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 next
Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 19th April 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the
Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Next Linked Data for Libraries
LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call, Tuesday, April 14, 2023 - Indigenous Artists and Wikidata: Report launch and discussion.
Agenda.
Christos started a Wikibase to collect and organise existing research-related resources about Wikibase. Feel free to add to it.
researchwb.wikibase.cloud
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on creating the new datatype that allows linking to EntitySchemas in statements. It will be available on test systems next. (
phab:T332139)
QueryBuilder: We are putting finishing touches on the language selector so you can switch the UI language of the Query Builder. (
phab:T328764)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on making it possible to create or replace labels and descriptions in a iven language. (
phab:T323813)
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 see
nearby articles on a Kartographer map with the button for the new feature "Show nearby articles". Six wikis have been testing this feature since October.
[1][2]
At Wikimedia Commons, some thumbnails have not been getting replaced correctly after a new version of the image is uploaded. This should be fixed later this week.
[4][5]
For the last few weeks, some external tools had inconsistent problems with logging-in with OAuth. This has now been fixed.
[6]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 April. It will be on all wikis from 20 April (
calendar).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour April 24, 2023: Would you like to know how to join and use Telegram? Two regular Wikidata Telegram users will provide an introduction to Telegram and its available Wikidata channels. They will discuss how they use it, how it can provide help with Wikidata work, and how it can facilitate connections with other Wikidata users
Event page
User:Nikki/colour icons.css - is a Userscript to add colour to the editing icons. It uses green for add/save, yellow for edit, red for remove, orange for cancel and blue for help.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The
Wikibase newbie docs are here (to help to onboard new Wikibase users easier).
REST API: We continued work on making it possible to create or replace a label, or a description in a given language (
phab:T323813)
EntitySchemas: We continued working on the new datatype for linking to EntitySchemas. It is now available on beta in a very bare-bones version but not ready for wider testing yet. (
phab:T332139)
Ontology issues: We are evaluating the results of the survey we ran earlier this year.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Due to security issues with the
Graph extension, graphs have been disabled in all Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Foundation teams are working to respond to these vulnerabilities.
[8]
For a few days, it was not possible to save some kinds of edits on the mobile version of a wiki. This has been fixed.
[9][10][11]
Changes later this week
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on April 26. This is planned for
14:00 UTC.
[12]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 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.
The
Video2commons tool has been updated. This fixed several bugs related to YouTube uploads.
[16]
The
Special:Preferences page has been redesigned on mobile web. The new design makes it easier to browse the different categories and settings at low screen widths. You can also now access the page via a link in the Settings menu in the mobile web sidebar.
[17]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 May. It will be on all wikis from 4 May (
calendar).
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
ForgesBot (Task: Add licensing information to software forges entries in accordance to what is found in the corresponding Wikipedia page. It is used as a helper in the context of the
Forges project)
Next Linked Data for Libraries
LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 2, 2023: Fudie Zhao will be presenting on Wikidata in Digital Humanities projects.
Agenda
WeChangEd is an ERC-funded research project and online database by Ghent University, about women editors in Europe. The database shows stories about women editors and their publications, and is powered by Wikidata and
Sciencestories.io.
A
request for comment about removing administrative privileges in specified situations is open for feedback.
Technical news
Progress has started on the
Page Triage improvement project. This is to address the concerns raised by the community in their
2022 WMF letter that requested improvements be made to the tool.
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
Last week, Community Tech released the first update for providing
better diffs, the #1 request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey.
This update adds legends and tooltips to inline diffs so that users unfamiliar with the blue and yellow highlights can better understand the type of edits made.
When you close an image that is displayed via MediaViewer, it will now return to the wiki page instead of going back in your browser history. This feature request was
voted #65 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
[18]
The
SyntaxHighlight extension now supports wikitext as a selected language. Old alternatives that were used to highlight wikitext, such as html5, moin, and html+handlebars, can now be replaced.
[19]
Graph Extension update: Foundation developers have completed upgrading the visualization software to Vega5. Existing community graphs based on Vega2 are no longer compatible. Communities need to update local graphs and templates, and shared lua modules like
de:Modul:Graph. The
Vega Porting guide provides the most comprehensive detail on migration from Vega2 and
here is an example migration. Vega5 has currently just been enabled on mediawiki.org to provide a test environment for communities.
[21]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (
calendar).
Until now, all new OAuth apps went through manual review. Starting this week, apps using identification-only or basic authorizations will not require review.
[22]
There will be an
A/B test on 10 Wikipedias where the Vector 2022 skin is the default skin. Half of logged-in desktop users will see an interface where the different parts of the page are more clearly separated. You can
read more.
[24][25]
jquery.tipsy will be removed from the MediaWiki core. This will affect some user scripts. Many lines with .tipsy( can be commented out. OO.ui.PopupWidget can be used to keep things working like they are now. You can
read more and
read about how to find broken scripts.
[26]
EntitySchemas: We've continued work on the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements. (
phab:T214884)
Converted a number of Properties from string to external ID datatype (
phab:T334450)
mul language code: We've worked on preparing the special pages related to labels, descriptions and aliases for the new language code. (
phab:T330193,
phab:T329626)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the ability to modify labels of an Item using the HTTP PATCH method. (
phab:T332739).
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
Citations that are automatically generated based on
ISBN are currently broken. This affects citations made with the
VisualEditor Automatic tab, and the use of the citoid API in gadgets and user scripts. Work is ongoing to restore this feature.
[27]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 May. It will be on all wikis from 18 May (
calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "
Add a link" (Gorontalo Wikipedia, Hausa Wikipedia, Hakka Chinese Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Fiji Hindi Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Upper Sorbian Wikipedia, Haitian Creole Wikipedia, Interlingua Wikipedia, Interlingue Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Iloko Wikipedia, Ingush Wikipedia, Ido Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Inuktitut Wikipedia, Jamaican Patois Wikipedia, Javanese Wikipedia). This is part of the
progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can
configure how this feature works locally.
[28]
Gadget and userscript developers should replace jquery.cookie with mediawiki.cookie. The jquery.cookie library will be removed in ~1 month, and staff developers will run a script to replace any remaining uses at that time.
[29]
Wikimedia Deutschland is launching a laptop donation program to support Wikidata contributors with limited access to technology. If you've been actively contributing to Wikidata for at least a year, you can request a free laptop to support your work.
WMDE Hardware Donation Program#Applying
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
improved impact module will be available at Wikipedias. The impact module is a feature available to newcomers
at their personal homepage. It will show their number of edits, how many readers their edited pages have, how many thanks they have received and similar things. It is also accessible by accessing Special:Impact.
[31]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (
calendar).
Next Linked Data for Libraries
LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 30, 2023: We will discuss results from our community survey on advocacy for Wikidata in libraries and hear from community members Mary Aycock, Steve Baskauf and Eric Willey about their experiences with advocacy and gaining support for Wikidata work within their respective libraries.
Agenda
TalkPageHeader.js shows the talk page header for languages other than English.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The libraries of the London School of Economics and the University of York have collaborated to produce a toolkit for uploading research theses metadata to Wikidata.
Full announcement and access to the toolkit
The contents of most Wikimedia Cloud Services Wiki Replicas are out-of-date owing to large & increasing replication lag; see
https://replag.toolforge.org/ &
Phab T337446. Exercise caution using data from any tools that have a dependency on these databases.
ISCED category orientation (International Standard Classification of Education category (based on focus/orientation) applicable to an educational program)
Learning outcome (specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that students are expected to acquire as a result of participating in a particular education program)
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
Citations can once again be added automatically from ISBNs, thanks to Zotero's ISBN searches. The current data sources are the Library of Congress (United States), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (French National Library), and K10plus ISBN (German repository). Additional data source searches can be
proposed to Zotero. The ISBN labels in the
VisualEditor Automatic tab will reappear later this week.
[32]
For a few days earlier this month, the "Add interlanguage link" item in the Tools menu did not work properly. This has now been fixed.
[34]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 May. It will be on all wikis from 1 June (
calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on
small and
medium wikis this week. Large wikis will follow in the coming weeks. This is part of the effort to move Parsoid into MediaWiki core. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here.
[35]
Following
an RfC, editors indefinitely site-banned by
community consensus will now have all rights, including sysop, removed.
As a part of the Wikimedia Foundation's
IP Masking project, a
new policy has been created that governs the access to temporary account IP addresses. An
associated FAQ has been created and individual communities can increase the requirements to view temporary account IP addresses.
Technical news
Bot operators and tool maintainers should schedule time in the coming months to test and update their tools for the effects of
IP masking. IP masking will not be deployed to any content wiki until at least October 2023 and is unlikely to be deployed to the English Wikipedia until some time in 2024.
Arbitration
The arbitration case World War II and the history of Jews in Poland has been closed. The topic area of Polish history during World War II (1933-1945) and the history of Jews in Poland is subject to a "reliable source consensus-required" contentious topic restriction.
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
RealMe extension allows you to mark URLs on your user page as verified for Mastodon and similar software.
Previously, clicking on someone else's link to Recent Changes with filters applied within the URL could unintentionally change your preference for "Group results by page". This has now been fixed.
[37]
Problems
For a few days last week, some tools and bots returned outdated information due to database replication problems, and may have been down entirely while it was being fixed. These issues have now been fixed.
[38]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (
calendar).
Bots will no longer be prevented from making edits because of URLs that match the
spam blacklist.
[39]
Introduction workshop about Wikidata for employees of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB, national library of the Netherlands), to make them more familiar and self-reliant with Wikidata - 6 June 2023, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, The Netherlands -
Slides (in Dutch) on Commons.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour June 5, 2023: In collaboration with the Black Bibliography Project, we will be adding metadata for undescribed or under-described African-American women authors listed in The Pen Is Ours: a Listing of Writings by and about African-American Women before 1910, compiled by Jean Fagan Yellin and Cynthia D. Bond.
Event page
Registration has opened for the
workshop on mathematical research data taking place on 9-11 October 2023 in Leipzig. Talks, demos and lightning talks can be suggested, including Wikidata-related ones.
Tool of the week
IdentifierInput makes it easier to add identifier properties by letting you put in the full url and then stripping it down to just the identifier for you.
beforehand owned by (person or institution that owned the subject just before stated event. Meant to be used as qualifier of "significant event (P793)" for events like sales, auctions, gifts, etc)
afterward owned by (person or institution that owned the subject after stated event. Meant to be used as qualifier of "significant event (P793)" for events like sales, auctions, gifts, etc)
solubility product constant (equilibrium constant for a sparingly soluble solid chemical substance dissolved in an aqueous solution)
funded by grant (title or name of the grant funding this item)
Wikibase REST API: We finished the new endpoint for patching labels (
phab:T332739). We also started work on the new endpoint for retrieving Property data (
phab:T337720)
Client wikis: We drastically reduced the size of a ResourceLoader module that’s loaded on most Wikipedia page views (
phab:334682)
Language code: With awesome help from Nikki, we improved documentation for how to add language codes to Wikibase/Wikidata (
phab:T335857)
EntitySchemas: We are getting the new datatype ready for testing.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call June 13, 2023: Helen Williams will discuss her work with Wikidata at the London School of Economics
Agenda
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
Search Preview panel has been deployed on four Wikipedias (Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian and Norwegian). The panel will show an image related to the article (if existing), the top sections of the article, related images (coming from MediaSearch on Commons), and eventually the sister projects associated with the article.
[41]
The
RealMe extension now allows administrators to verify URLs for any page, for Mastodon and similar software.
[42]
The default project license
has been officially upgraded to CC BY-SA 4.0. The software interface messages have been updated. Communities should feel free to start updating any mentions of the old CC BY-SA 3.0 licensing within policies and related documentation pages.
[43]
Problems
For three days last month, some Wikipedia pages edited with VisualEditor or DiscussionTools had an unintended __TOC__ (or its localized form) added during an edit. There is
a listing of affected pages sorted by wiki, that may still need to be fixed.
[44]
Currently, the "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is broken. Existing {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords incorrectly appear as missing templates in VisualEditor. Developers are exploring how to fix this. In the meantime, those wishing to edit the default sortkey of a page are advised to switch to source editing.
[45]
Last week, an update to the delete form may have broken some gadgets or user scripts. If you need to manipulate (empty) the reason field, replace #wpReason with #wpReason > input. See
an example fix.
[46]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (
calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on English Wikipedia on Monday, and all other
large wikis on Thursday. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here.
[47]
Future changes
From 5 June to 17 July, the Foundation's
Security team is holding a consultation with contributors regarding a draft policy to govern the use of third-party resources in volunteer-developed gadgets and scripts. Feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome at
Third-party resources policy on meta-wiki.
The role of Wikidata within the research lifecycle, Wednesday 21 June, 10am BST (UTC+1), online event hosted by the University of York, UK. International participation is welcome, despite "available to White Rose institutions only" on the booking page.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour June 23, 2023: Returning to Podcasts, we will be working on creating podcast episode pages. We will discuss how this episodic content can be transferred to other serialized items. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own project to work on
Event page
Webinar: Common European Data Space for cultural heritage (The ontology of Wikidata, how to interact with it for a better quality). Tuesday 20th June 2023, from 3.00 p,.m. to 5.00 p.m. CET.
Register
Mapping Diversity is a platform that utilizes Wikidata to discover key facts about diversity and representation in street names across Europe. E.g. 59% of the streets and squares in Paris are named after people. Of those, 8.9% are named after women.
mul language code: We've continued working on making the mobile termbox (labels, descriptions, aliases) ready for the new language code. (
phab:T329644,
phab:T338302,
phab:T329655,
phab:T316767)
Vector 2022 skin: We are fixing an issue with the bolding of results in the main search suggester. (
phab:T327510)
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
Flame graphs are now available in WikimediaDebug.
[48][49]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
There is now a toolbar search popup in the visual editor. You can trigger it by typing \ or pressing ctrl + shift + p. It can help you quickly access most tools in the editor.
[50][51]
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 Action API modules and Special:LinkSearch will now add a trailing / to all prop=extlinks responses for bare domains. This is part of the work to remove duplication in the externallinks database table.
[52]
Problems
Last week, search was broken on Commons and Wikidata for 23 hours.
[53][54]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (
calendar).
The Minerva skin now applies more predefined styles to the .mbox-text CSS class. This enables support for mbox templates that use divs instead of tables. Please make sure that the new styles won't affect other templates in your wiki.
[55][56]
Gadgets will now load on both desktop and mobile by default. Previously, gadgets loaded only on desktop by default. Changing this default using the |targets= parameter is also deprecated and should not be used. You should make gadgets work on mobile or disable them based on the skin (with the |skins= parameter in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition) rather than whether the user uses the mobile or the desktop website. Popular gadgets that create errors on mobile will be disabled by developers on the Minerva skin as a temporary solution.
[57]
All namespace tabs now have the same browser
access key by default. Previously, custom and extension-defined namespaces would have to have their access keys set manually on-wiki, but that is no longer necessary.
[58]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship:
Wolverène (RfP scheduled to end after 2 July 2023 18:46 UTC)
Closed request for adminship:
Vargenau (successful) Welcome onboard \o/
New requests for permissions/Bot:
RomesfulImporterBot (Task: Creating and updating Russian Lexemes by transferring information from the
Russian Wiktionary)
The next
Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 12th July 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the
Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
re:publica 2023 - Peer learning methods and Open Educational Resources (OER) on Wikidata for a viable digital culture of remembrance (in German) -
YouTube
Workshop - Aligning Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry ontologies with Wikidata -
YouTube
Managing conflations and duplications of personal items in Wikidata, National Library of Greece -
YouTube
Why Wikidata in Linked Data and Libraries (in Greek)-
YouTube
Adding metadata utilities in the Koha staff interface based on Wikidata -
YouTube
From authority control to identity management -
YouTube
DSI Webinar - The ontology of Wikidata: how to interact with it for a better quality -
YouTube
Wikidata as a tool for biocuration of cell types, Biocuration Conference 2023 -
YouTube
Webinar: Wikidata, a useful knowledge base for any study -
YouTube
KGC '23 Talk — The Error Is The Message: Extracting Insights From Deceptive Data for Nazi-Looted Art -
YouTube
TU Berlin research group "
The Restitution of Knowledge" are exploring the use of Wikidata to build a Linked Open Data (LOD) project that maps German colonial military expeditions into Africa. Interested in getting involved or learning more about their project? Reach out on the project's talk page:
Wikidata:WikiProject TheRoK/Data Models.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship:
koavf 3 (RfP scheduled to end after 8 July 2023 13:16 UTC)
Closed request for adminship:
Wolverène Welcome onboard \o/
New requests for permissions/Bot:
UrbanBot (Task: UrbanBot's task is to mass-add English descriptions to items that don't have one)
Closed request for permissions/Bot:
RomesfulImporterBot (Task: Creating and updating Russian Lexemes by transferring information from the
Russian Wiktionary)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour July 7, 2023: Let's collaborate to upgrade our community infrastructure! We'll transfer notes and content from Google Docs to our WikiProject subpages. We'll be practicing our Wiki markup skills and learning to manage Wikidata Project pages
Event page
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #99,
Breast milk (Challenge started on 2023-07-03 12:01:21)
m:User:Base/Scripts/HaveWikibaseLabelLowercased.js - is a Userscript that adds an arrow next to the main label (page title) which upon double click (a tap and a confirmation on touch devices) automatically makes the label's first letter lowercase for the current interface language. If there was already a matching alias it gets removed.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The
WikidataCon 2023 call for proposals is running until July 31st. If you have questions or need advice before sending a program proposal, join the program team during one of the office hour sessions (online or in Taiwan, in Chinese or in English).
More information
Nigerian registered company (RC) id (RC number (Registration Number), identifier assigned to a business by the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) in Nigeria)
Cent cols (A property to link Wikidata entries to the dedicated pages of each pass by the Cent Cols)
WikiProject Scotland's Accused Witches aims at producing structured data documenting witchhunts, and prosecuted Scotland's accused witches on Wikidata using the University of Edinburgh's landmark Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database (1563 to 1736).
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the GetProperty endpoint with fields filter and Conditional headers (
phab:T338141,
phab:T338138)
We started working on the endpoints for reading statement data of Properties (both a single statement, and a list of all of a Property’s statement) (
phab:T339356),
phab:T338383)
Ontology issue survey: We put together an overview of solutions for the various types of issues and will share them this week.
mul language code: We are continuing to work through the language fallback issues that were uncovered.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
From this week all gadgets automatically load on mobile and desktop sites. If you see any problems with gadgets on your wikis, please adjust the
gadget options in your gadget definitions file.
[62]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 July. It will be on all wikis from 6 July (
calendar).
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Closed request for adminship:
koavf 3 Welcome onboard \o/
New requests for permissions/Bot:
FromCrossrefBot 1: Publication dates (Task/s: Using information from Crossref: 1 - Add publication date to items where they are not present in Wikidata 2 - Fix publication dates where they are erroneous)
The next
Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 12th July 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the
Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
How to create a Wikidata Lexeme with ease - Beginner's Guide (in Twi and English)
YouTube
Tool of the week
Duplicity is a tool on Toolforge that helps find articles on Wikipedia that do not have a Wikidata Item, and match them to an existing Item, or create a new one. (
example for English Wikipedia)
HasProperty.js displays presence/absence of specific properties (configurable) after the Statements heading. Clicking a property name will jump to that properties section. For absent property, clicking property name will jump to the end of the page.
mul language code: We continued work on it focusing on showing it in the right place in the desktop termbox (
phab:T316767)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the endpoints for reading statement data of Properties (both a single statement, and a list of all of a Property’s statement) (
phab:T339356,
phab:T338383)
Vector 2022 skin: We continued work on improving the search display (
phab:T327510)
WMF Governance wiki is now connected to Wikidata so can be linked to in the sitelink section under multilingual sites (
phab:T321967)
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
Section-level Image Suggestions feature has been deployed on seven Wikipedias (Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Catalan, Hungarian, Finnish and Norwegian Bokmål). The feature recommends images for articles on contributors' watchlists that are a good match for individual sections of those articles.
Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool for administrators to help fight spam. It provides a clearer interface for blocking plain domains (and their subdomains), is more easily searchable, and is faster for the software to process for each edit on the wiki. It does not support regex (for complex cases), nor URL path-matching, nor the
MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist, but otherwise it replaces most of the functionalities of the existing
MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. There is a Python script to help migrate all simple domains into this tool, and more feature details, within
the tool's documentation. It is available at all wikis except for Meta-wiki, Commons, and Wikidata.
[64]
The WikiEditor extension was updated. It includes some of the most frequently used features of wikitext editing. In the past, many of its messages could only be translated by administrators, but now all regular translators on translatewiki can translate them. Please check
the state of WikiEditor localization into your language, and if the "Completion" for your language shows anything less than 100%, please complete the translation. See
a more detailed explanation.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (
calendar).
The default protocol of
Special:LinkSearch and API counterparts has changed from http to both http and https.
[65]
Special:LinkSearch and its API counterparts will now search for all of the URL provided in the query. It used to be only the first 60 characters. This feature was requested fifteen years ago.
[66]
Future changes
There is an experiment with a
ChatGPT plugin. This is to show users where the information is coming from when they read information from Wikipedia. It has been tested by Wikimedia Foundation staff and other Wikimedians. Soon all ChatGPT plugin users can use the Wikipedia plugin. This is the same plugin which was mentioned in
Tech News 2023/20.
[67]
There is an ongoing discussion on a
proposed Third-party resources policy. The proposal will impact the use of third-party resources in gadgets and userscripts. Based on the ideas received so far, policy includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, some best practices and exemption requirements such as code transparency and inspectability. Your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on
on the policy talk page.
Wikidata Recent Changes API (simple front-end to the actual API) lets you query Wikidata edits by either properties, or labels/aliases/descriptions/sitelinks. You can retrieve any changes, or specify added/changed/removed. Current lag to Wikidata: 1 seconds. (
blog)
autosuggest value (qualifier for P1963 that suggests which values should be autosuggested to the user that uses the property for items that are instances of the subject)
WikiProject Antiquity (aims to gather all contributors working in an aspect or another of Antiquity)
WikiProject Lodging (aims at creating, improving, and organizing Wikidata items related to lodging, such as hotels, motels, inns, guest houses and lodging-related topics)
Development
Vector 2022 skin: We finished working on removing the strange bolding pattern of the Search Results on Wikidata. Should be rolled out in the next train (
phab:T327510)
EntitySchemas: We are working on showing the Label of EntitySchema in Statements and Special pages (
phab:T339924)
Mismatch Finder: We are working on adding the Language Selector to the Mismatch Finder (
phab:T328149)
mul: We trying out changing how placeholders in Wikibase termboxes work: They’ll soon start falling back across the fallback chain of the language until they hit mul (
phab:T340832)
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 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (
calendar).
MediaWiki
system messages will now look for available local fallbacks, instead of always using the default fallback defined by software. This means wikis no longer need to override each language on the
fallback chain separately. For example, English Wikipedia doesn't have to create en-ca and en-gb subpages with a transclusion of the base pages anymore. This makes it easier to maintain local overrides.
[68]
The action=growthsetmentorstatus API will be deprecated with the new MediaWiki version. Bots or scripts calling that API should use the action=growthmanagementorlist API now.
[69]
Missed the initial office hour sessions for preparing a WikidataCon 2023 submission? Join the next sessions on 20th, 22nd, and 26th and bring all your questions.
Wikidata:WikidataCon 2023#Office hours (available in both Mandarin and English)
Live Wikidata editing in Italian, July 25 at 9:00 PM CEST on
YouTube
Ongoing
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #102,
Money (Challenge started on 2023-07-24 12:01:19)
Images near items - helps to find Wikimedia Commons images near Wikidata items without image. It can load a category tree of Commons images with coodrinates, and then find Wikidata items of a certain
P31 with coordinates but without images. Then, it will try to find nearby (<50 meters) pairs. (example
link for UK red phone booths)
Top scorer (This property is for the best scorer of a single season of a team sport's competition, or even for the best ever scorer of the history of a competition. The qualifiers to be admitted to this property should be: {{p|54}}; {{p|1532}}; {{p|1013}} (es.: goals / tries / points / etc ).)
EntitySchemas: We expanded the new datatype that is in testing. When a statement links to an EntitySchema it will now show its label when available (
phab:T338613). We are also working on showing them by their label in recent changes and similar places (
phab:T214885).
mul language code: we are working on improving the termbox to integrate this new language code better (
phab:T340644)
Mismatch Finder: We are working on adding a language selector to it so you can switch the language of the tool (
phab:T328149)
Wikibase REST API: We completed two new endpoint for the Wikibase REST API:
Retrieve all statements from a Property - /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements
Retrieve a single statement from a Property - /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements/{statement_id}
You can also retrieve a single statement from a Property from the existing /statements/{statement_id} endpoint
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 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (
calendar).
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 next
Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 19th April 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the
Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Next Linked Data for Libraries
LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call, Tuesday, April 14, 2023 - Indigenous Artists and Wikidata: Report launch and discussion.
Agenda.
Christos started a Wikibase to collect and organise existing research-related resources about Wikibase. Feel free to add to it.
researchwb.wikibase.cloud
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on creating the new datatype that allows linking to EntitySchemas in statements. It will be available on test systems next. (
phab:T332139)
QueryBuilder: We are putting finishing touches on the language selector so you can switch the UI language of the Query Builder. (
phab:T328764)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on making it possible to create or replace labels and descriptions in a iven language. (
phab:T323813)
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 see
nearby articles on a Kartographer map with the button for the new feature "Show nearby articles". Six wikis have been testing this feature since October.
[1][2]
At Wikimedia Commons, some thumbnails have not been getting replaced correctly after a new version of the image is uploaded. This should be fixed later this week.
[4][5]
For the last few weeks, some external tools had inconsistent problems with logging-in with OAuth. This has now been fixed.
[6]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 April. It will be on all wikis from 20 April (
calendar).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour April 24, 2023: Would you like to know how to join and use Telegram? Two regular Wikidata Telegram users will provide an introduction to Telegram and its available Wikidata channels. They will discuss how they use it, how it can provide help with Wikidata work, and how it can facilitate connections with other Wikidata users
Event page
User:Nikki/colour icons.css - is a Userscript to add colour to the editing icons. It uses green for add/save, yellow for edit, red for remove, orange for cancel and blue for help.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The
Wikibase newbie docs are here (to help to onboard new Wikibase users easier).
REST API: We continued work on making it possible to create or replace a label, or a description in a given language (
phab:T323813)
EntitySchemas: We continued working on the new datatype for linking to EntitySchemas. It is now available on beta in a very bare-bones version but not ready for wider testing yet. (
phab:T332139)
Ontology issues: We are evaluating the results of the survey we ran earlier this year.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Due to security issues with the
Graph extension, graphs have been disabled in all Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Foundation teams are working to respond to these vulnerabilities.
[8]
For a few days, it was not possible to save some kinds of edits on the mobile version of a wiki. This has been fixed.
[9][10][11]
Changes later this week
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on April 26. This is planned for
14:00 UTC.
[12]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 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.
The
Video2commons tool has been updated. This fixed several bugs related to YouTube uploads.
[16]
The
Special:Preferences page has been redesigned on mobile web. The new design makes it easier to browse the different categories and settings at low screen widths. You can also now access the page via a link in the Settings menu in the mobile web sidebar.
[17]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 May. It will be on all wikis from 4 May (
calendar).
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
ForgesBot (Task: Add licensing information to software forges entries in accordance to what is found in the corresponding Wikipedia page. It is used as a helper in the context of the
Forges project)
Next Linked Data for Libraries
LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 2, 2023: Fudie Zhao will be presenting on Wikidata in Digital Humanities projects.
Agenda
WeChangEd is an ERC-funded research project and online database by Ghent University, about women editors in Europe. The database shows stories about women editors and their publications, and is powered by Wikidata and
Sciencestories.io.
A
request for comment about removing administrative privileges in specified situations is open for feedback.
Technical news
Progress has started on the
Page Triage improvement project. This is to address the concerns raised by the community in their
2022 WMF letter that requested improvements be made to the tool.
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
Last week, Community Tech released the first update for providing
better diffs, the #1 request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey.
This update adds legends and tooltips to inline diffs so that users unfamiliar with the blue and yellow highlights can better understand the type of edits made.
When you close an image that is displayed via MediaViewer, it will now return to the wiki page instead of going back in your browser history. This feature request was
voted #65 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
[18]
The
SyntaxHighlight extension now supports wikitext as a selected language. Old alternatives that were used to highlight wikitext, such as html5, moin, and html+handlebars, can now be replaced.
[19]
Graph Extension update: Foundation developers have completed upgrading the visualization software to Vega5. Existing community graphs based on Vega2 are no longer compatible. Communities need to update local graphs and templates, and shared lua modules like
de:Modul:Graph. The
Vega Porting guide provides the most comprehensive detail on migration from Vega2 and
here is an example migration. Vega5 has currently just been enabled on mediawiki.org to provide a test environment for communities.
[21]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (
calendar).
Until now, all new OAuth apps went through manual review. Starting this week, apps using identification-only or basic authorizations will not require review.
[22]
There will be an
A/B test on 10 Wikipedias where the Vector 2022 skin is the default skin. Half of logged-in desktop users will see an interface where the different parts of the page are more clearly separated. You can
read more.
[24][25]
jquery.tipsy will be removed from the MediaWiki core. This will affect some user scripts. Many lines with .tipsy( can be commented out. OO.ui.PopupWidget can be used to keep things working like they are now. You can
read more and
read about how to find broken scripts.
[26]
EntitySchemas: We've continued work on the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements. (
phab:T214884)
Converted a number of Properties from string to external ID datatype (
phab:T334450)
mul language code: We've worked on preparing the special pages related to labels, descriptions and aliases for the new language code. (
phab:T330193,
phab:T329626)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the ability to modify labels of an Item using the HTTP PATCH method. (
phab:T332739).
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
Citations that are automatically generated based on
ISBN are currently broken. This affects citations made with the
VisualEditor Automatic tab, and the use of the citoid API in gadgets and user scripts. Work is ongoing to restore this feature.
[27]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 May. It will be on all wikis from 18 May (
calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "
Add a link" (Gorontalo Wikipedia, Hausa Wikipedia, Hakka Chinese Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Fiji Hindi Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Upper Sorbian Wikipedia, Haitian Creole Wikipedia, Interlingua Wikipedia, Interlingue Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Iloko Wikipedia, Ingush Wikipedia, Ido Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Inuktitut Wikipedia, Jamaican Patois Wikipedia, Javanese Wikipedia). This is part of the
progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can
configure how this feature works locally.
[28]
Gadget and userscript developers should replace jquery.cookie with mediawiki.cookie. The jquery.cookie library will be removed in ~1 month, and staff developers will run a script to replace any remaining uses at that time.
[29]
Wikimedia Deutschland is launching a laptop donation program to support Wikidata contributors with limited access to technology. If you've been actively contributing to Wikidata for at least a year, you can request a free laptop to support your work.
WMDE Hardware Donation Program#Applying
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
improved impact module will be available at Wikipedias. The impact module is a feature available to newcomers
at their personal homepage. It will show their number of edits, how many readers their edited pages have, how many thanks they have received and similar things. It is also accessible by accessing Special:Impact.
[31]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (
calendar).
Next Linked Data for Libraries
LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 30, 2023: We will discuss results from our community survey on advocacy for Wikidata in libraries and hear from community members Mary Aycock, Steve Baskauf and Eric Willey about their experiences with advocacy and gaining support for Wikidata work within their respective libraries.
Agenda
TalkPageHeader.js shows the talk page header for languages other than English.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The libraries of the London School of Economics and the University of York have collaborated to produce a toolkit for uploading research theses metadata to Wikidata.
Full announcement and access to the toolkit
The contents of most Wikimedia Cloud Services Wiki Replicas are out-of-date owing to large & increasing replication lag; see
https://replag.toolforge.org/ &
Phab T337446. Exercise caution using data from any tools that have a dependency on these databases.
ISCED category orientation (International Standard Classification of Education category (based on focus/orientation) applicable to an educational program)
Learning outcome (specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that students are expected to acquire as a result of participating in a particular education program)
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
Citations can once again be added automatically from ISBNs, thanks to Zotero's ISBN searches. The current data sources are the Library of Congress (United States), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (French National Library), and K10plus ISBN (German repository). Additional data source searches can be
proposed to Zotero. The ISBN labels in the
VisualEditor Automatic tab will reappear later this week.
[32]
For a few days earlier this month, the "Add interlanguage link" item in the Tools menu did not work properly. This has now been fixed.
[34]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 May. It will be on all wikis from 1 June (
calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on
small and
medium wikis this week. Large wikis will follow in the coming weeks. This is part of the effort to move Parsoid into MediaWiki core. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here.
[35]
Following
an RfC, editors indefinitely site-banned by
community consensus will now have all rights, including sysop, removed.
As a part of the Wikimedia Foundation's
IP Masking project, a
new policy has been created that governs the access to temporary account IP addresses. An
associated FAQ has been created and individual communities can increase the requirements to view temporary account IP addresses.
Technical news
Bot operators and tool maintainers should schedule time in the coming months to test and update their tools for the effects of
IP masking. IP masking will not be deployed to any content wiki until at least October 2023 and is unlikely to be deployed to the English Wikipedia until some time in 2024.
Arbitration
The arbitration case World War II and the history of Jews in Poland has been closed. The topic area of Polish history during World War II (1933-1945) and the history of Jews in Poland is subject to a "reliable source consensus-required" contentious topic restriction.
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
RealMe extension allows you to mark URLs on your user page as verified for Mastodon and similar software.
Previously, clicking on someone else's link to Recent Changes with filters applied within the URL could unintentionally change your preference for "Group results by page". This has now been fixed.
[37]
Problems
For a few days last week, some tools and bots returned outdated information due to database replication problems, and may have been down entirely while it was being fixed. These issues have now been fixed.
[38]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (
calendar).
Bots will no longer be prevented from making edits because of URLs that match the
spam blacklist.
[39]
Introduction workshop about Wikidata for employees of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB, national library of the Netherlands), to make them more familiar and self-reliant with Wikidata - 6 June 2023, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, The Netherlands -
Slides (in Dutch) on Commons.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour June 5, 2023: In collaboration with the Black Bibliography Project, we will be adding metadata for undescribed or under-described African-American women authors listed in The Pen Is Ours: a Listing of Writings by and about African-American Women before 1910, compiled by Jean Fagan Yellin and Cynthia D. Bond.
Event page
Registration has opened for the
workshop on mathematical research data taking place on 9-11 October 2023 in Leipzig. Talks, demos and lightning talks can be suggested, including Wikidata-related ones.
Tool of the week
IdentifierInput makes it easier to add identifier properties by letting you put in the full url and then stripping it down to just the identifier for you.
beforehand owned by (person or institution that owned the subject just before stated event. Meant to be used as qualifier of "significant event (P793)" for events like sales, auctions, gifts, etc)
afterward owned by (person or institution that owned the subject after stated event. Meant to be used as qualifier of "significant event (P793)" for events like sales, auctions, gifts, etc)
solubility product constant (equilibrium constant for a sparingly soluble solid chemical substance dissolved in an aqueous solution)
funded by grant (title or name of the grant funding this item)
Wikibase REST API: We finished the new endpoint for patching labels (
phab:T332739). We also started work on the new endpoint for retrieving Property data (
phab:T337720)
Client wikis: We drastically reduced the size of a ResourceLoader module that’s loaded on most Wikipedia page views (
phab:334682)
Language code: With awesome help from Nikki, we improved documentation for how to add language codes to Wikibase/Wikidata (
phab:T335857)
EntitySchemas: We are getting the new datatype ready for testing.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call June 13, 2023: Helen Williams will discuss her work with Wikidata at the London School of Economics
Agenda
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
Search Preview panel has been deployed on four Wikipedias (Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian and Norwegian). The panel will show an image related to the article (if existing), the top sections of the article, related images (coming from MediaSearch on Commons), and eventually the sister projects associated with the article.
[41]
The
RealMe extension now allows administrators to verify URLs for any page, for Mastodon and similar software.
[42]
The default project license
has been officially upgraded to CC BY-SA 4.0. The software interface messages have been updated. Communities should feel free to start updating any mentions of the old CC BY-SA 3.0 licensing within policies and related documentation pages.
[43]
Problems
For three days last month, some Wikipedia pages edited with VisualEditor or DiscussionTools had an unintended __TOC__ (or its localized form) added during an edit. There is
a listing of affected pages sorted by wiki, that may still need to be fixed.
[44]
Currently, the "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is broken. Existing {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords incorrectly appear as missing templates in VisualEditor. Developers are exploring how to fix this. In the meantime, those wishing to edit the default sortkey of a page are advised to switch to source editing.
[45]
Last week, an update to the delete form may have broken some gadgets or user scripts. If you need to manipulate (empty) the reason field, replace #wpReason with #wpReason > input. See
an example fix.
[46]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (
calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on English Wikipedia on Monday, and all other
large wikis on Thursday. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here.
[47]
Future changes
From 5 June to 17 July, the Foundation's
Security team is holding a consultation with contributors regarding a draft policy to govern the use of third-party resources in volunteer-developed gadgets and scripts. Feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome at
Third-party resources policy on meta-wiki.
The role of Wikidata within the research lifecycle, Wednesday 21 June, 10am BST (UTC+1), online event hosted by the University of York, UK. International participation is welcome, despite "available to White Rose institutions only" on the booking page.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour June 23, 2023: Returning to Podcasts, we will be working on creating podcast episode pages. We will discuss how this episodic content can be transferred to other serialized items. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own project to work on
Event page
Webinar: Common European Data Space for cultural heritage (The ontology of Wikidata, how to interact with it for a better quality). Tuesday 20th June 2023, from 3.00 p,.m. to 5.00 p.m. CET.
Register
Mapping Diversity is a platform that utilizes Wikidata to discover key facts about diversity and representation in street names across Europe. E.g. 59% of the streets and squares in Paris are named after people. Of those, 8.9% are named after women.
mul language code: We've continued working on making the mobile termbox (labels, descriptions, aliases) ready for the new language code. (
phab:T329644,
phab:T338302,
phab:T329655,
phab:T316767)
Vector 2022 skin: We are fixing an issue with the bolding of results in the main search suggester. (
phab:T327510)
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
Flame graphs are now available in WikimediaDebug.
[48][49]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
There is now a toolbar search popup in the visual editor. You can trigger it by typing \ or pressing ctrl + shift + p. It can help you quickly access most tools in the editor.
[50][51]
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 Action API modules and Special:LinkSearch will now add a trailing / to all prop=extlinks responses for bare domains. This is part of the work to remove duplication in the externallinks database table.
[52]
Problems
Last week, search was broken on Commons and Wikidata for 23 hours.
[53][54]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (
calendar).
The Minerva skin now applies more predefined styles to the .mbox-text CSS class. This enables support for mbox templates that use divs instead of tables. Please make sure that the new styles won't affect other templates in your wiki.
[55][56]
Gadgets will now load on both desktop and mobile by default. Previously, gadgets loaded only on desktop by default. Changing this default using the |targets= parameter is also deprecated and should not be used. You should make gadgets work on mobile or disable them based on the skin (with the |skins= parameter in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition) rather than whether the user uses the mobile or the desktop website. Popular gadgets that create errors on mobile will be disabled by developers on the Minerva skin as a temporary solution.
[57]
All namespace tabs now have the same browser
access key by default. Previously, custom and extension-defined namespaces would have to have their access keys set manually on-wiki, but that is no longer necessary.
[58]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship:
Wolverène (RfP scheduled to end after 2 July 2023 18:46 UTC)
Closed request for adminship:
Vargenau (successful) Welcome onboard \o/
New requests for permissions/Bot:
RomesfulImporterBot (Task: Creating and updating Russian Lexemes by transferring information from the
Russian Wiktionary)
The next
Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 12th July 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the
Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
re:publica 2023 - Peer learning methods and Open Educational Resources (OER) on Wikidata for a viable digital culture of remembrance (in German) -
YouTube
Workshop - Aligning Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry ontologies with Wikidata -
YouTube
Managing conflations and duplications of personal items in Wikidata, National Library of Greece -
YouTube
Why Wikidata in Linked Data and Libraries (in Greek)-
YouTube
Adding metadata utilities in the Koha staff interface based on Wikidata -
YouTube
From authority control to identity management -
YouTube
DSI Webinar - The ontology of Wikidata: how to interact with it for a better quality -
YouTube
Wikidata as a tool for biocuration of cell types, Biocuration Conference 2023 -
YouTube
Webinar: Wikidata, a useful knowledge base for any study -
YouTube
KGC '23 Talk — The Error Is The Message: Extracting Insights From Deceptive Data for Nazi-Looted Art -
YouTube
TU Berlin research group "
The Restitution of Knowledge" are exploring the use of Wikidata to build a Linked Open Data (LOD) project that maps German colonial military expeditions into Africa. Interested in getting involved or learning more about their project? Reach out on the project's talk page:
Wikidata:WikiProject TheRoK/Data Models.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship:
koavf 3 (RfP scheduled to end after 8 July 2023 13:16 UTC)
Closed request for adminship:
Wolverène Welcome onboard \o/
New requests for permissions/Bot:
UrbanBot (Task: UrbanBot's task is to mass-add English descriptions to items that don't have one)
Closed request for permissions/Bot:
RomesfulImporterBot (Task: Creating and updating Russian Lexemes by transferring information from the
Russian Wiktionary)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour July 7, 2023: Let's collaborate to upgrade our community infrastructure! We'll transfer notes and content from Google Docs to our WikiProject subpages. We'll be practicing our Wiki markup skills and learning to manage Wikidata Project pages
Event page
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #99,
Breast milk (Challenge started on 2023-07-03 12:01:21)
m:User:Base/Scripts/HaveWikibaseLabelLowercased.js - is a Userscript that adds an arrow next to the main label (page title) which upon double click (a tap and a confirmation on touch devices) automatically makes the label's first letter lowercase for the current interface language. If there was already a matching alias it gets removed.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The
WikidataCon 2023 call for proposals is running until July 31st. If you have questions or need advice before sending a program proposal, join the program team during one of the office hour sessions (online or in Taiwan, in Chinese or in English).
More information
Nigerian registered company (RC) id (RC number (Registration Number), identifier assigned to a business by the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) in Nigeria)
Cent cols (A property to link Wikidata entries to the dedicated pages of each pass by the Cent Cols)
WikiProject Scotland's Accused Witches aims at producing structured data documenting witchhunts, and prosecuted Scotland's accused witches on Wikidata using the University of Edinburgh's landmark Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database (1563 to 1736).
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the GetProperty endpoint with fields filter and Conditional headers (
phab:T338141,
phab:T338138)
We started working on the endpoints for reading statement data of Properties (both a single statement, and a list of all of a Property’s statement) (
phab:T339356),
phab:T338383)
Ontology issue survey: We put together an overview of solutions for the various types of issues and will share them this week.
mul language code: We are continuing to work through the language fallback issues that were uncovered.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
From this week all gadgets automatically load on mobile and desktop sites. If you see any problems with gadgets on your wikis, please adjust the
gadget options in your gadget definitions file.
[62]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 July. It will be on all wikis from 6 July (
calendar).
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Closed request for adminship:
koavf 3 Welcome onboard \o/
New requests for permissions/Bot:
FromCrossrefBot 1: Publication dates (Task/s: Using information from Crossref: 1 - Add publication date to items where they are not present in Wikidata 2 - Fix publication dates where they are erroneous)
The next
Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 12th July 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the
Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
How to create a Wikidata Lexeme with ease - Beginner's Guide (in Twi and English)
YouTube
Tool of the week
Duplicity is a tool on Toolforge that helps find articles on Wikipedia that do not have a Wikidata Item, and match them to an existing Item, or create a new one. (
example for English Wikipedia)
HasProperty.js displays presence/absence of specific properties (configurable) after the Statements heading. Clicking a property name will jump to that properties section. For absent property, clicking property name will jump to the end of the page.
mul language code: We continued work on it focusing on showing it in the right place in the desktop termbox (
phab:T316767)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the endpoints for reading statement data of Properties (both a single statement, and a list of all of a Property’s statement) (
phab:T339356,
phab:T338383)
Vector 2022 skin: We continued work on improving the search display (
phab:T327510)
WMF Governance wiki is now connected to Wikidata so can be linked to in the sitelink section under multilingual sites (
phab:T321967)
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
Section-level Image Suggestions feature has been deployed on seven Wikipedias (Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Catalan, Hungarian, Finnish and Norwegian Bokmål). The feature recommends images for articles on contributors' watchlists that are a good match for individual sections of those articles.
Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool for administrators to help fight spam. It provides a clearer interface for blocking plain domains (and their subdomains), is more easily searchable, and is faster for the software to process for each edit on the wiki. It does not support regex (for complex cases), nor URL path-matching, nor the
MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist, but otherwise it replaces most of the functionalities of the existing
MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. There is a Python script to help migrate all simple domains into this tool, and more feature details, within
the tool's documentation. It is available at all wikis except for Meta-wiki, Commons, and Wikidata.
[64]
The WikiEditor extension was updated. It includes some of the most frequently used features of wikitext editing. In the past, many of its messages could only be translated by administrators, but now all regular translators on translatewiki can translate them. Please check
the state of WikiEditor localization into your language, and if the "Completion" for your language shows anything less than 100%, please complete the translation. See
a more detailed explanation.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (
calendar).
The default protocol of
Special:LinkSearch and API counterparts has changed from http to both http and https.
[65]
Special:LinkSearch and its API counterparts will now search for all of the URL provided in the query. It used to be only the first 60 characters. This feature was requested fifteen years ago.
[66]
Future changes
There is an experiment with a
ChatGPT plugin. This is to show users where the information is coming from when they read information from Wikipedia. It has been tested by Wikimedia Foundation staff and other Wikimedians. Soon all ChatGPT plugin users can use the Wikipedia plugin. This is the same plugin which was mentioned in
Tech News 2023/20.
[67]
There is an ongoing discussion on a
proposed Third-party resources policy. The proposal will impact the use of third-party resources in gadgets and userscripts. Based on the ideas received so far, policy includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, some best practices and exemption requirements such as code transparency and inspectability. Your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on
on the policy talk page.
Wikidata Recent Changes API (simple front-end to the actual API) lets you query Wikidata edits by either properties, or labels/aliases/descriptions/sitelinks. You can retrieve any changes, or specify added/changed/removed. Current lag to Wikidata: 1 seconds. (
blog)
autosuggest value (qualifier for P1963 that suggests which values should be autosuggested to the user that uses the property for items that are instances of the subject)
WikiProject Antiquity (aims to gather all contributors working in an aspect or another of Antiquity)
WikiProject Lodging (aims at creating, improving, and organizing Wikidata items related to lodging, such as hotels, motels, inns, guest houses and lodging-related topics)
Development
Vector 2022 skin: We finished working on removing the strange bolding pattern of the Search Results on Wikidata. Should be rolled out in the next train (
phab:T327510)
EntitySchemas: We are working on showing the Label of EntitySchema in Statements and Special pages (
phab:T339924)
Mismatch Finder: We are working on adding the Language Selector to the Mismatch Finder (
phab:T328149)
mul: We trying out changing how placeholders in Wikibase termboxes work: They’ll soon start falling back across the fallback chain of the language until they hit mul (
phab:T340832)
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 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (
calendar).
MediaWiki
system messages will now look for available local fallbacks, instead of always using the default fallback defined by software. This means wikis no longer need to override each language on the
fallback chain separately. For example, English Wikipedia doesn't have to create en-ca and en-gb subpages with a transclusion of the base pages anymore. This makes it easier to maintain local overrides.
[68]
The action=growthsetmentorstatus API will be deprecated with the new MediaWiki version. Bots or scripts calling that API should use the action=growthmanagementorlist API now.
[69]
Missed the initial office hour sessions for preparing a WikidataCon 2023 submission? Join the next sessions on 20th, 22nd, and 26th and bring all your questions.
Wikidata:WikidataCon 2023#Office hours (available in both Mandarin and English)
Live Wikidata editing in Italian, July 25 at 9:00 PM CEST on
YouTube
Ongoing
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #102,
Money (Challenge started on 2023-07-24 12:01:19)
Images near items - helps to find Wikimedia Commons images near Wikidata items without image. It can load a category tree of Commons images with coodrinates, and then find Wikidata items of a certain
P31 with coordinates but without images. Then, it will try to find nearby (<50 meters) pairs. (example
link for UK red phone booths)
Top scorer (This property is for the best scorer of a single season of a team sport's competition, or even for the best ever scorer of the history of a competition. The qualifiers to be admitted to this property should be: {{p|54}}; {{p|1532}}; {{p|1013}} (es.: goals / tries / points / etc ).)
EntitySchemas: We expanded the new datatype that is in testing. When a statement links to an EntitySchema it will now show its label when available (
phab:T338613). We are also working on showing them by their label in recent changes and similar places (
phab:T214885).
mul language code: we are working on improving the termbox to integrate this new language code better (
phab:T340644)
Mismatch Finder: We are working on adding a language selector to it so you can switch the language of the tool (
phab:T328149)
Wikibase REST API: We completed two new endpoint for the Wikibase REST API:
Retrieve all statements from a Property - /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements
Retrieve a single statement from a Property - /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements/{statement_id}
You can also retrieve a single statement from a Property from the existing /statements/{statement_id} endpoint
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 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (
calendar).