On Thu, Sep 5, 2024 at 8:15 PM Physikerwelt <wiki(a)physikerwelt.de> wrote:
>
> Dear Luca,
>
> the communication was good I think.
>
> However, I don't understand the decision process. Who is the
> responsible person, e.g., the product manager, who eventually decided
> to cut WDQS into pieces?
>
> Moritz
The decision was defined together by the Search Team at Wikimedia
Foundation and the people in charge of Wikidata at Wikimedia
Deutschland. In particular, Lydia Pintscher is ultimately responsible
for all Wikidata product decisions at WMDE.
I would like to stress how this decision was not taken lightheartedly.
It's been three years that we know that Blazegraph is on the verge of
failing, we wrote a playbook in case of dramatic failure,[1] and we
evaluated several alternatives to Blazegraph,[2] each with its pros
and cons.
While evaluating which way to go, knowing that no solution would be a
"magic wand" that would magically solve all our problems - in fact, no
"magic solution" exists, each comes with its load of problems and
costs - we came to terms with the fact that we needed more time and
the split was a harsh, but ultimately effective solution to buy some
time in the transition to the next backend.
Hope this helps.
L.
[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/WDQS_backend_up…
[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/WDQS_backend_up…
*(Cross-posting from Wikimedia-l, Wikitech-l, langdivhub-com)*
Hello everyone!
We're excited to announce that the next *Language Community Meeting* is
happening soon, *May 30th at 15:00 UTC*! If you’d like to join, simply *sign
up on the wiki page*
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_and_Product_Localization/…>
.
This is a participant-driven meeting where we share updates on
language-related projects, discuss technical challenges in language wikis,
and collaborate on solutions. In our upcoming meeting, we plan to cover
results from a recent language onboarding experiment and hear experiences
from a Nigerian contributor who contributes to the Obolo wiki, which was
part of this experiment.
*Got a topic to share?* Whether it’s a technical update from your project,
a challenge you need help with, or a request for interpretation support,
we’d love to hear from you! Feel free to reply to this message or add
agenda items to *the document here*
<https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/language-community-meeting-may-2025>.
Also, we wanted to highlight that the 7th edition of the *Language &
Internationalization newsletter (April 2025)* is available here: *Wikimedia
Language and Product Localization/Newsletter/2025/April*
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Language_and_Pr…>.
This newsletter provides updates from the January–March 2025 quarter on new
feature development, improvements in various language-related technical
projects and support efforts, details about community meetings, and ideas
for contributing to projects. To stay updated, you can subscribe to the
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Localization/Newsletter*
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Newsletter:Language_and_I…>
.
Would you be interested in contributing to the technical workaround
language development? There is a newcomer-friendly core namespace-related
task waiting for your contribution: *T391725*
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T391725>.
We look forward to your ideas and participation at the Language Community
Meeting, see you there!
Cheers,
Srishti
*Srishti Sethi*
Senior Developer Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Dear Wikidata Community,
As part of Wikimedia Deutschland’s 2030 Strategic Direction and in close
collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the Wikidata team has
set its priorities for 2025 around 4 core themes: ensuring Wikidata can
continue to grow sustainably, strengthening the diverse community of
editors who steward and reuse our data, and refining the underlying
platform services that power everything we build together.
We chose these focuses because, first, as Wikidata’s size and impact
expand, it’s crucial that we build systems and policies that keep our
infrastructure healthy and our data dependable. Second, our community
remains at the heart of everything we do -- whether someone contributes the
first statement to a brand new Item or runs complex queries that power
research and apps. Finally, by refining data access methods “as a service”
across our ecosystem, we’ll open the door for all our product teams and
third-party developers to build meaningful services and applications that
create positive impact.
Supporting sustainable growth means two things this year.
We’ll partner with the Wikibase teams to improve federated SPARQL queries.
This would allow you pull data seamlessly from multiple Wikibase instances
lowering the barrier to hosting some data in other parts of the Wikibase
Ecosystem, ensuring everyone can continue to access and edit data reliably.
At the same time, we’ll have conversations about data governance guidelines
together with the Cloud and Suite teams and the wider Wikidata community.
This way it's always obvious where different kinds of data belong. That
clarity helps editors make confident decisions, reduces duplicate work, and
lays the foundation for new projects that can flourish alongside Wikidata
itself.
Strengthening the Wikidata community means making every step of
contribution easier and more rewarding.
Mobile editing has grown in recent years, yet adding or updating statements
on a phone still forces many users into “desktop view.” We’ll roll out a
prototype that will make editing statements on mobile phones easier. To
help more advanced editors and tool builders, we’ll continue growing the
visibility and documentation around EntitySchemas, so that editors
everywhere can adopt these powerful templates and can integrate them out of
the box. And of course, we’ll bring people together through online and
in-person events such as WikidataCon, regional capacity‑building campaigns
in Africa, meetups at Wikimania and other conferences, XXX Days events like
Data Reuse Days and Lexico Days, and more. By connecting newcomers with
experienced mentors, by highlighting local hubs where editors can support
each other, and by linking each Item back to its relevant WikiProjects,
we’ll nurture more active, diverse, and resilient communities.
Our third focus area is Increasing mission-aligned data reuse
The Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata_For_Wikimedia_Projects> team will
improve the editing experience and increase productivity of Wikipedia
contributors by making it easier for editors to monitor, understand, and
act on changes to their watchlisted articles when the edit comes from
Wikidata. Displaying Wikidata edits in Watchlist and Recent Changes pages
is an opt-in feature of the user preferences; our aim is to increase
awareness, adoption, and utility of this function by summer 2026.
In parallel, we will raise awareness and contributors’ understanding of the
Wikidata integrations currently being used in the Wikimedia Projects
through a community outreach project by hosting an online conference, Wikidata
and Sister Projects
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Event:Wikidata_and_Sister_Projects>,
dedicated to celebrating and informing Wikimedians of the many ways
Wikidata currently supports the Wikimedia Projects. Additionally, we are
reviewing the available documentation on Wikidata integrations to ensure it
is updated, comprehensive, and available in multiple core languages.
Refining platform services “as a service” is our fourth focus area.
We’ll refine data access methods so Wikidata's data can be reused to build
meaningful services and applications. Specifically, we'll build out search
capabilities in the REST API so developers can discover and query data more
easily. We’ll ensure the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is optimized for its
core strength of supporting queries that need the graph -- keeping it fast
and reliable under complex workloads. Finally, we’ll improve our data dumps
to provide more accessible snapshots and subsets of Wikidata’s data.
What does this mean for you?
If you’re a mobile‑first contributor, editing from your phone will become
smooth and straightforward. If you’re a developer or researcher, you’ll
gain powerful new search endpoints in the REST API, a finely tuned Wikidata
Query Service for graph-centric queries, and cleaner, more timely data
dumps to build on. If you organize or participate in events, you’ll find
more support and clearer pathways to grow local hubs and share best
practices. If you’re leveraging Wikidata’s data to support your workflows
and content in other Wikimedia projects, you’ll have access to current
use-cases, examples and better documentation to refer to. Ultimately, every
update we make in this period is designed to give you more confidence, more
choice, and more impact as you add, improve, and reuse the world’s free
structured knowledge.
We’ll keep you posted on progress throughout the year and as always,
welcome your questions and feedback on the talk page
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:Development_plan/Wikidata_2025-…>
.
Thank you for your efforts to drive Wikidata forward.
Best regards,
The Wikidata Team
Wikimedia Deutschland
--
*Danny Benjafield*
Community Communications Manager
Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0)30-577 11 62-0
https://wikimedia.de
Keep up to date! Current news and exciting stories about Wikimedia,
Wikipedia and Free Knowledge in our newsletter (in German): Subscribe now.
<https://www.wikimedia.de/newsletter/>
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sum of all knowledge. Help us to achieve our vision!
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Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin,
Steuernummer 27/029/42207. Geschäftsführende Vorstände: Franziska Heine
Dear All,
We are writing to you as researchers from the University of Regina in Regina, Canada who are studying open data. We invite you to participate in the Open Data Community Survey 2025 if you use or provide open data or FAIR data or if you are interested in using semantic metadata to improve the usability of your data.
The survey is estimated to take 15-20 minutes to complete, and it is available at the following link:https://uregina.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_2ryvDaooieWaAjY
Your responses will provide invaluable insights into the state of the open data community in 2025. You may choose to answer as open data user or provider if one of those roles dominates your time or both if they make equal demands of your attention. Please help to improve the power of the survey by sharing this invitation to participate widely within your networks. However, there is no obligation for you to pass along this invitation, and there will be no penalty to you if you do not share it.
You can read more about the survey at: https://www2.cs.uregina.ca/~hepting/projects/open-data/community-survey-202…
Data from the study will be posted as open data at these locations:
* https://<https://www2.cs.uregina.ca/~hepting/projects/open-data/community-survey-202…>www2.cs.uregina.ca/~hepting/projects/open-data/community-survey-2025<https://www2.cs.uregina.ca/~hepting/projects/open-data/community-survey-202…>
* https://borealisdata.ca/dataverse/heptingd<https://www2.cs.uregina.ca/~hepting/projects/open-data/community-survey-202…>/
The survey has been approved by the Research Ethics Board at the University of Regina in Regina, Canada. Funding for this survey has been provided by the DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) Alliance, an international collaboration dedicated to developing metadata standards and semantic products for describing social science data, data covering human activity, and other data based on observational methods.
Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.
Please note that there are inherent security issues when using email as a communication tool. By default, emails are not encrypted and are vulnerable to interception by outside sources or someone may see that you are involved in this research if you leave your browser open. We will use the phrase “Meeting Reminder” in the subject-line of all email correspondence so you will know the email is from us and recommend you submit any email queries using the same term.
Daryl Hepting, Ph.D.
daryl.hepting(a)uregina.ca<mailto:[email protected]>
Alain Maubert Crotte
alain.maubertcrotte(a)uregina.ca<mailto:[email protected]>
Hello everyone,
This is a breaking change announcement relevant for Wikidata users working
with RDF output.
This update will affect the way EntitySchema values are represented in
Wikidata’s RDF output. To align with the naming conventions used for other
entity type references, we are updating the wikibase:propertyType value for
properties with data type EntitySchema from:
http://wikiba.se/ontology#EntitySchema
to
http://wikiba.se/ontology#WikibaseEntitySchema
The former URI may one day be reused as the rdf:type of EntitySchema
entities when they are exported to RDF. (Compare, for example, wd:Q42 a
wikibase:Item vs. wd:P31 wikibase:propertyType wikibase:WikibaseItem)
Additionally, the EntitySchema property type URI will now be defined in the
Wikibase ontology at http://wikiba.se/ontology. This change brings
consistency with other entity types (Items, Properties, Lexemes, etc.) and
will simplify query writing and RDF processing.
Rollout Timeline:
-
Test Wikidata: The updated configuration is now deployed on Test
Wikidata.
-
Full Rollout on Wikidata: The change will go live on Wikidata on 24
April 2025 following the two-week advance notice as required by our Stable
Interface Policy.
Impact:
-
Users who get the data type of properties via RDF, or who filter for
EntitySchema-type properties in SPARQL queries, will need to change the
value they look for.
If you have any questions or concerns about this change, please don’t
hesitate to reach out to us in this ticket (T371196
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T371196>).
Cheers,
--
Zita U. Zage
Intern, Wikidata Software Communication Team
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0) 30 577 116 2466
https://wikimedia.de
Grab a spot in my calendar for a chat: cal.com/zuz
<https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=eml0YS56YWdlQHdpa2ltZWRpYS5kZQ>.
A lot is happening around Wikidata - Keep up to date!
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Status_updates> Current news and
exciting stories about Wikimedia, Wikipedia and Free Knowledge in our
newsletter (in German): Subscribe now <https://www.wikimedia.de/newsletter/>.
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. Help us to achieve our vision!
https://spenden.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland — Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Charlottenburg, VR 23855 B.
Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin,
Steuernummer 27/029/42207. Geschäftsführende Vorstände: Franziska Heine,
Dr. Christian Humborg