Inkbug

Tech News: 2015-09

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 software changes

• All new accounts are now global. [1]
• Your Meta user page is now shown if you don't have a user page on a wiki. You can report problems if you see any. You can ask a bot to delete your old user pages. [2] [3] [4]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 25. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 26 (calendar).
• It is now easier to see template fields in VisualEditor. The fields are bigger. [5]
• It is now easier to see when a button is disabled in VisualEditor. [6]
• Sometimes when you copy-pasted a template in VisualEditor, it was replaced by HTML. This problem is now fixed. [7]
• Tools in Labs will stop working for a few hours on February 24. [8]

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on February 26 at 00:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• At the moment you need to log in to edit Wikimedia wikis on mobile devices. You can say if anyone should be allowed to edit on the mobile sites. The discussion ends on March 15.
• Images in the interface will soon work better in Opera 12. [9]

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

16:28, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #147

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

• Discussions
  • RfC: Reforming administrator inactivity criteria
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Platypus - a speaking interface for Wikidata
  • Past: Wikidata for Research meetup
  • Past: GLAMhack (two of the results: The Endless Story and a family tree)
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata reached 200,000,000 edits
  • Welcome Wikibooks! Wikibooks now gets its language links via Wikidata as well.
  • Vote for your favorite Wikimania submissions. Here are the Wikidata related ones.
  • New release of the Wikidata Toolkit with lots of good stuff.
  • There are now over 30,000 objects in OpenStreetMap tagged with a Wikidata ID. Can you add more?
  • Want to see where we want infoboxes to go with Wikidata? Check out the infobox fromage on French Wikipedia. Have a look at the wiki text here.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Naturbase ID, Fach, AllMusic song ID, AllMusic album ID, AllMusic artist ID, Flora of North America ID, Florentine musea Inventario 1890 ID, beats per minute
  • Newest WikiProjects: Cheese, Filming Locations
  • Showcase items: None this week. Yours next week?
  • You can listen to Wikidata (setting at the bottom)
• Development
  • Chaged a number of Lua modules (from deprecated function mw.wikibase.getEntity to mw.wikibase.getEntityObject)
  • Updated the json documentation
  • Always link to Wikidata on client pages that don’t have any langlinks. This affects users without JavaScript and logged out users, logged in users will still see the link item dialog. gerrit:168632
  • Fixes for the Wikibase qunit Jenkins job
  • Made Vagrant git-update also properly update Wikibase and dependencies
  • Fix for phabricator:T88254 (malformatted Wikidata entries appearing in Watchlist RSS feed in clients)
  • Final touches on new header design
  • Investigated how we can provide language fallback also in suggestions when search or adding new statements
  • More work on allowing additional languages in monolingual text datatype
  • Added missing backend piece for quantities with units. Now the remaining piece is the user interface.
  • Enabled Wikibase Client on Wikibooks
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher 12:45, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-10

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 software changes

• A Lua function to use Wikidata has changed. You need to update the pages that use it. [10]
• You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Uzbek and Minangkabau. You need to enable it in your Beta options.
• You can now hide banners if you don't have an account. [11] [12]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 3. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 4 (calendar).
• You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Punjabi and Kyrgyz. You can ask for the tool in other languages.
• Editing the fake blank line in VisualEditor is now simpler. This change also fixed a few bugs. [13] [14] [15] [16]
• The TemplateData editor now warns you if a related page already has TemplateData. [17]
• The TemplateData table now tells you if a template doesn't take any parameters. [18]

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 4 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join technical meetings in France and Mexico this year. You will be able to ask for help if you can't pay yourself. [19]

Future changes

• You will be able to get a direct link for a section of a page. [20]

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

16:41, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #148

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

• Discussions
  • Open RfA: Haplology
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • upcoming: Wikidata for Wikipedians at Lokal K in Köln in 17th of March
  • upcoming: Wikidata editathon in Berlin on 24th of March
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Help flesh out landing pages for partners
  • Update on the Wikidata query service progress
  • The automatic description API can now generate infoboxes (currently, "person" and "artwork" on en.wp)
  • Wikidata Skim gives you very simple query functionality
  • Meet Kian, the first neural network to serve Wikidata
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Information Center for Israeli Art artist identifier, Comedien.ch identifier, oath of office date, Steam ID
  • Showcase items:Symphony No. 7
• Development
  • Fixed edit buttons sometimes not showing up because of caching
  • Added mailto to the allowed protocols in the URL data type
  • Worked on updating the data model documentation
  • Worked on client wiki subscription/notification mechanism
  • Improved handling of scientific notation for quantity values
  • Reworked a lot of code related to time parsing and formatting, e.g. proper support for language independent parsing of YYYY-MM-DD ordered dates
  • Continued working on the new Special:SetLabelDescriptionAliases
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 00:19, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-11

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

Recent changes

• You can now create books on almost all wikis. It doesn't work yet on wikis using the language converter. [21] [22]
• VisualEditor had problems with categories in Safari. It sometimes moved or removed the categories. The issue is now fixed. [23] [24] [25]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 11 (calendar).
• In VisualEditor the "Edit ^beta" button is now called "Edit" on the English Wikipedia. [26] [27]
• The feedback tool in VisualEditor now looks like the other tools. It also asks for information about your browser to help fix bugs. [28] [29]
• You now see the VisualEditor toolbar even if the rest of the page is still loading. [30] [31]
• You now see more information when you edit a link, a reference or other items in VisualEditor. You also see a clearer edit button in those tools. [32] [33]
• If you use the ContentTranslation tool you now see red links in the list of articles in other languages. The link is red if the article doesn't exist in the language of your options or of your browser. You can translate the article by clicking on the red link.

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 11 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a technical meeting in France in May. You can ask for help if you can't pay yourself. [34]

Future changes

• You can get help to become a developer. You can learn more on the Google Summer of Code and Outreachy pages. [35]
• You will soon be able to read technical reports in Phabricator. [36]

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

15:18, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #149

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

• Discussions
  • Successful RfA: Haplology
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Pictures, reloaded
  • Improving data quality on Wikidata – checking what we have
  • Linkin mash
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Simple Wikidata graph generator
  • Please help test the next step for header redesign
  • Provide input about how to improve Wikidata watchlist integration on Wikipedia and other sister projects
  • Items without statements - help by adding "instance of" to some of them
  • Picture of current geocoordinate coverage on Wikidata
  • Query generator spreadsheet
  • Image search now allows the addition of the "grave image" property
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Flemish organization for Immovable Heritage ID, National Pipe Organ Register identifier, Hornbostel-Sachs classification, Watson & Dallwitz family ID, Aviation Safety Network Wikibase Occurrence, Aviation Safety Network accident description ID, category related to list, list related to category, scale, BBC Your Paintings collection identifier, name day, Parlement & Politiek ID, NCI Thesaurus ID, Flora of China, ZooBank nomenclatural act, VASCAN ID, Agassiz et al checklist number, Bradley and Fletcher checklist number, GTAA concept identifier, category for films shot at this location, CiNii book identifer, Merck Index monograph
• Development
  • Got next step for header redesign and other goodies ready for testing (see above)
  • Created gadget for displaying padlock indicators on protected items and properties
  • Preliminary support for statements in the RDF export
  • Fixed "page watched" icon not being updated after an edit that should trigger it
  • Released Wikibase DataModel 2.6
  • Wikidata builds are now prepared automatically each day
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 20:31, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-12

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 servers that resize images are using new software. You should report new problems that you notice with images. [37]
• You can now see lists of bugs about Commons, Wikisource and Wiktionary. [38]
• It is now easier to add special characters in VisualEditor. You can edit the list of characters for your wiki. [39] [40]

Problems

• Wikis were broken for a few minutes on Thursday due to a code error.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 17. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 18 (calendar).
• A puzzle piece icon () now shows hidden templates in VisualEditor. You can edit the template by clicking the icon. For example, you can now edit anchor templates. [41] [42]
• You can now add examples, and details about old parameters, in TemplateData. [43] [44]

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 18 at 23:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The list of bad user names on your wiki will no longer work. The global list will replace it. You can ask to add rules for bad user names on Meta. [45] [46]
• You can comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [47]
• The final steps of single user login (SUL) will happen in April. You can see the rules to rename accounts. [48]

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

15:14, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #150

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Editathon at MACBA
  • Past: Wikidata intro session for Wikipedians at Lokal K in Cologne
  • Upcoming: Wikidata editing at Wikimedia Germany in Berlin
  • Upcoming: Office hour on 31st of March (Topics include Freebase migration, dev update, admin inactivity criteria)
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Freebase is going read-only at the end of the month and we expect an influx of new people. There is now an FAQ to answer their most common questions.
  • We now have (improved) landing pages for partners at d:Wikidata:Data donation and d:Wikidata:Data access. Could use some help with making them easier to read and more visual.
  • Lots of improvements around MixNMatch. It has a new catalog overview page. ~340K IDs have been matched so far with it and it now has an FAQ for institutions wanting to get their identifiers linked in Wikidata
  • There is a fancy new tool to help with patrolling edits on Wikidata
  • First screenshot of the primary sources tool that'll help with migrating data from Freebase and enriching it with references has been leaked ;-): 1 and 2
  • DBpedia converts Wikidata data to the DBpedia ontology
  • Another 3rd-party SPARQL endpoint has been set up for testing
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: art-name, posthumous name, temple name, courtesy name, school of, possible creator, forgery after, manner of, circle of, follower of, workshop of, attributed to, USDA plant identifier, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System identifier, LMI code, denkXweb identifier, place name sign
  • Newest WikiProjects: Municipalities of Germany
  • Newest gadgets: Image search supports the new "place name sign" property
• Development
  • Fixed property suggestions on empty items
  • Updated database for property suggestions with newest correlations so you should get better suggestions
  • Updated various documentation
  • Continued working on RDF export (among other things a requirement for query functionality)
  • Polishing in the user interface
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 22:44, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #150

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Editathon at MACBA
  • Past: Wikidata intro session for Wikipedians at Lokal K in Cologne
  • Upcoming: Wikidata editing at Wikimedia Germany in Berlin
  • Upcoming: Office hour on 31st of March (Topics include Freebase migration, dev update, admin inactivity criteria)
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Freebase is going read-only at the end of the month and we expect an influx of new people. There is now an FAQ to answer their most common questions.
  • We now have (improved) landing pages for partners at d:Wikidata:Data donation and d:Wikidata:Data access. Could use some help with making them easier to read and more visual.
  • Lots of improvements around MixNMatch. It has a new catalog overview page. ~340K IDs have been matched so far with it and it now has an FAQ for institutions wanting to get their identifiers linked in Wikidata
  • There is a fancy new tool to help with patrolling edits on Wikidata
  • First screenshot of the primary sources tool that'll help with migrating data from Freebase and enriching it with references has been leaked ;-): 1 and 2
  • DBpedia converts Wikidata data to the DBpedia ontology
  • Another 3rd-party SPARQL endpoint has been set up for testing
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: art-name, posthumous name, temple name, courtesy name, school of, possible creator, forgery after, manner of, circle of, follower of, workshop of, attributed to, USDA plant identifier, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System identifier, LMI code, denkXweb identifier, place name sign
  • Newest WikiProjects: Municipalities of Germany
  • Newest gadgets: Image search supports the new "place name sign" property
• Development
  • Fixed property suggestions on empty items
  • Updated database for property suggestions with newest correlations so you should get better suggestions
  • Updated various documentation
  • Continued working on RDF export (among other things a requirement for query functionality)
  • Polishing in the user interface
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 23:44, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #150

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Editathon at MACBA
  • Past: Wikidata intro session for Wikipedians at Lokal K in Cologne
  • Upcoming: Wikidata editing at Wikimedia Germany in Berlin
  • Upcoming: Office hour on 31st of March (Topics include Freebase migration, dev update, admin inactivity criteria)
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Freebase is going read-only at the end of the month and we expect an influx of new people. There is now an FAQ to answer their most common questions.
  • We now have (improved) landing pages for partners at d:Wikidata:Data donation and d:Wikidata:Data access. Could use some help with making them easier to read and more visual.
  • Lots of improvements around MixNMatch. It has a new catalog overview page. ~340K IDs have been matched so far with it and it now has an FAQ for institutions wanting to get their identifiers linked in Wikidata
  • There is a fancy new tool to help with patrolling edits on Wikidata
  • First screenshot of the primary sources tool that'll help with migrating data from Freebase and enriching it with references has been leaked ;-): 1 and 2
  • DBpedia converts Wikidata data to the DBpedia ontology
  • Another 3rd-party SPARQL endpoint has been set up for testing
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: art-name, posthumous name, temple name, courtesy name, school of, possible creator, forgery after, manner of, circle of, follower of, workshop of, attributed to, USDA plant identifier, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System identifier, LMI code, denkXweb identifier, place name sign
  • Newest WikiProjects: Municipalities of Germany
  • Newest gadgets: Image search supports the new "place name sign" property
• Development
  • Fixed property suggestions on empty items
  • Updated database for property suggestions with newest correlations so you should get better suggestions
  • Updated various documentation
  • Continued working on RDF export (among other things a requirement for query functionality)
  • Polishing in the user interface
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 00:44, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-13

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 this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 24. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 25 (calendar).
• The text of a reference is now more visible when you click on it. It has a blue background. Many wikis already have the blue color. Those wikis can now remove it from their CSS page. [49]
• VisualEditor is now much faster. For many users it is now at least as fast as the wikitext editor. [50] [51] [52]
• When you add a list of references in VisualEditor, you now see it right away. You can still change its group by editing it. [53]

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 25 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Talk pages using "LiquidThreads" on mediawiki.org will soon use the new system. [54]

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

15:09, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-13

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 this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 24. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 25 (calendar).
• The text of a reference is now more visible when you click on it. It has a blue background. Many wikis already have the blue color. Those wikis can now remove it from their CSS page. [55]
• VisualEditor is now much faster. For many users it is now at least as fast as the wikitext editor. [56] [57] [58]
• When you add a list of references in VisualEditor, you now see it right away. You can still change its group by editing it. [59]

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 25 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Talk pages using "LiquidThreads" on mediawiki.org will soon use the new system. [60]

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

16:09, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #151

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Sex and artists
  • VIAF is Moving to Wikidata
  • Upcoming: IRC office hour on Tuesday
  • Upcoming: Editathon in the pre-program of the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The next steps for the header redesign and bugfixes are live
  • New tool by Magnus that lets you add reference URLs with a single click
  • An update from Freebase (which is going read-only on Tuesday!)
  • The tours are working again thanks to Bene* and Lucie
  • Effort to define a biomedical relationship ontology for Wikidata
  • Eventzoom.net - displaying history from Wikidata on maps
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: ABoK number, Word Health Organisation International Nonproprietary Name, Danish National Filmography ID, Masaryk University person ID, EMLO person identifier, Commemorative plaque image, Wikimedia database name, Maltese Islands National Inventory of Cultural Property identifier, ISO 639-5, International Standard Industrial Classification code, Smithsonian American Art Museum: person/institution thesaurus id, bureau du patrimoine de Seine-Saint-Denis ID, format as a regular expression, category of associated people, category of people buried here, BioStor author identifier, chief operating officer, DVN identifier
• Newest WikiProjects:
• Newest gadgets: Image search can find photos for the new "commemorative plaque image" property
  • New task forces: Dictionary of National Biography (DNB)
• There is a SpecialPage to easily get to the Wikidata item for a given Wikipedia article and another one to get to the Wikipedia article for a given Wikidata ID.
• Development
  • Deployed new code to Wikidata \o/ (and fixed a few issues that popped up)
  • Made good progress on RDF export (needed for example for queries)
  • Did more performance groundwork for arbitrary access
  • Students working on improved constraint reports and checking against 3rd party databases are making good progress
  • Looked into improving suggestions
  • Worked on making dispatching changes from Wikidata to Wikipedia and co more robust
  • Removed backwards compatibility from mw.wikibase.getEntity(), to be deployed April 7 and 8. See also here.
  • Improved support for right-to-left languages, e.g. in the sitelinks view
  • Created a unit test framework for special pages
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add multi-lingual labels for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 20:29, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-14

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

Recent changes

• You can now hide site banners even if you don't have an account. [61]
• You can now add citations more easily with VisualEditor on the French and Italian Wikipedia. The tool adds the information when you add some types of links. In the future you will be able to add this tool to your wiki. [62] [63] [64]
• All sites should now be faster if you have a recent browser. [65]
• You could see a serious bug when editing some templates with VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [66]
• VisualEditor could break when you edited an image. The issue was fixed quickly. [67]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 31. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 1 (calendar).
• VisualEditor is now the main editing tool on 53 more Wikipedias. [68]
• You can now edit the mobile site of all wikis without an account. [69]
• You can test a new tool on the beta mobile site on the English Wikipedia. With the new tool, you can create lists of articles. [70]
• You can now see that VisualEditor is opening even if you're not looking at the top of the page. [71]
• VisualEditor doesn't leave empty titles with just nowiki tags any more. [72] [73] [74] [75]

Meetings

• You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. The meeting will be on IRC on March 31 at 16:00 (UTC). [76]
• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 1 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:18, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #152

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

• Discussions
  • Closed RfC: Reforming administrator inactivity criteria
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • WikiArabia takes place in Monastir, Tunisia, 3-5 April
  • The GLAM-WIKI 2015 conference in The Hague (10-12 April) features several presentations and tutorials about Wikidata for/with cultural institutions.
  • The Library world will use Wikidata to link its information to any and all Wikipedias. No longer English only, but every Wikipedia will be exposed in this way.
  • Freebase, SEO and Wikidata
  • Office hour on IRC covering overall status/development, Freebase and admin inactivity criteria RfC. You can read the log.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Magnus wrote a short tour of Wikidata's tool ecosystem.
  • A first version of the Primary Sources Tool has been released. It'll help with migrating Freebase data and more.
  • Italian Wikipedia's quality festival is focusing on interwiki links and Wikidata this month. Help them out?
  • Lots of new databases have been added to Mix n Match.
  • Screenshots of the current state of new constraint reports and checks against 3rd party databases have been posted.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: choreographer, senat.fr ID, Great Aragonese Encyclopedia ID
• Development
  • Wikidata development started 3 years ago. <3 to everyone who is a part of it.
  • Went through all the feedback we got for improving watchlist integration on Wikipedia and co and posted our assesment
  • Put the infrastructure for creating Turtle-Beta dumps in place. All new Wikidata dumps will be in https://dumps.wikimedia.org/wikidatawiki/entities/ from Monday on (the old * directory will be kept around and receive new json dumps for backwards compatibility).
  • Reduced size of entities pages by removing no longer needed data (to make the UI faster).
  • Fixed bug that sometimes caused dates and other types of values to be cut short when quickly saving. (phabricator:T92831)
  • Fixed issues with setting focus after clicking edit.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 15:12, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-15

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 join a new email list for important news about Wikimedia Labs. [77]
• You can read the last monthly report. In the future you can read team reports every three months. You can see current work on the roadmap. [78] [79]
• The number of articles in Special:Statistics is now updated once a month. [80]
• You can use a new version of the Wikipedia app for Android. Using the app, you can now share a fact with your friends. [81]

Problems

• The import tool was broken for a few days. Imports didn't add log entries. You can delete and import pages again if necessary. [82]
• Labs was broken several times this week. [83] [84] [85] [86]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 8 (calendar).
• You can now add the same special characters with VisualEditor as with the wikitext editor. [87]
• Many bugs around copy-paste in VisualEditor are now fixed. [88] [89]
• You can now use basic tools of VisualEditor in the new talk tool. You can add links, bold and italics. You can also mention people. [90]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 8 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can again comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [91]

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

15:41, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #153

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata by country, or: The Wealth of Nation's Data
  • Wikidata the Game - one year in
  • Ongoing: GLAM-Wiki 2015
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Build a RSS image feed based on a query
  • Periodic table based on Wikidata data by Ricordisamoa
  • ~8000 biographical items with dates in the description, but no birth/death date statements
  • Magnus says ~8% (~1.4M) of all Wikidata items do not have any site links to Wikipedia etc.; knowledge that exists exclusively on Wikidata
  • Bene* wrote a user script that adds a filter bar above the statement section and lets you filter it
  • Magnus wrote a quick user script to move identifiers into the right sidebar to show how a statement section without identifiers would look like. This came up as part of a longer discussion on the mailinglist about moving identifier statements into their own section. Progress is being tracked at phabricator:T95287.
  • Samsung releases Freebase-Wikidata mappings in CC0: 4.4M pairs generated from Wikipedia links and custom code
  • Thanks to Bene* hovercards now also work for items and properties
  • New tool by Magnus for Wikidata item labels
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: short name, list of episodes, named as
  • New task forces: Star Wars, Open Access
• Development
  • We are going to change the way value suggestions are ranked when entering a new statement. This will help with "male" and "female" not showing up among the top suggestions. Previously we ranked by number of sitelinks. We will change this to the maximum of sitelinks and labels. So if an item has labels in many languages but no sitelinks like "male" and "female" it will still show up high in the suggestions. (phabricator:T94404)
  • Discussed how to move forward with identifiers. Outcome: They should get their own datatype. (phabricator:T95287)
  • Implemented arbitrary access for the {{#property:…}} parser function. This can be invoked on the wikis that have arbitrary access enabled by using {{#property:P123|from=Q42}}. So far this is only Wikidata itself.
  • Did further performance work on the client (Wikipedia and co) in preparation for arbitrary access
  • Improved the performance of wbgetentities significantly when loading a large number of entities
  • Wrote more browser tests for different datavalues
  • Further work on RDF mapping and dumps
  • Fixed in other language box showing old data (phabricator:T90893)
  • Fixed language fallback on Special:Recent changes and Special:Contributions
  • Added language fallback for the tooltip on badge icons
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:01, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-16

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 read the latest news about VisualEditor.
• You can now use the new translation tool on 22 Wikipedias. You now see the tool the first time you create a new page. [92]
• The list of bad user names on your wiki no longer works. The global list replaces it. You can ask to add rules for bad user names on Meta. [93] [94]

Problems

• Some wikis had issues on Wednesday. [95] [96]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 14. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 15 (calendar).
• Developers will start to rename 1.5 million accounts on Wednesday. After that all accounts will be unique and will work on all wikis. [97] [98]
• All users can now test link previews ("Hovercards") on several Wikipedias. [99]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 15 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:40, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #154

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

• Discussions
  • Open RfA: Aldnonymous
  • RfC: Review of "change datatype to monolingual" actions for some properties, Adopt Help:Classification as an official help page
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Redirects on Wikidata
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Tool by Magnus to find wrong nationalities on Wikidata
  • Where am I? (figuring out your location based on geocoordinates in Wikidata)
  • Map of French national parks
  • Histropedia published 5 query generator spreadsheets
  • Wikimedia's monthly GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) newsletter now includes a Wikidata report. The draft for the first edition, covering April, may be edited and your contributions will be welcome.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Baseball-Reference.com minor league player ID, Baseball-Reference.com major league player ID, road number, BAnQ ID, DSH object ID, Open Food Facts food category slug, Open Food Facts food additive slug, genealogics.org personID, Kaiserhof ID, addressee, National Portrait Gallery (London) person identifier, RSL book's identifier, name in kana
• Development
  • Made label, description and aliases special pages easier to use
  • Bene* created a new Special:ListProperties special page to list properties by data type
  • Expanded our set of automated browser tests
  • Made language fallbacks work in more situations and more consistently. In particular, the entity selector now uses language fallback. This should benefit especially people who want to use Wikidata in a variant such as en-gb.
  • Continued work on the planned DataModel 3.0 release
  • Continued discussing and documenting future calendar model support
  • Continued work on our RDF generator
  • Continued work on usage tracking for labels on multilingual sites
  • Addshore worked on various issues regarding redirects
  • Addshore worked on a special page to turn an item into a redirect
  • Work on showing entity labels in edit summaries on history pages
  • Implemented change dispatching based on the new usage tracking mechanism
  • Fixed issue with page deletions on some Wikipedias not being reported to Wikidata
  • More work on straightening out date formatting and parsing
  • Fixed handling of scientific notation for quantity values
  • Term box: fixed bug causing stale info to be show, and another bug causing babel languages to be ignored sometimes.
  • Implemented access to other arbitrary items via the #property parser function
  • Bene* implemented check to make sure two properties can not have the same alias only differing in capitalization
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 09:52, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-17

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 was sometimes a problem when saving a page in VisualEditor. It is now fixed on all wikis. [100]
• VisualEditor sometimes showed empty warnings for wikis using Flagged Revisions. This is now fixed on all wikis. [101]
• You can get the new version of the Wikipedia app for iOS. With it you can share facts with your friends. [102]
• If you write JavaScript, you should stop using importScript and importStylesheet. [103]

Problems

• There was a problem with Labs on Monday. [104]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 21. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 22 (calendar).
• Developers are renaming 1.5 million accounts. After that all accounts will be unique and will work on all wikis. [105] [106] [107]
• If your wiki has the auto-fill tool for citations, you can now use it when you edit a reference. [108]
• You can now give examples for template options in TemplateData. [109]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 22 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will soon be able to add and remove tags on edits. [110] [111]

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

15:29, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #155

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

• Discussions
  • RfC: Opting out of Global sysops 2
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata emerges as central element of GLAM-WIKI 2015
  • ongoing: Coding DaVinci
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The question that started Wikidata has finally been answered! Thank you Markus! ;-)
  • Wikimedia Sverige adapted two brochures about Wikidata, one for GLAMs and one for researchers.
  • Bene* has been working on making Wikidata work nicely on mobile. You can check the current status on a demo system.
  • Amir could use your help with automatic transliteration of human names
  • Commons-WD: a tool to edit Wikidata based on a Commons category
  • Various improvements to the Primary Sources Tool including:
    • Edits made with it will now say so in the edit summary
    • It now uses the URL blacklist to not suggest low-quality references
    • Caching issues were fixed
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Kiev street code, blood type, Perry Index, input set, SSR Name ID, SSR WrittenForm ID, INPN Code, Nasjonalbiblioteket photographer ID, distribution map, anti-virus alias, HathiTrust id, common name, Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online identifier, Swedish district code, investigated by, US Federal Election Commission identifier, PSS-archi ID, Gaoloumi ID, draft pick number, GrassBase ID, electorate, owner of, Roud Folk Song Index, IPI Code, ISWC
  • There are a number of user boxes you can add to your user page to indicate interests and which wiki projects you belong to.
• Development
  • On Tuesday, we are deploying usage tracking (no arbitrary access yet) to Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource, and subscription tracking on Wikidata. There should be no noticeable changes for users. These are necessary steps towards enabling arbitrary access in clients.
  • Worked on making language fallback work in the suggester (when adding a new statement or searching for an item)
  • More work on RDF output and the query service
  • Added Special:RedirectEntity for redirecting items
  • Investigated and working to fix JS bug on items with “invalid” values (phabricator:92975)
  • Did work towards having entity ids in revision histories and in diffs linked with their label (like on watchlists or in the recentchanges)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:59, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-18

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

• All accounts are now unique and work on all wikis. [112] [113]
• You can read a report from experts who tested the security of MediaWiki. [114]
• There was a problem between VisualEditor and an antivirus software. It is now fixed. [115]
• You can help test VisualEditor to see if it works in your language. [116]

Problems

• Some Labs tools had problems due to a software bug. [117]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 22. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 29 (calendar).
• It is now clearer that you can delete several rows and columns when you edit tables in VisualEditor. [118]
• You now see more information when you search for a template in VisualEditor. [119]
• You can now cancel when you add citations on desktop, or edit links on mobile, in VisualEditor. [120]
• You can now see the list of other formats for videos only after they're ready. [121]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 29 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:10, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Support request with team editing experiment project

Dear tech ambassadors, instead of spamming the Village Pump of each Wikipedia about my tiny project proposal for researching team editing (see here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Research_team_editing), I have decided to leave to your own discretion if the matter is relevant enough to inform a wider audience already. I would appreciate if you could appraise if the Wikipedia community you are more familiar with could have interest in testing group editing "on their own grounds" and with their own guidance. In a nutshell: it consists in editing pages as a group instead of as an individual. This social experiment might involve redefining some aspects of the workflow we are all used to, with the hope of creating a more friendly and collaborative environment since editing under a group umbrella creates less social exposure than traditional "individual editing". I send you this message also as a proof that the Inspire Campaign is already gearing up. As said I would appreciate of *you* just a comment on the talk page/endorsement of my project noting your general perception about the idea. Nothing else. Your contribution helps to shape the future! (which I hope it will be very bright, with colors, and Wikipedia everywhere) Regards from User:Micru on meta.

Wikidata weekly summary #156

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata was presented at a Swedish Linked Data Network Meet-up in Gothenburg.
  • The most important Wikipedia pages
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • P107 (main type) is finally orphaned and deleted, 20 months after deprecation. This was the first property used 1000000 times.
  • The royal baby was quickly updated on Wikidata. (her family tree)
  • New tool by Magnus: Find pictures on geography.co.uk, upload them to Commons and add them to Wikidata
  • All Van Gogh Museum paintings are now on Commons and Wikidata. Go go SumOfAllPaintings peeps!
  • List of topics with links in at least X Wikipedias
  • All French Senators matched using MixNMatch \o/
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: represented by, Netflix Identifier, maximum number of players, minimum number of players, CERL ID, Name Assigning Authority Number, Hall of Valor ID, ballots cast, eligible voters, catholic-hierarchy diocese ID, Wikidata example geographic coordinates, Wikidata example monolingual text, Wikidata example property, Wikidata example quantity, Wikidata example time, Wikidata example URL, Wikidata example item value, Wikidata example string, Wikidata example media file, Wikidata property example
• Development
  • We rolled out usage tracking on the first two wikis (French Wikisource and Dutch Wikipedia). Users should not notice anything. More wikis will follow in the next weeks. This is the remaining step for enabling arbitrary access on wikis other than Commons.
  • The students team is working hard to get a first release of the improved constraint reports and checks against 3rd party databases out.
  • Ricordisamoa fixed the issue with long descriptions being cut off.
  • We fixed the focus flow in the property selector.
  • We improved the messages on Special:EntityData to make it more understandable.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 14:13, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-19

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

Recent changes

• You can now chat with other users in Phabricator. [122]
• There was a rare problem with VisualEditor. The text of another wiki could be added to your edit. The issue is now fixed. [123] [124]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 5. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 6 (calendar).
• It is now easier to add a link in VisualEditor. You can see an image and a description about the page. [125]

Meetings

• You can join a meeting with the Language team. The meeting will be on May 5 at 14:30 (UTC). [126]
• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 6 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join an event in France on May 22−25. You need to sign up before May 8. [127]

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

15:03, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #157

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

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Mbch331
  • New request for comments: Notability policy overhaul
  • Closed requests for comments: Conflict of Interest (no consensus), Speedy vs Regular deletion (stale)
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • A study has been published about how Wikidata can help significantly improve the quality of medical content on Wikipedia. This is why we do Wikidata! \o/
  • MusicBrainz is migrating to Wikidata for Wikipedia links
  • Past: Open Data for Academics - some media available on Wikimedia Commons.
  • Upcoming: OuiShare Labs Camp in Paris
  • Upcoming: MediaWiki hackathon in Lyon
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The Wikidata Visualization Challenge has started. You can enter your submission until June 1 (23:59 CEST).
  • Denny has published a proposed breakdown of tasks for Wiktionary support incl mockups. Please read and comment.
  • The Wikidata Menu Challenge has started and goes on to May 27. Add labels, images and pronunciation audio to a list of around 290 items to help show off the power of Wikidata at a food festival.
  • Dynamic lists on Wikipedia based on Wikidata data
  • The Frick Collection and the Brooklyn Museum both have their paintings on Wikidata now.
  • The most distant known galaxy EGS-zs8-1 (Q19860435) has been discovered and added to Wikidata.
  • Reasonator has been restyled, to work better on mobile devices. It also has an enhanced display on first names (exsample: Paul)
  • Woah! Volcanos! (Help match the Smithonian's volcano identifiers with Wikidata) ;-)
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Smithsonian volcano identifier, cathedral, hair color, Declarator.org ID, Web Gallery of Art identifier, list of characters, measured by, income classification (Philippines), Vox-ATypI classification, after a work by, spacecraft
• Development
  • Access to data from arbitrary items is coming to the first wikis on Monday \o/ It'll be Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource.
  • Sneak peek at the current state of development for showing constraint violations on statements
  • Hovercards also show the target's label and ID now. (Try them by turning them on in the beta features section of your preferences.)
  • Continued working on RDF export
  • More work on making it possible to add a reference right away when adding a statement (and allowing the full statement incl references to be edited at the same time)
  • Did more work to make usage tracking possible on multilingual wikis (namely Commons)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 17:44, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-20

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

Recent changes

• You can now make charts and maps on your wiki with the new "graph" tool. If you have an old browser, you will see images instead. It uses a tool called Vega; you can learn how to use it and write help pages for your wiki. You can use the Vega edit tool to make charts and copy the code to your wiki. Charts and maps use complex code and you should put them into templates. In the future, you will be able to create charts with VisualEditor. [128] [129] [130]
• You can apply for technical jobs to develop tools for the community. [131]
• The logos of all wikis are now in a new place. It will make pages load faster. You can still ask to change the logo. You can also use local CSS for brief changes. [132] [133]

Problems

• There was a problem that caused slow editing. [134]
• Pages were sometimes removed from your watchlist in VisualEditor. This problem is now fixed. [135]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 6. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 12. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 13 (calendar).
• You can now use data from Wikidata on more pages. The page doesn't need to be linked to the Wikidata item. It works on a few wikis and more wikis will be added soon. [136] [137]
• You should get fewer errors when you add files to Commons. [138]
• When you use an external link to link to a wiki page, VisualEditor now converts it to a wiki link. [139]
• When you add a link in VisualEditor, you see pages that match what you type. It is now easier to see where they match. [140]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 13 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:34, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #158

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

• Discussions
  • Successful request for adminship: Mbch331
  • Closed request for comments: Opting out of Global sysops 2
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Using Wikidata to Improve the Medical Content on Wikipedia
  • Past: Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) spoke about authority control in Wikidata (and sister projects) at the World Digital Library's Arab Peninsula Regional Group Symposium, organised in conjunction with the Qatar National Library, in Doha on 13 May. His slides, with an Arabic translation, will be online soon.
  • Past: Wikidata editing workshop at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin
  • Past: Wikidata workshop for archivists of Catalan City of Justice
  • Upcoming: MediaWiki hackathon in Lyon
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Elections for the board of the Wikimedia Foundation are ongoing. Wikidata should be well represented among the voters. Go and vote!
  • Wikidata won another award by Land der Ideen! \o/ Thank you everyone who is making Wikidata awesome!
  • Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource now have the arbitrary access feature. Persian Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikipedia are following today. Italian Wikipedia and all remaining Wikisource projects are following on June 1st.
  • New manual for adding inventory numbers to paintings on Wikidata
  • English Wikipedia is running a bot to add authority control templates to many articles that are filled completely from Wikidata. Italian Wikipedia is doing so as well.
  • Wikidata won an Open Data award last year. Nominations for this year are open now. Who should win this year?
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources entry, vice-county
• Development
  • Prepared for deployment of arbitrary access on more wikis
  • Graph extension will be enabled on Wikidata later today
  • Improvements to calendar handling
  • More work on RDF export for query service
  • Continued work on usage tracking and arbitrary access for multilingual wikis
  • Addshore investigated and started fixing abuse filter issues
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 14:05, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-21

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 watch a video about the new graph tool.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 13. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 20 (calendar).
• References are now always in the right order. Also, the reference list now only shows references used on the page. [141]
• You can no longer create an account with a colon ':' in it. If you already have one, it still works. [142]
• The toolbar in VisualEditor now looks different. It is easier to see the icons. [143]
• You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday. [144] [145]
• UploadWizard now shows better matches when you add a category to your file. [146]
• A test about VisualEditor will start on the English Wikipedia on Thursday. [147]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 21 at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a technical meeting in France this week.

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

15:18, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-22

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

• VisualEditor was broken for 30 minutes on Tuesday. The problem was due to a tool it uses. [148]
• Some Labs tools had issues last week. [149] [150]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 20. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 26. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 27 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 28 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can add your ideas of new tools to help active users like you. [151]

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

16:12, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #159

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

• Events/Blogs/Press

Wikimedia Hackathon 2015

• • State of the Map US (OpenStreetMap's conference) in New York on 6-8 June
  • Wikimedia Hackathon 2015 in Lyon from 23-25 May. Some of the activities and outcomes:
    • Wikidata descriptions can be soon be edited in the Wikipedia iOS app.
    • A early preview of the official SPARQL endpoint for Wikidata has been created to query Wikidata. Remember that it is not stable and still beta. A short introduction to SPARQL can be found in Lucie's slides.
    • If you are not familiar with SPARQL yet, a tool has been created by Tpt and Bene* to generate SPARQL queries from natural language questions.
    • To do SPARQL queries from the command line, a command line tool was crafted by Marius.
    • The special page to query for badges is within reach.
    • A feedback session on the architecture of Wikibase was held.
    • We got a cool presentation by Maxime about inventaire.io.
    • We figured out the next steps to make Wikidata more mobile friendly.
    • Pilot on the Hungarian Wikipedia to show diagrams based on Wikidata in their articles on Spanish villages
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • New command line tool for mapping SKOS to Wikidata (video)
  • The Wikidata Visualization Challenge is ending soon. Please submit your entries. The Wikidata Menu Challenge is also ending soon.
  • The number of videos about Wikidata is growing and there is now a category on Wikimedia Commons for these.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: lowest note, highest note, source website, Fauna Europaea ID, Danish urban area code, OpenPlaques plaque identifier, signatory, BNC identifier, different from
  • Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Elections
• Development
  • Got early preview of the primary SPARQL endpoint for Wikidata live
  • The Graph extension is now live on Wikidata
  • Arbitrary access is rolled out on fawiki, hewiki and enwikivoyage now
  • Busy with the hackathon (see above)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 21:21, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #160

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • upcoming: State of the Map US
  • Visualizing history with automated event maps
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Final hours to make your vote count in the WMF board election
  • Now we have Q20000000 and P1900
  • Wikidata stats have been updated
  • Over 100 timeline of famous painters by Histropedia
  • WD-FIST can now take a manual item list and limit its search to JPEGs
  • Traveling this summer? Find items needing pictures around you with WikiShootMe
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: altered regulation leads to, posttranslational modification association with, gene substitution association with, gene inversion association with, gene insertion association with, gene duplication association with, deletion association with, increased expression in, decreased expression in, side effect, Commonwealth War Graves Commission person identifier, Australian Dictionary of Biography identifier, office held by head of state, FundRef registry name, Volcanic explosivity index, Spotify artist ID, BALaT person/organisation id, EAGLE id, Librivox author ID
• Development
  • Recovering from hackathon
  • Prepared rollout of usage tracking and arbitrary access to more wikis
  • Testing of the query service
  • Fixed styling issues with entity selector
  • Worked more on Capiunto to make it easier to create good infoboxes
  • Worked on making broken values editable to fix them (this for example happens when a property is deleted but some values are left over)
  • Made entity id an optional parameter in mw.wikibase.label and mw.wikibase.description lua methods. (default to use connected item)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:17, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-23

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

• Many wikis were slow for a few hours on Wednesday due to a code error. Sometimes the pages did not load at all and showed an error. [152]
• Some tools in Labs were broken on Wednesday and Thursday. [153]
• Edit tags added by the software were broken on all wikis from May 23 to May 28. [154] [155]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 3 (calendar).
• You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday. [156]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 3 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:30, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #161

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

• Discussions
  • RfC on usage of Wikidata on German-language Wikipedia
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Pigsonthewing and aude were at State of the Map US to talk about Wikidata/OpenStreetMap cooperation and more
  • Past: Lucie and Marius gave an intro to Wikidata at Gulaschprogrammiernacht in Karlsruhe (slides)
  • Upcoming: Office hour on IRC on 19th
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The English-language Wikipedia has decided to deprecate Persondata in favour of Wikidata.
  • New tool by Magnus to make it easier to add references
  • The results are in for the Wikimedia Foundation's board election. One name should sound familiar to you ;-)
  • Addshore created new maps of the geocoordinates on Wikidata. More coming.
  • Sylvain made an overview of the overlap in topics that the biggest Wikipedias have.
  • Wikidata has passed German Wikipedia in number of items with images (743850 dewp articles vs. 804885 items) - now only second to English-language Wikipedia.
  • Catalan Wikipedia is moving Taxon IDs to Wikidata.
  • Zolo did a comparison of English/French/German/Chinese and Cebuano Wikipedias in terms of main types of articles. Biographies were compared by period, nationality and occupation.
  • Connectivity statistics were updated.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: DMS V, Clinvar Accession Number, Vaccine Ontology ID, VIOLIN ID, vaccine for, participating team, first line, URI pattern for RDF resource, Commonwealth War Graves Commission burial ground identifier, Ministry of Education of Chile school ID
  • Newest gadgets: Mark as patrolled by User:Petr Matas
• Development
  • Italian Wikipedia and all remaining Wikisource projects now have arbitrary access. The rollout will continue. The schedule for the next projects is at d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access.
  • The Content Translation tool now automatically connects translated articles to Wikidata. (Thanks Content Translation developers!) Previously translated but unconnected articles have been connected by a bot. (Thanks Amir!)
  • Code review of the extensions written by a team of students to improve the constraint reports and make it possible to automatically check our data against other databases. A first version will go live soon pending further codereview and fixes.
  • Two new methods have been added to the lua library provided by Wikibase: wikibase.resolvePropertyId and wikibase.entity:getBestStatements.
  • Further work on making unserializable values editable in the UI (This can happen for example if a property is deleted.)
  • Made the Wikidata JSON dumps available on Labs in the standard dumps location there (/public/dumps).
  • Worked on automatically creating a redirect when merging items via the API.
  • Rewrote the script that generates a map image based on geocoordinates in Wikidata. (Result see above.)
  • Released Wikibase DataModel 3.0
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 15:14, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-24

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 this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 9. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 11 (calendar). [157] [158]
• If you use the Monobook skin, the buttons and other controls now look more the same in VisualEditor and other tools. [159]
• When you edit links and other items in VisualEditor, you now need to apply your change before closing the tool. [160]
• The title of dialogs is now easier to see when it is near long buttons. [161]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 9 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a meeting with the Language team. The meeting will be on June 10 at 14:30 (UTC). [162]

Future changes

• If you have a bot, you may need to fix it. The default continuation mode of the API for action=query will change at the end of June. [163]

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

15:21, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #162

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

• Discussions
  • Should we have a Wikidata User Group?
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Thanks to everyone who participated in the Wikidata:Menu Challenge which made Wikidata shine at A Taste of Stockholm. The live results are still up at https://wikimedia-sverige.github.io/tastydata .
  • Upcoming: Donostia-San Sebastián Wikidata Editathon
  • Upcoming: Ateliers Wikidata in Paris
  • News about Wikidata FIST
  • Review of the big interwiki link migration
  • Timeline of Christopher Lee films
  • Wikidata map - 19 months on
  • A challenge was raised to calculate the degrees of separation to Kevin Bacon. Already one routine has been produced, the next step is to use live data so that we can work on reducing the number of intermediary steps.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • ViziData has been improved significantly
  • Wikidata Visualization Challenge winners announced: first prize to ViziData.
  • New paper: Peer-production system or collaborative ontology development effort: what is Wikidata?
  • Jura1 posted some data around property usage on items about people
  • Tpt is interning at Google now to free up more content from Freebase for us. He's adding more data to the Primary Sources Tool.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: street key, relief location map, location map, McCune-Reischauer romanization, conifers.org ID, Dyntaxa ID, Project Gutenberg ID, UN/LOCODE, Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire ID, DBCS ID, Animator.ru ID, MobyGames ID, stated as, PGCH ID
• Development
  • Deployed arbitrary access on all Wikivoyage and Wikiquote projects and announced the next ones. See d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access for more.
  • More fine tuning on entity usage tracking (relevant for arbitrary access)
  • Fixed bug that sometimes allowed multiple properties to have the same label in a given language (phabricator:T102148)
  • More work on automatically creating redirects when merging items
  • More code review of the Wikidata Quality extensions (improved constraint reports and checks against 3rd party databases). Starting to look good for a first deployment.
  • The sitelinks heading hierarchy changed and includes a “Site links” heading now that is only shown on mobile. This is a DOM change needed to make Wikidata work better on mobile.
  • Started working on having PHPCS coverage for the major Wikibase.git code base to find small code issues more easily
  • Prepared Wikibase.git for the DataModel 3.0 switch
  • Released Wikibase DataModel Serialization 1.4
  • Released Wikibase Internal Serialization 1.4
  • New releases of several DataValue components, including DataValues Number 0.5, DataValues JavaScript 0.7 and ValueView 0.14.5
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 12:08, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-25

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

Recent changes

• Users have created more than 5000 articles with the new translation tool. [164]
• Editing a page is now faster. This is because some statistics about edit filters were removed. [165]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 17 June. It will be on all Wikipedias from 18 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 16 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. It will be on June 19 at 16:00 (UTC). [166]

Future changes

• Developers are working on a new tool to get and send newsletters. If you read or write a newsletter, share your ideas about it. [167]
• If you use Pywikibot, soon you won't be able to use compat anymore. [168] [169] [170]

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

15:04, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #163

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

• Discussions
  • German language Wikipedia closed its RfC on usage of Wikidata data. As a result Wikidata data can be used on the project as long as it happens through a template and it has a non-Wikimedia reference.
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Office hour on IRC. We talked about cool things that happened around Wikidata over the past 3 months got an update on upcoming developments and Freebase and more. You can read the log.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • en:South Pole Telescope is a nice example of an infobox completely filled from Wikidata.
  • Q20150617 was created on 2015-06-17
  • More data from Freebase have been added the Primary Sources Tool. There is also a page to help the mapping of Freebase properties.
  • Nice new manual for MixnMatch
  • The new nature.com/ontologies links to external ontologies and datasets; among them Wikidata.
  • National Gallery of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum now have entries for all their paintings on Wikidata thanks to wiki project Sum of all Paintings
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: takeoff and landing capability, Discogs label ID, Discogs master ID, Discogs artist ID, Encyclopaedia Metallum band id, investor, second surname in Spanish name, CulturaItalia ID, BerlPap identifier, Mapillary id, National Library of Ireland authority
  • Newest WikiProjects: Cross Items Interwikis
• Development
  • Made a small API breaking change to wbeditentity and wbgetclaims modules. Details can be seen in the commit message of https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/217885/
  • Worked more on unit support
  • Fixed an issue where you'd sometimes select the wrong value when entering a statement unintentionally (phabricator:T98471)
  • Switched the whole code base to make use of DataModel 3.0
  • The concept of “claims” no longer exists in Wikibase, as all places in the software work with statements. We are making this more and more explicit in the code.
  • The autoloading mechanism of the extension changed, see phabricator:T100813
  • More work on getting the Wikibase Quality extensions ready for deployment. They'll improve constraint checking and provide checks against 3rd party databases.
  • Special:UnconnectedPages had to be reworked (thanks Amir!) because of huge performance issues. Because of this it loses some functionality (being able to specify where the list starts and limiting the list to pages that have local interwiki links). We're working on bringing functionality back without the performance penalty.
  • Bene* created a SPARQL abstraction layer for PHP called Asparagus: https://github.com/Benestar/asparagus
  • Enabled arbitrary access on arwiki, cawiki, eswiki, huwiki, kowiki, rowiki, ukwiki, viwiki, and usage tracking on dewiki, ruwiki, cswiki and all s3 wikis. (ruwiki and cswiki get arbitrary access on June 23)
  • Finishing work on improved handling “invalid” values and statements with deleted properties.
  • Small breaking DOM change: Wikibase no longer adds its own h1 tag but uses MediaWiki's default .firstHeading element. (phabricator:T93534)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:34, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-26

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 wikis can now be used only with HTTPS. This includes the English, Russian and Chinese Wikipedias, among others. Soon all wikis will use only HTTPS for all users. [171] [172]
• You can't use HTTPS wikis with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP. You need to use another browser. [173]

Problems

• On June 15, search was broken on all wikis for several hours. [174] [175] [176]
• On June 16, images were broken for several hours on wikis that use InstantCommons. [177] [178] [179]
• Many Labs tools were broken for several days. Almost all of them are back now. They may be missing some data for the last 10 days. [180] [181] [182]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 23. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 24. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 25 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 23 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:23, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #164

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Ateliers Wikidata
  • Upcoming: Wikimania. There will be several talks and workshops related to Wikidata. Say hi at the "Ask Us Anything" session for Wikidata if you're there.
  • Reductionism
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Which geographic areas do different Wikipedias cover? How does it compare to Wikidata? Markus has a beautiful answer
  • Wikiproject Molecular Biology and AskPlatypus are shortlisted for the OpenData Award \o/ This is the award Wikidata won last year.
  • Paper on vandalism on Wikidata. Lydia is in touch with them to figure out how to best use the insights for us.
  • Reasonator got some updates: it is now using external ID formatter URLs, has monolingual string support and better social network links
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: number of children, MovieMeter movie identifier, MovieMeter director ID, Foursquare venue ID, BoxRec ID, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile catalogue number, sortkey, properties for this type, patron, Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, Google Scholar ID, Dutch Senate person ID, Trismegistos ID, Wikisource index page
  • Newest External tools: Wikidata Compare
  • Showcase items: none. Yours next week?
• Development
  • Jonas joined the team and Adam is back \o/
  • Deployed arbitrary access to ruwiki and cswiki
  • Machine readable versions (in various formats) of Wikibase entities will be advertised in their page heads as alternate link. (phabricator:T96298)
  • Fixed property label on item pages not scrolling anymore (phabricator:T94588)
  • More work on getting the Wikibase Quality extensions ready for release. The part doing constraint violation checks should go to test.wikidata.org next week. The part doing checks against 3rd party databases will still take a bit longer but is also shaping up nicely.
  • Made it possible to create items even when another user is mass-creating items (phabricator:T103796)
  • Bene* worked more on making Wikidata work nicely on mobile
  • Fixed weird issue with cursor jumping around in sitelink input field (phabricator:T103489)
  • Fixed an issue where it was not possible to edit a statement after you removed its only reference (phabricator:T103603)
  • Lydia will be traveling for much of July. Expect her to be a bit less responsive during that time.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 18:15, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-27

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

• Long lines in code blocks now look better. [183]
• You can now see graphs in VisualEditor. [184]
• When you read a page on the mobile site, you can now see a link to go to its talk page. [185]
• The code coloring tool has changed. You can now use many more languages. It now also works on mobile. [186] [187] [188]
• You can look at a new site to learn how to reuse data from Wikimedia sites. [189]

Problems

• JavaScript was broken on some wikis due to a code error. VisualEditor and other tools that use JavaScript were broken. [190]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 30. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 1. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 2 (calendar).
• You can now use a tool in VisualEditor to add and edit code in color. [191]
• When you edit a sentence in the Translate tool, it can show you older translations. They help you save time if they look alike. The older translations should now work better. If you see problems, you should report them. [192]
• If you are an admin or have other special rights, you now need a strong password. [193]
• Bot and JavaScript coders: The old continuation mode of the API for action=query doesn't work any more. [194]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 30 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future

• When you create a new account, it will also create one on Meta-Wiki and mediawiki.org. [195]

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

15:56, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #165

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

• Discussions
  • Discussion about Atheism and the religion property.
  • Discussion about the Verifiability of data as a policy.
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Upcoming: Wikimania. There will be several talks and workshops related to Wikidata. Say hi at the "Ask Us Anything" session for Wikidata if you're there.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • A new database report lists people categorized as dead in Wikipedia, but lacking Property:P570 (date of death). It's updated several times during the day. There are about 20 to 30 new entries each day. There is currently some backlog from the Arabic, Marathi, and Thai Wikipedias. Items updated first in Wikidata wont appear in the report. They are listed directly in Wikidata's recent deaths report.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: RSL editions, Open Hub ID, number of children, MovieMeter movie identifier, MovieMeter director ID
• Development
  • Adam wrote a blog post on the improvement of the data after one year and GeneaWiki
  • After the next deployment, Special:ItemDisambiguation will match aliases and be case insensitive.
  • Improved details of matches in the entity suggester (wbsearchentities api module)
  • Deployed the WikibaseQuality and WikibaseQualityConstraints extensions to test.wikidata.org
  • Fixed the layout of long qualifier names
  • JSON dumps are now automatically copied to labs
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:16, 4 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-28

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

• On the mobile site, you now see more information when you search for a page. It now shows the description from Wikidata. [196]

Problems

• The code of long pages is not colored any more. You may see this problem on the pages of long gadgets. [197]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 7. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 8. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 9 (calendar).
• The "Page information" tool shows how many users watch the page. You can now see how many are active. [198] [199]
• You can now translate articles into English with the new translation tool. [200]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 7 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:13, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #166

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Slides on Primary Sources Tool and Wikidata introduction (in Spanish) for the Donostia-San Sebastián Wikidata Editathon
  • Presentation about Wikidata at the Axel Springer Hack Day 2015
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikiresearch looked into the coverage of the moon by geotags in Wikidata
  • Wikiresearch published a visualization of the relationship between nationality and occupation based on Wikidata's data
  • Which zoo has polar bears? Wikidata attempts to answer the question here. Work in progress.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: MCN code, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Anime News Network anime ID, Anime News Network manga ID, Anime News Network company ID, Anime News Network person ID, FSK film rating, PolSys ID, Righteous Among The Nations ID, USDA NDB number, lesarchivesduspectacle ID, INEGI locality identifier
• Development
  • The Wikidata Quality extension (constraint reports per item) was deployed. You can now use d:Special:ConstraintReport to see the result for different items. This is for example the constraint report for the item cat (Q142).
  • 8 million additional statements from Freebase were made available through the Primary sources tool
  • Moving towards having a single edit button to edit references along with the value they belong to.
  • Bene continued working on phasing out the deprecated Entity superclass and making more entity types possible.
  • More work on phasing out a deprecated serializer implementation we still use in certain places.
  • Further work on the new RDF export.
  • PHPCS is now used on each change in Wikibase to ensure the code fulfils certain code quality standards.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 11:03, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-29

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

Recent changes

• You can now see a list of pages with errors in code coloring. [201]

Problems

• There was a problem with editing on Thursday. Some tools like bots and VisualEditor were broken on all wikis for 10 minutes. [202]
• There was a problem with images on Thursday. They were broken on all wikis for 15 minutes. [203]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 15. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 16 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join a technical meeting at Wikimania in Mexico City this week. [204]

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

15:06, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #167

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

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Nikki
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Right now: Wikimania
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Magnus made some new tools:
    • list of scientists on Wikidata born after 1950 with no image, grouped by employer. Check your university!
    • list of scientists on Wikidata born after 1950 with no ORCID iD, grouped by employer. Ditto!
    • an InfoBitt replacement
    • a tool you can use to match up Wikipedia articles without an item to either an existing item or a create a new one if none exists
    • plus Mix'N'Match got new datasets you can help match up with Wikidata
  • P2000 was created.
  • Some presentations at Wikimania related to Wikidata have detailed slides online:
    • WikiProject Sum of All Paintings
    • Templates are dead! Long live templates!, technical presentation on the function and future of template syntax
    • Future of structured documents: VisualEditor, Citations and Wikidata, oh my!
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: CPDL ID, UNESCO language status, UCI code, Facebook Places ID, parliament.uk bio link, medical specialty, AllMusic composition ID, TeX string, Plazi ID, LPSN URL, species kept, Encyclopaedia Metallum artist ID, Delarge ID
  • New task forces: Linguistics
• Development
  • Attending Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City right now, meeting awesome people that already use or want to know everything about Wikidata.
  • After the next deployment, redirects will be automatically created when merging items.
  • Special:UnconnectedPages can now be queried via the query API, thanks to Ladsgroup.
  • Migrating away from an older serializer to the DataModel Serialization component.
  • Worked on a new time parser that can parse formats like M/D/Y, Y M D and so on.
  • Fixed a bug where a value could not be edited when save failed.
  • Made the snak type, badge and rank selectors position themselves after resizing the browser window and introduced a possibility to collapse the sitelinks sections.
  • Worked on a change in editing to be able to edit a statement and it’s references in one step.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 15:48, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-30

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 this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 21. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 22. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 23 (calendar).
• You now see more warnings in the image viewer. They tell you to be careful when using the image, for example if it shows a person. [205]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 21 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Soon you won't be able to use MathJax to display math. [206]

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

03:05, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #168

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

• Discussions
  • Successful request for adminship: Nikki
  • Open request for oversightership: Sjoerddebruin
  • Closed request for comments: Administrative divisions and populated places, Given names and surnames
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata, coming soon to a menu near you!
  • Past: Wikimania
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Upload of 4.2M new statements from Freebase in the Primary Sources tool.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: NALT id, Instagram username, Twitter username, Revised Romanisation, CPDL ID, UNESCO language status, UCI code, Facebook Places ID
• Development
  • Continued migrating away from an older serializer to the DataModel Serialization component.
  • Released Wikibase DataModel Serialization 1.7.0
  • Depreacting the parameter ungroupedlist in the api modules GetClaims and GetEntities
  • Tweaking the sitelink input
  • Changing the display of item selector results
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:49, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-31

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

Recent changes

• You can now use redirects to link to JavaScript pages. [207]
• You cannot use the compact user bar any more. [208]
• You can change your options to see bigger images. [209]
• You can watch short videos about how to use VisualEditor. [210]
• You can now edit pages linked in "what links here" more easily. [211]

Problems

• There was a problem with some Lua modules on July 22 and 23. Some pages using them did not list them in "what links here". You can fix those pages with a null edit: edit and save the page without making any change.
• There was a problem with the abuse filter page on big wikis on July 23. It was due to a code error. [212]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 29. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 30 (calendar).
• JavaScript authors: You cannot use wgNoticeUserData to get edit counts anymore. [213]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 28 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:05, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #169

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

• Discussions
  • Open requests for Oversight: Sjoerddebruin
  • Enable Flow on Wikidata?
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Early version of a reconcile API for Wikidata by Magnus
  • PagePile: a new tool by Magnus
  • Mix-n-Match got a number of new catalogs and now shows a thin red line in front of a catalog that does not yet have a property on Wikidata
  • 1.700 biographical items without gender, but with image. Go go go!
  • Interested in art movements? Check out this
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: MoMA artwork id, Facebook ID, cuisine, Cooper-Hewitt Person ID, Exif make, Exif model, IPNI publication ID, ZooBank publication ID, ZooBank author ID, Catalogus Professorum Halensis, NALT id
  • Showcase items: László Krasznahorkai (Q512062)
• Development
  • Minor fixes to property edit mode
  • Some fixes for the cucumber test errors
  • Released Wikibase DataModel 4.0
  • Released Wikibase DataModel Services 1.0
  • Continued work to migrate away from old serializers in Wikibase Lib to those in WikibaseDataModelSerialization.
  • Working on scripts for importing entities from another Wikibase instance (e.g. Wikidata), so that development instances can have some sample data.
  • Fixed the counting of references
  • Changed style of the Entitytermsview inputs
  • Entity Selector displays alias in brackets behind label
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 19:29, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-32

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 ContentTranslation extension has been updated:
  • You can now type in list paragraphs on wikis with right-to-left scripts. [214]
  • Some user interface updates changed how details in the ContentTranslation extension look. [215] [216] [217] [218]
• The error page you see when the sites are not working is now simpler and easier to read. It also shows the Wikimedia logo. [219]
• MediaWiki now supports redirects for CSS pages. [220]
• Bots can't guess captchas unlimited times anymore. [221]

Problems

• There was a problem with thumbnails on wikis with local images on July 24 and 25. It was due to a code error. [222]
• We can't search by file type on Wikimedia wikis now. [223]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 5. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 6 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 4 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:51, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #170

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

• Discussions
  • Successful request for oversight rights: Sjoerddebruin
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikimedia UK is organizing a Wikidata training session. You can sign up here.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Talk pages on Wikidata can now be converted to use Flow. You can request migrating your talk page at d:Wikidata:Flow.
  • Mix-n-Match got a bunch of new catalogs for you to match up with Wikidata. Currently matching is happening at about 500 items per day. Pretty sweet :)
  • @happybirthdayauthors is a new Twitter account posting reading suggestions based on Wikidata data.
  • Arbitrary access is rolling out to a large number of wikis over the next two weeks.
  • Duplicity can help you match up unlinked Wikipedia articles to a Wikidata item.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Erdős number, worldfootball.net ID, AllMovie artist ID, Teuchos ID, isomeric SMILES, Catalogus Professorum Academiae Groninganae id, Hansard ID
• Development
  • Made some small changes to the style of the edit warning and sitelinks so they are easier to notice and understand
  • Added error messages for Special:GoToLinkedPage and Special:ItemByTitle so you get a useful message in case no result is found
  • The Entity Selector now displays alias in brackets behind label
  • The number of entities loaded via the {{#property:…}} parser function and via Lua will be reported in the “Parser profiling data” (which can be found below a page preview or within the Html of a page)
  • Prepared for next rounds of arbitrary access rollout
  • Investigated growing lag of dispatching of changes to Wikipedia and co. We'll need to investigate further and change things so the lag between an edit on Wikidata and it being send to the Wikipedias and other projects is not too high.
  • Added the property ID to Special:ListProperties
  • Moved two extensions (Wikidata.org and WikimediaBadges) from Github to Gerrit. More will follow.
  • We'd like to drop a database table. Discussion is ongoing.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 18:20, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-33

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

• MediaWiki can now hide the signature button when you edit a content page. [224]
• The "Your preferences have been saved" message has changed. You can now see more easily what was saved when you change preferences several times. [225]
• You can now play Ogg video files in some browsers that don't support this format. This solution uses JavaScript and works on desktop browsers only for now. It will work on mobile later. [226]
• You can now use the same tools to edit style in VisualEditor on mobile as in desktop browsers. [227]
• It is now easier to see if there is a JavaScript error in a user or site script. [228]
• JavaScript authors:
  • You can no longer use the Sajax library. You can see a list of pages to fix. [229] [230]
  • You can no longer use document.write on Wikimedia wikis. You can see a list of pages to fix. [231] [232]
• The content translation tool now works better. It is easier to use math, and useless tags are no longer added. [233]

Problems

• More edits have been rejected due to loss of session data lately. This is now fixed. [234]
• Importing a Lua module sometimes didn't work. This is now fixed. [235]
• Text was sometimes lost in the content translation tool. One part of the problem is now fixed. [236]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 12. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 13 (calendar).
• UploadWizard is getting a new look. The look of buttons and checkboxes has already changed. This week, UploadWizard gets a new date picker. The other text fields will change soon. [237]
• You can now test VisualEditor on mobile devices of all sizes. [238]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 11 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Some things in the watchlist will get a new look. [239]

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

14:57, 10 August 2015 (UTC)