Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2024-12-02. Missed the previous one? See issue #655
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: ThesaurusLinguaeAegyptiaeBot - Task(s): Creating and updating Hieroglyphic Ancient Egyptian and Coptic lexemes and ancient Egyptian text artifact items. It is also to maintain links to the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae project via approved properties.
Closed request for comments: Create items for Property proposals - Despite a spirited discussion with many comments both in favour and opposition, no consensus was reached.
Wikimedia Deutschland is providing a total of 15 participation scholarships for Wikimania 2025 (7 individual and 4 tandem scholarships). Further information is available on this page. An overview of all questions in the application form is here. Apply here. Closes 8 December 2024.
Tomorrow / 3rd December 2024: Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session @ 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm UTC / 6pm CET. If you would like to attend, please fill out the Etherpad form to ensure all necessary materials are provided for you.
Deadline for the Central Asian WikiCon 2025 scholarship application is December 30, 2024. We encourage you to make Wikidata-related submissions (the deadline for submission is March 22, 2025.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Research
Statement Signals: Wikidata usage on other Wikis: A new research report is available. Explores what trace Wikidata data is measurable on other Wiki pages and proposes initial metrics for measuring Wikidata statement usage on Wikimedia content pages. Also suggests methods to improve data analysis and collection. PDF is available on Commons
Blogs
Celebrating Wikidata’s 12th birthday across the world - Wikidata celebrated its 12th birthday in October and November 2024, with a series of global events and activities aimed at commemorating the platform's contributions to the open knowledge movement, engaging its community of volunteers, and highlighting the significant role Wikidata plays in the digital landscape. By Dan Shick
Class Order Disorder in Wikidata and First Fixes analyzes class order violations in Wikidata's ontology using SPARQL, evaluates fixes, and offers solutions through improved tools or community involvement. By P. Patel-Schneider and E. Doğan.
Videos
Edit a Wikidata Item and Lexeme - The Tyap Wikimedia User Group produced this tutorial on editing as part of the Wikidata 12th Birthday celebrations for the Wikidata @12 Data-a-thon.
(正體字, CN Trad.) Getting Started with Wikidata - An introduction and overview to Wikidata and some associated tools such as ORES and LiftWing.
(正體字, CN Trad.) Wikidata Basic Editing Tutorial - This session was given as part of the COSCUP '24 conference on the OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Agenda Track.
the Capacity to Grieve Once More - Alexandros Kosiaris of the Wikimedia Foundation explains changes made to make Wikipedia more stable and prevent outages, including how it calls and fetches data from Wikidata. Session given at SREcon24.
Tool of the week
LoRiS - Generate natural-language descriptions of SPARQL queries via LLM's.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata:WordGraph: Google released the WordGraph dataset as a belated present for Wikidata’s 12th birthday. The dataset contains 968,153 forms in 39 languages.
Tools or bots which use the wiki replicas (such as Quarry) will observe outdated data for up to 8-10 days, as a result of necessary database maintenance (T367856). Tools or bots which use the APIs will not be affected. (This was previously announced 2024-11-11 but didn’t actually take place yet.)
picture of this person doing their job (picture of a person in action, especially for a sportsperson, visual artist, musican, actor. P18 is normally used for portraits)
ISCC (ISCC hash code that identifies a media object based on fuzzy hashing)
OAI formatter (formatter to generate ID compatible with {{Q|2430433}} services)
Open Library Collection (Link to Open Library Collection which contain manually and automaticallly collections of editions and works on certain topics)
scientific illustration (an illustration of this subject to provide a detailed reference for its appearance. It should be ideally tied to the primary literature on the item.)
thesis submitted for (academic degree for which a thesis or dissertation is submitted)
meeting of (subject is a meeting or session of this body (legislature, committee, convention, etc.))
UMC rating (Age rating category as designated by the UAE Media Council (UMC))
extension that populates category (analogous to {{P|4329}} for tracking cat:s populated by extensions of MediaWiki, linking to extension causing the population)
CUATM statistical code (7-digits code attributed to administrative-territorial units of Moldova)
Bibliothek UvA/HvA - documenting, archiving and creating items from collections from the UvA/AUAS Library in Amsterdam, beginning with the works of Allard Pierson.
Ghana - A hub for Ghanaian activities and entities, including regional languages: Dagbanli, Twi and Dagari.
Thao (Taiwan): For collecting information related to Thao cultural themes, including statistics and activity records.
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on making it possible to search for an EntitySchema by its label or alias when making a new statement linking to an EntitySchema.
PropertySuggester: We have updated the script that generates the suggestions and will update the suggestions next.
Lexicographical data: We fixed a visual issue with search results on the Codex-based Special:NewLexeme (phab:T370057)
Vector 2022: We are working on designs to fix the remaining issues with the skin on Wikidata.
Wikibase REST API: We are finishing the prototype for supporting search in the API.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Starting this week, Wikimedia wikis no longer support connections using old RSA-based HTTPS certificates, specifically rsa-2048. This change is to improve security for all users. Some older, unsupported browser or smartphone devices will be unable to connect; Instead, they will display a connectivity error. See the HTTPS Browser Recommendations page for more-detailed information. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [1]
Starting December 16, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: arwiki, cawiki, frwiki, mediawikiwiki, orwiki, wawiki, wawiktionary, wikidatawiki, zhwiki. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF). [2]
This month the Chart extension was deployed to production and is now available on Commons and Testwiki. With the security review complete, pilot wiki deployment is expected to start in the first week of December. You can see a working version on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug with the "Download as PDF" system was fixed. [3]
Updates for technical contributors
In late February, temporary accounts will be rolled out on at least 10 large wikis. This deployment will have a significant effect on the community-maintained code. This is about Toolforge tools, bots, gadgets, and user scripts that use IP address data or that are available for logged-out users. The Trust and Safety Product team wants to identify this code, monitor it, and assist in updating it ahead of the deployment to minimize disruption to workflows. The team asks technical editors and volunteer developers to help identify such tools by adding them to this list. In addition, review the updated documentation to learn how to adjust the tools. Join the discussions on the project talk page or in the dedicated thread on the Wikimedia Community Discord server (in English) for support and to share feedback.
Following an RFC, the policy on restoration of adminship has been updated. All former administrators may now only regain the tools following a request at the Wikipedia:Bureaucrats' noticeboard within 5 years of their most recent admin action. Previously this applied only to administrators deysopped for inactivity.
Following a request for comment, a new speedy deletion criterion, T5, has been enacted. This applies to template subpages that are no longer used.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2024-12-09. Missed the previous one? See issue #656
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: KlaraBot - Task(s): Append a human's lifespan to descriptions when they can be authoritatively sourced.
Closed request for comments: Audio transcription (P9533) - Closed with no consensus. The discussion is ongoing on the Property P5933 talk page.
Events
Past: Amical Wikimedia, the Catalan-language and culture focused thematic Wikimedia Organization organized the Celebrem Wikidata (Let's celebrate Wikidata) project to celebrate Wikidata's 12th anniversary, from November 10 - 30. This included a Wikidata introduction workshop to equip participants with the editing skills to tackle the project's main aim. This was presented as a game to delete duplicate info on Wikidata and Catalan Viquipèdia infoboxes, in three areas: protected buildings, officers' positions and data related to sports teams players. At the end of the event, ~200 Wikidata-fed infoboxes and Wikidata items were improved and many Wikipedia editors edited Wikidata for the first time!
(Deutsch)Wikidata for Legal Historians - Tue. 10 December, 3pm - 7pm (UTC+1). This presentation explores Wikidata as a key platform for LOD, explains its Semantic Web foundation, introduces FactGrid (a Wikidata-based platform for historical research). Highlights potential of both platforms using examples and encourages discussion for legal historical research. Register here.
Today (09.12.2024) is the last chance to submit an Abstract for the Wikidata and Research conference (5 - 6 June 2025). If you are interested in participating, please review the submission acceptance format before submitting here.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
MediaWiki Conference Highlights, featuring Wikibase talks including one by Christos Varvantakis and Jon Amar from Wikimedia Deutschland.
Ten years of Philippine local Govt. data for Wikidata's 12th Birthday. Read about SKAP's (Shared Knowledge Asia Pacific) efforts to add 10 years worth of financial data of local Government assets to Wikidata during a Datathon.
Papers
Developing an OCR - Wikibase Pipeline for Place Names in the RGTC Series - introduces a semi-automated workflow for extracting and digitally storing geographically relevant information, including spatial relations and contextual details, from place names in the Répertoire géographique des textes cunéiformes. By Matthew Ong (2024).
Videos
Wikibase4Research - Kolja Bailly presents ways in which the Wikibase4Research tool by the TIB Open Science Lab supports researchers in dealing with Mediawiki software for knowledge bases such as Wikibase and facilitates better and FAIR Research Data Management. Includes a live demonstration and beginner-friendly instructions.
Tool of the week
CAT🐈: Metrics computing simple metrics (number of labels, number of descriptions, number of sitelinks, number of statements) for item matching a simple claim.
Let's Connect invites you to get involved in helping spread awareness and knowledge of Wikidata, potentially help organise a Wikidata Learning Clinic. Are you interested in participating? Please sign-up on this registration form.
reference illustration (an illustration of this subject to provide a detailed reference for its appearance. It should be ideally tied to the primary literature on the item.)
Showcase Items: Das Erste: A German public service television channel broadcasting for more than 70 years.
Showcase Lexemes: Kerzu (L8153) the Breton word for December, directly translates from "totally black", rather appropriate for the cold, dark last month of the year.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
Technical documentation contributors can find updated resources, and new ways to connect with each other and the Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team, at the Documentation hub on MediaWiki.org. This page links to: resources for writing and improving documentation, a new #wikimedia-techdocs IRC channel on libera.chat, a listing of past and upcoming documentation events, and ways to request a documentation consultation or review. If you have any feedback or ideas for improvements to the documentation ecosystem, please contact the Technical Documentation Team.
Updates for editors
Layout change for the Edit Check feature
Later this week, Edit Check will be relocated to a sidebar on desktop. Edit check is the feature for new editors to help them follow policies and guidelines. This layout change creates space to present people with new Checks that appear while they are typing. The initial results show newcomers encountering Edit Check are 2.2 times more likely to publish a new content edit that includes a reference and is not reverted.
The Chart extension, which enables editors to create data visualizations, was successfully made available on MediaWiki.org and three pilot wikis (Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedias). You can see a working examples on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now discover articles in Wikiproject campaigns of their interest from the "All collection" category in the articles suggestion feature. Wikiproject Campaign organizers can use this feature, to help translators to discover articles of interest, by adding the <page-collection> </page-collection> tag to their campaign article list page on Meta-wiki. This will make those articles discoverable in the Content Translation tool. For more detailed information on how to use the tool and tag, please refer to the step-by-step guide. [4]
The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, now has a multiselect filter for namespace selection. This enables users to select multiple specific namespaces, instead of only one or all, when fetching pages for deletion.
The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions. Thanks to Chlod and the Moderator Tools team for both of these improvements. [5]
The Editing Team is working on making it easier to populate citations from archive.org using the Citoid tool, the auto-filled citation generator. They are asking communities to add two parameters preemptively, archiveUrl and archiveDate, within the TemplateData for each citation template using Citoid. You can see an example of a change in a template, and a list of all relevant templates. [6]
Last week, all wikis had problems serving pages to logged-in users and some logged-out users for 30–45 minutes. This was caused by a database problem, and investigation is ongoing. [8]
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug in the Add Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases. [9][10]
Updates for technical contributors
Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, now has an early-stage implementation in PHP. It is available for general use in MediaWiki extensions and Toolforge apps through Composer, with use in MediaWiki core coming soon. More information is available in the documentation. Thanks to Doğu for the inspiration and many contributions to the library. [11]
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. On December 4, the MediaWiki Interfaces team began rerouting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content endpoints on testwiki from RESTbase to comparable MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The team encourages active users of these endpoints to verify their tool's behavior on testwiki and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket before the end of the year, as they intend to roll out the same change across all Wikimedia projects in early January. These changes are part of the work to replace the outdated RESTBase system.
The 2024 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 3 January 2025, and has an associated privacy statement.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2024-12-16. Missed the previous one? See issue #657
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: PWSBot - Task(s): Is a selfmade chatbot to answer factual questions as part of a final research project for educational purposes.
Closed request for permissions/Bot: CarbonBot - Withdrawn by submitter
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session (Attn: Please fill out Pre-Participation Survey!) 17 December 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, 17 December 2024 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6 pm CET (Time zone converter) Wikimedian Mahir Morshed is leading a series of four sessions focused on lexicographical data in Wikidata. We are looking forward to learning more about these Wikibase entities! If you anticipate attending the workshop sessions, please fill out a brief survey linked from our Series Etherpad to help us prepare relevant materials for you. Sessions will be held on November 5, November 19, December 3, and December 17, 2024 at our regular time of 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET. Event page
Baptiste de Coulon, "Les données liées, Wikidata et les archives : une opportunité de contribution aux communs numériques". In: La Gazette des archives, n°271, 2024-2, p.37-56 (free access online after 3 years).
Tabular Online Validator - checks if SPARQL query results conform to a provided schema by validating data and highlighting potential errors, such as missing properties, invalid values, or too many values, with the option to refine the schema if issues arise. (A major update to the current ShEx validator that is expected to get integrated into the existing validator soon)
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
Wikibase REST API: We prototyped search support for the REST API and would like your feedback on it.
Property Suggestions: We updated the underlying data so you should have more up-to-date suggestions again when making new statements.
EntitySchemas: We continued the work on making it possible to search for EntitySchemas by their label and aliases when linking to them in a statement.
Query Service: We are investigating if we can do something about the issue where not all edgeLabels are shown on a graph visualisation (phab:T381857) and if there are any alternatives to the library used for the graph builder in the Query Service (phab:T381764)
Under the hood: We are optimizing the server setup for the term store to accommodate its growth (phab:T351802)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
Interested in improving event management on your home wiki? The CampaignEvents extension offers organizers features like event registration management, event/wikiproject promotion, finding potential participants, and more - all directly on-wiki. If you are an organizer or think your community would benefit from this extension, start a discussion to enable it on your wiki today. To learn more about how to enable this extension on your wiki, visit the deployment status page.
Updates for editors
Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in Italy and Mexico on the Italian, Spanish, and English Wikipedias, can see a personalized Year in Review with insights based on their reading and editing history.
Users of the Android Wikipedia App in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia can see the new Rabbit Holes feature. This feature shows a suggested search term in the Search bar based on the current article being viewed, and a suggested reading list generated from the user’s last two visited articles.
The global reminder bot is now active and running on nearly 800 wikis. This service reminds most users holding temporary rights when they are about to expire, so that they can renew should they want to. See the technical details page for more information.
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 13 January 2025 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the Android Wikipedia App which had caused translatable SVG images to show the wrong language when they were tapped.
Updates for technical contributors
There is no new MediaWiki version next week. The next deployments will start on 14 January. [13]
Ongoing: Wikidata Cleanup 2024 - Romaine continues his initiative, "Wikidata Cleanup," to coordinate community efforts in addressing the problem of items missing basic properties during the last ten days of 2024, when many users have extra time due to holidays. The aim is to improve data quality by focusing on ensuring all items have essential properties like "instance of" (P31) or "subclass of" (P279), adding relevant country and location data, and maintaining consistency within item series.
Upcoming events: Data Reuse Days - online event focusing on projects using Wikidata's data, 18-27 February 2025. You can submit a proposal for the program on the talk page until January 12th.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
Exploring YouTube Channels Via Wikidata, by Tara Calishain. "This time I'm playing with a way to browse YouTube channels while using Wikidata as context. And you can try it too, because it doesn't need any API keys!"
Flying Dehyphenator is an Ordia game. Given the start part of a word, use the spacebar to move the word and hit the next part of the word. Only hyphenations described with the Unicode hyphenation character work.
Want a wrap of your Wikidata activities in 2024? Wiki Year In Review has it for you! (use www.wikidata.org for the project URL)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikibase/Suite-Contributing-Guide: Wikibase Suite's contributing guide has been published. This guide aims to help anyone who wants to contribute and make sure they are equipped with all the relevant information to do so.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
nonprofit tax status (country specific tax status of organisations like non-profits)
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 26th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 August 2024. At press time, over 94% of the world has legally fallen prey to the merry celebrations of "Christmas", and so shall you soon. It's been a quiet 4 months, and we hope to see you with way more new scripts next year. Happy holidays! Aaron Liu (talk) 05:06, 25 December 2024 (UTC)
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
Very useful for changelist patrollers, DiffUndo, by Nardog, is this edition's featured script. Taking inspiration from WP:AutoWikiBrowser's double-click-to-undo feature, it adds an undo button to every line of every diff from "show changes", optimizing partial reverts with your favorite magic spell and nearly fulfilling m:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Partial revert undo.
Miscellaneous
Doğu/Adiutor, a recent WP:Twinkle/WP:RedWarn-like userscript that follows modern WMF UI design, is now an extension. However, its sole maintainer has left the project, which still awaits WMF mw:code stewardship (among some audits) to be installed on your favorite WMF wikis.
DannyS712, our former chief editor, has ascended to MediaWiki and the greener purpley pastures of PHP with commits creating Special:NamespaceInfo and the __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ magic word to exclude a template from Special:UnusedTemplates! I wonder if Wikipedia has a templaters' newsletter...
BilledMammal/Move+ needs updating to order list of pages handle lists of pages to move correctly regardless of the discussion's page, so that we may avoid repeating fiasco history.
Andrybak/Unsigned helper forks Anomie/unsignedhelper to add support for binary search, automatic edit summaries after generating the {{unsigned}} template, support for {{undated}}, and support for generating while syntax highlighting is on.
Polygnotus/Move+ updates BilledMammal's classic Move+ to add automattic watchlisting of all pages—except the target page(s)—changed while processing a move.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2024-12-30. Missed the previous one? See issue #659
Welcome to 2023’s Final Weekly Summary!
A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to the newsletter this year! 🎉 Each of your contributions, whether big or small, has made a difference and has helped us create a vibrant and informative resource for the Wikidata community. 🙏 Let's continue building and sharing knowledge together in the coming year! 🙌✨
Discussions
Open request for oversight: Ameisenigel (RfP scheduled to end at 6 January 2025 21:52 UTC)
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Papers
Library Data in Wikimedia Projects: Case Study from the Czech Republic by Jansová, L., Maixnerová, L., & Š´tastná, P. (2024). "The paper outlines the collaboration between the National Library of the Czech Republic and Wikimedia since 2006, focusing on linking authority records with Wikipedia articles and training librarians and users. By 2023, the National Library provided most of its databases under a CC0 license, launched a "Wikimedians in Residence" program, and collaborated on projects involving linked data and using authority records in Wikidata. This partnership has enhanced their cooperation for mutual benefit, identifying key factors for their successful long-term collaboration."
How have you modelled my gender? Reconstructing the history of gender representation in Wikidata by Melis, B., Fioravanti, M., Paolini, C., & Metilli, D. (2024). "The paper traces the evolution of gender representation in Wikidata, showing how the community has moved from a binary interpretation of gender to a more inclusive model for trans and non-binary identities. The Wikidata Gender Diversity project (WiGeDi) timeline highlights the significant changes influenced by external historical events and the community's increased understanding of gender complexity."
Videos: Arabic Wikidata Days 2024 - Data Science Course - First Practical Session: Wikibase-CLI Tool (part 1, part 2) by Saeed Habishan. "The Wikibase-CLI enables command-based interaction with Wikidata using shell scripts and JavaScript. The tool runs on NodeJS and enables automatic reading and editing of Wikidata."
Tool of the week
WikiORA - is a tool designed for gene over-representation analysis. It integrates data from Wikidata, Wikipedia, Gene Ontology, and PanglaoDB to help researchers identify significantly enriched gene sets in their data.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
nonprofit tax status (country specific tax status of organisations like non-profits)
Newest WikiProjects: Uganda - aims to be a central hub for the curation of any and all items (biographical, cultural, geographical, organisational, etc...) relating to Uganda (Q1036)
WikiProject Highlights:
Narration/Folktales - creation of Items for motifs described in Thompson's motif index completed
Austria - concerns itself with improving data from nonprofit organizations in Austria
Showcase Lexemes: ਲੇਟਣ (L750580) - in Punjabi (pa) and "لیٹݨ" in Punjabi Shahmukhi (pnb) transliterate to "Leṭaṇ," which means "to lie down" or "to rest" in English.
Development
Most of the development team staff are still taking a break, so no development happened.
A request for comment is open to discuss whether admins should be advised to warn users rather than issue no-warning blocks to those who have posted promotional content outside of article space.
Technical news
The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-01-06. Missed the previous one? See issue #660
Discussions
New request for comments: Constraints for Germanies - Following from a property discussion on P17 (German non-states), this RfC aims to find consensus on how to apply constraints that exclude items of historical periods in German history.
Please submit your proposals for the Data Reuse Days online event until January 12th. See current proposals on the talk page and here's some ideas to inspire you: presentations/demos of tools using Wikidata's data (10mins Lightning Talk presentations), discussions and presentations connecting Wikidata editors with reusers and/or explanations and demos on how to use a specific part of the technical infrastructure to reuse Wikidata's data (APIs, dumps, etc.).
Talk to the Search Platform / Query Service Team --January 8, 2025. The Search Platform Team holds monthly meetings to discuss anything related to Wikimedia search, Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), Wikimedia Commons Query Service (WCQS), etc.! Time: 16:00-17:00 UTC / 08:00 PDT / 11:00 EDT / 17:00 CET
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC, 15th January 2025 (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.
Blogs: (fr) female authors with male pseudonyms, blog post by Le Deuxième Texte including SPARQL queries to find female authors with male pseudonyms.
Websites :Global Dementia and Risk Factors, website by 'Students at the Maastricht Science Programme', includes data visualizations of the prevalence and current treatments of dementia across the world. It utilises data extracted as SPARQL Endpoints from Wikidata.
Papers
Ontology-grounded Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction by LLM under Wikidata schema - This paper proposes an ontology-driven approach to KG construction using LLMs where competency questions guide ontology creation and relation extraction, leveraging Wikidata for semantic consistency. A scalable pipeline minimizes human effort while producing high-quality, interpretable KGs interoperable with Wikidata for knowledge base expansion. By Xiaohan Feng, Xixin Wu & Helen Meng (2024).
Knowledge Incorporated Image Question Answering Using Wikidata Repository - Proposes a Visual Question Answering (VQA) model that integrates external knowledge from Wikidata to address complex open-domain questions by combining image, question, and knowledge modalities. Evaluated on the VQAv2 dataset, the model outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches, demonstrating improved reasoning and accuracy (Koshti et al., 2024).
Videos: (arabic) Part 6: SPARQL Demo Session: connecting external services - Sparql SERVICE clause gives access to additional data such as labels via wikibase:label, interaction with MediaWiki APIs using wikibase:mwapi, and integration of data from subgraphs (such as the main graph and the scholarly articles graph). Integration of data from external SPARQL endpoints such as DBpedia.
Tool of the week
Wikidata Entity Linker - is a Microsoft Edge browser extension that creates web links for matching inner HTML text based on a regex format of Q\d+ which is the format of a Wikidata Entity ID. (email)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Vacancy: Research Software Engineer / Wikibase-Expert - The Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) located in Hannover has a research position open for someone interested in the deployment, administration and maintenance of open source knowledge management software such as Mediawiki, Wikibase and OpenRefine as part of the NFDI4Culture partnership within the OSL.
January 1, 2025, marked Public Domain Day, with hundreds of 1929 films entering the public domain. Sandra has shared helpful notes to assist in making these films discoverable via WikiFlix, by adding video files to Wikicommons and Wikidata. Join the effort!
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
nonprofit tax status (country specific tax status of organisations like non-profits)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC, 15th January 2025 (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.
Join the Wikidata Training Event 2025 organised by Wikimedia Botswana UG for Wikidata enthusiasts of all levels. Starts 18 Jan 10:00am CAT (UTC+2), registration required.
Wikidata module for the Hidden Figures CURE - The newly published Wikidata module for the Hidden Figures CURE teaches undergraduates to use Wikidata for uncovering and highlighting the contributions of hidden figures in natural history, such as women, people of color, and Indigenous peoples.
Memory of the World: Ways forward - Efforts to improve the representation of UNESCO's Memory of the World (MOW) international register on Wikidata include new articles, enhanced data quality, and training on creating structured data. Key contributions involve updating Wikipedia and Wikidata entries, addressing data inconsistencies, and expanding the visibility of MOW inscriptions across languages.
Public domain visibility on Wikidata (in Catalan). The article discusses how Wikidata is being used to enhance the visibility of public domain works by integrating copyright information and making it easily accessible.
Presentations: Wikibase e Wikidata per lo studio dell'epigrafia greca (in Italian, i.e. Wikibase and Wikidata for the study of Greek epigraphy), presentation at SAEG (Advanced Seminar of Greek Epigraphy) IX in Rome, 10 January 2025, by Pietro Ortimini, Anna Clara Maniero Azzolini, Epìdosis - slides
Tool of the week
Dungeon Of Knowledge - is a roguelike game with Items generated from Wikidata that lets you crawl through the Dungeon of Knowledge in a classic ASCII interface. (toot) (blog)
VIAF (cf. Q54919 and P214) underwent a relevant change of interface on January 10; the way of visualizing clusters in JSON format has changed in comparison with present OCLC documentation and e.g. http://viaf.org/viaf/102333412/viaf.json doesn't work anymore; this broke most or all Wikidata gadgets using VIAF data; in the absence of official communications from OCLC, developers are trying to understand if the new VIAF interface is stable before changing their gadgets accordingly
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
nomenclatural type of (taxon item of which this item is the taxonomic type (name-bearing type), e.g. the family for which this genus is the type, the genus for which this species is the type, the taxon for which this type specimen is the type, ect...)
World Heritage type (Propriety of World heritage site : the Type (Cultural, Natural, Mixed))
Entry height (Height of the entrance above ground level for boarding public transport vehicles.)
location code (the location code of the location item. Should be used with qualifier property {{Q|P459}} to specify which location code system being used.)
DIF historia player ID (Identifier for a sportsperson connected to Djurgårdens IF on difhistoria.se (official site))
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
The Single User Login system is being updated over the next few months. This is the system which allows users to fill out the login form on one Wikimedia site and get logged in on all others at the same time. It needs to be updated because of the ways that browsers are increasingly restricting cross-domain cookies. To accommodate these restrictions, login and account creation pages will move to a central domain, but it will still appear to the user as if they are on the originating wiki. The updated code will be enabled this week for users on test wikis. This change is planned to roll out to all users during February and March. See the SUL3 project page for more details and a timeline.
Updates for editors
On wikis with PageAssessments installed, you can now filter search results to pages in a given WikiProject by using the inproject: keyword. (These wikis: Arabic Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage, French Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia) [14]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Tigre (w:tig:) [15]
View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with updating a user's edit-count after making a rollback edit, which is now fixed. [16]
Updates for technical contributors
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints for all wiki projects. This change was previously available on testwiki and should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints may raise issues directly to the MediaWiki Interfaces Team in Phabricator if they arise.
Toolforge tool maintainers can now share their feedback on Toolforge UI, an initiative to provide a web platform that allows creating and managing Toolforge tools through a graphic interface, in addition to existing command-line workflows. This project aims to streamline active maintainers’ tasks, as well as make registration and deployment processes more accessible for new tool creators. The initiative is still at a very early stage, and the Cloud Services team is in the process of collecting feedback from the Toolforge community to help shape the solution to their needs. Read more and share your thoughts about Toolforge UI.
For tool and library developers who use the OAuth system: The identity endpoint used for OAuth 1 and OAuth 2 returned a JSON object with an integer in its sub field, which was incorrect (the field must always be a string). This has been fixed; the fix will be deployed to Wikimedia wikis on the week of January 13. [17]
Many wikis currently use Cite CSS to render custom footnote markers in Parsoid output. Starting January 20 these rules will be disabled, but the developers ask you to not clean up your MediaWiki:Common.css until February 20 to avoid issues during the migration. Your wikis might experience some small changes to footnote markers in Visual Editor and when using experimental Parsoid read mode, but if there are changes these are expected to bring the rendering in line with the legacy parser output. [18]
Edit-A-Thon for Black History Month: 12 February 1300 - 1500 MST (UTC+7) is an onsite event at the University of Colorado Boulder, with a theme to add or expand items on Black and African-American comics creators.
Data Reuse Days 2025 is from February 18 to 27, 2025! This is an online event focusing on how people and organizations use Wikidata's data to build interesting applications and tools. Don't forget to register so we can know you are coming.
Past: Missed the Q1 Wikidata+Wikibase office hour? You can catch up by reading the session log here: 2025-01-15 (Q1 2025)
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs: Cleaning up legacy Wikipedia links in Open Library: The blog post discusses cleaning up outdated Wikipedia links to improve article accuracy and navigation, while highlighting the importance of integrating Wikidata for better data management.
Tracking Looted Art with Wikidata Queries - As part of Art History Loves Wiki 25, Laurel Zuckerman will show how Wikidata SPARQL queries can aid provenance researchers and historians find, identify and track looted art.
OpenStreetMap and Wikidata in Disaster Times: Ormat Murat Yilmaz will speak on how Wikidata and OSM play a role in coordinating relief efforts by providing a collaborative platform for providing data about affected areas. Part of WM CEE meeting 2024 Istanbul.
Serbian Novels on Wikidata: Presented by Filip Maljkovič on the progress and process of adding Serbian literature into Wikidata, using OCR methods to map pages and assign Properties.
(german)Wikidata for NGOs: Use and network open data sensibly: Johan Hoelderle discusses how nonprofits can benefit from the largest free knowledge base and show what potential open data offers for non-profit projects.
Data partnerships and Libraries combating misinformation: WMDE's Alan Ang delivers a speech on how GLAM institutions can help prevent the spread of dis- and misinformation whether hallucinatory AI or malicious, part of the Wikimedia+Libraries International Convention 2025.
Product Manager: Wikibase Suite: Wikimedia Deutschland is looking for a PM to lead Wikibase Suite, empowering institutions like GLAMs and research groups to build customizable linked knowledge bases and contribute to the world’s largest open data graph.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
nomenclatural type of (taxon item of which this item is the taxonomic type (name-bearing type), e.g. the family for which this genus is the type, the genus for which this species is the type, the taxon for which this type specimen is the type, ect...)
World Heritage type (Propriety of World heritage site : the Type (Cultural, Natural, Mixed))
location code (the location code of the location item. Should be used with qualifier property {{Q|P459}} to specify which location code system being used.)
DIF historia player ID (Identifier for a sportsperson connected to Djurgårdens IF on difhistoria.se (official site))
We’re making good progress on checking format constraints more efficiently and with fewer errors (T380751)
We’re working on making distinct-values constraint checks works with the split Query Service (T369079)
EntitySchemas: We’re working on making the heading on EntitySchema pages apply language fallback (T228423)
Search: We’ve started working on the new search UI component which will let you search for additional entity types from the main search bar and not just Items anymore (T338483)
Wikibase REST API: We're working on adding search to the API (T383209)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Administrators can mass-delete multiple pages created by a user or IP address using Extension:Nuke. It previously only allowed deletion of pages created in the last 30 days. It can now delete pages from the last 90 days, provided it is targeting a specific user or IP address. [19]
On wikis that use the Patrolled edits feature, when the rollback feature is used to revert an unpatrolled page revision, that revision will now be marked as "manually patrolled" instead of "autopatrolled", which is more accurate. Some editors that use filters on Recent Changes may need to update their filter settings. [20]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Visual Editor's "Insert link" feature did not always suggest existing pages properly when an editor started typing, which has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is being progressively removed from the wikis. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. The last group of wikis (Catalan Wikiquote, Wikimedia Finland, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikibooks, Wikimedia Sweden) will soon be contacted. If you have questions about this process, please ping Trizek (WMF) at your wiki. [21]
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: updates about services from the Data Platform Engineering teams, information about Codex from the Design System team, and more.
Administrator changes
Interface administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Guideline and policy news
Technical news
Arbitration
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug in the Add Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases. [9][10]
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Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints for all wiki projects. This change was previously available on testwiki and should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints may raise issues directly to the MediaWiki Interfaces Team in Phabricator if they arise.