This user is busy in
real life and may not respond swiftly to queries.
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.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The visual editor will now work in the
Modern skin. The changes that needed to happen for this to work could cause problems for some scripts or gadgets.
[1]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 27. It will be on all wikis from May 28 (
calendar).
Past: WikidataLab XXXIII: Wiki-Education and Data Literacy with Shani Evenstein on May 21st. The training in English was organized by Wiki Movement Brazil User Group. (
replay)
Past: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #6 (
YouTube)
Upcoming:
Wikidata Wochenende, event dedicated to the German-speaking Wikidata community, will take place fully remote on June 12-14. If you're interested, don't forget to register. We're looking for speakers to give introductions to Wikidata & tools.
Upcoming
#vBIB20 (Q94495218) the first fully remote German library conference: May 26-28. Metadata about all presentations are already stored in Wikidata:
Query. Some sessions and presentations are related to Wikidata or other Wikiprojects:
Video: Editing Wikidata: File Candidates tool and World heritage of Visby -
Youtube,
Facebook
Tool of the week
If you're looking for even more tools, the
Tools Directory indexes over 130 Wikidata tools.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
New tool:
Structured Search, a tool allowing you to search through Wikimedia Commons using structured data, is now live. This tool by
Hay Kranen was demoed at Wikimedia Hackathon 2020.
New tool:
script by Tohaomg to easily rearrange the order of values for statements in Wikidata (to be added to your common.js page)
--
Rosiestep (
talk) 17:10, 25 May 2020 (UTC) via MassMessaging
Thanks for your work
Hey Cap, I am really happy and thankful to have your contribution on the very first article I created on wikipedia,.. I request you to please review it once again and help me out with making this article better. Is there anything lacking or just few words of encouragement will mean a lot to me :)
Thanks captain — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Wikiloverindia (
talk •
contribs) 21:13, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
Misleading sources in Italian politicians' articles
May you answer to my questions, please? I'm still waiting for your reply, but it looks like you don't want to communicate at all.--
Alienautic (
talk) 13:29, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
Sorry for the late reply. Thanks for sending a message on my talk page. At the moment i am not willing to apply for administrator. I'll send a message to your talk page when i need it. take care. thanks again.
CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 22:27, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
An invention is a unique or
noveldevice, method, composition or process, and the invention process is a process within an overall
engineering and product development process.
The Wikimedia Foundation announced that they will develop a universal code of conduct for all WMF projects. There is an open
local discussion regarding the same.
Arbitration
A
motion was passed to enact a
500/30 restriction on articles related to the history of Jews and antisemitism in Poland during World War II (1933–45), including the Holocaust in Poland. Article talk pages where disruption occurs may also be managed with the stated restriction.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Discussion of our Wikidata priorities and needs as we plan for the group's future, 02 June.
Agenda
The
WikiCite annual report 2019-20 has been published. Describing the "satellite event grants" program that was run (and details of the nine successful proposals); the changes that resulted from the COVID-19 shutdown of all in-person events; and a summary of WikiCite-related news from across the movement. For more details see
Meta:WikiCite/Administration. For more information, contact
LWyatt (WMF)
Past video: Querying Wikidata with a glimpse of SPARQL - Thorsten Butz - PSCONFEU 2020.
YouTube
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network Live Wikidata editing scheduled for 1st June at 7:00 PM UTC:
YouTube,
Facebook
Upcoming video (in Spanish): Wikidata Online Workshop: "Connecting Authority Resources with the Knowledge Graph" scheduled for 2nd June at 3:00 PM UTC:
YouTube
Tool of the week
wdumps allows you to create a limited RDF dump from Wikidata, for those times when your SPARQL queries keep timing out. It is not particularly user-friendly, and it typically takes several hours to get a complete dump, but it is the best way to for example get a list of all English names of humans in Wikidata, or a list of every scientific article with its title and DOI.
As part of a thesis project, the search engine "Lister" has been developed to make it easier for the general public to access data on the Semantic Web in general, and WikiData specifically. It's in a usability test-phase right now, and if you'd like to try it out and help improve it, you can do so at this
link. The test should at most 15 minutes.
Follow the
discussion about restricting editing of properties to autoconfirmed users.
New domain toolforge.org to be
adopted by our Toolforge community. New domain/scheme for Toolforge-hosted webservices will change from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org with the aim to introduce permanent redirects for the legacy URLs on 2020-06-15.
Wikidata development team is currently running a survey until June 9th to understand better how people access and reuse Wikidata’s data from the code of their applications and tools (for example through APIs), and how we can improve the tools to make your workflows easier. If you would like to participate, please use
this link (Google Forms, estimated fill-in time 5min).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new beta version of the
Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It has a new zoom function when you look at images. It can also suggest places when you upload geotagged photos.
[2]
Problems
There was a problem with the Commons database on 27 May. Commons could not be edited for eight minutes. Because of this problem the database was moved. This caused another short read-only time on 29 May.
[3][4][5]
The
Vector skin had a problem where you couldn't add links to the article in other languages. You couldn't see the section if there were no links to other languages already. It also removed
content translation links and links to language settings. This has now been fixed.
[6]
Changes later this week
You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can turn these notifications off for individual pages. You can soon turn them off also in the notifications you get.
[7]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 June. It will be on all wikis from 4 June (
calendar).
Hello and welcome to the June newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since
March 2020. You can unsubscribe from our mailings at any time; see below. All times and dates stated are in
UTC.
Current events
Election time: Nomination of candidates in our
mid-year Election of Coordinators opened on 1 June, and voting will take place from 00:01 on 16 June.
GOCE coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought about helping out at the Guild, or you know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them
here.
March Drive:
Self-isolation from
coronavirus may have played a hand in making this one of our most successful backlog elimination drives. The copy-editing backlog was reduced from 477 to a record low of 118 articles, a 75% reduction. The last four months of 2019 were cleared, reducing the backlog to three months. Fifty requests were also completed, and the total word count of copy-edited articles was 759,945. Of the 29 editors who signed up, 22 completed at least one copy edit. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available
here.
April Blitz: This blitz ran from 12 to 18 April with a theme of
Indian military history. Of the 18 people who signed up, 14 copyedited at least one article. Participants claimed a total of 60 copyedits. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available
here.
May Drive: This event marked the 10th anniversary of the GOCE's copy-editing drives, and set a goal of diminishing the backlog to just one month of articles, as close to zero articles as possible. We achieved the goal of eliminating all articles that had been tagged prior to the start of the drive, for the first time in our history! Of the 51 editors who signed up, 43 copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available
here.
Other news
Progress report: as of 2 June, GOCE participants had processed 328 requests since 1 January, which puts us on pace to exceed any previous year's number of requests. As of the end of the May drive, the backlog stood at just 156 articles, all tagged in May 2020.
Outreach: To mark the 10th anniversary of our first Backlog Elimination Drive,
The Signpost contributor and GOCE participant Puddleglum2.0 interviewed project coordinators and copy-editors for the journal's
April WikiProject Report. The Drive and the current Election of Coordinators have also been covered in The Signpost'sMay News and Notes page.
Upcoming:
Wikidata Wochenende, June 12-14: online Wikidata workshop and hackathon in German. Don't forget to register to get access to attendees information.
Upcoming: Video: Live Wikidata editing #9:
Youtube,
Facebook
Part 2 - The residency at the Bodleian Libraries -
YouTube
Part 3 - The Astrolabe Explorer & other datasets -
YouTube
Tool of the week
QuickStatements lets you edit thousands of Wikidata items at a time. Add labels and descriptions, or statements with sources and qualifiers, add sitelinks, create or merge items, or remove statements that were created in error. Batches can be discussed and, if necessary, reverted in full through the
EditGroups tool.
New page
Subsetting under
WikiProject Schemas for documenting how to define, construct, manage and maintain subsets of Wikidata.
MyCroft, the open digital personal assistant now has a
Wikidata skill to answer questions about current and historic facts & information about a person.
Do you know a Wikidata/Wikibase community member who has accomplished something new or has been inspiring in the last year? If so, please take a few minutes and
nominate someone in the
2020 Community Spotlight survey.
Wikidata Bridge: Made a number of technical improvements to wrap up the work in the first version.
Reference Hunt: Making final technical improvements and are now running the process to find references on the whole of Wikidata (as opposed to the initial small subset for testing). Once that's done we'll release them as a dump.
Easier access to data for programmers: Researching and interviewing ways to improve the APIs in preparation for working on them.
Query builder: Working on defining the first version and creating mockups based on the feedback we received.
Use modern TypeScript syntax (3.2 -> 3.9) (
phab:T253211)
More technical documentation for Federated Properties (
phab:T252991) & preparing for the next steps
Convert some properties to external identifiers (
phab:T253722)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Some articles have tables that can be sorted in different ways. For example a list of countries can be sorted alphabetically but you can click on the size column to sort them by size. If you clicked on the column a second time it would sort the countries from the bottom to the top instead. A third click will now take you back to the original sorting.
[8]
Self-closed tags now work as in the
HTML5 specifications. This means you should stop using some of them. <b/> is an example of a self-closed tag that won't work. area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, keygen, link, meta, param, source, track, wbr can be self-closed. Pages with tags that should not be self-closed have been listed in
a tracking category since 2016. They will be listed in
Special:LintErrors/self-closed-tag. This doesn't affect <references /> or <ref />.
[9]
There is a banner called WikidataPageBanner. It is for example used by the Wikivoyages, Wikimedia Russia and the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Turkish Wikipedias. It will now been seen by mobile visitors too. Before this it was only seen on desktop. The wikis should update instructions on MediaWiki:Sitenotice so that editors know to test and style for mobile too.
[10][11]
Changes later this week
You can now edit
MassMessage descriptions through the
API. This is useful for tools and gadgets.
[12]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 June. It will be on all wikis from 11 June (
calendar).
Future changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use
TemplateStyles instead. 118 wikis need to fix this. You can
read more and see if your wiki is affected.
[13]
Netherlands report: Analysis of Dutch GLAM-Wiki projects in relation to the Dutch Digital Heritage Reference Architecture, Content donation from Utrecht Archives, Detecting Wikipedia articles strongly based on single library collections and Collection highlights of the KB
Sweden report: Free music on Wikipedia; NHB webinars; Wikipedia in libraries – Projekt HBTQI
just got some nonsense message from you about me editing a page about some footballer or something 4 years ago ?
silly website - tracking by IPv4 doesn't work as most web users are connected via dynamic IP.
i suggest you update your model and consider yourself less important.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Program for Cooperative Cataloging's upcoming Wikidata pilot, June 16.
Agenda
Part 1 - Meet Ewan, WiR at the Uni' of Edinburgh -
YouTube
Part 2 - the Witch Hunts projects & Wikidata -
YouTube
Part 3 - Why Wikidata is important for education -
YouTube
Tool of the week
Mix'n'match lets you match lists of external identifiers to Wikidata items, or create new items if necessary. Thousands of catalogs already exist, in dozens of different topic areas, and it's easy to import new ones.
Collecting a lot of feedback and doing research around how to improve our APIs to start making it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers
Finalized the initial feature list for the query builder and working on designs and prototypes for testing
Doing user research on the Merge gadget to prepare for making it part of the proper code-base so that other Wikibase instances also benefit from easier merging
Federated Properties: continued working on the first version of Federation that will make it possible to use Wikidata's Properties in another Wikibase installation
Start of a new project (Wikibase Decoupling & Extension Registration) in order to clean up our codebase a bit and make it easier to extend with new features in the future
More work on the design system to have a set of unified components for Wikidata that will make it easier to develop new features in the future because we don't have to rewrite components that are used in a lot of places
Some MediaWiki skin changes meant broken edit links on Wikipedia and co. Fixed now. (
phabricator:T252800)
Reply tool: This is available as a Beta Feature at the four partner wikis (Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian Wikipedias). The Beta Feature will get
new features soon. The new features include writing comments in a new visual editing mode and pinging other users by typing @. You can
test the new features on the
Beta Cluster. Some other wikis will have a chance to try the Beta Feature in the coming months.
New requirements for user signatures: Soon, users will not be able to save invalid custom signatures in
Special:Preferences. This will reduce signature spoofing, prevent page corruption, and make new talk page tools more reliable. Most editors will not be affected.
Research on the use of talk pages: The Editing team worked with the
Wikimedia research team to study how talk pages help editors improve articles. We learned that new editors who use talk pages make more edits to the main namespace than new editors who don't use talk pages.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Toolforge hosts several tools created by the Wikimedia community like edit counters or enhanced editors. It is changing the domain from tools.wmflabs.org to toolforge.org. The routing scheme is moving from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org. You can
read the details. Tools that use OAuth will have to be updated to keep working. You can
ask for help.
Problems
There is a Wikidata item link in the sidebar on many pages. This disappeared for a couple of days for users who have the
Monobook skin. This was because of a bug. It has now been fixed.
[14]
Editing, logging in and logging out didn't work properly for a short period of time last week. It was soon fixed.
[15]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 June. It will be on all wikis from 18 June (
calendar).
Future changes
Pywikibot is a Python
library to automate work on wikis. It will not support
Python 2 after the new version in July. Support for Python 3.4 and MediaWiki below 1.19 will also be dropped. You should migrate to Python 3. You can
ask for help.
[16]
The selectors .menu and .vectorMenu will no longer work in the
Vector skin. This can affect gadgets and user scripts. .menu should be replaced by ul. .vectorMenu should be replaced by .vector-menu.
[17]
You are invited to join the
Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening
salon (7-8pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop. This month, as part of Wikimedia NYC's commitment to the well-being of members, we will hold WikiWednesday online via Zoom videoconferencing! To join the meeting from your computer or smartphone, just visit
this link. More information about how to connect is available
on the meetup page.
We look forward to seeing local Wikimedians, but would also like to invite folks from the greater New York metropolitan area (and beyond!) who might not typically be able to join us in person!
7:00pm - 8:00 pm online via
Zoom (optional breakout rooms from 8:00-8:30)
We especially encourage folks to add your 3-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues!
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from
this list.)
NPP Sorting can be a great way to find pages needing new page patrolling that match your strengths and interests. Using ORES, it divides articles into topics such as Literature or Chemistry and on Geography. Take a look and see if you can find time to patrol a couple pages a day. With over 10,000 pages in the queue, the highest it's been since
ACPERM, your help could really make a difference.
Google Adds New Languages to Google Translate
In late February, Google added 5 new languages to Google Translate: Kinyarwanda, Odia (Oriya), Tatar, Turkmen and Uyghur. This expands our ability to find and evaluate sources in those languages.
Discussions and Resources
A
discussion on handling new article creation by paid editors is ongoing at the Village Pump.
Also at the Village Pump is a
discussion about limiting participation at Articles for Deletion discussion.
Since you routinely perform deletion sorting for AfD discussions, check out the new Delsort category/page at
Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Products. Take a look, and note the criteria for posting there, listed atop the page in a box. Thanks for your work to manage Wikipedia! North America1000 21:32, 20 June 2020 (UTC)
William Mariner was an Englishman who lived in Tonga from 29 November 1806 to (probably) 8 November 1810. He later published Tonga Islands, an account of his experiences that is now one of the major sources of information on Tonga before it was significantly influenced by European culture and Christianity. Pictured is Mariner in Tongan attire.
Upcoming domain name migration on the Wikimedia Toolforge implies that OpenRefine users need to update their Wikidata reconciliation service to the new
endpoint which will be available by default in the upcoming release of OpenRefine (3.4).
phab:T254172
Wikirecords - proposal for a Wikibase-based sister-project
Apologies for both of the problematic queries ("MWAPI searches in wikidata about people described as slave traders by citizenship" in Weekly Summary #419 and "Monuments named after/commemorating/depicting slave traders” in Weekly Summary #420). The "MWAPI searches in wikidata about people described as slave traders by citizenship” in #419 lists any people with the word "slave" in a label, description or alias, among them several people who are not slave traders. The "Monuments named after/commemorating/depicting slave traders” in #420 incorrectly linked
this query for enslaved people instead of
this query for slavetraders.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
There are some
new tools to make it easier for newcomers to start editing. They are available on
some wikis. These wikis had a problem with the visual editor for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug in the new tools. It was soon fixed.
[18]
Some user scripts and gadgets stopped working because of a change to
CSS selectors. .vectorTabs should be replaced with .vector-menu-tabs to fix this.
[19]
Changes later this week
The developers are working on a
new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This will be released on 24 June. You can
give feedback.
[20]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 June. It will be on all wikis from 25 June (
calendar).
Future changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use
TemplateStyles instead. 91 wikis still need to fix this. You can
read more and see if your wiki is affected.
[21]
This user is busy in
real life and may not respond swiftly to queries.
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.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The visual editor will now work in the
Modern skin. The changes that needed to happen for this to work could cause problems for some scripts or gadgets.
[1]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 27. It will be on all wikis from May 28 (
calendar).
Past: WikidataLab XXXIII: Wiki-Education and Data Literacy with Shani Evenstein on May 21st. The training in English was organized by Wiki Movement Brazil User Group. (
replay)
Past: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #6 (
YouTube)
Upcoming:
Wikidata Wochenende, event dedicated to the German-speaking Wikidata community, will take place fully remote on June 12-14. If you're interested, don't forget to register. We're looking for speakers to give introductions to Wikidata & tools.
Upcoming
#vBIB20 (Q94495218) the first fully remote German library conference: May 26-28. Metadata about all presentations are already stored in Wikidata:
Query. Some sessions and presentations are related to Wikidata or other Wikiprojects:
Video: Editing Wikidata: File Candidates tool and World heritage of Visby -
Youtube,
Facebook
Tool of the week
If you're looking for even more tools, the
Tools Directory indexes over 130 Wikidata tools.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
New tool:
Structured Search, a tool allowing you to search through Wikimedia Commons using structured data, is now live. This tool by
Hay Kranen was demoed at Wikimedia Hackathon 2020.
New tool:
script by Tohaomg to easily rearrange the order of values for statements in Wikidata (to be added to your common.js page)
--
Rosiestep (
talk) 17:10, 25 May 2020 (UTC) via MassMessaging
Thanks for your work
Hey Cap, I am really happy and thankful to have your contribution on the very first article I created on wikipedia,.. I request you to please review it once again and help me out with making this article better. Is there anything lacking or just few words of encouragement will mean a lot to me :)
Thanks captain — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Wikiloverindia (
talk •
contribs) 21:13, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
Misleading sources in Italian politicians' articles
May you answer to my questions, please? I'm still waiting for your reply, but it looks like you don't want to communicate at all.--
Alienautic (
talk) 13:29, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
Sorry for the late reply. Thanks for sending a message on my talk page. At the moment i am not willing to apply for administrator. I'll send a message to your talk page when i need it. take care. thanks again.
CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 22:27, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
An invention is a unique or
noveldevice, method, composition or process, and the invention process is a process within an overall
engineering and product development process.
The Wikimedia Foundation announced that they will develop a universal code of conduct for all WMF projects. There is an open
local discussion regarding the same.
Arbitration
A
motion was passed to enact a
500/30 restriction on articles related to the history of Jews and antisemitism in Poland during World War II (1933–45), including the Holocaust in Poland. Article talk pages where disruption occurs may also be managed with the stated restriction.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Discussion of our Wikidata priorities and needs as we plan for the group's future, 02 June.
Agenda
The
WikiCite annual report 2019-20 has been published. Describing the "satellite event grants" program that was run (and details of the nine successful proposals); the changes that resulted from the COVID-19 shutdown of all in-person events; and a summary of WikiCite-related news from across the movement. For more details see
Meta:WikiCite/Administration. For more information, contact
LWyatt (WMF)
Past video: Querying Wikidata with a glimpse of SPARQL - Thorsten Butz - PSCONFEU 2020.
YouTube
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network Live Wikidata editing scheduled for 1st June at 7:00 PM UTC:
YouTube,
Facebook
Upcoming video (in Spanish): Wikidata Online Workshop: "Connecting Authority Resources with the Knowledge Graph" scheduled for 2nd June at 3:00 PM UTC:
YouTube
Tool of the week
wdumps allows you to create a limited RDF dump from Wikidata, for those times when your SPARQL queries keep timing out. It is not particularly user-friendly, and it typically takes several hours to get a complete dump, but it is the best way to for example get a list of all English names of humans in Wikidata, or a list of every scientific article with its title and DOI.
As part of a thesis project, the search engine "Lister" has been developed to make it easier for the general public to access data on the Semantic Web in general, and WikiData specifically. It's in a usability test-phase right now, and if you'd like to try it out and help improve it, you can do so at this
link. The test should at most 15 minutes.
Follow the
discussion about restricting editing of properties to autoconfirmed users.
New domain toolforge.org to be
adopted by our Toolforge community. New domain/scheme for Toolforge-hosted webservices will change from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org with the aim to introduce permanent redirects for the legacy URLs on 2020-06-15.
Wikidata development team is currently running a survey until June 9th to understand better how people access and reuse Wikidata’s data from the code of their applications and tools (for example through APIs), and how we can improve the tools to make your workflows easier. If you would like to participate, please use
this link (Google Forms, estimated fill-in time 5min).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new beta version of the
Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It has a new zoom function when you look at images. It can also suggest places when you upload geotagged photos.
[2]
Problems
There was a problem with the Commons database on 27 May. Commons could not be edited for eight minutes. Because of this problem the database was moved. This caused another short read-only time on 29 May.
[3][4][5]
The
Vector skin had a problem where you couldn't add links to the article in other languages. You couldn't see the section if there were no links to other languages already. It also removed
content translation links and links to language settings. This has now been fixed.
[6]
Changes later this week
You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can turn these notifications off for individual pages. You can soon turn them off also in the notifications you get.
[7]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 June. It will be on all wikis from 4 June (
calendar).
Hello and welcome to the June newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since
March 2020. You can unsubscribe from our mailings at any time; see below. All times and dates stated are in
UTC.
Current events
Election time: Nomination of candidates in our
mid-year Election of Coordinators opened on 1 June, and voting will take place from 00:01 on 16 June.
GOCE coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought about helping out at the Guild, or you know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them
here.
March Drive:
Self-isolation from
coronavirus may have played a hand in making this one of our most successful backlog elimination drives. The copy-editing backlog was reduced from 477 to a record low of 118 articles, a 75% reduction. The last four months of 2019 were cleared, reducing the backlog to three months. Fifty requests were also completed, and the total word count of copy-edited articles was 759,945. Of the 29 editors who signed up, 22 completed at least one copy edit. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available
here.
April Blitz: This blitz ran from 12 to 18 April with a theme of
Indian military history. Of the 18 people who signed up, 14 copyedited at least one article. Participants claimed a total of 60 copyedits. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available
here.
May Drive: This event marked the 10th anniversary of the GOCE's copy-editing drives, and set a goal of diminishing the backlog to just one month of articles, as close to zero articles as possible. We achieved the goal of eliminating all articles that had been tagged prior to the start of the drive, for the first time in our history! Of the 51 editors who signed up, 43 copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available
here.
Other news
Progress report: as of 2 June, GOCE participants had processed 328 requests since 1 January, which puts us on pace to exceed any previous year's number of requests. As of the end of the May drive, the backlog stood at just 156 articles, all tagged in May 2020.
Outreach: To mark the 10th anniversary of our first Backlog Elimination Drive,
The Signpost contributor and GOCE participant Puddleglum2.0 interviewed project coordinators and copy-editors for the journal's
April WikiProject Report. The Drive and the current Election of Coordinators have also been covered in The Signpost'sMay News and Notes page.
Upcoming:
Wikidata Wochenende, June 12-14: online Wikidata workshop and hackathon in German. Don't forget to register to get access to attendees information.
Upcoming: Video: Live Wikidata editing #9:
Youtube,
Facebook
Part 2 - The residency at the Bodleian Libraries -
YouTube
Part 3 - The Astrolabe Explorer & other datasets -
YouTube
Tool of the week
QuickStatements lets you edit thousands of Wikidata items at a time. Add labels and descriptions, or statements with sources and qualifiers, add sitelinks, create or merge items, or remove statements that were created in error. Batches can be discussed and, if necessary, reverted in full through the
EditGroups tool.
New page
Subsetting under
WikiProject Schemas for documenting how to define, construct, manage and maintain subsets of Wikidata.
MyCroft, the open digital personal assistant now has a
Wikidata skill to answer questions about current and historic facts & information about a person.
Do you know a Wikidata/Wikibase community member who has accomplished something new or has been inspiring in the last year? If so, please take a few minutes and
nominate someone in the
2020 Community Spotlight survey.
Wikidata Bridge: Made a number of technical improvements to wrap up the work in the first version.
Reference Hunt: Making final technical improvements and are now running the process to find references on the whole of Wikidata (as opposed to the initial small subset for testing). Once that's done we'll release them as a dump.
Easier access to data for programmers: Researching and interviewing ways to improve the APIs in preparation for working on them.
Query builder: Working on defining the first version and creating mockups based on the feedback we received.
Use modern TypeScript syntax (3.2 -> 3.9) (
phab:T253211)
More technical documentation for Federated Properties (
phab:T252991) & preparing for the next steps
Convert some properties to external identifiers (
phab:T253722)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Some articles have tables that can be sorted in different ways. For example a list of countries can be sorted alphabetically but you can click on the size column to sort them by size. If you clicked on the column a second time it would sort the countries from the bottom to the top instead. A third click will now take you back to the original sorting.
[8]
Self-closed tags now work as in the
HTML5 specifications. This means you should stop using some of them. <b/> is an example of a self-closed tag that won't work. area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, keygen, link, meta, param, source, track, wbr can be self-closed. Pages with tags that should not be self-closed have been listed in
a tracking category since 2016. They will be listed in
Special:LintErrors/self-closed-tag. This doesn't affect <references /> or <ref />.
[9]
There is a banner called WikidataPageBanner. It is for example used by the Wikivoyages, Wikimedia Russia and the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Turkish Wikipedias. It will now been seen by mobile visitors too. Before this it was only seen on desktop. The wikis should update instructions on MediaWiki:Sitenotice so that editors know to test and style for mobile too.
[10][11]
Changes later this week
You can now edit
MassMessage descriptions through the
API. This is useful for tools and gadgets.
[12]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 June. It will be on all wikis from 11 June (
calendar).
Future changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use
TemplateStyles instead. 118 wikis need to fix this. You can
read more and see if your wiki is affected.
[13]
Netherlands report: Analysis of Dutch GLAM-Wiki projects in relation to the Dutch Digital Heritage Reference Architecture, Content donation from Utrecht Archives, Detecting Wikipedia articles strongly based on single library collections and Collection highlights of the KB
Sweden report: Free music on Wikipedia; NHB webinars; Wikipedia in libraries – Projekt HBTQI
just got some nonsense message from you about me editing a page about some footballer or something 4 years ago ?
silly website - tracking by IPv4 doesn't work as most web users are connected via dynamic IP.
i suggest you update your model and consider yourself less important.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Program for Cooperative Cataloging's upcoming Wikidata pilot, June 16.
Agenda
Part 1 - Meet Ewan, WiR at the Uni' of Edinburgh -
YouTube
Part 2 - the Witch Hunts projects & Wikidata -
YouTube
Part 3 - Why Wikidata is important for education -
YouTube
Tool of the week
Mix'n'match lets you match lists of external identifiers to Wikidata items, or create new items if necessary. Thousands of catalogs already exist, in dozens of different topic areas, and it's easy to import new ones.
Collecting a lot of feedback and doing research around how to improve our APIs to start making it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers
Finalized the initial feature list for the query builder and working on designs and prototypes for testing
Doing user research on the Merge gadget to prepare for making it part of the proper code-base so that other Wikibase instances also benefit from easier merging
Federated Properties: continued working on the first version of Federation that will make it possible to use Wikidata's Properties in another Wikibase installation
Start of a new project (Wikibase Decoupling & Extension Registration) in order to clean up our codebase a bit and make it easier to extend with new features in the future
More work on the design system to have a set of unified components for Wikidata that will make it easier to develop new features in the future because we don't have to rewrite components that are used in a lot of places
Some MediaWiki skin changes meant broken edit links on Wikipedia and co. Fixed now. (
phabricator:T252800)
Reply tool: This is available as a Beta Feature at the four partner wikis (Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian Wikipedias). The Beta Feature will get
new features soon. The new features include writing comments in a new visual editing mode and pinging other users by typing @. You can
test the new features on the
Beta Cluster. Some other wikis will have a chance to try the Beta Feature in the coming months.
New requirements for user signatures: Soon, users will not be able to save invalid custom signatures in
Special:Preferences. This will reduce signature spoofing, prevent page corruption, and make new talk page tools more reliable. Most editors will not be affected.
Research on the use of talk pages: The Editing team worked with the
Wikimedia research team to study how talk pages help editors improve articles. We learned that new editors who use talk pages make more edits to the main namespace than new editors who don't use talk pages.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Toolforge hosts several tools created by the Wikimedia community like edit counters or enhanced editors. It is changing the domain from tools.wmflabs.org to toolforge.org. The routing scheme is moving from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org. You can
read the details. Tools that use OAuth will have to be updated to keep working. You can
ask for help.
Problems
There is a Wikidata item link in the sidebar on many pages. This disappeared for a couple of days for users who have the
Monobook skin. This was because of a bug. It has now been fixed.
[14]
Editing, logging in and logging out didn't work properly for a short period of time last week. It was soon fixed.
[15]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 June. It will be on all wikis from 18 June (
calendar).
Future changes
Pywikibot is a Python
library to automate work on wikis. It will not support
Python 2 after the new version in July. Support for Python 3.4 and MediaWiki below 1.19 will also be dropped. You should migrate to Python 3. You can
ask for help.
[16]
The selectors .menu and .vectorMenu will no longer work in the
Vector skin. This can affect gadgets and user scripts. .menu should be replaced by ul. .vectorMenu should be replaced by .vector-menu.
[17]
You are invited to join the
Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening
salon (7-8pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop. This month, as part of Wikimedia NYC's commitment to the well-being of members, we will hold WikiWednesday online via Zoom videoconferencing! To join the meeting from your computer or smartphone, just visit
this link. More information about how to connect is available
on the meetup page.
We look forward to seeing local Wikimedians, but would also like to invite folks from the greater New York metropolitan area (and beyond!) who might not typically be able to join us in person!
7:00pm - 8:00 pm online via
Zoom (optional breakout rooms from 8:00-8:30)
We especially encourage folks to add your 3-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues!
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from
this list.)
NPP Sorting can be a great way to find pages needing new page patrolling that match your strengths and interests. Using ORES, it divides articles into topics such as Literature or Chemistry and on Geography. Take a look and see if you can find time to patrol a couple pages a day. With over 10,000 pages in the queue, the highest it's been since
ACPERM, your help could really make a difference.
Google Adds New Languages to Google Translate
In late February, Google added 5 new languages to Google Translate: Kinyarwanda, Odia (Oriya), Tatar, Turkmen and Uyghur. This expands our ability to find and evaluate sources in those languages.
Discussions and Resources
A
discussion on handling new article creation by paid editors is ongoing at the Village Pump.
Also at the Village Pump is a
discussion about limiting participation at Articles for Deletion discussion.
Since you routinely perform deletion sorting for AfD discussions, check out the new Delsort category/page at
Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Products. Take a look, and note the criteria for posting there, listed atop the page in a box. Thanks for your work to manage Wikipedia! North America1000 21:32, 20 June 2020 (UTC)
William Mariner was an Englishman who lived in Tonga from 29 November 1806 to (probably) 8 November 1810. He later published Tonga Islands, an account of his experiences that is now one of the major sources of information on Tonga before it was significantly influenced by European culture and Christianity. Pictured is Mariner in Tongan attire.
Upcoming domain name migration on the Wikimedia Toolforge implies that OpenRefine users need to update their Wikidata reconciliation service to the new
endpoint which will be available by default in the upcoming release of OpenRefine (3.4).
phab:T254172
Wikirecords - proposal for a Wikibase-based sister-project
Apologies for both of the problematic queries ("MWAPI searches in wikidata about people described as slave traders by citizenship" in Weekly Summary #419 and "Monuments named after/commemorating/depicting slave traders” in Weekly Summary #420). The "MWAPI searches in wikidata about people described as slave traders by citizenship” in #419 lists any people with the word "slave" in a label, description or alias, among them several people who are not slave traders. The "Monuments named after/commemorating/depicting slave traders” in #420 incorrectly linked
this query for enslaved people instead of
this query for slavetraders.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
There are some
new tools to make it easier for newcomers to start editing. They are available on
some wikis. These wikis had a problem with the visual editor for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug in the new tools. It was soon fixed.
[18]
Some user scripts and gadgets stopped working because of a change to
CSS selectors. .vectorTabs should be replaced with .vector-menu-tabs to fix this.
[19]
Changes later this week
The developers are working on a
new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This will be released on 24 June. You can
give feedback.
[20]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 June. It will be on all wikis from 25 June (
calendar).
Future changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use
TemplateStyles instead. 91 wikis still need to fix this. You can
read more and see if your wiki is affected.
[21]
_crop.jpg)