Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week.
MediaWiki's JavaScript system will now allow async/await syntax in gadgets and user scripts. Gadget authors should remember that users' browsers may not support it, so it should be used appropriately.
The deployment of "Add a link" announced last week was postponed. It will resume this week.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call November 28, 2023: As a satellite event for Data Modeling Days, we will facilitate community discussion around data modeling in Wikidata for library collections in a variety of formats, including people, books, serials, scholarly articles, rare materials, music, media, and realia. Agenda
Linked Open Data and Wikidata < Alan Ang (WMDE) talks about the importance of Linked Open Data and forming mutually beneficial partnerships between the Foundation and Institutions.
Notebooks
Explore new ways of visualising your data with a Circular Dendrogam, illustrated here with Association Football players broken down by Country and Team.
Tool of the week
Harvest Templates - is a tool that helps transfer data from Wikimedia projects to Wikidata.
User:MichaelSchoenitzer/Updown - is a userscript used for faster navigation. If there are a lot of values for one property it will add arrows that allow you to jump to the first/last value.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
WMDE is researching ways to improve the editing experience in different languages and would love to hear your feedback. We would like to talk to a few of you in online interviews to learn about your experiences, expectations, and concerns. Please let us know in this sign-up form if you are interested in taking part.
The Research team at WMF is running a second labeling campaign to evaluate the Revert Risk model for Wikidata. This is part of ongoing work on creating a new generation of Machine Learning models to support patrolling work on Wikimedia projects. Please help by going to this link, and labeling each revision in one of these three categories: Keep, Not Sure, Revert. Notice that "Not Sure" should be used in all cases where the Keep or Revert labels are not clear to you.
COR SEM (The Danish central word registry identifier)
UPOC ({{TranslateThis
| de = Ist eine eindeutige id zur Identifizierung von Organisationen/Sendungen/... zu einem Dienstleister.
<!-- | xx = Beschreibungen in anderen Sprachen -->
}})
WikiProject Heritage Collections - The aim of the present project is to create the world’s most comprehensive high quality database of archival fonds and heritage collections (including contemporary scientific collections or documentation holdings) and to ensure the interlinking of respective catalogues, finding aids, or collection databases with Wikidata.
WikiProject Events and Role Frames - The primary aims of WikiProject Events and Role Frames is to define a set of properties that consistently model event occurrences and their participants; to fill gaps in Wikidata regarding items for events and actions; and to encourage use of the proposed model and newly introduced items across Wikidata.
We continued to make a lot more language codes available (phab:341409)
EntitySchemas: We are experimenting with how to work around some technical blockers for the new datatype
Wikibase REST API: We've been working on the ability to remove an Item's label in a specific language and modify the descriptions on a Property (phab:T342981, phab:T342981)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Quechua Wikipedia, Romansh Wikipedia, Romani Wikipedia, Rundi Wikipedia, Aromanian Wikipedia, Tarandíne Wikipedia, Rusyn Wikipedia, Kinyarwanda Wikipedia, Sanskrit Wikipedia, Sakha Wikipedia, Santali Wikipedia, Sardinian Wikipedia, Sicilian Wikipedia, Scots Wikipedia, Sindhi Wikipedia, Northern Sami Wikipedia, Sango Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, Sinhala Wikipedia, Slovak Wikipedia, Slovenian Wikipedia, Samoan Wikipedia, Somali Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Serbian Wikipedia, Sranan Tongo Wikipedia, Swati Wikipedia, Southern Sotho Wikipedia, Saterland Frisian Wikipedia, Sundanese Wikipedia, Silesian Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Tulu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tetum Wikipedia, Tajik Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkmen Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia, Tswana Wikipedia, Tongan Wikipedia, Tok Pisin Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Tsonga Wikipedia, Tatar Wikipedia, Twi Wikipedia, Tahitian Wikipedia, Tuvinian Wikipedia, Udmurt Wikipedia, Uyghur Wikipedia, Uzbek Wikipedia, Venda Wikipedia, Venetian Wikipedia, Veps Wikipedia, West Flemish Wikipedia, Volapük Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally.
The Vector 2022 skin will have some minor visual changes to drop-down menus, column widths, and more. These changes were added to four Wikipedias last week. If no issues are found, these changes will proceed to all wikis this week. These changes will make it possible to add new menus for readability and dark mode. Learn more.
Data Modelling Days, from November 30th to December 2nd: 3 days of online events to address data modelling challenges, discuss how to improve the way we structure data together, and discover the point of view of external reusers. Feel free to have a look at the program (under construction) and to sign up as a participant.
Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour November 20th, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to. The seventh Wikidata Working Hour will cover the Author Disambiguator tool, which helps users assign authors to articles.During the session we will demonstrate how to use the tool on an author who was created during a previous working hour, and another who doesn't exist in Wikidata yet. After the demonstration, participants are encouraged to try the tool themselves during the rest of the working hour. This session will build on the work done in previous Working Hours by connecting authors to the articles they have written. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page
ItWikiCon '23 (Italian) was hosted in Bari, Italy between the 17th - 19th November. Check the Programme for details on sessions and check for recordings or slidedecks of presentations.
GLAM Wiki 2023 took place in Montevideo, Uruguay. There were several Wikidata-related sessions some of which are linked in the Videos section.
Can you trust Wikidata? - is a paper exploring Wikidata's veracity and trustability for providing values to Knowledge Graphs. Written by V. Santos et al.
User-level gender statistics for Wikipedia - a tool that computes the number of articles created by gender has been repaired after some months of unavailability. It relies on xtools and P21 property.
Luthor - tool for finding usage examples from Wikisource and adding them to lexemes on Wikidata.
WikiProject Manuscripts - This WikiProject coordinates efforts on Wikidata to gather and curate structured data on manuscripts.
WikiProject Grove Hall Black Women Lead - aims to shed light on the lives and stories of Black women leaders who have shaped Boston’s history from the colonial era to the present day.
Newest database reports: User:Pasleim/projectmerge/enwiki-svwiki - 3875 merge candidates in English Wikipedia and Swedish Wikipedia based on same sitelink name.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Last week, users who previously visited Meta-Wiki or Wikimedia Commons and then became logged out on those wikis could not log in again. The problem is now resolved.
Last week, some pop-up dialogs and menus were shown with the wrong font size. The problem is now resolved.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).
Future changes
Reference Previews are coming to many wikis as a default feature. They are popups for references, similar to the PagePreviews feature. You can opt out of seeing them. If you are using the gadgets Reference Tooltips or Navigation Popups, you won’t see Reference Previews. Deployment is planned for November 22, 2023.
Canary (also known as heartbeat) events will be produced into Wikimedia event streams from December 11. Streams users are advised to filter out these events, by discarding all events where meta.domain == "canary". Updates to Pywikibot or wikimedia-streams will discard these events by default.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: S8321414 (RfP scheduled to end after 13 November 2023 14:50 UTC)
New requests for permissions/Bot:
DiFoolBot 2 (Task: import VIAF ID based on Union List of Artist Names ID)
KizuleBot (Task: Adding sitelinks to Serbian Wikipedia for maintenance categories (see contributions of account) based on items for English Wikipedia's ones)
KormiSKbot (Task: Linking newly created pages on SKWiki to the appropriate Wikidata items.)
Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call November 14, 2023: We will hear from Diego Saez-Trumper on Wikidata Revert Risk and Annotool. Agenda
Latin America in Wikidata Challenge (Spanish) < Nov. 14 - Dec. 14. Play the game and help highlight the region hosting the GLAM Wiki conference! (Prizes available).
Edit-a-thon "Women in sciences" < 17 Nov. 12:00 - 18 Nov. 03:00 (UTC). A live edit-a-thon to improve the quality and variety of articles of women who have won the prestigious L'Oréal-UNESCO National Award "For Women in Science". (Prizes available).
Language community meetings: A new initiative by WMF language team to organize quarterly gatherings to encourage collaboration among individuals and communities interested in language-related technical topics. First meeting: Friday, November 17, 2023, 16:00 to 17:00 (UTC)
Glam Wiki Program - 16 - 18 November, Montevideo, Uruguay. Want to attend in person? - Register here. Wikidata Related Sessions:
Knowledge Graphs - Foundations and Applications course by Prof. Dr. Harald Sack. October 11, 2023 - November 21, 2023. Enrol here if you have not done so yet.
GSOC ‘23: Automating Area Management in MusicBrainz <-- Prathamesh, in their Google Summer of Code project, developed a data pipeline to automate the synchronization of area metadata between MusicBrainz and Wikidata.
Papers
Wikidata for authority control: sharing museum knowledge with the world <-- The project “Usable Authorities for Data-driven Cultural Heritage Research” aims to link museum authority data to Wikidata, enhancing the visibility, accessibility, and relevance of information across different museum collections, and encouraging cultural heritage institutions in Sweden to contribute to and utilize the Wikimedia platforms.
The 4th Wikidata Workshop for the scientific Wikidata community happened on 07 November 2023. You can find a full list of presented papers here
Videos
Connecting Entomological Collectors ECN2023 <-- A presentation for the Entomological Collections Network 2023 conference by Siobhan Leachman, this presentation explains how Wikidata can be used to create an identifier for entomological collectors, empowering the collation & linking of biographical data as well as the ability to link to other databases & catalogs relating to those collectors.
Wikidata projects in Wikimedia Spain <-- part of the online sessions organized by Wikimedia España to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Wikidata. In this session, Ángel Obregón, a member of Wikimedia España, presents some of the projects driven by Wikidata by the members of WMES.
Notebooks:
Subclass of... <-- Wikidata's ontology is complex. This tool aims at finding if an item is a subclass of another one.
The Wednesday Index <-- A longitudinal analysis of gender diversity in Wikipedia articles.
Tool of the week
OpenFlights.org is now getting some of its airline data from Wikidata. It is a free open-source tool that allows you to log, map, calculate, and share your flights and trips.
WikiProject IDEA - This Wikiproject serves as a working group and process documentation archive for the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), a project generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and in development at Bard College and Yale University.
WikiProject Interwiki - The goal of this project is linking Wikidata items with wiki articles outside of the Wikimedia ecosystem. Niche wikis frequently offer more in-depth content compared to general online dictionary articles, although their quality can vary significantly.
WikiProject SrpKor - The main aim of this project is building Wikidata entities for the novels from SrpKor: Corpus of the contemporary Serbian language.
WikiProject Echinodermata - A repository for information pertaining to the NSF Grant Echinoderm Project.
Development
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the new endpoints for POST /entities/items/{item_id}/aliases/{language_code} (phab:T335842) and DELETE /entities/items/{item_id}/descriptions/{lang_code} (phab:T342986)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on the new data type for linking to EntitySchemas, working on overcoming architectural issues.
Language codes: We continued work towards allowing many more languages by default for Wikibase Lexeme and monolingual text statements. This will remove the need for a lot of requests for new language codes to be added. (phab:T341409)
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
In the Vector 2022 skin, the default font-size of a number of navigational elements (tagline, tools menu, navigational links, and more) has been increased slightly to match the font size used in page content.
Problems
Last week, there was a problem displaying some recent edits on a few wikis, for 1-6 hours. The edits were saved but not immediately shown. This was due to a database problem.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).
The Growth team will reassign newcomers from former mentors to the currently active mentors. They have also changed the notification language to be more user-friendly.
Upcoming: Data Modelling Days, November 30-December 2. You can propose a session until November 19. If you are running another event or meetup and would like to connect it to the Data Modelling Days, you can add it to the satellite events section.
Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web is a collection of preceedings from the 5th Iberoamerican Conference and 4th Indo-American Conference, KGSWC 2023, Nov. 13–15. By F. Ortiz-Rodriguez, B. Villazón-Terrazas, S. Tiwari & C. Bobed.
linguistic family of place name (Relates directly a placename to its original language family. It's not the language in which the toponym is written, but the language from which the word (place name) comes from.)
according to (to be used together with P248 if the statement is taken from an aggregator rather than directly from the source)
counterexample (qualifier for deprecated P279 statements; example instance or subclass of the item class for which a "subclass of" statement does not hold (alias: "item belonging to the subject class but not the value class"))
Newest WikiProjects: Source Reliability "is an effort to identify and aggregate online sources of assessments of the reliability and credibility of sources".
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We have implemented the endpoints for PATCH /entities/items/{item_id}/aliases (phab:T337371), PATCH /entities/properties/{property_id}/aliases (phab:T342982) and PATCH /entities/properties/{property_id}/labels (phab:T342980)
We started working on the new endpoints for POST /entities/items/{item_id}/aliases/{language_code} (phab:T335842) and DELETE /entities/items/{item_id}/descriptions/{lang_code} (phab:T342986)
Language codes:
We made Special:NewLexeme more likely to guess the spelling variant for you by changing the Property we use to get the language code. Now you will see the spelling variant input pop up less often. (phab:T349652)
We started work towards allowing many more languages by default for Wikibase Lexeme and monolingual text statements. This will remove the need for a lot of requests for new language codes to be added. (phab:T341409)
Query Service UI: We’ve fixed a small issue in the Query Service UI that was introduced when updating CSS variables. Content of selected cells in the query result should be readable again. (phab:T350153)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on the new data type for linking to EntitySchemas, working on overcoming architectural issues.
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 Structured Content team, as part of its project of improving UploadWizard on Commons, made some UX improvements to the upload step of choosing own vs not own work (T347590), as well as to the licensing step for own work (T347756).
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (calendar).
Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 2 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for many languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more.
Starting November 1, the impact module (Special:Impact) will be upgraded by the Growth team. The new impact module shows newcomers more data regarding their impact on the wiki. It was tested by a few wikis during the last few months.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Welcome to the 600th Weekly Summary!
Lydia initiated the weekly newsletter at the start of the Wikidata project, before it even went live, to keep the community in the loop about the developments, the new projects and tools. Léa carried on the newsletter in 2016 and then it was my turn in 2020. The newsletter has been going strong for eleven years, with its content powered by the community, and delivered every week without fail. Thank you to everyone who helped fill in the different sections of the Weekly Summary thus far ❤️ --Mohammed
Today it is time to celebrate Wikidata’s 11th birthday. Let’s take a look back at the past year and what’s coming.
Wikidata’s world - map of Wikidata Items with a geocoordinate
There are now over 12.200 amazing people who are actively editing on Wikidata - 3000 of them even making more than 100 edits a month ♥️ Thank you! Without you Wikidata wouldn’t be what it is today. Thank you for helping give more people more access to more knowledge every single day. This year also marks the year we can welcome a new sister to the Wikimedia projects: Wikifunctions is live, letting us all geek out on functions in anticipation of Abstract Wikipedia. Another big milestone was Wikibase Cloud coming out of private beta. Now you can more easily run your own Wikibase and collect and maintain data that doesn’t fit into Wikidata. 2023 was also the year when the efforts of Wikidata editors were recognized across the Wikimedia movement with the awarding of the Wikimedian of the Year award to Taufik Rosman and the Wikimedia Laureate award to Siobhan Leachman. Over the coming year I want us to find ways how we can bring more people, who are already editing a bit here and there, closer to the community and help them find their place in our community. If you are one of them and have not found your place yet, check out a WikiProject related to your interests. Wikidata has something for everyone 😉
Wikidata now has over 106 Million Items and nearly 1.2 Million Lexemes. We are closing in on 2 Billion edits, making about 20 Million edits per month. All this content is used to create useful, quirky, educational or just fun applications that wouldn’t be possible without Wikidata and all the work you put into it. Check out Notable People for example. Over the coming year we want to make that even easier by building better APIs, lessening the strain on the Query Service, doing more outreach to developers as well as making our data more usable by ironing out ontology issues. In addition there will be increased focus on improving how the other Wikimedia projects integrate Wikidata. With the opening up of Wikibase Cloud we will hopefully also see many new Wikibases pop up that cover more specialized data or be used as playgrounds to prepare data for Wikidata. I am looking forward to a growing Wikibase Ecosystem and excited about more Linked Open Data becoming available to the world, with Wikidata being an entryway to it all.
And last but not least: if you want to learn a bit more about the history and backstory of Wikidata, then you might like Wikidata: The Making Of by Denny, Markus and me.
List of presents gathered by the community for Wikidata's eleventh birthday
Luthor is a multi-lingual tool for adding usage examples to lexemes on Wikidata, from sentences found on Wikisource in the same language. (by Asaf Bartov)
সংকলক একটি সরঞ্জাম যেটা দিয়ে উইকিসংকলনের লেখাগুলির উইকিউপাত্ত আইটেম অনুসারে সে লেখাগুলিকে উন্নত ভাবে অনুসন্ধান করা যায়। - Sangkalak is a tool with which Wikisource works can be searched more readily, using the Wikidata items for those works. (present from Mahir256) (by মাহির২৫৬-এর উপহার)
Creating new Lexemes? For a lot more languages you now no longer need to provide a spelling variant when creating a new Lexeme, making it even easier to contribute data about words in your language. (present from the development team)
The Mismatch Finder, the tool to help review mismatches between Wikidata and other data sources now also has support for mismatches on qualifiers. This allows it to be useful also for issues that are in the data in qualifiers. (present from the development team)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call October 31, 2023: We will hear from Darnelle Melvin, Cory Lampert, and Andre Hulet, University of Nevada-Las Vegas Libraries, on WireframeVG: A Search and Discovery Application for Wikidata Projects. Agenda
How cultural institutions use Wikidata (How cultural heritage institutions sharing their collection data, including implementing Wikidata projects, batch uploading datasets to Wikidata, and how to share successes to a broader audience) - Jackie Rubashkin, Metadata Technician, Barack Obama Presidential Library; Michelle van Lanschot, Project Coordinator at Wikimedia-Netherlands; William Blueher, Associate Museum Librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Will Kent, Wiki Education
(in Chinese) Wikidata基礎編輯教學 (Wikidata basic editor) - Conference for Open Source Coders, Users & Promoters (COSCUP) 2023
Notable People is a map project by Topi Tjukanov that showing birthplaces of the most "notable people" around the world. It uses the combined data of Wikipedia and Wikidata from the paper's "a cross-verified database of notable people, 3500 BC-2018 AD" by Morgane Laouenan, Palaash Bhargava, Jean-Benoît Eyméoud, Olivier Gergaud, Guillaume Plique & Etienne Wasmer. The data shows only one person for each unique geographic location with the highest notability rank.
Wikimedia Research Fund Update update. "You can apply for research funds (USD 2K-50K) until December 15, 2023. While all research proposals related to Wikimedia projects are welcome, we particularly encourage research studies on medium to small size languages and communities, as well as in low resourced languages and projects."
The Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects team is investigating the different ways Wikidata is used in the sister projects. We would like to speak with you about your experiences integrating or connecting Wikidata, if you'd like to tell us, please sign up for an interview on our project page or on our Registration Form.
Wikidata:WikiProject Academic Publisher - a project to display open access shares (among others based on publishers) at the Austrian Datahub for Open Access Negotiations and Monitoring
Development
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing the work on making it possible to remove a description in a given language from an Item, modify the label of an Item and add aliases to an Item (phab:T342986, phab:T342980, phab:T335842)
Lexicographical data: We switched the Property that is used to pre-select the spelling variant on the Special:NewLexeme page from P218 (ISO 639-1 code) to P305 (IETF language tag) to make use of the latter’s larger coverage. (phab:T348923)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing to work on addressing the feedback from the testing of the new datatype in the test system.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. 
MediaWiki's JavaScript system will now allow 
