Wikidata Constraint Violations tool visualizes changes in constraint violations for last few weeks. Some of constraints produce millions of violations (marked as red).
Doing last polishing on the Lexeme entity type and cleaning up the demo data for the demo at Wikimania
Improving the dispatching of changes to Wikipedia and co to cope with the increased demand that lead to delays in Wikidata changes showing up in Wikipedia watchlist and recent changes
Working on making constraints work on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
Working on making it easier to see when input in property or value fields is not recognized/wrong (phabricator:T170531)
Added new language codes (eya, fuf, ood, pjt, yap, zun) for use in monolingual text values
Fixed an issue with badges not being shown next to interwiki links on Wikipedia and co (phabricator:T172592)
Worked on showing labels when linking to a redirect (phabricator:T96553)
Worked on making change dispatching to Wikipedia and co work better so changes made on Wikidata show up there in a reasonable time. There were issues because of significantly increased edit activity on Wikidata.
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.
We will include a look at the organization and planning for our chapter, and expanding volunteer roles for both regular Wikipedia editors and new participants.
We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.
We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
After the main meeting, pizza/chicken/vegetables and refreshments and video games in the gallery!
Upcoming: WikiArabia, in Cairo, Egypt, on 23-25 October. They're looking for a volunteer to give a Wikidata workshop. Please contact them if you're interested!
The Gene Wiki: Using Wikipedia and Wikidata to organize biomedical knowledge August Wikimedia Research Showcase (second half), presented by Andrew Su, about how GeneWiki is using Wikidata. Video on YouTube
Citation.js: Endpoint on RunKit shows a demo REST API to convert Wikidata entries into BibTeX, Bib.TXT, citations, and CSL-JSON.
The organization team is still looking for sponsors to support the event and provide even more awesome stuff to the attendees. If your company can support the WikidataCon, please get in touch with Lydia.
Seeing the enthusiasm of the community for the WikidataCon, we raised our attendees limit from 150 to 200 persons. The last tickets will be released on September 1st. People who registered on the waitlist will be notified when a ticket is available.
The program committee is currently reviewing and organizing the submissions. We will contact the speakers soon, and publish the program in the beginning of September (around 6th).
We're looking for a keynote speaker who could bring an external point of view on ontologies. If you know interesting people, feel free to help
Looking into not showing language fallback hints for dialects to make the UI less cluttered for them and make it less necessary to enter labels and descriptions for them (phabricator:T174318)
Wrapping up our experiments with the new front-end technologies
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Georgia (Disambiguation). Since you had some involvement with the Georgia (Disambiguation) redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Certes (talk) 13:47, 29 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Open Library, the biggest resource of freely-licensed books, now links to Wikidata (through Reasonator) and to VIAF (example here; see "Wikidata" in the right-hand column).
With 200 attendees, the WikidataCon is now complete. Thanks all for your enthusiasm \o/ If you registered on the waitlist or submitted a talk, check your mailbox for more information.
The WikidataCon program will be released this week, and we will call for volunteers soon
Looked into all the things necessary to make it possible to store forms and senses on Lexeme pages.
Worked more on caching constraints checks results which is needed to enable constraints checks for all logged-in users (phabricator:T173696)
Making progress on checking constraints also on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
Removed language fallback hints for dialects to make the UI less cluttered for them and make it less necessary to enter labels and descriptions for them (phabricator:T174318)
Fixed an issue that links to an item were not showing the label when it pointed to a redirect (phabricator:T96553)
Unrecognized input in entity selectors will be highlighted in red (phabricator:T170531)
Added an additional normalization for page titles when linking pages on Wiktionary via Cognate (phabricator:T172987)
The API will not only output the hashes for qualifier snaks, but also for main snaks as well as references snaks (phabricator:T174692). Note that hashes (other than IDs) are not meant to be stable identifiers, and should not be stored for a longer time.
Snak hashes will also appear as part of CSS classes in entity pages (phabricator:T171725)
The program of the WikidataCon is now published on-wiki. You will find there a lot of different formats, topics and speakers, during the two days of the conference.
The event is now complete, no more tickets available. The last tickets have been attributed to the first persons who registered on the waitlist. If some more seats get free because another attendee cancels participation, the next person on the waitlist will be informed.
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.
This month will also feature on our agenda, upcoming editathons, the organization's Annual Meeting, and Chapter board elections.
We will include a look at the organization and planning for our chapter, and expanding volunteer roles for both regular Wikipedia editors and new participants.
We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.
We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
After the main meeting, pizza/chicken/vegetables and refreshments and video games in the gallery!
Greetings from the Military history WikiProject! Elections for the Military history WikiProject Coordinators are currently underway. As a member of the WikiProject you are cordially invited to take part by casting your vote(s) for the candidates on the election page. This year's election will conclude at 23:59 UTC 29 September. Thank you for your time. For the current tranche of Coordinators, AustralianRupert (talk) 10:39, 21 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Rolled out more fine-grained usage tracking on Greek Wikipedia. This will lead to less irrelevant changes showing up in watchlist and recent changes on those projects. We're testing this on Greek Wikipedia to see if the solution we have scales before rolling it out further. (phabricator:T151717)
Adding an API module to copy a statement from one item to another (phabricator:T55619)
Working more on checking constraints also on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
Added support for the Creator namespace to the constraints check for Commons links (phabricator:T176062)
Added a css class to values that link to redirects so they can more easily be identified by editors who want that for maintenance work (phabricator:T70567) Thanks Matej!
Finishing touches on adding full URIs for external identifiers to our RDF export so we're good citizens of the semantic web (phabricator:T121274)
Added a new mw.wikibase.getAllStatements Lua function in addition to the existing getBestStatements, that returns all statements regardless of their rank (phabricator:T176124)
Looking into an issue where unwanted email notifications are being sent (phabricator:T174794)
Upcoming: WikidataCon, Berlin, 28-29 October (sold out)
We will have two exciting keynotes. The first keynote speaker is Fabian M. Suchanek, professor at Télécom Paris Tech University, working on the knowledge base YAGO. The second keynote speaker is Michael Kreil, datajournalist working on the project Data Sciences and Stories.
Please volunteer for some tasks at the conference if you are attending.
Breaking change: "wb_entity_per_page" table will not be updated and replicated on ToolLabs anymore
A mw.wikibase.getLabelByLang Lua function will be added (phabricator:T173262)
The mw.wikibase.sitelink Lua function will accept a second parameter with the global identifier of a wiki (e.g. "enwiki") to link to (phabricator:T142903)
Had to temporarily turn off showing Wikidata's changes on Commons and Russian Wikipedia because of database issues. We're working on turning it back on.
Continued work on persistently storing edits to Forms on Lexemes
Finishing work on checking constraints on qualifiers and references with the constraint checks gadget
Fixed a bug where notification emails for Wikidata changes were sent when they shouldn't have been (phabricator:T174794)
Full URIs for external identifiers will soon be in the RDF export (phabricator:T121274)
Monthly Tasks
Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
Learn how to work with your photos to illustrate New York City articles!
Note that this is part of the larger Open House New York Weekend activities on Saturday and Sunday, when sites normally closed to the public are open for public visits and photography.
If you can, bring your camera/photos to the event, and a laptop if you'd like to engage in adding photos to articles. But this is not necessary.
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.
We will include a look at the organization and planning for our chapter, and expanding volunteer roles for both regular Wikipedia editors and new participants.
We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.
We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
After the main meeting, pizza/chicken/vegetables and refreshments and video games in the gallery!
Upcoming: WikidataCon, Berlin, 28-29 October (sold out)
If you organize a local event for the Wikidata birthday, feel free to add it on the events page and the birthday page
A blog post describing Textes d'affiches, a tool using Wikidata to show movies and the works they are adapted from, developed during a hackathon at the national French library (by Shonagon, in French)
More work on checking constraints on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
Now caching constraints results to make it ready for rollout for more users
Continued work on more fine-grained usage tracking so we better know which parts of an item is used on an article on Wikipedia and the other sister projects
Improved the way Wikidata changes are shown in watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and Co so they are more in-line with the other changes (phabricator:T48329, phabricator:T50684) Thanks Matej!
Upcoming : Wikidata and Wiki Loves Monuments editathon in Berlin, 24-26 November (in German). We're looking for trainers to explain the basic use of QuickStatements, Open Refine and Mix'n'Match. If you want to join, please contact MB-one
Wikidata's birthday
The fifth anniversary of Wikidata was celebrated, as every year, with a lot of presents, events and stories. You can find an overview on the birthday page.
inventaire.io CC0 Wikidata-ready NDJSON and TTL dumps are now accessible at dumps.inventaire.io
You can now move claims to new items with moveClaim.js. You can do so by typing "new".
Prefix search on Wikidata (wbsearchentities API) now is using ElasticSearch as backend. This should improve search quality and also is more flexible and tunable.
The Wikipedia Asian Month Edit-a-thon @ The Met will be the Metropolitan Museum of Art's second edit-a-thon, hosted on Sunday November 19, 2017 in the Bonnie Sacerdote Classroom, Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education (81st Street entrance) at The Met Fifth Avenue in New York City.
Following the first Met edit-a-thon in May 2017, the museum is excited to work with Wikipedia Asian Month for the potential to seed new articles about Asian artworks, artwork types, and art traditions, from any part of Asia. These can be illustrated with thousands of its recently-released images of public domain artworks available for Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons from the museum’s collection spanning 5,000 years of art. The event is an opportunity for Wikimedia communities to engage The Met's diverse Asian collections onsite and remotely.
If you want to review what happened during the WikidataCon, here is the list of all the sessions, with slides, notes and videos, when available
Release of wikidata-edit v2.0.0: brings qualifiers and references support, and a few breaking changes. See changelogs
Release of wikidata-cli v5.0.0: brings qualifiers and references support, multi-entity summary|label|description|description requests, a new `edit-item` command, and a few breaking changes. See changelogs
The Cebuano and Swedish wikis have a lot of bot-created content which is unconnected to other wiki articles. A good way to tackle that problem is by checking constraint violations for property GeoNames ID.
Serbia report: Wikipedian in residence at Historical Archives of Subotica; Model of a grain of wheat exlusivly digitized for Wikimedia Commons; Cooperation of the Ministry of Culture and Information and Wikimedia Serbia - GLAM presentations and workshops for museums, archives and libraries
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at NYU ITP Tisch School of the Arts (4th floor) at 721 Broadway in Manhattan.
We will include a look at the organization and planning for our chapter, and expanding volunteer roles for both regular Wikipedia editors and new participants.
We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.
We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
After the main meeting, pizza/chicken/vegetables and refreshments and video games in the gallery!
We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Pharos (talk) ~~~~~
Latitudes, longitudes, as well as coordinate precisions have accidentally been exported to RDF as xsd:decimal, and are going to be exported as xsd:double soon (phabricator:T179228)
Continue on refactoring PropertySuggester-python for better maintainability and performance (phab:T179664)
Make AffectedPagesFinder take DESCRIPTION_USAGE into account (phab:T176417)
Accessing mw.config.get( 'wbEntity' ) will trigger a deprecation warning, gadgets and user script should use the wikibase.entityPage.entityLoaded hook instead (phabricator:T169771)
Work on caching constraint check results (phab:T179849) and indicating that they are cached (phab:T179844)
Work on JSON-LD support in the Purtle library used for exports (gerrit:379669)
Wikibase code base does not use Composer class autoloading any more (phabricator:T180067) as another step towards getting rid of our own build process and being more in line with the rest of Wikimedia
Monthly Tasks
Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
Hello, Aude. Voting in the 2017 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 10 December. All users who registered an account before Saturday, 28 October 2017, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Wednesday, 1 November 2017 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
Working on fixing a regression after a change in MediaWiki core that makes edit links show up on diff pages (phabricator:T181807)
More work on persistent editing of statements on Forms of a Lexeme (specifically phabricator:T180467)
Improved size of the diff that we sent to Wikipedia and co for changes happening on Wikidata. This is one more needed step towards only showing meaningful edits in the watchlists and recent changes there. (phabricator:T113468)
As we approach the end of the year, the Military History project is looking to recognise editors who have made a real difference. Each year we do this by bestowing two awards: the Military Historian of the Year and the Military History Newcomer of the Year. The co-ordinators invite all project members to get involved by nominating any editor they feel merits recognition for their contributions to the project. Nominations for both awards are open between 00:01 on 2 December 2017 and 23:59 on 15 December 2017. After this, a 14-day voting period will follow commencing at 00:01 on 16 December 2017. Nominations and voting will take place on the main project talkpage: here and here. Thank you for your time. For the co-ordinators, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:35, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Incoming:Next Structured Commons IRC office hour will be on Tuesday, February 13, 2018, at 18:00 UTC.
Past: Tech-talk about knowledge technologies, featuring Wikidata, DBpedia, and Histropedia at Jakarta Digital Valley, Jakarta, Indonesia on Dec 8, 2017. Slides are available at Slideshare link.
Structured Data on Commons: Participate in this survey to help the team understand which tools and functionalities are most important to the Commons and Wikidata communities
QuickStatements now has a CSV-like import function (under "import commands")
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.
We will include a look at the organization and planning for our chapter, and expanding volunteer roles for both regular Wikipedia editors and new participants.
We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.
We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
After the main meeting, pizza/chicken/vegetables and refreshments and video games in the gallery!
Final step towards being able to store statements on Forms of a Lexeme
Disabled RDF support for Lexemes as the mapping isn't defined yet (phabricator:T182660)
Adding some more smart tracking for Lua usage so we better know which properties from an item are used on a Wikipedia article even when the whole item is loaded (phabricator:T179923)
"Military history" is one of the most important subjects when speak of sum of all human knowledge. To support contributors interested in the area over various language Wikipedias, we intend to form a user group. It also provides a platform to share the best practices between military historians, and various military related projects on Wikipedias. An initial discussion was has been done between the coordinators and members of WikiProject Military History on English Wikipedia. Now this discussion has been taken to Meta-Wiki. Contributors intrested in the area of military history are requested to share their feedback and give suggestions at Talk:Discussion to incubate a user group for Wikipedia Military Historians.
You are invited to join us at Ace Hotel for Wikipedia Day NYC 2018, a Wikipedia celebration and mini-conference as part of the project's global 16th birthday festivities. In addition to the party, the event will be a participatory unconference, with keynotes, plenary panels, lightning talks, and of course open space sessions.
And there will be cake.
We also hope for the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
Past: Wikidata team and volunteers were at 34C3. Check the videos, https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%2334C3%20Wikidata&src=typd the tweets, a new design made by Bleeptrack for a cake. Videos of Wikidata-related workshops will be published soon.
Prevented checking of constraints on "Wikidata property example" statements (phabricator:T183267)
Added link to the property's talk page to the constraint violation dialog to guide people there to discuss the constraint if necessary (phabricator:T164351)
Monthly Tasks
Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
Netherlands report: Historical aerial photographs from the Ministry of Defense; Texts on Dutch philosophers released under free license; Wikipedia manual; Images from Erfgoedhuis Zuid-Holland
Serbia report: Two Serbian museums welcomed their first Wikipedians in Residence
Part of Wikipedia's global 17th birthday celebration, Wikipedia Day NYC 2018 at Ace Hotel will include a mini-conference of scheduled panels as well as unconference style talks and discussions proposed by attendees on the day of the event. We are very excited to announce speakers such as Jason Scott (Internet Archive), Jackie Koerner (Visiting Scholar, Wiki Ed), and Andrew Lih (Wikimedia DC), as well as a fantastic line-up of panels that highlight projects and issues of relevance to the Wikimedia NYC community.
We also hope for the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
Constraint violations can now be checked on qualifiers and references (phab:T168532)
Implemented usage tracking deduplication to reduce database load (phab:T178079). This should not have any effect on what users see on recent changes and watchlists.
Redirects on client wikis that are connected to a Wikidata item can have a tracking category, if set up (phab:T185743). Thanks, Matěj!
One way of looking at Wikidata relates it to the semantic web concept, around for about as long as Wikipedia, and realised in dozens of distributed Web institutions. It sees Wikidata as supplying central, encyclopedic coverage of linked structured data, and looks ahead to greater support for "federated queries" that draw together information from all parts of the emerging network of websites.
Another perspective might be likened to a photographic negative of that one: Wikidata as an already-functioning Web hub. Over half of its properties are identifiers on other websites. These are Wikidata's "external links", to use Wikipedia terminology: one type for the DOI of a publication, another for the VIAF page of an author, with thousands more such. Wikidata links out to sites that are not nominally part of the semantic web, effectively drawing them into a larger system. The crosswalk possibilities of the systematic construction of these links was covered in Issue 8.
Wikipedia:External links speaks of them as kept "minimal, meritable, and directly relevant to the article." Here Wikidata finds more of a function. On viaf.org one can type a VIAF author identifier into the search box, and find the author page. The Wikidata Resolver tool, these days including Open Street Map, Scholia etc., allows this kind of lookup. The hub tool by maxlath takes a major step further, allowing both lookup and crosswalk to be encoded in a single URL.
From the life of Wikidata: with the Wikidata Concepts Monitor we can now begin to discover how our communities use knowledge across the Wikimedia projects, by Goran S. Milovanović
See also: WDCM Journal, several examples of the use of Wikidata on the Wikimedia projects
We are saddened to report that Polish Wikimedian Krzysztof Machocki (who was also active on Wikidata) died on 31 January 2018, aged 36, after a couple of weeks of illness. Our condolences to his family and friends.
The call for submissions for Wikimania (Cape Town, July 2018) is now open. Deadline is March 18th. Ideas of submissions related to Wikidata can be discussed here
Based on community discussions, the ArticlePlaceholder will soon be deployed on Urdu and Estonian Wikipedias.
Statistics
January 2018 brought us 9,770,248 edits, 445,027 new items were created.
The number of users that edited Wikidata per day grew in 2017 from 2439 to 2672 users, 9,6% more compared to 2016. The number of edits by them grew with 18% to 190k edits per day. We also get edited by 542 IP adresses per day, 50% more than in 2016.
In 2017, Wikidata got edited by 46 various bots per day, executing 334k edits per day (63% more than in 2016). The most active bot in 2017 was Emijrpbot, who added 18 million edits to Wikidata.
The next Weekly Summary (February 19th) will be the 300th edition of the newsletter! To help making it special, you can share your favorite Wikidata tool, so the other readers discover nice tools
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.
We will include a look at the organization and planning for our chapter, and expanding volunteer roles for both regular Wikipedia editors and new participants.
We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.
We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
After the main meeting, pizza/chicken/vegetables and refreshments and video games in the gallery!
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Welcome to the 300th Weekly Summary!
The weekly newsletter was started by Lydia at the very beginning of the Wikidata project, even before the first deployment, to keep the community informed about the developments, the new projects and tools. More than five years later, the newsletter is still there, its content powered by the community, and sent every week all along the years. I wanted to say a warm "thank you!" to each person who helped filling the Weekly Summary <3
Over the past years, as you know, Wikidata has grown a lot. More data, more tools, more editors and reusers, more exciting projects led by the community. The Weekly Summary has evolved with us, and the 300th edition seems a good moment to ask you all your suggestions about the newsletter, how it could continue evolving, and how you would like to improve it.
On that purpose, you can find a feedback page to express all your ideas about the Weekly Summary. We're very interested to know more about your reading habits, the parts you're more or less interested in, the new topics you would like to share with the community. Thanks in advance for filling it.
I stay available anytime to discuss with you, feel free to contact me if you have any question or concern! Cheers, Léa
A selection of cool tools on Wikidata
Here are a few tools that are recommended by some Wikidata community members. External websites, gadgets or scripts, they are very useful for Wikidata editors or users!
QuickStatements is a powerful tool that can edit or add Wikidata item en masse, via a text editor or importing a spreadsheet. (Éder Porto via Facebook)
Mix'n'match (manual), which helps us to interlink Wikidata with the rest of the web and the world :-) (Spinster, Siobhan via Twitter)
WikiShootMe! allows you to see Wikidata items plotted out on a map and shows you whether they have images or not. (Ham II)
Yair Rand's WikidataInfo script adds the QID of the equivalent Wikidata item to the page being viewed (on sister projects), along with its Wikidata label and description. (Andy Mabbett)
Recoin measures the degree of completeness of relevant properties of a Wikidata item and suggests any relevant statements that can be added to the item. (Rachmat04)
DuplicateReferences gadget adds a link to copy references and add them to other statements on the same item. (PKM)
checkConstraints gadget adds notifications on the interface to easily notice the violation of constraints and help people fixing them (Léa)
Resolve authors lists scientific articles with the property author name string (P2093) and groups them on the basis of co-authors and topic, which helps to distinguish people referred to by identical name strings. (Daniel Mietchen)
The Wiki Loves Monuments map is powered by Wikidata. You can look for a city and find the monuments around. (Stefano Sabatini via Facebook)
Fixed incomplete "Label:", "Description:" and "Statement:" entity usage messages in various places (phab:T178090). Thanks, Matěj!
Improved violation messages for ranges involving the current date (e. g. “should not be in the future”).
Continued work on caching constraint check results.
Enabled Lua fine-grained usage tracking for better performance on several more wikis: hywiki, frwiki, svwiki, itwiki, zhwiki, bewiki, nlwiki, glwiki, and Wikimedia Commons (phab:T187265phab:T186714)
Representation and grammatical features of the form can be changed using the UI (WikibaseLexeme) (phab:T173743, phab:T160525)
You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the ((proposed deletion/dated files)) notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the file's talk page.
Around the time in February when Wikidata clicked past item Q50000000, another milestone was reached: the mix'n'match tool uploaded its 1000th dataset. Concisely defined by its author, Magnus Manske, it works "to match entries in external catalogs to Wikidata". The total number of entries is now well into eight figures, and more are constantly being added: a couple of new catalogs each day is normal.
Since the end of 2013, mix'n'match has gradually come to play a significant part in adding statements to Wikidata. Particularly in areas with the flavour of digital humanities, but datasets can of course be about practically anything. There is a catalog on skyscrapers, and two on spiders.
These days mix'n'match can be used in numerous modes, from the relaxed gamified click through a catalog looking for matches, with prompts, to the fantastically useful and often demanding search across all catalogs. I'll type that again: you can search 1000+ datasets from the simple box at the top right. The drop-down menu top left offers "creation candidates", Magnus's personal favourite. m:Mix'n'match/Manual for more.
For the Wikidatan, a key point is that these matches, however carried out, add statements to Wikidata if, and naturally only if, there is a Wikidata property associated with the catalog. For everyone, however, the hands-on experience of deciding of what is a good match is an education, in a scholarly area, biographical catalogs being particularly fraught. Underpinning recent rapid progress is an open infrastructure for scraping and uploading.
Significantly (on average to 1/4th) reduced the number of changes from Wikidata showing up on the watchlists and recent changes on Wikipedias and the other sister projects. This way changes that do not affect an article should no longer show up. We're still holding off roll-out to Commons, Cebuano, Waray-Waray and Armenian Wikipedia because of scalability concerns.
Working on optimizing one of the largest database tables (wb_terms) (phab:T188279)
Fixing a bug on how Wikidata changes are shown on Wikipedia (phab:T189320)
Continued addressing security review issues for Wikibase-Lexeme extension (phab:T186726)
Final note from Léa: thanks to people who participated to the feedback page! Today's Weekly Summary is already improved thanks to your suggestions. Feel free to add more comments, and feel free to edit the newsletter yourself: all small contributions are welcome :)
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.
We will include a look at the organization and planning for our chapter, and expanding volunteer roles for both regular Wikipedia editors and new participants.
We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.
We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
After the main meeting, pizza/chicken/vegetables and refreshments and video games in the gallery!
7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Babycastles gallery, 145 West 14th Street
(note the new address, a couple of doors down from the former Babycastles location)
We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Megs (talk)
The property suggestions were updated last week, the last update was in December 2017. The most noticable effect is the higher ranking of "family name" (P734) on items about people. Input about the suggester is still welcome.
George, le deuxième texte (fr), a website querying Wikidata to find French female authors, in order to bring more diversity in the literature school programs
New, configurable download page for Mix’n’match catalogs (example)
Due to the winter storm warning, the WikiWednesday Salon & Skillshare scheduled for March 21st has been cancelled. Please consider attending one of the many edit-a-thons scheduled for this week. We look forward to editing with you soon!
Upcoming: EuropeanaTech and Wikidata Workshop Day for GLAMs, Rotterdam (NL), Monday 14 May. A day of GLAM-related workshops around Wikidata and Structured Commons, for beginners and advanced users.
New search code for Wikidata merged. You may notice the improvement in the search results output for Wikidata item. However, new code for search is not enabled, only new results format. The search code will be enabled next week.
Improving formatting of language and lexical category in diff for Lexemes (phab:T189679)
G'day all, please be advised that throughout April 2018 the Military history Wikiproject is running its annual backlog elimination drive. This will focus on several key areas:
tagging and assessing articles that fall within the project's scope
adding or improving listed resources on Milhist's task force pages
updating the open tasks template on Milhist's task force pages
creating articles that are listed as "requested" on the project's various lists of missing articles.
As with past Milhist drives, there are points awarded for working on articles in the targeted areas, with barnstars being awarded at the end for different levels of achievement.
The drive is open to all Wikipedians, not just members of the Military history project, although only work on articles that fall (broadly) within the scope of military history will be considered eligible. This year, the Military history project would like to extend a specific welcome to members of Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red, and we would like to encourage all participants to consider working on helping to improve our coverage of women in the military. This is not the sole focus of the edit-a-thon, though, and there are aspects that hopefully will appeal to pretty much everyone.
The drive starts at 00:01 UTC on 1 April and runs until 23:59 UTC on 30 April 2018. Those interested in participating can sign up here.
Please join us as Women in Red and Art+Feminism continue our collaboration in April 2018. Continue the work you've done in March and pledge to help close the gender gap in April! All you need to do is sign up on the Meet-Up page below and list any articles you create in the month of April.
You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the ((proposed deletion/dated files)) notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the file's talk page.
A new version of Denelezh, a tool to monitor the gender gap in Wikidata, has been released, including a new methodology to produce the data (explained at the top of the main page and in the documentation), and an overview of the gender gap by Wikimedia project.
Open Citations Month, with its eminently guessable hashtag, is upon us. We should be utterly grateful that in the past 12 months, so much data on which papers cite which other papers has been made open, and that Wikidata is playing its part in hosting it as "cites" statements. At the time of writing, there are 15.3M Wikidata items that can do that.
Pulling back to look at open access papers in the large, though, there is is less reason for celebration. Access in theory does not yet equate to practical access. A recent LSE IMPACT blogpost puts that issue down to "heterogeneity". A useful euphemism to save us from thinking that the whole concept doesn't fall into the realm of the oxymoron.
Some home truths: aggregation is not content management, if it falls short on reusability. The PDF file format is wedded to how humans read documents, not how machines ingest them. The salami-slicer is our friend in the current downloading of open access papers, but for a better metaphor, think about skinning an onion, laboriously, 100 times with diminishing returns. There are of the order of 100 major publisher sites hosting open access papers, and the predominant offer there is still a PDF.
From the discoverability angle, Wikidata's bibliographic resources combined with the SPARQL query are superior in principle, by far, to existing keyword searches run over papers. Open access content should be managed into consistent HTML, something that is currently strenuous. The good news, such as it is, would be that much of it is already in XML. The organisational problem of removing further skins from the onion, with sensible prioritisation, is certainly not insuperable. The CORE group (the bloggers in the LSE posting) has some answers, but actually not all that is needed for the text and data mining purposes they highlight. The long tail, or in other words the onion heart when it has become fiddly beyond patience to skin, does call for a pis aller. But the real knack is to do more between the XML and the heart.
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly WikiWednesday evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery. We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
Is there a project you'd like to share? A question you'd like answered? A Wiki* skill you'd like to learn? Let us know by adding it to the agenda! After the main meeting, pizza and video games in the gallery.
7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Babycastles gallery, 145 West 14th Street
(note the new address, a couple of doors down from the former Babycastles location)
We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our agenda, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Megs (talk)
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
WikiWorkshop, a forum bringing together researchers exploring all aspects the Wikimedia projects, in Lyon, April 24th. Seven papers related to Wikidata will be presented.
Serbia report: Strong support from the Ministry of culture and information of Republic of Serbia: Financing the three WIR programs and realizing GLAM seminars
Sweden report: National museum of world Culture; Sounds and pronunciations; Nordic Museum
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.
We will include a look at the organization and planning for our chapter, and expanding volunteer roles for both regular Wikipedia editors and new participants.
We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.
We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
After the main meeting, pizza/chicken/vegetables and refreshments and video games in the gallery!
The proposal includes downloading 30,000 open access papers, aiming (roughly speaking) to create a baseline for medical referencing on Wikipedia. It leaves open the question of how these are to be chosen.
The basic criteria of WP:MEDRS include a concentration on secondary literature. Attention has to be given to the long tail of diseases that receive less current research. The MEDRS guideline supposes that edge cases will have to be handled, and the premature exclusion of publications that would be in those marginal positions would reduce the value of the collection. Prophylaxis misses the point that gate-keeping will be done by an algorithm.
Two well-known but rather different areas where such considerations apply are tropical diseases and alternative medicine. There are also a number of potential downloading troubles, and these were mentioned in Issue 11. There is likely to be a gap, even with the guideline, between conditions taken to be necessary but not sufficient, and conditions sufficient but not necessary, for candidate papers to be included. With around 10,000 recognised medical conditions in standard lists, being comprehensive is demanding. With all of these aspects of the task, ScienceSource will seek community help.
Ongoing: On 24 May, there was a significant outage affecting Wikidata and sister projects that use Wikidata. As a result, some features of are temporarily disabled: Wikidata's property suggester, Lua modules and parser functions calling by label instead of ID, search for the ArticlePlaceholder. We apologize for the inconvenience, we're working to get them back as soon as possible. For technical details, see: phab:T195520 & Incident documentation/20180524-wikidata.
Made constraint check result appear directly after adding a new statement (phab:T194247)
Working on looking up entities by external identifiers on Special:Search (phab:T99899)
Added Docker image to Wikibase website (phab:T189936)
Added WikibaseImport script to Docker images to make it easier for people to start their own Wikibase install with some data imported from Wikidata (phab:T192080)
You can now use global preferences on most wikis. This means you can set preferences for all wikis at the same time. Before this you had to change them on each individual wiki.
Country geoshape data have been added to Commons and linked to the corresponding Wikidata items. These geoshapes can be used to visualise query results e.g. World map showing population of each country.
Learning to Generate Wikipedia Summaries for Underserved Languages from Wikidata, presented at the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics by Lucie Kaffee and Hady Elsahar (see the poster and the paper)
Developing a prototype for usability testing for how the term box (labels, descriptions, aliases) could work on mobile
Investigating how we can do the display of items (their label and sometimes description when linked to in a statement or in listings like Recent Changes) in a way that is less of an issue for the database
Working on including the dispatch lag in the maxlag API to make it easier for bots to see when they should stop editing because of performance reasons (phabricator:T194950)
Working on adding a Lua function to check if an item is a subclass/instance of another one (phabricator:T179155)
Created an API that returns constraint violations for an item in TTL format in preparation for making constraint violations queryable in the query service (phabricator:T194762)
Started planning for support for Senses
Added more helpful text on Special:NewLexeme to make it easier to understand what information is required (phabricator:T193602)
Working on pre-filling the spelling variant for a new Form's representation (phabricator:T195708)
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan. Is there a project you'd like to share? A question you'd like answered? A Wiki* skill you'd like to learn? Let us know by adding it to the agenda.
We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.
Portal:Government of the United States/In the news, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Government of the United States/In the news and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Government of the United States/In the news during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. —Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs) 01:17, 20 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
There will be an IRC Office Hour for Structured Data on Commons on Tuesday, 26 June from 18:00-19:00 UTC. More information, including time and date conversion, is available on Meta. There is no set topic, you are welcome to bring any discussion that you would like to the office hour.
Facto Post enters its second year, with a Cambridge Blue (OK, Aquamarine) background, a new logo, but no Cambridge blues. On-topic for the ScienceSource project is a project page here. It contains some case studies on how the WP:MEDRS guideline, for the referencing of articles at all related to human health, is applied in typical discussions.
Close to home also, a template, called ((medrs)) for short, is used to express dissatisfaction with particular references. Technology can help with patrolling, and this Petscan query finds over 450 articles where there is at least one use of the template. Of course the template is merely suggesting there is a possible issue with the reliability of a reference. Deciding the truth of the allegation is another matter.
This maintenance issue is one example of where ScienceSource aims to help. Where the reference is to a scientific paper, its type of algorithm could give a pass/fail opinion on such references. It could assist patrollers of medical articles, therefore, with the templated references and more generally. There may be more to proper referencing than that, indeed: context, quite what the statement supported by the reference expresses, prominence and weight. For that kind of consideration, case studies can help. But an algorithm might help to clear the backlog.
Celtic Knot Conference, dedicated to Wikimedia projects and minority languages, July 5-6, in Aberystwyth (Wales). A lot of Wikidata workshops will take place during this event.
The Commons template Wikidata infobox has now passed 1.3 million uses on Commons categories, with plenty more still to come. A new help page gives advice on how to add, extend or improve uses of it, and how to fix data problems.
Sweden report: SMVK upload; Swedish National Archives; Wikidata connects Swedish people / archives using Wikidata tool hub; Topographical register at the Swedish National Archives; LIBRIS XL - Bibframe 2.0 and open linked data
Wikimedia NYC invites you to attend a Wiki Loves Pride Edit-a-thon on Thursday, July 12th at Jefferson Market Library! Wiki Loves Pride is a global campaign to expand and improve LGBT-related content across all Wikimedia projects, in all languages. We are holding this year's event in July in order to support folx who want to contribute a photograph they took at one of NYC's many Pride events or edit an article about something they learned this June. Not sure what to contribute? No problem! We will have a list of articles that need your help.
Officially it is "bridging the gaps in knowledge", with Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town paying tribute to the southern African concept of ubuntu to implement it. Besides face-to-face interactions, Wikimedians do need their power sources.
Facto Post interviewed Jdforrester, who has attended every Wikimania, and now works as Senior Product Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation. His take on tackling the gaps in the Wikimedia movement is that "if we were an army, we could march in a column and close up all the gaps". In his view though, that is a faulty metaphor, and it leads to a completely false misunderstanding of the movement, its diversity and different aspirations, and the nature of the work as "fighting" to be done in the open sector. There are many fronts, and as an eventualist he feels the gaps experienced both by editors and by users of Wikimedia content are inevitable. He would like to see a greater emphasis on reuse of content, not simply its volume.
If that may not sound like radicalism, the Decolonizing the Internet conference here organized jointly with Whose Knowledge? can redress the picture. It comes with the claim to be "the first ever conference about centering marginalized knowledge online".
Links
ScienceSource focus list (shortcut WD:SSFL on Wikidata), project to tag a first-pass open access medical bibliography on Wikidata, and also overcome the systematic biases in the medical literature by curation.