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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.
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. [1][2]
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. [3]
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
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. [4]
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. [5]
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. [6][7]
Following a motion, the contentious topic designation of Prem Rawat has been struck. Actions previously taken using this contentious topic designation are still in force.
Following several motions, multiple topic areas are no longer designated as a contentious topic. These contentious topic designations were from the Editor conduct in e-cigs articles, Liancourt Rocks, Longevity, Medicine, September 11 conspiracy theories, and Shakespeare authorship question cases.
Following a motion, remedies 3.1 (All related articles under 1RR whenever the dispute over naming is concerned), 6 (Stalemate resolution) and 30 (Administrative supervision) of the Macedonia 2 case have been rescinded.
Following a motion, remedy 6 (One-revert rule) of the The Troubles case has been amended.
An arbitration case named Industrial agriculture has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case close 8 November.
Miscellaneous
The Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in November 2023, with 700+ drafts pending reviews for in the last 4 months or so. In addition to the AfC participants, all administrators and New Page Patrollers can conduct reviews using the helper script, Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!
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.
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. [12]
Last week, some pop-up dialogs and menus were shown with the wrong font size. The problem is now resolved. [13]
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. [14]
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.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [15][16]
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. [17][18][19]
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. [20]
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
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. [21][22]
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. [23]
The deployment of "Add a link" announced last week was postponed. It will resume this week.
Around 250 war-threatened architectural monuments documented (German) - Wikidata, Wikibase and Commons are helping preserve and plan the restoration of culturally-significant Monuments damaged or destroyed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
ZotWb < export records in a Zotero group library to a custom Wikibase, prepare datasets to send to OpenRefine, feed OpenRefine reconciliaton results back to the Wikibase. Wikidata is envolved in the entity reconciliation. Here's a short explanation and demo video Tool is written and provided by David Lindermann with support from WMF Rapid Grant.
Montana Plant Life URL (URL for a plant family, genus, or species on the Montana Plant Life website)
event role (item that describes a role in an event class)
role in event (event class for which the item describes a role)
selectional preference ((to be used only with the subclasses of Q_event_role) an item that plays this role in an event instance should descend from this item via a combination of P31 and P279)
event arguments and types (item that plays a role in an event instance; used with a qualifier "argument type")
BnF archives and manuscripts ID (identifier for a manuscript in the archives and manuscripts catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). Do not include the initial "cc")
clerked for (this person has held a clerkship with the judge)
battery life (the length of time a device can continue to work before it needs its battery to be recharged)
Showcase Lexemes: läsa - 'read' about this Swedish word with many pronounciations and grammatical features.
Feel free to suggest next week's Showcase Item and Lexeme!
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the endpoint for removing an Item's label in a specific language (phab:T335841) and the endpoint for modifying descriptions on a Property (phab:T342981)
We are working on the endpoint for adding aliases in a given language for a Property (phab:T343721) and removing a Property's label in a given language (phab:T342983)
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on moving the tool over to the new design system Codex
We adjusted the styling for the values of monolingual text statements to make the language easier to distinguish from the value (phab:T280774)
mul language code: We made some final adjustments to get it ready for testing.
Lexemes: We are adding a license note for anon users when editing a Lexeme’s lemma, a Form or Sense (phab:T343999)
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 spacing between paragraphs on Vector 2022 has been changed from 7px to 14px to match the size of the text. This will make it easier to distinguish paragraphs from sentences. [24]
The "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is working again. You no longer need to switch to source editing to edit {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords. [25]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [26][27]
Registration & Scholarship applications are now open for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 that will take place from 3–5 May in Tallinn, Estonia. Scholarship applications are open until 5 January 2024.
Following a talk page discussion, the Administrators' accountability policy has been updated to note that while it is considered best practice for administrators to have notifications (pings) enabled, this is not mandatory. Administrators who do not use notifications are now strongly encouraged to indicate this on their user page.
Arbitration
Following a motion, the Extended Confirmed Restriction has been amended, removing the allowance for non-extended-confirmed editors to post constructive comments on the "Talk:" namespace. Now, non-extended-confirmed editors may use the "Talk:" namespace solely to make edit requests related to articles within the topic area, provided that their actions are not disruptive.
The Arbitration Committee has announced a call for Checkusers and Oversighters, stating that it will currently be accepting applications for CheckUser and/or Oversight permissions at any point in the year.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: LccnBot (Task: Adds P244 to bibliographic entities base on library authority records.)
New request for comments: Duplicate References Data Model and UI < During Data Modelling Days '23, 2 proposals emerged trying to answer the question of how to handle duplicate References on Wikidata Items.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call December 12, 2023: Several members of the Chinese Culture and Heritage Wikidata group will provide an overview of the group's Wikidata projects as well as the challenges they have encountered. Agenda
Data-SHS Bordeaux Week: Processing and Analyzing Quantitative Data in Human and Social Sciences 2023. Dec. 11 - 15, Bordeaux, FR.
OpenRefine - a open source tool for working with data < This session explores the advantages of using OR to wrangle, clean, transform and standardise data for Wikidata. Presented by Jinoy Tom Jacob at the IndiaFOSS3.0 Conference.
QLever SPARQl Engine < If you attended Data Modeling Days '23, you may have seen an extraordinary Session given by Hannah Bast and Johannes Kalmbach showcasing the power and advantages of the QLever engine. QLever can handle queries that cause the WDQS to timeout or allowing Federated queries and Geospatial!
(QLEver has already featured in Tool of the Week but we wanted to showcase it again after experiencing it at DMD '23)
counterexample (qualifier for deprecated P279 statements; example instance or subclass of the item class for which a "subclass of" statement does not hold)
WikiProject Heritage Collections: 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 Source Reliability: is an effort to identify and aggregate online sources of assessments of the reliability and credibility of sources.
Wikibase REST API: We continued work on the routes for adding aliases in a given language for a Property (phab:T343721) and removing a Property's label in a given language (phab:T342983)
Monolingual text values can now use many more languages than before. We’re still working on doing the same for Lexemes. (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
On Wikimedia Commons, there are some minor user-interface improvements for the "choosing own vs not own work" step in the UploadWizard. This is part of the Structured Content team's project of improving UploadWizard on Commons. [29][30]
Problems
There was a problem showing the Newcomer homepage feature with the "impact module" and their page-view graphs, for a few days in early December. This has now been fixed. [31][32]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 December. It will be on all wikis from 14 December (calendar). [33][34]
Future changes
The 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 5 January 2024, and has an associated privacy statement.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2024 because of the holidays.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 December. It will be on all wikis from 21 December (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [35][36]
Starting December 18, it won't be possible to activate Structured Discussions on a user's own talk page using the Beta feature. The Beta feature option remains available for users who want to deactivate Structured Discussions. This is part of Structured Discussions' deprecation work. [37]
There will be full support for redirects in the Module namespace. The "Move Page" feature will leave an appropriate redirect behind, and such redirects will be appropriately recognized by the software (e.g. hidden from Special:UnconnectedPages). There will also be support for manual redirects. [38]
Future changes
The MediaWiki JavaScript documentation is moving to a new format. During the move, you can read the old docs using version 1.41. Feedback about the new site is welcome on the project talk page.
The Wishathon is a new initiative that encourages collaboration across the Wikimedia community to develop solutions for wishes collected through the Community Wishlist Survey. The first community Wishathon will take place from 15–17 March. If you are interested in a project proposal as a user, developer, designer, or product lead, you can register for the event and read more.
Other discussions: How to handle concepts of trans people on Wikidata? Should {privacy at wikidata.org} be redirected to {privacy at wikimedia.org} or should it be monitored by Wikidata volunteers? Join the discussion!
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour December 18th, 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 ninth and final Wikidata Working Hour in the series will be using SPARQL and Scholia to query and visualize the data we’ve added to Wikidata during our series. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page
Blogs: #LD42023. Part I: The Future of Wikidata + Libraries (A Workshop) - This blog series explores how libraries engage with Wikidata and Linked Data in the face of AI challenges. Led by Silvia Gutiérrez and Giovanna Fontenelle from the Wikimedia Foundation, the series summarizes insights from a collaborative session at the 2023 LD4 Conference, using Design Thinking strategies to connect the Library-Wikidata community with WMF, focusing on Wikidata, Wikibase, and Structured Data on Commons (SDC) in libraries. By Silvia Gutiérrez & Giovanna Fontenelle
Papers
Wikipedia gender gap: a scoping review - This review analyzes Wikipedia's gender gap from 2007 to 2022, revealing a slight majority of female authors, addressing key themes, and exploring strategies to mitigate the gap, providing valuable insights into the research landscape in this domain. By Núria Ferran-Ferrer, Juan-José Boté-Vericad and Julia Minguillón.
Ten years of Wikidata: A bibliometric study - This research delves into scholarly publications about Wikidata from its inception in 2012 to late 2022, revealing 945 relevant papers, primarily from conferences. The analysis highlights a concentration of experts and contributors from the Global North, as well as governmental institutions as predominant funders. The study calls for enhanced networking and outreach to promote diversity and inclusion within the Wikidata research community. Emphasizing computer science perspectives, the research focuses on methods for developing and utilizing open knowledge graphs, notably Wikidata, with a narrower but significant interest in application-oriented studies in digital humanities, biology, and healthcare. (Turki, et al)
Videos
Duplicating Everywhere All at Once | Cebuano Wikipedia - Five years ago, Lsjbot's Wikipedia articles caused duplicate Wikidata items, notably impacting geographic places on Cebuano Wikipedia. This video by User:Canley at Wikimania 2023 delves into the history, visualizes the issue, and suggests cleanup strategies for Wikidata and Wikipedia, emphasizing Aotearoa New Zealand and parts of Australia, with implications for the global challenge of bot-created duplicates.
Useful Authorities for Data-Driven Collection Research with Alicia Fagerving - Alicia Fagerving, Wikimedia Sverige, introduces the project "Useful Authorities for Data-Driven Collection Research" and Wikidata. The project, spanning 2021-2023, links vocabularies from the databases of Nationalmuseum and Statens historiska museer to Wikidata, exploring it as a platform for semantic interoperability among cultural heritage institutions and providing tools and visualizations for similar projects.
2023: OSM-Wikidata Map Framework. Combining OpenStreetMap and Wikidata allows to leverage the strengths of the two projects to create richer maps. This talk explores how OSM-Wikidata Map Framework simplifies this process. By Daniele Santini
It's not bad! Measuring Gérard Depardieu's mark on French cinema (in French) - The analysis centers on Gérard Depardieu's impact on French cinema amid legal issues and sexual assault allegations. Despite difficulties in addressing these accusations, the author leverages Wikidata to measure Depardieu's influence by querying films from directors born after 1930 to assess his involvement.
How to Become a Billionaire: A Billionaire's Occupations Network Analysis - This network analysis investigates billionaires’ primary sources of income with a network graph—based on their occupations—connecting billionaires from all over the world and uncovering some of the biggest industries in the world.
Drama Corpora Project (DraCor) is a digital database of plays, primarily from Europe. It collects and organizes texts of plays in a way that allows researchers and others to extract and analyze information from those texts. This could include details about the characters, the dialogue, the stage directions, and more. The data is being pulled from Wikidata.
We finished adding the endpoints for adding aliases in a given language for a Property (phab:T343721) and removing a Property's label in a given language (phab:T342983)
We started working on the endpoint for removing a Property's description in a given language (phab:T342985)
We are fixing an issue with incorrect handling of lowercase statement IDs in edit requests (phab:T352644)
Special:PrefixIndex now shows label/lemma for Properties and Lexemes (phab:T343115)
Language codes: We changed where Wikidata is getting its languages from for Lexemes and Monolingual text statements and thereby resolved many tasks requesting another language being added to them (phab:T341409)
New year, new scripts. Welcome to the 23rd issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering around 39% of our favorite new and updated user scripts since 24 December 2021. That’s right, we haven’t published in two years! Can you believe it? Did you miss us?
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
User:Alexander Davronov/HistoryHelper has now become stable with some bugfixes and features such as automatically highlighting potentially uncivil edit summaries and automatically pinging all the users selected.
To a lesser extent, the same goes for User:PrimeHunter/Search sort.js. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
Aaron Liu: Watchlyst Greybar Unsin is a rewrite of Ais's Watchlist Notifier with modern APIs and several new features such as not displaying watchlist items marked as seen (hence the name), not bolding diffs of unseen watchlist elements which doesn’t work properly anyways, displaying the rendered edit summary, proper display of log and creation actions and more links.
Alexis Jazz: Factotum is a spiritual successor to reply-link with a host of extra features like section adding, link rewriting, regular expressions and more.
User:Aveaoz/AutoMobileRedirect: This script will automatically redirect MobileFrontend (en.m.wikipedia) to normal Wikipedia. Unlike existing scripts, this one will actually check if your browser is mobile or not through its secret agent string, so you can stay logged in on mobile! Hooray screen estate!
Deputy is a first-of-its-kind copyright cleanup toolkit. It overrides the interface for Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations for easy case processing. It also includes the functionality of the following (also new) scripts:
User:Elominius/gadget/diff arrow keys allows navigation between diffs with the arrow keys. It also has a version that requires holding Ctrl with the arrow key.
Frequently link to Wikipedia on your websites yet find generating CC-BY credits to be such a hassle? Say no more! User:Luke10.27/attribute will automatically do it for ya and copy the credit to yer clipboard.
User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft, a spiritual successor (i.e. fork) to Evad37's script, with a few bugs solved, and a host of extra features like check-boxes for choosing draftification reasons, multi-contributor notification, and appropriate warnings based on last edit time.
/CopyCodeBlock: one of the most important operations for any scripter and script-user is to copy and paste. This script adds a copy button in the top right of every code block (not to be confused with <code>) that will, well, copy it to your clipboard!
m:User:NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AceForLuaDebugConsole.js adds the Ace editor (a.k.a. the editor you see when editing JS, CSS and Lua on Wikimedia wikis) to the Lua debug console. "In my opinion, whoever designed it to be a plain <textarea> needs to seriously reconsider their decision."
GANReviewTool quickly and easily closes good article nominations.
ReviewStatus displays whether or not a mainspace page is marked as reviewed.
SpeciesHelper tries to add the correct speciesbox, category, taxonbar, and stub template to species articles.
User:Opencooper/svgReplace and Tol's fork replaces all rasterized SVGs with their original SVG codes for your loading pleasures. Tell us which one is better!
ArticleInfo displays page information at the top of the page, directly below the title.
/HeaderIcons takes away the Vector 2022 user dropdown and replaces it with all of the icons within, top level, right next to the Watchlist. One less click away! There's also an alternate version that uses text links instead of icons.
Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee rescinded the restrictions on the page name move discussions for the two Ireland pages that were enacted in June 2009.
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
mediawiki2latex is a tool that converts wiki content into the formats of LaTeX, PDF, ODT, and EPUB. The code now runs many times faster due to recent improvements. There is also an optional Docker container you can install on your local machine.
The way that Random pages are selected has been updated. This will slowly reduce the problem of some pages having a lower chance of appearing. [39]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar). [40][41]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New request for comments: Community request for the development team to access inverse properties on client wikis. (Summary: We currently cannot access inverse property values on Wikipedia. This can be a data management issue on Wikipedia as we must always ask ourself if we must introduce an inverse property for cases where we need them. So I think it’s useful to gather the usecases community would want and draft a request for an API to the devteam to do that.)
Upcoming: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 17th January 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Past
Provenance Loves Wiki (PLW24), Jan 12th - 14th, research and data on the origin of artworks and cultural heritage and how Wikibase and Wikidata can support this.
WikiLovesWomen #SheSaid campaign wrapped up the 2023 campaign by visiting Kinshasha and Kisangani, where local Wikimedians improved quotes from women on FR Wikipedia and Wikidata.
QLever: a new way to query OpenStreetMap --> Discussion of the new opportunities offered by QLever to query OpenStreetMap and to run federated queries with Wikidata
Wikidata for authority control: 3 years of work --> The three-year Wikidata for authority control project, a collaboration between Wikimedia Sverige and Swedish museums, concluded in December 2023. It equipped museum staff with tools and skills to integrate their authority databases with Wikidata, resulting in added identifiers, SPARQL query proficiency, and enhanced knowledge sharing within the GLAM sector.
Go-ahead for Wikidata Project of GLAM institutions from Baden-Württemberg --> The GLAM-BW project, under "GLAM goes OpenData," connects major collections in Baden-Württemberg, focusing on the württembergische Kunstkammer. With over 3,000 objects, the project integrates information on collectors, histories, and objects into a knowledge graph for semantic searches, contributing to the broader realm of linked open data, akin to Wikidata.
Swiss GLAM Programme --> Wikimedia CH imported the Museum of Natural History of Neuchâtel's urchin fossil casts to Wikimedia Commons, connecting structured data on Wikidata. The project involved data cleaning, adding missing elements, and file imports via OpenRefine, highlighting seamless integration between Wikidata and Commons.
Papers
Reflections on the PCC Wikidata Pilot at UCLA Library: --> Undertaking the PCC Learning Objectives. Discusses the 14-month Pilot programme for cooperative cataloguing of UCLA Library and Museum Collections. By E. Zhang, P. Biswas & I. Dagher.
SMWCon 2023: Semantics, Wikis, and AI --> Day 1, Keynote by Prof. Markus Krötzsch who explores origins and principles of semantic wikis and key challenges that lie ahead in managing knowledge.
Brian M Sperlongano released US boundary QA checker, a quality assurance tool for finding issues with boundary data in the United States by using Wikidata, OpenStreetMap, and US Census Bureau data.
The Surrounding Ocean (available at vrandezo.github.io/TheSurroundingOcean) - is a tool that allows you to browse lexicographical data. You can use the tool to explore words and their meanings, translations, and synonyms. The tool is currently under development, and the developer, Danny, would appreciate feedback to fix any issues with the tool. More info: Wikidata:The Surrounding Ocean.
WikiProject Highlights: Ontology Cleaning Task Force: A group of people have started a task force to discuss problems with the Wikidata ontology and how to clean them up. Anyone interested in participating is welcome. The task force maintains Wikidata:WikiProject Ontology/Cleaning Task Force as a record of its activities. You can add yourself to the participants list there and find out how to join group meetings or otherwise participate in the group. (Got something noteworthy happening in your WikiProject? Share it in the upcoming issue!)
IP masking: We are working on adjusting Wikibase to handle the upcoming introduction of IP masking, which will give editors who are not logged in a temporary account name instead of using their IP to attribute edits to (phab:T351968)
Lexicographical data: We are changing how empty Senses and Forms are represented in the dumps (phab:T305660)
mul language code: We are doing user testing for the current implementation to see if it is understandable for people.
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on migrating it to the Codex design system.
REST API:
We improved the handling of lower-case statement IDs (phab:T354262)
We are working on getting a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344039)
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
Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. [42]
Gadgets and personal user scripts may now use JavaScript syntax introduced in ES6 (also known as "ES2015") and ES7 ("ES2016"). MediaWiki validates the source code to protect other site functionality from syntax errors, and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. Previously, Gadgets could use the requiresES6 option. This option is no longer needed and will be removed in the future. [43]
An update on the status of the Community Wishlist Survey for 2024 has been published. Please read and give your feedback.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar). [46][47]
Starting on January 17, it will not be possible to login to Wikimedia wikis from some specific old versions of the Chrome browser (versions 51–66, released between 2016 and 2018). Additionally, users of iOS 12, or Safari on Mac OS 10.14, may need to login to each wiki separately. [48]
The jquery.cookie module was deprecated and replaced with the mediawiki.cookie module last year. A script has now been run to replace any remaining uses, and this week the temporary alias will be removed. [49]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
A bug in UploadWizard prevented linking to the userpage of the uploader when uploading. It has now been fixed. [50]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 January. It will be on all wikis from 25 January (calendar). [51][52]
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).
Administrator changes
Interface administrator changes
Guideline and policy news
Technical news
Arbitration
Miscellaneous
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 
The 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 5 January 2024, and has an associated privacy statement.
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
Updated scripts
Improve a script
Requested scripts
New scripts
CheckUser changes
Oversighter changes