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Wikidata weekly summary #412[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Ordia generates statistics from Wikidata lexeme information, and through the "Text to Lexemes" feature allows linking a document to the associated lexemes, and highlighting missing lexemes that can be added.
  • Development
    • Prototyping week: the Wikidata team at Wikimedia Germany spent one week working on some quick experiements. The projects developed during this week are not necessarily going to be added to the maintained codebase. Among those projects:
      • try to use GraphQL for the API providing access to Wikibase/Wikidata data
      • allow to programmatically access different configuration variables of a Wikibase instance to make it easier for tools to built on top of it
      • investigate ranking for Items to order them by their relevance in a query result
      • com up with a workflows for editing statements linking to other Items in the Wikidata Bridge
      • identify how to improve Wikidata's accessibility
      • create design system components to continue improving consistency

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #413[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • zotkat's exporter for Zotero (a software to manage bibliographic data) allows you to export bibliographies to the QuickStatements format. It is helpful to easily create bibliographical entries, especially as Zotero can read metadata about works from dozens of other websites, and can thus be used as intermediary.
  • Development
    • More work on error screens for the Bridge
    • Use updated data for the Bridge (phab:T240223)
    • Display statements made with federated properties on item pages (phab:T246606)
    • Automated references: normalizing data that the extractor gets out of HTML pages (phab:T249004)
    • Create a distributed game so people can vet references easily (phab:T248997)
    • Cleanup rows from wb_items_per_site (phab:T249613)
    • Don't suggest initial uppercase in mobile termbox (phab:T241978)
    • Have the focus on field when adding new element on Sense (phab:T203461)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #414[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Competition for the International Museum Day is about improving data about museums in Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland on Wikidata, from 3 May 2020 to 18 May 2020, more information on Museum Day 2020/Wikidata Competition
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Alex Jung on Wikidata and Wikipedia Infoboxes, 05 May. Agenda
    • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries in French by Vigneron, Tuesday May 5 at 20:00 CEST (UTC+2)
  • Tool of the week
    • ProWD explores completeness for entities and classes.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • MachtSinn, a tool that allows you to easily add Senses to Lexemes, has lately been improved significantly
    • 33,000 values of British Museum person or institution ID (d:Property:P1711) now have a useful target again. After their being mostly inoperative for several years, the new British Museum website now has information pages matching these values, with links to related objects. (Example). To work around bug T112081, a script by Andrew Gray is going through the items making null edits to update the relevant URLs.
    • Outdated copy of wb_terms has been dropped on April 29th
  • Development
    • Add monolingual language codes rm-rumgr, rm-surmiran, rm-sursilv, rm-sutsilv, rm-vallader, rm-puter (phab:T222426)
    • More work on the test system for federated properties
    • More work on displaying statements with federated properties (phab:T246606)
    • Bridge: more work on generic error screens (phab:T241126)
    • Bridge: warn the user that they are about to edit anonymously (phab:T246676)
    • Work on a Wikidata distributed game for automated finding of references
    • Automated finding references: build a scraper, simple value matching, item analyzer
    • Have the focus on field when adding new element on Sense (phab:T203461)
    • Add more properties to the PageImages list (phab:T249811)
    • Use strict types everywhere in Wikibase (phab:T251382)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #415[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Press, articles, blog posts, videos
    • Webinar introducing Wikidata and adding wikidata=* tags into OpenStreetMap objects for OpenStreetMap contributors in the Philippines (in English and Tagalog): YouTube
    • Wikidata Course at TAU: Hosting Mark Graham from the Internet Archive
      • Part 1 - Meet the Archive: YouTube
      • Part 2 - The IA & Wikimedia: YouTube
    • Wikidata Course at TAU: Hosting Lydia Pintscher from Wikimedia Deutschland
      • Part 1 - Wikidata - current state: YouTube
      • Part 2 - Wikibase & Lexemes: YouTube
      • Part 3 - Shape Expressions & Schemas: YouTube
    • How to create external identifiers on Wikidata (in Italian): YouTube
    • Open Data and Wikidata training (in Mandarin Chinese): YouTube
    • Bandaid: using Wikidata to generate band names
  • Tool of the week
    • WikidataExtract extracts schemas (shape expressions) from Wikidata entities
  • Development
    • Display statements with federated properties (phab:T246606)
    • Federated properties: fix a bug that caused some properties to not appear in search results (phab:T252024)
    • Wikidata Bridge: more work on error messages
    • Prevent Wikibase schema updaters to modify database directly (phab:T249598)
    • Write a technical RFC about site-wide edit rate limiting (phab:T247459)
    • Fix an issue on Wikibase: property names are missing when rendering (phab:T247196)
    • More work on automated references

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #416[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • WikidataTrust.jsP updates the interface with the contributors to each statement, label, description and sitelink. It is similar to the “blame” tool on text-based wikis.
  • Development
    • In the query service, variable names with non-“Latin” characters (e. g. ?fiancé, ?π) can now be used more easily. (T227952)
    • Wikidata Bridge: more work on error messages and warnings (phab:T246676, phab:T247250, phab:T244361)
    • Federated properties: display statements made with deleted properties (phab:T250785)
    • More work on fixing error messages on Wikidata's edit interface (phab:T247690)
    • Form grammatical features: connect labels and inputs (phab:T198703)

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #417[edit]

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

This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2020-05-25.

  • Tool of the week
    • If you're looking for even more tools, the Tools Directory indexes over 130 Wikidata tools.
  • Development
    • Federated properties: Linking to the source wiki immediately after saving a statement (phab:T251776)
    • Properly display federated properties on a local item's Revision History page (phab:T249836)
    • Documentation for federated properties (phab:T252991, phab:T252861)
    • Last steps of getting the distributed game "Reference hunt" ready
    • Wikidata Bridge: more work on error messages
    • Track errors people encounter when using the Bridge (phab:T252683)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #418[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • wdumps allows you to create a limited RDF dump from Wikidata, for those times when your SPARQL queries keep timing out. It is not particularly user-friendly, and it typically takes several hours to get a complete dump, but it is the best way to for example get a list of all English names of humans in Wikidata, or a list of every scientific article with its title and DOI.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • The former WikiProject iNaturalist was renamed WikiProject Biodiversity to allow discussions beyond iNaturalist.
    • Special:FewestRevisions to be disabled, if you are currently using it, please leave a comment
    • Winners of the Wikidata competition during Museum Day 2020: VIGNERON, Alexmar983, Braveheart, Pasleim, Benoît Prieur, Uli.ch, Nono314, Sukkoria and Airon90. Congratulations!
    • As part of a thesis project, the search engine "Lister" has been developed to make it easier for the general public to access data on the Semantic Web in general, and WikiData specifically. It's in a usability test-phase right now, and if you'd like to try it out and help improve it, you can do so at this link. The test should at most 15 minutes.
    • Follow the discussion about restricting editing of properties to autoconfirmed users.
    • New domain toolforge.org to be adopted by our Toolforge community. New domain/scheme for Toolforge-hosted webservices will change from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org with the aim to introduce permanent redirects for the legacy URLs on 2020-06-15.
    • Wikidata development team is currently running a survey until June 9th to understand better how people access and reuse Wikidata’s data from the code of their applications and tools (for example through APIs), and how we can improve the tools to make your workflows easier. If you would like to participate, please use this link (Google Forms, estimated fill-in time 5min).
  • Development
    • More documentation for federated properties
    • Properly display federated properties on a local item's Revision History page (phab:T249836)
    • More improvements on the Wikidata Bridge
    • Add Wikidata support for awawiki (phab:T252870)
    • Fix various bugs on Wikibase
    • Work on improving the unclear error messages (phab:T247690)
    • Create reports for the reference hunt game

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #419[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • QuickStatements lets you edit thousands of Wikidata items at a time. Add labels and descriptions, or statements with sources and qualifiers, add sitelinks, create or merge items, or remove statements that were created in error. Batches can be discussed and, if necessary, reverted in full through the EditGroups tool.
  • Development
    • Wikidata Bridge: Made a number of technical improvements to wrap up the work in the first version.
    • Reference Hunt: Making final technical improvements and are now running the process to find references on the whole of Wikidata (as opposed to the initial small subset for testing). Once that's done we'll release them as a dump.
    • Easier access to data for programmers: Researching and interviewing ways to improve the APIs in preparation for working on them.
    • Query builder: Working on defining the first version and creating mockups based on the feedback we received.
    • Use modern TypeScript syntax (3.2 -> 3.9) (phab:T253211)
    • More technical documentation for Federated Properties (phab:T252991) & preparing for the next steps
    • Convert some properties to external identifiers (phab:T253722)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #420[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Mix'n'match lets you match lists of external identifiers to Wikidata items, or create new items if necessary. Thousands of catalogs already exist, in dozens of different topic areas, and it's easy to import new ones.
  • Development
    • Collecting a lot of feedback and doing research around how to improve our APIs to start making it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers
    • Finalized the initial feature list for the query builder and working on designs and prototypes for testing
    • Doing user research on the Merge gadget to prepare for making it part of the proper code-base so that other Wikibase instances also benefit from easier merging
    • Federated Properties: continued working on the first version of Federation that will make it possible to use Wikidata's Properties in another Wikibase installation
    • Start of a new project (Wikibase Decoupling & Extension Registration) in order to clean up our codebase a bit and make it easier to extend with new features in the future
    • More work on the design system to have a set of unified components for Wikidata that will make it easier to develop new features in the future because we don't have to rewrite components that are used in a lot of places
    • Some MediaWiki skin changes meant broken edit links on Wikipedia and co. Fixed now. (phabricator:T252800)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #421[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • The currentDate gadget automatically adds the current date when using retrieved in a reference.
  • Development
    • Continue working on the infrastructure review, in order to address the most pressing infrastructure issues
    • Make the Wikibase.git code base PSR-4 compatible (phab:T172368)
    • Work on an overview of existing types of coupling in Wikibase between Repo and Client (phab:T254902)
    • More work on consistency of UX components
    • Handle failed requests to the federation source wiki when saving statements (phab:T254889)
    • Catch federated properties exceptions in getParserOutput and display error page (phab:T255010)
    • Improve the permissions for Blazegraph in wdqs docker image (phab:T237248)
    • Create entitySources config for WMF production wikis (phab:T254315)
    • Participate in fixing several incidents (phab:T255855, phab:T255410)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #422[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Wikibase Live sessions is coming back with the first call about Data Modeling in the context of Libraries happening on Thursday, July 2nd at 1600 UTC.
  • Development
    • It is now possible to search for EntitySchema pages using a shortcut “E:”, similar to “P:” for Properties and “L:” for Lexemes. For example: E:E10 or E:kakapo. T245529
    • Continued working on the first version of Federation, which will allow other Wikibase installations to use Wikidata's Properties - getting closer to a first testable version
    • More work on consistency of user interface components
    • Finalizing the click-dummy for the first version of the Query Builder so we can start testing it with some editors soon and get feedback.
    • Continuing to investigate how to improve our APIs and other ways to improve access to the data in Wikidata for programmers
    • Discussed the future of the Wikidata Query Service and ideas for next steps we can take to make it scale better. Guillaume will join the next office hour to talk about it.
    • More work on clearer separation of Wikibase repository and Wikibase client code in order to improve maintainability

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #423[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Ptable displays the periodic table automatically extracted from information provided by Wikidata; it also provides a check that all the elements are there with some basic properties. Additional pages provide charts of the nuclides under different criteria such as half-life. Each element or nuclide is linked to its Wikidata item for more information or to edit if necessary.
  • Development
    • More work on the consistent design system (Phabricator board)
    • More work on decoupling the different Wikibase extensions from each other
    • Polishing the first step of Federation (using Wikidata's Properties in another Wikibase installation) (incl. preventing users from selecting a federated property with a non-supported data type (phab:T252012) and preventing users from accessing Special:NewProperty when federation is enabled (phab:T255576) and viewing a list of all properties when federation is enabled (phab:T246339))
    • Continuing research and interviews around the topic of making it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers
    • Doing first testing of mockups and prototypes of the first version of the Query Builder - coding can start soon
    • Convert a few properties from string to external identifier: Linguasphere code (P1396), KOATUU identifier (P1077) and ISIN (P946)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #424[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: New co-facilitator introductions and tools for editathons, 14 July. Agenda
    • Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #12, 18 July Facebook, YouTube
    • Past: Celtic Knot Wikimedia language conference, online, July 9-10. Videos, documentation and slides of sessions are accessible from the program page.
  • Tool of the week
    • DragNDrop.js makes it possible to show a Wikipedia article and drag items to Wikidata.
  • Development
    • Continued building out documentation for Federated Properties (phabricator:T255651) and making interface improvements to the first stage of the feature (incl. phabricator:T246886, changes to special pages that interact with both Items/Properties, and phabricator:T255581, changes to Special:ListDataTypes when federation is enabled)
    • More work on the consistent design system
    • More work on decoupling the different Wikibase extensions from each other to make development easier
    • Finalizing research and interviews to better understand what could be improved in the way developers access Wikidata's data (APIs, SPARQL)
    • Testing the first prototype of the Simple Query Builder with some editors to get final input before coding starts
    • Sorting of language links on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects was broken (presumably by a change in MediaWiki core). A fix is being worked on. (phabricator:T257625)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #425[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming: The First Wikidata Workshop: Second Call for Papers. Papers due: August 10, 2020 | Workshop date: October 29, 2020
    • Upcoming: next Wikidata office hour, July 21st at 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST) in the Wikidata Telegram group. Query Service special with guests from WMF Search Team.
    • Upcoming: Wikidata Lab XXIV: Posicionamento digital relativo with Ederporto - July 23 17:00 UTC (14:00 BRT). In this technical training, we'll study the possibilities and functionalities of relative digital positioning in images and do practical activities on this topic using historical photographs of the city of São Paulo. The event will be held in Portuguese. Join us!
    • Upcoming video: July 21 - Wikipedia Weekly Network - Entity Schemas and Shape Expressions (ShEx) Facebook YouTube
    • Upcoming video: July 25 - Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #13 Facebook YouTube
    • Upcoming: Kidok-Workshop, online workshop about church building data. In German, non-native users welcome. Currently looking for a date in the upcoming week and people to help!
    • Upcoming video: Beyond Wikipedia - Knowledge that even a computer can understand. July 22, 2020 at 17:00 UTC. In this talk, Zbyszko Papierski will present Wikidata Query Service as one way that developers can interact with Wikidata.
  • Development
    • More work on the consistent design system
    • More work on decoupling the different Wikibase extensions from each other to make development easier:
    • Prepare the first development phase for the Simple Query Builder
    • Reference game: run a scraper, work on a dashboard that will gives an overview of the potential references that have already been judged in the game
    • Fix a bug related to maximum limit of search results (phab:T256885)
    • Resolve some configuration issues regarding Entity Sources (phab:T254315)
    • Federated Properties:
      • Changes to special pages that interact with both items/properties when federation is enabled (phab:T246886)
      • Changes to Special:ListDatatypes when federation is enabled (phab:T255581)
    • Add new monolingual language codes: mic (Miꞌkmaq), gil (Kiribati)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #426[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • We would love suggestions for tools to include in this section of the weekly summary. Please add your suggestions directly under Status updates/Next#Backlog after checking that the tool isn't already listed.
  • Development
    • Changed the size of image previews to 1024 in the gallery view of the query service to avoid some images not loading sometimes (phabricator:T258241)
    • Added an actual space between the entity title and the name of the fallback language (if any), so that the fallback language isn't selected anymore when double-clicking the entity title for copying (phabricator:T256857)
    • Fixed the directionality of text pieces in placeholders that mix LTR and RTL (phabricator:T253812)
    • Continued work on first pieces of design system to make coding new features easier in the future
    • Continued untangling the code of Wikibase Client and Wikibase Repo to make it easier to develop on them
    • Finished first piece of research on how to make it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers - more work to be done
    • Preparing to start coding on the Query Builder to make it easier to create queries without having to know SPARQL
    • Finished running the scraper that gets potential new references for unreferenced statements and preparing it for publishing

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #427[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Wiki13
  • Tool of the week
    • SQID allows you to analyse, browse and query Wikidata. SQID is inspired by Magnus Manske's Reasonator, but focuses on prominently featuring information about Wikidata classes and properties.
  • Development
    • The last week was our quarterly prototyping week. We worked on the following projects. None of them are ready for prime-time yet but we'll continue with them.
      • Slices: We've had a lot of requests for accessing dumps of a smaller part of Wikidata's data since rarely anyone needs the complete data in Wikidata. The tricky part is figuring out which part is needed and if any of that can be generalized. We looked into for example how to make dump generation faster so we could potentially produce more smaller dumps that only cover a part of Wikidata's data, either thematically (e.g. humans) or by type of data (e.g. only statements and English labels and aliases but not sitelinks or descriptions).
      • REST API: As part of our effort to make it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers we looked into a REST API. We tried to see if we could cover the existing action API modules in a REST API. We could. We'll take this as input for our ongoing API work now.
      • Improving quality ratings through ORES: ORES can judge the quality of an Item automatically. It is currently not very good at it however. We tried a few things to make it more accurate and found some easy wins we'll probably make happen in the next weeks.
      • Query manipulator: One of the ways we could potentially improve the load situation of the Wikidata Query Service is by automatically analyzing and then redirecting a bunch of queries to other systems that are more suitable for that particular type of query. The nice thing about that would be that the person/program sending the query wouldn't have to care about it but it'd be done automagically for them. We tried to build such a system and the results look very promising but more work/experimenting is needed, especially together with the WMF Search team.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #428[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Past: Wikibase Live Session - August 2020. This session had a few people present on some of their work with modeling GLAM data in Wikibase or Wikidata. (replay)
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Daniel Mietchen and Lane Rasberry about Scholia, a project to present bibliographic information and scholarly profiles of authors and institutions, 11 August. [Agenda]
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #25, August 16
  • Development
    • finalized designs for the query builder to start coding at the beginning of September
    • wrapping up the initial work on the design system so that we can start using the first pieces of it in the query builder development
    • working on properly linking redirects in recent changes, watchlist and co (phabricator:T255387)
    • addressed remaining security review comments about the Wikidata Bridge so that we can deploy it finally on the first Wikipedia
    • fixed a bug where string values had the wrong length limit (phabricator:T259440)
    • finishing the work of untangling Wikibase Client and Wikibase Repository extensions to make development easier

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #429[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Entity Explosion: a new multilingual Chrome browser extension. "Taking the power of Wikidata with me wherever I go across the web!". Uses API calls to the Wikidata Query Service to match the URL you are browsing on to a Wikidata item, and then displays data and links to other sites about the same entity. (Video)
  • Development
    • Fixed a bug where a length limit for strings seems to have reverted itself back from 1500 to its default 400 (phabricator:T259440)
    • Fixed a bug that Wikibase is not always adding &redirect=no in situations when MediaWiki usually does (phabricator:T255387)
    • Wrapping up the initial work on the design system so it is ready for use in the first new feature (Query Builder)
    • Fixed the serialization of statements on Forms and Senses not containing the datatype (phabricator:T249206)
    • Wrapping up work on the first version of Federated Properties so that other Wikibase installations can use Wikidata's Properties instead of having to maintain their own
    • Worked on ensuring the data from the linked data interface at Special:EntityData is always up to date after an edit has been made (phabricator:T128486)
    • Enabling clients to use Lua to request labels, descriptions and aliases in some (often minority) languages even when they are not content languages (phabricator:T259340, phabricator:T260118)


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.

Wikidata weekly summary #430[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Sophox allows for SPARQL querying of Wikidata and OpenStreetMap in a single query
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Two new grant programs from WikiCite, in support of open citations and linked bibliographic data.
Full documentation, eligibility requirements, selection criteria, program design principles, and contacts at the links. Apply by 1 October.
  1. Project & events [$2-10k]
  2. e-Scholarships [per-diem calculated on your city; 1-5 people (single, or as a 'remote group') for 2-4 days, for COVID-era "stay at home" projects. Paid in advance living allowance, no expense report required.]
  • Development
    • Deployed the first version of the Wikidata Bridge to Catalan Wikipedia
    • Creating Grafana Dashboards for the new Wikidata Bridge so we have some data to help us determine which datatypes to support next for example (phabricator:T260532)
    • Finished working on ensuring Labels of Items in some unusual, often minority, languages are still available on Wikipedia and other clients (phabricator: T259340)
    • Fixed error messages for API modules that will not work with the first version of Federated Properties (phabricator:T258558)
    • Working on improving how ORES judges the quality of an Item to make it more accurate
    • Started coding on Automated Configuration Discovery to make it easier for tool builders to make their tools work for other Wikibase instances as well

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #431[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Wikidata for Firefox is a browser extension that displays Wikidata items while browsing the web, adds missing IDs and extracts information from websites to Wikidata.
  • Development
    • Working on Automated Configuration Discovery to make it easier for tool builders to make their tools work for other Wikibase instances as well
    • Polishing remaining pieces of the first version of Federated Properties to make it possible to use Wikidata's Properties in other Wikibase instances
    • Continuing to work on improving the way ORES automatically scores the quality of an Item to make it more accurate

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #432[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Rob Fernandez (Wikimedia District of Columbia) on Listeria, a tool that uses SPARQL queries to define a list, and provides a bot that will update a wiki page containing that list if the results of that SPARQL query change, all based on Wikidata, 08 September. Agenda
    • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 8 at 18:00 CEST
    • Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #19 Facebook, YouTube, September 10
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #29, September 13
  • Development
    • Added Wikidata support to Japanese Wikivoyage. phab:T261451
    • Investigating the nature of our training outliers to improve the way ORES automatically scores the quality of an Item.
    • Working on error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an item. phab:T260869
    • Completed various investigations to make an informed decision on the output format of WikibaseManifest files (automated configuration detection for toolbuilders) phab:T261285
    • Completed various bug fixes and wrap-up tasks to conclude the major engineering work on the Federated Properties project
    • More work on Item Quality Scoring and Federated Properties

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #433[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Mbabel is a tool that simplifies article creation by providing pre-made sentences based on Wikidata statements.
  • Development
    • Fixing an error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an Item instead of just one. (phabricator:T260869)
    • Development of version one of Federated Properties has concluded! Expect an announcement with timing of the release of this feature soon. Wikibase users who want an early look at the feature are invited to reach out to participate in the pre-release testing round.
    • Development of the WikibaseManifest extension has continued into its second sprint; we focused on determining a product specification for the Manifest output.
    • Finishing a draft documentation for a REST API to get it ready for a feedback round before implementation.
    • Finished improvements to the automated scoring of the quality of Items with ORES. Still need to retrain ORES and deploy the changes before the scores are actually different though.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #434[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata Introduction Workshop (German) (September 29)
    • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 21 at 18:00 CEST
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: A starting point for newer institutions to think through what is involved in coordinating a Wikidata project, including shared infrastructure, training, and documentation, 22 September. Agenda
    • Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #21 WikiDojo: Facebook, YouTube, September 25
  • Tool of the week
    • copy-qid is a user script by Abbe98 that allows you to copy the Qid with one click.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • WQS now supports mwapi service request for Wikibooks (phab:T261125)
    • The language codes lij-mc, ja-Hira, ja-Kana, ja-Hrkt, ja-Hani, ojp, ojp-Hira and ojp-Hani" have been added for use in monolingual text property values (phab:T254968, phab:T195816)
    • The language codes de-1901, eo-hsistemo and eo-xsistemo, ja-hira, ja-kana and ja-hrkt have been added for Lexemes (phab:T262330,phab:T257422, phab:T250559)
    • P1438 has been converted from string to external ID datatype (phab:T262198)
    • Worked on fixing an input issue with invisible characters (phab:T261071)
    • Investigating what work would be needed to get the new termbox that's available on mobile to also work on desktop
    • Fixing several issues with Special:Undelete (phab:T261747)
    • Fixing an error message being shown twice (phab:T260869)
    • Starting the coding work on the Query Builder
    • Continuing to write a draft for a REST API specification
    • Finishing the remaining work needed to get the improved quality scoring for Items deployed to ORES
    • Continuing work on WikibaseManifest: Determined the essential metadata that will be included in the WikibaseManifest file, added some new features (mostly MediaWiki metadata) to the Manifest that were requested by the OpenRefine team (phab:T262805 and phab:T262804) and set up a test system that will soon be ready for tool builders to use for testing the integration of their tools with WikibaseManifest


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.

Wikidata weekly summary #435[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • The Wikidata development team is seeking to evaluate and improve the process of collecting and reacting to bug reports and feature requests. You can give feedback about your experience using this anonymous form until September 30th or add feedback publically to Wikidata talk:Contact the development team/Process review 2020.
    • Nominate your favorite tools for the Coolest Tool Award 2020 before October 14th.
    • Wikidata Walkabout is a new site that lets you browse and drill down through different "classes" of data on Wikidata: wikidatawalkabout.org
    • Como is a new Android app, that uses Wikidata lexemes and senses to create a word-guessing game. It let's players create new senses and tests them on other players to finally save them in Wikidata. The app is developed as part of a BA thesis, to determine if this concept is useful to create more lexicographical data, and testers would be very welcome.
  • Development
    • A long-standing bug has been fixed (T217144) where Items and Lexemes created via OAuth would not be added to the user’s watchlist even if the user had the Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist setting enabled. (The Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist setting was probably likewise ineffective, but this was not tested specifically.) Affected tools include QuickStatements, Mix'n'Match, and Wikidata Lexeme Forms; users of these and other tools may see more pages being added to their watchlists now. (This only applies to new edits and page creations; previously created or edited pages will not be automatically added to the watchlist retroactively.)
    • Working on the basic building blocks of the Query Builder towards making it possible to create the first very simple query with it
    • Talking to people about comparing Wikidata's data against other databases and flagging mismatches
    • Fixing an issue with Item creations via the API by blocked users leading to skipped entity IDs (phab:T232620)
    • Fixed an input issue with invisible characters (phab:T261071)
    • Finishing the draft of the REST API spec to get it ready for feedback
    • WikibaseManifest: created a separate key for local entities and decided what we do about non-local entity sources based on tool-builder feedback (phab:T263527) and specifying the API in OpenApi format (phab:T262919)


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.

Wikidata weekly summary #436[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
  • Events
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Professor Toby Hudson on Entity Explosion, a browser extension which allows you to get information about entities on the web page you’re visiting, 06 October. Agenda
    • Upcoming: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, October 27th at 17:00 CEST (15:00 GMT)
    • Upcoming: plenty of events for the Wikidata birthday, check the calendar and feel free to organise one!
  • Tool of the week
    • IllWill.js is a userscript that searches Wikidata for foreign-language sitelinks, to populate Template:ill and replace plain red links on other Wikimedia projects.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • omeka-s-wikidata is a new module for the open source GLAM collection management software Omeka, that allows cataloguers to use Wikidata as a vocabulary for persons, places, subjects, etc.
  • Development
    • First pieces of the Query Builder are coming together and we are working towards making it generate the first dumb query
    • Talking to people about their thoughts on checking Wikidata's data against other databases. If you're interested reach out to Mohammed.
    • Got some first internal feedback for the REST API specification draft. We'll publish it for feedback in the next days.
    • Fixing an issue with certain language codes no longer being available (phab:T264294)
    • Working on making sure blocked bots don't waste Item IDs when trying to create new Items (phab:T232620)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #437[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: MsynABot
    • Closed request for adminship: Fuzheado (successful)
  • Tool of the week
    • OD2WD automatically converts CSV files from Open Data portals into QuickStatements for Wikidata republishing. Demo video
  • Development
    • The RFC to semi-protect all property pages has been implemented, all properties now require the “autoconfirmed” right to edit (T254280)
    • Working on enabling JSON dumps for Lexemes (phab:T220883)
    • Finishing preventing blocked users from making us skip QIDs (phab:T232620)
    • Continuing work on the Wikibase Manifest extension that allows toolbuilders to easily access configurations of a specific Wikibase instance so it is easier for them to make their tools work with not just Wikidata but also other Wikibase instances
    • Started analyzing what we consider a mismatch for our work around checking Wikidata's data against other databases
    • Continued work on the Query Builder to get it to create the first very simple query. It can do that now but not yet visualize the result.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #438[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Prepbio tool uses Wikidata to create the beginnings of a Wikipedia stub biography article. (2020-10-19)
  • Development
    • Blocked users trying to create new Items no longer make us skip QIDs (phab:T232620)
    • So far we don't have JSON dumps for Lexemes. We're working on regularly generating them as well now (phab:T264883)
    • Continuing work on getting the Query Builder to generate the first query. Almost there.
    • Started the feedback round for the REST API. Please provide your input if you are currently using the action API or plan to develop against Wikidata's API in the future.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #439[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Past: Providing sustainable data services through Wikibase and Wikidata, SEMIC Conference 2020 - (replay)
    • Past: Introduction to Wikidata by Frimelle, Software Freedom Kosova 2020 - (replay)
    • Past: What's new in Wikidata? by Lea Lacroix, Lydia Pintscher and Mattia Capozzi, ItWikiCon 2020 - (replay)
    • Ongoing: plenty of Wikidata birthday events, online and onsite! Here's an overview of the upcoming events, you can find the links and details in the main calendar.
      • WikiCite virtual conference on October 26-28, live-streamed on Youtube and Twitter, with sessions across many timezones and languages – English, French, German, Indonesian, and Portuguese.
      • Wikidata Education Week, online, on October 26-30
      • 24-hours online meetup, on October 28-29: an open discussion with plenty of community members facilitating exchange around the topic "what makes you enthusiastic about Wikidata"
      • Gene Wiki: how to synchronize and curate primary sources with and in Wikidata, online, on October 29th
      • Birthday celebration in Rennes, France, on October 29th
      • Birthday Celebration in Accra, Ghana, and online, on October 29th
    • Upcoming: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, October 27th at 17:00 CET (16:00 GMT)
    • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, October 27 at 18:00 CET
  • Tool of the week
    • WikibaseJS-cli allows to edit Wikidata from command line, including creating items from samples ("templates") and do complex transformations of statements
  • Development
    • Got the Query Builder to create the first simple queries. You can follow along the development from now on on the test system.
    • Preparing regular JSON dumps for Lexemes (phab:T264883)
    • Analyzed a number of queries to the query service together with the WMF search team to better understand what the queries are doing and what further optimizations we can make to the query service and which queries need different systems to answer them.
    • Working on creating and tracking implicit usages of Wikidata descriptions so description changes show up in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co (phab:T265897)
    • Created Extension:WikibaseManifest documentation on MediaWiki.
    • Looking into what would be considered a mismatch when comparing WIkidata's data against another database. This is groundwork for potentially automating this in the future to find potential issues in the data to flag to editors.
    • Working on deploying the new Item quality scoring model for ORES to production so we have improved quality scores
    • Finished investigating how to handle a restricted list of external Wikibase services. (phab:T265118)
    • Removed noratelimit on bots for wikidata.org (phab:T258354)
    • Published Easier Access for Programmers to Wikidata research report

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #440[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Hasley (RfP scheduled to end after 2 November 2020 17:23 UTC)
  • Events
    • Past: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, October 27 (notes)
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Arthur Smith and Daniel Mietchen discussing author items in Wikidata and the Author Disambiguator Tool, 3 November. Agenda
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #37, November 8
    • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, November 3 at 18:00 CET
This is 32 hours of video covering 85 individual presentations in 7 languages.
1266 "unique viewers" have watched some portion on YouTubeSince the conference began last Monday.
  • Tool of the week
    • reCH is a Wikidata anti-vandalism tool that is used to review edits and patrol new changes.
  • Development
    • Fixing the issue of `content was: ""` (empty string) when deleting Lexemes (phab:T263435)
    • Final steps for deployment of JSON dumps for Lexeme (phab:T264883)
    • Working on fixing an issue with adding statements with datatype mathematical formula (phab:T266673)
    • The Query Builder can now generate its first very simple query and show the result. You can follow along as we develop it at the demo system.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #441[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Template:Cite Q on Wikipedia makes it easier to use Wikidata items as Wikipedia references.
  • Development
    • Continuing work with the WMF search team to automatically categorize WDQS queries to see how they can better be served
    • Query Builder work is continuing. Next step is making it possible to create a query with an arbitrary Property instead of the currently hard-coded post code.
    • Feedback round for the REST API is finishing this week and then we will review all the feedback and make changes to the spec accordingly.
    • Preparing to release 1.35 version of Wikibase docker image (phab:T264538)
    • Fixed Math extension to not require JS parser which caused issues creating new Statements for mathematical formulae (phab:T266673)
    • Made sure there is a meaningful edit summary when deleting a Lexeme (phab:T263435)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #442[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • ALEC (A List of Everything Cool) is a tool to explore biodiversity content in Wikidata.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Join the upcoming #1Lib1Ref Wikipedia campaign from January 15th to February 5th 2021 and improve Wikidata items by adding references to statements.
  • Development
    • Added "Random lexeme" link under dedicated section for lexicographical data in the Wikidata sidebar (phab:T205525). Thanks to Matěj Suchánek!
    • Working on language/spelling variant selector bug on Special:NewItem and Special:NewLexeme that makes it difficult to continue creating Items or Lexemes (phab:T266638)
    • Work on the Query Builder continues. We're focusing on making it possible to query for all Items with a specific Property but any value next.
    • Went over all the feedback we have received for the REST API specification draft. Overall the feedback is positive and really useful. So we will move ahead after thinking more about the remaining points that were raised.
    • Working on making changes to descriptions show up in the RecentChanges feed and watchlists on Wikipedia and co as well even if they are not explicitly used (phab:T191831)
    • Fixed a problem adding statements with Properties of datatype mathematical formula (phab:T266496)
    • Kicked off our new effort to implement a predictable release cycle and release infrastructure for Wikibase suite by creating a prototype build workflow (phab:T267553) and prototype test workflow (phab:T267554)

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.

ikidata weekly summary #443[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • EntityShape.js is a script that allows you to check an Item against an EntitySchema. On the Item page, it will display various information about the Item, like the properties that should be present on the Item.
  • Development
    • Query Builder: We're making it possible to switch between querying for specific values (e.g. all Items with a specific post code) or any value (all Items with a post code statement regardless of which one it is)
    • Correcting the behaviour of what automatically happens on Wikidata when a page is moved on Wikipedia and co to an excluded namespace with the "suppress redirect" option (phab:T261275)
    • Making language fallback indicators not show up for language variant fallbacks in a few more places (phab:T267502)
    • Adding html language attributes for statements linking to Forms and Senses (phab:T267023)
    • Working on language and lexical category fields turning red on unfocus even though no changes are made after a change in ooui (phab:T266936)
    • Finished building the 1.35 versions of the Wikibase base and bundle docker images and published to dockerhub (phab:T264538)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #444[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: We will have several speakers joining us to discuss their projects in lightning talks, 1 December. Agenda
    • Upcoming: WMF search platform team office hour, Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020. 16:00-17:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PST / 11:00-12:00 EST / 17:00-18:00 CET. Etherpad, Google Meet. You can come and chat about the Wikidata & Commons Query Service.
    • Online edition of the Wikimedia Coolest Tool Award ceremony, on Friday, December 11th at 17:00 UTC.
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #41, December 6
  • Tool of the week
    • osm2kg is a tool to facilitate matching Wikidata entries to OSM nodes.
  • Development
    • Development on the Query Builder is continuing. You can follow along at https://query-builder-test.toolforge.org
    • Fixed an issue where language fallback indicators were still shown when falling back from a variant of the language (phab:T267502)
    • Fixed an issue on Lexeme pages where language and lexical category fields turn red on unfocus even though no changes were made (phab:T266936)
    • Working on improving what happens to sitelinks when an article is moved to a unsupported namespace (phab:T261275))
    • Investigating a significant increase in skipped Item IDs (phab:T268625)
    • Addressing the feedback for the draft of the REST API spec

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #445[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • We now have a central repository for wikibase-cli templates, with the aim to document best practices, offer general purpose request/create/edit templates, but also offer more niche templates as examples of what's possible: contributions and template requests welcome!
  • Development
    • Simple Query Builder development continues. We worked on combining different query conditions as well as internationalisation.
    • Making the precision translatable in geocoordinate and date inputs (phab:T269102)
    • Changes to descriptions in a specific language now show up on watchlist and recent changes on the Wikipedia and co for that language (phab:T191831)
    • Finished working on the problem of incorrectly-escaped label being included in a link to Special:NewItem if there are no search results (phab:T263258)
    • Investigating why we're currently skipping a significant number of Item IDs (phab:T268625)
    • Wikibase Release Strategy/Infrastructure: We have decided where to host future Docker and tarball releases of Wikibase. You can read about the details and the reasoning in the following ADRs: Docker Image Repository, Tarball Repository


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.

Wikidata weekly summary #446[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • datao.net is a visual tool for querying and exposing Wikidata easily.
  • Development
    • We spend the week doing some exploratory work for the next year. Among other things we looked into how to measure the number of constraint violations on an average Item and what we can learn from it.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #447[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Wikidata Live is a real-time visual dashboard for Wikidata edits; paper, interface (visualizes recent changes to Wikidata in quasi real time).
  • Development
    • Continuing to work on the query builder. It can now have more than one query conditions. One of the next steps is making it possible to query for Item values. You can follow along on the demo system.
    • Finished working on the problem of values of Statements that link to Forms and Senses not having language attributes associated with them in the HTML code (phab:T267023)
    • Fixed language selectors covering other input fields when using keyboard navigation for Special:NewItem and Special:NewLexeme (phab:T266638)
    • Fixed language fallback indicators sometimes still shown for variant fallbacks (phab:T267502)
    • Working on whitespace stripped while typing when editing lexemes (phab:T250550)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #448[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Ongoing: rC3 (remote Chaos Communication Congress). Several Wikidata-related talks and meetups happening on December 27th, 28th and 29th: introduction to Wikidata, Wikidata for datajournalists, Wikidata meetups in German and English, and a Query Service workshop. (see Wikipaka schedule for more details)
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Project Grants open call for proposals in 2021. Changes in the review process for Project Grants in 2021; the open call for community organizing proposals will be from January 11 to February 10 and the open call for software and research proposals will be from February 15 to March 16.
  • Development

Due to the winter holidays, the development team is taking a break and no deployment is happening for Wikidata at the moment :)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #449[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • Due to the winter holidays, no deployment has happened for Wikidata in the last two weeks.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #450[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • QueryGraph is a web tool for creating queries in SPARQL from graphs.
  • Development
    • Continued working on the Query Builder. We focused on making it possible to query for Item values and being able to limit the number of Items in the result. We also looked into how to query for quantity values.
    • Changed P920’s data type from string to external identifier (phab:T269205)
    • Finished working on the problem of Items that have the page prop wikibase:statements set to 0 but actually do have statements (phab:T145712)
    • Continued work on the “Publishing” step of the Wikibase release pipeline by building and testing three components of the software suite: Wikibase (phab: T267893), Query Service frontend (phab:T268025), and Query Service backend (phab:T268022)

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #451[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Development
    • Continued working on the Query Builder. We continued to set up tracking for the number of queries that result in an error, timeout, etc. (phab:T269224). We als made it possible to query for Item values (phab:T268814). You can always try the current state on the test system.
    • Finished fixing an issue with whitespace being stripped while typing when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
    • Worked on no error being shown when trying to save Lemma with invalid language code (phab:T265783)
    • Working on using Special:MyLanguage feature for more links in the Wikidata Query Service interface to redirect people to documentation in their language (phab:T267656)
    • Continued interviewing people to better understand how to best compare Wikidata's data against other databases in order to find mismatches that need the editors' attention

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #452[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Past: Wikidata+Wikibase office hour happened on January 21st. See notes here (English).
    • Past: 2021 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Beginner Teaching Workshop (in Chinese). Replay on YouTube 1, 2, 3, 4
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Wikibase, the Integrated Authority File (GND) pilot at the German National Library, and the WikiLibrary Manifesto, 26 January. Agenda
    • Upcoming: SPARQL queries and OpenRefine live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, Januray 26 at 18:00 CET
    • Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #29 - YouTube, Facebook, 30 January
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #47, 31 January
    • Upcoming: The Open Festival of Persistent Identifiers starts from 27 January 2021. See schedule here.
  • Tool of the week
    • TAViewer is a web-based anatomy atlas viewer that cross-references Terminologia Anatomica terms with data from Wikipedia and Wikidata.
  • Development
    • Continued working on the Query Builder: made it possible to limit the number of results in the result set, made it possible to include results from subclasses when querying for Item values, worked on negating queries and started on sharing of queries via URL. As always you can try the current state on the test system.
    • Making links in the Query Service redirect to the proper translations of their pages on-wiki by using Special:MyLanguage redirects (phab:T267656)
    • Working on fixing an issue with displaying large numbers for quantity values (phab:T268456)
    • Fixed a case where no error message was shown when trying to save a Lemma with an invalid language code (phab:T265783)
    • Talked to a few more people about checking Wikidata's data against other databases to find potential errors
    • Continuing the Release Strategy project for Wikibase, with the following progress:
      • Created a “release pipeline” for Wikibase extension (phab:T267627)
      • Created MediaWiki docker images based off release branches (phab:T270133)
      • Defined format and contents of Wikibase suite components not maintained by Wikimedia Germany (phab:T271194)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #453[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Labelcleaner is a script by Andrew Gray used to clean up Wikidata labels/aliases/descriptions for a given language on a set of items.
  • Development
    • Continuing development on the first version of the Query Builder. It's starting to be able to do the first really meaningful queries now. Latest addition was the ability to negate conditions. Up next is the ability to connect conditions with OR instead of only AND as well as querying for quantities and ranges. You can follow along on the test system.
    • Exploring possible solutions for how to compare Wikidata's data against other databases to find and highlight mismatches automatically.
    • Added lexicographical data codes for a few languages: rkt, ctg (phab:T271589), and az-cyrl (phab:T265906)
    • Finished working on the issue of TypeError on a diff of a Wikidata talk page phab:T271402
    • Updated Wikidata unit conversion configuration (phab:T267644)
    • Fixed two last places where links in the the Query Service UI were not using Special:MyLanguage yet to redirect to the documentation page in the user's language (phab:T267656)
    • Pushing JSON dumps for Lexemes over the finish line (phab:T264883)
    • Working on showing an error when trying to save lemmas with invalid language codes (phab:T265783)
    • Wikibase Release Strategy
      • Investigated the release of Wikibase suite components not maintained by Wikimedia (phab:T271193)
      • Continued process of adding additional components to the Wikibase release, including OAuth (phab:T272580)


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.

Wikidata weekly summary #454[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Item documentation has two new features. First, it now includes two predefined SPARQL queries. The first one give the number of statements about the item by property and the second the list of statement about the properties. Second, for items of class award, it includes predefined SPARQL queries from TP award. See Q1624297 for an example.
    • Ranker lets you edit the ranks of several statements at once.
  • Development
    • Made it possible to connect query conditions with OR (instead of only AND) in the Query Builder (phab:T272694)
    • Making it possible to query only for statements with or without a reference in the Query Builder (phab:T272699)
    • Continuing to work on adding a rate limit for creating Item IDs to prevent people from allocating a large number of unassigned Item IDs that are then lost (phab:T272032)
    • Working on the problem of Lexeme merging failing if the source Lexeme has links to its own Senses (phab:T273830)
    • Working on showing an error when trying to save a Lemma with invalid language code on a Lexeme (phab:T265783)
    • Fixing an issue in the Property selector fallback where it is not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
    • Making it possible to add Interwiki links to/from Multilingual Wikisource (phab:T138332)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #455[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Development
    • Work on the Simple Query Builder continues. We finished connecting query conditions via OR (phab:T272694). Next we will work on adding the UI for sharing the visual query via a link (phab:T272887)
    • Improved the deployment process for the Query Service UI to make it easier to deploy
    • Fixed language code "dag" for Dagbani not working for Lemmas for Lexemes (phab:T272242)
    • Fixing the bug where the Property selector is not falling back from language variant to major language for Property labels (phab:T272712)
    • Adding a rate limit for creating Item IDs to avoid skipping so many due to misbehaving bots (phab:T272032)
    • Fixed the case where no error was shown when trying to save a lemma with an invalid language code (phab:T265783)
    • Fixed a but where merging two Lexemes fails if the source Lexeme has links to its own Senses (phab:T273830)
    • Increasing the rate of edits that trigger a check by the constraint checker to 50%. This will increase the number of constraints violations that you can query in the Query Service. (phab:T204031)
    • Making it possible to add interwiki links to/from Multilingual Wikisource (phab:T138332)

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #456[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Fixed wrongly encoded HTML in some messages in the Wikidata Bridge (phab:T272350)
    • Working on showing all languages in the language suggester for monolingual text Properties (phab:T124758)
    • Fixed an issue with spaces in external identifier URLs being replaced by "+" (phab:T271126)
    • Added a rate limit for creating Item IDs, which should help with decreasing the number of skipped Q-IDs (phab:T272032)
    • Fixed an issue where whitespace was stripped while typing when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
    • Fixing the case where you cannot easily edit negative quantities after saving (phab:T274129)
    • Working on making it possible to query for quantity values in the Query Builder (phab:T268942)

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #457[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Press, articles, blog posts, videos
    • Blogpost: Wikidata and Correspondence Archives (Enriching basic metadata with a knowledge graph)
    • Blogpost: The promise of Wikidata - How journalists can use the crowdsourced open knowledge base as a data source (at DataJournalism.com)
    • Video: Accra Archive Wikidata and Wikipedia Workshop (GLAMS Campaign Ghana) - YouTube
    • Video: COVID-19 coverage on Wikidata - YouTube
    • Video: Identify and describe items of bibliographic interest (articles, monographs, authors) on Wikidata (in Italian) - YouTube
    • Video: Visualizing the global research ecosystem via Wikidata and Scholia - YouTube
    • Video: Demo: How to upload new bibliography and create dashboards on Wikidata - YouTube
    • Video: Reconciliation Open Refine Wikidata (in Swedish) - YouTube
    • Video: Reconciling researchers to Wikidata via Google Sheets - YouTube
    • Video: LIVE Wikidata editing #33 - YouTube, Facebook
    • Video: How to create new Wikidata item (in Dutch) - YouTube
    • Video: Merging Wikidata items (in Dutch) - YouTube
  • Tool of the week
    • EditSum, a new user script which allows to attach custom summary text to any label/statement/sitelink/etc. modification.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • Working on first version of small tool that lets you get the average ORES quality score for a list of Items and find the lowest-quality Items in the batch so it's easier to improve them.
    • Taking a closer look at what larger improvements we want to make to Lexemes later this year.
    • Thinking through different ways how we can technically get mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases so we can later expose them.
    • Thinking through what the first version of the REST API should contain and what should come later.
    • Fixed an issue with whitespaces when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
    • Made sure all languages show up in the language selector for monolingual text Properties at least with their language code because them not showing up was very confusing (phab:T124758)
    • Fixed an issue with generating correct links for external IDs with + (phab:T271126)
    • Fixing an issue with Property selector not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
    • Continuing to build out the Query Builder and focusing on input for quantity and date queries (phab:T268942 and phab:T272697)
    • Due to the planned delay of the release of MediaWiki 1.36, the Wikibase team has been working on preparing a Wikibase update that includes new functionality (such as the “Federated Properties” feature) based on v1.35. To that end, we started backporting certain features and fixes into the Wikibase 1.35 release. Follow our progress here.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #458[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Fixed an issue where the Property selector is not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
    • Working on support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via wbeditentity (phab:T199896)
    • Continuing to work on the Query Builder and making it possible to query for quantities and dates with it.
    • Putting finishing touches on a small tool that lets you get the average ORES quality score for a list of Items as well as the individual scores for each of the Items


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.

Wikidata weekly summary #459[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Minorax (RfP scheduled to end after 19 March 2021 11:23 UTC)
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Plant Humanities Lab is a website you can use to explore the cultural histories of plants and their influence on human societies.
    • DX Lab Art Index is an interactive database of over 18,000 nineteenth century Australian Artworks by over 2000 artists with links to Wikidata & compiled by volunteers over 10 years.
    • The new WDQS Streaming Updater is live as of March 15, 2021 on a pre-production test server for feedback. Available at https://query-preview.wikidata.org/. Release details here.
    • Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year - Call for Nominations! The research must be on, about, using data from, and/or of importance to Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons or other Wikimedia projects. Deadline to submit your nomination is no later than 2021-03-22.


  • Development
    • Continued working on the Query Builder and focused on querying for quantity values (phab:T268942), handling special cases around sub classes for taxons and locations (phab:T274634) adding tooltips (phab:T275542) and sharing a visual query (phab:T272887)
    • Making changes to how Cognate handles redirects on Wiktionary to make more pages accessible through interwiki links (phab:T165061)
    • Creating a dashboard to break down the number of editors by namespace (phab:T275999)
    • Finishing support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via wbeditentity API module (phab:T199896)

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #460[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Ongoing: 30 Lexic-o-days, events and projects around lexicographical data, continues until April 14th. (full schedule, details and links here)
      • March 22: Bug triage hour about Lexemes with Lydia Pintscher
      • March 23: SPARQL querying for Lexemes with Vigneron
      • March 24: Open discussion in French about Lexemes
      • March 25: Documentation Q&A with Dan Shick
      • March 27: Lingua Libre, how you can record words in your language and use them on Wikidata, with Poslovitch
    • Upcoming: The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 25 March 2021 (Add to calendar). This month we will have a team member from Enslaved.org talk to us briefly about how they are using Linked Open Data (LOD) with the help of Wikibase (due of technical challenges they couldn't join us last time). Everyone is welcome to attend the call.
    • Upcoming: The Arctic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference is taking place remotely on June 24-25, and focusing on indigenous and underrepresented languages on the Wikimedia projects. The call for submissions is now open until April 15th, if you want to present something related to Wikidata and languages, feel free to apply.
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Members of the EthicsLD Group will be leading a discussion on ethics in linked data, Tuesday, March 23rd.[4]
    • Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #37 - YouTube, Facebook, March 27
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #55, March 28
  • Tool of the week
    • Sparql_rc is a recent changes feed that only shows you changes in an area of Wikidata you care about. It now also supports Lexemes.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Wikidata Lexeme Forms now supports Portuguese nouns
    • erinnerungshort.de/kap/ is a data and photo research project and map visualization tool with federated license query from Structured Commons, by Raymond and Elya.
    • ~7500 person items have been enriched with the new property GEPRIS person ID (P4872), imported from a high quality dataset from the Q707283.
  • Development
    • Work on the first version of the Query Builder is nearing its end. Doing remaining work on querying for quantities, dates and ranges as well as polishing and bug fixing.
    • Made Cognate work correctly for redirects on Wiktionary (phab:T165061)
    • Fixed an issue where the termbox on Item pages used the wrong list of languages on the mobile version (phab:T275611)
    • Cleaned up deleted Items from the term store database table (phab:T263730)
    • Got feedback on the initial click-dummies for checking Wikidata's data against other databases to find mismatches

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #461[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Closed request for adminship: Minorax, welcome onboard!
  • Development
    • The dev team spent the last week prototyping a few things to learn if some things would be feasible/a good idea. Among other things we tried building a small tool to connect Senses to Items, looked into the different types of ontology issues that can be found on Wikidata and checked what using a document store for data storage would look like.
    • Note: from March 29th until April 12th, Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) is not available to answer messages. If you have any requests for the development team, please ask on Contact the development team. For any emergency, you can contact Lea Lacroix (WMDE). Because of Easter holidays in Germany, the upcoming newsletter will be issued one day later, on April 6th.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #462[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • QRank is a tool providing a rank for Wikidata entities based on page view statistics from several Wikimedia projects.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • The final version of the Wikibase Yearly Summary 2020 has been published.
    • Wikidata Lexeme Forms now supports additional Breton templates (Source)
    • User:Nikki/LexemeAddIPA.js userscript adds a link in the header for forms on lexeme pages which opens a dialog for adding IPA statements to forms that do not have any yet.
    • LexSAOB adds Svenska Akademiens ordbok (SAOB) identifiers to Swedish lexemes in Wikidata.
  • Development
    • We continued to make improvements to the Query builder. We worked on adding a footer to the Query Builder (phab:T268643) and showing all relevant columns in the query result (phab:T277646) as well as querying for dates (phab:T272697)
    • Fixed a bug where Item pages scrolls back to "In more languages" block after every change of DOM (phab:T277999, being deployed to Wikidata later this week)
    • Continued working on a new grafana graph to track editor numbers split by namespace (phab:T275999)
    • Finished a small tool to get the ORES quality score for a list of Items. Waiting for deployment to toolforge for broader use now.
    • Defined remaining work for redirect sitelink exceptions (phab:T278962)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #463[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • EditSum, a user script which allows to attach custom summary text to any label/statement/sitelink/etc. modification.
  • Development
    • Started research and collecting material for the work on improvements to the Lexeme UI and prepared the first interviews
    • Finishing up the work on the first version of the Query Builder. We still need to get the security review before we can deploy it properly. Current state can be tested on the test system.
    • Finalized the dashboard to see the number of (active/very active) editors split by namespace. See the graphs at the bottom of this dashboard.
    • Continued working on the remaining pieces needed to fully support editing statements on Senses of a Lexeme (phab:T199896)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #464[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • User:So9q/Gadget-CreateNewEntity.js is a userscript to add a "create new item" link in the dropdown menu for when you want to * add an item to a property, but the item does not exist. (recently modified to support lexemes).
  • Development
    • Finished work on the support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via the API (phab:T199896)
    • Got all feature work done on the first version of the Query Builder. It is now awaiting security review.
    • Statements linking to deleted Lexemes now indicate this similar to statements linking to deleted Items (phab:T277089)
    • Fixing a bug with misaligned grammatical features after an OOUI update (phab:T278522)
    • Finished work on the small tools to get the number of constraints violations and ORES scores for a list of Items. Will publish soon.
    • Did interviews with a few people about how they work around lexicographical data
    • Selected focus languages for continued work on lexicographical data and Abstract Wikipedia together with Abstract Wikipedia team. The selected ones are Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam and Dagbani. You can read more about it in the Abstract Wikipedia newsletter.
    • Gave input to WMF search platform team for a survey draft around the query service in order to better understand how to move forward with improvements

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #465[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • wbeditentity now supports editing statements on Senses (phab:T199896)
    • We added syntax highlighting for viewing Entity Schema pages. There is not syntax highlighting for editing of Entity Schemas yet. (phab:T238831)
    • Improved the way Lua deals with redirects (phab:T238831)
    • Worked on making it possible to add a title to the top of a query visualization via a comment in the SPARQL code (phab:T225883)
    • Discussed how to get persistent storage of constraint violations unstuck as this is a prerequisite to making it easier to analyze and query constraint violations (phab:T214362)
    • Discussed a high-level plan for how to move forward with checking Wikidata's data against 3rd-party databases
    • Finished work on version 1 of the Query Builder. Not it is awaiting security review before we can deploy it.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #466[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Entity Schemas now have syntax highlighting for viewing (phab:T238831, example)
    • Reviewing a patch that will make it possible to use templates on d:MediaWiki:Wikibase-SortedProperties. This will for example make it possible to show labels automatically for each Property ID. Thanks, Luca! (phab:T280787)
    • Evaluated the interviews and other research we did around improvements for lexicographical data
    • Worked on/fixed small remaining bugs in the Query Builder (phab:T280505, phab:T279928, phab:T279945)
    • Continuing to work on evaluating and addressing scaling issues of the Query Service
    • Provided input to a research team working on a potential new and improved Property Suggester
    • Wikibase: we are completing the final tasks necessary to prepare the Wikibase Spring release and expect to publish new versions of the tarball and Docker images on or before May 15, 2021

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #466[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Entity Schemas now have syntax highlighting for viewing (phab:T238831, example)
    • Reviewing a patch that will make it possible to use templates on d:MediaWiki:Wikibase-SortedProperties. This will for example make it possible to show labels automatically for each Property ID. Thanks, Luca! (phab:T280787)
    • Evaluated the interviews and other research we did around improvements for lexicographical data
    • Worked on/fixed small remaining bugs in the Query Builder (phab:T280505, phab:T279928, phab:T279945)
    • Continuing to work on evaluating and addressing scaling issues of the Query Service
    • Provided input to a research team working on a potential new and improved Property Suggester
    • Wikibase: we are completing the final tasks necessary to prepare the Wikibase Spring release and expect to publish new versions of the tarball and Docker images on or before May 15, 2021

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #467[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Development
    • Omaha-Ponca language is now available for monolingual text properties. (phab:T265296)
    • Added a meaningful error message when trying to use Special:EntityData with a Lexeme subentity like L123-F1 in cases where the Lexeme L123 was redirected to another Lexeme (phab:T257494)
    • Changed the “type” and “value type” constraints to ignore deprecated values (phab:T170401)
    • Working on rendering empty claims in JSON as `claims: {}` instead of `claims: []` (phab:T241422)
    • Investigating some issues with page_props missing on Commons wiki after adding sitelinks to Commons categories (phab:T280627)
    • Removed Google Knowledge Graph Id (P2671) and Wolfram Language entity code (P4839) from the Property Suggestions as they are usually not useful suggestions (phab:T280779)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #468[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Ongoing:
      • Data literacy snacks - Talk about "Wikibase knowledge graphs for data management & data science" on 23rd of June. For registration, send e-mail to info@berd-bw.de
    • Upcoming
      • SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, May 18 at 18:00 CEST
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Mahir Morshed will be discussing Lexemes in Wikidata; Agenda, May 18th.
      • May 21-22, 2021 [6] Boston Rock City: Explore Wikidata and Learn About Local Music: Boston Public Library is partnering with Harvard Library for a guided exploration of Wikidata and local music history. Join us for two days of music and Wikidata editing; no prior experience or punk cred necessary! This public event is free to all and will take place via Zoom; please register in advance. The subject of this project is the Arthur Freedman Collection, and audiovisual archive that captures over four decades of Boston rock music performances. We’ll provide: instructions, tools, data sources, visualizations, optional Discord chat, and a soundtrack. If you have questions, please contact Harvard Library staff member Peter Laurence at laurenc@fas.harvard.edu.
      • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #63, May 23
      • OpenStreetMap Taiwan x Wikidata Taiwan Taipei (Q1867) Meetup 2021-06-07 Mozilla Community Space Taipei (Q61752245).
  • Development
    • Fixed the entity usage dashboards that no longer showed data due to technical issues. It tracks how much data from Wikidata is used on the other Wikimedia projects. (phab:T279762)
    • Configured the Property Suggester to not suggest Google Knowledge Graph ID (P2671) and Wolfram Language entity code (P4839) (phab:T280779)
    • Investigated remaining issue with updating the page_props table on the client wikis, which is confusing some bots making use of that table (phab:T280627)
    • Fixed an issue in the Query Builder where it got confused when adding several conditions with the same Property (phab:T279945)
    • Working on tracking the number of edits per namespace over time (phab:T281356)
    • Working on fixing a bug where old revisions of Items have edit buttons but should not (phab:T281587)
    • Fixing an issue where value suggestions are not showing all values that are defined in the property constraint (phab:T280650)

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #469[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Designing and planning for the first version of a tool to compare Wikidata's data against other databases and find mismatches that might need fixing
    • Looking into unit conversion for the Commons Query Service (phab:T281468)
    • Improving RDF export performance problems for very large Items (phab:T281272)
    • Fixed entity suggestions not showing all Items defined in that Property's constraint (phab:T280650)
    • Removed edit buttons that had reappeared on old revisions of Items where they shouldn't be (phab:T281587)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #470[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Call to participation in interview study to building a recommender system that can help improve the editing experience in Wikidata: Researchers at King's College London develop a personalized recommendation system to suggest Wikidata items for the editors based on their interests and preferences. The researchers are inviting volunteers to interview them about their current ways to choose the items you work on in order to understand the factors that might influence such a decision.
    • dewiki considered, but rejected the introduction of local short descriptions to replace those from Wikidata
    • User:Nikki/LexemeEntitySuggester.js was improved to now
      • automatically suggests the existing senses/forms when using demonstrates sense/form
      • automatically suggests items (based on the lemma matching the label or an alias) when using item for this sense
      • and searches for lemmas exactly matching the input when using synonym, antonym, hyperonym or pertainym
  • Development
    • Italian Wikiversity used Lua on their Recent Changes SpecialPage via overwriting a MediaWiki message. Our code used to not expect that, now it does. (phab:T283240)
    • Updating the panel that tracks Wikidata edits over time in different namespaces to include all namespaces (phab:T281356)
    • Working on adding a new constraints type for Lexemes (phab:T200689)
    • Working on designs for improving Special:NewLexeme
    • Working on designs for the system to find mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases
    • Fixing some malformed globe-coordinate precisions in the database (phab:T283576)

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #471[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • You can now add a title to a query visualisation by adding #title:YourTitle to your SPARQL code (phab:T225883, example query with a title)
    • Added a new constraints type to indicate that a certain Property should only be used on Lexemes of a certain language (phab:T200689)
    • Working on not checking the format constraints via SPARQL to take that load off the SPARQL endpoint and make it technically better (phab:T176312)
    • Working on making the API-Sandbox not suggest edits to real Items (phab:T219215)


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.

Wikidata weekly summary #472[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Wikidata Community/Diversity 2021 Survey has been published. The results are meant to serve as a baseline to see how the community might (not) change in the future.
    • WikidataCon 2021: A sustainable future for Wikidata. Information about "the conference theme, its three-day program structure and a special project on diversity taking place before the conference itself".
    • The call for candidates for 2021 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections has begun on June 9. The last date to apply is June 29, 2021.
  • Development
    • Working on no longer using the Query Service to evaluate Constraints Checks regular expressions (this should make our checks faster and allow for further improvements) (phab:T176312)
    • Changing the rate limits for assigning Item IDs further, which should result in even fewer Q-IDs being skipped in the future (phab:T284538)
    • Finalizing the concepts for a tool to help work on mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases/websites/...

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #473[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Interlanguage links now work for multilingual Wikisource. phab:T275958
    • User:Nikki/LexemeEntitySuggester.js now supports searching for senses for the translation property.
    • The call for candidates for 2021 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections has begun on June 9. The last date to apply is June 29, 2021.
    • Since the beginning of the month, phabricator tickets about language codes (and names of languages) were reviewed and triaged to better reflect their content and current status. Some work was done to better identify the steps for such changes, highlight and address bottlenecks and system issues. Patches for a few codes were contributed and are being released. Phabricator "Language codes" workboard provides an overview, phab:T284856 attempts to identify maintenance steps and phab:T284276 determine turn-around times. phab:T284808 should finally close a gap in termbox language handeling. A way to better address some or all aspects of changes of language codes applicable to Wikipedia editions still needs to be found. Don't hesitate to request the addition or update of language names (e.g. the name of Dutch in Danish) or missing language codes, notably for monolingual strings (see Help:Monolingual text languages).

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #474[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Mismatch Finder: We started building the foundation of the place that will store the mismatches between Wikidata and other databases/catalogs/...
    • Continued work on migrating the checks of regular expressions for constraints from SPARQL to a better solution to take that load off of the SPARQL endpoint (phab:T176312)
    • Made it possible to show language links from multilingual Wikisource to the other language versions of Wikisource (phab:T275958)
    • Added a new constraint type to indicate that a certain Property should only be used on Lexemes with a specific language (phab:T200689)
    • Fixed a weird issue with suggesters popping back up when they shouldn't (phab:T284219)
    • Invalid data will not be handled better in RDF outputs (phab:T285131)
    • Working on lowering the rate limit at which a misbehaving bot can waste new Item IDs to further reduce the percentage of skipped Item IDs (phab:T284538)
    • Working on not suggesting real Item IDs in the API sandbox to avoid accidental edits by people who think it is not making real edits (phab:T219215)
    • Working on reducing the time it takes between entering a value in a new statement and being able to save the statement (phab:T281669)
    • Improved documentation of the usage tracking aspects in API help pages. Usage tracking is an internal mechanism to track which article on Wikipedia etc uses which data from an Item on Wikidata. (phab:T283040)
    • Language codes for monolingual strings "gsw-fr", "ykg", "wya", "osa-latn" were made available: Alsatian, Tundra Yukaghir, Wendat, Osage (phab:T262922, phab:T252198, phab:T283364, phab:T265297)
    • The English name for language code "crh" and the Swedish name for "fa" were corrected (phab:T240350, phab:T281702)
    • Lexeme language codes ha-arab, sux-latn, sux-xsux, gsg, tlh-piqd, tlh-latn, bfi, pwn, enm were added. That is Hausa in Arabic script, Sumerian in cuneiform and Latin-script, German Sign Language, Klingon in pIqaD and Latin script, British Sign Language, Paiwan and Middle English. (phab:T282512, phab:T279557)
    • It was determined that language codes can be activated for Wikidata while being blocked for use on Incubator (phab:T273705), this to avoid projects such as a "British English Wikipedia"
    • Language code "es-419" for Latin American Spanish has been available for labels and descriptions for quite some time (phab:T230786)
    • A possibly confusing Russian mis-translation of the name of the language code for "multiple languages" (mul) is being reviewed (phab:T245927)
    • "en-simple:" can be used instead of "simple:" to link to Simple Wikipedia. Query Services outputs "en-simple", not "simple" for sitelinks to Simple Wikipedia (phab:T283149).
    • There was some discussion about the creation of a language code "en-in" for monolingual strings, but "en-in" as interface language seems to be preferred (phab:T212313)

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #475[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship:
  • Events
    • Past:
      • Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #49 - YouTube
    • Upcoming:
      • SPARQL queries live on Twitch in French by Vigneron, July 6 at 18:00 CEST (UTC+2)
  • Tool of the week
    • User:Nikki/AnchorLinks.js is a userscript that adds a small link before property labels and statement values on entity pages to provide a clickable/copiable link to that section of the page.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • A job opening for a fullstack developer to work on integrating Wikidata with expert-curated knowledge on invasion biology
  • Development
    • Mismatch Finder: We continued the work on building the basic store that in the future will hold mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases/websites/catalogs/... These mismatches will then be used in the Mismatch Finder website and other tools to easily review them.
    • Improved the namespace behavior of the CommonsLink constraint so that it now produces less false positives (phab:T237920)
    • Working on adding a magic word to allow pages to be excluded from Special:UnconnectedPages on Wikipedias and co (phab:T97577)
    • Language names in Scots (sco) were updated (phab:T285076)
    • A task to complete language names in Dutch (nl) is being filled (phab:T231748)
    • A language code for an undetermined Mixtec language is being determined (phab:T155419)

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #476[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship:
      • Emu (RfP scheduled to end after 13 July 2021 11:49 UTC)
      • -akko (RfP scheduled to end after 16 July 2021 06:31 UTC)
    • Closed request for adminship:
  • Events
    • Past:
      • LIBER 2021 - Panel Discussion: Why use Wikidata or not - YouTube
      • SPARQL Wikidata divers. Session of Tuesday, June 29 (in French) - YouTube
      • SPARQL Wikidata Wikisource. Tuesday, July 6 session (in French) - YouTube
    • Upcoming:
      • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday 28th July 2021 at 16:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. This month we will also be having a guest presentation about Toolhub by Srishti Sethi from the Wikimedia Foundation.
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Carlo Bianchini (University of Pavia), Stefano Bargioni (Pontifical University Santa Croce (Rome)), and Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo (University of Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore) will discuss their recent project and article “Beyond VIAF: Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries”.; [9], July 13th.
      • Upcoming Search Platform Office Hours—July 14th, 2021. Come and ask anything related to Wikimedia search, Wikidata Query Service, Wikimedia Commons Query Service, etc.!
      • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #71, July 18
  • Tool of the week
    • Schafe vorm Fenster is a project to build up a calendar for rural villages in Vorpommern-Greifswald using Wikidata to get images and short descriptions for the villages. (See example)
  • Development
    • Mismatch Finder (a tool to review mismatches between Wikidata and other databases): We continued initial development of the store part of the tool. We focused on the upload of new mismatches. (phab:project/view/5422)
    • Discussion on how do describe the types of mismatches reviewed in Mismatch Finder (phab:T285849)
    • We introduced a magic word that can be used to exclude a page from Special:UnconnectedPages on Wikipedia and co. This will make the special page more useful to find pages on Wikipedia and co that should be added to an Item on Wikidata as sitelinks. (phab:T97577).
    • We reduced the number of Wikidata edits that show up in the watchlist and recent changes of Wikipedia and co by not triggering entries for a number of Wikidata edits that do not influence the article (phab:T286193)
    • Property Suggester: We are reviewing patches by a student working on an improved Property Suggester.
    • Working on improving how deprecated statements are handled when checking “type” and “value type” constraints" (phab:T170401)
    • Working on fixing a bug where the entity suggestions are opened when a valid value is already selected (phab:T285102)
    • Wikidata-Wikibase federation (Federation v2): We investigated How to refer to entities that have the same IDs as the source wikibase entities. You can read the ADR here


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.


Wikidata weekly summary #478[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Past:
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Carlo Bianchini (University of Pavia), Stefano Bargioni (Pontifical University Santa Croce (Rome)), and Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo (University of Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore) will discuss their recent project and article “Beyond VIAF: Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries”.; July 13th.
    • Upcoming:
  • Tool of the week
    • searchy.toolforge.org is a semantic search engine to find articles on a topic and filter results by metascientific info (gender and region).
  • Development
    • Mismatch Finder: Continued working on the store part. It can import first mismatches now.
    • Fixing an issue where month and year are sometimes parsed as the first day of the month (phab:T233105)
    • Fixing an issue with adding sitelinks for some of the newer Wikipedias (phab:T285919)
    • Working on improving the Lua usage tracking for redirected Items (phab:T280910)
    • SPARQL was amended on the 4th July to use the report #title, if present, as the anchor for the 'Try it' link. (example)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #479[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Added a tags parameter to the wbmergeitems API so Item merges can now also get an edit tag (T286778)
    • Mismatch Finder: Continued working on the store part. This week we focused on uploading a file with potential mismatches and the UI for getting a list of all uploaded mismatch files.
    • Addressing comments from the security review of the Query Builder so we can hopefully soon move it from the test system to its proper place under query.wikidata.org

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #480[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Portuguese version of the Wikidata Query Service tutorial tool is now available.
    • Advisory board call for members for the Web2Cit project: Web2Cit: Visual Editor for Citoid Web Translators project is moving! With Diegodlh we are inviting people to apply to be an Advisory Board member. Is this you? Is this someone you know? Check the Call for members and apply to be an Advisory Board member before August 6th!. If you are too busy this time around to apply, don't worry: we get it. You can also help us by spreading the word!
    • The moveClaim.js user script has been updated using code created by Melderick to support changing a property of a claim within an entity. Please switch to the updated version if you used the other one, and report any bugs.
    • New tool: Lexemes Party displays lexemes linked to a list of Wikidata items, so you can improve related lexicographical data in the languages you know. You can build your own lists and several examples are available. A weekly challenge is also proposed, theme of the week: Olympic Games.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #477[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Mismatch Finder: Finishing work on importing mismatches and moved on to building the API for retrieving mismatches from the mismatch store.
    • Added tags for all edits done through the UI to more easily distinguish them from edits made through tools and other means (phab:T236893)
    • Moved regular expression checking for constraints from the SPARQL endpoint to a dedicated service to make it faster and put less stress on the SPARQL endpoint (phab:T176312)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #481[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Cut save-time for edits in half (phab:T288639)
    • Mismatch Finder: We are making good progress on the tool. We made it possible to retrieve mismatches that are in the store part of the tool via an API.
    • Regular expressions in constraints are now no longer checked via the Query Service. The checks have been completely moved over to a dedicated service for regular expression checking. (phab:T204031)
    • Edits made via the user interface (as opposed to with tools, bots, etc.) are now tagged as such to make them easier to filter (example - edits made to labels, descriptions and aliases on mobile are still missing but will follow soon)
    • Working on allowing to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #482[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: MusikBot II (RfP scheduled to end after 26 August 2021 03:07 UTC)
  • Development
    • Deployed the new shiny Query Builder to https://query.wikidata.org/querybuilder
    • Edits to labels, descriptions and aliases on mobile are now also tagged as edits made via the user interface. All edits made via the user interface are now tagged as such. (phab:T286775)
    • ArticlePlaceholder pages will now indicate that they are generated by the ArticlePlaceholder thanks to a patch by Luca (phab:T124191)
    • Working on making it possible to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
    • Adding a new constraint type to ensure Items have a label in a certain language (phab:T195178)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #483[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Wikidata2Ical
  • Development
    • Wikidata:Mismatch Finder development continues. We are now working on the frontend. First pieces are starting to be visible at https://mismatch-finder.toolforge.org (but nothing usable yet)
    • Fixed an issue with unicode characters in constraints checks (phab:T289805)
    • Worked on support for "separators" parameter for distinct value constraints (phab:T277855)
    • Continued work on allowing to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
    • Continued work on new constraint type to ensure that the Item has a label in a particular language (phab:T195178)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #484[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • User:SuccuBot has made its 100.000.000th edit. It is the first user account in Wikidata to reach this milestone.
    • In the frame of a Google Summer of Code project a new tool, called WikidataComplete was created. The tool smoothly integrates in the Wikidata UI and proposes new statements extracted by machine learning algorithms. Editors are asked to either approve or reject them. To activate it check here for a short tutorial check here. Any feedback is welcome here.
  • Development
    • Continued work on the Mismatch Finder. We are now working on creating the page where mismatches will be listed for review.
    • Worked on support for "separators" parameter for distinct value constraints (phab:T277855)
    • Made it possible to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
    • Added a new constraint type to ensure that the Item has a label in a particular language (phab:T195178)
    • Added a button for the Query Builder to query.wikidata.org to make the Query builder discoverable (phab:T276210) - integration in the example dialog is still in progress (phab:T280229)
    • We started work on some behind-the-scenes improvements to the way Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects are notified about a change that affects their articles. (They need this notification so the article can be purged and show the latest data from Wikidata again. It is also required for showing the edit in the watchlist and recent changes on those wikis. This should have no visible impact for editors but is needed maintenance work.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #485[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming:
      • WikidataCon update: you can now check in the program of the first day of the online conference
      • Transbordados: WikidataCon's preconference for Latin America - September 14, 21 and 28 (21h UTC) - with simultaneous translation for Portuguese and Spanish, via YouTube - set of events to discuss Wikidata and decoloniality, knowledge organization and digital dissemination of collections in Latin America contexts. Join us!
        • 14/09 - Towards a decolonial wiki: overflowing knowledge from the Latin American horizon - speakers: Amanda Jurno (Wiki Movimento Brasil), Bianca Santana (journalist, writer and activist) and Silvia Gutiérrez (El Colégio de México) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
        • 21/09 - The universe of libraries: Wikidata and the multiplication of knowledge potencies - speakers: Lilian Viana (GLAM das Bibliotecas da USP) and Maurício Genta (Wikimedia Argentina e Biblioteca Nacional da Argentina) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
        • 28/09 - Digital collections and Wikidata: organizing a network of knowledge - speakers: Evelin Heidel (a.k.a. Scann; Wikimedistas do Uruguai) and Karen Worcman (Museu da Pessoa) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
      • Demo of the Query Builder live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 14 at 18:00 CEST
    • Ongoing:
      • Data Quality Days - several sessions happened over the past days and more are coming this week. Recordings, slides and notes are linked in the program
    • Past:
      • Forex - 36C3 Wikipaka WG: Live querying: let’s explore Wikidata together! - YouTube
  • Tool of the week
    • Wwwyzzerdd for Wikidata is a browser extension that allows you to view and edit Wikidata information from Wikipedia (demo video). Install it in Firefox or Chrome
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Face The Facts mobile app allows you to scan election posters and see the true facts about politicians.
    • Wikidata now has over 150,000 Senses on Lexemes!

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #486[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Press, articles, blog posts, videos
    • Videos
      • Mapping the Scottish Reformation - using Wikidata, Wikipedia's sister project - YouTube
      • OpenSym 2021: WDProp: Web Application to Analyse Multilingual Aspects of Wikidata Properties - YouTube
      • Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #53 (user scripts and gadgets that can help you edit) - YouTube


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.

Wikidata weekly summary #487[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: BrokenSegue (RfP scheduled to end after 27 September 2021 14:36 UTC)
  • Development
    • Changed the formatting of low year numbers so that they now show as e.g. “5 CE” instead of “5” to reduce ambiugity in dates like “March 5 (CE)” (phab:T104750)
    • Working on fixing an issue where two Properties could have the same label in a given language (phab:T289473)
    • Working on preventing a few more cases where two Items could have the same sitelink (phab:T291377)
    • Mismatch Finder: Continuing to work on showing mismatches on the results page so that they can be reviewed
    • Continuing to work on technical improvements to how changes on Wikidata are propagated to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #488[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Closed request for adminship: BrokenSegue. Welcome onboard \o/
  • Development
    • Finished preventing a case where the same sitelink could be added to two different Items (phab:T291377)
    • Continuing work on the Mismatch Finder. Currently focusing on showing the details of the mismatches to the person reviewing mismatches.
    • Continued work on not allowing two Properties to have the same label after undo/revert (phab:T289473)
    • Continuing work on improving how changes on Wikidata are propagated to Wikipedia and the other other Wikimedia projects. The new system is being rolled out to all wikis now. It should not change anything for editors and just be a technical improvement in the backend.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #489[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Development
    • Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on the review part of the system. We are now working on letting reviewers indicate if the mismatch is on Wikidata, the other database, both or neither.
    • Fixed a bug where it was possible for two Properties to have the same label in a given language by undoing/reverting an edit (phab:T289473)
    • Fixed a confusing error message that was being shown when trying to save geoshape / tabular data that doesn’t exist (phab:T285758)
    • Removing some unnecessary entity link formatting in edit summaries and special pages to improve performance (phab:T292203)
    • Fixing an issue with invalid dates that the API accepts but should not (phab:T289417)
    • Migrated all Wikimedia wikis to use the new change dispatching system. This system is responsible for notifying the other wikis about edits made on Wikidata that affect their articles so the article is refreshed and edits are added to recent changes and watchlists.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #490[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Development
    • Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on the review part of the system. We are working on letting reviewers submit their decision if the mismatch is on Wikidata, the other database, both or neither.
    • In the previous week we migrated all Wikimedia wikis to use the new change dispatching system. This system is responsible for notifying the other wikis about edits made on Wikidata that affect their articles so the article is refreshed and edits are added to recent changes and watchlists. This week we monitored the new system and investigated and fixed a few issues that came up.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #491[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • QID ("Initialism of Q-identifier, a unique identifier for an item in Wikidata. [from 2012]") now has an entry in Wiktionary
    • The 3rd edition of the Coolest Tool Award is looking for nominations (see announcement on wikimedia-l). Please submit your favorite tools by October 27th. The awarded projects will be announced and showcased in a virtual ceremony in December.
  • Development
    • The new WDQS Streaming Updater now fully shipped to production. This will help the Query Service better deal with the amount of edits happening on Wikidata. (more information)
    • Mismatch Finder: Continuing work on the results page where mismatches are shown for review. We are focusing on showing all necessary information for a mismatch to make a good determination if it is a mismatch in Wikidata, the external source or neither.
    • Finishing the work on the new change dispatching system that improves how Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects are notified about edits happening on Wikidata that affect them. Currently tying up some lose ends.
    • Preparing for WikidataCon.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #492[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • WikidataCon! \o/
    • Continued the work on the first version of the Mismatch Finder. We are getting closer to the polishing phase now and will have something ready in the next weeks.
    • Lua access for Lexemes is now ready to test on English Beta Wiktionary.
    • Concluded work on the improved behind-the-scenes system for notifying Wikipedias and co about Wikidata edits that affect them. Nothing should have changed for you.
    • Started working on a new implementation of the search box to be ready for the upcoming skin changes the WMF is working on.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #493[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Mismatch Finder: We finished adding “next steps” dialog and a “more info” dialog to tell users more about the import a mismatch was added in.
    • We had discussions about how to best make the SearchBox WVUI component for the new Vector skin work well for Wikidata (phab:T275251)
    • We have put a version of WBStack on wikibase.dev. We will start work to deploy to wikibase.cloud in the coming weeks.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #494[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • The language codes agq (Aghem, T288335) and mcn (Massa, T293884) are now supported.
    • Mismatch Finder: Added various dialogs and help texts to make it easier to understand what reviewers need to do and what information they are seeing in the tool
    • Mismatch Finder: started polishing and bug fixing for release of the first version
    • Making the order of Lexeme's grammatical features consistent (phab:T232557)
    • Investigating how to share complex SPARQL queries in Wikidata Query Service via short URL (phab:T295560)


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.

Wikidata weekly summary #495[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • WikiCite Search is a bibliographic search engine for Wikidata that finds articles either by searching for keywords, or by string matching.
  • Development
    • Working on displaying the grammatical features of Lexemes in a particular order in the UI (phab:T232557)
    • Mismatch Finder: continuing polishing before first release. Focusing on making API documentation available and adding a footer to the site
    • The ongoing work on MediaWiki skin improvements especially for Wikipedia will break the search box for Wikidata. We're working on addressing this. (phab:T275251)
    • Migrating a number of components to vue 3 to keep up with the rest of MediaWiki (phab:T294465)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #496[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Development
    • Mismatch Finder: Continued working on last remaining tickets for the first version. Added a footer to the site, improved documentation and added ability to delete a batch of mismatches.
    • Made good progress on migrating our on-wiki Vue apps to support the new Vue.createMwApp compatibility layer in MediaWiki core (phab:T294465)
    • Continued work on making it possible to define a custom ordering of grammatical features on Lexemes (phab:T232557)
    • More research and discussion on mul language code (phab:T285156)
    • Discussing with data re-users about their views on the ontology issue classification we worked on earlier this year to get their input (slides from Data Quality Days session)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #497[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Mismatch Finder: Continued polishing for the first version. Improving the texts and adding loading state. Incorporating feedback from testing.
    • Continued migrating our on-wiki Vue apps to support the new Vue.createMwApp compatibility layer in MediaWiki core (phab:T294465)
    • Continued work on making it possible to define a custom ordering of grammatical features on Lexemes (phab:T232557)
    • Finished work on small tool to show Items recently edited by several accounts to surface current events.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #498[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Lightning talks on WikiProject Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, Wikidata use for a site-specific archaeological case study (Dura-Europos, Syria), and round tripping Wikidata into Alma using Alma Refine. Agenda, Dec. 14th.
  • Development
    • Mismatch Finder: Developed a user script to show a notification on an Item if the Mismatch Finder has an unreviewed mismatch for it.
    • Preparing for Lexeme Lua access to be enabled on the first wikis. (phab:T294637, phab:T294159)
    • Continuing work on migrating the termbox to vue3 (phab:T296202)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #499[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Due to the winter holidays, the development team is taking a break and no deployment is happening for Wikidata at the moment. Happy holidays, everyone :)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #500[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Ameisenigel (RfP scheduled to end after 27 December 2021 15:57 UTC)
  • Tool of the week
    • Articles created by country of citizenship : a javascript notebook which looks at the distribution of articles created by a user by country of citizenship (P27). It uses Wikidata's API through wikibase-sdk library.
  • Development
    • Due to the winter holidays, the development team is taking a break and no deployment is happening for Wikidata at the moment.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #501[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming:
      • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, January 19th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group.
      • SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, January 4 at 19:00 CEST
    • Ongoing:
    • Past:
      • Wikibase live session (December 2021) - log
  • Tool of the week
    • Wikidata's Q item explorer: Show claims where the item is the subject of the statement but doesn't show statements where the item is the target value.
  • Development
    • Due to the winter holidays, no development has happened for Wikidata in the last two weeks.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #502[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • OneZoom "tree of life explorer" is an interactive map of the evolutionary links between all living things known to science using Wikidata.
  • Development
    • Getting the Wikidata:Mismatch Finder ready for release. Focusing on adding statistics.
    • Fixed an issue where statement editing was broken in some older browser (phab:T298001)
    • Made it so that grammatical features on a Form of a Lexeme can be ordered consistently across all Lexemes (phab:T232557)
    • Working on an issue where changes from Wikidata don't get sent to the other wikis for the initial adding of the sitelink to an Item (phab:T233520)

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.

  • Looking back at 2021
    • Developments rolled out in 2021:
      • New updater for the Wikidata Query Service to help it keep up with the large number of edits on Wikidata
      • Query Builder to make it easier for people to create SPARQL queries without having to know SPARQL
      • Item Quality Evaluator to make it easy to find the highest and lowest quality Items in a topic area
      • Constraints Violations Checker is a small command-line tool that gives constraint violation statistics for a set of Items to make it easier to find the Items that need more work
      • Curious Facts finds anomalies in the data in Wikidata and offers them up for review and amusement
      • Wikidata Map to see the distribution of Wikidata's Items across the world and the connections between them
      • Current Events to make it easy to see what's currently a hot topic in the world and being edited a lot on Wikidata
    • New entities in 2021:

Wikidata weekly summary #503[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: MSGJ (RfP scheduled to end after 20 January 2022 17:45 UTC)
  • Development
    • Fixed an issue where making changes with sitelinks were not fully dispatched to the clients (phab:T233520)
    • Mismatch Finder: Improved the texts in the tool to be more understandable after testing
    • Mismatch Finder: added a way to get statistics about all the reviews that have been done in the tool and what is still awaiting review
    • Special:NewLexeme: kicked off the development work to improve the page in order to make it more understandable

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #504[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Closed request for adminship: MSGJ (Successful). Welcome onboard \o/
  • Tool of the week
    • Comparator compare the list of cited entities across two different wikipedia articles using Wikidata and SPARQL
  • Development
    • Enabling usage tracking specifically for statements on Waray, Armenian and Cebuano Wikipedias (phab:T296383, phab:T296382, phab:T296384)
    • Implementing basic version of mul language code and deploying it to Test Wikidata (phab:T297393)
    • Preparing an event centered on reusing Wikidata's data
    • Mismatch Finder: Been in touch with people who can potentially provide the first mismatches to load into the new tool for the launch. Finalized the statistics part.

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #505[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Basque version of Wordle using Wikidata's lexicographic data. Check it out!
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • WDQS scaling update for Jan 2022 available here. We will be trying to do monthly updates starting this month.
  • Development
    • Continuing work on adding the mul language code for labels, descriptions and aliases. (phab:T297393)
    • Enabled statement usage tracking for Cebuano, Armenian and Warai Warai to ensure fine-grained notifications about edits on Wikidata on those Wikipedias (phab:T296383, phab:T296382, phab:T296384)
    • Continuing work on fixing a bug where Wikidata changes do not get sent to Wikipedia and co for the first sitelink adding leading to missing information in the page_props table (phab:T233520)
    • Continuing work on making sure the Wikidata search box works with the new Vector skin improvements (phab:T296202)
    • Mismatch Finder: Debugging some issues with the first files we got with mismatches that we can load into the Mismatch Finder


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.

Wikidata weekly summary #506[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming:
      • The Data Reuse Days will bring together Wikidata editors and data reusers on March 14-24 - we're currently building the schedule. Join us and discover many cool projects!
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Andy Mabbett on the "Cite Q" template that uses data from Wikidata in Wikipedia citations and Crystal Clements on setting the framework for a future discussion on addressing ethical concerns surrounding representation of gender for living persons in Wikidata, February 8th. Agenda
      • Wikidata Query Service scaling: You can join 2 calls and provide feedback at the 2 WDQS scaling community meetings on Thursday, 17 Feb 2022 18:00 UTC, and Monday 21 Feb 2022 18:00 UTC. Full details here.
      • Live on Twitch and in French about Academic bibliographical data and Scholia by Vigneron and Jsamwrites, February 8 at 19:00 CET (UTC+1)
      • LIVE Wikidata editing #70 - YouTube, Facebook, February 12 at 19:00 UTC
      • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #95, February 13 at 13.00 UTC
    • Ongoing:
    • Past:
  • Tool of the week
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • January 1st as date
    • Wikidata has 2,540,891 items for people with both date of birth and date of death. There are 9 redirects for every 100 such items. (source). 2000 people share dates of birth and death with another person.
  • Development
    • Mismatch Finder: Tracking down one last issue with the upload of mismatch files. Once that is fixed we are ready to release the tool.
    • Lexicographical data: Started coding on the rewrite of Special:NewLexeme to make it easier to understand and use.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #507[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • Continuing work on the basics of the new Special:NewLexeme page. Nothing to see yet though.
    • Fixed a bug where sitelinks where added for wikis that shouldn't get them. (phab:T301247)

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #508[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Call for Mentors: Wiki Mentor Africa is a mentorship project for tool creators/contributors. Interested to become a mentor (experienced tool creators/contributors), please visit this page!
  • Development
    • We started coding on the Wikibase Rest API based on the proposal we published a while ago.
    • We are continuing to work on the new Special:NewLexeme page. The first input fields are in place but not pretty or usable yet.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #509[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Lexicographical data: work is continuing on the new Special:NewLexeme page. We are working on the basic input fields and permission handling.
    • Mismatch Finder: Released the tool and working through feedback now and getting additional mismatches from organizations using our data.
    • REST API: Starting to build the initial Wikibase REST API. We are starting with the endpoint to read Item data first.
    • Data Reuse Days: Continuing event preparation
    • Published new security release updates for Wikibase suite wmde.6 (1.35)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #510[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • New requests for permissions/Bot: EnvlhBot 3. Task/s: add dictionaries IDs to French lexemes
    • Closed request for permissions/Bot: IndoBot (Approved). Task/s: I would like to import all Indonesian schools, more than 100000. The data includes school type, location, and coordinates as well as external identifiers
  • Tool of the week
    • Wikxhibit is a tool that allows anyone, even non-programmers, to create cool presentations of Wikidata, and other sources of data on the web, only using HTML and without any additional programming. Are you interested in creating presentations of Wikidata? We would like to understand your experience with Wikidata to better improve our tool. It would help if you can fill out our survey https://mit.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cvZKKlRu2S7C9Fk
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Wikidata dumps: Due to technical issues the JSON and RDF dumps for the week of March 1st couldn't be properly generated (phab:T300255#7746418). The situation is expected to get back to normal this week.
    • Item with QID 111,111,111 was created
    • Job openings:
      • The development team at WMDE is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to develop and improve the software behind the Wikidata project. Apply here!
      • The WMF Search Platform team is looking for someone to maintain and develop Wikidata Query Service. Apply here!
      • Natural History Museum, Berlin (Q233098) is looking for someone for project- and data management especially for Wikidata related stuff about the museums collections Job Description (German)
  • Development
    • Data Reuse Days: Preparing for the upcoming Data Reuse Days. Join us! A lot of exciting sessions are coming together.
    • Lexicographical data: Continued work on the new Special:NewLexeme page. We are getting close to the point where it can create a Lexeme.
    • REST API: Continuing to work on the first endpoint to read Item data.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #511[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • WDQS outage on 06 March: users may have unexpectedly had requests blocked. Incident report here.
  • Development
    • Getting ready for Data Reuse Days
    • Mismatch Finder: Discussing the next batches of potential mismatches with MusicBrainz data and some remaining Freebase data
    • Lexicographical data: Continuing work on the basic version of the new Special:NewLexeme page, focusing on putting in the base data about the new Lexeme
    • REST API: Continuing coding on the basic version of the GET Item endpoint

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #512[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
      • PodcastBot. Task/s: Upload new podcast episodes, extract: title, part of the series, has quality (explicit episode), full work available at (mp3), production code, apple podcast episode id, spotify episode ID. Regex extraction: talk show guest, recording date (from description)
      • AradglBot. Task/s: Create between 100,000 and 200,000 new lexemes in Aragonese language Q8765
    • Closed request for permissions/Bot: EnvlhBot 3 (approved). Task/s: add dictionaries IDs to French lexemes
  • Tool of the week
    • Linked People project let's you explore the family trees of all known people at Wikipedia/Wikidata.
    • Gene of the Day (gene-wordle) uses Wikidata for gene names and crafting an answer list by number of sitelinks.
  • Development
    • Lexicographical data: We're continuing with the work on the new Special:NewLexeme page. We worked on saving a valid new Lexeme with the new page. We are now focusing on the suggesters for language and lexical category so editors can select the right Item for them.
    • Data Reuse Days: We ran sessions on how to use Wikidata's data programmatically and the best practices around it. Slides and videos are available already (see above).
    • REST API: Continuing coding on the basic version of the GET Item endpoint. We have the very initial version of the get item endpoint ready and are now adding more parameters to it.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #513[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Scribe is a keyboard extension based on lexicographical data that can help users remember grammar rules (see blogpost above).
    • WorldlEH is a wordle clone in Basque.
  • Development
    • [Significant Change]: wbsearchentities changed to explicitly return display terms and matched term
    • Lexicographical data: Working on the lookup for language and lexical category and displaying potential errors during Lexeme creation
    • Improved the API response of the wbsearchentities endpoint by adding the language to the labels and descriptions in the API response (phab:T104344)
    • Data Reuse Days: Second and final week - organized, attended and held a few sessions incl. bug triage hour and pink pony session
    • REST API: Continuing work on getting the the data of an Item, we almost have filtering of the data returned by the API and basic error handling is in place. Next up: not returning the data if the client already has the most recent data, and authentication

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #514[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • New requests for permissions/Bot: APSbot 4: Task/s: Regularly create organizations from the Research Organization Registry (ROR - https://ror.org/) that are missing in Wikidata.
  • Tool of the week
    • Kyrksok.se is an app about Swedish churches based on Wikidata.
    • QAnswer is a question answering system based on Wikidata and other projects. Who was the first to create liquid helium? Try it!
  • Development
    • Lexicographical data: Continued work on the new Special:NewLexeme page and focused on displaying sensible error messages if an error occurs during Lexeme creation. We're also working on adding a dropdown for the language variant.
    • REST API: Continued work on conditional requests and authorization
    • Made use of the new fields added in the wbsearchentities API and added language information to the markup of entity searches that you see when editing a statement or searching with the little searchbox at the top of the page on Wikidata. Now these search results should make a bit more sense to people who use screen readers.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #515[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Glitter another R package to write SPARQL queries and query Wikidata and other SPARQL endpoints. This package provides a domain specific language to write queries directly from R.
    • Conzept is a topic-exploration tool based on Wikidata and other information sources.
  • Development
    • Lexicographical data: Continued work on the new Special:NewLexeme page. We worked on displaying error messages and inferring the spelling variant from the language. We also looked into the non-JavaScript version of the page.
    • REST API: Worked on conditional requests (do not return data the client already has) and authorization.

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #516[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Pi admin bot (RfP scheduled to end after 20 April 2022 17:58 UTC)
    • Closed request for adminship: Stang (successful)
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
  • Tool of the week
    • Bird O'Clock! is a tool based on Wikidata and other data sources that shows pictures and numbers from actual people counting actual birds in the actual world!
    • Tiago's Coin Herbarium is a coin collection depicting different plant information displayed via Wikidata SPARQL queries.
  • Development
    • Lexicographical data: Worked on inferring the spelling variant from the language's Item on the new Special:NewLexeme page and started building a little help box on the special page to explain what lex. data is.
    • REST API: Getting closer to having a first version of the REST API that returns Item data.

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #517[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Closed request for adminship:
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
  • Tool of the week
    • Wikitaxa is a software of taxonomy data written in R.
    • User:So9q/fatcat-link.jsscrip is a userscript for looking up fatcat! DOIs. It adds a link to the fatcat! database in the Tools' section on items.
  • Development
    • Lexicographical data: Worked on showing the name of language variants in the language variant selector and added the new information box to help people get a better understanding of lex. data.
    • REST API: Finished the initial implementation of the endpoint for getting data for a full Item and discussed feedback, testing and roll-out plans.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #518[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • The new "mul" term language code is now available on Test Wikidata
    • Lexicographical data: We are finishing up the information box that should help new users understand quickly what lexicographical data is. We also added the help text to encourage people to check if the Lexeme already exists before creating one.
    • REST API: We started working on the REST routes to get all statements of an Item and retrieve a single statement from an Item.

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #519[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Closed request for permissions/Bot:
      • PangolinBot. Task/s: Automatically replace one property value with another (Approved)
  • Development
    • REST API: We are continuing to implement the REST routes to get all statements of an Item and retrieve a single statement from an Item (phab:T305988, phab:T307087, phab:T307088)
    • Lexicographical data: We are finishing the version of the page for browsers without JavaScript support (phab:T298160). We started working on the feature to pre-fill the input fields by URL parameter (phab:T298154). And we started working on better suggestions for lexical categories so commonly-used ones can more easily be added to avoid mistakes (phab:T298150).
    • We fixed an issue with recently added new language codes not being usable for Lexemes and not being sorted correctly on Special:NewItem (phab:T277836).

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #520[edit]

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

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #521[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming:
      • 6 and 8 June: Scholia hackathon with focus on software-related visualizations and curation workflows
      • 29 July 2022: The submission deadline for the Wikidata Workshop 2022 that will be co-located with the 21st International Conference on Semantic Web (ISWC 2022).
    • Ongoing:
  • Tool of the week
    • LOD4Culture is a web application for exploring world-wide cultural heritage.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • UNLOCK, a Wikimedia Deutschland program, is looking for your project ideas. These could be the development of tools building on top of Wikidata's data, of applications for social and public good or related to civic tech. Apply until May 29th, 2022!
    • Job opening: Community Communications Manager - Wikibase at Wikimedia Deutschland.
  • Development
    • Wikibase REST API: Initial implementation of a route providing all statements of an item (phab:T305988), an a route to retrieve a single statement (phab:T307087) completed.
    • First batch of WBstack.com accounts successfully migrated to Wikibase.cloud. You can keep track of our progress on this phabricator ticket phab:T303852.
    • Lexicographical data: We updated the input placeholders on the new version of the NewLexeme special page (T302877, T307443). We finished the feature to prefill the inputs from URL parameters if present (T298154) and to suggest common lexical category items (T298150). We are working on some accessibility improvements (T303806, T290733, T305359) and improving validation / error messages (T305854).

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #522[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Want to know more about Abstract Wikipedia & Wikifunctions? You can now subscribe to the weekly newsletter and get a friendly reminder every time a new issue is published!
    • Radioactivity map: Mind map about radioactive radiation built by importing from Wikidata with InfoRapid KnowledgeBase Builder
  • Development
    • Wikibase REST API: Expanding statement reading routes (a single statement specified by ID (phab:T307087), all statements of an item (phab:T305988), a single statement for a specific item (phab:T307088))
    • Fetch revision metadata and entity data separately in all use cases (phab:T307915, decision)
    • Update installation instructions in WikibaseLexeme.git readme file (phab:T306008)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #523[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Development
    • Lexicographical data: We finished work on input validation and displaying errors for faulty input (phab:T305854) and are continuing work on accessibility improvements such as screen reader support and keyboard navigation (phab:T290733, phab:T30535).
    • REST API: We finished implementation of conditional statement requests (phab:T307031, phab:T307032) and published the OpenAPI specification document (still subject to change as the API develops). We started working on the write part of the API with adding statements to an Item (phab:T306667).

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #524[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call June 14, 2022: Will Kent (Wikidata Program Manager at Wiki Education) and Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight (Wikimedia Foundation Trustee; Visiting Scholar at Northeastern University; co-founder of Wiki Women in Red) will present on Leveraging Wikidata for Wikipedia – running a multi-language wiki project and the role of Wikidata in improving Wikipedia's content gender gap. Agenda
      • Live editing session on Twitch, in French, by Vigneron, June 14 at 19:00 CEST (UTC+2)
    • Ongoing
    • Past
  • Tool of the week
    • ExtraInterwiki. Some language links will never show up in your favorite Wikipedia, those who don’t have a corresponding article in this Wikipedia. This new tool aims to give them more visibility by searching topics closed to the one on an article with no article on your wiki.
  • Development
    • Fixed a bug where Item IDs where shown instead of the label after selecting an Item in an Item selector (phab:T306214)
    • Lexicographical data: finished accessibility improvement for the new Special:New Lexeme page (phab:T290733), improving error messages for the new page (phab:T310134) and worked on a new search profile to make selecting languages easier (phab:T307869)
    • REST API: continued work on creating statements (phab:T306667)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #425[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Lexicographical data:
      • Enabled Lua access to Lexemes for all Wikimedia projects
      • Continued work on improving the language search for Lexeme languages on the new Special:NewLexeme page (phab:T307869)
      • Improving the accessibility of a design system component and the new Special:NewLexeme page (phab:T290733)
      • Making it easier to understand what to do when the spelling variant isn't available on the new Special:NewLexeme page (phab:T298146)
    • REST API: Continuing work on making it possible to add a statement to an Item

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #426[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
      • William Avery Bot 7. Task/s: Merge multiple references on the same claim citing Accademia delle Scienze di Torino.
  • Tool of the week
    • IsisCB Explore - is a research tool for the history of science whose books and subjects use imagery from Wikidata.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Template Item documentation now includes a query to the corresponding lexemes. This is an attempt to make navigation between lexemes and items easier. For the record, Item documentation is available in the header of the talk page for each item.
  • Development
    • Lexicographical data: We are wrapping up the coding on the new Special:NewLexeme page. Testing and rolll-out will follow soon. We are still working on making it easier to find languages in the language selector on the Special:NewLexeme page. (phab:T307869)
    • REST API: We are continuing to code on the ability to create statements on an Item (phab:T306667)
    • Investigating an issue with labels not being shown after merges (phab:T309445)
    • Preparation for upcoming work: We are planning the next work on the Mismatch Finder to address feedback we have received so far as well as EntitySchemas to make them more integrated with other areas of Wikidata.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #522[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
      • ListedBuildingsUKBot. Task/s: Add wikidata site links to appropriate wiki commons category pages for listed buildings with matching ID numbers. I've identified about 1000 entities that can be updated. e.g. [16] should have a wiki commons link to [17] since they both refer to [18].
  • Development
    • Lexicographical data:
      • We have finished most of the development on the new Special:NewLexeme page. You can try it at https://wikidata.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:NewLexemeAlpha. We will make this available on Wikidata for testing with real-world data on July 14th.
      • We are continuing to work on the new search profile for languages to make setting the language of a new Lexeme easier (phab:T307869)
    • REST API: We are putting finishing touches on the first version of the API route to add statements to an Item. It is still lacking support for automated edit summaries.
    • We are working on word-level diffs to make it easier to see what changed in an edit (phab:T303317)
    • We are investigating the issue of labels not being shown after some merges (phab:T309445)

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #528[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming:
      • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, July 27th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (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.
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call July 12, 2022: Houcemeddine Turki will speak on "Enriching and Validating Wikidata from Large Bibliographic Databases." This call will be part of the 2022 LD4 Conference on Linked Data, “Linking Global Knowledge.” While you can attend the call directly via the links below without registering for the conference, we encourage everyone to check out the full conference program and all the excellent sessions on Sched at Agenda
      • 7/30 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata @ COSCUP 2022
      • 2022 LD4 Conference on Linked data. July 11th through July 15th, 2022
    • Ongoing
    • Past:
  • Development
    • Data Quality Days!
    • Making plans for improving EntitySchemas and integrate them more into editing and maintenance workflows
    • Implemented word-level diffs of labels, descriptions, aliases and sitelinks (phab:T303317)
    • Continuing the investigation about labels not being shown after some merges (phab:T309445)
    • Lexicographical data:
      • Continuing work on making it easier to pick the right language for a new Lexeme (phab:T298140)
      • Fixing a bug where `[object Object]` was shown in the gramatical feature field (phab:T239208)
      • Fixing a number of places where labels for redirected Items were not shown even though the redirect target had labels (phab:T305032)
    • REST API:
      • Finished the first version of the API route for creating statements on an Item (excluding autosummaries so far)
      • Started work on the API route for removing a statement from an Item

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #529[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming
      • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, July 27th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (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.
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries Wikidata Working Hour July 18, 2022: Working with diverse children's book metadata. The second Wikidata Working Hour in the series will cover reconciliation in OpenRefine, so we can identify which authors from our spreadsheet of children's book metadata already exist and/or need to be created in Wikidata. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. Event page
      • Assessing the Quality of Sources in Wikidata Across Languages - Wikimedia Research Showcase, Wednesday, July 20, at 9:30 AM PST/16:30 UTC
      • Mark your calendars for the Wikimania Hackathon! The free, online, public event will take place from 16- 22 UTC August 12 and 12-17 UTC August 13, and include a final showcase on August 14.
    • Ongoing
    • Past
  • Development
    • Lexicographical data:
    • REST API: Continued working on the API route to replace or remove a statement of an Item
    • We are making Wikibase resolve redirects when showing Item labels and descriptions in a lot more places; notably, this includes the wbsearchentities API. (phab:T312223)
    • Mismatch Finder: We are discussing options for how to improve its handling of dates, specifically calendar model and precision.
    • EntitySchemas: We are trying to figure out how to best technically go about implementing some of the most-needed features for version 2.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #530[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming:
      • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, July 27th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (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.
      • [Small wiki toolkits] [Upcoming bots & scripts workshop. "How to maintain bots" is coming up on Friday, July 29th, 16:00 UTC
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call July 26, 2022: Clair Kronk, Crystal Clements, and Alex Jung will be providing an update to Wikidata/gender discussions from the February 8 call with a focus on pronouns. Clair will introduce us to LGBTdb, a Wikibase instance created for and by LGBTQIA+ people from which we draw insight in Wikidata-related discussions. We also hope to discuss current pain points and share action items for future collaboration. Input from community members who are familiar with lexicographical data would be greatly appreciated. Agenda
      • Wikimedia Indonesia Wikidata meetup. 1300 WIB, July 30, 2022.
    • Ongoing:
      • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #51, Plants
  • Tool of the week
    • User:Magnus Manske/referee.js - is a userscript that automatically checks external IDs and URLs of a Wikidata item as potential references, and adds them with a single click.
  • Development
    • Lexicographical data: We went over all the feedback we received for teh testing of the new Special:NewLexeme page and started addressing it and fixing the uncovered issues. One issue already fixed is a bug that prevented it from working on mobile view. (phab:T313116)
    • Mismatch Finder: investigated how we can make it work for mismatches in qualifiers instead of the main statement (phab:T313467)
    • REST API: Continued working on making it possible to replace and remove a statement of an Item
    • We enabled the profile parameter to the wbsearchentities API on Test Wikidata (phab:T307869)
    • We continued making Wikibase resolve redirects when showing Item labels and descriptions in more places (phab:T312223)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #531[edit]

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

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #532[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming
      • Wikimania 2022, August 11 to 14, online event. The Hackathon will take place August 12-14. On this page you can find a summary of sessions and community gatherings related to Wikidata and Wikibase.
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call August 9, 2022: Pieter Vander Vennet on MapComplete, a thematic OpenStreetMap viewer and editor which uses species, language, and image data from Wikidata. Agenda.
      • The Wikimania Hackathon starts next Friday, August 16-22! There are still lots of spots in the schedule to add your Wikidata related sessions or project ideas (anyone can present a session)
    • Ongoing
      • Wikimedia Indonesia's Wikidata edit-a-thon (datathon) for the 77th anniversary of the Indnesian Independence Day started on 5th August and will be held until 12th August. Participants are instructed to edit items containing the statement country of origin (P495): Indonesia (Q252).
      • Toolhub is a catalog of 1500+ tools used every day in a wide variety of workflows across many Wiki projects. We are currently improving the search functionality and need your input – whether you are already familiar with Toolhub or not. Please take 5-10 minutes to leave feedback.
    • Ongoing
      • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #53, Sheep
    • Past
      • First online meet-up fully organized by volunteers of the Indonesian Wikidata Community has been held on 30th July where we edited items on Indonesian ethnic groups.
  • Tool of the week
    • Wiki tools - adds dozens of Wikipedia and Wikidata functions to your Google sheets.
  • Development
    • Lexicographical data:
      • Continuing to address feedback from the testing (e.g. phab:T312292, phab:T313113, phab:T313466)
      • We have pushed back replacing Special:NewLexeme with the new Special:NewLexemeAlpha a bit to address more of the testing feedback.
    • Continuing to tackle allowing sitelinks to redirects under some circumstances (phab:T278962)
    • REST API:
      • Finishing up the endpoints for removing and replacing statements and adding authentication and authorization to them
      • Looking into feedback from first testing

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

Wikidata weekly summary #533[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship:
      • Estopedist1 (RfP scheduled to end after 21 August 2022 12:36 UTC)
  • Events
    • Upcoming:
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Wikidata Working Hour August 15, 2022: Fourth session of our summer/fall project working with diverse children's book metadata. We'll be covering manually creating publisher items: showing how to create items, add statements to items, add references, and use gadgets. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. All sessions in our project series will be recorded for those who cannot attend. Links will be added to the event page when available. Event page
    • Ongoing:
  • Tool of the week
    • KnolCase is a case-based knowledge management tool for gathering information about subjects of interest and organizing these into case files.
  • Development
    • Took part in Wikimania and the Wikimania hackathon
    • Continuing work on making it possible to add sitelinks to redirects under some special conditions (phab:T278962)
    • Lexicographical data: continuing to address the feedback from testing
    • REST API:

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #534[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • List of created Wikidata items - a tool which combines Xtools pages created API with Wikidata API to get the list of items created by a user with their label.
  • Development
    • Lexicographical data: continuing to address feedback from testing. We are almost done now.
    • REST API: continued investigating the use of PATCH and JSON Patch and worked on a proof-of-concept
    • Birthday planning and prepping is in full swing

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #535[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Development
    • REST API: working on the ability to change existing statements on an Item (phab:T306934)
    • Lexicographical data: Finishing up the remaining pieces of the new Special:NewLexeme page based on the testing feedback (subtickets of phab:T307866)

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #536[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
      • MsynBot 9. Task/s: manage existing GND ID (P227) identifier claims
      • DL2204bot. Task/s: Add ExternalID values, edit/create items, add/edit lexemes, senses, forms
  • Events
    • Upcoming:
      • Wikidata's 10th birthday is coming up soon: you can contribute to the celebration video, prepare an event or a birthday present.
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call September 6, 2022: Dominic Byrd-McDevitt will talk about the Digital Public Library's Wikimedia program, an effort to provide national leadership around access and discoverability of digital collections by leveraging Wikipedia and its sister projects. 2 years ago, DPLA launched a digital asset pipeline to enable participating institutions in the DPLA network to share their collections with Wikimedia Commons. DPLA is continuing to innovate by taking advantage of Wikidata entities and Structured Data on Commons to continually synchronize data and improve discoverability. We'll discuss issues around large datasets, aggregation, reconciliation, and other challenges DPLA has faced. Agenda
      • Talk to the Search Platform / Query Service Team—September 7th, 2022 Date: Wednesday, September 7th, 2022. Time: 15:00-16:00 UTC / 08:00 PDT / 11:00 EDT / 17:00 CEST / 19:00 GST
    • Ongoing:
  • Development
    • REST API:
      • We are continuing to work on the PATCH endpoint to make it possible to edit existing statements (phab:T306934)
      • We started the security review process for one of the libraries we are using. Until that is finished this part of the REST API can unfortunately not be tested on beta Wikidata. (phab:T316523)
      • For anything but the PATCH endpoint, you can follow along development on beta Wikidata and see the latest docs. More details at Wikidata:REST API feedback round.
    • Lexicographical data: Continued addressing remaining issues found during testing (phab:T314064, phab:T312633, phab:T312652)
    • Continuing work on supporting sitelinks to redirects under some special conditions (phab:T278962)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #537[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Wikidata Working Hour September 12, 2022: Sixth session of our summer/fall project working with diverse children's book metadata. We'll be creating items for books (works and editions) in Wikidata. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. All sessions in our project series will be recorded for those who cannot attend. Links will be added to the event page when available. Wikidata Working Hour Event page
      • Webinar: Querying Wikidata: All the Knowledge in the World. Sep 15, 2022 5:00 PM Central European Summer Time
    • Ongoing:
      • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #58, City
  • Tool of the week
    • View it! Tool - (based on Wikidata) allows viewing a multitude of images that depicts a given topic on Wikipedia.
  • Development
    • REST API: Continued work on the endpoint for changing a statement (phab:T306934)
    • Lexicographical data: Made sure that the new Lexeme creation page also is shown in older browsers (phab:T311157), which was one of the last remaining issues before we can switch out the existing page (phab:T307866)
    • Continued work on enabling sitelinks for redirects under certain conditions (phab:T278962)
    • Spend a few days with people from Wikimedia Indonesia to discuss our partnership

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #538[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
      • بوٹ دا عثمان
        • Task/s:
          • Dual script support for Punjabi Wikidata labels and descriptions in Gurmukhi (pa) and Shahmukhi (pnb), taking a conservative approach (only making "obvious" transliterations).
          • Addition of labels and descriptions entirely consistent of information which can be inferred from other language labels (again, only for "obvious" cases).
  • Tool of the week
    • WD-FIST is a userscript that checks Wikipedia pages for available images if the item doesn't have one (automatically or manually via sidebar link).
  • Development
    • REST API:
      • Finished the endpoint for editing statements (phab:T306934)
      • Working on automated edit summaries (phab:T312811)
      • Making small modifications to the response format for statements (phab:T317866)
    • Lexicographical data:
      • Special:NewLexemeAlpha now uses the new search profile for languages, which makes it easier to select a language Item for the language of the new Lexeme (phab:T312853)
      • Finished the work on making sure that the example Lexeme falls back to other locally defined examples for languages other than English instead of the pre-set example Lexeme (phab:T313599)
      • Working on making sure that only *-x-Q123, not *-x-q123, can be used as a Lexeme language code (phab:T317863)
    • Sitelinks to Redirects are now available for testing on test.wikidata.org
    • Improved the wrapping and selection behavior of aliases in the header of an Item (phab:T315991) Thanks Fomafix for the patch!
    • Improved the translations of the Lexeme and EntitySchema namespaces (phab:T316770) Thanks to Amire80 for the patch!
    • Started supporting Codex work for some Wikidata-specific work needed in the new design system (phab:T306932)

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #539[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • 🧵 Discussions
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
      • JhsBot 6
        • Task/s: Add sitelinks to newly created wikis after wikis have been created and exported from the Wikimedia Incubator.
  • 🎊 Events
    • Upcoming
      • Live editing session on Twitch, in French, by Vigneron, September 26 at 18:00 CEST (UTC+2)
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Wikidata Working Hour September 30, 2022: the seventh Wikidata Working Hour in the series will be a review session of creating contributor and publisher items in Wikidata. The primary goal of this session is to generate as many contributor and publisher items as we can in advance of the two following sessions which have to do with batch editing -- we want enough to make a good batch! We will review how to add items, but then reserve the bulk of the session for open editing, kind of like a mini-editathon! Naturally, participants can ask questions and share thoughts at any point during the editing! You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. All sessions in the project series will be recorded. Links will be added when available. Event page
    • Ongoing
      • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #60, Cows
  • 🧰 Tool of the week
    • User:Bovlb/notability.js is a userscript that adds a small notability indicator to the top right of an item showing how well the item satisfies the three notability criteria. Left to right, the three columns indicate sitelinks, identifiers and references, and structural need.
  • 🧑🏿‍💻 Development
    • Continuing work on making the mul language code work.
    • Continuing work on making Special:UnconnectedPages scale (phab:T300770)
    • Ensuring that Lexeme language codes using mis use uppercase Q consistently in the Item IDs (phab:T317863)
    • REST API: Working on automated edit summaries (phab:T312811)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #540[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • 🎊 Events
    • Upcoming
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call
        • October 4, 2022: Lana Soglasnova and Roman Tashlitskyy will talk about their preliminary work in creating and editing items for Slavic people and some of the complications involved in this work, especially around transliterating names in various languages. Agenda
        • Wikibase Working Hour! 25 October 2022, 2pm Eastern (Time zone converter) Amy Ruskin of Northeastern University Library, will speak on the topic of Wikidata vs. custom Wikibases: Community history case studies, Boston’s Chinatown. The Boston Research Center (BRC) is a digital community history and archives lab based in the Northeastern University Library. One of our current projects involves taking an inventory of historical materials related to Boston’s Chinatown, and we have been using Wikibase to store multilingual data about the linked collections, organizations, and people. In this presentation, we will discuss our experience of getting started with a custom Wikibase and give an overview of our progress so far on the Chinatown Collections project. Amy Ruskin is the Data Engineer in the Digital Scholarship Group in the Northeastern University Library. She has a Master's degree in Information Studies from McGill University and a background in computer science and statistics. Registration link
      • Live editing session on Twitch, in French, by Vigneron, October 4 at 18:00 CEST (UTC+2)
      • [Small wiki toolkits] Upcoming "How to interact with Wikidata via Pywikibot" workshop on Friday, October 7th, 16:00 UTC
      • The State of Wikidata and Cultural Heritage: 10 Years In. Oct 4, 2022 08:00 AM in Pacific Time (US and Canada)
      • Talk to the Search Platform / Query Service Team—October 5th, 2022
      • Wikidata Office Hour GLAM-Hack − online meet-up about the "library world" with Wikidata. October 5th, 12.00 UTC (online via Zoom)
    • Ongoing
      • Wikimedia Österreich, in cooperation with Wikimedia Deutschland, started the DACH Culture Contest as a Börthday present for Wikidata 10th anniversary! It features two categories: "libraries in Austria, Germany and Switzerland" and "Culture in Austria, Germany and Switzerland". So if you would like to improve data about libraries, books, music, art, video games, cinema etc as a börthday treat, join us and get the chance to win some nice prizes! The contest will last until October 16, 2022.
      • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #61, Time
  • 🧑🏿‍💻 Development


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.

Wikidata weekly summary #541[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • ✨ Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • The fourth edition of the Coolest Tool Award is looking for nominations. Please submit your favorite tools by October 12, 2022. The awarded projects will be announced and showcased in a virtual ceremony in December.
    • The September 2022 summary for the Wikidata Query Service backend update is out.
  • 🧑🏿‍💻 Development
    • MUL language code: fixed the order of languages shown in the termbox on desktop, especially when mul is used (phab:T311617)
    • Lexicographical data:
      • Made Special:NewLexemeAlpha use the same font as the rest of the wiki (phab:T313166) – this should be the last blocker for replacing the old special page
      • Disallowed *-x-qid with lowercase Q as Lexeme language codes in favor of *-x-Qid (phab:T317863)
    • REST API: worked on handling conditional HTTP request headers
    • Changed the unexpectedUnconnectedPage page prop so that Special:UnconnectedPages can show the latest pages first, which should finally resolve this old security task in production (phab:T300770)
    • Cleaned up the Wikibase and WikibaseLexeme ontology files (phab:T314360)
    • Added a few more globes for geocoordinates (phab:T314611) - Thanks, Mike!

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #542[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • 🧑🏿‍💻 Development
    • REST API:
      • Finished work on handling conditional HTTP request headers (If-Match, If-None-Match, etc)
      • Working on providing more clear error reports to PATCH route errors
    • Mismatch Finder: Implementing a new random mismatch feature (phab:T302289)
    • The text in the namespace tabs for Lexeme: and EntitySchema: pages can now be easily translated (phab:T316770) - thanks Amir!
    • Made the Wikibase error message "Malformed input" more meaningful (phab:T304943)
    • Continued working on the deployment of a patch to improve the Query Service lag integration in MediaWiki API's maxlag (phab:T315423)
    • Fixed a bug where the Kartographer map preview is erroneously closed, when clicking on zoom actions (+/-) (phab:T303103)
    • Still working on fixing a mobile termbox issue related to the "mul" language code (phab:T318137)
    • Added ircs as an allowed protocol for the URL datatype (phab:T320643) - thanks Lectrician1!

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #543[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Wikidata passed another milestone on October 19.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #544[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • 🧰 Tool of the week
    • sparklis (source) : query builder in natural language that allows people to explore and query SPARQL endpoints with all the power of SPARQL and without any knowledge of SPARQL, nor of the endpoint vocabulary.
  • ✨ Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Word Finder is a tool based on Wikidata Lexemes that solves anagrams and find missing letters in crosswords.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #545[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • 🎊 Events
    • Upcoming
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Wikidata Working Hour November 7, 2022: tenth and final Wikidata Working Hour in the series will be using SPARQL to query and visualize the data we’ve added to Wikidata during our series. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. All sessions in our project series will be recorded for those who cannot attend. Links will be added to the event page when available. Event page
      • Live querying session on Twitch, in French, by Vigneron, November 8 at 18:00 CET (UTC+1)
      • Wikidata and Wikibase office hour, taking place online on November 9th at 17:00 UTC (more details here)
      • Raising an Artist Profile with Wikidata: Thursday November 10, 2022 at 20:00 UTC (Session A) and 23:00 UTC (Session B). This free, step-by-step Wikidata workshop will focus mainly on Indigenous artists. Participants may choose to attend either Session A or Session B: both will cover the exact same material.
      • Wikidata editathon in Swedish with focus on climate politics and COP27, online and in Stockholm, 11 November 13.00-18.00 UTC
      • A Hands-On Introduction to Wikidata: Thursday December 1, 2022 at 17:00 UTC. By the end of this session, you will be able to edit Wikidata records about the cultural venues that matter most to you.
  • 🧰 Tool of the week
    • WikibaseEcho.js: Userscript that shows the labels of entities in your notifications. Currently only works on Firefox.
  • 🧑🏿‍💻 Development
    • Lexicographical data: Replaced the old Special:NewLexeme page with the new one (phab:T307866) - a few remaining issues will still be fixed
    • Vue 3: Almost finished the Vue 3 migration in Wikibase and WikibaseLexeme (phab:T321595 and (phab:T304534) - this is needed for finalizing the migration in MediaWiki overall
    • Mismatch Finder: Worked on improving the handling of dates (phab:T288511)
    • Search: Working with the WMF on making the new Vue-based Vector search understand Wikidata (phab:T316093)), especially regarding “load more” behavior
    • REST API:
      • Continued improving error reporting for PATCH routes (phab:T320358)
      • Ensuring that the API correctly marks bot edits as bot edits and treats them as such in various other places

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #546[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • 🎊 Events
    • Upcoming:
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call November 15, 2022: We will be discussing the first Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour series, which ran from July to early November of this year. We will offer visualizations based on our data, listen to some of our volunteers talk about their experience helping to build the series, and discuss the results of our participant survey. We want to hear your questions and suggestions for future series! Agenda
      • Enrichissement des données sur la danse: Wednesday 16 November at 6:30 pm UTC (Session A) and Thursday 17 November at 6:30 pm UTC (Session B). Join the Regroupement québécois de la danse (RQD) and the Linked Digital Future Initiative (LDFI) for two dynamic sessions focusing on dance data. Session A will focus on artists, while Session B will focus on organizations and dance companies. Note: These sessions are offered in French only.
    • Ongoing:
    • Past:
      • Wikidata/Wikibase Telegram office hours log (2022-11-09)
  • 🧰 Tool of the week
    • QLever - Alternative instance for SPARQL queries.
    • Discuss.js - Adds a link to a diff when clicked will open a new topic on the talk page that mentions the revision and the user.
  • 🧑🏿‍💻 Development
    • REST API:
      • Finished work on improved error reporting of the PATCH routes (phab:T320358)
      • Finished work on properly handling bot user right and marking bot edits as such
      • Adjusting statement data structure in Wikibase REST API responses and requests (phab:T321459)
    • Mismatch Finder: continuing work om improving the handling of dates in the Mismatch Finder (phab:T288511)
    • New Vector skin: continuing work with the WMF on making the new Vue-based Vector search understand Wikidata (phab:T316093, phab:T317682)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #547[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming:
      • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #130, November 27 at 13.00 UTC
      • Wiki <3 Data - How to use Wikidata for data visualization. Join us on Monday 28 Nov. from 13:15 - 17:00 at Aalto University in Espoo, Finland or online! - Hosted by Visual Communication Design programme at Aalto Arts, workshop by Yamen Bousrih.
      • Next Wikidata Bug Triage Hour about Entity Schemas and other topics, on December 6th at 17:00 on Jitsi
    • Ongoing:
  • Development
    • REST API: continuing work on adjusting JSON request and response format (phab:T321459)
    • Lexicographical data:
      • Added separation between identifiers and other statements on Lexemes (phab:T318310)
      • Fixed the case where language fallback indicators where shown on Special:NewLexeme when they should not be (phab:T322687)
      • Adjusted the help link for the spelling variant input field (phab:T315161)
    • Mismatch Finder:
      • Finished work on better handling of dates (phab:T288511)
      • Finished work on allowing mismatches with empty Wikidata values to make it possible to use the Mismatch Finder also for suggesting missing data (phab:T313468)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #548[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming:
      • Save the date! The next WikidataCon will take place on October 28-29, 2023, and will be organized by Wikimedia Taiwan and Wikimedia Germany. The hybrid event will be streamed from Taipei and accessible for everyone online. More information and updates on d:Wikidata:WikidataCon_2023
      • Next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call November 29, 2022: We will be discussing openly managed data gathering and management with Holly Little (Smithsonian), Sabine von Mering (Museum für Naturkunde), Erica Krimmel (Florida State University), and Debra Paul (University of Illinois)! Agenda
      • A Hands-On Introduction to Wikidata: Thursday December 1, 2022 at 17:00 UTC. By the end of this session, you will be able to edit Wikidata records about the cultural venues that matter most to you.
      • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #131, December 4 at 13.00 UTC
    • Past:
      • Wikibase live session (November 2022) log
  • Development
    • REST API:
      • Finished the adjusted statement data structure (phab:T321459)
      • Simplifying the structure of sitelinks in Item data (phab:T321483)
      • Simplifying the value format for entity ID, time and globecoordinate value types (phab:T322734)
      • Investigating the way forward for rate limiting (phab:T322746)
    • Ontology issues: Preparing a survey for re-users of Wikidata's data about the different types of ontology issues and which ones are causing the most issues for application builders
    • Mismatch Finder:
      • Finishing the work on making it possible to provide mismatches with an empty Wikidata value so the tool can also be used to suggest new data (phab:T313468)
      • Finishing the work on better handling of calendar models and precision for dates (phab:T288511)
    • Lexicographical data: Fixing bugs:

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #549[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour on December 5. We will be working on Structured Data on Commons with a WINTER FUN theme, adding depicts statements to images and playing with some tools. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. This will be our last scheduled Working Hour for 2022. Please join us for a relaxing and enjoyable session to wrap up a year of excellent work together. Event page
      • Bug Triage Hour on December 6 at 17:00 UTC, on the topic of Entity Schemas (other topics also welcome). Come with your favorite Phabricator ticket so we can improve its description together!
      • Save the date! The next WikidataCon will take place on October 28-29, 2023, and will be organized by Wikimedia Taiwan and Wikimedia Germany. The hybrid event will be streamed from Taipei and accessible for everyone online. More information and updates on the WikidataCon 2023 page.
    • Ongoing
      • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #69, Cycles
  • Tool of the week
    • How many edits does Wikidata get per second? listen.hatnote.com/#wikidata is a tool that allows you to listen to the sound of Wikidata's recent changes feed.
  • Development
    • Improved the error message for sitelinks to redirects (phab:T320490)
    • Made the Property namespace a content namespace (phab:T321282)
    • Lexicographical data: Added a better link for a help message (phab:T315161)
    • Mismatch Finder:
      • Linked the header to make it easier to get back to the main page (phab:T323680)
      • Made the layout more compact (phab:T323678)
      • Fixed an issue where the whole header of a mismatch results table was a link instead of just the Item ID (phab:T323823)
      • Improved the text on a button (phab:T323682)
      • Finished better support for dates with calendar model and precision (phab:T288511)
      • Ordered the columns in the results page better so they make more sense (phab:T323819)
    • Fixed a bug where a large horizontal scrollbar appeared on RTL interface languages (phab:T321441)
    • Fixed a bug in the search in the new Vector skin (phab:T324148)
    • Query Service:
    • mul language code: continuing investigation for language fallbacks on mobile that is currently blocking it (phab:T323098)
    • REST API:

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #550[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Development
    • REST API:
    • Vektor 2022: Finished work on making Vector’s new Search work with Wikidata. The changes roll out for testing on test.wikidata.org next week (phab:T275251)
    • Query Service:
      • Getting a link to the query is now possible in the same place as getting a link to the result of the query (phab:T324218)
      • Removed the gif that showed on hover over the button that advertises the Query Builder to make it less annoying (phab:T296135)
      • Added wikibase:identifiers to the autocomplete feature (phab:T302057)
      • Adjusted the layout of the Query Builder header to be more in line with other application (phab:T288939)
    • Constraint violations: When a language name is mentioned in the constraint it will now show the name of the language in the interface language instead of the language itself to make it easier to understand (phab:T316936)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #551[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming:
      • You can now register for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2023, taking place on May 19-21 in Athens, Greece. You can also apply for a scholarship until January 14th. More information: Wikimedia Hackathon 2023/Participate
      • digital@IANLS: online Wikidata workshop for Neo-Latinists in February 2023
      • Call for Papers on Linked Open Data on Journal BiD: Deadline: Sun, 04/09/2023. Some of the ideas and issues to be included in this issue: Creation and exploitation of knowledge graphs, Information services based on linked open data and knowledge graphs, Artificial intelligence and linked open data, Textual corpora and linked open data, Textual corpora and knowledge graphs, Application of bots in linked open data, Application of bots in knowledge graphs, Linked open data and diversity of genres, Graphs of knowledge and diversity of genres, FAIR and linked open data, FAIR and knowledge graphs, Ontologies and linked open data, Ontologies and knowledge graphs, Application of ontologies in information services.
    • Ongoing:
  • Tool of the week
    • Wikidata Atlas is a system allows the user to search for different types of entities (with geo-coordinates) on Wikidata and visualize them on a world map. (Feedback is very welcome to help evaluate and improve the tool.)
    • Check out a similar tool: wiki-atlas
  • Development
    • REST API: We are getting ready for a release in January and would really love more people to test the current state on beta. You can find details for testing at Wikidata:REST API feedback round.
    • Vector 2022 search: We have worked on making the new search in the Vector 2022 skin work for Wikidata. You can now test it on test.wikidata.org and soon on Wikidata.
    • Query Service:
      • Removed the SVG download options for result views where SVG downloads are not supported, such as Map (phab:T311594)
      • Fixed the indentation of autocompletion suggestions (phab:T291695)
      • Fixed downloading query results in the Query Builder (phab:T323451)
    • Lexicographical data:
      • Working on showing the Lexeme lemmas when you look at a Lexeme’s history (phab:T312660)
      • Fixing a keyboard navigation issue in the lookups on Special:NewLexeme (phab:T324743)
    • mul language code:
      • Continuing to investigate how to implement language fallbacks on mobile termbox (phab:T323098)
      • Investigating how to disallow `mul` descriptions (phab:T313027)
    • Improving and harmonizing the footers in the Query Builder (phab:T324356) and Mismatch Finder (phab:T324366)
    • Preparing for showing constraint violations to visitors who aren’t logged in (phab:T272132)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #552[edit]

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to and read the newsletter this year. If you have a moment, please let us know what you would like to see changed in the newsletter in 2023. Thank you again for your support and have a happy new year!

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming
      • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, November 9th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (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.
    • Ongoing
  • Development
    • Due to the winter holidays, the development team is taking a break and no deployment is happening for Wikidata at the moment.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #553[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming
      • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC on Wednesday, 18th January 2023 (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.
    • Ongoing
      • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #74, Urology
  • Tool of the week
    • OWL Map - a tool to help in linking Wikidata items with the matching object on OpenStreetMap.
  • Development
    • The development team took a break during the winter holidays and as a result, no development occurred.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #554[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
      • Bean49Bot 2. Task/s: Adding statements to plwikisource items with no statements.
      • RPI2026F1Bot 4. Task/s: Reconstruct npm dependencies.
    • Closed request for permissions/Bot:
  • Events
    • Upcoming
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call January 10, 2023: Egon Willighagen will be introducing us to SARS-CoV-2 queries, a well-documented series of Wikidata queries around the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the pandemic. This work contributes to Wikiproject COVID-19 and documentation is currently available in Japanese, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese. Agenda
      • Talk to the Search Platform / Query Service Team—January 11, 2023. Time: 16:00-17:00 UTC / 08:00 PDT / 11:00 EDT / 17:00 CET
      • The full version of View it! Tool is out! The new user script uses structured data to display related media in any Wikimedia content pages—including Wikidata items—in an on-wiki image panel or gallery view. Please join the public launch and demo of the full version of this new tool on Thursday, January 12th, 5:00 UTC via Zoom (Meeting ID: 160 454 5329) to learn more and discuss forthcoming editing features.
      • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC on Wednesday, 18th January 2023 (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.
      • About 2 months left to register for the first digital@IANLS workshop: Learn the basics of Wikidata and how to use it in your Neo-Latin research. Event is online, free, and open to all. More info on event and registration.
    • Ongoing
      • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #75, Tools
  • Tool of the week
    • Web Hub allows users to navigate between origin and destination on the web using information from Wikidata, primarily on Wikimedia sites.
  • Development
    • REST API: Preparing the first release to test.wikidata.org on January 17th and to Wikidata on January 24th
    • Entity Schemas: Continuing to investigate and prototype technical approaches for version 2
    • Mismatch Finder: Working on giving mismatch providers access to the reviews of the mismatches they uploaded (phab:T304794)
    • Investigated how to best do language switching for the Query Builder and Mismatch Finder. So far they only support it by specifying the language via a URL parameter and not yet via the UI (phab:T324653)
    • Query Service:
      • Lexeme IDs now have tooltips so you can see the Lemma in the SPARQL code, similar as for Items and Properties (phab:T255245)
      • Fixed a bug where the y-axis label on a graph were misaligned and hard to read (phab:T325808)
    • Lexicographical data:
      • Statements linking to a Sense now also show the language of the Lexeme to make it easier to see for example which language a translation statement refers to (phab:T207392)
      • Fixed a bug in the language dropdown on Special:NewLexeme (phab:T324743)
      • The Lemma of a Lexeme is now shown in the title of the revision history of the Lexeme as well (phab:T312660)
    • Vector 2022 theme: worked on making the search on Wikidata work in this new theme. You can test it on test.wikidata.org now and next week on Wikidata. (phab:T316093)
    • mul language code:
      • Continued investigation around how to handle language fallbacks on mobile, which is a blocker for adding this language code (phab:T323098)
      • Preventing the addition of descriptions for mul (phab:T313027)
    • Constraint violations: Working on also showing them to non-logged in users (phab:T272132)

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.

Automated report of empty item: Q9712533[edit]

Hello, an item that you have edited (and you are the only non-bot editor) is considered empty and will be deleted in 72 hours if it doesn't improve. Your automated cleaner, Dexbot (talk) 13:33, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Automated report of empty item: Q9739784[edit]

Hello, an item that you have edited (and you are the only non-bot editor) is considered empty and will be deleted in 72 hours if it doesn't improve. Your automated cleaner, Dexbot (talk) 13:35, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Automated report of empty item: Q9781386[edit]

Hello, an item that you have edited (and you are the only non-bot editor) is considered empty and will be deleted in 72 hours if it doesn't improve. Your automated cleaner, Dexbot (talk) 13:37, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #555[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Vector 2020 skin: the search that works properly with Wikidata has been deployed
    • Entity Schemas: Making progress on the proof of concept that will help us figure out the technical way forward
    • REST API: getting ready to deploy the first version to test.wikidata.org on February 17th
    • Lexicographical data: When linking to a Sense in a statement the language of the Lexeme for that Sense is now also shown. This makes it easier to understand translation statements for example (phab:T207392)
    • Constraints: Constraint violations are now also shown to logged out users (phab:T272132)
    • Fixing a regression where Wikipedia and co are no longer notified about a disconnected sitelink when the Item that contains the sitelink is deleted (phab:T326082)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #556[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Past
    • Upcoming
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call January 24, 2023: We will be discussing plans for 2023, and requesting feedback and ideas for future programming. Based on a previous recommendation to host a discussion on advocacy for Wikidata within libraries, we will introduce and provide time to complete a short survey to foster conversation in a future Group Call. Please come ready to share your thoughts Agenda
      • Introductions to Wikidata, online meetings organized by Wikimedia Australia on January 25, 26 and 31
  • Development
    • Wikibase REST API: The new API is now available for testing on Test.Wikidata
    • Ontology issues: We finalized and published the survey to better understand which types of ontology issues are most problematic for reusers of our data.
    • Wikipedia and co: Fixing a regression where there is no entry in recent changes and watchlist when an Item is deleted that was connected to an article on that wiki (phab:T326082)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #557[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • A citation hunt program was organized for secondary school students at IIS School in Dubai as part of the 74th Republic Day celebration of India. 16 students participated, with different mother tongues and from different states of India living as expatriates in Dubai. The goal was to increase references for Wikidata statements based on research. The students were introduced to the importance of protecting India's history on the internet, and were taught how to edit Wikipedia and Wikidata. They were given a special event page on Wikidata with instructions and a list of Wikidata items to add citations to, and they searched for references in their textbooks and search engines to add to the Wikidata items.More details are given here.
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour January 30, 2023: The #1Lib1Ref campaign is afoot, so we will be working on adding references to Wikidata statements. We'll have some data for you to work with, but you're welcome to bring your own. We'll be mainly working with adding webpages as sources, but if you want to get experience using books or articles as sources, we recommend bringing some to the session to use as references for Wikidata items you have identified. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own project to work on Event page
  • Tool of the week
    • theyrule.net is a website that helps to explore the boardroom connections of the largest US companies.
  • Development
    • Wikibase REST API: The first version of the new API is released on Wikidata now \o/ We'd love to hear your feedback on what to improve next in the API.
    • Property Suggester: We updated the data for the Property Suggester so suggestions for new statements to add to an Item should be more in line with current Property usage on other similar Items again.
    • Fixed an issue with Item deletions not showing up on Wikipedia and co if they affect an article on that wiki (phab:T326082)
    • Vector 2022: Made it possible to add a new sitelink on Wikipedia and co in the new Vector 2022 language selector (phab:T310259)
    • Lua: Working on two new Lua functions, getDescriptionByLang (phab:T230839) and getBadges (phab:T305378)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #558[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Let's Quiz is a game that generates random quizzes to test your knowledge & learn something new every day.
    • User:Nikki/AddTermboxLanguage.js - makes it easier to add/edit labels to an item in a language other than the ones shown by default.
  • Development
    • REST API: adding a new GET /entities/items/{item_id}/descriptions endpoint (phab:T327881)
    • Lua: added two Lua functions, getDescriptionByLang (phab:T230839) and getBadges (phab:T305378) that make it easier to get this data on Wikipedia and co
    • Lexicographical data: added documentation for the WikibaseLexeme JSON structure (phab:T201489)
    • Action API: fixed a bug that prevented the wblistentityusage API module from being used as a generator (phab:T254334)
    • Dates: working together with Matěj Suchánek to fix date parsing issues in Czech (phab:T221097)
    • Constraints: working on showing constraint clarification messages to make it easier to understand why a constraint violation is happening and how to fix it (phab:T219037)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #559[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
      • CJMbot (CJMbot lets users upload a CSV file in a certain format. The data inside this file is then validated and processed. New items wil be created based on the data in the CSV file and existing items wil updated by adding statements and references).
      • RPI2026F1Bot 5 Task/s: Import dependency and version data from PyPi
  • Events
    • Upcoming
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikibase Working Hour February 13, 2023. The February Working Hour will feature a presentation by Steve Baskauf on using VanderBot with Wikibase: The Wikibase API provides a mechanism for programmatic control of uploads, and its behavior is consistent across instances (Wikidata, Structured Data in Commons, and those that are established privately). In this session, Steve will discuss basic interactions with the API and demonstrate using the VanderBot Python application to rapidly upload tabular data to a wikibase.cloud instance. After performing a mass deletion, Steve will conclude by describing how he's used the Wikibase API to facilitate addition of structured data to Commons. Registration link
      • Strategically Using Production Photos to Increase Your Online Discoverability, February 22 and 24, 2023. This two-part workshop presented by CAPACOA will explain how to upload performing arts production photos to Wikimedia Commons and how to document credits in Wikidata.
    • Ongoing
      • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #80, Work
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Wikidata Graph Builder released a major update, introducing new layouts and visualization ideas. You can read the full changelog here.
    • The new Service Level Objective for the Wikidata Query Service has been implemented: the current aim is to maintain a 95% uptime based on a 90 day rolling window. You can read the full announcement here.
    • Observablehq.com recently introduced a system of tags. Anyone authoring a notebook using data from Wikidata can add the #Wikidata tag: https://observablehq.com/tag/wikidata?filter=recent.
    • a.gup.pe provides group features for Mastodon. @wikidata@a.gup.pe is a group about Wikidata in general. @querywikidata@a.gup.pe is a group about Wikidata queries. Anyone can join those groups simply by following them in Mastodon. Anyone can share a message with all members of those groups by mentioning them in a publication in Mastodon or any other application of the Fediverse.
    • The hashtag #Wikidata can be used to tag all publications related to Wikidata in Mastodon. Anyone can find recent publications using this tag using the search feature: https://wikis.world/tags/Wikidata.
    • @wikidata@wikis.world is the official Mastodon account of the Wikidata project.
    • You can now vote for your favorite proposals on the Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Wikidata. The voting phase is open until February 24th.
  • Development
    • [Significant change] Heads-up: Upcoming fixes for date parsing - Thank you Matej for moving this forward!
    • REST API:
      • Went over the feedback on the first release and deciding on the next routes to add
      • Added a new endpoint for getting descriptions (phab:T327881)
      • Worked on throwing exceptions when something goes wrong (validation failed, Item not found, etc.) instead of returning an error response object (phab:T327527)
    • Entity Schemas: Finished the technical exploration that will unblock the next steps for actual development
    • Query Service: Changed URLs with URL-encoded characters to be shown un-encoded for better line-breaks and readability (phab:T327514)
      • Query Builder:
      • Adding support for a few additional datatypes (phab:T328528)
      • Adding a basic language selector to make it easier to switch the language of the page (phab:T328764)
    • Constraint checks: Working on showing constraint clarification messages to make it easier to understand how to fix a violation on a statement (phab:T219037)
    • Search: Exploring design options for how to make it easier to search for entities other than Items (phab:T327507)

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.

Automated report of empty item: Q116748737[edit]

Hello, an item that you have edited (and you are the only non-bot editor) is considered empty and will be deleted in 72 hours if it doesn't improve. Your automated cleaner, Dexbot (talk) 08:24, 20 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #560[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
      • Cmtqwikibot 2 (Task/s: Add credits (cast and crew) for audiovisual work produced in Quebec based on the Cinémathèque québécoise's catalogue data. Adds reference. Deletes redundant, more general existing statements in certain circumstances.)
      • Gabrabot (Bulk upload Maltese lexeme data to wikidata from Gabra.)
      • MsynBot 12 (import missing GND ID (P227) identifier based on linked VIAF cluster)
  • Events
    • Upcoming
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call February 21, 2023: Jim Hahn and John Mark Ockerbloom will be presenting on Penn Libraries' Linked Data Vision. They will discuss their framework for activities and goals around linked data, which includes both existing standards and new functionality. Additionally, they will share successes and areas where progress has not yet been made. The presentation will cover projects with Wikidata tie-ins, such as the Digital Scriptorium Wikibase project and the Deep Backfile copyright information project. The presenters also plan to have ample time for conversation with those interested in using linked data to bring new functionality to their libraries. Agenda
      • Wikidata and Wikibase - SEMIC workshop 2 physical hands-on workshop in Brussels on the 23rd of February (Register here)
      • If you are interested in organizing or joining the Wikimedia Hackathon 2023 satellite events, you can apply for funds by March 20 via the Rapid Grants maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation.
      • Call for papers for the 10th Wiki Workshop in 2023 is out. Submit your 2-page abstracts by March 23.
    • Ongoing
      • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #81, Eye
  • Development
    • REST API:
      • Finished work on endpoints for getting labels and descriptions (phab:T325647, phab:T327881)
      • Started work on makign it possible to get statements from an Item based on the Property ID instead of just the statement ID (phab:T309021)
    • Entity Schemas: finalized technical investigation and making plan for the next steps
    • Working on more validation for valid URIs for units, globes and calendar models (phab:T102840)
    • Query Builder:
      • Adding support for additional data types (phab:T328528)
      • Adding a language selector to make it possible to switch the UI language (phab:T329487)
    • Constraint: Putting finishing touches on showing the constraint clarification messages in the constraint violation popup (phab:T219037)

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #561[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
    • Closed requests for permissions/Bot:
      • Cmtqwikibot 2 (Task/s: Add credits (cast and crew) for audiovisual work produced in Quebec based on the Cinémathèque québécoise's catalogue data. Adds reference. Deletes redundant, more general existing statements in certain circumstances.)
      • MsynBot 12 (Task/s: import missing GND ID (P227) identifier based on linked VIAF cluster)
  • Press, articles, blog posts, videos
    • Videos
      • LIVE Wikidata editing #106 - YouTube
      • CALA Speaker Series "Describing Chinese Rare Books and Cultural Heritage Collections" Session 1 - YouTube
      • TWed Talk (21 Feb 2023): Sola Shirai on "Working with Wikidata" - YouTube
  • Tool of the week
    • AutosuggestSitelink is a gadget that suggests Wikidata items for possible linking with a Wikimedia site page, using interwiki linking.
  • Development
    • REST API:
      • We added a way to get all statements on an Item for a given Property ID via a filter (phab:T309021)
      • We made it possible to configure the server for the "Try it out" button on the OpenAPI spec (phab:T329606)
    • Query Builder:
    • Constraints: We added support for showing constraint clarifications in constraint violation pop-up (phab:T219037)
    • We finished restricting unit/calendar/globe URIs to sensible values (phab:T102840)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #562[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • wikidata-todo is a tool that helps you find Commons categories with files, where none of the files are used on Wikidata.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • Wikibase REST API:
      • The statements endpoint now supports filtering by Property ID like ?property=P123 (phab:T309021)
      • We started working on GET /entities/items/{item_id}/aliases (phab:T327882)
      • We started working on including sitelink URLs in GET /entities/items/{item_id} (phab:T330252)
    • Community Wishlist Survey: We reviewed the results and what we can do to address some of the wishes.
    • Query Builder:
      • We continued work on the language selector to make it possible to switch the UI language (phab:T328764)
      • We have added support for the datatypes for Form (phab:T329205) and Property (phab:T329207)
    • Search: We are looking deeper into how we can make it possible to search for Properties, Lexemes and EntitySchemas in the search box, not just Items (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.


Wikidata weekly summary #563[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Open Etymology Map - is an interactive map that shows the etymology of names of streets and points of interest. (blogpost in Polish)
  • Development
    • Query Builder: We continued the work on making it possible to switch the language of the UI (phab:T328764)
    • EntitySchemas: We started the development of version 2 with some underlying cleanup and technical improvements.
    • REST API:
      • We worked on getting full URLs for sitelink data in the responses (phab:T330252)
      • We worked on a dedicated way to get the aliases of an Item (phab:T327882)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #564[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • EntitySchemas: We are preparing for adding a new datatype and other changes by improving tests, documentation, etc.
    • Date input: We did a bug triage hour around issues with date parsing and improved it for Japanese dates (phab:T214002)
    • Ontology issues: We started evaluating the survey responses for the survey about different types of ontology issues reusers are facing. More work is needed before we have results.
    • REST API: We finished work on including the URL of an article in sitelink data (phab:T330252) as well as providing all aliases of an Item (phab:T327882)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #565[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming:
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour March 27, 2023: We will be creating items related to notable book podcasts. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own project to work on.Event page
      • WikiCite Monthly Meeting, online on 28 March 2023 at 16:00 UTC. Information and notes
      • Wikidata Query Service backend update office hours will be held on Jitsi on 27 March 2023 at 17:00 UTC (link to the Etherpad) and 28 March 2023 at 10:00 UTC (link to the Etherpad)
      • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #86, Clothes
  • Development
    • EntitySchemas: We started working on the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements (phab:T214884)
    • Query Builder: We finished the work on the language selector so you can swithc the interface language of the tool (phab:T328148) It will be available on the site in the next days.
    • Wikibase REST API: We implemented the functionality to provide an Item's label, description or aliases in a specific language (phab:T323173)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #566[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • EntitySchemas: We are continuing the development of a new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements (phab:T214884)
    • Search: We are doing user testing with prototypes for search that makes it easier to find Properties, Lexemes and EntitySchemas (phab:T321543)
    • REST API: We are workng on making it possible to create, or replace, a label or a description in a given language (phab:T323813)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #567[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
      • RPI2026F1Bot 7 (Add start time (P580) as qualifiers to subreddit (P3984))
      • BotFunast (Task: The bot is already operational in the Tachelhit Wikipedia. One of its main tasks is editing template tags and categories, and creating new ones when necessary, based on a csv database (that you can find in github) . When adding new pages though, a common problem is to link those to Wikidata. This can be unfeasible by hand in a reasonable amount of time, when hundreds of pages, e.g. categories, are added at once. The idea is to have the bot approved for Wikidata, so it can link the pages to their counterparts in other languages automatically.)
    • Closed request for permissions/Bot:
  • Tool of the week
    • Pauken! ("to cram" in German) - is a tool lets you learn words in different languages, based on images.
  • Development

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.


Wikidata weekly summary #568[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming
      • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 19th April 2023 (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.
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call, Tuesday, April 14, 2023 - Indigenous Artists and Wikidata: Report launch and discussion. Agenda.
    • Ongoing
  • Tool of the week
    • Query Chest is a tool that allows you to store Wikidata queries if they are too long for w.wiki to shorten it.
  • Development
    • EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on creating the new datatype that allows linking to EntitySchemas in statements. It will be available on test systems next. (phab:T332139)
    • QueryBuilder: We are putting finishing touches on the language selector so you can switch the UI language of the Query Builder. (phab:T328764)
    • Wikibase REST API: We continued working on making it possible to create or replace labels and descriptions in a iven language. (phab:T323813)

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #569[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour April 24, 2023: Would you like to know how to join and use Telegram? Two regular Wikidata Telegram users will provide an introduction to Telegram and its available Wikidata channels. They will discuss how they use it, how it can provide help with Wikidata work, and how it can facilitate connections with other Wikidata users Event page
    • Ongoing
      • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #89, Ear
    • Past
  • Tool of the week
    • User:Nikki/colour icons.css - is a Userscript to add colour to the editing icons. It uses green for add/save, yellow for edit, red for remove, orange for cancel and blue for help.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • REST API: We continued work on making it possible to create or replace a label, or a description in a given language (phab:T323813)
    • EntitySchemas: We continued working on the new datatype for linking to EntitySchemas. It is now available on beta in a very bare-bones version but not ready for wider testing yet. (phab:T332139)
    • Ontology issues: We are evaluating the results of the survey we ran earlier this year.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #570[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
      • ForgesBot (Task: Add licensing information to software forges entries in accordance to what is found in the corresponding Wikipedia page. It is used as a helper in the context of the Forges project)
      • BEANS Bot (Task: Use protocol (P2700) instead of of (P642) to specify the protocol used in port (P1641) statements.)
    • Closed request for permissions/Bot:
      • AddLetterboxdFilmIdBot (Task: Adding Letterboxd Film ID (P6127) statements to items which already have a TMDB Film ID (P4947))
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • WeChangEd is an ERC-funded research project and online database by Ghent University, about women editors in Europe. The database shows stories about women editors and their publications, and is powered by Wikidata and Sciencestories.io.
  • Development
    • EntitySchemas: We are still working on the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements. (phab:T214884)
    • Wikibase REST API: We're fixing several smaller issues like phab:T335578 and phab:T335581.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #571[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Infrastruktur (RfP scheduled to end after 12 May 2023 14:16 UTC)
  • Tool of the week

Open Burial Map - Interactive map showing the details of burial places based on OpenStreetMap and Wikidata.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #572[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
  • Development
    • EntitySchemas: We've continued work on the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements. (phab:T214884)
    • Converted a number of Properties from string to external ID datatype (phab:T334450)
    • mul language code: We've worked on preparing the special pages related to labels, descriptions and aliases for the new language code. (phab:T330193, phab:T329626)
    • Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the ability to modify labels of an Item using the HTTP PATCH method. (phab:T332739).

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.

Automated report of empty item: Q116845167[edit]

Hello, an item that you have edited (and you are the only non-bot editor) is considered empty and will be deleted in 72 hours if it doesn't improve. Your automated cleaner, Dexbot (talk) 13:49, 15 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Automated report of empty item: Q118121084[edit]

Hello, an item that you have edited (and you are the only non-bot editor) is considered empty and will be deleted in 72 hours if it doesn't improve. Your automated cleaner, Dexbot (talk) 14:31, 15 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #573[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • We continue working on modify data of labels of an Item in the Wikibase REST API. (phab:T332739)
    • We continued working on the new datatype for linking to EntitySchemas.
    • We are continuing to prepare various special pages for the mul language code.
    • We fixed a bug on Wikipedia and co where the "add interlanguage link dialog threw an error (phab:T337081)
    • We attended the Wikimedia hackathon.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #578[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 30, 2023: We will discuss results from our community survey on advocacy for Wikidata in libraries and hear from community members Mary Aycock, Steve Baskauf and Eric Willey about their experiences with advocacy and gaining support for Wikidata work within their respective libraries. Agenda
  • Tool of the week
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • The libraries of the London School of Economics and the University of York have collaborated to produce a toolkit for uploading research theses metadata to Wikidata. Full announcement and access to the toolkit
    • The contents of most Wikimedia Cloud Services Wiki Replicas are out-of-date owing to large & increasing replication lag; see https://replag.toolforge.org/ & Phab T337446. Exercise caution using data from any tools that have a dependency on these databases.
  • Development
    • Ontology issues: We are finishing the evaluation of the survey about which types of ontology issues are hindering reuse of Wikidata's data the most.
    • Otherwise mostly a slow week because of the Wikimedia hackathon.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #579[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Introduction workshop about Wikidata for employees of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB, national library of the Netherlands), to make them more familiar and self-reliant with Wikidata - 6 June 2023, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, The Netherlands - Slides (in Dutch) on Commons.
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour June 5, 2023: In collaboration with the Black Bibliography Project, we will be adding metadata for undescribed or under-described African-American women authors listed in The Pen Is Ours: a Listing of Writings by and about African-American Women before 1910, compiled by Jean Fagan Yellin and Cynthia D. Bond.Event page
    • Registration has opened for the workshop on mathematical research data taking place on 9-11 October 2023 in Leipzig. Talks, demos and lightning talks can be suggested, including Wikidata-related ones.
  • Tool of the week
    • IdentifierInput makes it easier to add identifier properties by letting you put in the full url and then stripping it down to just the identifier for you.
  • Development
    • Wikibase REST API: We finished the new endpoint for patching labels (phab:T332739). We also started work on the new endpoint for retrieving Property data (phab:T337720)
    • Client wikis: We drastically reduced the size of a ResourceLoader module that’s loaded on most Wikipedia page views (phab:334682)
    • Language code: With awesome help from Nikki, we improved documentation for how to add language codes to Wikibase/Wikidata (phab:T335857)
    • EntitySchemas: We are getting the new datatype ready for testing.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #580[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call June 13, 2023: Helen Williams will discuss her work with Wikidata at the London School of Economics Agenda
    • Wikidata Workshop 2023 will be co-located with the 22nd International Conference on Semantic Web (ISWC) in November 2023 in Athens. The submission deadline is Thursday, 20 July 2023. More details and call for papers
  • Tool of the week
    • narrow.css attempts to make the Wikidata desktop interface work better on narrower screens.

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.

Wikidata weekly summary #581[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Vargenau (RfP scheduled to end after 25 June 2023 07:51 UTC)
    • Closed request for adminship: Infrastruktur (closed on May 12th without prior mention)
    • Closed request for permissions/Bot:
  • Tool of the week
    • Mapping Diversity is a platform that utilizes Wikidata to discover key facts about diversity and representation in street names across Europe. E.g. 59% of the streets and squares in Paris are named after people. Of those, 8.9% are named after women.
  • Development
    • REST API:
      • We finished the endpoint for getting data from Properties and it is now available on Wikidata.
      • We started expanding that endpoint with filter options and conditional http headers.
    • EntitySchemas: The new datatype is now available for testing and feedback.
    • mul language code: We've continued working on making the mobile termbox (labels, descriptions, aliases) ready for the new language code. (phab:T329644, phab:T338302, phab:T329655, phab:T316767)
    • Vector 2022 skin: We are fixing an issue with the bolding of results in the main search suggester. (phab:T327510)


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.


Wikidata weekly summary #582[edit]

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Wolverène (RfP scheduled to end after 2 July 2023 18:46 UTC)
    • Closed request for adminship: Vargenau (successful) Welcome onboard \o/
    • New requests for permissions/Bot: RomesfulImporterBot (Task: Creating and updating Russian Lexemes by transferring information from the Russian Wiktionary)
  • Tool of the week
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • TU Berlin research group "The Restitution of Knowledge" are exploring the use of Wikidata to build a Linked Open Data (LOD) project that maps German colonial military expeditions into Africa. Interested in getting involved or learning more about their project? Reach out on the project's talk page: Wikidata:WikiProject TheRoK/Data Models.
  • Development
    • Wikibase REST API: We are working on making it possible to get statements from a Property. (phab:T338383)
    • EntitySchema: We're looking into the feedback we received from the testing of the new datatype.
    • Ontology issues: We have released the survey results. The next step is looking into solutions.
    • mul language code: We are continuing to adapt the desktop UI to make it ready for the new special language code. (phab:T329644, phab:T338302, phab:T339103, phab:T329655, phab:T329655)
    • Vector 2022: We are changing the style for search suggestions as the default of the skin isn't working well for Wikidata. (phab:T327510)

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.

Merge[edit]

Thank you for your work in maintaining Wikidata. I have a small suggestion to improve your future work. If you notice that two items are duplicates, please merge them instead of blanking one of them as you did with the item Q124519071. External sites use Wikidata identifiers, so it is important that we preserve the chain of references. We do this by making one item a redirect for the other. In particular, item ids are intended to be a permanent identifier, so we never reuse them for another concept. See Help:Merge for more information on how to merge items, and consider installing the Merge Gadget. Thanks!  Madamebiblio (talk) 17:04, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Madamebiblio - thank you very much for your note. I really appreciate it. I actually have the merge gadget installed and I've used it before. For some reason it didn't work properly today (possibly an unstable internet connection) and I panicked a little bit and wasn't sure what to do. Now I know! :-) Your point about item ids being unique identifiers that are not recycled/reused is very enlightening, particularly in this context. I will keep this in mind next time I find myself in a situation that involves duplicate items. Thanks again! -- ToniSant (talk) 17:14, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Retrieved from "https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:ToniSant&oldid=2076469838"