User talk:Rich Farmbrough/Archive/2025 March

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Wikimedians for Sustainable Development - February 2025 Newsletter

This is our fortieth newsletter. This issue has news related to SDG 3, 5, 8, 11, 13, 15 and 16.

User group news

• User group meeting in February (minutes).

Other news

• Time to get ready to organize Wiki Loves Earth (SDG 15)
• ‘Women of the Future’ – International Women’s Day 2025 (SDG 5)
• The Experts Behind the Edits: Expanding public understanding of healthcare (SDG 3)
• Wikimedia Enterprise and Ecosia Partner to Drive Sustainable Search Innovation (SDG 13)
• A subproject to WikiProject Climate Change about Climate Change Policies has just started on Wikidata (SDG 13)

Events

• 1 March: Open Data Day 2025 in Côte d'Ivoire (SDG 8)
• 7 March Govdirectory Collab Hour - Open Data Day 2025 (SDG 16)
• 8 March–1 April: Shine Her Light Writing Contest 2025 (SDG 5)

This message was sent with Global message delivery by Ainali (talk) 07:51, 1 March 2025 (UTC) • Contribute • Manage subscription

Alexander Paul Burton

I have to say I am VERY surprised that you moved this AI generated garbage to mainspace! Theroadislong (talk) 08:14, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

I'm also surprised that you moved this to mainspace. There are several issues with the article, including that the puffery is still there and there's a pretty clear lack of notability. voorts (talk/contributions) 17:07, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

It isn't garbage. Wikipedia has no rule against AI generated material that is then edited. How is it garbage? It is an objectively written piece. Do you have a personal vendetta against Alexander Paul Burton? It sounds like there might be a conflict of interest here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by PeterLawriwBahan (talk • contribs) 12:00, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) PeterLawriwBahan There is certainly a conflict of interest which you are yet to correctly disclose as per the terms and conditions of editing Wikipedia. Theroadislong (talk) 16:51, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #669

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2025-03-03. Missed the previous one? See issue #668

Discussions

• Other: Email Chain "Elephant in the room" - discussing the large number of Wikidata Items lacking Statements, Sitelinks or Labels/Descriptions.

Events

• Upcoming events:
  • All the information you need to start working on your Wikimania 2025 program submissions is now available on the Wiki. Deadline: March 31 st, Anywhere on Earth.
  • New Wikidata Event! The upcoming "Wikidata and Sister Projects" event (May 29–June 1) is looking for speakers to share how Wikidata connects with other Wikimedia projects - if you are interested, request more info or submit your session idea here.
  • New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series! We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series session on Tuesday, March 4, 2025 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET Time Zone Converter Eric Willey will be facilitating a series of four sessions focused on starting a Wikidata project from the foundation up at your institution. The third session will focus on making the most of your time and work. Event page.
  • Wikidata and Wikibase - Curriculum Transformation in the Digital Humanities - Join for 4 free talks showcasing how linked open data can support teaching, research and collections. March 5, 1500 - 1700 GMT (UTC-0).
  • Wiki Workshop 2025 CfP - Call for Papers (Submission deadline: March 9)
  • Open Data Day Taiwan 2025 March 9 Time: 09:30-17:30 UTC+8 at Taipei Humanities Building (Q122750631)
  • Wiki Mentor Africa (WMA) Hackathon 2025 - Registration & Scholarship Now Open. Date: 28th - 30th March 2025. Who Can Participate? African developers, Wikimedia contributors, and anyone interested in Wikimedia projects.
• Ongoing:
  • Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025 - annual global contest aimed at documenting and sharing the diverse customs and traditions observed during the month of Ramadan. Date: 25 February 2025 – 16 April 2025. Register here!
  • Items with P31 (instance of) = human settlement without a country has dropped from 7600 to below 4600 Items. You can help to get it even lower.
  • Wikidata & OpenStreetMap Datathon & Mapathon as part of International Open Data Day 2025 from 1st - 15th March 2025 by WikiProject India (Q11037573).
• Past events: Data Reuse Days 2025: you can watch the sessions that you missed at your own pace.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • UK universities educate the most national leaders globally, analysis (based on Wikidata) shows. By The Guardian
  • Two Wikimedians-in-Residence appointed to increase Maltese literature representation on Wikipedia and Wikidata Times of Malta
• Videos
  • (French) PasseGares: Bug fixes and data imports from Wikidata YouTube
  • Adding Wikidata label and descriptions, from the Wali Language Art+Feminism Editathon (Ghana 2025) YouTube
  • Workshop showcasing QuickStatements 3.0! Learn how this updated tool streamlines your workflow and discover new features. YouTube
  • Contributing to Wikidata 101, a series of demonstrations organised by WM Community UG Uganda Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
  • Optimize SPARQL queries to avoid timeouts: Efficiently count entities sharing values YouTube
  • Data Reuse Days playlist and live-editing session with User:Ainali and User:Abbe98 YouTube
  • LUDAP: Shared authority file for Luxembourg's Scientific and Cultural Heritage, with Wikibase YouTube

Tool of the week

• QuickStatements 3.0 - new version of the original QuickStatements with enhanced functionality, performance, and user experience.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• On March 17, Vector 2022 will become the default skin on Wikidata
• Jobs
  • Senior UX Designer for Wikidata - Apply online
  • Product Manager for Wikibase Suite - Apply online

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • thesis submitted for degree (the academic degree for which a thesis or dissertation is submitted)
• Newest External identifiers: Korean National Species list ID, NES Directory game ID, Miraheze wiki ID, Global Energy Monitor Wiki ID, FU-Lexikon ID, MACM artwork ID, Hiking Note chalet identifier, domain name, ‎TechRaptor game ID, ‎TechRaptor company ID, ‎TechRaptor genre ID, Sanzhi Dargwa dictionary ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • copy present in institution (copy present in institution)
  • single extrait de l'album (indicates the album from which the item is taken)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: HelloAsso organization ID, europlayers.com club ID, eLIBRARY Document Number, LIBRIS Library ID, parlament.fyi person ID, Embryo Project Encyclopedia ID, factordb id, Yukon Register of Historic Places ID, Our Campaigns container ID, Encyclopaedia of Islam (glossary and index of terms) ID, badmintoncn.com star ID, Game Input Database ID, Historia Hispánica ID, Coasterpedia ID, Captain Coaster coaster ID, Captain Coaster park ID, Dark Ride Database IDs

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Map of Birthplace of Polish Nationals, born after 1900 who have an article on Polish Wikipedia
  • Items with no Statement or Sitelinks - You can help by expanding these Items!
  • Showcase lexemes and their language/lexical category (source)
• Newest WikiProjects: Climate Change Policies - aims to model policies related to Climate change on Wikidata.
• Newest database reports: Most linked category Items
• Showcase Items: Basshunter (Q383541) - Swedish singer, record producer, and DJ
• Showcase Lexemes: baguette (L7347) - French noun that can mean "elongated type of bread loaf", "elongated type of bread loaf", "conductor's baton", "chopsticks", "drum sticks" or "magic wand".

Development

• Wikibase REST API: We are continuing the work on the simple Item search (phab:T383126)
• Dumps: We fixed an issue that prevented the dumps from being generated (phab:T386401)
• Search: We are continuing to work on the search UI that will let you search not just Items but also other entity types (phab:T321543)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country: Australia
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

· Read the full report · Previous issue · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Abdulai (WMDE) talk · MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:26, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-10

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

Updates for editors

• All logged-in editors using the mobile view can now edit a full page. The "Edit full page" link is accessible from the "More" menu in the toolbar. This was previously only available to editors using the Advanced mobile contributions setting. [1]
• Interface administrators can now help to remove the deprecated Cite CSS code matching "mw-ref" from their local MediaWiki:Common.css. The list of wikis in need of cleanup, and the code to remove, can be found with this global search and in this example, and you can learn more about how to help on the CSS migration project page. The Cite footnote markers ("[1]") are now rendered by Parsoid, and the deprecated CSS is no longer needed. The CSS for backlinks ("mw:referencedBy") should remain in place for now. This cleanup is expected to cause no visible changes for readers. Please help to remove this code before March 20, after which the development team will do it for you.
• When editors embed a file (e.g. [[File:MediaWiki.png]]) on a page that is protected with cascading protection, the software will no longer restrict edits to the file description page, only to new file uploads.[2] In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g. {{:File:MediaWiki.png}}) will now restrict edits to the page.[3]
• When editors revert a file to an earlier version it will now require the same permissions as ordinarily uploading a new version of the file. The software now checks for 'reupload' or 'reupload-own' rights,[4] and respects cascading protection.[5]
• When administrators are listing pages for deletion with the Nuke tool, they can now also list associated talk pages and redirects for deletion, alongside pages created by the target, rather than needing to manually delete these pages afterwards. [6]
• The previously noted update to Single User Login, which will accommodate browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies by moving login and account creation to a central domain, will now roll out to all users during March and April. The team plans to enable it for all new account creation on Group0 wikis this week. See the SUL3 project page for more details and an updated timeline.
• Since last week there has been a bug that shows some interface icons as black squares until the page has fully loaded. It will be fixed this week. [7]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Sylheti (w:syl:) [8]
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed with loading images in very old versions of the Firefox browser on mobile. [9]

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 02:28, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

RFC watcher

Hi Rich, this edit got reverted (by bot) because RFC watcher (talk · contribs) is classed as inactive - no edits since 2015. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:29, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

Thanks I saw. A different approach is needed anyway. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 22:51, 6 March 2025 (UTC).

Nomination of Officers' Association for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Officers' Association is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Officers' Association until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.

Kaptain Kebab Heart (talk) 14:33, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #670

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2025-03-10. Missed the previous one? See issue #669

Events

• Upcoming events: Tuscan Women & Wikidata - data entry lab for shared memory, 5 March.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • WMDE Blog - Highlights of Data Reuse Days: The post showcases 3 excellent apps: WikiFlix (public domain full-length films), KDE Itinerary (travel assistant app) and Scribe Keyboard (easier writing in secondary languages). These are just some of the applications built using Wikidata; check out more at the Data Reuse Days pages.
  • (German) Digital Stumbling Blocks – How the Wiki Community Drives Remembrance Culture: User:Cookroach highlights the efforts of Wikimedians across projects (Wikidata, Wikipedia, Commons) to digitally document the Stolpersteine, brass-plaques laid to commemorate victims of the National Socialism.
  • (German) Digital History Berlin: Field research with LOD - a write-up of the methods, experiences data-model and SPARQl queries of the field research conducted as part of the WikiProject: Field Survey Digital Humanities.
  • (Italian) Wikipedia & Wikidata project for Cesare Alfieri - an introduction to the project to expand articles and data of the archives of Cesare Alfieri University of Florence.
  • Communicating Ontology: Technical approaches for facilitating use of our Wikibase data (Semantic Lab at Pratt Institute)

Tool of the week

• zelph: A new tool for detecting logical contradictions and making inferences in Wikidata, using a rule-based system to improve data quality and derive new facts. Check it out on GitHub or explore results on the project website.
• New Tool for Women’s Day: Scheherazade identifies women without articles in your Wikipedia but present in many others, helping editors prioritize creating missing biographies.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Wikimedia Research Fund had launched. You're encourage to submit proposals around Wikidata. The deadline to submit your proposal is April 16, 2025.
• The 4th iteration of the Wikidata:Open Online Course will begin from March 17 until April 30. Whether you're a beginner taking your first steps, an individual in need of a refresher on Wikidata concepts, or a seasoned trainer looking to level up your skills - this course is right for you.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • model number (identifier for a product model)
  • provides data for property (dataset associated with this external ID usually contains data applicable to this other Wikidata property)
  • items classified (class of items that this classification system classifies)
  • presented works (works of art or creative works performed, displayed or presented at a given event)
  • number of goals scored in penalty shootouts (total number of goals scored by a team in a penalty shootout)
• Newest External identifiers: ‎Thinky Games game ID, Lenape Talking Dictionary ID, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China (X-Boorman) ID, LEMAC ID, Bane NOR station ID, Sutian entry ID, Platform for Taiwan Religion and Folk Culture ID, Meine Abgeordneten ID, Hiking Note plant ID, VGC game ID, VGC company ID, VGC people ID, Archives in Bavaria ID, VGC theme ID, ‎Steam group ID, AllGame game ID (archived)
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • kigo of (the season the sense denotes in haiku in Japanese)
  • Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised score (score that the subject have received on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised psychological assessment tool as administered by a suitably qualified and experienced clinician under scientifically controlled and licensed conditions, standardized conditions)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Archaeological site (Japan) ID, Hmong Studies Citations ID, GitLab topic, Christchurch City Council Park ID, Clio-online researcher ID, Clio-online web resource ID, Clio-online organization ID, Congress.gov committee ID, AGORHA ID, Crunchyroll artist ID, ZOOM Platform product ID, GCMD keyword ID, KnowWhereGraph entity ID, VejinBooks author ID, SteamDB tech ID, Identifiant Cartofaf d'une organisation, Saarland Biografien ID, Murderpedia ID, Big Fish Games game ID, Danskefilmstemmer.dk work ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Obscure units of measurement and where to find them
  • Female scientists with most number of sitelinks (but not English Wikipedia)
• Newest WikiProjects: AncientCoinsAndModernMedals
• WikiProject Highlights:
  • WikiProject Biology: List of Mushrooms - revived by User:Prototyperspective, help catalogue all known fungal friends, and join the subreddit (for all Wikidata topics): r/WData
  • India/Police Stations
• Newest database reports: List of free software without an image set - This is a table of Wikidata items about a free software missing an image.
• Showcase Items: Doctor Strange (Q18406872) - 2016 film directed by Scott Derrickson
• Showcase Lexemes: felle (L476372) - Bokmål verb that can mean "to make something fall", "to kill", "to force a resignation", "to prove guilt", "to let lose", "to announce" or "to join."

Development

• Search: The search team at the WMF has added a new search keyword for Lexemes. You can use the keyword "inlanguage:en" or "inlanguage:Q1860" to limit your search to Lexemes with Lexeme language English and so on. Here is an example search for "bank" within English Lexemes: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?search=L%3Abank+inlanguage%3Aen (phab:T271776)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

· Read the full report · Previous issue · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Abdulai (WMDE) talk · MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:02, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-11

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

Updates for editors

• Editors who use password managers at multiple wikis may notice changes in the future. The way that our wikis provide information to password managers about reusing passwords across domains has recently been updated, so some password managers might now offer you login credentials that you saved for a different Wikimedia site. Some password managers already did this, and are now doing it for more Wikimedia domains. This is part of the SUL3 project which aims to improve how our unified login works, and to keep it compatible with ongoing changes to the web-browsers we use. [10][11]
• The Wikipedia Apps Team is inviting interested users to help improve Wikipedia’s offline and limited internet use. After discussions in Afrika Baraza and the last ESEAP call, key challenges like search, editing, and offline access are being explored, with upcoming focus groups to dive deeper into these topics. All languages are welcome, and interpretation will be available. Want to share your thoughts? Join the discussion or email aramadan@wikimedia.org!
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 19. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the launch of the Community Updates module, the most recent changes in Community Configuration, and the upcoming test of in-article suggestions for first-time editors.
• An old API that was previously used in the Android Wikipedia app is being removed at the end of March. There are no current software uses, but users of the app with a version that is older than 6 months by the time of removal (2025-03-31), will no longer have access to the Suggested Edits feature, until they update their app. You can read more details about this change.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:07, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

Phab

T367754 says Access denies: Restricted task \n You do not have permission to view this object. Weird. Polygnotus (talk) 02:05, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Because it's a security issue I would say. I did not know that was a thing, but it's not a bad idea. However an issue has been resolved it's normal practice to publish it. I note that I said I would raise a CERT issue after 30 days (although I haven't yet) so I feel it's ethical to discuss the issue in public. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 11:13, 17 March 2025 (UTC).

Wikidata weekly summary #671

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2025-03-17. Missed the previous one? See issue #670

Discussions

• New request for comments: Time to deprecate P642 - of (P642) has spent 3 years marked asdeprecated. Is it time to finally mark it as an obsolete Wikidata property(Q18644427)?

Events

• Upcoming events:
  • Call for Wikimania 2025 Programme reviewers. Apply until Monday 17 March 12:00 UTC
  • Wikidata Affinity Group Update: The fourth session of Starting a Wikidata Project, originally set for March 18, will now be an asynchronous Slack discussion in the #wikidata channel of the LD4 Slack Space. Join us at 9am PT / 16:00 UTC to discuss Reporting Your Outcomes and Results. Join Slack here. Note: April programming will pause as we prepare the next series.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • Training for the staff of the Museum of Photography in Krakow on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata - "The training aimed to enable the MuFo staff to effectively navigate and develop skills in editing and managing the museum's digital resources within the Wikimedia projects."
  • (German) Wikipedia Unterwegs - this time in Neu-Ulm: This travelling community meetup for German Wikimedians discusses the growing ecosystem of Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons.
  • REST in Rust by Magnus: "A new Rust crate has been developed to simplify access to the Wikibase REST API, featuring industry-level coding standards, 248 unit tests, >97% code coverage, and high maintainability. Check out the GitHub repo and contribute via the issue tracker or pull requests!"
• Videos
  • Useful videos that explain how to set up/make use of Wikibases. Put together by Valerie
  • Wikidata and Wikibase - Curriculum Transformation in the Digital Humanities
  • (Chinese) Open Data Day Taiwan 2025: more details and program agenda on the Wikimedia Taiwan Meta Event page
  • Wikidata as an Open Data Resource: Ian Watt at Open Source SG
  • Bridging GLAM and Wiki: The Khalili Perspective: Dr. Martin Poulter, WiR at Khalili Foundation.

Tool of the week

• Research Expeditions on Wikidata with itineraries - Visualization tool for research expeditions itineraries and natural history collections.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• An update regarding the WDQS backend has been published, about the adoption of the new endpoints and the next steps that will take place.
• Call for Projects – Wiki Mentor Africa Hackathon 2025. Do you have a technical project that needs contributions? Or a testing initiative that could use more hands? Submit a project BY 21st March 2025.
• The Wikidata Vector Database prototype is almost ready! Developers interested in integrating semantic search into their applications and editors looking to explore Wikidata items using natural language search are invited to reach out for more details: philippe.saadewikimedia.de
• Join the Wikimedia Deutschland software development team: Product Manager Wikibase Suite (all genders)

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • OAI formatter (formatter to generate ID compatible with Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting services)
  • AI-generation prompt (exact prompt that was used to generate this AI-generated media or work)
  • data analysis method (methods used in the main item for inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information)
• Newest External identifiers: Wikishire article ID, HelloAsso organization ID, Dictionnaire de la déportation gardoise person ID, Graceful17 entity ID, ‎Game Input Database ID, DRTV ID, Calindex person ID, Historia Hispánica ID, ‎TERMDAT ID, Kulturdatenbank ID, DDLC entry ID, Chinese Basketball Association player ID, ‎Captain Coaster coaster ID, Memoria Chilena ID, Jamendo track ID, MikuWiki article ID, ‎ZOOM Platform product ID, Clio-online researcher ID, Clio-online organization ID, ‎SteamDB tech ID, ‎Big Fish Games game ID, Clio-online web resource ID, Iowa State University Library Vocabularies ID, Newsweek topic ID, booru tag
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • watercraft prefix (prefix applied to watercraft operated by different organisations)
  • accused (person or organization who has been accused of carrying out this harmful, illegal, or immoral act without having received a criminal conviction or where the accused have been acquitted in a court of law)
  • applies to volume (volume of the item (usually edition of a work) to which the claim applies)
  • oxygen endurance (The maximum time a submarine, spacecraft or enclosed vehicle can sustain life using its onboard oxygen supply.)
  • Coefficient of thermal expansion ()
  • fracture toughness ()
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Danskefilmstemmer.dk work ID, Danskefilmstemmer.dk character ID, Internet-Portal „Westfälische Geschichte“ person ID, Kosovo NGO registration number, Yale LUX ID, geraldika.ru symbol ID, Swimcloud swimmer ID, CACI company ID, VD 16 ID, World Higher Education Database ID, Qur'an Wiki article ID, JSIC code, Macrotransactions game ID, Landtag Tirol person ID, NexusMods mod ID, Thunderstore game ID, SideQuest app ID, IndExs Exsiccata ID, National Academy of Engineering member ID, DGO ID, The Rural Settlement of Roman Britain ID, Audiovisual Identity Database page, Encyclopaedia of Islam (Arabic edition) ID, Rodovid family ID, Cultural Heritage Azerbaijan ID, Zurich Kantonsrat and Regierungsrat member ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Location of fire stations in Spain (source)
  • Oldest known individual per taxon (pre-20th century) (source)
• Newest WikiProjects: AncientMaths
• WikiProject Highlights: New country page for Poland in WikiProject Nonprofit Organizations, and on cividata.org. Help expanding it!
• Newest database reports: German lexemes without forms divided by lexical category (source)
• Showcase Items: Perm (Q915) - city in Russia
• Showcase Lexemes: Knoten (L298686) - German noun that can mean "knot", "fundamental unit of which graphs (in graph theory) are formed", "point where an orbit crosses a plane of reference to which it is inclined", or "hair wrapped in a circular coil around itself (bun)."

Development

• Wikibase REST API: We continued the work on adding search to the API (phab:T383126)
• Search: We are continuing the work on making it easier to search for entities other than Items in the search box (phab:T338483)
• Query Service: We set up the constraint checks to use the split graph instead of the full graph (phab:T374021)
• Integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are looking into how changes from Wikidata are represented on the other Wikimedia projects and how that can be improved (phab:T386200)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

· Read the full report · Previous issue · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Abdulai (WMDE) talk · MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:55, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-12

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

Weekly highlight

• Twice a year, around the equinoxes, the Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team performs a datacenter server switchover, redirecting all traffic from one primary server to its backup. This provides reliability in case of a crisis, as we can always fall back on the other datacenter. Thanks to the Listen to Wikipedia tool, you can hear the switchover take place: Before it begins, you'll hear the steady stream of edits; Then, as the system enters a brief read-only phase, the sound stops for a couple of minutes, before resuming after the switchover. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog. If you want to keep an ear out for the next server switchover, listen to the wikis on March 19 at 14:00 UTC.

Updates for editors

• The improved Content Translation tool dashboard is now available in 10 Wikipedias and will be available for all Wikipedias soon. With the unified dashboard, desktop users can now: Translate new sections of an article; Discover and access topic-based article suggestion filters (initially available only for mobile device users); Discover and access the Community-defined lists filter, also known as "Collections", from wiki-projects and campaigns.
• On Wikimedia Commons, a new system to select the appropriate file categories has been introduced: if a category has one or more subcategories, users will be able to click on an arrow that will open the subcategories directly within the form, and choose the correct one. The parent category name will always be shown on top, and it will always be possible to come back to it. This should decrease the amount of work for volunteers in fixing/creating new categories. The change is also available on mobile. These changes are part of planned improvements to the UploadWizard.
• The Community Tech team is seeking wikis to join a pilot for the Multiblocks feature and a refreshed Special:Block page in late March. Multiblocks enables administrators to impose multiple different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. If you are an admin or steward and would like us to discuss joining the pilot with your community, please leave a message on the project talk page.
• Starting March 25, the Editing team will test a new feature for Edit Check at 12 Wikipedias: Multi-Check. Half of the newcomers on these wikis will see all Reference Checks during their edit session, while the other half will continue seeing only one. The goal of this test is to see if users are confused or discouraged when shown multiple Reference Checks (when relevant) within a single editing session. At these wikis, the tags used on edits that show References Check will be simplified, as multiple tags could be shown within a single edit. Changes to the tags are documented on Phabricator. [12]
• The Global reminder bot, which is a service for notifying users that their temporary user-rights are about to expire, now supports using the localized name of the user-rights group in the message heading. Translators can see the listing of existing translations and documentation to check if their language needs updating or creation.
• The GlobalPreferences gender setting, which is used for how the software should refer to you in interface messages, now works as expected by overriding the local defaults. [13]
• View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Wikipedia App for Android had a bug fixed for when a user is browsing and searching in multiple languages. [14]

Updates for technical contributors

• Later this week, the way that Codex styles are loaded will be changing. There is a small risk that this may result in unstyled interface message boxes on certain pages. User generated content (e.g. templates) is not impacted. Gadgets may be impacted. If you see any issues please report them. See the linked task for details, screenshots, and documentation on how to fix any affected gadgets.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:45, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 March 2025

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Kentucky militia

Hi. Can you please undelete this? I am going to turn it into an article here. Thanks! Semper Fi! FieldMarine (talk) 12:15, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Hi, no need to undelete a redirect, you can just write the article. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 13:11, 23 March 2025 (UTC).

Hi, I know, but I had some cats I researched at the time used in the redirect and it would be easier to start from that point, not to mention original launch date. Semper Fi! FieldMarine (talk) 15:05, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

The two categories were Category:Militia in the United States and Category:Military units and formations in Kentucky. Not worth restoring for that — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:13, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-13

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

Weekly highlight

• The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking your feedback on the drafts of the objectives and key results that will shape the Foundation's Product and Technology priorities for the next fiscal year (starting in July). The objectives are broad high-level areas, and the key-results are measurable ways to track the success of their objectives. Please share your feedback on the talkpage, in any language, ideally before the end of April.

Updates for editors

• The CampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (see deployment plan for details) in April 2025, and the team has begun the process of engaging communities on the identified wikis. The extension provides tools to organize, manage, and promote collaborative activities (like events, edit-a-thons, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. The extension has three tools: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation Lists. It is currently on 13 Wikipedias, including English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia, as well as Wikidata. Questions or requests can be directed to the extension talk page or in Phabricator (with #campaigns-product-team tag).
• Starting the week of March 31st, wikis will be able to set which user groups can view private registrants in Event Registration, as part of the CampaignEvents extension. By default, event organizers and the local wiki admins will be able to see private registrants. This is a change from the current behavior, in which only event organizers can see private registrants. Wikis can change the default setup by requesting a configuration change in Phabricator (and adding the #campaigns-product-team tag). Participants of past events can cancel their registration at any time.
• Administrators at wikis that have a customized MediaWiki:Sidebar should check that it contains an entry for the Special pages listing. If it does not, they should add it using * specialpages-url|specialpages. Wikis with a default sidebar will see the link moved from the page toolbox into the sidebar menu in April. [15]
• The Minerva skin (mobile web) combines both Notice and Alert notifications within the bell icon (). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts. [16]
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• VisualEditor has introduced a new client-side hook for developers to use when integrating with the VisualEditor target lifecycle. This hook should replace the existing lifecycle-related hooks, and be more consistent between different platforms. In addition, the new hook will apply to uses of VisualEditor outside of just full article editing, allowing gadgets to interact with the editor in DiscussionTools as well. The Editing Team intends to deprecate and eventually remove the old lifecycle hooks, so any use cases that this new hook does not cover would be of interest to them and can be shared in the task.
• Developers who use the mw.Api JavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with the userAgent parameter: var api = new mw.Api( { userAgent: 'GadgetNameHere/1.0.1' } );. If you maintain a gadget or user script, please set a user agent, because it helps with library and server maintenance and with differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate traffic. [17][18]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:39, 24 March 2025 (UTC)