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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion over the naming of people
  • Discussion over population
  • Successful RfA: Sjoerddebruin
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • See the office hours logs at meta
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • See the FOSDEM slides
  • Thiemo joins the Wikidata development team
• Development
  • More work on badges by Bene*
  • Lots of Lua improvements by hoo (separate announcement with details soon)
  • Created backend Time parsers (yet another necessary step towards doing more in the backend instead of in Java Script in the frontend)
  • Automatic builds created, tested and deployed to beta labs every day!
  • Investigate Elastic Search as possible backend for queries
  • Made Wikibase Query work with our new component structure
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 22:37, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

09:30, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Let's redesign Wikidata's interface
• Reasonator
  • By hovering over a wikilink you will see the first paragraph.
  • The "personal settings" allow you to import your Babel info from Wikidata. This can be used to restrict the random items you will get.
  • The first iteration of "on the fly" text generation for English. It works for "humans" and, is completely based on the available Wikidata information.
  • You can now add labels in your language from within Reasonator. Technically oAuth is used. It now takes just one click to add a label in your language.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: IAAF ID, Lagrangian point
  • Showcase items: Vesta (Q3030)
• Development
  • Wrote performance tests so we can track performance improvements better
  • Did a code review of all gadgets that are enabled by default in Wikidata. Found and fixed a performance bottleneck.
  • Work on making the interface more responsive, e. g. live preview when editing labels and updating the watchlist star when saving.
  • Started refactoring and fixing issues with automatically created summaries that are, for example, created by bots via API calls.
  • Fixed an issue with OAuth on Wikidata because of permissions
  • Started code review of the code the student team is working on for suggestions
  • Discussed updates to the data model document to be able to update it to the actual implementation
  • Did a technical debt analysis and design review of Wikibase.git, with initial focus on WikibaseLib
  • Got (backend) EntityStore on the way, so we can test API modules without touching the database
  • Further work on TimeParsers move to the backend
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 13:24, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

08:38, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Did you know?

You can easily re-use references by going to the Insert menu, choosing "Reference", and clicking on "Use an existing reference" in the lower left corner. A list of all references, their numbers, and their ref names (if any) will be shown. You can search the list for any author, title, date, or other keyword. Read the user guide for more information.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some small changes to the user interface, such as moving the reference item to the top of the Insert menu, as well as some minor features and fixing bugs, especially for rich copying and pasting of references.

The biggest change was the addition of more features to the image dialog, including the ability to set alignment (left, right, center), framing options (thumbnail, frame, frameless, and none), adding alt text, and defining the size manually. There is still some work to be done here, including a quick way to set the default size.

• The main priority is redesigning the reference dialog, with the goal of providing autofill features for ISBNs and URLs and streamlining the process. Current concept drawings are available at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. Please share your ideas about making referencing quick and easy with the designers.
• A few bugs in the existing reference dialog were fixed. The toolbar was simplified to remove galleries and lists from the reference dialog. When you re-use references, it now correctly displays the references again, rather than just the number and name. If you paste content into a dialog that can't fit there (e.g. ==section headings== in references), it now strips out the inappropriate HTML.
• You can now edit image galleries inside VisualEditor. At this time, the gallery tool is a very limited option that gives you access to the wikitext. It will see significant improvements at a later date.
• The character inserter tool in the "Insert" menu is being redesigned. Your feedback on the special character inserter is still wanted, especially if you depend on Wikipedia's character inserters for your normal editing rather than using the ones built into your computer.
• You can now see a help page about keyboard shortcuts in the page menu (three bars next to the Cancel button) (T54844).
• If you edit categories, your changes will now display correctly after saving the page (T50560).
• Saving the page should be faster now (T61660).
• Any community can ask to test a new tool to edit TemplateData by leaving a note at T53734.

Looking ahead: The link tool will tell you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. The warning about wikitext will hide itself after you remove the wikitext markup in that paragraph. Support for creating and editing redirects is in the pipeline. Looking further out, image handling will be improved, including default and upright sizes. The developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments, some behavioral magic words like DISPLAYTITLE, and in-line language setting (dir="rtl").

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 04:20, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikisource will receive access to the data in Wikidata on February 25th. Planning is taking place at d:Wikidata:Wikisource.
  • 1 week left to give initial input for the user interface redesign
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: impact factor, Municipality code (Denmark), USB ID, Home world, Cardinality of the group, Internet media type, Bluebook abbreviation, Z39.5 abbreviation, ISO 4 abbreviation, CODEN, landing site, US Congress Bio identifier, Scopus Source ID, Scopus Affiliation ID, Scopus EID, Scopus Author ID, IPTC Media Topic, topic's main portal, Regensburg Classification, Library of Congress Classification, neutron number
  • Fun Fact: Wikidata has reached 30 million statements
• Development
  • Refactored the suggestions drop-downs when entering properties for better performance
  • Fixed a misdirected arrow in left-to-right languages (bugzilla:61308)
  • Worked on an Apache redirect issue (bugzilla:54273)
  • Found and started fixing an issue that asked users for additional languages they don't want according to their Babel box (bugzilla:61446)
  • Table-of-contents link to the statements section of an item was broken
  • Kept poking TimeParsers
  • Made WikibaseDatabase feature complete for use with WikibaseQueryEngine
  • Work on caching javascript config variables in parser cache
  • Investigate using ElasticSearch as term index backend to take some load of the most-used database table
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the MedlinePlus ID (P604) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help develop the next summary here!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher 13:58, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

10:18, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:59, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion about defining lists
  • Open RfAs: לערי ריינהארט, Pamputt
  • Closed RfAs: Epìdosis (Successful)
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Wikidata scholarships for the Zürich Hackathon
  • Wikidata FOSS Outreach Program for Women
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: unemployment rate, manner of death, file extension, received signal, prevalence, connecting service, first performance, Universal Decimal Classification, Chinese Library Classification, Dharma Drum Buddhist College place ID, Dharma Drum Buddhist College person ID, MEP directory identifier, Rodovid ID, handle, Gewässerkennzahl, LIBRIS editions, numeric value, visitors per year, Geokod, approximation algorithm, transmitted signal
  • Showcase item: Why not improve Kleinmachnow (Q104192) to showcase standard?
  • Wikidata's presence: vici.org are using Wikidata identifiers in their data storage
• Development
  • Made loading items a lot faster
  • Enabled access to the data on Wikidata for Wikisource
  • Fixed the diff view sometimes showing the wrong revision
  • Attended ConFoo and learned all of the things
  • Released Wikibase DataModel Serialization 0.1
  • Continue work on caching javascript config variables in parser cache
  • Started to make Wikidata even faster by removing StaticExpert and BifidExpert
  • Started reviewing interface animations. You should be able to disable them all by setting $.fx.off = true; in your Special:MyPage/common.js.
  • Fixed Wikidata looking a bit odd when enabling the Typography refresh Beta feature.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the MedlinePlus ID (P604) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 18:38, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

09:30, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion about enabling GuidedTours on Wikidata
  • Open RfA: ElfjeTwaalfje
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikiquote will get language links via Wikidata on April 8th. Coordination is happening at d:Wikidata:Wikiquote
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: portal's main topic, Finnish municipality number, carries scientific instrument, upper stage booster, river basin category, mode of inheritance
• Development
  • Added more details to the diffs of time and geocoordinate values (will show which globe the coordinate is on and so on now as well)
  • More work on badges by Bene* - most work left is now in the GUI part of it
  • Removed unneeded and unused permissions/rights
  • Fixed a bug concerning spaces in quantities (bugzilla:61911)
  • Started work on taking ranks into account for queries, the property parser function and Lua. (By default only preferred values should be used if available. If not available then it should use values with rank normal.)
  • test2.wikipedia.org and test.wikipedia.org now use test.wikidata.org as their data repository, instead of wikidata.org
  • Started work on WikibaseInternalSerialization component
  • Released Wikibase DataModel 0.7 - https://github.com/wmde/WikibaseDataModel/blob/master/RELEASE-NOTES.md
  • Added indexes to Wikibase QueryEngine
  • Improved SQLite support in Wikibase Database
  • Started moving virtual machine instances of various test systems to the new Wikimedia Datacenter
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the sport (P641) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 15:39, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

09:10, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Notability of items
  • Organisation of statements, sitelinks and external identifiers
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Media Hack Days, Berlin March 22nd-23rd
  • Ateliers Wikidata, Bordeaux, France March 22nd-23rd
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Happy Pi Day
  • paper by Denny Vrandečić and Markus Krötzsch
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: NLC authorities, Atlas ID, fuel system, supercharger, ID (General Administration of Press and Publication), ISMN, NUKAT authorities
• Development
  • Changed the ((property)) parser function and Lua’s mw.wikibase.entity.formatPropertyValues to only return the statements ranked as preferred or if none are available the ones ranked as normal (This will probably go live on April 25th.)
  • Worked on improving page load time further by reducing the number of reloads during page loading
  • Made diffs for time and geocoordinates more complete and prettier
  • Continued research for user interface redesign
  • Tpt worked on optionally showing links to other sister projects in the client’s sidebar (bugzilla:54374)
  • Wrote a fix for Wikidata changes not showing up in the client’s watchlist (bugzilla:62149)
  • Updated a major chunk of our inline code documentation
  • Continued discussing technical details about how coordinates should be stored in Wikibase
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the Léonore ID (P640) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 22:29, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

07:14, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Did you know?

The template dialog has been simplified to make it faster and easier to add parameter data. Read the user guide for more information.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on changes to the template and image dialogs.

The biggest change in the last few weeks was the redesign of the template dialog. The template dialog now opens in a simplified mode that lists parameters and their descriptions. (The complex multi-item transclusion mode can be reached by clicking on "Show options" from inside the simplified template dialog.) Template parameters now have a bigger, auto-sizing input box for easier editing.  With today's update, searching for template parameters will become case-insensitive, and required template parameters will display an asterisk (*) next to their edit boxes. In addition to making it quicker and easier to see everything when you edit typical templates, this work was necessary to prepare for the forthcoming simplified citation dialog. The main priority in the coming weeks is building this new citation dialog, with the ultimate goal of providing autofill features for ISBNs, URLs, DOIs and other quick-fills. This will add a new button on the toolbar, with the citation templates available picked by each wiki's community. Concept drawings can be seen at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. Please share your ideas about making referencing quick and easy with the designers.

• The link tool now tells you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. Pages that exist, but are not indexed by the search engine, are treated like non-existent pages (T56361).
• Wikitext warnings will now hide when you remove wikitext from the paragraph you are editing.
• The character inserter tool in the "Insert" menu has been slightly redesigned, to introduce larger buttons. Your suggestions for more significant changes to the special character inserter are still wanted.
• The page options menu (three bars, next to the Cancel button) has expanded. You can create and edit redirect pages, set page options like __STATICREDIRECT__, __[NO]INDEX__ and __[NO]NEWEDITSECTION__, and more.  New keyboard shortcuts are listed there, and include undoing the last action, clearing formatting, and showing the shortcut help window. If you switch from VisualEditor to wikitext editing, your edit will now be tagged.
• It is easier to edit images. There are more options and they are explained better. If you add new images to pages, they will also be default size.  You can now set image sizes to the default, if another size was previously specified. Full support for upright sizing systems, which more readily adapt image sizes to the reader's screen size, is planned.
• VisualEditor adds fake blank lines so you can put your cursor there. These "slugs" are now smaller than normal blank lines, and are animated to be different from actual blank lines.
• You can use the Ctrl+Alt+S or ⌘ Command+⌥ Option+S shortcuts to open the save window, and you can preview your edit summary when checking your changes in the save window.
• After community requests, VisualEditor has been deployed to the Interlingual Occidental Wikipedia, the Portuguese Wikibooks, and the French Wikiversity.
• Any community can ask for custom icons for their language in the character formatting menu (bold, italic, etc.) by making a request on Bugzilla or by contacting Product Manager James Forrester.

The developers apologize for a regression bug with the deployment on 6 March 2014, which caused the incorrect removal of |upright size definitions on a handful of pages on the English Wikipedia, among others. The root cause was fixed, and the broken pages were fixed soon after.

Looking ahead:  Several template dialogs will become more compact. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. You will be able to see the Table of Contents change live as you edit the page, rather than it being hidden. In-line language setting (dir="rtl") may be offered to a few Wikipedias soon.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on 19 April 2014 at 2000 UTC. Thank you! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:44, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Wikiquote notability
  • Belongs to jurisdiction
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Cambridge revisited II documents how you can query Wikidata and put the results on a map.
  • Cambridge revisited V shows that maps have popups with texts generated on Wikidata statements and labels.
  • The architecture of the Wikimedia storage of the meta data of media files discusses that integration of Commons is a subset of what we can achieve when we consider the whole of media files.
  • Spaghetti Open Data, Bologna. March 28th - 30th
  • GLAM Treffen, Bremen. March 29th - 30th
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Riksdagen person-id
• Development
  • Continued making the UI faster
  • Fixed Wikidata changes not showing up in the watchlist on the client (Wikipedia, etc.) (bugzilla:62149)
  • Decided to turn off the inoperable wikidata.org language subdomains for now to reduce confusion
  • Created initial version of Wikibase Internal Serialization component
  • wbEntity and wbUsedEntities JavaScript variables are now cached in the parser cache
  • Ongoing refactoring to get rid of the previously used numeric ID numbers in favor of prefixed IDs
  • Made wbsearchentities aware of previously unquoted percent characters
  • Put some time into fixing longstanding oddities that made the developers cry from time to time
  • Worked on reducing internal usage of EntityContent, in preparation for redirect support
  • Worked on performance issues with JSON dump generation (hopefully we can start generating dumps soon)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the original language (P364) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 15:00, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

18:56, 24 March 2014 (UTC)