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Tech News: 2024-48

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• A new version of the standard wikitext editor-mode syntax highlighter will be available as a beta feature later this week. This brings many new features and bug fixes, including right-to-left support, template folding, autocompletion, and an improved search panel. You can learn more on the help page.
• The 2010 wikitext editor now supports common keyboard shortcuts such Ctrl+B for bold and Ctrl+I for italics. A full list of all six shortcuts is available. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. [1]
• Starting November 28, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: bswiki, elwiki, euwiki, fawiki, fiwiki, frwikiquote, frwikisource, frwikiversity, frwikivoyage, idwiki, lvwiki, plwiki, ptwiki, urwiki, viwikisource, zhwikisource. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF).
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a user creating a new AbuseFilter can now only set the filter to "protected" if it includes a protected variable.

Updates for technical contributors

• The CodeEditor, which can be used in JavaScript, CSS, JSON, and Lua pages, now offers live autocompletion. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. The feature can be temporarily disabled on a page by pressing Ctrl+, and un-selecting "Live Autocompletion".
• Tool-maintainers who use the Graphite system for tracking metrics, need to migrate to the newer Prometheus system. They can check this dashboard and the list in the Description of the task T350592 to see if their tools are listed, and they should claim metrics and dashboards connected to their tools. They can then disable or migrate all existing metrics by following the instructions in the task. The Graphite service will become read-only in April. [2]
• The New PreProcessor parser performance report has been fixed to give an accurate count for the number of Wikibase entities accessed. It had previously been resetting after 400 entities. [3]

Meetings and events

• A Language community meeting will take place November 29 at 16:00 UTC. There will be presentations on topics like developing language keyboards, the creation of the Mooré Wikipedia, the language support track at Wiki Indaba, and a report from the Wayuunaiki community on their experiences with the Incubator and as a new community over the last 3 years. This meeting will be in English and will also have Spanish interpretation.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:39, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #655

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2024-11-26. Missed the previous one? See issue #654

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot: 333Bot - Task(s): Add missing sitelinks to english Wikisource based on their header templates there.
• Closed request for comments: Additional rights for bureaucrats - Closed as successful. Bureaucrats will now be able to remove Admin rights.

Events

• Upcoming
  • 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon - registration is now open
  • Save the date: the Data Reuse Days 2025, an online event focusing on the use of Wikidata's data for tools and applications, will take place in February. You can already propose sessions for the program.
  • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session (Attn: Please fill out Pre-Participation Survey!) 3 December 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, 3 December 2024 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6 pm CET (Time zone converter). Wikimedian Mahir Morshed is leading a series of four sessions focused on lexicographical data in Wikidata. We are looking forward to learning more about these Wikibase entities! If you anticipate attending the workshop sessions, please fill out a brief survey linked from our Series Etherpad to help us prepare relevant materials for you. You only need to fill it out once, no matter how many sessions you plan to attend. Sessions will be held on November 5, November 19, December 3, and December 17, 2024, at our regular time of 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6 pm CET. Event page
  • Wikimania 2025 Scholarships are now open! This application is open until Sunday 8th December, 2024

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • Why and for what purpose should Wikidata be used in Colombia?
  • Wikidata Workshop 2024: National Library of Latvia
  • Wikidata and the 2024 Open Library Community Celebration
  • Where the data may roam: Bringing Wild West performers to Wikidata. Author Jason Sharp documents their experience adding legendary showman Buffalo Bill to Wikidata.
  • Advancing BHL’s Data for a Sustainable Future: Meet Tiago, Our New Wikimedian-in-Residence The BHL-Wiki Working Group has enrolled a Wikimedian-in-Residence with a focus on Wikidata and Structured Data on Commons.
• Papers
  • Beyond the Library Catalogue: Connecting Library Metadata to Wikidata - examines how integrating Wikidata into libraries enhances resource discoverability, fosters interoperability, and empowers users within a global knowledge network. By Okuonghae, O. (2024).
  • On assessing weaker logical status claims in Wikidata cultural heritage records - approaches to representing weaker logical status (WLS) information in Wikidata, finding limited usage, variations and ambiguities between datasets, and proposes improvements for clarity and accuracy. By Di Pasquale et al.(2024)
• Books: Tiziana Possemato, Entity modeling: la terza generazione della catalogazione: contains many references to the use of Wikidata in cataloguing
• Videos
  • (Portuguese)Wikidata & OpenRefine - Part of the “Introduction to digital platforms for research” sessions for the Centro Luís Krus of NOVA FCSH. Practical exercises for data reconciliation from the Portuguese Early Music Database using the OpenRefine tool.
  • NODES 2024: Using Dbpedia and Wikidata Knowledge Graphs With Neo4j - Cuneyt Tyler presents 'Semantic Space', a project using Dbpedia and Wikidata to enhance the user experience browsing articles on the web.
  • Uploading Images From Public Sites - Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata make great bedfellows. Margaret Donald shows how to create Commons categories, create structured data and link categories to Wikidata.
  • WCNA: LOFESQ Lots of Farmers Empty Silos Quicker: building community through a named entity Wikibase. Experiences of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives setting up the WikiNames Wikibase instance and breaking down knowledge silos
• Podcast series: Decolonizing structured data: a new season of Whose Voices? including "Episode 5 -- Unpacking Wikidata’s possibilities with Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)"
• Other
  • SPINACH: AI help for asking Wikidata "challenging real-world questions"
  • De Wikidata à Wikibase : Pour une meilleure compréhension de vos données, presentation by John Samuel at Le campus du libre 2024 (Q131312243), Lyon, November 23, 2024.

Tool of the week

• Guess Image from Pronunciation is an Ordia game that uses lexicographic data in Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. The game challenges players to match the correct image with the audio pronunciation of what the image depicts.
• ABECTO is a tool that compares #RDF data to spot errors and assess completeness. Recent changes to the tool adjust result export for #Wikidata Mismatch Finder to changed format, add reporting of qualifier mismatches to Wikidata Mismatch Finder export, and suppress illegal empty external values in Wikidata Mismatch Finder export (Tweet)
• Wikidata Infernal is an API that allows you to infer new facts from Wikidata. It uses a set of rules to infer new facts from existing ones. The generated statements will have qualifiers to indicate the source and method of the inference. Output is an array of statements in JSON/Wikidata format. (blog)

Other Noteworthy Stuff

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • picture of this person doing their job (picture of a person in action, especially for a sportsperson, visual artist, musican, actor. P18 is normally used for portraits)
  • ISCC (ISCC hash code that identifies a media object based on fuzzy hashing)
• Newest External identifiers: Kultboy editor ID, WikiBaseball ID, Ninilchik Russian Dictionary ID, ANID Researcher Portal ID, TOPO ID, DBIS Resource ID, ITV News topic ID, Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites ID, ISFDB editorial collection ID, Great Norwegian Encyclopedia contributor ID, ILEC World Lake Database ID, Sage Social Science Thesaurus ID, El Moudjahid tag ID, SGES monument ID, DEX ’09 entry ID, Electronic Language International Festival person ID, Medieval Coin Hoards of the British Isles ID, Paramount+ video ID, Le Club Mediapart blogger ID, Phish.net venue ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • study or design for this work (preliminary work for this finished work)
  • OAI formatter (formatter to generate ID compatible with {{Q|2430433}} services)
  • Open Library Collection (Link to Open Library Collection which contain manually and automaticallly collections of editions and works on certain topics)
  • scientific illustration (an illustration of this subject to provide a detailed reference for its appearance. It should be ideally tied to the primary literature on the item.)
  • thesis submitted for (academic degree for which a thesis or dissertation is submitted)
  • meeting of (subject is a meeting or session of this body (legislature, committee, convention, etc.))
  • UMC rating (Age rating category as designated by the UAE Media Council (UMC))
  • Non-binary population (number of non-binary people inhabiting the place)
  • role named as (use as qualifier to indicate how the object's role was named in the credits of it's respective work)
  • bequest income (The sum a organisations receives from bequests/legacies in a timeframe.)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: ISLRN, erail.in railway station identifier, Gallimard author ID, Japanese Health Insurance System Facility ID, Identifiant d'un(e) artiste sur Reg-Arts, Eyrolles author ID, Zvuk album ID, Chtyvo author ID, Bibliothèque du Séminaire de Tournai IDs, EU Corporate body code, SBOID, Waymark code, Radio Algeria tag ID, Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian entry ID, PBY Ben-Yehuda dictionary identifier, ThePWHL.com player ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Map of Swedish municipalities colored by Wikipedia article length (source)
  • Timeline of deaths from disasters in Spain (source)

• Newest WikiProjects:
  • Aargauer Bibliografie - WikiProject for the coordination of data ingests and Wikipedia workshops related to the official bibliography of the Aargau Cantonal Library, operated by Bibliothek und Archiv Aargau (Switzerland)
  • WikiProject Taiwan/Amis - collects information related to the Ami culture, including statistics and activity records.
  • Rwanda - aims to be a central hub for the curation of any and all items (biographical, cultural, geographical, organizational, etc...) relating to Rwanda Rwanda (Q1037)
• Newest database reports: A list of Items with a sitelink to English Wikipedia but without any Statements
• Showcase Items: Cueva de las Manos (Q223385) - cave with cave paintings in Santa Cruz, Argentina
• Showcase Lexemes: bezczelny (L2781) - Polish adjective that can mean "impudent" or "brazen" in English

Development

• Wikidata Query Service: The graph split rules have been updated to now also include Items that contain a statement using "publication type of scholarly work" into the scholarly article graph.
• Wikibase.cloud now allows personal userscripts (phab:T378627)
• EntitySchemas: We continued the work on making it possible to search for EntitySchemas by label and aliases when making a statement linking to an EntitySchema.(phab:T375641)
• Ontology file: We are updating the Wikibase ontology file. (phab:T371196, phab:T371752)
• Property Suggester: We are updating the suggestions data (phab:T377986 but first need to improve the underlying scripts (phab:T376604)
• Wikibase REST API: We are prototyping the search functionality for the REST API (phab:T379608)
• Revision table: We are continuing the investigation into the size limitations of the table.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country: Ghana
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

· Previous issue · Mohammed Abdulai (WMDE) (talk) · MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:42, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #656

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2024-12-02. Missed the previous one? See issue #655

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot: ThesaurusLinguaeAegyptiaeBot - Task(s): Creating and updating Hieroglyphic Ancient Egyptian and Coptic lexemes and ancient Egyptian text artifact items. It is also to maintain links to the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae project via approved properties.
• New request for comments: Schema Virtual Tour - User:Brechtd would like feedback on determining a data model and schema for Wikidata items that are an instance of virtual tour(Q2915546) - See Schema Proposal - Virtual Tour for more info.
• Closed request for comments: Create items for Property proposals - Despite a spirited discussion with many comments both in favour and opposition, no consensus was reached.

Events

• Upcoming:
  • Wikimedia Deutschland is providing a total of 15 participation scholarships for Wikimania 2025 (7 individual and 4 tandem scholarships). Further information is available on this page. An overview of all questions in the application form is here. Apply here. Closes 8 December 2024.
  • Talk to the Search Platform / Query Service Team—December 4, 2024. The time is 17:00 CET
  • Tomorrow / 3rd December 2024: Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session @ 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm UTC / 6pm CET. If you would like to attend, please fill out the Etherpad form to ensure all necessary materials are provided for you.
  • Deadline for the Central Asian WikiCon 2025 scholarship application is December 30, 2024. We encourage you to make Wikidata-related submissions (the deadline for submission is March 22, 2025.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Research
  • Statement Signals: Wikidata usage on other Wikis: A new research report is available. Explores what trace Wikidata data is measurable on other Wiki pages and proposes initial metrics for measuring Wikidata statement usage on Wikimedia content pages. Also suggests methods to improve data analysis and collection. PDF is available on Commons
• Blogs
  • Celebrating Wikidata’s 12th birthday across the world - Wikidata celebrated its 12th birthday in October and November 2024, with a series of global events and activities aimed at commemorating the platform's contributions to the open knowledge movement, engaging its community of volunteers, and highlighting the significant role Wikidata plays in the digital landscape. By Dan Shick
• Papers
  • Beyond the Library Catalogue: Connecting Library Metadata to Wikidata - This paper explores how libraries can leverage Wikidata to enhance resource discoverability, foster interoperability, and integrate into the global knowledge ecosystem. By Omorodion Okuonghae (2024).
  • A framework for integrating biomedical knowledge in Wikidata with open biological and biomedical ontologies and MeSH keywords - Enhancing Wikidata’s biomedical knowledge by integrating OBO ontologies and PubMed’s MeSH keywords, addressing gaps, improving classification accuracy, and verifying relations for stronger interoperability and accuracy. By Chebil et al. (2024).
  • Class Order Disorder in Wikidata and First Fixes analyzes class order violations in Wikidata's ontology using SPARQL, evaluates fixes, and offers solutions through improved tools or community involvement. By P. Patel-Schneider and E. Doğan.
• Videos
  • Edit a Wikidata Item and Lexeme - The Tyap Wikimedia User Group produced this tutorial on editing as part of the Wikidata 12th Birthday celebrations for the Wikidata @12 Data-a-thon.
  • State of the art in combining OpenStreetMap and Linked Data - Covers Linked Data basics, its potential with OSM, and popular methods for linking, extracting, combining, and querying data from both sources. Jump to (Wikidata)
  • (正體字, CN Trad.) Getting Started with Wikidata - An introduction and overview to Wikidata and some associated tools such as ORES and LiftWing.
  • (正體字, CN Trad.) Wikidata Basic Editing Tutorial - This session was given as part of the COSCUP '24 conference on the OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Agenda Track.
  • LLM-based natural-language representations for SPARQL queries over Wikidata and DBpedia - LORiS: This tool can help you understand complex SPARQL queries by converting them to natural language.
  • Towards an Open NLI LLM-based System for KGs: A Wikidata Case Study - At the 7th ISRITI 2024 conference, Jaycent Ongris shows how RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) has been used in a natural-language question-answer platform to directly query Wikidata.
  • How knowledge representation is changing in a world of LLM's - Denny Vrandečić gives this keynote session at the SWIB (Semantic Web in Libraries) conference.
  • the Capacity to Grieve Once More - Alexandros Kosiaris of the Wikimedia Foundation explains changes made to make Wikipedia more stable and prevent outages, including how it calls and fetches data from Wikidata. Session given at SREcon24.

Tool of the week

• LoRiS - Generate natural-language descriptions of SPARQL queries via LLM's.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Wikidata:WordGraph: Google released the WordGraph dataset as a belated present for Wikidata’s 12th birthday. The dataset contains 968,153 forms in 39 languages.
• Product Manager: Wikibase Suite: Wikimedia Deutschland has an open and exciting vacancy for a Product Manager of Wikibase Suite. Apply!
• Tools or bots which use the wiki replicas (such as Quarry) will observe outdated data for up to 8-10 days, as a result of necessary database maintenance (T367856). Tools or bots which use the APIs will not be affected. (This was previously announced 2024-11-11 but didn’t actually take place yet.)

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest properties:
  • General datatypes:
    • picture of this person doing their job (picture of a person in action, especially for a sportsperson, visual artist, musican, actor. P18 is normally used for portraits)
    • ISCC (ISCC hash code that identifies a media object based on fuzzy hashing)
  • External identifiers: Kultboy editor ID, WikiBaseball ID, Ninilchik Russian Dictionary ID, ANID Researcher Portal ID, TOPO ID, DBIS Resource ID, ITV News topic ID, Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites ID, ISFDB editorial collection ID, Great Norwegian Encyclopedia contributor ID, ILEC World Lake Database ID, Sage Social Science Thesaurus ID, El Moudjahid tag ID, SGES monument ID, DEX ’09 entry ID, Electronic Language International Festival person ID, Medieval Coin Hoards of the British Isles ID, Paramount+ video ID, Le Club Mediapart blogger ID, Phish.net venue ID
• New property proposals to review:
  • General datatypes:
    • study or design for this work (preliminary work for this finished work)
    • OAI formatter (formatter to generate ID compatible with {{Q|2430433}} services)
    • Open Library Collection (Link to Open Library Collection which contain manually and automaticallly collections of editions and works on certain topics)
    • scientific illustration (an illustration of this subject to provide a detailed reference for its appearance. It should be ideally tied to the primary literature on the item.)
    • thesis submitted for (academic degree for which a thesis or dissertation is submitted)
    • meeting of (subject is a meeting or session of this body (legislature, committee, convention, etc.))
    • UMC rating (Age rating category as designated by the UAE Media Council (UMC))
    • Third-gender population (number of third-gender people inhabiting the place)
    • role named as (use as qualifier to indicate how the object's role was named in the credits of it's respective work)
    • bequest income (The sum a organisations receives from bequests/legacies in a timeframe.)
    • Audio tour ()
    • Augmented reality tour ()
    • Virtual reality tour ()
    • extension that populates category (analogous to {{P|4329}} for tracking cat:s populated by extensions of MediaWiki, linking to extension causing the population)
    • CUATM statistical code (7-digits code attributed to administrative-territorial units of Moldova)
    • CUATM unique identification code (4-digits code attributed to administrative-territorial units of Moldova)
  • External identifiers: ISLRN, erail.in railway station identifier, Gallimard author ID, Japanese Health Insurance System Facility ID, Identifiant d'un(e) artiste sur Reg-Arts, Eyrolles author ID, Zvuk album ID, Chtyvo author ID, Bibliothèque du Séminaire de Tournai IDs, EU Corporate body code, SBOID, Waymark code, Radio Algeria tag ID, Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian entry ID, PBY Ben-Yehuda dictionary identifier, ThePWHL.com player ID, Radio Algeria tag ID (Arabic), Identifiant L'AF au champ d'honneur, Identifiant d'un(e) auteurice dans Vidas, Open Source Security Foundation Best Practices Identifier, OpenSSF Best Practices ID, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language entry, Identifiant sur Mémoire des avocats, BCU Kirundi-English Dictionary ID, Wurfhand, University Bibliography Tübingen ID, ZSL Authority ID, PUG authority ID, Three Decks class ID, HCERES expert ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Using cross-product / cross-join to produce list of categories
  • Map of individuals charged, convicted and/or exonerated of Witchcraft with place of death in Switzerland
  • Names and Locations of French Castles (Château)
  • Train Station information (with a Spanish Wikipedia article)
• Newest WikiProjects:
  • Bibliothek UvA/HvA - documenting, archiving and creating items from collections from the UvA/AUAS Library in Amsterdam, beginning with the works of Allard Pierson.
  • Ghana - A hub for Ghanaian activities and entities, including regional languages: Dagbanli, Twi and Dagari.
  • Thao (Taiwan): For collecting information related to Thao cultural themes, including statistics and activity records.
• Newest database reports: Recent Deaths
• Showcase Items: Miguel de Cervantes: Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright (1547-1616)
• Showcase Lexemes: புறவு (L1236574) - A Tamil lemma for dense forest, impassable jungle and a pigeon dove.

Development

• EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on making it possible to search for an EntitySchema by its label or alias when making a new statement linking to an EntitySchema.
• PropertySuggester: We have updated the script that generates the suggestions and will update the suggestions next.
• Lexicographical data: We fixed a visual issue with search results on the Codex-based Special:NewLexeme (phab:T370057)
• Vector 2022: We are working on designs to fix the remaining issues with the skin on Wikidata.
• Wikibase REST API: We are finishing the prototype for supporting search in the API.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country: Ghana
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

· Previous issue · Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) · MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:30, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-49

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Two new parser functions were added this week. The {{#interwikilink}} function adds an interwiki link and the {{#interlanguagelink}} function adds an interlanguage link. These parser functions are useful on wikis where namespaces conflict with interwiki prefixes. For example, links beginning with MOS: on English Wikipedia conflict with the mos language code prefix of Mooré Wikipedia.
• Starting this week, Wikimedia wikis no longer support connections using old RSA-based HTTPS certificates, specifically rsa-2048. This change is to improve security for all users. Some older, unsupported browser or smartphone devices will be unable to connect; Instead, they will display a connectivity error. See the HTTPS Browser Recommendations page for more-detailed information. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [4]
• Starting December 16, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: arwiki, cawiki, frwiki, mediawikiwiki, orwiki, wawiki, wawiktionary, wikidatawiki, zhwiki. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF). [5]
• This month the Chart extension was deployed to production and is now available on Commons and Testwiki. With the security review complete, pilot wiki deployment is expected to start in the first week of December. You can see a working version on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug with the "Download as PDF" system was fixed. [6]

Updates for technical contributors

• In late February, temporary accounts will be rolled out on at least 10 large wikis. This deployment will have a significant effect on the community-maintained code. This is about Toolforge tools, bots, gadgets, and user scripts that use IP address data or that are available for logged-out users. The Trust and Safety Product team wants to identify this code, monitor it, and assist in updating it ahead of the deployment to minimize disruption to workflows. The team asks technical editors and volunteer developers to help identify such tools by adding them to this list. In addition, review the updated documentation to learn how to adjust the tools. Join the discussions on the project talk page or in the dedicated thread on the Wikimedia Community Discord server (in English) for support and to share feedback.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:20, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #657

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2024-12-09. Missed the previous one? See issue #656

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot: KlaraBot - Task(s): Append a human's lifespan to descriptions when they can be authoritatively sourced.
• Closed request for comments: Audio transcription (P9533) - Closed with no consensus. The discussion is ongoing on the Property P5933 talk page.

Events

• Past: Amical Wikimedia, the Catalan-language and culture focused thematic Wikimedia Organization organized the Celebrem Wikidata (Let's celebrate Wikidata) project to celebrate Wikidata's 12th anniversary, from November 10 - 30. This included a Wikidata introduction workshop to equip participants with the editing skills to tackle the project's main aim. This was presented as a game to delete duplicate info on Wikidata and Catalan Viquipèdia infoboxes, in three areas: protected buildings, officers' positions and data related to sports teams players. At the end of the event, ~200 Wikidata-fed infoboxes and Wikidata items were improved and many Wikipedia editors edited Wikidata for the first time!
• Upcoming events:
  • (Deutsch)Wikidata for Legal Historians - Tue. 10 December, 3pm - 7pm (UTC+1). This presentation explores Wikidata as a key platform for LOD, explains its Semantic Web foundation, introduces FactGrid (a Wikidata-based platform for historical research). Highlights potential of both platforms using examples and encourages discussion for legal historical research. Register here.
  • Today (09.12.2024) is the last chance to submit an Abstract for the Wikidata and Research conference (5 - 6 June 2025). If you are interested in participating, please review the submission acceptance format before submitting here.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • MediaWiki Conference Highlights, featuring Wikibase talks including one by Christos Varvantakis and Jon Amar from Wikimedia Deutschland.
  • Semantic Wikibase 2024 Update
  • WMDE launches AI Knowledge project in collaboration with DataStax built with NVIDIA AI
  • Ten years of Philippine local Govt. data for Wikidata's 12th Birthday. Read about SKAP's (Shared Knowledge Asia Pacific) efforts to add 10 years worth of financial data of local Government assets to Wikidata during a Datathon.
• Papers
  • Developing an OCR - Wikibase Pipeline for Place Names in the RGTC Series - introduces a semi-automated workflow for extracting and digitally storing geographically relevant information, including spatial relations and contextual details, from place names in the Répertoire géographique des textes cunéiformes. By Matthew Ong (2024).
• Videos
  • Wikibase4Research - Kolja Bailly presents ways in which the Wikibase4Research tool by the TIB Open Science Lab supports researchers in dealing with Mediawiki software for knowledge bases such as Wikibase and facilitates better and FAIR Research Data Management. Includes a live demonstration and beginner-friendly instructions.

Tool of the week

• CAT🐈: Metrics computing simple metrics (number of labels, number of descriptions, number of sitelinks, number of statements) for item matching a simple claim.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Template:Image properties New template listing properties that link to images.
• Let's Connect invites you to get involved in helping spread awareness and knowledge of Wikidata, potentially help organise a Wikidata Learning Clinic. Are you interested in participating? Please sign-up on this registration form.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest properties:
  • General datatypes:
    • reference illustration (an illustration of this subject to provide a detailed reference for its appearance. It should be ideally tied to the primary literature on the item.)
  • External identifiers: Gallimard author ID, Football Kit Archive ID, Bibliothèque du Séminaire de Tournai author ID, Bibliothèque du Séminaire de Tournai publisher ID, Reg-Arts artist ID, EU Corporate body code, PBY Ben-Yehuda dictionary identifier, Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian entry ID, L'AF au champ d'honneur ID, Radio Algeria tag ID (Arabic), Radio Algeria tag ID (French), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language entry ID, Kamus Dewan Edisi Keempat ID
• New property proposals to review:
  • General datatypes:
    • land acknowledgement (acknowledgement of indigenous or native people whose ancestors lived at a location)
    • homonym of (taxon item of which the taxon name is an exact homonym)
    • taxon known by this common name (taxon item of which this common name refers)
  • External identifiers: PCGames.de product ID, AniSearch character ID, Hachette author ID, El Watan tag ID, Albin Michel author ID, DNCI label ID, Battle.net game ID, Collectie Nederland ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Items missing Hungarian labels or description that are part of Library and Information Science (Q13420675)
  • Items from Maori Wikipedia missing English labels or descriptions
  • Instances of "Shopping Center" located in administrative territorial entity subclass of Norway
• Newest WikiProjects:
  • Nonprofit Organisations in Nigeria, Belgium and Italy.
• WikiProject Highlights:
  • Rwanda - since its creation a couple of weeks ago, it has expanded greatly with new sections for Lists, Museums and Hospitals.
• Newest database reports: Unauthorized Bots - A list of bots and their edits, operating without a Bot flag.
• Showcase Items: Das Erste: A German public service television channel broadcasting for more than 70 years.
• Showcase Lexemes: Kerzu (L8153) the Breton word for December, directly translates from "totally black", rather appropriate for the cold, dark last month of the year.

Development

• You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country: Ghana
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

· Previous issue · Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) · MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:19, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-50

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• Technical documentation contributors can find updated resources, and new ways to connect with each other and the Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team, at the Documentation hub on MediaWiki.org. This page links to: resources for writing and improving documentation, a new #wikimedia-techdocs IRC channel on libera.chat, a listing of past and upcoming documentation events, and ways to request a documentation consultation or review. If you have any feedback or ideas for improvements to the documentation ecosystem, please contact the Technical Documentation Team.

Updates for editors

Layout change for the Edit Check feature

• Later this week, Edit Check will be relocated to a sidebar on desktop. Edit check is the feature for new editors to help them follow policies and guidelines. This layout change creates space to present people with new Checks that appear while they are typing. The initial results show newcomers encountering Edit Check are 2.2 times more likely to publish a new content edit that includes a reference and is not reverted.
• The Chart extension, which enables editors to create data visualizations, was successfully made available on MediaWiki.org and three pilot wikis (Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedias). You can see a working examples on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
• Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now discover articles in Wikiproject campaigns of their interest from the "All collection" category in the articles suggestion feature. Wikiproject Campaign organizers can use this feature, to help translators to discover articles of interest, by adding the <page-collection> </page-collection> tag to their campaign article list page on Meta-wiki. This will make those articles discoverable in the Content Translation tool. For more detailed information on how to use the tool and tag, please refer to the step-by-step guide. [7]
• The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, now has a multiselect filter for namespace selection. This enables users to select multiple specific namespaces, instead of only one or all, when fetching pages for deletion.
• The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions. Thanks to Chlod and the Moderator Tools team for both of these improvements. [8]
• The Editing Team is working on making it easier to populate citations from archive.org using the Citoid tool, the auto-filled citation generator. They are asking communities to add two parameters preemptively, archiveUrl and archiveDate, within the TemplateData for each citation template using Citoid. You can see an example of a change in a template, and a list of all relevant templates. [9]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in Indonesian (voy:id:) [10]
• Last week, all wikis had problems serving pages to logged-in users and some logged-out users for 30–45 minutes. This was caused by a database problem, and investigation is ongoing. [11]
• View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug in the Add Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases. [12][13]

Updates for technical contributors

• Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, now has an early-stage implementation in PHP. It is available for general use in MediaWiki extensions and Toolforge apps through Composer, with use in MediaWiki core coming soon. More information is available in the documentation. Thanks to Doğu for the inspiration and many contributions to the library. [14]
• Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. On December 4, the MediaWiki Interfaces team began rerouting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content endpoints on testwiki from RESTbase to comparable MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The team encourages active users of these endpoints to verify their tool's behavior on testwiki and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket before the end of the year, as they intend to roll out the same change across all Wikimedia projects in early January. These changes are part of the work to replace the outdated RESTBase system.
• The 2024 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 3 January 2025, and has an associated privacy statement.
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [15]

Meetings and events

• The next meeting in the series of Wikimedia Foundation discussions with the Wikimedia Commons community will take place on December 12 at 8:00 UTC and at 16:00 UTC. The topic of this call is new media and new contributors. Contributors from all wikis are welcome to attend.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:13, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 12 December 2024

• News and notes: Arbitrator election concludes

• Arbitration report: Palestine-Israel articles 5

• Disinformation report: Sex, power, and money revisited

• Op-ed: On the backrooms by Tamzin

• In focus: Are Wikipedia articles representative of Western or world knowledge?

• In the media: Like the BBC, often useful but not impartial

• Traffic report: Something Wicked for almost everybody

• Opinion: Worm That Turned's reconfirmation RfA debriefing

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:56, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #658

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2024-12-16. Missed the previous one? See issue #657

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot: PWSBot - Task(s): Is a selfmade chatbot to answer factual questions as part of a final research project for educational purposes.
• Closed request for permissions/Bot: CarbonBot - Withdrawn by submitter

Events Upcoming events:

• Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session (Attn: Please fill out Pre-Participation Survey!) 17 December 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, 17 December 2024 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6 pm CET (Time zone converter) Wikimedian Mahir Morshed is leading a series of four sessions focused on lexicographical data in Wikidata. We are looking forward to learning more about these Wikibase entities! If you anticipate attending the workshop sessions, please fill out a brief survey linked from our Series Etherpad to help us prepare relevant materials for you. Sessions will be held on November 5, November 19, December 3, and December 17, 2024 at our regular time of 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET. Event page
• 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon - register now

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Papers
  • Are Wikipedia articles representative of Western or world knowledge?, December 12, 2024, The Signpost
  • Baptiste de Coulon, "Les don­nées liées, Wikidata et les archi­ves : une oppor­tu­nité de contri­bu­tion aux com­muns numé­riques". In: La Gazette des archives, n°271, 2024-2, p.37-56 (free access online after 3 years).
• Videos: AWS re:Invent 2024 - Wikimedia Deutschland's Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) and Philippe Saadé talk about d:Wikidata:Embedding Project.

Tool of the week

• Tabular Online Validator - checks if SPARQL query results conform to a provided schema by validating data and highlighting potential errors, such as missing properties, invalid values, or too many values, with the option to refine the schema if issues arise. (A major update to the current ShEx validator that is expected to get integrated into the existing validator soon)
• CAT🐈: Overview if references: looking at references for a set of Wikidata items

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Now Hiring: OpenRefine Developer & Contributor Engagement
• The Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) is launching the Entity Management Cooperative (EMCO) program in 2025, aiming to unify entity management across the semantic web, including registries like Wikidata. Volunteers, including those with prior experience in PCC’s ISNI or Wikidata pilots, are invited to join the Early Adopters Phase by January 17, 2025.
• The Biodiversity Heritage Library Working Group has set up a page on Meta to coordinate contributions across projects, including Wikidata

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • bequest income (the sum a organisations receives from bequests/legacies in a timeframe)
• Newest External identifiers: PCGames.de product ID, PUG authority ID, Three Decks class ID, Vidas author ID, Usito ID, ZSL authority ID, Collectie Nederland ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
  • nonprofit tax status (country specific tax status of non-profit organisations)
  • Рахимов, Гафур Рахимович (Gʻafur Rahimov)
  • nomenclatural type of (taxon item of wich this item is the taxonomic type)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Three Decks conflict ID, Algeria Press Service tag ID (French), Algeria Press Service tag ID (English), Algeria Press Service tag ID (Arabic), JudaicaLink person ID, Newmark Albanian-English Dictionary ID, Norsk oversettterleksikon ID, footballdatabase.eu match ID, Kamus Pelajar Edisi Kedua ID, Berlinische Galerie object ID, Singapore Unique Entity Number, Lyricfind artist ID, HonestGamers game ID, identifiant MACM d'un artisite, Syrian Memory person ID, Identifiant d'un(e) auteurice sur le site Mille ans de littérature d'oc, Paris Match ID, Kamus Dewan Edisi Tiga, identifiant Registre national des gels, DOSBox Wiki, Identifiant Cimetières de France

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • World map of recent censuses known at Wikidata for each decade (select decade on the right side)
  • Timeline of inception of Ghanaian universities
  • Most common name in Germany by year of birth
• WikiProject Highlights:
  • Chemistry/Elements
  • Taiwan/Truku - a compilation of information on the subject of Taroko culture, including statistics and records of activities.
• Newest database reports: Dagbani Lexemes with Glosses which are the same as the Lemma
• Showcase Items: Alice Through the Looking Glass (Q17485699) - 2016 film directed by James Bobin where now 22-year-old Alice comes across a magical looking glass that takes her back to Wonderland.
• Showcase Lexemes: آب‌لرزه‌یاب (L744998) - Persian noun, translates to "hydro-seismometer"

Development

• Wikibase REST API: We prototyped search support for the REST API and would like your feedback on it.
• Property Suggestions: We updated the underlying data so you should have more up-to-date suggestions again when making new statements.
• EntitySchemas: We continued the work on making it possible to search for EntitySchemas by their label and aliases when linking to them in a statement.
• Query Service: We are investigating if we can do something about the issue where not all edgeLabels are shown on a graph visualisation (phab:T381857) and if there are any alternatives to the library used for the graph builder in the Query Service (phab:T381764)
• Under the hood: We are optimizing the server setup for the term store to accommodate its growth (phab:T351802)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country:
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

· Previous issue · Mohammed Abdulai (WMDE) (talk) · MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:57, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-51

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• Interested in improving event management on your home wiki? The CampaignEvents extension offers organizers features like event registration management, event/wikiproject promotion, finding potential participants, and more - all directly on-wiki. If you are an organizer or think your community would benefit from this extension, start a discussion to enable it on your wiki today. To learn more about how to enable this extension on your wiki, visit the deployment status page.

Updates for editors

• Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in Italy and Mexico on the Italian, Spanish, and English Wikipedias, can see a personalized Year in Review with insights based on their reading and editing history.
• Users of the Android Wikipedia App in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia can see the new Rabbit Holes feature. This feature shows a suggested search term in the Search bar based on the current article being viewed, and a suggested reading list generated from the user’s last two visited articles.
• The global reminder bot is now active and running on nearly 800 wikis. This service reminds most users holding temporary rights when they are about to expire, so that they can renew should they want to. See the technical details page for more information.
• The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 13 January 2025 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the Android Wikipedia App which had caused translatable SVG images to show the wrong language when they were tapped.

Updates for technical contributors

• There is no new MediaWiki version next week. The next deployments will start on 14 January. [16]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:22, 16 December 2024 (UTC)