This page 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.
Animation illustrating the discovery history of satellite galaxies of the Milky Way over the last 100 years. The classical satellite galaxies are in blue (labeled with their names), SDSS-discoveries are in red, and more recent discoveries (mostly with DES) are in green.
Upcoming: Wikidata Zurich Training in Zurich on the weekend of November 2-3. There will be presentations and hands-on sessions on editing, querying and coding for Wikidata.
Namescript fills in labels, descriptions and aliases of items about names, making it easier to create such items (you only need to provide a few statements).
Upcoming: Wikidata Zurich Training in Zurich on the weekend of November 2-3. There will be presentations and hands-on sessions on editing, querying and coding for Wikidata.
This Recent changes tool allows to get a list of unpatrolled Wikidata changes with enhanced filters that are more adapted to Wikidata than the standard Recent Changes page. Available actions include mass patroling and easier revert interface.
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
Last week's Tech News had delivery problems. Some did not get the newsletter. Some got it more than one time. The problem where some pages got it three times should now be fixed. [1]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 October. It will be on all wikis from 3 October (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 2 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Special:Contributions will get the standard OOUI look. This makes it easier to use on mobile and makes it look like other Special: pages. There is a script you can use to make the form smaller if you want to. [2]
Following a discussion, a new criterion for speedy category renaming was added: C2F: One eponymous article, which applies if the category contains only an eponymous article or media file, provided that the category has not otherwise been emptied shortly before the nomination. The default outcome is an upmerge to the parent categories.
Technical news
As previously noted, tighter password requirements for Administrators were put in place last year. Wikipedia should now alert you if your password is less than 10 characters long and thus too short.
soweego links Wikidata to large third-party catalogs. Together with its friend Mix'n'match, it helps Wikidata to become the universal linking hub of open data.
Two Wikidata users were nominated for a “WikiEule”, the German Wikipedia community’s annual awards: MisterSynergy (nomination) for an “EngagementEule” (special commitment to the wiki projects) and Tobias1984 (nomination) for an “OrgaEule” (organizational work).
You can nominate projects for the WikidataCon award until October 7th at 23:59 UTC (today).
During the summer, WikidataJS became WikibaseJS! More specifically:
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
There is a problem in the visual editor when you copy or delete text with footnotes. It will be fixed soon. [4]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 October. It will be on all wikis from 10 October (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 9 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
The Community Wishlist Survey has a new format. It will focus on wikis that typically get less support. It will probably go back to the normal format next year. It is not decided exactly how it will work this year. You can leave feedback.
There is a new technical community newsletter. You can read more about the work of Wikimedia's technical community. Subscribe to get the information in the future.
Outreachy is an internship program for groups who are underrepresented in free and open-source software. There are seven Wikimedia projects about coding, documentation and quality assurance in the next round. Persons who fit the criteria can apply. The last day to apply is 5 November.
Sweden report: Open cultural heritage; More libraries in Africa on Wikidata; Global MIL Week 2019 Feature Conference; Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete; Wiki Loves Monuments
UK report: Oxford, Khalili Collections and Endangered Archives
USA report: Hispanic Heritage and Disability Awareness Month
Special story: Help the Movement Learn about Content Campaigns & Supporting newcomers in Wikidata training courses!
The U.S. Navy guided missile cruiser USS Josephus Daniels (CG-27) maneuvers around an island as it passes through the Strait of Magellan en route to Punte Arenas, Chile, on 1 July 1990, during exercise "Unitas XXXI", a combined exercise involving the naval forces of the United States and nine South American nations.
Lei (Nico) Zheng, et al. (2019) The Roles Bots Play in Wikipedia. Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 3, Issue CSCW, Article 215 (November 2019), 20 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3359317 (also blog post).
Lina M. Rojas-Barahona, et al. (2019) Spoken Conversational Search for General Knowledge. Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue. ACL Anthology ID: W19-5914 + arXiv:1909.11980
Tool of the week
ShowTalkLabels: with this script enabled, when a talk page is shown on your watchlist or similar pages, the label of the related entity is shown.
Other noteworthy stuff
We now have d:Q70000000 (3,5-dimethyl-3H-pyrazole, chemical compound) and Lexeme:L200000 (spiritualistically, English adverb)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can now use more advanced editing tools on the mobile web. You can turn them on and off in your preferences in the mobile version. [5]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 October. It will be on all wikis from 17 October (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 16 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are no longer supported. This means the browsers might start looking a bit weird. They will not get security support. You can't read Wikimedia wikis in Internet Explorer on Windows XP or Windows versions that are older than Windows XP. This is because almost no one uses the browsers anymore. Supporting them made the wikis less secure for everyone else. [6]
In the future section headings might have a share link. This is to make it easier to link to the section. You can read more and discuss.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The API sandbox and help pages now show more clearly when API modules are marked as internal. API modules marked as internal were probably internal before. It was easier to miss. You should look for non-internal alternatives. [7]
Problems
There is a translation tool we use on wikis with more than one language. For a few days it did not create pages for new languages when someone translated a page. The languages did not show in the language bar. This has been fixed. [8]
The history and diffs can show wrong content. This is because of a cache problem. It will soon be fixed. [9]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 October. It will be on all wikis from 24 October (calendar).
Reference Previews will be a beta feature on all Wikipedias and some Wikivoyages. It shows you a preview of the footnote when you hover over or click on the number. It has been a beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia since April.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 October. See how to join.
The Wikidata Wor(l)dmap is showing translations of the same concept on a world map. To use it, type a word (for example "water") in the search field, then observe the map. You can zoom in the map. The data comes from Wikidata item labels and the coordinate location property of the language.
Panandâ, a mobile app powered by Wikidata (and Wikimedia Commons), was selected as one of the five finalists in the App for Social Good category in the Android Masters 2019 competition organized by Google Developer Group Philippines. The final event will be held on November 16.
Issue with Wikidata Query Service: aggregate variables can no longer reuse the names of other variables (T235540).
You can translate labels in the background image of Wikidata front page by adding translation to this file
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can post proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals until 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can read more about the format for this year.
Mobile users now have a specific design for their Watchlist. [10][11]
You can share feedback and ideas on the Desktop Improvements project. The goal is to make the interface easier to use for readers and editors without removing any functionality. The Foundation's Readers Web team will work on this over the next two years.
OOUI now allows using px (pixels) instead of em (em) for some specific cases. [12][13]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 October. It will be on all wikis from 31 October (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 30 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
There will be no software changes from 19 December to 2 January. The first MediaWiki version next year will come the week of 6 January. [14]
Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015, this information was moved from global variables named wg* to mw.config. The old global variables will be removed later this year. You can know more about it and tell the developers if you want to try this out on your wiki first.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Happy birthday, Wikidata!
Today, on October 29th, it’s Wikidata’s 7th birthday. Time to reflect and celebrate and to look forward to see where we are going from here. Message from the Wikidata development team
The Community Wishlist Survey 2020 from Wikimedia Foundation started. This year, it is focused on small projects and Wikidata-related wishes will not be included.
You can help expanding the list of databases, encyclopedias, etc. which could be added to Mix'n'match. Can be used for property creation too.
What talk page interactions do you remember? Is it a story about how someone helped you to learn something new? Is it a story about how someone helped you get involved in a group? Something else? Whatever your story is, we want to hear it!
Please tell us a story about how you used a talk page. Please share a link to a memorable discussion, or describe it on the talk page for this project. The team wants your examples. These examples will help everyone develop a shared understanding of what this project should support and encourage.
Talk pages project
The Talk Pages Consultation was a global consultation to define better tools for wiki communication. From February through June 2019, more than 500 volunteers on 20 wikis, across 15 languages and multiple projects, came together with members of the Foundation to create a product direction for a set of discussion tools. The Phase 2 Report of the Talk Page Consultation was published in August. It summarizes the product direction the team has started to work on, which you can read more about here: Talk Page Project project page.
The team needs and wants your help at this early stage. They are starting to develop the first idea. Please add your name to the "Getting involved" section of the project page, if you would like to hear about opportunities to participate.
Mobile visual editor
The Editing team is trying to make it simpler to edit on mobile devices. The team is changing the visual editor on mobile. If you have something to say about editing on a mobile device, please leave a message at Talk:VisualEditor on mobile.
In September, the Editing team updated the mobile visual editor's editing toolbar. Anyone could see these changes in the mobile visual editor.
One toolbar: All of the editing tools are located in one toolbar. Previously, the toolbar changed when you clicked on different things.
New navigation: The buttons for moving forward and backward in the edit flow have changed.
Seamless switching: an improved workflow for switching between the visual and wikitext modes.
Feedback: You can try the refreshed toolbar by opening the mobile VisualEditor on a smartphone. Please post your feedback on the Toolbar feedback talk page.
Talk Pages Project: The team is thinking about the first set of proposed changes. The team will be working with a few communities to pilot those changes. The best way to stay informed is by adding your username to the list on the project page: Getting involved.
Testing the mobile visual editor as the default: The Editing team plans to post results before the end of the calendar year. The best way to stay informed is by adding the project page to your watchlist: VisualEditor as mobile default project page.
Measuring the impact of Edit Cards: This study asks whether the project helped editors add links and citations. The Editing team hopes to share results in November. The best way to stay informed is by adding the project page to your watchlist: Edit Cards project page.
This newsletter comes a little earlier than usual because the backlog is rising again and the holidays are coming very soon.
Getting the queue to 0
There are now 816 holders of the New Page Reviewer flag! Most of you requested the user right to be able to do something about the huge backlog but it's still roughly less than 10% doing 90% of the work. Now it's time for action.
Exactly one year ago there were 'only' 3,650 unreviewed articles, now we will soon be approaching 7,000 despite the growing number of requests for the NPR user right. If each reviewer soon does only 2 reviews a day over five days, the backlog will be down to zero and the daily input can then be processed by every reviewer doing only 1 review every 2 days - that's only a few minutes work on the bus on the way to the office or to class! Let's get this over and done with in time to relax for the holidays.
Want to join? Consider adding the NPP Pledge userbox.
Our next newsletter will announce the winners of some really cool awards.
Coordinator
Admin Barkeep49 has been officially invested as NPP/NPR coordinator by a unanimous consensus of the community. This is a complex role and he will need all the help he can get from other experienced reviewers.
This month's refresher course
Paid editing is still causing headaches for even our most experienced reviewers: This official Wikipedia article will be an eye-opener to anyone who joined Wikipedia or obtained the NPR right since 2015. See The Hallmarks to know exactly what to look for and take time to examine all the sources.
Tools
It is now possible to select new pages by date range. This was requested by reviewers who want to patrol from the middle of the list.
It is now also possible for accredited reviewers to put any article back into the New Pages Feed for re-review. The link is under 'Tools' in the side bar.
Reviewer Feedback
Would you like feedback on your reviews? Are you an experienced reviewer who can give feedback to other reviewers? If so there are two new feedback pilot programs. New Reviewer mentorship will match newer reviewers with an experienced reviewer with a new reviewer. The other program will be an occasional peer review cohort for moderate or experienced reviewers to give feedback to each other. The first cohort will launch November 13.
Second set of eyes
Not only are New Page Reviewers the guardians of quality of new articles, they are also in a position to ensure that pages are being correctly tagged for deletion and maintenance and that new authors are not being bitten. This is an important feature of your work, especially while some routine tagging for deletion can still be carried out by non NPR holders and inexperienced users. Read about it at the Monitoring the system section in the tutorial. If you come across such editors doing good work, don't hesitate to encourage them to apply for NPR.
Do be sure to have our talk page on your watchlist. There are often items that require reviewers' special attention, such as to watch out for pages by known socks or disruptive editors, technical issues and new developments, and of course to provide advice for other reviewers.
Arbitration Committee
The annual ArbCom election will be coming up soon. All eligible users will be invited to vote. While not directly concerned with NPR, Arbcom cases often lead back to notability and deletion issues and/or actions by holders of advanced user rights.
Community Wish list
There is to be no wish list for WMF encyclopedias this year. We thank Community Tech for their hard work addressing our long list of requirements which somewhat overwhelmed them last year, and we look forward to a successful completion.
To opt-out of future mailings, you can remove yourself here
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Martin Poulter on Wikidata projects at the University of Oxford, 05, November. Agenda
SPARQL RC is showing the recent changes on items that are listed from a specific query. It is very useful to monitor the changes on a specific subset of data, for example data that you recently imported in Wikidata.
Made the Lua functions mw.wikibase.getBestStatements and mw.wikibase.getAllStatements faster if called more than once for the same statement on a single 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.
Recent changes
At Special:Contributions you could see up to 5000 edits at the same time if you edited the URL. This has been lowered to 500. This is to stop requests which break the sites. [15]
Changes later this week
MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry can set the default length to block a user for your wiki. You will be able to use MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry-ip to set a different default block length for IP editors. [16]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 November. It will be on all wikis from 7 November (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 November at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
In order to decrease the size of what we store in caches we stopped storing the actual EntityUsage objects in ParserOutput and now just store minimal identifier strings (phabricator:T236749)
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
MediaWiki2LaTeX can put different pages from a Wikimedia wiki into a PDF. It can now make a PDF with around 5000 pages. Previously this was 800 pages.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Wikimedia will take part in Google Code-in. This is for young students who want to help with open source software. You can read more. Experienced technical Wikimedians can mentor students.
The National Museum is a Czech museum institution intended to systematically establish, prepare, and publicly exhibit natural scientific and historical collections. It was founded in 1818 and is located in Prague.
Panandâ, a mobile app powered by Wikidata (and Wikimedia Commons), won the top prize in the App for Social Good category in the Android Masters 2019 competition organized by Google Developer Group Philippines. Eugene, the app's developer, recently gave a lightning talk about the app at WikidataCon 2019.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
You will be able to read but not to edit some wikis for up to 30 minutes on 26 November at 06:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. It will probably last much shorter than 30 minutes. This will also affect the centralauth database. This could for example affect changing passwords, logging in to new wikis, changing emails or global renames. [17]
Changes later this week
You can soon vote on proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can read more about the format for this year.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Parsoid is software we use for the visual editor, content translation, Flow and the Android app. This has been rewritten. It will come to the wikis gradually over the next two weeks. It has been tested, but there could be some diffs or previews that don't look right. If you see any you can report them. [19]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 November. It will be on the other wikis next week (calendar). This is because of holidays.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
You will switch between the article and the talk page in a new way in the mobile view in the future. It will use tabs. This is more like in the desktop view. [20]
Join the global m:WikiForHumanRights Campaign by participating with WikiProject Human rights. The campaigns is focused on increasing coverage of human rights topics on Wikimedia projects through January 30.
Cradle enables editors to create a new item by completing a form. You can create a new form on the Cradle help page. Cradle forms can be used as templates to ensure that similar new items are structured the same way. This can be especially helpful for specific WikiProjects or datathons, and is a great timesaver if you are creating many similar items by hand.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
570k VIAF identifiers have been added to Wikidata items in an effort of synchronisation between the two databases, thanks to Bargioni. In order to report errors in VIAF an apposite page has been created. More information here.
Query Service lag now affects maxlag. You may need to retry/reset error multiple times when you run QuickStatement or OpenRefine in busy hours.
Wikidata now documented more than six million people, more than the number of articles in English Wikipedia
An RfC on the administrator resysop criteria was closed. 18 proposals have been summarised with a variety of supported and opposed statements. The inactivity grace period within which a new request for adminship is not required has been reduced from three years to two. Additionally, Bureaucrats are permitted to use their discretion when returning administrator rights.
Alt Labels displays item labels in other languages when there is no label in your default language. You may click a label to add it as the label for your language. This tool is very helpful for labels for people, books, articles, or films that do not need their labels to be translated.
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
Mix'n'match is a tool to connect Wikidata items to information in other databases. It can be used to find subjects that are missing in a Wikipedia. It now has more than 3000 datasets. Before it was closer to 2000.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 December. It will be on all wikis from 5 December (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
There will be a new schema for XML dumps. Scripts and apps that use them will need to be updated. If they are not updated they will no longer work. [21]
The ((REVISIONID)) magic word will no longer work in the content namespaces. This is for performance reasons. When you preview a page it returns "" (empty string). When you read a page it returns "-" (dash). In the future this will also affect other namespaces. The next ones are file and category namespaces. [22]
overpass: Embeds a map displaying features tagged with the current item in OpenStreetMap. Powered by overpass turbo. It helps check if the Wikidata object is mapped in OSM and also if it's correct.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
A WikiCite event will take place in May 2020 in Cologne. Call for contributions is now open (more info)
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
Wikimedia projects use Translatewiki to translate the wiki interface. You can now use WatchTranslations to watch projects there. You would get an email if there are missing translations to your language. [23]
There is a new dataset you can use. It shows the number of editors per country per month for a number of countries. You can read the documentation and download the dataset.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 December. It will be on all wikis from 12 December (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 11 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
You can test a new reference tool. It makes it possible to reference different parts of a source without repeating all information. You can test it on the beta cluster. You can see an example article. [24]
Recoin displays information about the relative completeness of a Wikidata item by comparing its statements with those found on other similar items. Especially useful for editors working in a knowledge area that is new to them.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. It did not show new changes last week. This was because of an API problem. It is now working again. [25]
Special:Watchlist can show the wrong information again. It does not always show which edits are read and which are unread. This is because of a database problem. The developers are working on solving the problem. [26]
Changes later this week
You can get email notifications. You can get them immediately, a summary every day or a summary once every week. If you choose a summary you can soon choose not to get notifications you have already marked as read on the wiki. [27]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 December. It will be on all wikis from 19 December (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 18 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
The partial blocks feature is now stable. It will come to most wikis on 6 January. Your wiki can ask to wait. Contact NKohli (WMF) if you don't want it now. [28]
This year's Reviewer of the Year is Rosguill. Having gotten the reviewer PERM in August 2018, they have been a regular reviewer of articles and redirects, been an active participant in the NPP community, and has been the driving force for the emerging NPP Source Guide that will help reviewers better evaluate sourcing and notability in many countries for which it has historically been difficult.
Special commendation again goes to Onel5969 who ends the year as one of our most prolific reviewers for the second consecutive year. Thanks also to Boleyn and JTtheOG who have been in the top 5 for the last two years as well.
Several newer editors have done a lot of work with CAPTAIN MEDUSA and DannyS712 (who has also written bots which have patrolled thousands of redirects) being new reviewers since this time last year.
Thanks to them and to everyone reading this who has participated in New Page Patrol this year.
(The top 100 reviewers of the year can be found here)
Redirect autopatrol
A recent Request for Comment on creating a new redirect autopatrol pseduo-permission was closed early. New Page Reviewers are now able to nominate editors who have an established track record creating uncontroversial redirects. At the individual discretion of any administrator or after 24 hours and a consensus of at least 3 New Page Reviewers an editor may be added to a list of users whose redirects will be patrolled automatically by DannyS712 bot III.
Source Guide Discussion
Set to launch early in the new year is our first New Page Patrol Source Guide discussion. These discussions are designed to solicit input on sources in places and topic areas that might otherwise be harder for reviewers to evaluate. The hope is that this will allow us to improve the accuracy of our patrols for articles using these sources (and/or give us places to perform a WP:BEFORE prior to nominating for deletion). Please watch the New Page Patrol talk page for more information.
This month's refresher course
While New Page Reviewers are an experienced set of editors, we all benefit from an occasional review. This month consider refreshing yourself on Wikipedia:Notability (geographic features). Also consider how we can take the time for quality in this area. For instance, sources to verify human settlements, which are presumed notable, can often be found in seconds. This lets us avoid the (ugly) 'Needs more refs' tag.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 6 January 2020.
Recent changes
All mobile site users now have new features. Features include: tabs for page/discussion; an expanded user-menu; direct access to history pages. These features were initially part of the "advanced mode".
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
Future changes
You can use setlang in the URL to change the user interface language. This will no longer happen automatically. When you open the link you will be asked to confirm the language change. This will not happen if Javascript is not working in your browser. [29]
The revised version of the very powerful PetScan offers to edit or create items based on Wikipedia categories, search, SPARQL, links with filters by label or properties
Other Noteworthy Stuff
New tool: Dwynwen, adapted from Crotos, provides users with a search interface designed specifically for artworks and other visual digital content from Commons, using Wikidata.
A request for comment asks whether partial blocks should be enabled on the English Wikipedia. If enabled, this functionality would allow administrators to block users from editing specific pages or namespaces, rather than the entire site.
A proposal asks whether admins who don't use their tools for a significant period of time (e.g. five years) should have the toolset procedurally removed.
The fourth case on Palestine-Israel articles was closed. The case consolidated all previous remedies under one heading, which should make them easier to understand, apply, and enforce. In particular, the distinction between "primary articles" and "related content" has been clarified, with the former being the entire set of articles whose topic relates to the Arab-Israeli conflict, broadly interpreted rather than reasonably construed.
The pilot in command of an aircraft is the person aboard who is ultimately responsible for its operation and safety during flight. This would be the captain in a typical two- or three-pilot aircrew, or "pilot" if there is only one certificated and qualified pilot at the controls of an aircraft.
Resolver allows you to quickly find an item based on a property+value string pair. It is especially useful for checking whether an external identifier such as a VIAF ID (P214) or Getty AAT ID (P1014) is already in use in Wikidata.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
When trying to move a page, if the target title already exists then a warning message is shown. The warning message will now include a link to the target title. [30]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 January. It will be on all wikis from 9 January (calendar).
Tabernacle creates a tabular view of a set of data items from a SPARQL query, PagePile list, or manual list of items. You can select which languages and properties to display. The tool lets you drag-and-drop statements from one item to another, and manually add or edit statements without leaving the page. Tabernacle is great for harmonizing a set of related items or identifying items that need their labels and descriptions translated.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser use very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It can lead to downgrade attacks. Since 9 December you just see a warning. Soon the browser will not connect to the wikis at all. Most are users on Android systems older than 4.4. You can read the browser recommendations. [31]
Wikis can protect pages so that only some users can edit them. The standard protection levels are Require autoconfirmed or confirmed access and Require administrator access. If your wiki use more protection levels the technical name might be renamed for standardisation. This doesn't affect what users see. [33]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 January. It will be on all wikis from 16 January (calendar).
Future changes
Deepcat and Catgraph will stop working. This will happen at the end of January. This is because you can now use the normal search function instead. [34]
You can use <ref follow="…"> to merge footnotes that follow each other. It is meant to be used for digitised books on Wikisource. If the order of the footnotes is wrong no error was shown but the bad <ref> was shown outside the <references /> list. This will change and you will see an error message instead. [35]
Upcoming: next Wikidata office hour, January 22nd, at 17:00 UTC (18:00 UTC+1), on the Wikidata Telegram channel. Topics: presenting the roadmap for 2020 and some news from the development team
Tool of the week
The Wikidata Card Game Generator generates printable cards based on a topic (eg chemical elements) and some statements of the item.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
New gadget added to Preferences, "Show UnpatrolledEdits" (see discussion): it shows if the last edit to the item has not been patrolled
Pywikibot deprecates Python 2 support. Any scripts running via Python 2 should be migrated soon, see more at [36]
The next Weekly Summary (January 27) will be the issue #400. Please help us collecting interesting Wikidata-related facts around the number 400!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 January. It will be on all wikis from 23 January (calendar).
Future changes
There is a new suggestion for what to show when someone edits without registering an account. This is to give unregistered editors better privacy and make some anti-vandalism work go faster. You can give feedback.
Pywikibot is a Python library to automate work on wikis. It will no longer support Python 2. Use the python2 tag if you need to continue running Python 2 scripts. The Pywikibot team strongly recommends to migrate to Python 3. You can get help to do so. [37]
The weekly MediaWiki branch cut will soon become automated. The timing for this cut may change. You can discuss in Phabricator if this affects you. [38]
You can read about coming technical events and mentoring interns.
The Serengeti ecosystem is a geographical region located in northern Tanzania, Africa. It spans approximately 30,000 km2 (12,000 sq mi), and hosts the second largest terrestrial mammal migration in the world. Pictured is a leopard in a tree in the Serengeti.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Welcome to the 400th Weekly Summary! Here are some interesting Wikidata facts or queries collected by the community and related to the number 400:
Item #400 is Jenna Jameson; Property #400 is platform (software), and Lexeme #400 is "vierhonderd" - Dutch for "four hundred". The QID for the natural number 400 is Q1535396. The QID for the year 400 is Q25621.
The Greek philosopher Hypatia, one of the first women scientists, became head of the Neo-Platonist school at Alexandria, in 400 AD. We include her here in tribute to those working to reduce Wikidata's gender gap.
Duplicate Item copies the current item (without descriptions or sitelinks) to a new item. This tool is useful for splitting items and for making sets of similar items. Recommended for experienced users.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Some mobile diffs have problems. A couple of buttons are not shown. Structured data diffs on Commons are confusing. The developers are working on fixing it. [39][40]
Administrators on wikis that use Structured Discussions can't move discussion pages. This is a bug. The developers are working on fixing it. [41]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
There is JavaScript code on Special:Undelete for administrators that makes it possible to automatically select multiple checkboxes by holding the "Shift" key and clicking. This code is also loaded by accident on other special pages and on articles. This makes pages slower to load. This will be fixed. If you know of other special pages where this is useful please tell the developers at phab:T232688.
Following a request for comment, partial blocks are now enabled on the English Wikipedia. This functionality allows administrators to block users from editing specific pages or namespaces rather than the entire site. A draft policy is being workshopped at Wikipedia:Partial blocks.
The request for comment seeking the community's sentiment for a binding desysop procedure closed with wide-spread support for an alternative desysoping procedure based on community input. No proposed process received consensus.
Technical news
Twinkle now supports partial blocking. There is a small checkbox that toggles the "partial" status for both blocks and templating. There is currently one template: ((uw-pblock)).
When trying to move a page, if the target title already exists then a warning message is shown. The warning message will now include a link to the target title. [42]
Arbitration
Following a recent arbitration case, the Arbitration Committee reminded administrators that checkuser and oversight blocks must not be reversed or modified without prior consultation with the checkuser or oversighter who placed the block, the respective functionary team, or the Arbitration Committee.
VizQuery allows you to use the Wikidata Query Service without having to know SPARQL. Simply use a couple of autocomplete input boxes and you can do most basic queries.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Bruno and Denny present how to use Lexical Masks in ShEx to validate lexemes, including a first set of example schemata. They also invite everyone to work on more languages, and will keep adding more ShEx schema over time.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 February. It will be on all wikis from 6 February (calendar).
Learn about the use of Wikidata, Wikipedia and sister projects in education, at the Wikimedia in Education UK Summit at Coventry University on 26 February
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: further discussion of labels and aliases; start looking at Google Sheets, 11 February. Agenda
Reasonator offers a visual formatted display of Wikidata information. It is useful for introducing Wikidata to new audiences and can help find missing or incorrect data by presenting a different view than the standard editing interface.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Kensho Derived Wikimedia Dataset is a a cleaned English subset of Wikipedia/Wikidata with 2.3B tokens, 5.3M pages, 51M nodes, and 120M edges for use in natural language processing (NLP) research
Property talk pages now include a link to query for a few random items using the "SERVICE bd:sample" in SPARQL. Example: look for "random list" on d:Property talk:P279
There are now 100,000 people with the name "John" in Wikidata. "Elizabeth" is now the most frequent female given name.
Knowledge Grapher is a new tool to create Wikidata knowledge graphs without needing any knowledge of Wikidata Query or SPARQL code. Developed by Fuzheado, it is currently in early testing mode and helps create graphs as described by MartinPoulter at his 2019 blog post Making Wikidata Visible. Feedback is appreciated.
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 version of the Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It should fix the failed uploads problem. [43]
Problems
There was a problem with the new MediaWiki version last week. It deleted some messages by accident. The new version was late because it was stopped to fix things. [44]
Changes later this week
The MediaWiki action API is used by various tools like bots and gadgets. Some error codes will change. Some parameter values that do not follow the standard will no longer work. [45]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 February. It will be on all wikis from 13 February (calendar).
Sweden report: FindingGLAMs Challenge; Art by Edvard Munch from the Thiel Gallery; More European archives on Wikidata; OpenGLAM now! – watch the presentations; Wikipedia in Libraries
The first NPP source guide discussion is now underway. It covers a wide range of sources in Ghana with the goal of providing more guidance to reviewers about sources they might see when reviewing pages. Hopefully, new page reviewers will join others interested in reliable sources and those with expertise in these sources to make the discussion a success.
Redirects
New to NPP? Looking to try something a little different? Consider patrolling some redirects. Redirects are relatively easy to review, can be found easily through the New Pages Feed. You can find more information about how to patrol redirects at WP:RPATROL.
Discussions and Resources
There is an ongoing discussion around changing notifications for new editors who attempt to write articles.
A resource page with links pertinent for reviewers was created this month.
A proposal to increase the scope of G5 was withdrawn.
Refresher
Geographic regions, areas and places generally do not need general notability guideline type sourcing. When evaluating whether an article meets this notability guideline please also consider whether it might actually be a form of WP:SPAM for a development project (e.g. PR for a large luxury residential development) and not actually covered by the guideline.
Six Month Queue Data: Today – 7095 Low – 4991 High – 7095
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Science Stories by Kat Thornton and Kenneth Seals-Nutt, an application that tells stories about underrepresented people in STEM using Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, is the winner of the LODLAM 2020 Challenge!
Wikidata Bridge: more work on unsupported edit cases (unsupported datatypes phab:T235753, ambiguous statements phab:T240212, deprecated statements phab:T238660, unknown value or no value statements phab:T242747)
Including the property label in the title of the Data Bridge dialog (phab:T233295)
Making the edit based on the user's fixed/updated choice (phab:T238662)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 February. It will be on all wikis from 20 February (calendar).
Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference, one of the themes being how Wikidata can support minority languages, will take place on July 9-10 in Limerick, Ireland. Call for submissions open from February 27th to March 30th.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: More discussion of pseudonyms and historical place names, 25 February. Agenda
QWiki, a mobile game asking geography questions based on Wikidata, now has a new version released as well as a website where one can learn how the game was made and how to contribute;
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 February. It will be on all wikis from 27 February (calendar).
Future changes
There will be a reply button after each post on a talk page if you want one. This will soon be a beta feature on the Arabic, French, Dutch and Hungarian Wikipedias. You will have to turn it on if you want to use it. It will come to more wikis later. You can test the reply button. It was briefly shown earlier than planned by mistake on the four first wikis last week.
A company is a legal entity made up of an association of people, be they natural, legal, or a mixture of both, for carrying on a commercial or industrial enterprise.
Following an RfC, the blocking policy was changed to state that sysops must not undo or alter CheckUser or Oversight blocks, rather than should not.
A request for comment confirmed that sandboxes of established but inactive editors may not be blanked due solely to inactivity.
Technical news
Following a discussion, Twinkle's default CSD behavior will soon change, most likely this week. After the change, Twinkle will default to "tagging mode" if there is no CSD tag present, and default to "deletion mode" if there is a CSD tag present. You will be able to always default to "deletion mode" (the current behavior) using your Twinkle preferences.
July 2-4, Lisbon: WikiData Days 2020. Call for proposals is open until April 15.
Program submissions for the Celtic Knot Conference are open until March 30th. Submissions about languages on Wikidata, GLAM or supporting minority languages are very welcome.
Wikidata graph builder is a front-end on top of the Query service, allowing to easily build graphs.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikidata Languages Landscape dashboard provides insights into the ways languages are organized and used in Wikidata and across the Wikimedia projects that reuse Wikidata.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Readers who were not logged in briefly saw the interface in a language decided by their browser. It should normally be in the language of the wiki. This happened for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug. [48]
Changes later this week
If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You will now be able to choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This will be a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. [49]
When you asked for a new password you could see if the username didn't exist on Special:PasswordReset. Now the page will show the username you entered and tell you an email has been sent if the username exists. This is for better security. [50]
On Special:WhatLinksHere you can see what other pages link to a page. You can see if the link is from a redirect. You can now see which section the redirect links to. [51]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 March. It will be on all wikis from 5 March (calendar).
There is a vote on the creation of a new user group called abuse filter manager. The vote runs from March 1 to March 31 on Meta.
wgMFSpecialCaseMainPage was used for the mobile site. It was deprecated in 2017. It will stop working in April. Wikis should see if they use it. If they do they should fix it. You can read more and ask for help. This affects 183 wikis. There is a list. [53]
Querying the URL datatype with haswbstatement is now possible (phab:T243693). It will take two to three months before URLs are indexed for all Wikidata items.
Wikidata Bridge: more style fixes, preparing a prototype to show how we will display references
Fixing various production errors
Monitoring the run of wb_terms migration
Fixing an issue with the Commons files search field (phab:T196165)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new search word called articletopic. You can use it to search for articles on a specific topic. It is available on the Arabic, Czech, English and Vietnamese Wikipedias. It will come to more Wikipedias soon. [54][55][56]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 March. It will be on all wikis from 12 March (calendar).
The Wikipedia Android app will do push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will come later this year. [57]
Indonesia report: Proposing collaboration with museums in Bali; First Wikisource training in the region
Netherlands report: Students write articles about Media artists, Public Domain Day 2020, Wiki Goes Caribbean, WikiFridays at Ihlia - Wikimedia Nederland in January & February 2020
Norway report: Wikipedia editing workshop with the Norwegian Network for Museums
Note: Due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation, most meetups, including all those funded by Wikimedia Foundation grants, have been cancelled, or moved online, for the foreseeable future.
All identifiers are now sorted mostly alphabetically according to the RfC regarding the sorting of identifiers, which remains open if you have improvement proposals. Feel free to comment here!
Maximilian Klein applied for a project grant to merge and improve WHGI and Denelezh, tools that heavily rely on Wikidata to provide statistics about gender gap and biographical content in Wikimedia projects.
QuickStatements change (4 March). QuickStatements is now executing "run in background" batches with the same priority as direct batches run from the browser. Background batches may now run many times faster than they previously did (discussion), when the WDQS updater can handle this.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new API module for changing the content model of existing pages. Use action=changecontentmodel to specify the new model. You can read the documentation on mediawiki.org. [58]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 March. It will be on all wikis from 19 March (calendar).
Future changes
If you edit a page at the same time as someone else you can get an edit conflict. There is a new two-column interface to make it easier to solve this. It will soon be active by default on the German, Arabic, and Farsi Wikipedias. It will be on by default on more wikis within the next months. You will be able to opt out of the new interface. [59][60]
You can see a proposed design for replying to comments in an easier way.
Wikidata Lexeme Forms allows quickly generating a new lexeme with all its forms in selected languages; you can also use the tool to add forms to an existing lexeme, or bulk upload many lexemes and forms at once.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Some development will be slower than planned. This is because of the current pandemic. You can see the new deployment guidelines. This is to avoid risks when some persons could be unavailable.
There was a problem when adding interwiki links. The tool you use to add interwiki links could suggest the wrong project to link to. This has now been fixed. [61][62]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 March. It will be on all wikis from 26 March (calendar).
Future changes
There is a project to make editing easier for newcomers. The developers are trying to understand what initiatives different Wikipedias have to welcome newcomers. They also want to know which templates are often used for maintenance activities. You can help this project by checking if your wiki's pages are listed on Wikidata.
Upcoming: The Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference will take place fully remotely in July 2020. Call for submissions with remote formats is open until April 30th.
Upcoming: the Wikidata Wochenende (previously in Ulm) will take place fully remote on June 12-14
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 April. It will be on all wikis from 2 April (calendar).
Future changes
The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. The current beta feature will become the video player for everyone. The old player will be removed. [64]
There is a project to make templates easier to use. The next few weeks the developers will present ideas on the project page. You can watch that page if you are interested in giving feedback. [65]
Following the banning of an editor by the WMF last year, the Arbitration Committee resolved to hold a Arbcom RfC regarding on-wiki harassment. A draft RfC has been posted at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Anti-harassment RfC (Draft) and not open to comments from the community yet. Interested editors can comment on the RfC itself on its talk page.
Miscellaneous
The WMF has begun a pilot report of the pages most visited through various social media platforms to help with anti-vandalism and anti-disinformation efforts. The report is updated daily and will be available through the end of May.
Ongoing: covid-19 virtual biohackathon until April 11th. Information on how to participate. Instructions to participate are on the github wiki and join #wikidata room. Several Wikidata-related topics are currently presented, such as: COVID-19 Global Dashboard, sync the ICTV Virus classification and Nomenclature with Wikidata, federate between Wikidata and NextProt, use wikibase to align between (bio)schema.org and Wikidata.
Scholia highlights the scholarly data in Wikidata, including scholarly works, projects, topics, and individual researchers, including their relationships and statistics. It encourages further enrichment of Wikidata through links on the "missing" pages.
Job opportunity: Science Museum, London. Research Developer, "using computational techniques to create links between the SMG collection and Wikidata at scale" (deadline: 19 April).
New tool: Wikidata Complete uses machine learning algorithms to read Wikipedia, identify facts and import them into Wikidata after manual check (blog post)
schema.org announced an extension to allow for special announcements with regards to COVID-19. The way to identify the topic as per the example? By using the Wikidata Q-Identifier, Q81068910: Structured data for special announcements
Interactive map showing the spread of COVID-19, updated daily with data from Wikidata.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
There was a problem with user pages not being shown properly on desktop. This was because of a bug. It will soon be fixed. [66]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 April. It will be on all wikis from 9 April (calendar).
Future changes
MediaWiki will use a newer version of Unicode. Some characters that did not have an upper case equivalent before do now. Titles beginning with one of these characters will be moved. A list of these titles can be seen on Phabricator. The titles will be renamed by the user Maintenance script. This will start on 13 April 2020. You can rename them before this if you wish and the new title can be different from the one the script would rename it to. [67]
The team is planning some upcoming changes. Please review the proposed design and share your thoughts on the talk page. The team will test features such as:
an easy way to mention another editor ("pinging"),
a rich-text visual editing option, and
other features identified through user testing or recommended by editors.
Indonesia report: Volunteers' meet-up; Wiki Cinta Budaya 2020 structured data edit-a-thon
Ireland report: Video tutorials; Celtic Knot Conference 2020
Kosovo report: WoALUG and NGO Germin call Albanian Diaspora to contribute to Wikipedia
Netherlands report: Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen contributes to Wikimedia Commons again; Student research on GLAM-Wiki at Erasmus University Rotterdam
Serbia report: March Highlights - Everything is postponed
Sweden report: FindingGLAMs; Wikipedia in libraries; Art from the Thiel Gallery Collections; Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can now use the articletopic search word on all Wikipedias. It searches articles by topic. [68]
There was a problem with the Wikidata database last week. Some wikis went down for twenty minutes. Wikidata and other projects showed error messages. Interwiki links were not shown, some tools did not work and other problems. Some of this was fixed quickly. The developers are working on fixing the rest. [72][73][74]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 15. It will be on all wikis from April 16 (calendar).
Future changes
Some graphs have not worked on mobile. This will soon be fixed. [75]
The article tab on talk pages of redirects links to the target of the redirect. It could link to the redirect page itself instead. You can leave feedback on this.
For pages using syntax highlighting, the use of the deprecated <source> tag, as well as the use of the deprecated enclose parameter, will add tracking categories.
COVID19 Dashboard is a Wikidata-powered one-stop information/visualization service for COVID19-related topics such as COVID19's outbreak map, deaths, symptoms, taxonomy, and publications.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
A database breakage, also affecting connected sister projects such as Wikipedia, on April 6, 11pm UTC. A fix has been deployed and no data has been lost. However, issues related to sitelinks and bots creating duplicates can still occur.
A call to action directed at the audience of the Weekly Debrief to edit Wikidata YouTube
Propose new identifiers on Wikidata (in Italian) YouTube
The Map of Libraries on Wikidata (in Spanish) YouTube
Tool of the week
Ordia generates statistics from Wikidata lexeme information, and through the "Text to Lexemes" feature allows linking a document to the associated lexemes, and highlighting missing lexemes that can be added.
Prototyping week: the Wikidata team at Wikimedia Germany spent one week working on some quick experiements. The projects developed during this week are not necessarily going to be added to the maintained codebase. Among those projects:
try to use GraphQL for the API providing access to Wikibase/Wikidata data
allow to programmatically access different configuration variables of a Wikibase instance to make it easier for tools to built on top of it
investigate ranking for Items to order them by their relevance in a query result
com up with a workflows for editing statements linking to other Items in the Wikidata Bridge
identify how to improve Wikidata's accessibility
create design system components to continue improving consistency
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 4 May 2020.
Recent changes
The small wiki toolkits is to help smaller wikis that need technical skills. They can learn and share technical skills. [76]
Over-qualified CSS selectors in Wikimedia skins have been removed. div#content is now .mw-body. div.portal is now .portal. div#footer is now #footer. This is so the skins can use HTML5 elements. If your gadgets or user styles used them you will have to update them. [77]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Some things on the wikis might look weird or not work in Internet Explorer 8 in the future. Internet Explorer 8 was replaced in 2011. [78]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 April next week. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 April next week. It will be on all wikis from 30 April next week (calendar).
Editing food items and querying glaciers: YouTube and Facebook
Interactions between VIAF and Wikidata (in Italian) YouTube
Tool of the week
zotkat's exporter for Zotero (a software to manage bibliographic data) allows you to export bibliographies to the QuickStatements format. It is helpful to easily create bibliographical entries, especially as Zotero can read metadata about works from dozens of other websites, and can thus be used as intermediary.
Competition for the International Museum Day is about improving data about museums in Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland on Wikidata, from 3 May 2020 to 18 May 2020, more information on Museum Day 2020/Wikidata Competition
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Alex Jung on Wikidata and Wikipedia Infoboxes, 05 May. Agenda
Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing: YouTube
Art+Feminism Office Hours: Introduction to Editing Wikidata: YouTube
Webinar on why and how to contribute to Wikipedia and Wikidata? (in French): YouTube
Tool of the week
ProWD explores completeness for entities and classes.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
MachtSinn, a tool that allows you to easily add Senses to Lexemes, has lately been improved significantly
33,000 values of British Museum person or institution ID (d:Property:P1711) now have a useful target again. After their being mostly inoperative for several years, the new British Museum website now has information pages matching these values, with links to related objects. (Example). To work around bug T112081, a script by Andrew Gray is going through the items making null edits to update the relevant URLs.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 5 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [80]
Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 7 May. This will also affect CentralAuth. This can for example affect global renames, password changes, changing or confirming your email address and logging in to new wikis. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [81]
Changes later this week
You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can soon turn these notifications off for individual pages. [82]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 May. It will be on all wikis from 7 May (calendar).
Working on Wikidata Lexeme Forms tool by Lucas Werkmeister: Part 1, Part 2
Wikidata: Figure skating workflow, starting from scratch (installing and configuring everything on a new computer) by Harmonia Amanda: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Past: Wikidata local school gathering was organised by Wikidata Taiwan. Link to Event page and dashboard
Webinar introducing Wikidata and adding wikidata=* tags into OpenStreetMap objects for OpenStreetMap contributors in the Philippines (in English and Tagalog): YouTube
Wikidata Course at TAU: Hosting Mark Graham from the Internet Archive
A proposal for a new Wikiproject Wikilambda that allows creating multilingual content in Wikidata that can be used in all Wikipedias. Signatures of support are needed and discussion and questions are welcomed!
Brazil report: GLAMce at Museu Paulista: making things machine-readable
Czech Republic report: WikiGap 2020 in Czech Republic; International event; support for Wikimedia community; edit-a-thon run with the US embassy and the Swedish Embassy
France report: Association des Archivistes Francais; Palladia, a museum collection portal based on Wikimedia resources
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Everyone can now import photos from Flickr to Commons with the UploadWizard. Before this only autopatrollers on Commons could import photos from Flickr. [83]
Problems
Commons will be on read-only for a few minutes on 12 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [84]
Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [85][86]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 May. It will be on all wikis from 14 May (calendar).
Future changes
JavaScript scripts and gadgets can no longer check multiple keys at once via mw.config.exists() or mw.user.tokens.exists(). You can use exists() or get() to check one at a time instead. [87]
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: João Alexandre Peschanski on Wikidata + Education projects he has worked on in Brazil, 19 May. Agenda
How to use the Wikidata Query Service (in Italian): YouTube
Introduction to Wikidata and data modeling: YouTube
Tool of the week
WikidataTrust.jsP updates the interface with the contributors to each statement, label, description and sitelink. It is similar to the “blame” tool on text-based wikis.
Read-only time for Wikidata on Tuesday 19th May at 05:00 AM UTC for 15 minutes due to upgrade and restart of services. Services targeting Wikidata may not work during the meantime.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You can choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This is a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. This is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. [88][89]
Problems
There is a bug that creates problems for iPhone users with iOS 13 and Safari. If you use an iPhone to read or edit Wikipedia and see bugs on the mobile site you can report them. [90]
Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [91][92]
Graphs will be rendered in the reader's browser. This will use Javascript. Graphs will hopefully work better for everyone who uses Javascript. It will not work for users who don't use Javascript. This will not affect diagrams in image files. [94]
Some CSS for the skins has been simplified. This affects div#p-personal, div#p-navigation, div#p-interaction, div#p-tb, div#p-lang, div#p-namespaces, div#p-variants and div#footer. They will have to remove div. You will have to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. This is so we can use HTML5. [95]
Some CSS for the Vector skin has been changed. This affects #p-variants, #p-namespaces, #p-personal, #p-views and #p-cactions. They can no longer use > ul. You might need to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. See how.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The visual editor will now work in the Modern skin. The changes that needed to happen for this to work could cause problems for some scripts or gadgets. [96]
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)
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. [97]
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. [98][99][100]
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. [101]
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. [102]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 June. It will be on all wikis from 4 June (calendar).
Upcoming: Wikidata Wochenende, June 12-14: online Wikidata workshop and hackathon in German. Don't forget to register to get access to attendees information.
Upcoming: Video: Live Wikidata editing #9: Youtube, Facebook
Part 2 - The residency at the Bodleian Libraries - YouTube
Part 3 - The Astrolabe Explorer & other datasets - YouTube
Tool of the week
QuickStatements lets you edit thousands of Wikidata items at a time. Add labels and descriptions, or statements with sources and qualifiers, add sitelinks, create or merge items, or remove statements that were created in error. Batches can be discussed and, if necessary, reverted in full through the EditGroups tool.
New page Subsetting under WikiProject Schemas for documenting how to define, construct, manage and maintain subsets of Wikidata.
MyCroft, the open digital personal assistant now has a Wikidata skill to answer questions about current and historic facts & information about a person.
Do you know a Wikidata/Wikibase community member who has accomplished something new or has been inspiring in the last year? If so, please take a few minutes and nominate someone in the 2020 Community Spotlight survey.
Wikidata Bridge: Made a number of technical improvements to wrap up the work in the first version.
Reference Hunt: Making final technical improvements and are now running the process to find references on the whole of Wikidata (as opposed to the initial small subset for testing). Once that's done we'll release them as a dump.
Easier access to data for programmers: Researching and interviewing ways to improve the APIs in preparation for working on them.
Query builder: Working on defining the first version and creating mockups based on the feedback we received.
Use modern TypeScript syntax (3.2 -> 3.9) (phab:T253211)
More technical documentation for Federated Properties (phab:T252991) & preparing for the next steps
Convert some properties to external identifiers (phab:T253722)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Some articles have tables that can be sorted in different ways. For example a list of countries can be sorted alphabetically but you can click on the size column to sort them by size. If you clicked on the column a second time it would sort the countries from the bottom to the top instead. A third click will now take you back to the original sorting. [103]
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 />. [104]
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. [105][106]
Changes later this week
You can now edit MassMessage descriptions through the API. This is useful for tools and gadgets. [107]
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. [108]
Netherlands report: Analysis of Dutch GLAM-Wiki projects in relation to the Dutch Digital Heritage Reference Architecture, Content donation from Utrecht Archives, Detecting Wikipedia articles strongly based on single library collections and Collection highlights of the KB
Sweden report: Free music on Wikipedia; NHB webinars; Wikipedia in libraries – Projekt HBTQI
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Program for Cooperative Cataloging's upcoming Wikidata pilot, June 16. Agenda
Part 1 - Meet Ewan, WiR at the Uni' of Edinburgh - YouTube
Part 2 - the Witch Hunts projects & Wikidata - YouTube
Part 3 - Why Wikidata is important for education - YouTube
Tool of the week
Mix'n'match lets you match lists of external identifiers to Wikidata items, or create new items if necessary. Thousands of catalogs already exist, in dozens of different topic areas, and it's easy to import new ones.
Collecting a lot of feedback and doing research around how to improve our APIs to start making it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers
Finalized the initial feature list for the query builder and working on designs and prototypes for testing
Doing user research on the Merge gadget to prepare for making it part of the proper code-base so that other Wikibase instances also benefit from easier merging
Federated Properties: continued working on the first version of Federation that will make it possible to use Wikidata's Properties in another Wikibase installation
Start of a new project (Wikibase Decoupling & Extension Registration) in order to clean up our codebase a bit and make it easier to extend with new features in the future
More work on the design system to have a set of unified components for Wikidata that will make it easier to develop new features in the future because we don't have to rewrite components that are used in a lot of places
Some MediaWiki skin changes meant broken edit links on Wikipedia and co. Fixed now. (phabricator:T252800)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Toolforge hosts several tools created by the Wikimedia community like edit counters or enhanced editors. It is changing the domain from tools.wmflabs.org to toolforge.org. The routing scheme is moving from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org. You can read the details. Tools that use OAuth will have to be updated to keep working. You can ask for help.
Problems
There is a Wikidata item link in the sidebar on many pages. This disappeared for a couple of days for users who have the Monobook skin. This was because of a bug. It has now been fixed. [109]
Editing, logging in and logging out didn't work properly for a short period of time last week. It was soon fixed. [110]
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. [111]
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. [112]
This issue of the Editing newsletter includes information the Talk pages project, an effort to help contributors communicate on wiki more easily.
Reply tool: This is available as a Beta Feature at the four partner wikis (Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian Wikipedias). The Beta Feature is called "Discussion tools". 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 now. 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.
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.
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. [113]
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. [114]
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. [115]
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. [116]
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Merrilee Proffitt, Chris Cyr, and Rob Fernandez on a project to surface library holdings to indicate possible notability for persons, June 30th. Agenda
It is now possible to search for EntitySchema pages using a shortcut “E:”, similar to “P:” for Properties and “L:” for Lexemes. For example: E:E10 or E:kakapo. T245529
Continued working on the first version of Federation, which will allow other Wikibase installations to use Wikidata's Properties - getting closer to a first testable version
More work on consistency of user interface components
Finalizing the click-dummy for the first version of the Query Builder so we can start testing it with some editors soon and get feedback.
Continuing to investigate how to improve our APIs and other ways to improve access to the data in Wikidata for programmers
Discussed the future of the Wikidata Query Service and ideas for next steps we can take to make it scale better. Guillaume will join the next office hour to talk about it.
More work on clearer separation of Wikibase repository and Wikibase client code in order to improve maintainability
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Everyone was logged out. This was because a few users saw the wikis as if they were logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [117]
Some readers didn't see new edits to pages. If the page had been recently changed they saw an older version of the page instead. This only affected readers who were logged out. It lasted for ten days. It has been fixed. [118]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 July. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (calendar).
Future changes
The Modern and Monobook skins use the ID searchGoButton for the go button. This is searchButton for Vector. To have the same ID for all skins it will change to searchButton in Monobook and Modern too. This will affect gadgets and user scripts. It will happen on 23 July. They should be updated to use searchButton. You can read more and see a list of affected scripts.
The Medicine case was closed, with a remedy authorizing standard discretionary sanctions for all discussions about pharmaceutical drug prices and pricing and for edits adding, changing, or removing pharmaceutical drug prices or pricing from articles.
Ptable displays the periodic table automatically extracted from information provided by Wikidata; it also provides a check that all the elements are there with some basic properties. Additional pages provide charts of the nuclides under different criteria such as half-life. Each element or nuclide is linked to its Wikidata item for more information or to edit if necessary.
Polishing the first step of Federation (using Wikidata's Properties in another Wikibase installation) (incl. preventing users from selecting a federated property with a non-supported data type (phab:T252012) and preventing users from accessing Special:NewProperty when federation is enabled (phab:T255576) and viewing a list of all properties when federation is enabled (phab:T246339))
Continuing research and interviews around the topic of making it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers
Doing first testing of mockups and prototypes of the first version of the Query Builder - coding can start soon
Convert a few properties from string to external identifier: Linguasphere code (P1396), KOATUU identifier (P1077) and ISIN (P946)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
The Score extension has been disabled for now. This is because of a security issue. It will work again as soon as the security issue has been fixed. [119]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 July. It will be on all wikis from 9 July (calendar).
Future changes
Abstract Wikipedia is a new Wikimedia project. It will collect language-independent information that can be easily read in different languages. It builds on Wikidata. The name is preliminary. You can read more. [120]
Some rules for user signatures will soon be enforced. Lint errors and invalid HTML will no longer be allowed in user signatures. Nested substitution will not be allowed. A link to your user page, user talk page or user contributions will be required. You can check if your signature works with the new rules. This is because the signatures can cause problems for tools or other text on the page.
Seven years ago this month, the Editing team offered the visual editor to most Wikipedia editors. Since then, editors have achieved many milestones:
More than 50 million edits have been made using the visual editor on desktop.
More than 2 million new articles have been created in the visual editor. More than 600,000 of these new articles were created during 2019.
The visual editor is increasingly popular. The proportion of all edits made using the visual editor has increased every year since its introduction.
In 2019, 35% of the edits by newcomers (logged-in editors with ≤99 edits) used the visual editor. This percentage has increased every year.
Almost 5 million edits on the mobile site have been made with the visual editor. Most of these edits have been made since the Editing team started improving the mobile visual editor in 2018.
Editors have made more than 7 million edits in the 2017 wikitext editor, including starting 600,000 new articles in it. The 2017 wikitext editor is VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode. You can enable it in your preferences.
The phrase "omakase" is most commonly used when dining at Japanese restaurants where the customer leaves it up to the chef to select and serve seasonal specialties. Pictured is omakase at a restaurant.
Continued building out documentation for Federated Properties (phabricator:T255651) and making interface improvements to the first stage of the feature (incl. phabricator:T246886, changes to special pages that interact with both Items/Properties, and phabricator:T255581, changes to Special:ListDataTypes when federation is enabled)
More work on the consistent design system
More work on decoupling the different Wikibase extensions from each other to make development easier
Finalizing research and interviews to better understand what could be improved in the way developers access Wikidata's data (APIs, SPARQL)
Testing the first prototype of the Simple Query Builder with some editors to get final input before coding starts
Sorting of language links on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects was broken (presumably by a change in MediaWiki core). A fix is being worked on. (phabricator:T257625)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Users can thank others for their edits. Checkusers can now see user data related to that action. This can help identify sock puppets who harass others using thanks. [121]
Problems
Everyone was logged out a couple of weeks ago to fix a security problem. The problem was not entirely fixed. Because of this everyone was logged out once again last week. [122][123]
Changes later this week
Wikis that are not for one specific language can translate pages. Sometimes parts of translations are outdated or missing. Outdated translations are marked with a pink background. Missing translations will also be marked in the future. This markup can sometimes break things. It can soon be disabled by using <translate nowrap></translate> on the source page. [124]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 July. It will be on all wikis from 16 July (calendar).
Future changes
Wikimedia code review plans to use GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. [125][126][127][128]
Upcoming: next Wikidata office hour, July 21st at 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST) in the Wikidata Telegram group. Query Service special with guests from WMF Search Team.
Upcoming: Wikidata Lab XXIV: Posicionamento digital relativo with Ederporto - July 23 17:00 UTC (14:00 BRT). In this technical training, we'll study the possibilities and functionalities of relative digital positioning in images and do practical activities on this topic using historical photographs of the city of São Paulo. The event will be held in Portuguese. Join us!
Upcoming video: July 21 - Wikipedia Weekly Network - Entity Schemas and Shape Expressions (ShEx) FacebookYouTube
Upcoming video: July 25 - Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #13 FacebookYouTube
Upcoming: Kidok-Workshop, online workshop about church building data. In German, non-native users welcome. Currently looking for a date in the upcoming week and people to help!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. The mobile main page special casing stopped working 14 July. 60 wikis now have main pages that don't work well on mobile. You can see which ones, how to fix it and how to get help in Phabricator. This is the same problem that was reported in Tech News 2020/24 and 2020/26.
Problems
There is a problem with the interlanguage links. The interlanguage links are the links that help you find a specific page in a different language. The sorting is broken. The developers are working on a solution. [129]
Some users keep getting the notifications for the same event. Some of these are old events. [130]
Some users have trouble logging in. This is probably a browser cookie problem. The developers are working on understanding the problem. If you have trouble logging in you can see the details on Phabricator. [131]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 July. It will be on all wikis from 23 July (calendar).
Future changes
There is a Printable version link. This will disappear. That is because web browsers today can create a printable version or show how it will look in print anyway. [132]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Starter kit is now available for wiki communities. This page lists technical resources, tools, and recommendations. These are essential to operate a wiki project. This is mostly useful for smaller wikis where the community has limited experience with this. [133]
The first features of the Desktop Improvements project are available for logged-in users on all wikis. In order to use them, uncheck Use Legacy Vector in your local or global preferences in section Skin preferences. More improvements are planned. Feedback is welcome.
The deployment train for MediaWiki has been blocked this week. [134][135]
Translation Notification Bot was sending the same message multiple times to every translator. This has been fixed. [136]
Some users were receiving the same notification multiple times. This has been fixed. [137]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from July 29. It will be on all wikis from JUly 30 (calendar).
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Liam Wyatt on WikiCite and its future plans, ways to get involved, and discussions that are happening in the community, 28 July. Agenda
Past: Wikidata and Wikibase office hour with a focus on the Query Service, July 21st. Notes of the discussions
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #14, August 1 FacebookYouTube
Library’s linked-data project gets new grant. "Known as Linked Data for Production, the project is part of a long-term collaboration among Cornell University Library, Stanford Libraries and the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa. Through linked data, information about books and other items in library records will be enhanced by related information from external online sources". By Jose Beduya
Wikidata Training Workshop 1, by Canadian Arts Presenting Association
Part 1 - Introduction to Wikidata - YouTube (En, Fr)
Part 3 - Components of a Wikidata item - YouTube (En, Fr)
Video: Wikidata Lab XXIV on relative digital positioning (in Portuguese). YouTube
Video: Women Writers in Review: Integrating special collections into Wikidata. YouTube
Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - Entity Schemas and Shape Expressions (ShEx) FacebookYouTube
Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #13 FacebookYouTube
Tool of the week
We would love suggestions for tools to include in this section of the weekly summary. Please add your suggestions directly under Status updates/Next#Backlog after checking that the tool isn't already listed.
Changed the size of image previews to 1024 in the gallery view of the query service to avoid some images not loading sometimes (phabricator:T258241)
Added an actual space between the entity title and the name of the fallback language (if any), so that the fallback language isn't selected anymore when double-clicking the entity title for copying (phabricator:T256857)
Fixed the directionality of text pieces in placeholders that mix LTR and RTL (phabricator:T253812)
Continued work on first pieces of design system to make coding new features easier in the future
Continued untangling the code of Wikibase Client and Wikibase Repo to make it easier to develop on them
Finished first piece of research on how to make it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers - more work to be done
Preparing to start coding on the Query Builder to make it easier to create queries without having to know SPARQL
Finished running the scraper that gets potential new references for unreferenced statements and preparing it for publishing
The potato (Solanum tuberosum) is an example of a New World crop, a crop native to the New World (mostly the Americas) before 1492 CE and not found anywhere else at that time.
SQID allows you to analyse, browse and query Wikidata. SQID is inspired by Magnus Manske's Reasonator, but focuses on prominently featuring information about Wikidata classes and properties.
a graph of MPs and parties in the Swedish Parliament and with whom they worked together with to create motions 2018 SPOILER: >95% is just with people in the same party
The last week was our quarterly prototyping week. We worked on the following projects. None of them are ready for prime-time yet but we'll continue with them.
Slices: We've had a lot of requests for accessing dumps of a smaller part of Wikidata's data since rarely anyone needs the complete data in Wikidata. The tricky part is figuring out which part is needed and if any of that can be generalized. We looked into for example how to make dump generation faster so we could potentially produce more smaller dumps that only cover a part of Wikidata's data, either thematically (e.g. humans) or by type of data (e.g. only statements and English labels and aliases but not sitelinks or descriptions).
REST API: As part of our effort to make it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers we looked into a REST API. We tried to see if we could cover the existing action API modules in a REST API. We could. We'll take this as input for our ongoing API work now.
Improving quality ratings through ORES: ORES can judge the quality of an Item automatically. It is currently not very good at it however. We tried a few things to make it more accurate and found some easy wins we'll probably make happen in the next weeks.
Query manipulator: One of the ways we could potentially improve the load situation of the Wikidata Query Service is by automatically analyzing and then redirecting a bunch of queries to other systems that are more suitable for that particular type of query. The nice thing about that would be that the person/program sending the query wouldn't have to care about it but it'd be done automagically for them. We tried to build such a system and the results look very promising but more work/experimenting is needed, especially together with the WMF Search team.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
All queries to the Wikidata Query Service failed between 17:50 and 17:59 UTC on Thursday 23 July. Some queries failed during a longer period. [138]
Interlanguage links were ordered incorrectly for the past few weeks. This problem was also mentioned in Tech News two weeks ago. The problem is now fixed. [139]
There is a problem with the global preferences for the "Use Legacy Vector" option. Developers are working on fixing it. [140]
A bug in the Wikibase extension had disabled the "move" and "create" types of protection in the main (Gallery) namespace on Wikimedia Commons. New protections could not be added, and existing protections were not enforced, allowing some page moves and page creations that should not have been possible. This has now been fixed. [141]
Changes later this week
The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. This week, the current beta feature will become the video player for everyone on most non-Wikipedia wikis. The old player will be removed. [142]
Users' global.js and global.css pages will now also be loaded on the mobile site. You can read documentation for how to avoid applying styles to the mobile skin. [143]
In the MonoBook skin, the searchGoButton identifier is now searchButton. This may affect CSS and JS gadgets. Migration instructions can be found in T255953. This was previously mentioned in issue 27.
Bot operators can use Pywikibot to regularly archive discussions. The behavior when the bot uses counter to prevent large archives was changed. [144]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 5. It will be on all wikis from August 6 (calendar).
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Daniel Mietchen and Lane Rasberry about Scholia, a project to present bibliographic information and scholarly profiles of authors and institutions, 11 August. [Agenda]
Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - QuickStatements and Distributed Wikidata games Facebook, YouTube
Video: Collaboration, contribution and use of Wikidata and Wikipedia by academic libraries (in Greek). YouTube
Librarians work to broaden Vanderbilt’s research reputation with Wikidata tools. "To speed up the creation of metadata about faculty and their publications, Steven Baskauf, data science and data curation specialist for libraries, developed “VanderBot,” a set of scripts that can read and write to Wikidata, greatly improving the efficiency by which Vanderbilt’s faculty are discoverable through Wikidata".
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
FileImporter and FileExporter became standard features on all Wikis during the first week of August. They help you transfer files from local wikis to Wikimedia Commons with the original file information and history intact. [145]
Problems
The mobile skin displays a message at the bottom of the page about who edited last. This message showed raw wikitext. This has now been fixed. Some messages in Structured Discussions and content translation may still appear as raw wikitext. Developers are working on it. [146]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 12. It will be on all wikis from August 13 (calendar).
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [147][148]