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Latest '''[[m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News|tech news]]''' from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. [[m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2021/39|Translations]] are available.
'''Recent changes'''
* [[w:en:IOS|iOS 15]] has a new function called [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212614 Private Relay] (Apple website). This can hide the user's IP when they use [[w:en:Safari (software)|Safari]] browser. This is like using a [[w:en:Virtual private network|VPN]] in that we see another IP address instead. It is opt-in and only for those who pay extra for [[w:en:ICloud|iCloud]]. It will come to Safari users on [[:w:en:OSX|OSX]] later. There is a [[phab:T289795|technical discussion]] about what this means for the Wikimedia wikis.
'''Problems'''
* [[File:Octicons-tools.svg|15px|link=|Advanced item]] Some gadgets and user-scripts add items to the [[m:Customization:Explaining_skins#Portlets|portlets]] (article tools) part of the skin. A recent change to the HTML may have made those links a different font-size. This can be fixed by adding the CSS class <bdi lang="zxx" dir="ltr"><code>.vector-menu-dropdown-noicon</code></bdi>. [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T291438]
'''Changes later this week'''
* [[File:Octicons-sync.svg|12px|link=|Recurrent item]] The [[mw:MediaWiki 1.38/wmf.2|new version]] of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from {{#time:j xg|2021-09-28|en}}. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from {{#time:j xg|2021-09-29|en}}. It will be on all wikis from {{#time:j xg|2021-09-30|en}} ([[mw:MediaWiki 1.38/Roadmap|calendar]]).
* The [[mw:Special:MyLanguage/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians#New_experience|GettingStarted extension]] was built in 2013, and provides an onboarding process for new account holders in a few versions of Wikipedia. However, the recently developed [[mw:Special:MyLanguage/Growth/Feature_summary|Growth features]] provide a better onboarding experience. Since the vast majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features, GettingStarted will be deactivated starting on 4 October. [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T235752]
* A small number of users will not be able to connect to the Wikimedia wikis after 30 September. This is because an old [[:w:en:root certificate|root certificate]] will no longer work. They will also have problems with many other websites. Users who have updated their software in the last five years are unlikely to have problems. Users in Europe, Africa and Asia are less likely to have immediate problems even if their software is too old. You can [[m:Special:MyLanguage/HTTPS/2021 Let's Encrypt root expiry|read more]].
* You can [[mw:Special:MyLanguage/Help:Notifications|receive notifications]] when someone leaves a comment on user talk page or mentions you in a talk page comment. Clicking the notification link will now bring you to the comment and highlight it. Previously, doing so brought you to the top of the section that contained the comment. You can find [[phab:T282029|more information in T282029.]]
'''Future changes'''
* The [[mw:Special:MyLanguage/Help:DiscussionTools#Replying|Reply tool]] will be deployed to the remaining wikis in the coming weeks. It is currently part of "{{int:discussiontools-preference-label}}" in [[Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures|Beta features]] at most wikis. You will be able to turn it off in [[Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion|Editing Preferences]]. [[phab:T288485|See the list of wikis.]] [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T262331]
'''''[[m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News|Tech news]]''' prepared by [[m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/Writers|Tech News writers]] and posted by [[m:Special:MyLanguage/User:MediaWiki message delivery|bot]] • [[m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News#contribute|Contribute]] • [[m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2021/39|Translate]] • [[m:Tech|Get help]] • [[m:Talk:Tech/News|Give feedback]] • [[m:Global message delivery/Targets/Tech ambassadors|Subscribe or unsubscribe]].''
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05:22, 28 กันยายน 2564 (+07)
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User:Bargioni/WikiBridge.js userscript enables you to add a tabbed section to Wikidata items showing some paragraphs from Wikipedias chosen by the Babel languages of the logged-in user. Demo video (in Italian)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata Lexeme Forms now lists languages on the index page using their autonyms (language name in that language). (Source)
User:Bargioni/WikiBridge.js userscript enables you to add a tabbed section to Wikidata items showing some paragraphs from Wikipedias chosen by the Babel languages of the logged-in user. Demo video (in Italian)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata Lexeme Forms now lists languages on the index page using their autonyms (language name in that language). (Source)
You can link to specific log entries. You can get these links for example by clicking the timestamps in the log. Until now, such links to private log entries showed no entry even if you had permission to view private log entries. The links now show the entry.[2]
Admins can use the abuse filter tool to automatically prevent bad edits. Three changes happened last week:
The filter editing interface now shows syntax errors while you type. This is similar to JavaScript pages. It also shows a warning for regular expressions that match the empty string. New warnings will be added later.[3]
Oversighters can now hide multiple filter log entries at once using checkboxes on Special:AbuseLog. This is how the usual revision deletion works.[4]
When a filter matches too many actions after it has been changed it is "throttled". The most powerful actions are disabled. This is to avoid many editors getting blocked when an administrator made a mistake. The administrator will now get a notification about this "throttle".
Bots using the API no longer watch pages automatically based on account preferences. Setting the watchlist to watch will still work. This is to reduce the size of the watchlist data in the database.[6]
There was a new version of MediaWiki last week. You can read a detailed log of all 763 changes. Most of them are very small and will not affect you.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 January. It will be on all wikis from 14 January (calendar).
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Using QuickStatements for bulk uploading archived website data to Wikidata with Peter Chan, 12 January. Agenda
Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #27 on Wikipedia20 - YouTube, Facebook, 16 January
Video: How to use WikiBridge - a userscript that enables you to add a tabbed section to Wikidata items showing some paragraphs from Wikipedias chosen by the Babel languages of the logged-in user. Demo video
Tool of the week
QueryGraph is a web tool for creating queries in SPARQL from graphs.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikibase now has a dedicated Twitter account: Follow @WikibaseHQ for updates on everything Wikibase.
You can now create and curate catalog groups on Mix’n’match, and find the most common unmatched entries between them (Source)
Continued working on the Query Builder. We focused on making it possible to query for Item values and being able to limit the number of Items in the result. We also looked into how to query for quantity values.
Changed P920’s data type from string to external identifier (phab:T269205)
Finished working on the problem of Items that have the page prop wikibase:statements set to 0 but actually do have statements (phab:T145712)
Continued work on the “Publishing” step of the Wikibase release pipeline by building and testing three components of the software suite: Wikibase (phab: T267893), Query Service frontend (phab:T268025), and Query Service backend (phab:T268022)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Using QuickStatements for bulk uploading archived website data to Wikidata with Peter Chan, 12 January. Agenda
Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #27 on Wikipedia20 - YouTube, Facebook, 16 January
Video: How to use WikiBridge - a userscript that enables you to add a tabbed section to Wikidata items showing some paragraphs from Wikipedias chosen by the Babel languages of the logged-in user. Demo video
Tool of the week
QueryGraph is a web tool for creating queries in SPARQL from graphs.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikibase now has a dedicated Twitter account: Follow @WikibaseHQ for updates on everything Wikibase.
You can now create and curate catalog groups on Mix’n’match, and find the most common unmatched entries between them (Source)
Continued working on the Query Builder. We focused on making it possible to query for Item values and being able to limit the number of Items in the result. We also looked into how to query for quantity values.
Changed P920’s data type from string to external identifier (phab:T269205)
Finished working on the problem of Items that have the page prop wikibase:statements set to 0 but actually do have statements (phab:T145712)
Continued work on the “Publishing” step of the Wikibase release pipeline by building and testing three components of the software suite: Wikibase (phab: T267893), Query Service frontend (phab:T268025), and Query Service backend (phab:T268022)
Continued working on the Query Builder. We continued to set up tracking for the number of queries that result in an error, timeout, etc. (phab:T269224). We als made it possible to query for Item values (phab:T268814). You can always try the current state on the test system.
Finished fixing an issue with whitespace being stripped while typing when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
Worked on no error being shown when trying to save Lemma with invalid language code (phab:T265783)
Working on using Special:MyLanguage feature for more links in the Wikidata Query Service interface to redirect people to documentation in their language (phab:T267656)
Continued interviewing people to better understand how to best compare Wikidata's data against other databases in order to find mismatches that need the editors' attention
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 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all wikis from 21 January (calendar).
MassMessage posts could be automatically timestamped in the future. This is because MassMessage senders can now send pages using MassMessage. Pages are more difficult to sign. If there are times when a MassMessage post should not be timestamped you can let the developers know.
Past: Wikidata+Wikibase office hour happened on January 21st. See notes here (English).
Past: 2021 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Beginner Teaching Workshop (in Chinese). Replay on YouTube 1, 2, 3, 4
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Wikibase, the Integrated Authority File (GND) pilot at the German National Library, and the WikiLibrary Manifesto, 26 January. Agenda
Continued working on the Query Builder: made it possible to limit the number of results in the result set, made it possible to include results from subclasses when querying for Item values, worked on negating queries and started on sharing of queries via URL. As always you can try the current state on the test system.
Making links in the Query Service redirect to the proper translations of their pages on-wiki by using Special:MyLanguage redirects (phab:T267656)
Working on fixing an issue with displaying large numbers for quantity values (phab:T268456)
Fixed a case where no error message was shown when trying to save a Lemma with an invalid language code (phab:T265783)
Talked to a few more people about checking Wikidata's data against other databases to find potential errors
Continuing the Release Strategy project for Wikibase, with the following progress:
Created a “release pipeline” for Wikibase extension (phab:T267627)
Created MediaWiki docker images based off release branches (phab:T270133)
Defined format and contents of Wikibase suite components not maintained by Wikimedia Germany (phab:T271194)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Bracket matching will be added to the CodeMirror syntax highlighter on the first wikis. The first wikis are German and Catalan Wikipedia and maybe other Wikimedia wikis. This will happen on 27 January. [12]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (calendar).
PNAS – Official journal of the National Academy of Sciences
EBSCO – New Arabic and Spanish language databases added
We have a wide array of other collections available, and a significant number now no longer require individual applications to access! Read more in our blog post.
Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects!
Continuing development on the first version of the Query Builder. It's starting to be able to do the first really meaningful queries now. Latest addition was the ability to negate conditions. Up next is the ability to connect conditions with OR instead of only AND as well as querying for quantities and ranges. You can follow along on the test system.
Exploring possible solutions for how to compare Wikidata's data against other databases to find and highlight mismatches automatically.
Added lexicographical data codes for a few languages: rkt, ctg (phab:T271589), and az-cyrl (phab:T265906)
Finished working on the issue of TypeError on a diff of a Wikidata talk page phab:T271402
Updated Wikidata unit conversion configuration (phab:T267644)
Fixed two last places where links in the the Query Service UI were not using Special:MyLanguage yet to redirect to the documentation page in the user's language (phab:T267656)
Pushing JSON dumps for Lexemes over the finish line (phab:T264883)
Working on showing an error when trying to save lemmas with invalid language codes (phab:T265783)
Wikibase Release Strategy
Investigated the release of Wikibase suite components not maintained by Wikimedia (phab:T271193)
Continued process of adding additional components to the Wikibase release, including OAuth (phab:T272580)
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
IPv6 addresses were written in lowercase letters in diffs. This caused dead links since Special:Contributions only accepted uppercase letters for the IPs. This has been fixed. [13]
Changes later this week
You can soon use Wikidata to link to pages on the multilingual Wikisource. [14]
Often editors use a "non-breaking space" to make a gap between two items when reading but still show them together. This can be used to avoid a line break. You will now be able to add new ones via the special character tool in the 2010, 2017, and visual editors. The character will be shown in the visual editor as a space with a grey background. [15][16]
Wikis use abuse filters to stop bad edits being made. Filter maintainers can now use syntax like 1.2.3.4 - 1.2.3.55 as well as the 1.2.3.4/27 syntax for IP ranges. [17]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).
Future changes
Minerva is the skin Wikimedia wikis use for mobile traffic. When a page is protected and you can't edit it you can normally read the source wikicode. This doesn't work on Minerva on mobile devices. This is being fixed. Some text might overlap. This is because your community needs to update MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext to work on mobile. You can read more. [18][19]
Cloud VPS and Toolforge will change the IP address they use to contact the wikis. The new IP address will be 185.15.56.1. This will happen on February 8. You can read more.
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 Wikipedia app for Android now has watchlists and talk pages in the app. [20]
Changes later this week
You can see edits to chosen pages on Special:Watchlist. You can add pages to your watchlist on every wiki you like. The GlobalWatchlist extension will come to Meta on 11 February. There you can see entries on watched pages on different wikis on the same page. The new watchlist will be found on Special:GlobalWatchlist on Meta. You can choose which wikis to watch and other preferences on Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings on Meta. You can watch up to five wikis. [21]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (calendar).
Future changes
When admins protect pages the form will use the OOUI look. Special:Import will also get the new look. This will make them easier to use on mobile phones. [22][23]
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [24]
Last week Tech News reported that the IP address Cloud VPS and Toolforge use to contact the wikis will change on 8 February. This is delayed. It will happen later instead. [25]
Video: Wikidata as a PID community. By Simon Cobb - YouTube
Tool of the week
Item documentation has two new features. First, it now includes two predefined SPARQL queries. The first one give the number of statements about the item by property and the second the list of statement about the properties. Second, for items of class award, it includes predefined SPARQL queries from TP award. See Q1624297 for an example.
Ranker lets you edit the ranks of several statements at once.
Made it possible to connect query conditions with OR (instead of only AND) in the Query Builder (phab:T272694)
Making it possible to query only for statements with or without a reference in the Query Builder (phab:T272699)
Continuing to work on adding a rate limit for creating Item IDs to prevent people from allocating a large number of unassigned Item IDs that are then lost (phab:T272032)
Working on the problem of Lexeme merging failing if the source Lexeme has links to its own Senses (phab:T273830)
Working on showing an error when trying to save a Lemma with invalid language code on a Lexeme (phab:T265783)
Fixing an issue in the Property selector fallback where it is not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
Making it possible to add Interwiki links to/from Multilingual Wikisource (phab:T138332)
Video: Wikidata editing #31 Free Software Day - YouTube, Facebook
Video: Knowledge Graphs for AI: Wikidata and beyond - YouTube
Tool of the week
UseAsRef script allows you to add references to statements using one external ID as source (see User:Bargioni/UseAsRef and this YouTube video for more information)
Public Domain Tool, developed by the Flemish Institute for Archives automates the process of determining whether their collection items could be in the public domain.
Sizes of country items (like "Portugal" (Q45)) were recently reduced by 30% to 50% by moving a few economics properties to "economy of"-items (sample: "economy of Portugal" (Q1649355)). The item "economy of Portugal" is currently larger than "Portugal". This can simplify uses of country items that previously timed-out. Infoboxes can still access the properties with the link through "economy of topic" (P8744).
Later this week, the development team will enable a rate limit for assigning new item IDs. Bots and users who successfully create items should notice no change, since the rate limit is equal to the existing limit on all edits. However, bots that often fail to create items may start to see different error messages than usual. This will hopefully reduce the problem of skipped item IDs.
Work on the Simple Query Builder continues. We finished connecting query conditions via OR (phab:T272694). Next we will work on adding the UI for sharing the visual query via a link (phab:T272887)
Improved the deployment process for the Query Service UI to make it easier to deploy
Fixed language code "dag" for Dagbani not working for Lemmas for Lexemes (phab:T272242)
Fixing the bug where the Property selector is not falling back from language variant to major language for Property labels (phab:T272712)
Adding a rate limit for creating Item IDs to avoid skipping so many due to misbehaving bots (phab:T272032)
Fixed the case where no error was shown when trying to save a lemma with an invalid language code (phab:T265783)
Fixed a but where merging two Lexemes fails if the source Lexeme has links to its own Senses (phab:T273830)
Increasing the rate of edits that trigger a check by the constraint checker to 50%. This will increase the number of constraints violations that you can query in the Query Service. (phab:T204031)
Making it possible to add interwiki links to/from Multilingual Wikisource (phab:T138332)
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 were problems with recent versions of MediaWiki. Because the updates caused problems the developers rolled back to an earlier version. Some updates and new functions will come later than planned. [27][28]
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [29]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (calendar).
Past: Online Talk Show on Fri, Feb 19, 2021, by Wikimedia Indonesia and Fariz Darari - Take a peek into the data warehouse of Wikimedia projects (= Wikidata): Youtube link
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Adding bibliographic data to Wikidata with Jason Evans, Wikimedian in residence at the Wales National Library, Tuesday, February 23rd.[30]
Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #33 - YouTube, Facebook, February 27
Past: Online Talk Show on Fri, Feb 19, 2021, by Wikimedia Indonesia and Fariz Darari - Take a peek into the data warehouse of Wikimedia projects (= Wikidata): Youtube link
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Adding bibliographic data to Wikidata with Jason Evans, Wikimedian in residence at the Wales National Library, Tuesday, February 23rd.[31]
Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #33 - YouTube, Facebook, February 27
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 visual editor will now use MediaSearch to find images. You can search for images on Commons in the visual editor when you are looking for illustrations. This is to help editors find better images. [32]
Editing a timeline might have removed all text from it. This was because of a bug and has been fixed. You might need to edit the timeline again for it to show properly. [34]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 February. It will be on all wikis from 25 February (calendar).
Future changes
There is a user group for developers and users interested in working on Wikimedia wikis with the Rust programming language. You can join or tell others who want to make your wiki better in the future.
Upcoming: Wikidata-based Data Sprint hosted by the University of New Brunswick. One Wikidata data set will be provided on 11th March 2021 and various teams will have 2 hours to run a set of SPARQL queries against the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) and showcase their results.
Video: How to create new Wikidata item (in Dutch) - YouTube
Video: Merging Wikidata items (in Dutch) - YouTube
Tool of the week
EditSum, a new user script which allows to attach custom summary text to any label/statement/sitelink/etc. modification.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
User:Nikki/LexemeInterwikiLinks.js, is a userscript that adds Wiktionary interwiki links in the sidebar on Lexeme pages. (It links to pages corresponding to the first lemma and puts the lexeme language's Wiktionary first, followed by languages in the user's Babel box).
Shared Citations, a proposal arising from the WikiCite project, for a central reference management database supporting all Wikimedia projects, with significant relationship to Wikidata. Seeking feedback.
Modèle:Indice de diversité de genre (Template:Gender diversity index) is a new template in the French Wikipedia which use P21 (gender property) to count the number of people by gender mentioned in an article. It helps to find articles which "forget" to cite women.
Lexeme JSON dumps are now available as a collection of individual lexeme data in the regular JSON format, separate from the regular Wikidata dumps containing Items and Properties. phab:T264883
Working on first version of small tool that lets you get the average ORES quality score for a list of Items and find the lowest-quality Items in the batch so it's easier to improve them.
Taking a closer look at what larger improvements we want to make to Lexemes later this year.
Thinking through different ways how we can technically get mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases so we can later expose them.
Thinking through what the first version of the REST API should contain and what should come later.
Fixed an issue with whitespaces when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
Made sure all languages show up in the language selector for monolingual text Properties at least with their language code because them not showing up was very confusing (phab:T124758)
Fixed an issue with generating correct links for external IDs with + (phab:T271126)
Fixing an issue with Property selector not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
Due to the planned delay of the release of MediaWiki 1.36, the Wikibase team has been working on preparing a Wikibase update that includes new functionality (such as the “Federated Properties” feature) based on v1.35. To that end, we started backporting certain features and fixes into the Wikibase 1.35 release. Follow our progress here.
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
Wikis using the Growth team tools can now show the name of a newcomer's mentor anywhere through a magic word. This can be used for welcome messages or userboxes.
A new version of the VideoCutTool is now available. It enables cropping, trimming, audio disabling, and rotating video content. It is being created as part of the developer outreach programs.
Problems
There was a problem with the job queue. This meant some functions did not save changes and mass messages were delayed. This did not affect wiki edits. [35]
Some editors may not be logged in to their accounts automatically in the latest versions of Firefox and Safari. [36]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 March. It will be on all wikis from 4 March (calendar).
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: OCLC Research’s CONTENTdm Wikibase data model for pilot project to improve collection discoverability, Tuesday, March 9th.[37]
Upcoming: SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, March 9 at 18:00 CET
Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #35 - YouTube, Facebook, March 13
"Giving knowledge back to Wikipedia: Towards a Systematic Approach to Sync Factual Data across Wikipedia, Wikidata and External Data Sources" (by DBPedia)
Fixed an issue where the Property selector is not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
Working on support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via wbeditentity (phab:T199896)
Continuing to work on the Query Builder and making it possible to query for quantities and dates with it.
Putting finishing touches on a small tool that lets you get the average ORES quality score for a list of Items as well as the individual scores for each of the Items
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
Section translation now works on Bengali Wikipedia. It helps mobile editors translate sections of articles. It will come to more wikis later. The first focus is active wikis with a smaller number of articles. You can test it and leave feedback.
When someone links to a Wikipedia article on Twitter this will now show a preview of the article. [39]
Problems
Many graphs have JavaScript errors. Graph editors can check their graphs in their browser's developer console after editing. [40]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 March. It will be on all wikis from 11 March (calendar).
The New Discussion tool will soon be a new discussion tools beta feature for on most Wikipedias. The goal is to make it easier to start new discussions. [41]
Future changes
There will be a number of changes to make it easier to work with templates. Some will come to the first wikis in March. Other changes will come to the first wikis in June. This is both for those who use templates and those who create or maintain them. You can read more.
Reference Previews will become a default feature on some wikis on 17 March. They will share a setting with Page Previews. If you prefer the Reference Tooltips or Navigation-Popups gadget you can keep using them. If so Reference Previews won't be shown. [42][43]
New JavaScript-based functions will not work in Internet Explorer 11. This is because Internet Explorer is an old browser that doesn't work with how JavaScript is written today. Everything that works in Internet Explorer 11 today will continue working in Internet Explorer for now. You can read more.
Plant Humanities Lab is a website you can use to explore the cultural histories of plants and their influence on human societies.
DX Lab Art Index is an interactive database of over 18,000 nineteenth century Australian Artworks by over 2000 artists with links to Wikidata & compiled by volunteers over 10 years.
The new WDQS Streaming Updater is live as of March 15, 2021 on a pre-production test server for feedback. Available at https://query-preview.wikidata.org/. Release details here.
Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year - Call for Nominations! The research must be on, about, using data from, and/or of importance to Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons or other Wikimedia projects. Deadline to submit your nomination is no later than 2021-03-22.
Continued working on the Query Builder and focused on querying for quantity values (phab:T268942), handling special cases around sub classes for taxons and locations (phab:T274634) adding tooltips (phab:T275542) and sharing a visual query (phab:T272887)
Making changes to how Cognate handles redirects on Wiktionary to make more pages accessible through interwiki links (phab:T165061)
Creating a dashboard to break down the number of editors by namespace (phab:T275999)
Finishing support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via wbeditentity API module (phab:T199896)
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 Wikipedia app for KaiOS phones. They don't have a touch screen so readers navigate with the phone keys. There is now a simulator so you can see what it looks like.
You will be able to read but not edit twelve wikis for a short period of time on 23 มีนาคม at 06:00 (UTC). This can also affect password changes, logging in to new wikis, global renames and changing or confirming emails. This could take 30 minutes but will probably be much faster.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 March. It will be on all wikis from 25 March (calendar).
Flagged revisions will no longer have multiple tags like "tone" or "depth". It will also only have one tier. This was changed because very few wikis used these features and they make the tool difficult to maintain. [49][50]
Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015 this was moved from wg* to mw.config. wg* will soon no longer work. [51]
March 22: Bug triage hour about Lexemes with Lydia Pintscher
March 23: SPARQL querying for Lexemes with Vigneron
March 24: Open discussion in French about Lexemes
March 25: Documentation Q&A with Dan Shick
March 27: Lingua Libre, how you can record words in your language and use them on Wikidata, with Poslovitch
Upcoming: The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 25 March 2021(Add to calendar). This month we will have a team member from Enslaved.org talk to us briefly about how they are using Linked Open Data (LOD) with the help of Wikibase (due of technical challenges they couldn't join us last time). Everyone is welcome to attend the call.
Upcoming: The Arctic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference is taking place remotely on June 24-25, and focusing on indigenous and underrepresented languages on the Wikimedia projects. The call for submissions is now open until April 15th, if you want to present something related to Wikidata and languages, feel free to apply.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Members of the EthicsLD Group will be leading a discussion on ethics in linked data, Tuesday, March 23rd.[52]
Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #37 - YouTube, Facebook, March 27
erinnerungshort.de/kap/ is a data and photo research project and map visualization tool with federated license query from Structured Commons, by Raymond and Elya.
~7500 person items have been enriched with the new property GEPRIS person ID (P4872), imported from a high quality dataset from the Q707283.
Work on the first version of the Query Builder is nearing its end. Doing remaining work on querying for quantities, dates and ranges as well as polishing and bug fixing.
Made Cognate work correctly for redirects on Wiktionary (phab:T165061)
Fixed an issue where the termbox on Item pages used the wrong list of languages on the mobile version (phab:T275611)
Cleaned up deleted Items from the term store database table (phab:T263730)
Got feedback on the initial click-dummies for checking Wikidata's data against other databases to find mismatches
The dev team spent the last week prototyping a few things to learn if some things would be feasible/a good idea. Among other things we tried building a small tool to connect Senses to Items, looked into the different types of ontology issues that can be found on Wikidata and checked what using a document store for data storage would look like.
Note: from March 29th until April 12th, Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) is not available to answer messages. If you have any requests for the development team, please ask on Contact the development team. For any emergency, you can contact Lea Lacroix (WMDE). Because of Easter holidays in Germany, the upcoming newsletter will be issued one day later, on April 6th.
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 very old web browsersdon’t work well with the Wikimedia wikis. Some old code for browsers that used to be supported is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. [53]
IRC recent changes feeds have been moved to a new server. Make sure all tools automatically reconnect to irc.wikimedia.org and not to the name of any specific server. Users should also consider switching to the more modern EventStreams. [54]
Problems
When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split. It might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem. [55]
Some translatable pages on Meta could not be edited. This was because of a bug in the translation tool. The new MediaWiki version was delayed because of problems like this. [56][57]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 March. It will be on all wikis from 1 April (calendar).
The citoidAPI will use for example 2010-12-XX instead of 2010-12 for dates with a month but no days. This is because 2010-12 could be confused with 2010-2012 instead of December 2010. This is called level 1 instead of level 0 in the Extended Date/Time Format.[59]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 April. It will be on all wikis from 8 April (calendar).
Future changes
PAWS can now connect to the new Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 28 April. There is a new way to connect to the databases. Until 28 April both ways to connect to the databases will work. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech.
April 7: Data import for Lexemes: how to add a lot of content in your language
April 8: Documentation Q&A
April 8: Leveraging text corpora for curating lexicographical data
April 10: Lingua Libre, how you can record words in your language and use them on Wikidata
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Cliff Landis (Digital Initiatives Librarian, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library) on “GaNCH: Using Wikidata for Georgia's Natural, Cultural, and Historic Organizations' Disaster Response.” April 6th.[60]
Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #39 - YouTube, Facebook, April 10
Wikidata Lexeme Forms now supports additional Breton templates (Source)
User:Nikki/LexemeAddIPA.js userscript adds a link in the header for forms on lexeme pages which opens a dialog for adding IPA statements to forms that do not have any yet.
LexSAOB adds Svenska Akademiens ordbok (SAOB) identifiers to Swedish lexemes in Wikidata.
We continued to make improvements to the Query builder. We worked on adding a footer to the Query Builder (phab:T268643) and showing all relevant columns in the query result (phab:T277646) as well as querying for dates (phab:T272697)
Fixed a bug where Item pages scrolls back to "In more languages" block after every change of DOM (phab:T277999, being deployed to Wikidata later this week)
Continued working on a new grafana graph to track editor numbers split by namespace (phab:T275999)
Finished a small tool to get the ORES quality score for a list of Items. Waiting for deployment to toolforge for broader use now.
Defined remaining work for redirect sitelink exceptions (phab:T278962)
Royal Trees, powered by Wikidata is an interactive website that shows royal family trees, for all royal families worldwide. See an example of Philip Duke of Edinburgh.
Started research and collecting material for the work on improvements to the Lexeme UI and prepared the first interviews
Finishing up the work on the first version of the Query Builder. We still need to get the security review before we can deploy it properly. Current state can be tested on the test system.
Finalized the dashboard to see the number of (active/very active) editors split by namespace. See the graphs at the bottom of this dashboard.
Continued working on the remaining pieces needed to fully support editing statements on Senses of a Lexeme (phab:T199896)
Royal Trees, powered by Wikidata is an interactive website that shows royal family trees, for all royal families worldwide. See an example of Philip Duke of Edinburgh.
Started research and collecting material for the work on improvements to the Lexeme UI and prepared the first interviews
Finishing up the work on the first version of the Query Builder. We still need to get the security review before we can deploy it properly. Current state can be tested on the test system.
Finalized the dashboard to see the number of (active/very active) editors split by namespace. See the graphs at the bottom of this dashboard.
Continued working on the remaining pieces needed to fully support editing statements on Senses of a Lexeme (phab:T199896)
Upcoming: SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, April 20 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Alexandra Wong on experiences and workflows for linking archival collections to Wikidata. There will also be a recap of insights from the recent Canadian archivists’ panel on Wikidata by the University and College Archives Special Interest Section (UCASIS) of the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA). Agenda, April 20
Upcoming: Wikipedia Weekley Network - Biodiversity edition: iNaturalist place ID YouTube, Facebook, April 23
Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #41 - YouTube, Facebook, April 24
Upcoming: 25 April - WikidataDays Sessions II, an online editing session dedicated to democracy and political parties, coinciding with the celebration of Freedom Day.
Structured Data on Commons explained, with Andrew Lih, John Cummings and Pharos (Youtube)
Discovering history's notable people (audio). Using Wikidata and Wikipedia as the backbone, this project "construct[s] a new dataset of more than seven million notable individuals across recorded human history".
User:So9q/Gadget-CreateNewEntity.js is a userscript to add a "create new item" link in the dropdown menu for when you want to * add an item to a property, but the item does not exist. (recently modified to support lexemes).
Wikidata Lexeme Forms no longer automatically redirects you to login, so you can now use edit mode to view the forms of a lexeme in the “right” order. Here is an example.
Finished work on the support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via the API (phab:T199896)
Got all feature work done on the first version of the Query Builder. It is now awaiting security review.
Statements linking to deleted Lexemes now indicate this similar to statements linking to deleted Items (phab:T277089)
Fixing a bug with misaligned grammatical features after an OOUI update (phab:T278522)
Finished work on the small tools to get the number of constraints violations and ORES scores for a list of Items. Will publish soon.
Did interviews with a few people about how they work around lexicographical data
Selected focus languages for continued work on lexicographical data and Abstract Wikipedia together with Abstract Wikipedia team. The selected ones are Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam and Dagbani. You can read more about it in the Abstract Wikipedia newsletter.
Gave input to WMF search platform team for a survey draft around the query service in order to better understand how to move forward with improvements
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
Email to the Wikimedia wikis are handled by groups of Wikimedia editors. These volunteer response teams now use Znuny instead of OTRS. The functions and interface remain the same. The volunteer administrators will give more details about the next steps soon. [61][62]
If you use syntax highlighting, you can see line numbers in the 2010 and 2017 wikitext editors when editing templates. This is to make it easier to see line breaks or talk about specific lines. Line numbers will soon come to all namespaces. [63][64][65]
Because of a technical change there could be problems with gadgets and scripts that have an edit summary area that looks similar to this one. If they look strange they should use mw.loader.using('mediawiki.action.edit.styles') to go back to how they looked before. [66]
The latest version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis last week. There was no Tech News issue last week.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in two weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.
Working with Zotero on WiKidata (in Italian) - YouTube
Tool of the week
User:So9q/AddNewLexemeMenu.js is a userscript that adds a section to the sidebar with links for creating new lexemes.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
WMDE built two tools to help editors get a better understanding of the quality of Wikidata's data in a specific area of interest. Try them out and let us know what you think.
Collaborative translation of Cita is now available on translatewiki.net. Cita is a Wikidata addon that adds citations metadata support to Zotero, using cites work (P2860) information from Wikidata, and enabling users to easily contribute missing data. Cita is currently under development with a WikiCite grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, and presentation workshops will be held on May 27th (Spanish) and May 31st (English). More info and pre-registration here.
RaiseWikibase is a tool for speeding up multilingual knowledge graph construction with Wikibase. Among other features, it can be utilized to create a mini Wikibase instance with Wikidata properties in a few minutes.
wbeditentity now supports editing statements on Senses (phab:T199896)
We added syntax highlighting for viewing Entity Schema pages. There is not syntax highlighting for editing of Entity Schemas yet. (phab:T238831)
Improved the way Lua deals with redirects (phab:T238831)
Worked on making it possible to add a title to the top of a query visualization via a comment in the SPARQL code (phab:T225883)
Discussed how to get persistent storage of constraint violations unstuck as this is a prerequisite to making it easier to analyze and query constraint violations (phab:T214362)
Discussed a high-level plan for how to move forward with checking Wikidata's data against 3rd-party databases
Finished work on version 1 of the Query Builder. Not it is awaiting security review before we can deploy it.
Take a list of cities in your country, add {{Item documentation}} in the talk page and have fun looking at people born in this place ordered by number of sitelinks. You may have some surprises!
Working with Zotero on WiKidata (in Italian) - YouTube
Tool of the week
User:So9q/AddNewLexemeMenu.js is a userscript that adds a section to the sidebar with links for creating new lexemes.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
WMDE built two tools to help editors get a better understanding of the quality of Wikidata's data in a specific area of interest. Try them out and let us know what you think.
Collaborative translation of Cita is now available on translatewiki.net. Cita is a Wikidata addon that adds citations metadata support to Zotero, using cites work (P2860) information from Wikidata, and enabling users to easily contribute missing data. Cita is currently under development with a WikiCite grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, and presentation workshops will be held on May 27th (Spanish) and May 31st (English). More info and pre-registration here.
RaiseWikibase is a tool for speeding up multilingual knowledge graph construction with Wikibase. Among other features, it can be utilized to create a mini Wikibase instance with Wikidata properties in a few minutes.
wbeditentity now supports editing statements on Senses (phab:T199896)
We added syntax highlighting for viewing Entity Schema pages. There is not syntax highlighting for editing of Entity Schemas yet. (phab:T238831)
Improved the way Lua deals with redirects (phab:T238831)
Worked on making it possible to add a title to the top of a query visualization via a comment in the SPARQL code (phab:T225883)
Discussed how to get persistent storage of constraint violations unstuck as this is a prerequisite to making it easier to analyze and query constraint violations (phab:T214362)
Discussed a high-level plan for how to move forward with checking Wikidata's data against 3rd-party databases
Finished work on version 1 of the Query Builder. Not it is awaiting security review before we can deploy it.
Take a list of cities in your country, add {{Item documentation}} in the talk page and have fun looking at people born in this place ordered by number of sitelinks. You may have some surprises!
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
Templates have parameters that can have specific values. It is possible to suggest values for editors with TemplateData. You can soon see them as a drop-down list in the visual editor. This is to help template users find the right values faster. [67][68][69]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 April. It will be on all wikis from 29 April (calendar).
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
Twinkle is a gadget on English Wikipedia. It can help with maintenance and patrolling. It can now be used on other wikis. You can get Twinkle on your wiki using the twinkle-starter GitHub repository.
Some things will not work for about a minute on 5 May. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This will affect the content translation tool and notifications among other things. This is because of an upgrade to avoid crashes. [71]
Changes later this week
Reference Previews will become a default feature on a number of wikis on 5 May. This is later than planned because of some changes. You can use it without using Page Previews if you want to. The earlier plan was to have the preference to use both or none. [72][73]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 May. It will be on all wikis from 6 May (calendar).
Future changes
The CSS classes .error, .warning and .success do not work for mobile readers if they have not been specifically defined on your wiki. From June they will not work for desktop readers. This can affect gadgets and templates. The classes can be defined in MediaWiki:Common.css or template styles instead. [74]
Wikinegata is a platform for browsing interesting negations about Wikidata entities. (Overview video)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Template:Item classification and Template:Item documentation now include more generic queries for classes: it include the number of subclasses, the number of instances, the number of instances by class, the list of instances and the list of most frequent properties for items of this class.
TP organization now includes generic queries for items of class school.
Entity Schemas now have syntax highlighting for viewing (phab:T238831, example)
Reviewing a patch that will make it possible to use templates on d:MediaWiki:Wikibase-SortedProperties. This will for example make it possible to show labels automatically for each Property ID. Thanks, Luca! (phab:T280787)
Evaluated the interviews and other research we did around improvements for lexicographical data
Continuing to work on evaluating and addressing scaling issues of the Query Service
Provided input to a research team working on a potential new and improved Property Suggester
Wikibase: we are completing the final tasks necessary to prepare the Wikibase Spring release and expect to publish new versions of the tarball and Docker images on or before May 15, 2021
Wikinegata is a platform for browsing interesting negations about Wikidata entities. (Overview video)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Template:Item classification and Template:Item documentation now include more generic queries for classes: it include the number of subclasses, the number of instances, the number of instances by class, the list of instances and the list of most frequent properties for items of this class.
TP organization now includes generic queries for items of class school.
Entity Schemas now have syntax highlighting for viewing (phab:T238831, example)
Reviewing a patch that will make it possible to use templates on d:MediaWiki:Wikibase-SortedProperties. This will for example make it possible to show labels automatically for each Property ID. Thanks, Luca! (phab:T280787)
Evaluated the interviews and other research we did around improvements for lexicographical data
Continuing to work on evaluating and addressing scaling issues of the Query Service
Provided input to a research team working on a potential new and improved Property Suggester
Wikibase: we are completing the final tasks necessary to prepare the Wikibase Spring release and expect to publish new versions of the tarball and Docker images on or before May 15, 2021
User:Nikki/Ranker.js adds a link to the Ranker tool next to every property on an entity page.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikibase spring release is now available! This new release is compatible with MediaWiki 1.35 and it contains new features: Federated Properties, WikibaseManifest & Wikibase Pingback.
May 2021 Query Builder updates: We finished usability testing of new features and incorporated feedback from users including people with visual impairments and RTL languages. It is now possible to query for dates and we're also looking into making the Query Builder discoverable from the Wikidata Query Service.
Wikimedia Foundation 2021 Board Elections has been announced. Please sign-up as an Election Volunteer if you'd like to support the elections. Election Volunteers serve as a bridge between the Elections Committee, the facilitation team and the movement.
Omaha-Ponca language is now available for monolingual text properties. (phab:T265296)
Added a meaningful error message when trying to use Special:EntityData with a Lexeme subentity like L123-F1 in cases where the Lexeme L123 was redirected to another Lexeme (phab:T257494)
Changed the “type” and “value type” constraints to ignore deprecated values (phab:T170401)
Working on rendering empty claims in JSON as `claims: {}` instead of `claims: []` (phab:T241422)
Investigating some issues with page_props missing on Commons wiki after adding sitelinks to Commons categories (phab:T280627)
Removed Google Knowledge Graph Id (P2671) and Wolfram Language entity code (P4839) from the Property Suggestions as they are usually not useful suggestions (phab:T280779)
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 11 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 May. It will be on all wikis from 13 May (calendar).
Future changes
You can see what participants plan to work on at the online Wikimedia hackathon 22–23 May.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
An earlier issue of Tech News said that the citoidAPI would handle dates with a month but no days in a new way. This has been reverted for now. There needs to be more discussion of how it affects different wikis first. [80]
Changes later this week
MediaWiki:Pageimages-blacklist will be renamed MediaWiki:Pageimages-denylist. The list can be copied to the new name. It will happen on 19 May for some wikis and 20 May for some wikis. Most wikis don't use it. It lists images that should never be used as thumbnails for articles. [81]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 May. It will be on all wikis from 20 May (calendar).
Data literacy snacks - Talk about "Wikibase knowledge graphs for data management & data science" on 23rd of June. For registration, send e-mail to infoberd-bw.de
Upcoming
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, May 18 at 18:00 CEST
May 21-22, 2021 [82] Boston Rock City: Explore Wikidata and Learn About Local Music: Boston Public Library is partnering with Harvard Library for a guided exploration of Wikidata and local music history. Join us for two days of music and Wikidata editing; no prior experience or punk cred necessary! This public event is free to all and will take place via Zoom; please register in advance. The subject of this project is the Arthur Freedman Collection, and audiovisual archive that captures over four decades of Boston rock music performances. We’ll provide: instructions, tools, data sources, visualizations, optional Discord chat, and a soundtrack. If you have questions, please contact Harvard Library staff member Peter Laurence at laurenc@fas.harvard.edu.
Template:Annotate QID (currently on en. & de.Wikisource) allows names and other terms in texts to be semantically annotated with the equivalent QIDs. sv.Wikisource has a similar template.
Wikimedia Foundation 2021 Board Elections has been announced. Please sign-up as an Election Volunteer if you'd like to support the elections. Election Volunteers serve as a bridge between the Elections Committee, the facilitation team and the movement.
Fixed the entity usage dashboards that no longer showed data due to technical issues. It tracks how much data from Wikidata is used on the other Wikimedia projects. (phab:T279762)
Configured the Property Suggester to not suggest Google Knowledge Graph ID (P2671) and Wolfram Language entity code (P4839) (phab:T280779)
Investigated remaining issue with updating the page_props table on the client wikis, which is confusing some bots making use of that table (phab:T280627)
Fixed an issue in the Query Builder where it got confused when adding several conditions with the same Property (phab:T279945)
Working on tracking the number of edits per namespace over time (phab:T281356)
Working on fixing a bug where old revisions of Items have edit buttons but should not (phab:T281587)
Fixing an issue where value suggestions are not showing all values that are defined in the property constraint (phab:T280650)
#1Lib1Ref Campaign in Italy, as part of the IFLA Wikidata Working Group campaign (May 15 - June 5); more than 10k references have already been added (see the dashboard for more details)
Wikidata-related projects that have been developed/improved during the Wikimedia Hackathon 2021:
User:Lucas_Werkmeister/Ranker - Finished and announced the batch modes for the Ranker tool, allowing users to edit the ranks of statements in Wikidata or Structured Data on Commons in bulk
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 Wikimedia movement has been using IRC on a network called Freenode. There have been changes around who is in control of the network. The Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts have decided to move to the new Libera Chat network instead. This is not a formal decision for the movement to move all channels but most Wikimedia IRC channels will probably leave Freenode. There is a migration guide and ongoing Wikimedia discussions about this.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 May. It will be on all wikis from 27 May (calendar).
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, June 1 at 18:00 CEST
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Affinity Group Co-facilitators will recap the last year, introduce plans for the coming year, and receive suggestions from the community for future sessions.; [83], June 1st.
Italian Wikiversity used Lua on their Recent Changes SpecialPage via overwriting a MediaWiki message. Our code used to not expect that, now it does. (phab:T283240)
Updating the panel that tracks Wikidata edits over time in different namespaces to include all namespaces (phab:T281356)
Working on adding a new constraints type for Lexemes (phab:T200689)
Working on designs for improving Special:NewLexeme
Working on designs for the system to find mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases
Fixing some malformed globe-coordinate precisions in the database (phab:T283576)
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 an issue on the Vector skin with the text size of categories and notices under the page title. It was fixed last Monday. [84]
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 8 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 June. It will be on all wikis from 10 June (calendar).
Future changes
The Wikimedia movement uses Phabricator for technical tasks. This is where we collect technical suggestions, bugs and what developers are working on. The company behind Phabricator will stop working on it. This will not change anything for the Wikimedia movement now. It could lead to changes in the future. [85][86][87]
Searching on Wikipedia will find more results in some languages. This is mainly true for when those who search do not use the correct diacritics because they are not seen as necessary in that language. For example searching for Bedusz doesn't find Będusz on German Wikipedia. The character ę isn't used in German so many would write e instead. This will work better in the future in some languages. [88]
The CSRF token parameters in the action API were changed in 2014. The old parameters from before 2014 will stop working soon. This can affect bots, gadgets and user scripts that still use the old parameters. [89][90]
SPARQL Jupyter notebooks in PAWS: PAWS is a wikitech services which allows to run Jupyter notebooks. There is a SPARQL kernel which makes it possible to run SPARQL queries. See this example notebook.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata Community/Diversity 2021 Survey has been published. The results are meant to serve as a baseline to see how the community might (not) change in the future.
WikidataCon 2021: A sustainable future for Wikidata. Information about "the conference theme, its three-day program structure and a special project on diversity taking place before the conference itself".
The call for candidates for 2021 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections has begun on June 9. The last date to apply is June 29, 2021.
Working on no longer using the Query Service to evaluate Constraints Checks regular expressions (this should make our checks faster and allow for further improvements) (phab:T176312)
Changing the rate limits for assigning Item IDs further, which should result in even fewer Q-IDs being skipped in the future (phab:T284538)
Finalizing the concepts for a tool to help work on mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases/websites/...
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
Logged-in users on the mobile web can choose to use the advanced mobile mode. They now see categories in a similar way as users on desktop do. This means that some gadgets that have just been for desktop users could work for users of the mobile site too. If your wiki has such gadgets you could decide to turn them on for the mobile site too. Some gadgets probably need to be fixed to look good on mobile. [91]
German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC. [93]
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 28 June. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [94][95]
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 24th June 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). This month we'll have a team member from Wikibase Stakeholders Group talk briefly about their work, and then we'll welcome people to share out about their work around Wikibase. We'll leave some space in the agenda to discuss meta issues related to the Wikibase Community Usergroup.
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in English by Vigneron, June 22 at 18:00 CEST
The call for candidates for 2021 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections has begun on June 9. The last date to apply is June 29, 2021.
Since the beginning of the month, phabricator tickets about language codes (and names of languages) were reviewed and triaged to better reflect their content and current status. Some work was done to better identify the steps for such changes, highlight and address bottlenecks and system issues. Patches for a few codes were contributed and are being released. Phabricator "Language codes" workboard provides an overview, phab:T284856 attempts to identify maintenance steps and phab:T284276 determine turn-around times. phab:T284808 should finally close a gap in termbox language handeling. A way to better address some or all aspects of changes of language codes applicable to Wikipedia editions still needs to be found. Don't hesitate to request the addition or update of language names (e.g. the name of Dutch in Danish) or missing language codes, notably for monolingual strings (see Help:Monolingual text languages).
Fixed a bug that broke the "Add sitelink" popup on Commons (phab:T284854)
Working on a fix for suggesters popping up unexpectedly when tabbing quickly (phab:284219)
Reviewing code for a new Property Suggester by a student (phab:T284820)
Mismatch Finder: Working on a tool to work through mismatching data between Wikidata and external databases. Your feedback is welcome on Wikidata talk:Mismatch Finder
Curious Facts: We developed a tool to help editors check random curious facts on Wikidata. Try it and give us your feedback on Wikidata talk:Curious Facts
Kicked off our continued work on Wikidata-Wikibase federation (Federation v2) with preparatory work, including:
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 otrs-member group name is now vrt-permissions. This could affect abuse filters. [96]
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC. [97]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 June. It will be on all wikis from 24 June (calendar).
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, June 28 at 18:00 CEST
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Robert Chavez (Northeastern University) will provide an introduction to SPARQL and using the Wikidata Query Service.; [98], June 29th.
Wikidata Community/Diversity 2021 Survey has been published. The results are meant to serve as a baseline to see how the community might (not) change in the future. Feel free to give us your feedback on this discussion page.
A new version of the Open Art Browser allows discovering works of art in the new section "Types", which presents you more than 1500 expressions of art. Explore it!
Mismatch Finder: We started building the foundation of the place that will store the mismatches between Wikidata and other databases/catalogs/...
Continued work on migrating the checks of regular expressions for constraints from SPARQL to a better solution to take that load off of the SPARQL endpoint (phab:T176312)
Made it possible to show language links from multilingual Wikisource to the other language versions of Wikisource (phab:T275958)
Added a new constraint type to indicate that a certain Property should only be used on Lexemes with a specific language (phab:T200689)
Fixed a weird issue with suggesters popping back up when they shouldn't (phab:T284219)
Invalid data will not be handled better in RDF outputs (phab:T285131)
Working on lowering the rate limit at which a misbehaving bot can waste new Item IDs to further reduce the percentage of skipped Item IDs (phab:T284538)
Working on not suggesting real Item IDs in the API sandbox to avoid accidental edits by people who think it is not making real edits (phab:T219215)
Working on reducing the time it takes between entering a value in a new statement and being able to save the statement (phab:T281669)
Improved documentation of the usage tracking aspects in API help pages. Usage tracking is an internal mechanism to track which article on Wikipedia etc uses which data from an Item on Wikidata. (phab:T283040)
Language codes for monolingual strings "gsw-fr", "ykg", "wya", "osa-latn" were made available: Alsatian, Tundra Yukaghir, Wendat, Osage (phab:T262922, phab:T252198, phab:T283364, phab:T265297)
The English name for language code "crh" and the Swedish name for "fa" were corrected (phab:T240350, phab:T281702)
Lexeme language codes ha-arab, sux-latn, sux-xsux, gsg, tlh-piqd, tlh-latn, bfi, pwn, enm were added. That is Hausa in Arabic script, Sumerian in cuneiform and Latin-script, German Sign Language, Klingon in pIqaD and Latin script, British Sign Language, Paiwan and Middle English. (phab:T282512, phab:T279557)
It was determined that language codes can be activated for Wikidata while being blocked for use on Incubator (phab:T273705), this to avoid projects such as a "British English Wikipedia"
Language code "es-419" for Latin American Spanish has been available for labels and descriptions for quite some time (phab:T230786)
A possibly confusing Russian mis-translation of the name of the language code for "multiple languages" (mul) is being reviewed (phab:T245927)
"en-simple:" can be used instead of "simple:" to link to Simple Wikipedia. Query Services outputs "en-simple", not "simple" for sitelinks to Simple Wikipedia (phab:T283149).
There was some discussion about the creation of a language code "en-in" for monolingual strings, but "en-in" as interface language seems to be preferred (phab:T212313)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Wikisources have a new OCR tool. If you don't want to see the "extract text" button on Wikisource you can add .ext-wikisource-ExtractTextWidget { display: none; } to your common.css page. [100]
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit the Wikimedia wikis for a few minutes on 29 June. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [101][102]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 June. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (calendar).
Future changes
Threshold for stub link formatting, thumbnail size and auto-number headings can be set in preferences. They are expensive to maintain and few editors use them. The developers are planning to remove them. Removing them will make pages load faster. You can read more and give feedback.
A toolbar will be added to the Reply tool's wikitext source mode. This will make it easier to link to pages and to ping other users. [103][104]
User:Nikki/AnchorLinks.js is a userscript that adds a small link before property labels and statement values on entity pages to provide a clickable/copiable link to that section of the page.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
A job opening for a fullstack developer to work on integrating Wikidata with expert-curated knowledge on invasion biology
Mismatch Finder: We continued the work on building the basic store that in the future will hold mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases/websites/catalogs/... These mismatches will then be used in the Mismatch Finder website and other tools to easily review them.
Improved the namespace behavior of the CommonsLink constraint so that it now produces less false positives (phab:T237920)
Working on adding a magic word to allow pages to be excluded from Special:UnconnectedPages on Wikipedias and co (phab:T97577)
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 19 July.
Recent changes
AutoWikiBrowser is a tool to make repetitive tasks easier. It now uses JSON. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPageJSON and Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Config. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/Version has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/VersionJSON. The tool will eventually be configured on the wiki so that you don't have to wait until the new version to add templates or regular expression fixes. [105]
Problems
InternetArchiveBot helps saving online sources on some wikis. It adds them to Wayback Machine and links to them there. This is so they don't disappear if the page that was linked to is removed. It currently has a problem with linking to the wrong date when it moves pages from archive.is to web.archive.org. [106]
Changes later this week
The tool to find, add and remove templates will be updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It will come to the first wikis on 7 July. It will come to more wikis later this year. [107][108]
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Some Wikimedia wikis use Flagged Revisions or pending changes. It hides edits from new and unregistered accounts for readers until they have been patrolled. The auto review action in Flagged Revisions will no longer be logged. All old logs of auto-review will be removed. This is because it creates a lot of logs that are not very useful. [109]
LIBER 2021 - Panel Discussion: Why use Wikidata or not - YouTube
SPARQL Wikidata divers. Session of Tuesday, June 29 (in French) - YouTube
SPARQL Wikidata Wikisource. Tuesday, July 6 session (in French) - YouTube
Upcoming:
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday 28th July 2021 at 16:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. This month we will also be having a guest presentation about Toolhub by Srishti Sethi from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Carlo Bianchini (University of Pavia), Stefano Bargioni (Pontifical University Santa Croce (Rome)), and Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo (University of Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore) will discuss their recent project and article “Beyond VIAF: Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries”.; [110], July 13th.
(Q107425133), by Kartik Shenoy et al, published 1 July 2021, explores the use of three indicators - deleted statements that are not replaced; deprecated statements; and constraint violations - as a framework for evaluating data quality.
Wikidata Workshop by Juan Antonio Pastor at the University of Murcia (in Spanish) - YouTube
Tool of the week
Schafe vorm Fenster is a project to build up a calendar for rural villages in Vorpommern-Greifswald using Wikidata to get images and short descriptions for the villages. (See example)
OpenRefine has two Junior Developer job openings (paid contractor positions; part-time, fully remote) for building Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons functionality
Mismatch Finder (a tool to review mismatches between Wikidata and other databases): We continued initial development of the store part of the tool. We focused on the upload of new mismatches. (phab:project/view/5422)
Discussion on how do describe the types of mismatches reviewed in Mismatch Finder (phab:T285849)
We introduced a magic word that can be used to exclude a page from Special:UnconnectedPages on Wikipedia and co. This will make the special page more useful to find pages on Wikipedia and co that should be added to an Item on Wikidata as sitelinks. (phab:T97577).
We reduced the number of Wikidata edits that show up in the watchlist and recent changes of Wikipedia and co by not triggering entries for a number of Wikidata edits that do not influence the article (phab:T286193)
Property Suggester: We are reviewing patches by a student working on an improved Property Suggester.
Working on improving how deprecated statements are handled when checking “type” and “value type” constraints" (phab:T170401)
Working on fixing a bug where the entity suggestions are opened when a valid value is already selected (phab:T285102)
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 tool to find, add and remove templates was updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It was supposed to come to the first wikis on 7 July. It was delayed to 12 July instead. It will come to more wikis later this year. [111][112]
Special:UnconnectedPages lists pages that are not connected to Wikidata. This helps you find pages that can be connected to Wikidata items. Some pages should not be connected to Wikidata. You can use the magic word __EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__ on pages that should not be listed on the special page. [113]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 July. It will be on all wikis from 22 July (calendar).
Future changes
How media is structured in the parser's HTML output will soon change. This can affect bots, gadgets, user scripts and extensions. You can read more. You can test it on Testwiki or Testwiki 2.
The parameters for how you obtain tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can read more.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Carlo Bianchini (University of Pavia), Stefano Bargioni (Pontifical University Santa Croce (Rome)), and Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo (University of Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore) will discuss their recent project and article “Beyond VIAF: Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries”.; July 13th.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday 28th July 2021 at 16:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. This month we will also be having a guest presentation about Toolhub by Srishti Sethi from the Wikimedia Foundation.
The next Wikibase live session is at 16:00 UTC on Thursday 29th July 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). This month, we welcome Luca Mauri to give a presentation about installing Wikibase from scratch.
The next Wikibase live session is at 16:00 UTC on Thursday 29th July 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). This month, we welcome Luca Mauri to give a presentation about installing Wikibase from scratch.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Andra Waagmeester on work with Shape Expressions in Wikidata to describe the genomics of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; [114], July 27th.
COSCUP 2021 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 2020.07.31-08.01 Online website, Meta-wiki
Still mapping!"Our team has been working continuously on improving the number of Welsh place names that appear online since our inception in 2017 as partt of the Welsh Government’s Welsh Government #Cymraeg2050 project"..."we will also use Wikidata to store and share Welsh language information".
Added a tags parameter to the wbmergeitems API so Item merges can now also get an edit tag (T286778)
Mismatch Finder: Continued working on the store part. This week we focused on uploading a file with potential mismatches and the UI for getting a list of all uploaded mismatch files.
Addressing comments from the security review of the Query Builder so we can hopefully soon move it from the test system to its proper place under query.wikidata.org
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 new version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis the week before last week. This was not in Tech News because there was no newsletter that week.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 July. It will be on all wikis from 29 July (calendar).
Future changes
If you use the Monobook skin you can choose to switch off responsive design on mobile. This will now work for more skins. If ⧼monobook-responsive-label⧽ is unticked you need to also untick the new preferenceเปิดใช้งานโหมดตอบสนอง. Otherwise it will stop working. Interface admins can automate this process on your wiki. You can read more.
Advisory board call for members for the Web2Cit project: Web2Cit: Visual Editor for Citoid Web Translators project is moving! With Diegodlh we are inviting people to apply to be an Advisory Board member. Is this you? Is this someone you know? Check the Call for members and apply to be an Advisory Board member before August 6th!. If you are too busy this time around to apply, don't worry: we get it. You can also help us by spreading the word!
The moveClaim.js user script has been updated using code created by Melderick to support changing a property of a claim within an entity. Please switch to the updated version if you used the other one, and report any bugs.
New tool: Lexemes Party displays lexemes linked to a list of Wikidata items, so you can improve related lexicographical data in the languages you know. You can build your own lists and several examples are available. A weekly challenge is also proposed, theme of the week: Olympic Games.
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 your wiki uses markup like <div class="mw-content-ltr"> or <div class="mw-content-rtl"> without the required dir attribute, then these will no longer work in 2 weeks. There is a short-term fix that can be added to your local wiki's Common.css page, which is explained at T287701. From now on, all usages should include the full attributes, for example: <div class="mw-content-ltr" dir="ltr" lang="en"> or <div class="mw-content-rtl" dir="rtl" lang="he">. This also applies to some other HTML tags, such as span or code. You can find existing examples on your wiki that need to be updated, using the instructions at T287701.
Last week, all wikis had slow access or no access for 30 minutes. There was a problem with generating dynamic lists of articles on the Russian Wikinews, due to the bulk import of 200,000+ new articles over 3 days, which led to database problems. The problematic feature has been disabled on that wiki and developers are discussing if it can be fixed properly. [115][116]
Changes later this week
When adding links to a page using VisualEditor or the 2017 wikitext editor, disambiguation pages will now only appear at the bottom of search results. This is because users do not often want to link to disambiguation pages. [117]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 August. It will be on all wikis from 5 August (calendar).
Future changes
The team of the Wikipedia app for Android is working on communication in the app. The developers are working on how to talk to other editors and get notifications. You can read more. They are looking for users who want to test the plans. Any editor who has an Android phone and is willing to download the app can do this.
The Beta Feature for เครื่องมือช่วยเหลือการอภิปราย will be updated in the coming weeks. You will be able to subscribe to individual sections on a talk page at more wikis. You can test this now by adding ?dtenable=1 to the end of the talk page's URL (example).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Wikidata Edit-a-thons highlighting Boston Rock City Edit-a-thon, Wikidata Comics Edit-a-thon, and Wiki-Relays [118], Aug 10th.
LD4 Wikibase Working Hour - Next steps after installing a Wikibase instance -- creating users, items, and properties. Friday, August 27th, 2021 / 1PM (time zone converter). Registration: Please fill in ZOOM Registration Link to register
Wikimania 2021, August 13 to 17, online event. On this page you can find a summary of sessions and community gatherings related to Wikidata and Wikibase.
Mismatch Finder: Finishing work on importing mismatches and moved on to building the API for retrieving mismatches from the mismatch store.
Added tags for all edits done through the UI to more easily distinguish them from edits made through tools and other means (phab:T236893)
Moved regular expression checking for constraints from the SPARQL endpoint to a dedicated service to make it faster and put less stress on the SPARQL endpoint (phab:T176312)
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 can read but not edit 17 wikis for a few minutes on 10 August. This is planned at 05:00 UTC. This is because of work on the database. [119]
Changes later this week
The Wikimania Hackathon will take place remotely on 13 August, starting at 5:00 UTC, for 24 hours. You can participate in many ways. You can still propose projects and sessions.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 August. It will be on all wikis from 12 August (calendar).
The old CSS <div class="visualClear"></div> will not be supported after 12 August. Instead, templates and pages should use <div style="clear:both;"></div>. Please help to replace any existing uses on your wiki. There are global-search links available at T287962.
Future changes
The Wikipedia Library is a place for Wikipedia editors to get access to sources. There is an extension which has a new function to tell users when they can take part in it. It will use notifications. It will start pinging the first users in September. It will ping more users later. [120]
Additionally, De Gruyter and Nomos have been centralised from their previous on-wiki signup location on the German Wikipedia. Many other collections are freely available by simply logging in to The Wikipedia Library with your Wikimedia login!
We are also excited to announce that the first version of a new design for My Library was deployed this week. We will be iterating on this design with more features over the coming weeks. Read more on the project page on Meta.
Lastly, an Echo notification will begin rolling out soon to notify eligible editors about the library (T132084). If you can translate the notification please do so at TranslateWiki!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 20:23, 11 สิงหาคม 2564 (+07)
Mismatch Finder: We are making good progress on the tool. We made it possible to retrieve mismatches that are in the store part of the tool via an API.
Regular expressions in constraints are now no longer checked via the Query Service. The checks have been completely moved over to a dedicated service for regular expression checking. (phab:T204031)
Edits made via the user interface (as opposed to with tools, bots, etc.) are now tagged as such to make them easier to filter (example - edits made to labels, descriptions and aliases on mobile are still missing but will follow soon)
Working on allowing to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
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 add language links in the sidebar in the new Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet. [122]
Problems
There was a problem on wikis which use the Translate extension. Translations were not updated or were replaced with the English text. The problems have been fixed. [123][124][125]
Changes later this week
A revision tag will soon be added to edits that add links to disambiguation pages. This is because these links are usually added by accident. The tag will allow editors to easily find the broken links and fix them. If your wiki does not like this feature, it can be hidden. [126]
Would you like to help improve the information about tools? Would you like to attend or help organize a small virtual meetup for your community to discuss the list of tools? Please get in touch on the Toolhub Quality Signal Sessions talk page. We are also looking for feedback from tool maintainers on some specific questions.
In the past, edits to any page in your user talk space ignored your mute list, e.g. sub-pages. Starting this week, this is only true for edits to your talk page. [127]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 August. It will be on all wikis from 19 August (calendar).
The next Wikibase live session is at 16:00 UTC on Thursday 26th August 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). You're welcome to come and share your work around Wikibase.
BiCIKL Hackathon at the Meise Botanic Garden, September 20 - 24. Theme: adding articles/items about “Hidden women in science” on Wikipedia/Wikidata. If you're interested to participate, please write to maarten.trekelsplantentuinmeise.be
50 cool new things you can now do with KB’s collection highlights - In this series of 5 articles we show the added value of putting images and metadata of digitised collection highlights of the KB, national library of the Netherlands, into the Wikimedia infrastructure. By putting our collection highlights into Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, dozens of new functionalities have been added. As a result of Wikifying this collection in 2020, you can now do things with these highlights that were not possible before. Article by OlafJanssen, DanielleJWiki and 1Veertje_(KB)
The "Wikidata Quickstatements" translator which lets users transfer metadata about citation sources fromZotero into Wikidata, no longer needs to be manually installed. Existing manually-installed versions should update automatically, like other translators.
Edits to labels, descriptions and aliases on mobile are now also tagged as edits made via the user interface. All edits made via the user interface are now tagged as such. (phab:T286775)
ArticlePlaceholder pages will now indicate that they are generated by the ArticlePlaceholder thanks to a patch by Luca (phab:T124191)
Working on making it possible to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
Adding a new constraint type to ensure Items have a label in a certain language (phab:T195178)
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 Score extension (<score> notation) has been re-enabled on public wikis and upgraded to a newer version. Some musical score functionality may no longer work because the extension is only enabled in "safe mode". The security issue has been fixed and an advisory published.
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit some wikis for a few minutes on 25 August. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. During this time, operations on the CentralAuth will also not be possible.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 August. It will be on all wikis from 26 August (calendar).
Data Quality Days, September 8-15, a series of community-powered events on the topic of data quality. If you're interested in presenting a tool or a topic, feel free to add something to the schedule.
Depictor is a mobile-friendly tool to verify if people depicted on Wikimedia Commons are the same, and adds structured data statements (using Wikidata)
Nicolas Vigneron (User:VIGNERON, User:VIGNERON en résidence) has started a one-year residence at the libraries of Clermont-Ferrand, more info and batch upload to come
WikidataCon update: news about the online conference, grants for affiliates in Latin America and Carribean, glimpse on the keynotes topics and next steps
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 musical score syntax no longer works and may needed to be updated, you can check Category:Pages with score rendering errors on your wiki for a list of pages with errors.
Problems
Musical scores were unable to render lyrics in some languages because of missing fonts. This has been fixed now. If your language would prefer a different font, please file a request in Phabricator. [128]
Changes later this week
The parameters for how you obtain tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can read more about this.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 September. It will be on all wikis from 2 September (calendar).
Future changes
You will be able to read but not edit Commons for a few minutes on 6 September. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 13 September. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [129]
Data Quality Days - a week of all things data quality around Wikidata from Septempber 8th to 15th. Check the schedule, join sessions and add more if you would like to facilitate a discussion or workshop!
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: developing Wikidata tools and gadgets with Andrew Lih. [130], Sep 7th.
LIVE Wikidata editing #52 - YouTube, Facebook, September 11 at 18:00 UTC
Template:Generic queries for authors : new generic queries template designed for authors (fiction and non-fiction). Feedback and translations are welcome.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
User:SuccuBot has made its 100.000.000th edit. It is the first user account in Wikidata to reach this milestone.
In the frame of a Google Summer of Code project a new tool, called WikidataComplete was created. The tool smoothly integrates in the Wikidata UI and proposes new statements extracted by machine learning algorithms. Editors are asked to either approve or reject them. To activate it check here for a short tutorial check here. Any feedback is welcome here.
Continued work on the Mismatch Finder. We are now working on creating the page where mismatches will be listed for review.
Worked on support for "separators" parameter for distinct value constraints (phab:T277855)
Made it possible to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
Added a new constraint type to ensure that the Item has a label in a particular language (phab:T195178)
Added a button for the Query Builder to query.wikidata.org to make the Query builder discoverable (phab:T276210) - integration in the example dialog is still in progress (phab:T280229)
We started work on some behind-the-scenes improvements to the way Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects are notified about a change that affects their articles. (They need this notification so the article can be purged and show the latest data from Wikidata again. It is also required for showing the edit in the watchlist and recent changes on those wikis. This should have no visible impact for editors but is needed maintenance work.
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 wikis that have Growth features deployed have been part of A/B testing since deployment, in which some newcomers did not receive the new features. Now, all of the newcomers on 21 of the smallest of those wikis will be receiving the features. [131]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
In 2017, the provided jQuery library was upgraded from version 1 to 3, with a compatibility layer. The migration will soon finish, to make the site load faster for everyone. If you maintain a gadget or user script, check if you have any JQMIGRATE errors and fix them, or they will break. [132][133]
Last year, the Portuguese Wikipedia community embarked on an experiment to make log-in compulsory for editing. The impact report of this trial is ready. Moving forward, the Anti-Harassment Tools team is looking for projects that are willing to experiment with restricting IP editing on their wiki for a short-term experiment. Learn more.
Transbordados: WikidataCon's preconference for Latin America - September 14, 21 and 28 (21h UTC) - with simultaneous translation for Portuguese and Spanish, via YouTube - set of events to discuss Wikidata and decoloniality, knowledge organization and digital dissemination of collections in Latin America contexts. Join us!
14/09 - Towards a decolonial wiki: overflowing knowledge from the Latin American horizon - speakers: Amanda Jurno (Wiki Movimento Brasil), Bianca Santana (journalist, writer and activist) and Silvia Gutiérrez (El Colégio de México) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
21/09 - The universe of libraries: Wikidata and the multiplication of knowledge potencies - speakers: Lilian Viana (GLAM das Bibliotecas da USP) and Maurício Genta (Wikimedia Argentina e Biblioteca Nacional da Argentina) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
28/09 - Digital collections and Wikidata: organizing a network of knowledge - speakers: Evelin Heidel (a.k.a. Scann; Wikimedistas do Uruguai) and Karen Worcman (Museu da Pessoa) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
Demo of the Query Builder live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 14 at 18:00 CEST
Ongoing:
Data Quality Days - several sessions happened over the past days and more are coming this week. Recordings, slides and notes are linked in the program
Wwwyzzerdd for Wikidata is a browser extension that allows you to view and edit Wikidata information from Wikipedia (demo video). Install it in Firefox or Chrome
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Face The Facts mobile app allows you to scan election posters and see the true facts about politicians.
Mismatch Finder: The website part of the tool is taking shape but is not quite functional yet. We worked on creating the results page. You can see the current very much not finished state at https://mismatch-finder.toolforge.org/
Linked the Query Builder from the Query Service so it is discoverable (phab:T280229)
Finished work on normalizing filenames when linking to media files on Commons (phab:T251480)
All new wbstack.com wikis will now be created with elastic search support, including Wikibase indexes! All existing sites will have elastic search soon! (Source)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
A majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features. The Growth team has published an FAQ page about the features. This translatable FAQ covers the description of the features, how to use them, how to change the configuration, and more.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 September. It will be on all wikis from 16 September (calendar).
Starting this week, Wikipedia in Italian will receive weekly software updates on Wednesdays. It used to receive the updates on Thursdays. Due to this change, bugs will be noticed and fixed sooner. [136]
You can add language links in the sidebar in the new Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet. [137]
The syntax highlight tool marks up code with different colours. It now can highlight 23 new code languages. Additionally, golang can now be used as an alias for the Go programming language, and a special output mode has been added to show a program's output. [138][139]
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Bionomia and maintaining Wikidata synchrony with David Shorthouse (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada). [140], Sep 21st.
Lightning Talk: Wikidata in your Civic Tech project | Summit 2021 - YouTube
Continuing the work on the Mismatch Finder. This week we focused on the remaining groundwork for showing the first mismatches for review.
Continuing to work on improvements to the underlying system of how edits are propagated from Wikidata to the other Wikimedia projects.
Implemented two improvements for constraints: the “distinct values” constraint type now supports the “separator” parameter (phab:T277855) and we no longer check qualifiers on some unusual™ properties (phab:T235292)
Adding tags to some of the remaining UI edits that didn't get them yet for edits on Lexemes (phab:T290950)
Making it possible to add tags to some remaining Lexeme API modules (phab:T290951)
Fixed a bug in the Query Builder where it didn't show labels when opening an existing visual query from a shared link (phab:T280684)
Made the Query Builder more visible in the Query Service UI (phab:T280229)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
MediaWiki had a feature that would highlight local links to short articles in a different style. Each user could pick the size at which "stubs" would be highlighted. This feature was very bad for performance, and following a consultation, has been removed. [141]
A technical change was made to the MonoBook skin to allow for easier maintenance and upkeep. This has resulted in some minor changes to HTML that make MonoBook's HTML consistent with other skins. Efforts have been made to minimize the impact on editors, but please ping Jon (WMF) on wiki or in phabricator if any problems are reported.
Problems
There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of an accidental restart of the search servers. [142]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 September. It will be on all wikis from 23 September (calendar).
The meta=proofreadpage API has changed. The piprop parameter has been renamed to prpiprop. API users should update their code to avoid unrecognized parameter warnings. Pywikibot users should upgrade to 6.6.0. [143]
Future changes
The Reply tool will be deployed to the remaining wikis in the coming weeks. It is currently part of "เครื่องมือช่วยเหลือการอภิปราย" in Beta features at most wikis. You will be able to turn it off in Editing Preferences. [144]
The previously announced change to how you obtain tokens from the API has been delayed to September 21 because of an incompatibility with Pywikibot. Bot operators using Pywikibot can follow T291202 for progress on a fix, and should plan to upgrade to 6.6.1 when it is released.
We’re celebrating the 9th birthday of Wikidata on October 29 during the WikidataCon 🎂 Did you know that you can participate in the celebration by preparing a birthday present or attending events? Here’s how you can get involved!
User-level gender statistics for Wikipedia an Observable notebook which computes the share of articles created on fr.wikipedia.org by gender using P21 property through Wikidata's API.
Changed the formatting of low year numbers so that they now show as e.g. “5 CE” instead of “5” to reduce ambiugity in dates like “March 5 (CE)” (phab:T104750)
Working on fixing an issue where two Properties could have the same label in a given language (phab:T289473)
Working on preventing a few more cases where two Items could have the same sitelink (phab:T291377)
Mismatch Finder: Continuing to work on showing mismatches on the results page so that they can be reviewed
Continuing to work on technical improvements to how changes on Wikidata are propagated to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects
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
iOS 15 has a new function called Private Relay (Apple website). This can hide the user's IP when they use Safari browser. This is like using a VPN in that we see another IP address instead. It is opt-in and only for those who pay extra for iCloud. It will come to Safari users on OSX later. There is a technical discussion about what this means for the Wikimedia wikis.
Problems
Some gadgets and user-scripts add items to the portlets (article tools) part of the skin. A recent change to the HTML may have made those links a different font-size. This can be fixed by adding the CSS class .vector-menu-dropdown-noicon. [145]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 September. It will be on all wikis from 30 September (calendar).
The GettingStarted extension was built in 2013, and provides an onboarding process for new account holders in a few versions of Wikipedia. However, the recently developed Growth features provide a better onboarding experience. Since the vast majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features, GettingStarted will be deactivated starting on 4 October. [146]
A small number of users will not be able to connect to the Wikimedia wikis after 30 September. This is because an old root certificate will no longer work. They will also have problems with many other websites. Users who have updated their software in the last five years are unlikely to have problems. Users in Europe, Africa and Asia are less likely to have immediate problems even if their software is too old. You can read more.
You can receive notifications when someone leaves a comment on user talk page or mentions you in a talk page comment. Clicking the notification link will now bring you to the comment and highlight it. Previously, doing so brought you to the top of the section that contained the comment. You can find more information in T282029.
There is a new tool to build new skins. You can also see existing skins. You can give feedback. [5]
There was a new version of MediaWiki last week. You can read a detailed log of all 763 changes. Most of them are very small and will not affect you.
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