing of Entity Schemas yet. (
phab:T238831)
Improved the way Lua deals with redirects (
phab:T238831)
Worked on making it possible to add a title to the top of a query visualization via a comment in the SPARQL code (
phab:T225883)
Discussed how to get persistent storage of constraint violations unstuck as this is a prerequisite to making it easier to analyze and query constraint violations (
phab:T214362)
Discussed a high-level plan for how to move forward with checking Wikidata's data against 3rd-party databases
Finished work on version 1 of the Query Builder. Not it is awaiting security review before we can deploy it.
Take a list of cities in your country, add {{
Item documentation}} in the talk page and have fun looking at people born in this place ordered by number of sitelinks. You may have some surprises!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Templates have parameters that can have specific values. It is possible to suggest values for editors with
TemplateData. You can soon see them as a drop-down list in the visual editor. This is to help template users find the right values faster.
[15][16][17]
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.
[19]
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.
[20][21]
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.
[22]
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.
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.
[28]
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.
[29]
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
[30] Boston Rock City: Explore Wikidata and Learn About Local Music: Boston Public Library is partnering with Harvard Library for a guided exploration of Wikidata and local music history. Join us for two days of music and Wikidata editing; no prior experience or punk cred necessary! This public event is free to all and will take place via Zoom; please register in advance. The subject of this project is the Arthur Freedman Collection, and audiovisual archive that captures over four decades of Boston rock music performances. We’ll provide: instructions, tools, data sources, visualizations, optional Discord chat, and a soundtrack. If you have questions, please contact Harvard Library staff member Peter Laurence at laurenc@fas.harvard.edu.
Template:Annotate QID (currently on en. & de.Wikisource) allows names and other terms in texts to be semantically annotated with the equivalent QIDs. sv.Wikisource has
a similar template.
Wikimedia Foundation
2021 Board Elections has been announced. Please sign-up as an
Election Volunteer if you'd like to support the elections. Election Volunteers serve as a bridge between the Elections Committee, the facilitation team and the movement.
Fixed the
entity usage dashboards that no longer showed data due to technical issues. It tracks how much data from Wikidata is used on the other Wikimedia projects. (
phab:T279762)
Configured the Property Suggester to not suggest Google Knowledge Graph ID (P2671) and Wolfram Language entity code (P4839) (
phab:T280779)
Investigated remaining issue with updating the page_props table on the client wikis, which is confusing some bots making use of that table (
phab:T280627)
Fixed an issue in the Query Builder where it got confused when adding several conditions with the same Property (
phab:T279945)
Working on tracking the number of edits per namespace over time (
phab:T281356)
Working on fixing a bug where old revisions of Items have edit buttons but should not (
phab:T281587)
Fixing an issue where value suggestions are not showing all values that are defined in the property constraint (
phab:T280650)
#1Lib1Ref Campaign in Italy, as part of the IFLA Wikidata Working Group campaign (May 15 - June 5); more than 10k references have already been added (see the
dashboard for more details)
Wikidata-related projects that have been developed/improved during the
Wikimedia Hackathon 2021:
User:Lucas_Werkmeister/Ranker - Finished and announced the batch modes for the Ranker tool, allowing users to edit the ranks of statements in Wikidata or Structured Data on Commons in bulk
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Wikimedia movement has been using
IRC on a network called
Freenode. There have been changes around who is in control of the network. The
Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts have
decided to move to the new
Libera Chat network instead. This is not a formal decision for the movement to move all channels but most Wikimedia IRC channels will probably leave Freenode. There is a
migration guide and ongoing Wikimedia
discussions about this.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 May. It will be on all wikis from 27 May (
calendar).
SPARQL queries
live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, June 1 at 18:00 CEST
Next Linked Data for Libraries
LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Affinity Group Co-facilitators will recap the last year, introduce plans for the coming year, and receive suggestions from the community for future sessions.;
[31], 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.
[32]
FoldArchives collapses archived talk page threads in order to reduce screen space
GoToTitle converts the page title into an input field for navigating to other pages
UserHighlighter adds highlighting to links to the userpages, talk pages, and contributions of administrators and other user groups as well as tooltips to indicate which groups a user is in
filterDiff: Adds a "Show changes" button to the filter editor.
filterNotes: Parses filter notes as wikitext (so links are clickable), and signs and dates new comments for you.
filterTest: Adds a "Test changes" button. Opens
Special:AbuseFilter/test with what's currently in the edit form, not with what's saved in the database, so you don't have to copy-paste your changes.
Twinkle has a number of improvements, including that most watchlist defaults now make use of the new
temporary watchlist feature. Other changes include rollbacks treating consecutive IPv6 editors in the same /64 range as the same user, adding a preview for shared IP tagging, a preference for watching users after CSD notification, and for sysops, the ability to
block the /64 and link to a
WP:RfPP request, and new copyright blocks default to indefinite.
Wikipedia:Shortdesc helper now v3.4.17, changes include minor fixes and preventing edits that don't change the description.
Joeytje50's JWB now version 4.1.0, includes the ability to generate page lists from the search tool, major updates to the handling of regular expressions, the storing of user settings, the addition of upload protection, and an option to skip pages that belong to a specific category, among other changes. See
User:Joeytje50/JWB/Changelog for a full list of recent changes.
Wikipedia:User scripts/List has been revamped to make it easier to find scripts suited for your needs. If you know of a cool script that is missing on the list, or a script on the list that is no longer working, please edit the list or let us know on
the talk page.
My apologies for this long-overdue issue, and if I missed any scripts. Hopefully going forward we can go back to monthly releases - any help would be appreciated. Thanks, --
DannyS712 (
talk) 13:04, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
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.
[33][34][35]
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.
[36]
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.
[37][38]