Wikibooks will get access to language links via Wikidata on February 24th. Coordination is happening at d:Wikidata:Wikibooks.
Roughly 17000 of the candidate articles that Google identified as potentially being about the same topic but lacking a language link have been merged. About 17500 are remaining and waiting for you to go through them via https://tools.wmflabs.org/yichengtry/
Did more work on Capiunto to get it into a state where it can be deployed to Wikimedia sites.
Mourned Titan (phabricator:T88550) as its developers were bought up. Began evaluation for which graph database to use instead for a Wikidata query service (mw:Wikibase/Indexing)
Further work on header section redesign
Tweaks to the sitelink section
Worked on making monolingual text datatype accept more languages
Finished showing the language when a language fallback is used
Started looking into fixing the existing Guided Tours after Guided Tours extension API changes
Worked on implementing Lua convenience functions for rendering arbitrary Snaks. This is useful for displaying references or qualifiers. (phabricator:T76213)
The templates for adding badges (good article, featured article, etc) to articles on Wikipedia in the sidebar are getting removed from articles rapidly in favor of getting that information from Wikidata \o/ German Wikipedia even deleted those templates already. English Wikipedia seems to be getting close.
We are hiring! Passionate about Wikidata and know your way around Java Script and co? Apply!
We'll spend the next week working with Nik and Stas from WMF to move queries forward in Berlin
Worked on implementing a Lua interface for arbitrary Snak rendering. This can be used to render eg. qualifiers or references in Wikipedia infoboxes.
Did groundwork for Lua convenience functions that render data in the user’s interface language, rather than the content language (for multilingual wikis, like Commons or Wikidata only)
Did further work on making the Lua interface code nicer and share code with the parser functions
Removed input method selector in the sitelink input as it was hiding the actual input and not very useful there
Fixed some issues in diff views showing new data instead of old data
Created a few scripts to make it easier for 3rd parties to install Wikibase
Fixed icinga notification that tests if dispatch lag gets high
Investigated several issues regarding storage of time values and started fixing them
Fixed editing of qualifiers
Fixed most browser tests after introduction of new header design
Chaged a number of Lua modules (from deprecated function mw.wikibase.getEntity to mw.wikibase.getEntityObject)
Updated the json documentation
Always link to Wikidata on client pages that don’t have any langlinks. This affects users without JavaScript and logged out users, logged in users will still see the link item dialog. gerrit:168632
Fixes for the Wikibase qunit Jenkins job
Made Vagrant git-update also properly update Wikibase and dependencies
Fix for phabricator:T88254 (malformatted Wikidata entries appearing in Watchlist RSS feed in clients)
Final touches on new header design
Investigated how we can provide language fallback also in suggestions when search or adding new statements
More work on allowing additional languages in monolingual text datatype
Added missing backend piece for quantities with units. Now the remaining piece is the user interface.
Lots of improvements around MixNMatch. It has a new catalog overview page. ~340K IDs have been matched so far with it and it now has an FAQ for institutions wanting to get their identifiers linked in Wikidata
First screenshot of the primary sources tool that'll help with migrating data from Freebase and enriching it with references has been leaked ;-): 1 and 2
WikiArabia takes place in Monastir, Tunisia, 3-5 April
The GLAM-WIKI 2015 conference in The Hague (10-12 April) features several presentations and tutorials about Wikidata for/with cultural institutions.
The Library world will use Wikidata to link its information to any and all Wikipedias. No longer English only, but every Wikipedia will be exposed in this way.
WikiArabia takes place in Monastir, Tunisia, 3-5 April
The GLAM-WIKI 2015 conference in The Hague (10-12 April) features several presentations and tutorials about Wikidata for/with cultural institutions.
The Library world will use Wikidata to link its information to any and all Wikipedias. No longer English only, but every Wikipedia will be exposed in this way.
We are going to change the way value suggestions are ranked when entering a new statement. This will help with "male" and "female" not showing up among the top suggestions. Previously we ranked by number of sitelinks. We will change this to the maximum of sitelinks and labels. So if an item has labels in many languages but no sitelinks like "male" and "female" it will still show up high in the suggestions. (phabricator:T94404)
Discussed how to move forward with identifiers. Outcome: They should get their own datatype. (phabricator:T95287)
Implemented arbitrary access for the {{#property:…}} parser function. This can be invoked on the wikis that have arbitrary access enabled by using {{#property:P123|from=Q42}}. So far this is only Wikidata itself.
Did further performance work on the client (Wikipedia and co) in preparation for arbitrary access
Improved the performance of wbgetentities significantly when loading a large number of entities
Wikimedia's monthly GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) newsletter now includes a Wikidata report. The draft for the first edition, covering April, may be edited and your contributions will be welcome.
Made label, description and aliases special pages easier to use
Bene* created a new Special:ListProperties special page to list properties by data type
Expanded our set of automated browser tests
Made language fallbacks work in more situations and more consistently. In particular, the entity selector now uses language fallback. This should benefit especially people who want to use Wikidata in a variant such as en-gb.
Continued work on the planned DataModel 3.0 release
Continued discussing and documenting future calendar model support
Continued work on our RDF generator
Continued work on usage tracking for labels on multilingual sites
Addshore worked on various issues regarding redirects
Addshore worked on a special page to turn an item into a redirect
Work on showing entity labels in edit summaries on history pages
Implemented change dispatching based on the new usage tracking mechanism
Fixed issue with page deletions on some Wikipedias not being reported to Wikidata
More work on straightening out date formatting and parsing
Fixed handling of scientific notation for quantity values
Term box: fixed bug causing stale info to be show, and another bug causing babel languages to be ignored sometimes.
Implemented access to other arbitrary items via the #property parser function
Bene* implemented check to make sure two properties can not have the same alias only differing in capitalization
There are a number of user boxes you can add to your user page to indicate interests and which wiki projects you belong to.
Development
On Tuesday, we are deploying usage tracking (no arbitrary access yet) to Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource, and subscription tracking on Wikidata. There should be no noticeable changes for users. These are necessary steps towards enabling arbitrary access in clients.
Worked on making language fallback work in the suggester (when adding a new statement or searching for an item)
More work on RDF output and the query service
Added Special:RedirectEntity for redirecting items
Investigated and working to fix JS bug on items with “invalid” values (phabricator:92975)
Did work towards having entity ids in revision histories and in diffs linked with their label (like on watchlists or in the recentchanges)
We rolled out usage tracking on the first two wikis (French Wikisource and Dutch Wikipedia). Users should not notice anything. More wikis will follow in the next weeks. This is the remaining step for enabling arbitrary access on wikis other than Commons.
The students team is working hard to get a first release of the improved constraint reports and checks against 3rd party databases out.
Ricordisamoa fixed the issue with long descriptions being cut off.
We fixed the focus flow in the property selector.
We improved the messages on Special:EntityData to make it more understandable.
A study has been published about how Wikidata can help significantly improve the quality of medical content on Wikipedia. This is why we do Wikidata! \o/
The Wikidata Menu Challenge has started and goes on to May 27. Add labels, images and pronunciation audio to a list of around 290 items to help show off the power of Wikidata at a food festival.
Hovercards also show the target's label and ID now. (Try them by turning them on in the beta features section of your preferences.)
Continued working on RDF export
More work on making it possible to add a reference right away when adding a statement (and allowing the full statement incl references to be edited at the same time)
Did more work to make usage tracking possible on multilingual wikis (namely Commons)
Past: Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) spoke about authority control in Wikidata (and sister projects) at the World Digital Library's Arab Peninsula Regional Group Symposium, organised in conjunction with the Qatar National Library, in Doha on 13 May. His slides, with an Arabic translation, will be online soon.
Past: Wikidata editing workshop at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin
Past: Wikidata workshop for archivists of Catalan City of Justice
Upcoming: MediaWiki hackathon in Lyon
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Elections for the board of the Wikimedia Foundation are ongoing. Wikidata should be well represented among the voters. Go and vote!
Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource now have the arbitrary access feature. Persian Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikipedia are following today. Italian Wikipedia and all remaining Wikisource projects are following on June 1st.
English Wikipedia is running a bot to add authority control templates to many articles that are filled completely from Wikidata. Italian Wikipedia is doing so as well.
Wikidata descriptions can be soon be edited in the Wikipedia iOS app.
A early preview of the official SPARQL endpoint for Wikidata has been created to query Wikidata. Remember that it is not stable and still beta. A short introduction to SPARQL can be found in Lucie's slides.
If you are not familiar with SPARQL yet, a tool has been created by Tpt and Bene* to generate SPARQL queries from natural language questions.
To do SPARQL queries from the command line, a command line tool was crafted by Marius.
The special page to query for badges is within reach.
A feedback session on the architecture of Wikibase was held.
We got a cool presentation by Maxime about inventaire.io.
We figured out the next steps to make Wikidata more mobile friendly.
Wikidata has passed German Wikipedia in number of items with images (743850 dewp articles vs. 804885 items) - now only second to English-language Wikipedia.
Catalan Wikipedia is moving Taxon IDs to Wikidata.
Zolo did a comparison of English/French/German/Chinese and Cebuano Wikipedias in terms of main types of articles. Biographies were compared by period, nationality and occupation.
Italian Wikipedia and all remaining Wikisource projects now have arbitrary access. The rollout will continue. The schedule for the next projects is at d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access.
The Content Translation tool now automatically connects translated articles to Wikidata. (Thanks Content Translation developers!) Previously translated but unconnected articles have been connected by a bot. (Thanks Amir!)
Code review of the extensions written by a team of students to improve the constraint reports and make it possible to automatically check our data against other databases. A first version will go live soon pending further codereview and fixes.
A challenge was raised to calculate the degrees of separation to Kevin Bacon. Already one routine has been produced, the next step is to use live data so that we can work on reducing the number of intermediary steps.
Deployed arbitrary access on all Wikivoyage and Wikiquote projects and announced the next ones. See d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access for more.
More fine tuning on entity usage tracking (relevant for arbitrary access)
Fixed bug that sometimes allowed multiple properties to have the same label in a given language (phabricator:T102148)
More work on automatically creating redirects when merging items
More code review of the Wikidata Quality extensions (improved constraint reports and checks against 3rd party databases). Starting to look good for a first deployment.
The sitelinks heading hierarchy changed and includes a “Site links” heading now that is only shown on mobile. This is a DOM change needed to make Wikidata work better on mobile.
Started working on having PHPCS coverage for the major Wikibase.git code base to find small code issues more easily
Prepared Wikibase.git for the DataModel 3.0 switch
Released Wikibase DataModel Serialization 1.4
Released Wikibase Internal Serialization 1.4
New releases of several DataValue components, including DataValues Number 0.5, DataValues JavaScript 0.7 and ValueView 0.14.5
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
German language Wikipedia closed its RfC on usage of Wikidata data. As a result Wikidata data can be used on the project as long as it happens through a template and it has a non-Wikimedia reference.
Events/Blogs/Press
Past: Office hour on IRC. We talked about cool things that happened around Wikidata over the past 3 months got an update on upcoming developments and Freebase and more. You can read the log.
Fixed an issue where you'd sometimes select the wrong value when entering a statement unintentionally (phabricator:T98471)
Switched the whole code base to make use of DataModel 3.0
The concept of “claims” no longer exists in Wikibase, as all places in the software work with statements. We are making this more and more explicit in the code.
More work on getting the Wikibase Quality extensions ready for deployment. They'll improve constraint checking and provide checks against 3rd party databases.
Special:UnconnectedPages had to be reworked (thanks Amir!) because of huge performance issues. Because of this it loses some functionality (being able to specify where the list starts and limiting the list to pages that have local interwiki links). We're working on bringing functionality back without the performance penalty.
Enabled arbitrary access on arwiki, cawiki, eswiki, huwiki, kowiki, rowiki, ukwiki, viwiki, and usage tracking on dewiki, ruwiki, cswiki and all s3 wikis. (ruwiki and cswiki get arbitrary access on June 23)
Finishing work on improved handling “invalid” values and statements with deleted properties.
Small breaking DOM change: Wikibase no longer adds its own h1 tag but uses MediaWiki's default .firstHeading element. (phabricator:T93534)
Upcoming: Wikimania. There will be several talks and workshops related to Wikidata. Say hi at the "Ask Us Anything" session for Wikidata if you're there.
Machine readable versions (in various formats) of Wikibase entities will be advertised in their page heads as alternate link. (phabricator:T96298)
Fixed property label on item pages not scrolling anymore (phabricator:T94588)
More work on getting the Wikibase Quality extensions ready for release. The part doing constraint violation checks should go to test.wikidata.org next week. The part doing checks against 3rd party databases will still take a bit longer but is also shaping up nicely.
Made it possible to create items even when another user is mass-creating items (phabricator:T103796)
Bene* worked more on making Wikidata work nicely on mobile
Fixed weird issue with cursor jumping around in sitelink input field (phabricator:T103489)
Fixed an issue where it was not possible to edit a statement after you removed its only reference (phabricator:T103603)
Lydia will be traveling for much of July. Expect her to be a bit less responsive during that time.
Upcoming: Wikimania. There will be several talks and workshops related to Wikidata. Say hi at the "Ask Us Anything" session for Wikidata if you're there.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
A new database report lists people categorized as dead in Wikipedia, but lacking Property:P570 (date of death). It's updated several times during the day. There are about 20 to 30 new entries each day. There is currently some backlog from the Arabic, Marathi, and Thai Wikipedias. Items updated first in Wikidata wont appear in the report. They are listed directly in Wikidata's recent deaths report.
Attending Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City right now, meeting awesome people that already use or want to know everything about Wikidata.
After the next deployment, redirects will be automatically created when merging items.
Special:UnconnectedPages can now be queried via the query API, thanks to Ladsgroup.
Migrating away from an older serializer to the DataModel Serialization component.
Worked on a new time parser that can parse formats like M/D/Y, Y M D and so on.
Fixed a bug where a value could not be edited when save failed.
Made the snak type, badge and rank selectors position themselves after resizing the browser window and introduced a possibility to collapse the sitelinks sections.
Worked on a change in editing to be able to edit a statement and it’s references in one step.
Made some small changes to the style of the edit warning and sitelinks so they are easier to notice and understand
Added error messages for Special:GoToLinkedPage and Special:ItemByTitle so you get a useful message in case no result is found
The Entity Selector now displays alias in brackets behind label
The number of entities loaded via the {{#property:…}} parser function and via Lua will be reported in the “Parser profiling data” (which can be found below a page preview or within the Html of a page)
Prepared for next rounds of arbitrary access rollout
Investigated growing lag of dispatching of changes to Wikipedia and co. We'll need to investigate further and change things so the lag between an edit on Wikidata and it being send to the Wikipedias and other projects is not too high.
Added the property ID to Special:ListProperties
Moved two extensions (Wikidata.org and WikimediaBadges) from Github to Gerrit. More will follow.
You have a bunch of names etc. and want to find Wikidata items with those labels/aliases? Try relabel!
SourcererBot is adding lots of references to existing statements on several thousand items.
Mix-n-Match has new catalogs including the National Library of Australia.
Deaths at Wikipedia are a series of reports comparing items at Wikidata with death-by-year-categories of Wikipedia. For the years since 2000, only about 15% of items at Wikidata lack d:Property:P570 (date of death).
Soon the edit summary for edits through the API will also contain the automatic edit summary that you are used to for edits done through the website. The summary given by the API user will be appended to the automatic summary. (phabricator:T97247)
Addressed performance issues in usage tracking updates and had to delay the latest round of rollouts because of it
Fixed a bug where suggestions would show up twice in item and property selectors (phabricator:T109697)
Improved performance of the mw.wikibase.sitelink Lua method
Made final changes so we can redirect mobile users to the mobile version by default
Evaluated the remaining steps to get the extension deployed that lets you do checks against 3rd party databases. Not much left it seems and we'll tackle that in one of the next sprints. Getting the new features deployed for the constraints checks will still take a bit longer.
More work on making the edit summaries in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co more meaningful
Optimized Wikidata for viewing on mobile devices. You will be redirected to m.wikidata.org automatically when using a mobile device soon the same way it already happens on Wikipedia. (Editing will only be possible via the special pages!)
API custom summary will no longer override the autocomment (phabricator:T97247)
Paging and sorting has been added to Special:ListProperties and it now also shows the IDs of the properties
Worked more on making the edit summaries on the client more meaningful and readable
Introduced a limit of 250 different entities that can be used on a page in the client via arbitrary access. The limit does not apply to convenience functions in lua, such as mw.wikibase.label which use a TermLookup instead of loading a full entity to get labels. (phabricator:T93885)
Stalagmites and stalactites visualizes items without statements, items with statements, and deleted/redirected items by batches of 100,000 QIDs
Mix n Match is now available for mobile, has an improved automatic matching algorithm, got speed improvements and new catalogs were added like the National Gallery of Victoria, World Heritage Sites and CulturaItalia
Matched birth and death days seeks to investigate all pairs of humans (in various subsets) that appear to have the same birth dates and death dates. De-duplication underway!
You can now use the new special page Special:PagesWithBadges to see which articles on that project have a badge like "featured article".
Release of the query service and unit support (see above)
Made quantities not show URIs when editing a value but instead show the label
Worked on new datatype for identifiers to be able to split them from the other statements in the user interface, link them without the need for the authority control gadget and be able to link them in JSON/RDF
Worked more on making the edit summaries in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co more meaningful
A follow-up to the Wikidata for research proposal has begun to be drafted by the University of Haifa and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
Community page for the new SPARQL query service, including a subpage for interesting or illustrative queries, and a board for suggestions and discussions.
Discussion has started on English WikiProject Football about using Wikidata for player squad templates (example) and player club history (example). Needs more input on best practices and commitment to update data.
You'll now get redirected to the mobile view automatically on mobile devices (example)
Made it possible to use more entities on a page via Lua without running into Lua's memory limit
Added the Article Placeholder extension’s results to the search result page (this is one of a few remaining blockers before we can put it on a testsystem for you to try out and give feedback)
Added option to create a new article from Article Placeholder
More work on the new datatype for properties
More work on making meaningful edit summaries on the client. Found a few remaining bugs during testing.
Finished the create article button for the ArticlePlaceholder page
From Monday on a bzip2 compressed version of the beta Wikidata TTL dumps will be published along the gzip one
Getting close to make it possible to add the main value of a statement and its reference at the same time
Worked on adding a new section to item and property pages for identifiers
Did backend work for making identifiers useful in our machine-readable outputs (by actually linking them instead of just giving the identifier string) - more work needed
Fixed a bug where dates would have English months on non-English wikis (phabricator:T116503)
query.wikidata.org now more prominently shows example queries in case you missed them before, lets you filter and gives you a preview for them. Additionally you can click a little magnifying glass next to an item ID in a query result and explore it further.
<3 Thanks for being awesome. Enjoy the holidays :)
We will take the "in other projects"-sidebar out of beta features in January (phabricator:T103102)
Making ranking information like label and statement counts available to the CirrusSearch index in order to improve ranking in search results (phabricator:T110648)
Continued work on the identifier data type for identifiers like VIAF and ISBN so we can easily put them into a separate section in the items and properly link them in the exports (phabricator:T95682, phabricator:T121274)
Continued work on making external identifiers clickable links without the help of the authority control gadget (phabricator:T95684)
Fixed a mistake in the set reference API documentation (gerrit:259171)
Students worked on new datatype to capture mathematical expressions (phabricator:T67397)
Updated property suggester data to give you more up-to-date suggestions when adding new statements
Pages in the module namespace now also get interwiki links (phabricator:T123234)
Reduced number of resource loader modules to improve performance (phabricator:T123233)
Started experimenting with showing an image in the header area (phabricator:T119493)
Fixed a bug where the query text would be moved off the screen on the query service website (phabricator:T120196)
Worked on the remaining blocker for taking the in other projects sidebar out of beta. We need to link to the Commons category and not gallery for articles without frying the servers (phabricator:T94989)
Changes in how authentication in MediaWiki is handled are being rolled out (and more coming). [3] Ordinary users and gadgets / user scripts should not be affected but bots may need to be adjusted. pywikibot already supports [4] OAuth authentication, though bot operators need to set that up for their bot.
Investigated language support in MediaWiki and Wikibase to allow more languages in monolingual text and disallow some non-sense for label/descriptions/aliases (phabricator:T78006)
Fixed missing license info and broken links for Wikibase libraries on Special:Version
Working on improving scoring of search results on Wikidata, on Special:Search
Preparing to take the "in other projects" sidebar out of beta features, with the Wikimedia Commons link going to the Commons category (phabricator:T103102, phabricator:T94989)
Amir and Aaron are turning ORES into an extension to make it easier for you to spot bad edits \o/
Final touches on putting identifiers into their own section (phabricator:T117421)
Switching the in other languages box to be expanded by default for new people (phabricator:T92387)
More experimenting with adding an image to the header area (phabricator:T119493)
Last call for comments on the new process for showcase items at d:User:Harmonia Amanda/Showcase items. Please review and comment on the associated talk page.
Groundwork for adding new entity types to move us forward with support for structured data on Commons. (Other entity types are Item and Property. We'll need Mediainfo for Commons.)
Work on first prototype for Commons support - specifically by making it possible to have more entity types than just Item and Property (phabricator:T125822)
Work on first prototype for Commons support - specifically by making it possible to have more entity types than just Item and Property (phabricator:T125822)
In order to deploy the ORES extension on Wikidata we need a few more people to help with a labeling campaign. ORES will help us a lot with anti-vandalism fighting.
The in other projects sidebar has graduated from beta features and is now turned on on all projects except Dutch Wikipedia. (They have their own hack.) This closes a wish that has been around since 2004 \o/ (phabricator:T2708)
Added a new identifiers section in items. Everything with datatype external identifier goes there now. Once we have all identifiers converted items should be easier to scan and understand because of the clearer structure.
We have a patch upcoming that should reduce loading time of items with a lot of sitelinks by 25%
Fixed a bug where you could not add statements with external identifier or mathematical expression datatype (phabricator:T127095)
More groundwork for Commons (making it possible to have more entities than just items and properties)
Wikiversity is now supported by Wikidata as well. Language links can be maintained on Wikidata now. Access to the data will follow. Welcome, sister!
Wikidata now has cross-wiki notifications as a beta feature. You can enable it in your preferences. Once enabled you will see notifications you received on the other Wikimedia wikis.
Property:P1367 ("BBC Your Paintings artist-ID") has become "Art UK artist identifier". Identifier values were replaced.
The number of claims on each item is to be included in the "page property" database table. For some items where it had been missing, it was recently added. This leads to improved coverage by database reports: without claims by site.
Mix'n'match has new catalogs: Artists of the Nationalmuseum in Sweden and Encyclopædia Britannica
Wikidata Query Service now allows to view images linked from Commons and display image galley if the query result has images. Example: Paintings by Gustav Klimt
Fixed a bug in Special:NewItem which prevented submission of the form (phabricator:T128075)
More performance work
In diffs for mathematical expressions we're now also showing the TeX source to make it possible to see changes that do not affect the rendering of the formula (phabricator:T125712)
More work on cleaning up languages for multilingual text values and labels/descriptions/aliases
Lucie and Charlie handed in their Bachelor theses on the Article Placeholder and Editing Wikidata from Wikipedia. Work on both topics will continue. We'll publish both theses soon. A big congrats to both of them!
Has recibido esta notificación porque te inscribiste como traductor de español y portugués en Wikidata.
La página Help:FAQ está disponible para su traducción. Puedes traducirla aquí:
Has recibido esta notificación porque te inscribiste como traductor de español y portugués en Wikidata.
La página Wikidata:Data donation está disponible para su traducción. Puedes traducirla aquí:
This article from Russian Wikipedia is generated only with Lua Module and Listeria, based on its Wikidata item.
If you're into Wikidata, GLAM and Facebook there is now a Facebook group for you.
There are 4 new games to help with the migration of the Persondata template on English Wikipedia.
There was a huge increase in the number of qualifiers over the last 2 weeks. It went from 2.6 to 3.7 Million due to additions of qualifiers for evidence codes on human and mouse proteins.
Interested in seeing Wikidata training sessions at Wikimania? Add yourself to interested attendees for the sessions.
Substantially reduced server load for item and property displaying (phab:T132662)
There are currently some issues with the order of latitude/longitude inn coordinates in the query service map visualization. It will be fixed tonight.
Removed unsupported sort and dir parameters from the wikibase.api.RepoApi JavaScript module. This may break user JavaScript calling getEntitiesByPage (phab:T119856).
Worked on new flyers for institutions that want to cooperate with Wikidata and developers wanting to use our data (will be published on Commons once they're done)
Moved forward with internationalization of the query service interface (not on translatewiki.net yet but being worked on)
Worked on making it possible to extend SPARQL queries in simplified natural language version. It will also no longer add query prefixes when editing the query. Those are not live yet.
Fixed a bug where admins got a blank page when trying to view deleted revisions (phabricator:T132645)
Investigating issues with bad suggestions for properties when adding new statements (phabricator:T132839)
Our Main Page now has a section for popular items to show you what is trending on Wikidata based on several people editing an item over the last few days
Worked on creating mediainfo entities on demand when a file is viewed that doesn't have an associated mediainfo entity yet. This is needed for structured data support for Commons.
ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 100 can avoid timeouts on Wikidata Query Service (source)
Development
Worked on making it easier to add new query examples right from the query service by just clicking a button. There are some technical issues with it still though. Will take a while to sort through.
More work on creating new Media-Info entities (the equivalent of item for media file data) on the fly (phabricator:T134259)
EasyQuery is now a gadget that you can enable in your preferences. It gives you an icon next to each statement value. That gives you a list of other items with the same statement.
Stats have been updated and show a significant jump in references.
There is now a 100wikidatadays challenge based on the 100wikidays challenge for Wikipedia. The goal: convert 100 templates to make use of Wikidata over the course of 100 days.
Thiemo wrote a user script to pre-fill "date retrieved" in a reference with the current date. Please test and let us know what you think ont he linked page. If you like it it can become a gadget.
More groundwork for Commons. We can now save a statement in the new MediaInfo entity type \o/ (Some minor issues still with the demo system but should be solved next week.)
Fixed a display issue with description tooltips in recent changes. Thanks Matěj Suchánek! (phabricator:T89663)
Refactored quite some of the sitelinks-related JavaScript code (phabricator:T127056 and gerrit:294687. This may break some existing gadgets and user scripts temporarily.
Updated the graphic representing the data model in Wikidata: long, medium, short
Fixed problem with editing statements on Wikidata, after last week's deployment (phabricator:T138974)
Started interviews to find user needs and workflows for automated list generation (phabricator:T139284)
Working on an infographic to represent the flow of data in Wikidata
Work on multi-content revisions in order to be able to store an entity (item, property, mediainfo) and wiki text in the same page (This is needed for Commons) (phabricator:T107595)
Did more interviews with editors as preparation for the work on automated list generation for Wikipedia and co based on Wikidata data
Fixed a bug with data parsing in Korean and a few other languages (phabricator:T139509)
Added "non" as a language code for monolingual text values (phabricator:T137115)
Removed display of calendar model for dates with precision of 10 years or larger (phabricator:T133973)
Fixed issues in some of the forms on special pages on mobile (phabricator:T138413)
Numbers on Wikidata:Database reports/without claims by site for some projects decreased (e.g. dewiki), remained consistently low (e.g. nlwiki), or recently increased to new highs (e.g. enwiki).
Development
Finished first rough prototype for structured data on Commons. Wanted to sent out announcement on Friday but one configuration issue is still unsolved. Should be solved in the next 1 or 2 days.
We are adding a "no match found" message to the suggester that you get when selecting an item or property while adding a new statement for example (phabricator:T140085)
When a query result contains a mathematical expression it will soon be rendered correctly (phabricator:T137784)
Added support for Haida (hai) for monolingual text values (phabricator:T138131)
You can now translate all sister project pages to your language, like Wikidata:Wikipedia. Please, link to them from your projects to give your fellow users chance to learn Wikidata basics.
You can now enable the CoordinateDiffMap Gadget in your preferences to get a map for coordinate changes.
Added a message to the suggester that pops up when you search for items or properties. When no matching property or item is found it will now tell you. (phabricator:T140085)
Considerably improved our browser tests to find more issues before You ever see them.
Added Haida as a language available for monolingual text properties (phabricator:T138131)
Worked on layout improvements to have a better visual separation of qualifiers and references (phabricator:T141862)
Added a line to the suggester to indicate when no matching item or property was found (phabricator:T142034)
Fixed and issue with scroll bars in the logo section of the ArticlePlaceholder (phabricator:T139977)
Worked more on making it possible to translate an article in the ArticlePlaceholder (phabricator:T124036)
Worked on fixing link in in other languages section for ArticlePlaceholder (phabricator:T137933)
Worked more on groundwork for multi content revisions which we need for structured data support for Commons in order to have structured and unstructured data on the file page at the same time (phabricator:T141878)
Worked on automatically creating a mediainfo entity when adding a statement - so far it is only possible by adding a label or description (phabricator:T140760)
WikiShootMe has a lot of new updates: OAuth-based image upload button, uploads to Commons and adds to Wikidata item with one click, right-click on the map to add a missing item, build-in Wikidata search, free images search (example for Central Cambridge)
A famous Italian song, Tanti Auguri by Raffaella Carrà, states "Com'è bello far l'amore da Trieste in giù" (literally, in English: "How great it is to make love from Trieste to below"). This is a query to find out where you shouldn't make love.
Planet to Earth: this tool uses data from Wikidata to visualise the links between places on an astronomical body named after a place on planet Earth.
WikiDataScape is a Cytoscape app for interactive browsing of Wikidata.
The property "KML file" was created last week (see list below) and has already a full list of values, sample LUA module and property documentation page available (Property talk:P3096)
Welsh Wikipedia includes Wikidata-based article placeholders, like this one
Wiki Loves Monuments started! You can help by improving the items about heritage buildings or use Wikishootme to find unpictured monuments
English Wikipedia now has a WikiProject Wikidata to coordinate integration with Wikidata. Why not start one for your local Wikipedia? Add it to Q20855878 if you do.
Upcoming: Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) & Liam Wyatt (User:Wittylama) speaking about GLAM-Wiki (including Wikidata) in Warsaw, 19 October. Details tbc.
Upcoming: Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) speaking & running workshop about Wikidata at SFK 16 ("Software Freedom Kosova Conference") in Pristina, 21-23 October.
#SundayQuery on Twitter: every Sunday, you can ask for help or advice about SPARQL queries, how to build or fix it, some SPARQL-ninjas will be there to answer you!
Researcher? You can participate in the WSDM Cup 2017 challenge and improve Wikidata vandalism detection
New templates: {{Denmark properties}}, {{Greece properties}}. Please add labels in your own languages, and consider making a similar template for your country or region.
Development
Lowered relevance threshold for ArticlePlaceholder search results from 3 to 2 sitelinks (T144188)
Added 'otk' as an available language for monolingual text values (T137809)
Working on making it possible to paste partial URLs into the site selector (T144310)
Made progress on showing editors on all Wikimedia projects which articles on their project use data from a given Wikidata item. We will also show in the page information (action=info) which items a given article uses. Also worked on showing which projects use a given item in the page information. (T103091)
Added meta information to the html header of item pages (T88475)
Made progress on making ArticlePlaceholders indexable for search engines (T144590)
The Project Grants program is accepting proposals from September 12 to October 11 to fund new tools, research, offline outreach, online organizing and other experiments that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers.
The RevisionSlider is now available as a beta feature, try it to have a visual overview of your diffs.
The Wikidata team attended and participated to a lot of conference these past days (WikiCon, ViewSource, DPpedia, SoCraTes, Write the doc) that's why we don't have many tasks to share with you this week :)
TXT Werk is doing automatic entity recognition in text with the help of Wikidata. Previously only German was supported. English is now supported as well.
Proposition for upgrading the default copyright license for Wikimedia projects to CC-by-SA 4.0 (does not affect the structured data part of Wikidata, which uses CC0).
More work on automated sitelinks for Wiktionary (phabricator:T987)
More work on federation for Commons in order to be able to use Wikidata's items and properties there (phabricator:T76007)
Adding entity usage information in action=edit on Wikipedia and co (phabricator:T144921)
Working on making it possible to get formatted values back on the client. With this we will for example link the value to a Wikipedia article where possible. (phabricator:T142940)
Upcoming: Andy Mabbett speaking about Wikidata & running a GLAM-Wiki workshop at SFK 16 ("Software Freedom Kosova Conference") in Pristina, 21-23 October.
New template: d:Template:Poland properties. Please add labels in your own languages, and consider making a similar template for your country or region.
Development
Worked further on automatic linking of pages between Wiktionary language editions
Worked further on making it possible to use Wikidata's items and properties to describe files on Commons
Reviewed error messages and made them easier to understand
Added tooltips in some places in the UI to make them more understandable (e.g. ranks, special values)
Made the loading animation clearer in embedded query results (phabricator:T148042)
Making it possible to paste the full URL of an image on Commons into image properties (phabricator:T147917)
Worked on a small birthday present
Fixed run button not being reenabled after some queries (phabricator:T147114)
More work on better parser function and Lua functions that return formatted values (phabricator:T142940)
Undoing the last edit to an item will now show a undo summary, not a restore one (phabricator:T147631) Thanks Matěj!
Lule Sami and Pite Sami are now supported languages in Wikidata (phabricator:T146707)
Brainstormed about how to make it easier to write queries without knowing SPARQL
A lot of surprises, stories and presents will be shared between October 29th and November 4th. Check the project chat or the mailing-list every day to see what happens!
You can also participate by posting a story (more info here), a tweet with #WikidataBirthday, let a message or a present on the birthday page.
If you're participating to Wikidata's birthday, you can add this template to your user page.
Four new types of charts for the Query Service: line chart, bar chart, scatter chart and area chart (read more and try examples in the documentation) by Jonas
{{#statements:…}}, a new parser function is currently in development with better features that you can try on beta by the Wikidata dev team and volunteers
Search field added in Scholia, a tool to create scholarship profiles, by fnielsen
The birthday party is not finished yet, every day until November 4th you will discover new presents and stories. Follow the project chat or the mailing-list or #Wikidatabirthday to get the news!
Thanks to everyone who celebrated the birthday by organizing or attending to an event, letting a message on Wikidata or on the social networks, writing a story or creating a present!
Here's the list of the birthday presents from the community and development team:
Four new types of charts for the Query Service: line chart, bar chart, scatter chart and area chart! Read more and try examples in the documentation (Jonas)
{{#statements:…}}, a new parser function is currently in development with better features: try it here! (Thiemo, Wikidata dev team and volunteers)
Search field added in Scholia, a tool to create scholarship profiles (fnielsen)
Technical documentation about Wikibase for PHP and JS scripts (Ladsgroup and Jonas)
new feature for the graph view in the Query Service: it can now browse the properties of items. see in the video (Jonas)
graph builder tool for the query service to create and export graphs (demo video) (Jonas, [[d:user:Smalyshev (WMF)|Smalyshev)
More work on federation in order to be able to use Wikidata's items and properties to describe media files on Wikimedia Commons in the future (phabricator:T149580)
A new Wikidata PageRank dataset has been published. The dataset was computed in August 2016 and provides PageRank scores for 10,364,840 Wikidata entities.
Due to a possible hack, please consider resetting your passwords.
Parlement & Politiek ID (P1749) has been completed in Mix'n'match. Over 5000 politicians from the Netherlands (and also Belgium) now have a link to this resource
Unit conversion has been rolled out for the first dimension for a short while now.
Undo diffs now utilize language fallbacks for property and item labels (gerrit:315291). Thanks to Matěj Suchánek!
Reworked database schema for Cognate (the extension that will do automatic interwiki links for Wiktionary). It is still waiting for security review before it can be deployed.
Worked more on basic version of Lexeme entity type
Fixed a bug where the links on action=info where wrong (phabricator:T149598)
Getting close to finishing the groundwork for Federation so that in the future you'll be able to use Wikidata's items and properties to describe files on Commons.
Added Innu-aimun as a language for monolingual text values (phabricator:T151129)
Worked on linking to Wikipedia articles in the statements on an ArticlePlaceholder (phabricator:T113955)
The Fossasia Opentech Submit in Singapore is looking for speakers. If you're in the area and want to introduce attendees to Wikidata, feel free to send your application!
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of User:Coyau. He was a very active editor on Wikidata and the other Wikimedia projects. He will be deeply missed by his friends and family but his great work on open culture will stay. Feel free to browse and share his work. Thanks Guillaume for this message.
Basque language Wikipedia develops a most prominent basque and worlwide person born/death in this day for all the day related articles. For example, eu:Abenduaren 19. It also displays interesting red links for people born and dead that day that are not represented in eu:wp.
This week, most of the developers are at the Dev Summit hacking stuff and doing great things!
Continued working on "federation" – support for multiple Wikibase repositories (phab:T76007)
New dimensions for unit conversion in the query service (phab:T150881)
Fixed a timing issue that can happen when using the property suggester (phab:T115267)
Still investigating an issue in which the "save" button stays disabled, as reported in December
We may remove the sliding animation when using the date, geo, monolingual, and quantity experts (gerrit:330145). The preview popup may now cover parts of the page. Please try it at wikidata.beta.wmflabs.org and tell us what you think on our contact page.
Attended the Wikimedia Developer Summit to talk about a lot of things (including editing Wikidata from Wikipedia directly, back-end work for structured data support for Commons - specifically Multi Content Revisions, ideas for improvements to the query service)
Final touches to get ArticlePlaceholder pages ready for search engine indexing
Continued working on "federation" – support for multiple Wikibase repositories (phab:T76007)
Clickable prototype for client editing is finally in the works!
Coordinates on Russian Wikipedia now link to maps generated with the Kartographer extension. The map includes the location outline, if that object exists in OpenStreetMap (OSM) with a corresponding Wikidata ID (ways and relations only, not nodes). Example: w:ru:Зальцбург (click coordinates in the upper right corner, or in the infobox on the side). If you create a Wikidata item about a specific administrative area, building, or other physical individual object which appears on maps, then please add the Wikidata ID to the relevant object in OSM, using key:wikidata= (here's how to contribute to OSM).
QuickStatements V2 can now run your commands in the background, no need to keep the browser tab open anymore
When posting a link to an item to social networks and on messenger apps that show previews the previews will now be nicer and show an image. (phabricator:T51859)
The Cebuano and Swedish wikis have a lot of bot-created content which is unconnected to other wiki articles. A good way to tackle that problem is by checking constraint violations for property GeoNames ID.
Module Wikidata on Wikidata received an update to improve its performance. If your wiki has forked this one, consider updating it and report any problems (already reported one).
Experimental c:Template:Category contains for categories on Commons, including a per-category Wikidata query. See introductory discussion on Commons Village Pump. Presented together with current statistics on Commons category <-> Wikidata links
Doing a trial run of allowing search engines to index a number of ArticlePlaceholder pages on Welsh Wikipedia. If there are no major issues we will enable this for all placeholders.
Improving Federation-related after initial tests,
Getting ready to deploy automated sitelinks for Wiktionary
Making final fixes to initial version of Federation (needed to be able to use Wikidata items and properties to describe media on Commons in the future)
More work on baseline for Lexeme entity type for Wiktionary support
Wikidata Query Service got additional servers, the data has been reloaded to fix a number of issues caused by missed updates and an increase of the time-out of 30s is being looked into.
You can now make your Harvest Templates tasks run automatically. After you have generated a permalink to your task, add &run= to the url. When you open it next time, it will load and then run automatically. Alternatively, you can use &load= which will only prepare the task for running.
Continued to finalize the initial version of Federation (needed to be able to use Wikidata items and properties to describe media on Commons in the future)
More work on baseline for Lexeme entity type for Wiktionary support
Converted undo/restore interface to use OOUI. You can test it here (phab:T134643).
Fixed an other rounding issue on geo coordinates (phab:T158772).
Added thumbnail images to the Wikimedia Commons suggester (phab:T160319).
Continued working on introducing Lexeme entity type.
Finishing federation prototype.
We are going to change all snak, reference, and qualifier hashes with the planned DataModel 7.0 release. If you are a tool developer, make sure you do not persist hashes, and never use them to request edits to entities. Statement IDs are safe (phab:T157965).
A warm welcome to our new intern, Lucas Werkmeister! You may now him for his work on queries as WikidataFacts. He will work in the team for the next months.
There's now also a #100wikidays challenge on Wikidata, aptly named #100wikidatadays! It is a personal challenge in which a person very significantly improves (at least) one Wikidata items per day, for 100 days in a row. There was already a version of the challenge on various Wikipedias, on Commons and on Wikisource - now on Wikidata as well. Participate and make Wikidata shine!
Worked more on support for lexicographical data (specifically support for lexicographic category and statements on forms)
Dealt with issues after the deployment of automatic interwiki links for Wiktionary
Worked on constraint violation user script based on your feedback (improving messages to make it more understandable, layout, etc)
Add support for the following new language codes for monolingual text properties: brx, chn, cop, gez, quc, kjh, nr (will become available in a few days)
Has recibido esta notificación porque te inscribiste como traductor de español y portugués en Wikidata.
La página Wikidata:Glossary está disponible para su traducción. Puedes traducirla aquí:
Dear translator!
Page "Wikidata:Glossary" was updated and reorganized. This page is very important for understanding Wikidata.
Please check and update your translations ASAP!
Past: WikiCite, May 23rd-25th in Vienna. Documentation will be available soon, in the meantime you can check on Twitter and the video streams to see what happened
MySociety (Q10851773) are publishing a "five part series examining how to use Wikidata to answer the question: 'What is the gender breakdown of heads of government across the world?'".
Data donation: following WikiCite, our friends at DBLP (Q1224715) have begun to donate data, with >4,800 values in the first batch, including >1,300 DBLP ID (P2456) plus assorted aliases, and values for VIAF ID (P214), GND ID (P227), ORCID iD (P496), ACM Digital Library author ID (P864), zbMATH author ID (P1556), & Google Scholar ID (P1960).
MySociety (Q10851773) have now completed publishing a "five part series examining how to use Wikidata to answer the question: 'What is the gender breakdown of heads of government across the world?'". Here is the full set:
Has recibido esta notificación porque te inscribiste como traductor de español y portugués en Wikidata.
La página Wikidata:Wiktionary/Sitelinks está disponible para su traducción. Puedes traducirla aquí:
Due the necessary time for people to get visas (about 3 months), we changed the deadline for the scholarship applications. You can apply for a scholarship before July 16th. We will then make sure that the applicants receive a response on July 25th.
WikidataCon: We reached 100 registrations, the event is complete for now. More tickets will be released in September. You can still register on the waitlist.
Newest gadgets: Units converter converts from 20 currencies to a selected currency. Converts metric units (mass, dimensions, area, temperature, speed) to/from United States units. The currency amounts are inflation adjusted if data is available.
Development
Worked more on support for lexicographical data and Wiktionary. The focus was on creating a necessary new datatype to link to Lexemes as well as making Glosses and statements on Glosses editable.
Getting ready to migrate the constraints definitions from templates on the property talk page to statements on the property.
Citation management tool Zotero can now read data from Wikidata, and can write data from other sources to Wikidata via QuickStatements. See Wikidata:Zotero for details.
The scholarship process is now closed. Recipients will be informed around July 25th.
You can still suggest ideas for the program, or submit a project until July 31st. The program of the conference is made by the attendees, only what you bring will be in there :)
Ma Commune Wikipédia is a website developed by Wikimedia France to give information about the state of the Wikipedia articles for every French municipality and encourage people to edit the Wikimedia projects. It uses Wikidata to identify the communes.
The wbEntity JavaScript variable will not miss elements any more but contain empty arrays instead (gerrit:365604). Please check if this affects your scripts, and have a look at the wikibase.entityPage.entityLoaded hook as a possible replacement.
Wikidata Constraint Violations tool visualizes changes in constraint violations for last few weeks. Some of constraints produce millions of violations (marked as red).
Doing last polishing on the Lexeme entity type and cleaning up the demo data for the demo at Wikimania
Improving the dispatching of changes to Wikipedia and co to cope with the increased demand that lead to delays in Wikidata changes showing up in Wikipedia watchlist and recent changes
Working on making constraints work on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
Working on making it easier to see when input in property or value fields is not recognized/wrong (phabricator:T170531)
Added new language codes (eya, fuf, ood, pjt, yap, zun) for use in monolingual text values
Fixed an issue with badges not being shown next to interwiki links on Wikipedia and co (phabricator:T172592)
Worked on showing labels when linking to a redirect (phabricator:T96553)
Worked on making change dispatching to Wikipedia and co work better so changes made on Wikidata show up there in a reasonable time. There were issues because of significantly increased edit activity on Wikidata.
Upcoming: WikiArabia, in Cairo, Egypt, on 23-25 October. They're looking for a volunteer to give a Wikidata workshop. Please contact them if you're interested!
The Gene Wiki: Using Wikipedia and Wikidata to organize biomedical knowledge August Wikimedia Research Showcase (second half), presented by Andrew Su, about how GeneWiki is using Wikidata. Video on YouTube
Citation.js: Endpoint on RunKit shows a demo REST API to convert Wikidata entries into BibTeX, Bib.TXT, citations, and CSL-JSON.
The organization team is still looking for sponsors to support the event and provide even more awesome stuff to the attendees. If your company can support the WikidataCon, please get in touch with Lydia.
Seeing the enthusiasm of the community for the WikidataCon, we raised our attendees limit from 150 to 200 persons. The last tickets will be released on September 1st. People who registered on the waitlist will be notified when a ticket is available.
The program committee is currently reviewing and organizing the submissions. We will contact the speakers soon, and publish the program in the beginning of September (around 6th).
We're looking for a keynote speaker who could bring an external point of view on ontologies. If you know interesting people, feel free to help
Looking into not showing language fallback hints for dialects to make the UI less cluttered for them and make it less necessary to enter labels and descriptions for them (phabricator:T174318)
Wrapping up our experiments with the new front-end technologies
Open Library, the biggest resource of freely-licensed books, now links to Wikidata (through Reasonator) and to VIAF (example here; see "Wikidata" in the right-hand column).
With 200 attendees, the WikidataCon is now complete. Thanks all for your enthusiasm \o/ If you registered on the waitlist or submitted a talk, check your mailbox for more information.
The WikidataCon program will be released this week, and we will call for volunteers soon
Looked into all the things necessary to make it possible to store forms and senses on Lexeme pages.
Worked more on caching constraints checks results which is needed to enable constraints checks for all logged-in users (phabricator:T173696)
Making progress on checking constraints also on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
Removed language fallback hints for dialects to make the UI less cluttered for them and make it less necessary to enter labels and descriptions for them (phabricator:T174318)
Fixed an issue that links to an item were not showing the label when it pointed to a redirect (phabricator:T96553)
Unrecognized input in entity selectors will be highlighted in red (phabricator:T170531)
Added an additional normalization for page titles when linking pages on Wiktionary via Cognate (phabricator:T172987)
The API will not only output the hashes for qualifier snaks, but also for main snaks as well as references snaks (phabricator:T174692). Note that hashes (other than IDs) are not meant to be stable identifiers, and should not be stored for a longer time.
Snak hashes will also appear as part of CSS classes in entity pages (phabricator:T171725)
The program of the WikidataCon is now published on-wiki. You will find there a lot of different formats, topics and speakers, during the two days of the conference.
The event is now complete, no more tickets available. The last tickets have been attributed to the first persons who registered on the waitlist. If some more seats get free because another attendee cancels participation, the next person on the waitlist will be informed.
Rolled out more fine-grained usage tracking on Greek Wikipedia. This will lead to less irrelevant changes showing up in watchlist and recent changes on those projects. We're testing this on Greek Wikipedia to see if the solution we have scales before rolling it out further. (phabricator:T151717)
Adding an API module to copy a statement from one item to another (phabricator:T55619)
Working more on checking constraints also on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
Added support for the Creator namespace to the constraints check for Commons links (phabricator:T176062)
Added a css class to values that link to redirects so they can more easily be identified by editors who want that for maintenance work (phabricator:T70567) Thanks Matej!
Finishing touches on adding full URIs for external identifiers to our RDF export so we're good citizens of the semantic web (phabricator:T121274)
Added a new mw.wikibase.getAllStatements Lua function in addition to the existing getBestStatements, that returns all statements regardless of their rank (phabricator:T176124)
Looking into an issue where unwanted email notifications are being sent (phabricator:T174794)
Upcoming: WikidataCon, Berlin, 28-29 October (sold out)
We will have two exciting keynotes. The first keynote speaker is Fabian M. Suchanek, professor at Télécom Paris Tech University, working on the knowledge base YAGO. The second keynote speaker is Michael Kreil, datajournalist working on the project Data Sciences and Stories.
Please volunteer for some tasks at the conference if you are attending.
Breaking change: "wb_entity_per_page" table will not be updated and replicated on ToolLabs anymore
A mw.wikibase.getLabelByLang Lua function will be added (phabricator:T173262)
The mw.wikibase.sitelink Lua function will accept a second parameter with the global identifier of a wiki (e.g. "enwiki") to link to (phabricator:T142903)
Had to temporarily turn off showing Wikidata's changes on Commons and Russian Wikipedia because of database issues. We're working on turning it back on.
Continued work on persistently storing edits to Forms on Lexemes
Finishing work on checking constraints on qualifiers and references with the constraint checks gadget
Fixed a bug where notification emails for Wikidata changes were sent when they shouldn't have been (phabricator:T174794)
Full URIs for external identifiers will soon be in the RDF export (phabricator:T121274)
Monthly Tasks
Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
Has recibido esta notificación porque te inscribiste como traductor de español y portugués en Wikidata.
La página Wikidata:Wikidata in Wikimedia projects está disponible para su traducción. Puedes traducirla aquí:
Upcoming: WikidataCon, Berlin, 28-29 October (sold out)
If you organize a local event for the Wikidata birthday, feel free to add it on the events page and the birthday page
A blog post describing Textes d'affiches, a tool using Wikidata to show movies and the works they are adapted from, developed during a hackathon at the national French library (by Shonagon, in French)
More work on checking constraints on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
Now caching constraints results to make it ready for rollout for more users
Continued work on more fine-grained usage tracking so we better know which parts of an item is used on an article on Wikipedia and the other sister projects
Improved the way Wikidata changes are shown in watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and Co so they are more in-line with the other changes (phabricator:T48329, phabricator:T50684) Thanks Matej!
Upcoming : Wikidata and Wiki Loves Monuments editathon in Berlin, 24-26 November (in German). We're looking for trainers to explain the basic use of QuickStatements, Open Refine and Mix'n'Match. If you want to join, please contact MB-one
Wikidata's birthday
The fifth anniversary of Wikidata was celebrated, as every year, with a lot of presents, events and stories. You can find an overview on the birthday page.
inventaire.io CC0 Wikidata-ready NDJSON and TTL dumps are now accessible at dumps.inventaire.io
You can now move claims to new items with moveClaim.js. You can do so by typing "new".
Prefix search on Wikidata (wbsearchentities API) now is using ElasticSearch as backend. This should improve search quality and also is more flexible and tunable.
If you want to review what happened during the WikidataCon, here is the list of all the sessions, with slides, notes and videos, when available
Release of wikidata-edit v2.0.0: brings qualifiers and references support, and a few breaking changes. See changelogs
Release of wikidata-cli v5.0.0: brings qualifiers and references support, multi-entity summary|label|description|description requests, a new `edit-item` command, and a few breaking changes. See changelogs
The Cebuano and Swedish wikis have a lot of bot-created content which is unconnected to other wiki articles. A good way to tackle that problem is by checking constraint violations for property GeoNames ID.
Latitudes, longitudes, as well as coordinate precisions have accidentally been exported to RDF as xsd:decimal, and are going to be exported as xsd:double soon (phabricator:T179228)
Continue on refactoring PropertySuggester-python for better maintainability and performance (phab:T179664)
Make AffectedPagesFinder take DESCRIPTION_USAGE into account (phab:T176417)
Accessing mw.config.get( 'wbEntity' ) will trigger a deprecation warning, gadgets and user script should use the wikibase.entityPage.entityLoaded hook instead (phabricator:T169771)
Work on caching constraint check results (phab:T179849) and indicating that they are cached (phab:T179844)
Work on JSON-LD support in the Purtle library used for exports (gerrit:379669)
Wikibase code base does not use Composer class autoloading any more (phabricator:T180067) as another step towards getting rid of our own build process and being more in line with the rest of Wikimedia
Monthly Tasks
Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
Working on fixing a regression after a change in MediaWiki core that makes edit links show up on diff pages (phabricator:T181807)
More work on persistent editing of statements on Forms of a Lexeme (specifically phabricator:T180467)
Improved size of the diff that we sent to Wikipedia and co for changes happening on Wikidata. This is one more needed step towards only showing meaningful edits in the watchlists and recent changes there. (phabricator:T113468)
Incoming:Next Structured Commons IRC office hour will be on Tuesday, February 13, 2018, at 18:00 UTC.
Past: Tech-talk about knowledge technologies, featuring Wikidata, DBpedia, and Histropedia at Jakarta Digital Valley, Jakarta, Indonesia on Dec 8, 2017. Slides are available at Slideshare link.
Structured Data on Commons: Participate in this survey to help the team understand which tools and functionalities are most important to the Commons and Wikidata communities
QuickStatements now has a CSV-like import function (under "import commands")
Final step towards being able to store statements on Forms of a Lexeme
Disabled RDF support for Lexemes as the mapping isn't defined yet (phabricator:T182660)
Adding some more smart tracking for Lua usage so we better know which properties from an item are used on a Wikipedia article even when the whole item is loaded (phabricator:T179923)
Past: Wikidata team and volunteers were at 34C3. Check the videos, the tweets, a new design made by Bleeptrack for a cake. Videos of Wikidata-related workshops will be published soon.
Prevented checking of constraints on "Wikidata property example" statements (phabricator:T183267)
Added link to the property's talk page to the constraint violation dialog to guide people there to discuss the constraint if necessary (phabricator:T164351)
Monthly Tasks
Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
Constraint violations can now be checked on qualifiers and references (phab:T168532)
Implemented usage tracking deduplication to reduce database load (phab:T178079). This should not have any effect on what users see on recent changes and watchlists.
Redirects on client wikis that are connected to a Wikidata item can have a tracking category, if set up (phab:T185743). Thanks, Matěj!
From the life of Wikidata: with the Wikidata Concepts Monitor we can now begin to discover how our communities use knowledge across the Wikimedia projects, by Goran S. Milovanović
See also: WDCM Journal, several examples of the use of Wikidata on the Wikimedia projects
We are saddened to report that Polish Wikimedian Krzysztof Machocki (who was also active on Wikidata) died on 31 January 2018, aged 36, after a couple of weeks of illness. Our condolences to his family and friends.
The call for submissions for Wikimania (Cape Town, July 2018) is now open. Deadline is March 18th. Ideas of submissions related to Wikidata can be discussed here
Based on community discussions, the ArticlePlaceholder will soon be deployed on Urdu and Estonian Wikipedias.
Statistics
January 2018 brought us 9,770,248 edits, 445,027 new items were created.
The number of users that edited Wikidata per day grew in 2017 from 2439 to 2672 users, 9,6% more compared to 2016. The number of edits by them grew with 18% to 190k edits per day. We also get edited by 542 IP adresses per day, 50% more than in 2016.
In 2017, Wikidata got edited by 46 various bots per day, executing 334k edits per day (63% more than in 2016). The most active bot in 2017 was Emijrpbot, who added 18 million edits to Wikidata.
The next Weekly Summary (February 19th) will be the 300th edition of the newsletter! To help making it special, you can share your favorite Wikidata tool, so the other readers discover nice tools
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Welcome to the 300th Weekly Summary!
The weekly newsletter was started by Lydia at the very beginning of the Wikidata project, even before the first deployment, to keep the community informed about the developments, the new projects and tools. More than five years later, the newsletter is still there, its content powered by the community, and sent every week all along the years. I wanted to say a warm "thank you!" to each person who helped filling the Weekly Summary <3
Over the past years, as you know, Wikidata has grown a lot. More data, more tools, more editors and reusers, more exciting projects led by the community. The Weekly Summary has evolved with us, and the 300th edition seems a good moment to ask you all your suggestions about the newsletter, how it could continue evolving, and how you would like to improve it.
On that purpose, you can find a feedback page to express all your ideas about the Weekly Summary. We're very interested to know more about your reading habits, the parts you're more or less interested in, the new topics you would like to share with the community. Thanks in advance for filling it.
I stay available anytime to discuss with you, feel free to contact me if you have any question or concern! Cheers, Léa
A selection of cool tools on Wikidata
Here are a few tools that are recommended by some Wikidata community members. External websites, gadgets or scripts, they are very useful for Wikidata editors or users!
QuickStatements is a powerful tool that can edit or add Wikidata item en masse, via a text editor or importing a spreadsheet. (Éder Porto via Facebook)
Mix'n'match (manual), which helps us to interlink Wikidata with the rest of the web and the world :-) (Spinster, Siobhan via Twitter)
WikiShootMe! allows you to see Wikidata items plotted out on a map and shows you whether they have images or not. (Ham II)
Yair Rand's WikidataInfo script adds the QID of the equivalent Wikidata item to the page being viewed (on sister projects), along with its Wikidata label and description. (Andy Mabbett)
Recoin measures the degree of completeness of relevant properties of a Wikidata item and suggests any relevant statements that can be added to the item. (Rachmat04)
DuplicateReferences gadget adds a link to copy references and add them to other statements on the same item. (PKM)
checkConstraints gadget adds notifications on the interface to easily notice the violation of constraints and help people fixing them (Léa)
Resolve authors lists scientific articles with the property author name string (P2093) and groups them on the basis of co-authors and topic, which helps to distinguish people referred to by identical name strings. (Daniel Mietchen)
The Wiki Loves Monuments map is powered by Wikidata. You can look for a city and find the monuments around. (Stefano Sabatini via Facebook)
Fixed incomplete "Label:", "Description:" and "Statement:" entity usage messages in various places (phab:T178090). Thanks, Matěj!
Improved violation messages for ranges involving the current date (e. g. “should not be in the future”).
Continued work on caching constraint check results.
Enabled Lua fine-grained usage tracking for better performance on several more wikis: hywiki, frwiki, svwiki, itwiki, zhwiki, bewiki, nlwiki, glwiki, and Wikimedia Commons (phab:T187265phab:T186714)
Representation and grammatical features of the form can be changed using the UI (WikibaseLexeme) (phab:T173743, phab:T160525)
Significantly (on average to 1/4th) reduced the number of changes from Wikidata showing up on the watchlists and recent changes on Wikipedias and the other sister projects. This way changes that do not affect an article should no longer show up. We're still holding off roll-out to Commons, Cebuano, Waray-Waray and Armenian Wikipedia because of scalability concerns.
Working on optimizing one of the largest database tables (wb_terms) (phab:T188279)
Fixing a bug on how Wikidata changes are shown on Wikipedia (phab:T189320)
Continued addressing security review issues for Wikibase-Lexeme extension (phab:T186726)
Final note from Léa: thanks to people who participated to the feedback page! Today's Weekly Summary is already improved thanks to your suggestions. Feel free to add more comments, and feel free to edit the newsletter yourself: all small contributions are welcome :)
The property suggestions were updated last week, the last update was in December 2017. The most noticable effect is the higher ranking of "family name" (P734) on items about people. Input about the suggester is still welcome.
George, le deuxième texte (fr), a website querying Wikidata to find French female authors, in order to bring more diversity in the literature school programs
New, configurable download page for Mix’n’match catalogs (example)
Upcoming: EuropeanaTech and Wikidata Workshop Day for GLAMs, Rotterdam (NL), Monday 14 May. A day of GLAM-related workshops around Wikidata and Structured Commons, for beginners and advanced users.
New search code for Wikidata merged. You may notice the improvement in the search results output for Wikidata item. However, new code for search is not enabled, only new results format. The search code will be enabled next week.
Improving formatting of language and lexical category in diff for Lexemes (phab:T189679)
A new version of Denelezh, a tool to monitor the gender gap in Wikidata, has been released, including a new methodology to produce the data (explained at the top of the main page and in the documentation), and an overview of the gender gap by Wikimedia project.
WikiWorkshop, a forum bringing together researchers exploring all aspects the Wikimedia projects, in Lyon, April 24th. Seven papers related to Wikidata will be presented.
Ongoing: On 24 May, there was a significant outage affecting Wikidata and sister projects that use Wikidata. As a result, some features of are temporarily disabled: Wikidata's property suggester, Lua modules and parser functions calling by label instead of ID, search for the ArticlePlaceholder. We apologize for the inconvenience, we're working to get them back as soon as possible. For technical details, see: phab:T195520 & Incident documentation/20180524-wikidata.
Made constraint check result appear directly after adding a new statement (phab:T194247)
Working on looking up entities by external identifiers on Special:Search (phab:T99899)
Added Docker image to Wikibase website (phab:T189936)
Added WikibaseImport script to Docker images to make it easier for people to start their own Wikibase install with some data imported from Wikidata (phab:T192080)
You can now use global preferences on most wikis. This means you can set preferences for all wikis at the same time. Before this you had to change them on each individual wiki.
Country geoshape data have been added to Commons and linked to the corresponding Wikidata items. These geoshapes can be used to visualise query results e.g. World map showing population of each country.
Learning to Generate Wikipedia Summaries for Underserved Languages from Wikidata, presented at the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics by Lucie Kaffee and Hady Elsahar (see the poster and the paper)
Developing a prototype for usability testing for how the term box (labels, descriptions, aliases) could work on mobile
Investigating how we can do the display of items (their label and sometimes description when linked to in a statement or in listings like Recent Changes) in a way that is less of an issue for the database
Working on including the dispatch lag in the maxlag API to make it easier for bots to see when they should stop editing because of performance reasons (phabricator:T194950)
Working on adding a Lua function to check if an item is a subclass/instance of another one (phabricator:T179155)
Created an API that returns constraint violations for an item in TTL format in preparation for making constraint violations queryable in the query service (phabricator:T194762)
Started planning for support for Senses
Added more helpful text on Special:NewLexeme to make it easier to understand what information is required (phabricator:T193602)
Working on pre-filling the spelling variant for a new Form's representation (phabricator:T195708)
Has recibido esta notificación porque te inscribiste como traductor de español y portugués en Wikidata.
La página Wikidata:Introduction está disponible para su traducción. Puedes traducirla aquí:
There will be an IRC Office Hour for Structured Data on Commons on Tuesday, 26 June from 18:00-19:00 UTC. More information, including time and date conversion, is available on Meta. There is no set topic, you are welcome to bring any discussion that you would like to the office hour.
Celtic Knot Conference, dedicated to Wikimedia projects and minority languages, July 5-6, in Aberystwyth (Wales). A lot of Wikidata workshops will take place during this event.
The Commons template Wikidata infobox has now passed 1.3 million uses on Commons categories, with plenty more still to come. A new help page gives advice on how to add, extend or improve uses of it, and how to fix data problems.
EditGroups can now revert batches which created items. These items are deleted in the revert batch. This feature is only available to administrators but other users can easily request revert from the tool.
populationWDvsOSM: a new script that compares the population in OSM place nodes and boundary relations with Wikidata
user:Lakokat is back to adminship, congratulations!
Terminator, a tool by Magnus Manske that finds Wikidata items that lack a label, description, or article in a specific language, has now a version 2 (blog post)
Further work on supporting Senses on Lexemes - specifically persistent IDs for Senses and preventing the deletion of the last Gloss of a Sense (phabricator:T198032, phabricator:T198199)
Adjusted colors of the Query Service UI to be more in line with Wikimedia style guide (phabricator:T192235, Thanks abian!)
Past: State of the Map, the OpenStreetMap equivalent of Wikimania, was held in Milan from 28-30 July. There were two meetups on interactions between Wikimedia and OSM, and Wikidata was mentioned in several sessions, including:
JOSM/Plugins/Wikipedia/GSoC 2018: 'Floscher' has been working to improve the Wikidata/Wikipedia-related functionality of the 'JOSM' editor for OpenStreetMap
Design Challenges in Named Entity Transliteration - a paper discussing "fundamental design challenges that impact the development of a multilingual state-of-the-art named entity transliteration system", with reference to Wikidata
Quicksilver: Training an #ML system to generate draft Wikipedia articles and Wikidata entries simultaneously, slides by John Bohannon and Vedant Dharnidharka
It's possible to add somevalue and novalue using QuickStatements, and to use the tool on test.wikidata.org as well.
More properties can be searched using haswbstatement. This includes all properties with "external identifier", "string", "item", "property", "lexeme", "form" and "sense" datatypes, except published in (P1433) and cites (P2860). In addition you may make queries without a specified value.
The page creation and edit rate limit imposed in April will be removed in the next days. However, users who are not bots or administrators are throttled to 90 edits per minute (which was set up on all Wikimedia wikis in May).
These new languages are now supported for monolingual text strings: mid, mnw, gmy, rar, haz, uga. The language doesn't show up in the suggester, but you can save the statement and it will be stored properly.
Continued work on merging Lexemes. Merging via the SpecialPage is done and will be rolled out soon. Merging via the API is still being worked on. (phabricator:T189129)
Long Lemmas in Lexemes look bad because they are not flowing to the next line and instead break the layout. Working on a fix. (phabricator:T195367)
Improving the validity of the HTML of the Lexeme headers. (phabricator:T196228)
Worked on showing the Lemma(s) or Representation(s) when Lexemes or Forms are mentioned in constraint reports. (phabricator:T195315)
Got a new beta feature ready for deployment that will improve the suggestions for properties like sex/gender by first suggesting the values defined in the one-of constraint. (phabricator:T202712)
Continuing through September and early October: Andy Mabbett is touring Australia for a series of open-science and GLAM Wiki-focused talks, workshops, and meetups.
An increasing number of reports from This Month in GLAM Wikidata related stories. To follow, subscribe here. Though most country reports include Wikidata activities, highlights from this month include:
Collection Explorer, a Wikidata-driven tool bringing together collection data from the Ashmolean Museum, the Bodleian Library, and the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Has recibido esta notificación porque te inscribiste como traductor de español y portugués en Wikidata.
La página Help:Sitelinks está disponible para su traducción. Puedes traducirla aquí:
Has recibido esta notificación porque te inscribiste como traductor de español y portugués en Wikidata.
La página Help:Sitelinks está disponible para su traducción. Puedes traducirla aquí:
Has recibido esta notificación porque te inscribiste como traductor de español y portugués en Wikidata.
La página Help talk:Property constraints portal/sandbox está disponible para su traducción. Puedes traducirla aquí:
There were three Wikidata-related presentations at the 10th International Conference on Ecological Informatics that took place on 23-28 September in Jena.
Upcoming: German-speaking WikiCon, October 3-5 in St Gallen (Switzerland). Several Wikidata-related talks and workshops in the programme.
SPNHC & TDWG Conference 2018 — blog post on a talk (slides, speaker notes) about using Wikimedia projects and materials from the Biodiversity Heritage Library and other sources to collect information regarding New Zealand's biodiversity
Has recibido esta notificación porque te inscribiste como traductor de español y portugués en Wikidata.
La página Wikidata:Edit groups está disponible para su traducción. Puedes traducirla aquí:
A new Wikidata game has been created to suggest corrections for some constraints violations. These corrections are learned from the Wikidata edit history.
A Wikidata workshop will be led by Shani Evenstein, in collaboration with Wikimedia Israel & and the Israel Internet Association, on 18th & 25th of October in Tel Aviv. The first meeting will be dedicated to an introduction and adding information to WD, and the second meeting will focus on querying & SPARQL.
An Introduction to Wikidata by Harmonia Amanda, an Introduction to Wikibase by Sandra Müllrick and a Wikicite workshop by Miriam Redi at the Wiki Techstorm in the Dutch National Library in the Hague on the 26th & 27th of October
Many events to celebrate Wikidata's birthday around the world. You can check the full list and the map to find one near you
Die vergessene fünfte Partnerstadt (German), Der Landbote, October 18, 2018. Press article about the discoverage of Winterthur's sister city Ontario thanks to Wikidata, which only became official in Ontario in the year 1982, while it got forgotten in Winterthur.
A new academic course featuring Wikidata opened on October 15th at Tel Aviv University. The elective is called "From Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, from Wikipedia to Wikidata" and it's the 1st for-credit course in the world to focus on Wikidata! The course is available to all undergraduate students at TAU, from all disciplines, and is led by educator & Wikimedian Shani Evenstein.
Change on QuickStatements: all your new QuickStatements batch job edits will now be done under your own account, rather than QuickStatementsBot (thanks to Lucas)
Wikidata Image Positions, showing the relative position of depicted elements within the images of items (example, documentation)
Plenty of Wikidata 6th birthday events happen all around the world. You can check the Commons category and the hashtag #WikidataBirthday on social networks.
A new tool to display Wikimedia Commons categories (and Wikipedia/Wikidata tags) with coordinates on the OSM map
The Association of Research Libraries published the draft of a Wikidata Task Force White Paper on how libraries and Wikidata/ Wikibase con join forces aroud linked open data for both library discovery systems and Wikipedia, and advancing a diversity and inclusion agenda in the cultures of both libraries and Wikimedia. The draft is open for public comment until 30 November.
The Swedish National Heritage Board has started working on a project, related to Structured Data on Commons, that focuses on ways to feed back improved (crowdsourced) metadata to cultural institutions who contribute media files to Wikimedia Commons.
Upcoming: "Researcher meets Curator", with a subquestion: "What are the consequences of collecting born digital sources, working with digital network analysis and engaging with linked open data initiatives such as Wikidata", in Maastricht on 22 March 2019. Call for papers
We added a Page property for easier programmatic access to the number of Senses and Forms of a Lexeme (phabricator:T199611)
The code samples in the query service have been improved (phabricator:T207749, thanks abian!)
We're working on tracking how often the different Lua functions that Wikibase provides are used in the Wikimedia project to see how that changes over time (phabricator:T191416)
We worked on and fixed a security incident related to blocking (phabricator:T210953)
We are continuing to bring the termbox (showing labels, descriptions, aliases) to mobile viewers
Has recibido esta notificación porque te inscribiste como traductor de español y portugués en Wikidata.
La página Wikidata:Showcase lexemes está disponible para su traducción. Puedes traducirla aquí:
Call for contribution for the WikiWorkshop, forum bringing together researchers exploring all aspects of the Wikimedia projects, held in May 2019 in San Francisco, is now open until January 31st
Scholia's "missing" pages (example) now link to the new Author Disambiguator tool, and a Listeria list is available to help prioritize co-author disambiguation for authors with sitelinks.
Has recibido esta notificación porque te inscribiste como traductor de español y portugués en Wikidata.
La página Wikidata:Property creators está disponible para su traducción. Puedes traducirla aquí:
Has recibido esta notificación porque te inscribiste como traductor de español y portugués en Wikidata.
La página Help:P3182 está disponible para su traducción. Puedes traducirla aquí:
Has recibido esta notificación porque te inscribiste como traductor de español y portugués en Wikidata.
La página Wikidata:Administrators está disponible para su traducción. Puedes traducirla aquí:
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