Pelagic

Contacting me. This page is the best way to get my attention. Please do ping me in conversations, but I often fall behind. Partly this is because of the large number of notifications I get from Structured Discussions on MediaWiki wiki. The mailbox I use with Wikipedia is mainly for website registrations, password resets, spam, and notifications. Unfortunately you often can't get one without the others. I don't check it regularly. If you want to send me something non-publicly, please do use wikimail and leave a note here so that I know about it.

Newsletters are archived (or dual-delivered) to /Newsletters. Apologies for all the un-actioned newsletters here; I hope to clean them up some day. See also /NewsSelection. Automated notices are manually archived to /Notices.

Welcome from Martyman

Welcome!

Hello Pelagic, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page
• Help pages
• Tutorial
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page.

I see you aren't brand new but I thought as no one else had greated you yet I would say hi. I notice you have been editing articles related to Sydney which is great there is still a lot of information about Australia that needs to be fleshed out. It would be great if you would consider joining the Sydney WikiProject which helps users focus their efforts and sets out guidlines and targets for Sydney articles. It would also help you meet other editors who may have similar interests to you. There is also the Australian Wikipedians' notice board which is central meeting place for Australian Wikipedians. --Martyman-(talk) 09:39, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Hi

Thanks, Martyman, that's a great welcome message. I'm posting back onto my own talk page in case you have a watch on it. I'm new at this so still don't have a great grasp on how the various user pages, discussion pages, project pages, etc. fit into the whole authoring/revision/consensus/editing process.

Pelagic 17:42, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

It can be a bit confuding yes, though after enough time most things here become almost second nature. It is easy to forget how daunting the interface and communication system is for new comers. I can recommend that the Wikipedia:Community Portal has many useful links for learning your way around. --Martyman-(talk) 21:02, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Sydney meetup

Hi, I got your name from this list, and thought you might be interested in a meetup in Sydney at the Alexandria Hotel tomorrow. I hope you can join us. Sorry for the late notice. --99of9 (talk) 11:23, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for October 3

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Western banded snake eagle, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Raptor. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 09:15, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Apology

Pelagic ... very sorry if you got a few password reset messages. I couldn't remember my previously created but unused account name and the system looked like it let me send a password reset to your acccount and my email -- hopefully it just looks that way and doesn't really do it. I am now pelagicsmath Pelagicsmath (talk) 01:04, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

DYK for White-rumped falcon

 — Crisco 1492 (talk) 00:04, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Finding copyright year on UBD street directories

Hi, DaveDodgy here. I read what you were writing about Bankstown Airport and it's naming. Do you still have the old street directory with only the edition number (no year) ? Thanks. DaveDodgy (talk) 14:27, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Wow, Dave, that post was nine years ago! I'd forgotten all about it. I'm not sure whether I could put my hands on the book, it may be packed away. If I find it on the bookshelf I'll let you know, but I have a feeling it's in a crate under a pile of other crates behind a mountain of stuff in a storage unit. Or my wife may have thrown it out years ago without my knowledge. Pelagic (talk) 11:58, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

Hi. I know exactly how you feel. I moved home so many times in the last 4 years alone! Things in PODS, things in a 20' container, things hidden in the roof, things chucked out by my landlords, and cousin, etc. Not knowing what I still have, and what is gone. Or where it is! Nightmare!!!! Depressing!!!! If you ever see the same street directory, at a garage sale, or where ever (based on the image of the front cover) have a look, and get back online ! :) Sorry to any moderator, I know this comment doesn't belong here. DaveDodgy (talk) 13:32, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Talk:The Dark Fields

Care to reply? --George Ho (talk) 04:36, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the prompt, George. I've replied on the talk page. I hope this mention pings you (am still trying to get my head around the alerting system). Pelagic (talk) 10:51, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:40, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

A brownie for you!

Thank you for your help!!! Songuitar333 (talk) 07:08, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Teamwork Barnstar
	Thank You for editing Pransukh Nayak and helping me in DYK. Regards, Nizil (talk) 05:40, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

DYK nomination of Cheerleading in Australia

Hello! Your submission of Cheerleading in Australia at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and some issues with it may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) underneath your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 00:11, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

Template:Did you know nominations/Cheerleading in Australia

Hello. I have reviewed your DYK nomination of Cheerleading in Australia, and there are some sourcing and issues that need to be addressed. Please fix these as soon as possible, otherwise the nomination will be marked for closure as stale. Thank you and happy editing. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 01:28, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

Please see new note on your DYK nomination. Yoninah (talk) 22:34, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Cheerleading in Australia

Hello Pelagic. As you have not responded to comments left on your DYK nomination of Cheerleading in Australia, the nomination has now been marked for closure. If you wish for the nomination to continue, please leave a message there before it is closed. Thank you. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 02:02, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

Template:Did you know nominations/Cheerleading in Australia

As you have not been active on Wikipedia over the past few weeks, I have now marked your DYK nomination for closure. If you wish for the nomination to continue, please return to editing as soon as possible. Thank you. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 04:00, 19 September 2018 (UTC)

This bot DID NOT nominate any file(s) for deletion; please refer to the page history of each individual file for details. Thanks, FastilyBot (talk) 01:00, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

Page move

I moved the page you created today to User:Pelagic/sandbox/j/2019/08/16. You created the page in mainspace because you forgot to prepend User: before your name. Schazjmd (talk) 21:58, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

Belated note: thanked on their talk page with some wikilove. Pelagic (talk) 01:59, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

Arb comments

Hi Pelagic, could it be that your latest comment on the Fram proposed decision talkpage got accidentally placed in the wrong section? It ended up underneath mine but looks as if it was meant to be in yours, right? Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:48, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Heheh, now that I look more closely, it seems you actually posted it three times, in a different section each. Probably because somebody else was busy inserting more section headings above yours and edit-conflicting with you all the time. ;-) Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:51, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Aha, you've hit the nail on the head, FP☼. I see that Gerda added some subheads and that the section-edit links work by section number — action=edit&section=22 or #/editor/22 — so that explanation would make … 'perfect' sense. The mobile interface doesn't appear to be detecting edit conflicts for me. (Nothing appeared to happen after tapping the Publish button. Also nothing happened when I tried to delete the stray comment in Nosebagbear's section, as you were removing that at the same time. Have left a null-edit summary in the history: mobdiff.) Not sure if the broken ec-detection is a general thing, or specific to AMC, &/or dependent on platform/device. Thanks for cleaning up. Pelagic (talk) 18:53, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Brock Blomberg Bio Request

Hello! I want to thank you again for helping with this request to review and remove the misinterpreted content from the Brock Blomberg article. I was hoping you'd be able to return to this request to remove inaccurate text about T. Winegar as well. I included the link to the (resolved) legal docket, per your request. The last 2 paragraphs of the "Career" section are problematic (as outlined here), but I'm willing to focus on the Winegar content specifically if that's your preference. I understand you probably have a few other requests out there, so if there are fellow editors who may be willing to assist or offer recommendations, please feel free to point me in that direction too. Thanks, again, for your ongoing help and guidance! TY Ursinus (talk) 19:10, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

A survey to improve the community consultation outreach process

Hello!

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking to improve the community consultation outreach process for Foundation policies, and we are interested in why you didn't participate in a recent consultation that followed a community discussion you’ve been part of.

Please fill out this short survey to help us improve our community consultation process for the future. It should only take about three minutes.

The privacy policy for this survey is here. This survey is a one-off request from us related to this unique topic.

Thank you for your participation, Kbrown (WMF) 10:45, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Darkinyung people

Thanks for your edits on this page.

One point about bibliographic listings: they are sorted alphabetically by author(s) last name, not by date only. If there is more than one work by the same author, they are sorted by date within author; and if there is more than one work by the same author in the same year, they are distinguished by a single lower-case alphabetic suffix (called a "date disambiguator"), for example Smith 1995a, Smith 1995b, etc.

I mention this because I saw your hidden comment in the wikitext ("ordered by year"). I have a script which takes care of this all automatically (plus a lot more): just on the sorting (a small part of its job), it has to worry about authors with the same last name but different first names, cites with more than one author; cites that don't have any author at all, plus it adds date disambiguators automatically, if needed. If you see "fixes" in my edit summaries on any of the Australian Aboriginal articles, it is referring to this script, which I call my "ETVP script" and is partly described by the long pinned thread on my talk page. --NSH001 (talk) 23:52, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

Desktop improvements prototype

Hello, Pelagic!

		Exploration of the Unknown
		I hereby award you the Exploration of the Unknown award! You are being recognized for your courage and willingness to test a feature, gadget, or tool in development and for the constructive feedback you provided.

Thanks for taking the time to participate in the user feedback round for our desktop improvements prototype. This feedback is super valuable to us and is currently being used to determine our next steps. We have published a report gathering the main takeaways from the feedback and highlighting the changes we’ll make based on this feedback. Please take a look and give us your thoughts on the talk page of the report. To learn more about the project overall and the other features we’re planning on building in the future, check out the main project page.

SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:28, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Secret message

I wonder whether you would like User:Pelagic/common.js to look like User:Whatamidoing (WMF)/common.js.

(Just remember that if you "do" this, you will have to "undo" it when the Beta Feature arrives.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:38, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the hint, Whatamidoing (WMF). I'm giving it a try now. Pelagic ( messages ) Z – (20:35 Mon 01, AEST) 10:35, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Let me know what you think. I'm loving it. (I suspect that the devs produced this so that I would quit pestering them to release it here now. It is sooooo handy on long pages like VPT and ArbCom cases.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:58, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

It sure beats scrolling up to the section heading in a long discussion. There are a few things I’d need before I get to "I’m loving it" territory, though:

1. @-mention tool (coming soon): copying and editing the user-page URL is a right pain. This would be enough to prevent me from using it regularly in production. Seems like a nice-to-have at first, but with continued use it’s more of a must-have. I wonder if the French, Hungarians, etc. feel the same.
2. Edit summary (already a thread on this but I should go back and add to it): most of the time on a talk page, the edit summary is going to be blah like "response" or "comment", but I’ve already had situations where I wanted to put something more specific.
3. Faith that it won’t lose my work when the browser tab reloads. I gather that most post-VE code is supposed to be able to recover, but for me that often doesn’t work. The classic-editor cycle of type–preview–type–preview is more robust. Great for short comments, but for long edits with lots of tab switching there's always Old Faithful.
4. Works on mobile.

— Pelagic ( messages ) Z – (07:57 Tue 02, AEST) 21:57, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-24

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

Recent changes

• Some articles have tables that can be sorted in different ways. For example a list of countries can be sorted alphabetically but you can click on the size column to sort them by size. If you clicked on the column a second time it would sort the countries from the bottom to the top instead. A third click will now take you back to the original sorting. [1]
• Self-closed tags now work as in the HTML5 specifications. This means you should stop using some of them. <b/> is an example of a self-closed tag that won't work. area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, keygen, link, meta, param, source, track, wbr can be self-closed. Pages with tags that should not be self-closed have been listed in a tracking category since 2016. They will be listed in Special:LintErrors/self-closed-tag. This doesn't affect <references /> or <ref />. [2]
• There is a banner called WikidataPageBanner. It is for example used by the Wikivoyages, Wikimedia Russia and the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Turkish Wikipedias. It will now been seen by mobile visitors too. Before this it was only seen on desktop. The wikis should update instructions on MediaWiki:Sitenotice so that editors know to test and style for mobile too. [3][4]

Changes later this week

• You can now edit MassMessage descriptions through the API. This is useful for tools and gadgets. [5]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 June. It will be on all wikis from 11 June (calendar).

Future changes

• A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use TemplateStyles instead. 118 wikis need to fix this. You can read more and see if your wiki is affected. [6]

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

21:12, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #2 – Quick updates

Read this in another language • Subscription list

The new features include a toolbar. What do you think should be in the toolbar?

This edition of the Editing newsletter includes information the Wikipedia:Talk pages project, an effort to help contributors communicate on wiki more easily. The central project page is on MediaWiki.org.

• Reply tool: This is available as a Beta Feature at the four partner wikis (Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian Wikipedias). The Beta Feature will get new features soon. The new features include writing comments in a new visual editing mode and pinging other users by typing @. You can test the new features on the Beta Cluster. Some other wikis will have a chance to try the Beta Feature in the coming months.
• New requirements for user signatures: Soon, users will not be able to save invalid custom signatures in Special:Preferences. This will reduce signature spoofing, prevent page corruption, and make new talk page tools more reliable. Most editors will not be affected.
• New discussion tool: The Editing team is beginning work on a simpler process for starting new discussions. You can see the initial design on the project page.
• Research on the use of talk pages: The Editing team worked with the Wikimedia research team to study how talk pages help editors improve articles. We learned that new editors who use talk pages make more edits to the main namespace than new editors who don't use talk pages.

– Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-25

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

Recent changes

• Toolforge hosts several tools created by the Wikimedia community like edit counters or enhanced editors. It is changing the domain from tools.wmflabs.org to toolforge.org. The routing scheme is moving from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org. You can read the details. Tools that use OAuth will have to be updated to keep working. You can ask for help.

Problems

• There is a Wikidata item link in the sidebar on many pages. This disappeared for a couple of days for users who have the Monobook skin. This was because of a bug. It has now been fixed. [7]
• Editing, logging in and logging out didn't work properly for a short period of time last week. It was soon fixed. [8]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 June. It will be on all wikis from 18 June (calendar).

Future changes

• Pywikibot is a Python library to automate work on wikis. It will not support Python 2 after the new version in July. Support for Python 3.4 and MediaWiki below 1.19 will also be dropped. You should migrate to Python 3. You can ask for help. [9]
• The selectors .menu and .vectorMenu will no longer work in the Vector skin. This can affect gadgets and user scripts. .menu should be replaced by ul. .vectorMenu should be replaced by .vector-menu. [10]

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

21:38, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-26

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

Problems

• There are some new tools to make it easier for newcomers to start editing. They are available on some wikis. These wikis had a problem with the visual editor for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug in the new tools. It was soon fixed. [11]
• Some user scripts and gadgets stopped working because of a change to CSS selectors. .vectorTabs should be replaced with .vector-menu-tabs to fix this. [12]

Changes later this week

• The developers are working on a new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This will be released on 24 June. You can give feedback. [13]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 June. It will be on all wikis from 25 June (calendar).

Future changes

• A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use TemplateStyles instead. 91 wikis still need to fix this. You can read more and see if your wiki is affected. [14]

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

18:49, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 June 2020

• News and notes: Progress at Wikipedia Library and Wikijournal of Medicine

• Community view: Community open letter on renaming

• Gallery: After the killing of George Floyd

• In the media: Part collaboration and part combat

• Discussion report: Community reacts to WMF rebranding proposals

• Featured content: Sports are returning, with a rainbow

• Arbitration report: Anti-harassment RfC and a checkuser revocation

• Traffic report: The pandemic, alleged murder, a massacre, and other deaths

• News from the WMF: We stand for racial justice

• Recent research: Wikipedia and COVID-19; automated Wikipedia-based fact-checking

• Interview: What is wrong with rebranding to "Wikipedia Foundation"?

• Humour: Cherchez une femme

• Opinion: Trying to find COI or paid editors? Just read the news

• On the bright side: For what are you grateful this month?

• In focus: Edit Loud, Edit Proud: LGBTIQ+ Wikimedians and Global Information Activism

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Black Lives Matter

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:53, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-27

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

Problems

• Everyone was logged out. This was because a few users saw the wikis as if they were logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [15]
• Some readers didn't see new edits to pages. If the page had been recently changed they saw an older version of the page instead. This only affected readers who were logged out. It lasted for ten days. It has been fixed. [16]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 July. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (calendar).

Future changes

• The Modern and Monobook skins use the ID searchGoButton for the go button. This is searchButton for Vector. To have the same ID for all skins it will change to searchButton in Monobook and Modern too. This will affect gadgets and user scripts. It will happen on 23 July. They should be updated to use searchButton. You can read more and see a list of affected scripts.

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

16:31, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #3

On 16 March 2020, the 50 millionth edit was made using the visual editor on desktop.

Seven years ago this week, the Editing team made the visual editor available by default to all logged-in editors using the desktop site at the English Wikipedia. Here's what happened since its introduction:

• The 50 millionth edit using the visual editor on desktop was made this year. More than 10 million edits have been made here at the English Wikipedia.
• More than 2 million new articles have been created in the visual editor. More than 600,000 of these new articles were created during 2019.
• Almost 5 million edits on the mobile site have been made with the visual editor. Most of these edits have been made since the Editing team started improving the mobile visual editor in 2018.
• The proportion of all edits made using the visual editor has been increasing every year.
• Editors have made more than 7 million edits in the 2017 wikitext editor, including starting 600,000 new articles in it. The 2017 wikitext editor is VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode. You can enable it in your preferences.
• On 17 November 2019, the first edit from outer space was made in the mobile visual editor.
• In 2019, 35% of the edits by newcomers, and half of their first edits, were made using the visual editor. This percentage has been increasing every year since the tool became available.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:06, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-28

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

Problems

• The Score extension has been disabled for now. This is because of a security issue. It will work again as soon as the security issue has been fixed. [17]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 July. It will be on all wikis from 9 July (calendar).

Future changes

• Abstract Wikipedia is a new Wikimedia project. It will collect language-independent information that can be easily read in different languages. It builds on Wikidata. The name is preliminary. You can read more. [18]
• The iOS Wikipedia app developers are thinking about new experimental tools. If you use an iPhone you can help them by answering the survey.
• Some rules for user signatures will soon be enforced. Lint errors and invalid HTML will no longer be allowed in user signatures. Nested substitution will not be allowed. A link to your user page, user talk page or user contributions will be required. You can check if your signature works with the new rules. This is because the signatures can cause problems for tools or other text on the page.

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

20:18, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-29

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

Recent changes

• Users can thank others for their edits. Checkusers can now see user data related to that action. This can help identify sock puppets who harass others using thanks. [19]

Problems

• Everyone was logged out a couple of weeks ago to fix a security problem. The problem was not entirely fixed. Because of this everyone was logged out once again last week. [20][21]

Changes later this week

• Wikis that are not for one specific language can translate pages. Sometimes parts of translations are outdated or missing. Outdated translations are marked with a pink background. Missing translations will also be marked in the future. This markup can sometimes break things. It can soon be disabled by using <translate nowrap></translate> on the source page. [22]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 July. It will be on all wikis from 16 July (calendar).

Future changes

• Wikimedia code review plans to use GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. [23][24][25][26]

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

16:30, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-30

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

Recent changes

• A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. The mobile main page special casing stopped working 14 July. 60 wikis now have main pages that don't work well on mobile. You can see which ones, how to fix it and how to get help in Phabricator. This is the same problem that was reported in Tech News 2020/24 and 2020/26.

Problems

• There is a problem with the interlanguage links. The interlanguage links are the links that help you find a specific page in a different language. The sorting is broken. The developers are working on a solution. [27]
• Some users keep getting the notifications for the same event. Some of these are old events. [28]
• Some users have trouble logging in. This is probably a browser cookie problem. The developers are working on understanding the problem. If you have trouble logging in you can see the details on Phabricator. [29]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 July. It will be on all wikis from 23 July (calendar).

Future changes

• There is a Printable version link. This will disappear. That is because web browsers today can create a printable version or show how it will look in print anyway. [30]

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

19:11, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Pelagic

Your username is fantastic. that is all. :) --Merbabu (talk) 09:47, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-31 (part)

[...]

• The first features of the Desktop Improvements project are available for logged-in users on all wikis. In order to use them, uncheck Use Legacy Vector in your local or global preferences in section Skin preferences. More improvements are planned. Feedback is welcome.

[...]

The Signpost: 2 August 2020

• Special report: Wikipedia and the End of Open Collaboration?

• COI and paid editing: Some strange people edit Wikipedia for money

• News and notes: Abstract Wikipedia, a hoax, sex symbols, and a new admin

• In the media: Dog days gone bad

• Discussion report: Fox News, a flight of RfAs, and banning policy

• Featured content: Remembering Art, Valor, and Freedom

• Traffic report: Now for something completely different

• Gallery: Photos of threatened species from iNaturalist

• News from the WMF: New Chinese national security law in Hong Kong could limit the privacy of Wikipedia users

• Recent research: Receiving thanks increases retention, but not the time contributed to Wikipedia

• Essay: Not compatible with a collaborative project

• Obituaries: Hasteur and Brian McNeil

• In focus: WikiLoop DoubleCheck, reviewing edits made easy

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:25, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-32

[...]

Changes later this week

• The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. This week, the current beta feature will become the video player for everyone on most non-Wikipedia wikis. The old player will be removed. [31]
• Users' global.js and global.css pages will now also be loaded on the mobile site. You can read documentation for how to avoid applying styles to the mobile skin. [32]

[...]

15:43, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-33

[...]

Recent changes

• FileImporter and FileExporter became standard features on all Wikis during the first week of August. They help you transfer files from local wikis to Wikimedia Commons with the original file information and history intact. [33]

[...]

16:06, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-35

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 August. It will be on all wikis from 27 August (calendar).

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

17:59, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

IFLA Library Reference Model moved to draftspace

An article you recently created, IFLA Library Reference Model, does not have enough sources and citations as written to remain published. It needs more citations from reliable, independent sources. (?) Information that can't be referenced should be removed (verifiability is of central importance on Wikipedia). I've moved your draft to draftspace (with a prefix of "Draft:" before the article title) where you can incubate the article with minimal disruption. When you feel the article meets Wikipedia's general notability guideline and thus is ready for mainspace, please click on the "Submit your draft for review!" button at the top of the page. Mccapra (talk) 23:37, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Why, @Mccapra? Are you saying it's non-notable? Pelagic ( messages ) – (14:30 Thu 27, AEST) 04:30, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Hi. I’m saying it does not have enough sources to remain published. It has one that is not third-party. Thanks Mccapra (talk) 04:55, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

@Mccapra, that's not my understanding of how it works. Articles, even if undeveloped, are kept if the subject is notable. But whatever, I've added some third-party ref's and expanded the content slightly. Understandably for a new standard, a lot of the third-party matter is conference presentations and slide decks. I also removed the AfC template, since I have no intention of going through that process. Thanks for replying so promptly. Would you be happy for me to de-draftify it in its new state? Pelagic ( messages ) – (17:32 Thu 27, AEST) 07:32, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Yes thanks that’s great. Mccapra (talk) 09:00, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks for reviewing. Pelagic ( messages ) – (19:01 Thu 27, AEST) 09:01, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-41 (highlights)

m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2020/41

Selected items:

• There is a new tool where you can see which home wiki users have in discussions on Meta. This can help show which communities are not part of the discussion on wikis where we make decisions that affect many other wikis.

Problems

• There were many errors with the new MediaWiki version last week. The new version was rolled back. Updates that should have happened last week are late. [34]
• Everyone was logged out. This was because a user reported being logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [35]
• Many pages have JavaScript errors. You can read more and now see a list of user scripts with errors.

Wikidata weekly summary #437 (highlight)

• Tool of the week
  • OD2WD automatically converts CSV files from Open Data portals into QuickStatements for Wikidata republishing. Demo video

Wikidata weekly summary #439 (trimmed)

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • WikiCite awards 23 grants & eScholarships to improve open citations (including plenty of Wikidata-related projects)
  • Video: Eyoungstrom and Evolution and evolvability explore and explain different Wikidata tools in 15-part series on YouTube - Playlist

...

• • Wikidata Training Workshop 4, by Canadian Arts Presenting Association - YouTube
    • Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata - (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5)

• Tool of the week
  • WikibaseJS-cli allows to edit Wikidata from command line, including creating items from samples ("templates") and do complex transformations of statements

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: ... permits, prohibits, ...

• • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: ..., Numérisé par, Online catalog, ... word lookup, hair or facial hair style, Cup size, for color scheme

• • Query examples:

...

• • • Invasive species in EU and whether they have articles in different languages (Source)

...

• • Wikimedia Commons Query examples:
    • Get information of Europeana item using federated query

• Development

...

• • Working on creating and tracking implicit usages of Wikidata descriptions so description changes show up in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co (phab:T265897)
  • Created Extension:WikibaseManifest documentation on MediaWiki.
  • Looking into what would be considered a mismatch when comparing WIkidata's data against another database. This is groundwork for potentially automating this in the future to find potential issues in the data to flag to editors.
  • Working on deploying the new Item quality scoring model for ORES to production so we have improved quality scores [No link in original newsletter, but see Item quality judgments from ORES.]

...

• • Published Easier Access for Programmers to Wikidata research report

... Read the full report · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 16:00, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-44

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

Problems

• You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on October 27 around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [36]
• Last week, links to "diffs" from mobile watchlists and recentchanges were linking to page-revisions instead of diffs. This has now been fixed. [37]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• Since the introduction of the interface administrators user group in 2018, administrators couldn’t view the deleted history of CSS/JS pages. Now they can. [38]
• There was a problem with the Change Tags. The software would apply the "Reverted" tag to any page actions such as page-protection changes if they came directly after a reverted edit. This has now been fixed for new edits. [39]
• The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias in November. Another announcement will be made once the date is finalized. [40]

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

17:37, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

Growth team updates #15

Welcome to the fifteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Variants C and D deployed

Variant D in Portuguese Wikipedia

Variants C and D are two new arrangements of the newcomer homepage. We hope they will increase the number of users using suggested edits. They both make suggested edits the clear place where newcomers should get started on the page. They have some differences in their workflows, because we want to test which design is better. We deployed these variants on October 19; half of newcomers get each variant. After about 5 weeks, we will analyze the data from the tests. The goal is to determine which variant is helping more newcomers to make more suggested edits. We will identify the better variant and then use it with all newcomers.

Structured tasks: add a link

Concept A for add a link.

As we discussed in previous newsletters, the team is working on our first "structured task": the "add a link" task. After community discussion on design ideas, we ran user tests on the mobile designs. We decided on the design concept we want to use moving forward: Concept A. We're now engineering the backend for this feature. Next, we will be running user tests for desktop designs.

Learn more about the findings.

Community news

• We recently deployed the Growth features to Polish, Portuguese, Swedish and Turkish Wikipedias. 18 wikis now have Growth features. Learn more about getting the features.
• Have you recently checked if all interface messages are translated for your language?

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:09, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 November 2020

• News and notes: Ban on IPs on ptwiki, paid editing for Tatarstan, IP masking

• In the media: Murder, politics, religion, health and books

• Book review: Review of Wikipedia @ 20

• Op-Ed: Anti-vandalism with masked IPs: the steps forward

• Discussion report: Proposal to change board composition, In The News dumps Trump story

• Featured content: The "Green Terror" is neither green nor sufficiently terrifying. Worst Hallowe'en ever.

• Traffic report: Jump back, what's that sound?

• Interview: Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner

• News from the WMF: Meet the 2020 Wikimedian of the Year

• Recent research: OpenSym 2020: Deletions and gender, masses vs. elites, edit filters

• In focus: The many (reported) deaths of Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:52, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-45

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

Recent changes

• You can no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser uses very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It could lead to downgrade attacks. Since October 29, 2020, users who use old TLS versions will not be able to connect to Wikimedia projects. A list of browser recommendations is available. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [41]
• There is a new automatic tracking category available: Pages with non-numeric formatnum arguments. It collects pages which use the {{formatnum}} parser function with invalid (non-numeric) input, e.g. {{formatnum:TECHNEWS}}. Note that {{formatnum:123,456}} is also invalid input: as described in the documentation, the argument should be unformatted so that it can be reliably and correctly localised. The tracking category will help identify problematic usage and double-formatting. The new tracking category's name can be translated at translatewiki. [42]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 4. It will be on all wikis from November 5 (calendar).
• Administrators and stewards will be able to use a special page (Special:CreateLocalAccount) to force local account creation for a global account. This is useful when account creation is blocked for that user (by a block or a filter). [43]
• The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias on November 4. This change excludes the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias, plus a few smaller Wikipedias with special circumstances. You can read the help page and the troubleshooting guide for more information. [44]

Future changes

• A discussion has been restarted about using a Unicode minus sign (− U+2212) in the output of {{formatnum}} when it is given a negative argument. [45]
• In the future IP addresses of unregistered users will not be shown for everyone. They will get an alias instead. There will be a new user right or an opt-in function for more vandal fighters to see the IPs of unregistered users. There would be some criteria for who gets the user right or opt-in. There will also be other new tools to help handle vandalism. This is early in the process and the developers are still collecting information from the communities before they suggest solutions.

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

16:08, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #440

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

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Hasley (RfP scheduled to end after 2 November 2020 17:23 UTC)

• Events
  • Past: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, October 27 (notes)
  • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Arthur Smith and Daniel Mietchen discussing author items in Wikidata and the Author Disambiguator Tool, 3 November. Agenda
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #37, November 8
  • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, November 3 at 18:00 CET

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Wikidata is eight years old - an interview with product manager Lydia Pintscher (in German), by Elisabeth Giesemann
  • Wikidata 8th birthday, Message from the development team
  • Happy 8th birthday, Wikidata! (8 reasons why Wikidata is great), by Will Kent
  • Happy Eighth Birthday Wikidata!, by Stella Wisdom
  • Tree networks, national history and open mountains of data - knowledge through node formation with Wikidata for the 8th, by Jens Bemme
  • Video: Why is Wikidata important? (Wikidata birthday event - in Spanish)
  • SPARQL in the shadow of Structured Data on Commons, by Zbyszko Papierski
  • Answers to curious questions and where to find them: here's how to query wikidata with SPARQL, by Lianna D'amato
  • CiTO updates #2: annotation migration to Wikidata and first Scholia patch, by Egon Willighagen
  • Video: Wikidata+OpenStreetMaps talk and discussion
  • Video: Wikidata – what libraries need to know about wikidata - Kohacon20, by David Nind
  • Video: Visualizing the neuroscience research ecosystem via Wikidata Scholia, by Daniel Mietchen
  • Video: Knowledge Graphs and Wikidata (in Indonesian)
  • All videos from the WikiCite 2020 Virtual Conference are now on Commons, and embedded in the program page on Meta.

This is 32 hours of video covering 85 individual presentations in 7 languages.

1266 "unique viewers" have watched some portion on YouTubeSince the conference began last Monday.

• Tool of the week
  • reCH is a Wikidata anti-vandalism tool that is used to review edits and patrol new changes.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata Eighth Birthday Presents
    • All recordings of Wikidata Labs are now available on Wikimedia Commons (Wiki Movimento Brasil)
    • Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) tutorial website – a new user-friendly tutorial to querying Wikidata (Wikimedia Israel)
    • Wikidata Spanish Tutorials Website – a brand new user-friendly (with Dublin Core Metadata!) digital collection of Wikidata slides, tutorials, and manuals in Spanish (Biblioteca Daniel Cosío Villegas, Mexico)
    • Happy Birthday from Semantic MediaWiki
    • Wikidata Lexeme Forms ?language_code feature: announcement tweet and documentation edit
    • Automated finding references: dump and dashboard (Wikidata development team - announcement)
    • Better Item quality judgments from ORES (Wikidata development team)
    • Announcement of the distributed WikidataCon 2021 (Wikidata development team - announcement)
    • Results of Sum of all Indian paintings datathon organized by WikiProject India.
    • Happy birthday Wikidata! In the Abstract Wikipedia Updates (2020-10-29) by the project team, speaking about the future integration with Wikidata.
    • Knowledge Grapher filmmaker mode can visually display all the films and cast members of an individual director or producer.
    • User:Teester/EntityShape.js - a userscript to show how an item conforms to an entityschema
  • The next WikidataCon will take place on 29-30-31 October 2021, in a distributed format. Follow this page to keep up to date: WikidataCon 2021.
  • The Election Tracker, uses Wikidata to keep track of upcoming national elections around the world.
  • Accepted published papers for the Wikidata Workshop on Monday, 02.11 are now available online wikidataworkshop.github.io
  • witches.is.ed.ac.uk shows the geographical residence location for accused witches in Scotland.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: die axis, annual average daily traffic, maximum current
    • External identifiers: Rheinland-Pfälzische Personendatenbank ID, Dicionário de Historiadores Portugueses ID, Unione Romana Biblioteche Scientifiche ID, Kramerius of Moravian Library UUID, OpenStreetMap numeric user ID, VA facility ID, Sports-Reference.com college basketball box score ID, Persée article ID, Polski Słownik Judaistyczny ID, Base constructions bibliothèques ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Matrix room, regex (lang), Ukrainian romanization, Power consumption index, Heating energy consumption index, Business Number (Canada), notable tv series, number of points or goals attempted
    • External identifiers: Royal Horticultural Society plant ID, EGAFD ID, NCAA Statistics coach ID, NCAA school code, NCAA Statistics team season ID, Twitch team ID, Twitch tag ID, FINA Wiki ID, All the Tropes identifier, MTMT journal ID, UAF person ID, Soccerway stadium ID, NCAA Statistics player ID, Portuguese Football Federation ID, Wolfram language WordData sense, Namuwiki
  • Query examples:
    • Movies by rate of actors who studied at RADA (When distribution has at last 5 actors)
    • Central libraries in California linked to their branch library
    • Writers in the SIEFAR dictionary with a portrait in Wikimedia Commons (Source)
    • Place and date of birth of people buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery (one color per century of birth) (Source)
    • Occupations of people on Wikidata dying of coronavirus (politician ranks higher than the next 3 occupations combined) (Source)
    • Things Donald Trump and others own / have owned (Source)
    • Graveplots by gender in Père Lachaise Cemetery (Source)
    • Co-authorship between researchers from National University of La Plata (Source)
    • Number of Harvard Law graduates dead by year between 1850 and 1950 (Source)
    • Visualization of the works of Charles Heaphy (Source)
    • Identifiers present on the item for Penelope Cruz (or other movie people), but not on the item for Sean Connery
    • Map of places of birth of people with an identifier Inter-university Health Library in Wikidata colored by century of birth (Source)
    • Map of the trees recorded in OSM with protection status. OSM/Wikidata query (Source)
  • Newest WikiProjects: Wikiproject European Film Awards
  • Newest database reports: Sean Connery filmography

• Development
  • Fixing the issue of `content was: ""` (empty string) when deleting Lexemes (phab:T263435)
  • Final steps for deployment of JSON dumps for Lexeme (phab:T264883)
  • Working on fixing an issue with adding statements with datatype mathematical formula (phab:T266673)
  • The Query Builder can now generate its first very simple query and show the result. You can follow along as we develop it at the demo system.

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 16:47, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

IP block

This IP address or range is used by Netskope web security, which is widely used by companies and governments. For myself, I can bypass it, or wait until I am off work and edit from home. But there might be a fair bit of collateral blockage. Since it's only a short duration, side effects might not be too significant.

(Unless it's actually the X-Forwarded-For 60._._.14 that's blocked, in which case the user was someone in my building!)

This blocked user's request to have autoblock on their IP address lifted has been reviewed by an administrator, who declined the request.

Pelagic (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

Pelagic (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

---

Block message:

Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "ACMruralevents". The reason given for ACMruralevents's block is: ...

• Blocking administrator: ‪Cullen328‬ (talk • blocks)

---

Decline reason: The autoblock is doing its job properly. --jpgordon^{𝄢𝄆 𝄐𝄇} 15:33, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

Meh, thanks anyway. Pelagic ( messages ) – (14:25 Fri 06, AEST) 04:25, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for December 14

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited South Mosman ferry wharf, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Howard Hinton.

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 06:40, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

 Fixed Pelagic ( messages ) – (14:08 Tue 15, AEDT) 03:08, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #447

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

• Events
  • Past: OpenAlt 2020 Conference (replay)
    • Wikidata: how to get involved (in Czech)
    • Lexemes on Wikidata (in Czech)

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Video: HGAPS Speaker Series by Thomas Shafee
    • Wikidata Overview: how you can use it to improve the overall knowledge base of the Internet
    • Wikidata Walkthrough: hands-on editing experience
  • Wikidata for Bat Collectors, YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • Wikidata Live is a real-time visual dashboard for Wikidata edits; paper, interface (visualizes recent changes to Wikidata in quasi real time).

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Complex constraint about labels' language

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: National Library at Kolkata romanization, URL match pattern, URL match replacement value
    • External identifiers: ClassInd audiovisual work ID, Georgia Museum of Art ID, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien ID, tribunsdelaplebe.fr ID, PBA artwork ID, OpenReview.net profile ID, OpenReview.net group ID, OpenReview.net submission ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: applicable "stated in" value, WMF hosted image that could be moved to Commons, Category for the view of the item, OSM object, property related to this topic, personality traits, graph girth, ALA-LC romanization
    • External identifiers: SAPA, Manus Online author ID, Mapy.cz ID, CollectieGelderland-creator-ID, SVTplay identifier, identifiant Mediafilm, IFLA form of music ID, IFLA key of musical work ID, IFLA mode of musical work ID, RDA support type ID, SLAM artwork ID, Kunstmuseum Basel ID, NPG ID, jeuxvideo.com ID, Dizionario bio-bibliografico dei bibliotecari italiani del XX secolo ID, Google Podcasts show ID, Royal Museums Greenwich ID, PIAC ID, Castbox show ID, Stitcher show ID, Pocket Casts show ID, Podcast Addict show ID, Radio.com Podcasts show ID
  • Deleted properties: street address (P969)
  • Query examples:
    • Tex-Mex singers (Source)
    • Map of images from Wicipics project (photography campaign in Wales) (Source)
    • Vito Russo Test in Wikidata
    • Distinct dialects of Wikidata lexemes (Source)
    • Patronage of rapid-transit transportation (Source)
    • People who played Julius Caesar, and what "version" of him they played
  • Newest WikiProjects: Media Representation
  • Newest database reports: Reports on Italian given names

• Development
  • Continuing to work on the query builder. It can now have more than one query conditions. One of the next steps is making it possible to query for Item values. You can follow along on the demo system.
  • Finished working on the problem of values of Statements that link to Forms and Senses not having language attributes associated with them in the HTML code (phab:T267023)
  • Fixed language selectors covering other input fields when using keyboard navigation for Special:NewItem and Special:NewLexeme (phab:T266638)
  • Fixed language fallback indicators sometimes still shown for variant fallbacks (phab:T267502)
  • Working on whitespace stripped while typing when editing lexemes (phab:T250550)

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Help add human (Q5) to properties that currently don't have it.
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help untangle items that refer to different concepts.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 16:50, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-52

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

Tech News

• Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2021.

Recent changes

• The {{citation needed}} template shows when a statement in a Wikipedia article needs a source. If you click on it when you edit with the visual editor there is a popup that explains this. Now it can also show the reason and when it was added. [46]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.

Future changes

• You can propose and discuss what technical improvements should be done for geographic information. This could be coordinates, maps or other related things.
• Some wikis use LanguageConverter to switch between writing systems or variants of a language. This can only be done for the entire page. There will be a <langconvert> tag that can convert a piece of text on a page. [47]
• Oversighters and stewards can hide entries in Special:AbuseLog. They can soon hide multiple entries at once using checkboxes. This works like hiding normal edits. It will happen in early January. [48]

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

20:52, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 December 2020

• News and notes: Year-end legal surprises cause concern, but Public Domain Day is imminent

• In the media: Concealment, data journalism, a non-pig farmer, and some Bluetick Hounds

• Arbitration report: 2020 election results

• Opinion: How to make your factory's safety and labor issues disappear

• Featured content: Very nearly ringing in the New Year with "Blank Space" – but we got there in time.

• Traffic report: 2020 wraps up

• News from the WMF: What Wikipedia saw during election week in the U.S., and what we’re doing next

• Recent research: Predicting the next move in Wikipedia discussions

• Essay: Subjective importance

• Op-Ed: An unforgettable year we might wish to forget

• Gallery: Angels in the architecture

• Humour: 'Twas the Night Before Wikimas

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:25, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

Happy New Year Wikipedia

HNY from Australia! Pelagic ( messages ) – (00:04 Fri 01, AEDT) 13:04, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #449

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

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Martin Urbanec (RfP scheduled to end after 7 January 2021 17:21 UTC)
  • Should we rename place of burial (P119) to place of mortal remains?

• Events
  • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, January 5 at 18:00 CET
  • Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #26 - YouTube, Facebook, 9 January
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #44, January 10
  • Past: Wikidata sessions at rC3 (remote Chaos Communication Congress) (replay)
    • Introduction to Wikidata
    • Wikidata for datajournalists
  • Past: Wikidata sessions at g0vsummit2020 (in Chinese) (replay)
    • Wikidata one year in Taiwan, what is our results and what is our future plan
    • Challenges of GLAM Taiwan

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Video: Applying linked data model for the Bogotá Digital Library (in Spanish) - YouTube
  • Video: Wikidata with Shani Evenstein Sigalov, Wikimedia Armenia - YouTube
  • Video: How to import scholarly articles to Wikidata using Zotero - YouTube
  • Video: How to import books to Wikidata using a spreadsheet and OpenRefine - YouTube
  • Video: How to import library materials to Wikidata using MarcEdit and OpenRefine - YouTube
  • Video: Introduction to Wikidata (in Italian) - YouTube
  • Video: Linking a new Wikipedia article to a Wikidata item - YouTube
  • Video: Schema and Wikidata - YouTube
  • Video: Using Twinkle on Wikidata - YouTube
  • Video: Managing Interlanguage links with Wikidata (in Urdu) - YouTube
  • Blog post: 52 Wikidata weeks 2020
  • Blog post: Scottish nautical wrecks in wikidata

• Tool of the week
  • User:Bargioni/WikiBridge.js userscript enables you to add a tabbed section to Wikidata items showing some paragraphs from Wikipedias chosen by the Babel languages of the logged-in user. Demo video (in Italian)

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata Lexeme Forms now lists languages on the index page using their autonyms (language name in that language). (Source)

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: graph girth, category for the view of the item, ALA-LC romanization, liturgical rank
    • External identifiers: PIAC ID, CPV Supplementary, Dizionario bio-bibliografico dei bibliotecari italiani del XX secolo ID, ISDS ID, Mapy.cz ID, World Rowing ID (UUID format), 1914-1918-Online ID, JAD ID, Game UI Database ID, Lumières.Lausanne ID, Swiss Unihockey player ID, IFF player ID, Magyar életrajzi lexikon ID, Lexikon zum Literatur- und Kulturbetrieb im Österreich der Zwischenkriegszeit ID, Ancient History Encyclopedia ID, Literary Encyclopedia ID, Google Podcasts show ID, Stitcher show ID, Castbox show ID, Pocket Casts show ID, Podcast Addict show ID, TuneIn Podcasts show ID, RadioPublic show ID, Player.fm show ID, PodBean show ID, Podtail show ID, Encyclopedia of Saami Culture ID, The Podcast App show ID, Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries manuscript ID, Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries work ID, Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries person ID, Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries place ID, Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries organization ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: YouTube custom URL, Author last names, Author first names, Naval flag, supplements, closed WMF project sitelink, has part (string value), member, number of data sets
    • External identifiers: IFPI Danmark work ID, National Museum in Warsaw ID, Olympedia Affiliations ID, IFLA value vocabularies ID, Erudit article ID, Olympedia Event ID, dati.beniculturali.it ID, Barnivore product ID, Archivo Histórico de diputados de España ID, Port Letter, FFF player ID (new scheme), Hungarian Film Archive ID, GEPRIS-Historisch ID (Person), EuroBabeIndex ID, MFAT person ID, SportsLogos.net team ID, Alpine Linux package, Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine ID, Povos Indígenas no Brasil ID, NLS place type ID, BookDepository publisher ID, National Historic People id, NFL.com ID (new scheme)
  • Query examples:
    • Works identified (via dedicated property P3893) as entering the public domain on 1/1/2021, ordered by number of articles on Wikimedia sites (Source)
    • Painters in the collections of Paris Musées which enter the public domain on January 1 (Source)
    • Map of forts related to Dutch trading companies VOC and WIC found in the Atlas of Mutual Heritage (Source)
    • Map of forts in the Cologne fortress ring (Source)
    • First-level administrative divisions in Germany
    • Population of cities in Germany corresponds to the total number of vaccinations in Germany (Source)
    • Most popular theorems according to their number of articles on Wikipedia (Source)
    • Number of people who have died, or been diagnosed, of COVID-19, grouped by occupation (Source)
    • Deaths in 2020 - date of birth, date of death, cause of death and country of nationality (Source)
    • Summary of a UK parliamentary career seat-party-start pairs(Source)
    • Timeline of aircraft types around the world and the first time a type of aircraft made a flight (Source)
    • Indonesian legislation related to indigenous people (Source)
    • Which artist could be "D.K. 1964"? (source)
    • Line graph of colleges and universities in India by year of establishment (Source)
    • Graph of Indian films that are remakes of other Indian films (Source)
    • Graph of academic descendants of C. R. Rao and K. Ananda Rau (Source)
    • Map of gram panchayats in Kerala by literacy rate in 2001 (Source)
    • Maps of different places in West Bengal according to suffix (Source)
    • Tree map of Rabindranath's poems according to the month of writing (Source)
    • Count of locations of exhibitions on Wikidata (Source)
    • Wikidata lexeme forms by language (Source)
  • Newest database reports: 2021, Greek given names

• Development
  • Due to the winter holidays, no deployment has happened for Wikidata in the last two weeks.

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 16:26, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-02

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

Recent changes

• You can choose to be reminded when you have not added an edit summary. This can be done in your preferences. This could conflict with the CAPTCHA. This has now been fixed. [49]
• You can link to specific log entries. You can get these links for example by clicking the timestamps in the log. Until now, such links to private log entries showed no entry even if you had permission to view private log entries. The links now show the entry. [50]
• Admins can use the abuse filter tool to automatically prevent bad edits. Three changes happened last week:
  • The filter editing interface now shows syntax errors while you type. This is similar to JavaScript pages. It also shows a warning for regular expressions that match the empty string. New warnings will be added later. [51]
  • Oversighters can now hide multiple filter log entries at once using checkboxes on Special:AbuseLog. This is how the usual revision deletion works. [52]
  • When a filter matches too many actions after it has been changed it is "throttled". The most powerful actions are disabled. This is to avoid many editors getting blocked when an administrator made a mistake. The administrator will now get a notification about this "throttle".
• There is a new tool to build new skins. You can also see existing skins. You can give feedback. [53]
• Bots using the API no longer watch pages automatically based on account preferences. Setting the watchlist to watch will still work. This is to reduce the size of the watchlist data in the database. [54]
• Scribunto's file metadata now includes length. [55]
• CSS and JavaScript code pages now have link anchors to line numbers. You can use wikilinks like w:en:MediaWiki:Common.js#L-50. [56]
• There was a new version of MediaWiki last week. You can read a detailed log of all 763 changes. Most of them are very small and will not affect you.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 January. It will be on all wikis from 14 January (calendar).

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

15:41, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #450

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

• Discussions
  • Closed request for adminship: Martin Urbanec (successful)
  • New request for comments: How should we develop and deploy documentation for items?

• Events
  • Upcoming: Wikidata+Wikibase office hour, Thursday, January 21st, at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time), on Telegram
  • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Using QuickStatements for bulk uploading archived website data to Wikidata with Peter Chan, 12 January. Agenda
  • Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #27 on Wikipedia20 - YouTube, Facebook, 16 January
  • Past: SMWCon videos are published incl. quite a few Wikidata related ones
  • Past: Wiki Workshop 2021 is accepting submissions. The deadline for the submissions to be considered for proceedings is January 29. All other submissions should be received by March 1.
  • Past: Czech editaton Výzva 63 000 (Q102733400) finished (30.11.2020-31.12.2020). Purpose was connect NKCR AUT ID (P691) to Wikidata by hand in Mix'n'match (Q28054658). Detailed info.

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogpost: The nobody who could overtake Wikipedia (in German)
  • Blogpost: Documenting Software Applications on Wikidata, by John Samuel
  • Article: Nitpicking online knowledge representations of governmental leadership: The case of Belgian prime minsters in Wikipedia and Wikidata
  • Paper: Familiar Wikidata: The Case for Building a Data Source We Can Trust - an introduction to the value of Wikidata for humanities research making the case for humanities researchers’ intervention in its development.
  • Video: How to use WikiBridge - a userscript that enables you to add a tabbed section to Wikidata items showing some paragraphs from Wikipedias chosen by the Babel languages of the logged-in user. Demo video

• Tool of the week
  • QueryGraph is a web tool for creating queries in SPARQL from graphs.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikibase now has a dedicated Twitter account: Follow @WikibaseHQ for updates on everything Wikibase.
  • You can now create and curate catalog groups on Mix’n’match, and find the most common unmatched entries between them (Source)
  • Wikidata Walkabout browsing tool has had some important recent improvements in language support, interface, etc. See a list of all comedy films directed by a vegetarian (in Spanish)

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: Bharati Braille, Consejo de Calificación Cinematográfica's video game rating, solution to, archaeological site of
    • External identifiers: AV Production person ID, Mediafilm ID, Radio.com Podcasts show ID, Libsyn show ID, Mitre ATT&CK ID, SFLI ID, e-GEDSH ID, Viceversa Letteratura author ID, Barnivore product ID, AVN movie ID, Archivo Histórico de diputados de España ID, BG School ID, Muck Rack media outlet ID, I professori dell'Università di Pavia (1859-1961) ID, BHCL UUID, Calaméo ID, Studium Parisiense ID, viaggiareinpuglia.it ID, DiVo person ID, DiCamillo Database Country House ID, Internet Game Database numeric game ID, GEPRIS-Historisch ID (Person), Alpine Linux package, A*dS Encyclopedia ID, Biographical Archive of Psychiatry ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: minutes played, two-pointers made, two-pointers attempted, three-pointers attempted, three-pointers made, free throws made, free throws attempted, field goals made, personal fouls, Short DOI, total rebounds, offensive rebounds, defensive rebounds, number of vaccinations, category for software under a license, assessment outcome, quality for this class, Template combines topics, CCCM Museum (Macau Museum) object ID, CCCM Museum Object ID, Medium, FL number, Notable ascent
    • External identifiers: CantoDict identifiers, Norwegian State Administration Database ID, POSIX locale identifier, Wurdboek fan de Fryske taal GTB ID, BABEL author ID, Songlexikon ID, FANZA AV actress ID, VAi Building ID, Biographies.net person ID, Literature.com book ID, National Museum Norway artwork ID, TikTok music ID, Oxford Classical Dictionary ID, Conservapedia Article, NZ Museums ID, Akademická encyklopedie českých dějin ID, WreckSite ID
  • Query examples:
    • Mathematicians born in prime number years featuring Albert Einstein, Pierre de Fermat, Georg Ohm, Carl Gauss, Évariste Galois, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, James Maxwell et al.
    • Timeline of coups d'état of the 21st century (including attempted ones) (Source)
    • Map of Karens / Johns per million according to Wikidata (Source)
    • Children of which were born with by a person, and their step child
    • Map of the shortest railway path (in terms of number of stations) between Dibrugarh and the Scottish Highlands (Source)
    • Map of place of birth of Olympique de Marseille football players (Source)
    • Map of Kolkata wards by number of schools (Source)
    • Map of beaches in Mexico (Source)
    • Graph of shared borders between Indian districts (Source)
    • Descendants of Upendrakishore Roy (Source)
    • Timeline of Indian High Commissioners to Britain (Source)
    • A tree map of items for artworks depicting Mughal emperors (Source)
    • Example of documented usage of different Bengali words (Source)
    • 'Llan' place names in the UK (Source)
    • Organizations with DZI donation seal approval according to donation amount (Source)
  • Newest database reports: Russian given names

• Development
  • Continued working on the Query Builder. We focused on making it possible to query for Item values and being able to limit the number of Items in the result. We also looked into how to query for quantity values.
  • Changed P920’s data type from string to external identifier (phab:T269205)
  • Finished working on the problem of Items that have the page prop wikibase:statements set to 0 but actually do have statements (phab:T145712)
  • Continued work on the “Publishing” step of the Wikibase release pipeline by building and testing three components of the software suite: Wikibase (phab: T267893), Query Service frontend (phab:T268025), and Query Service backend (phab:T268022)

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 17:32, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

DiscussionTools update

Hello,

The Editing team has scheduled a major update to mw:Extension:DiscussionTools (the new Reply tool) for next week's deployment train. Since you invoke the feature from a script (I do, too), you're probably going to see that update next week, before it's officially released in the mw:Beta Feature system. The new update will use a similar system for starting a ==New discussion==. As before, full-page wikitext editing will not be affected. There is more information on the project page at mw:Talk pages project/New discussion.

You don't have to do anything about this; I just didn't want you to be surprised. If you encounter problems next week, please ping me or leave a note on the talk page for the project. Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:10, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #451

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

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Alphama (RfP scheduled to end after 24 January 2021 15:12 (UTC))
  • Other: Wikidata will be one of the communities involved in the Phase 2 of the Universal Code of Conduct consultation. Have your say at the consultation talk page or get in contact with the UCoC facilitator, User:Sannita (WMF).

• Events
  • Upcoming: Wikidata+Wikibase office hour, Thursday, January 21st, at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time), on Telegram
  • Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #28 - YouTube, Facebook, 23 January
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #46, January 24

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogpost: Automatically maintained citations with Wikidata and Cite Q, by Mike Peel and Andy Mabbett.
  • Video: Wikidata editing #27: #Wikipedia20 - YouTube, Facebook
  • Video: Dealing with more than one date value in Wikidata (using preferential rank) - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • User:Lagewi/navigation.js userscript enables adding links to list subclasses and instances to Wikidata items.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • New dashboard for lexicographical data statistics: Wikidata Datamodel Lexemes
  • The Wikidata Analytics dashboards are now available at a new URL: https://wikidata-analytics.wmcloud.org/ (announcement)

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: date canceled, subdivision of this unit
    • External identifiers: dati.beniculturali.it agent ID, dati.beniculturali.it site ID, dati.beniculturali.it cultural heritage ID, Projecto Vercial author ID, National Historic People ID, Olympedia event ID, TheCocktailDB drink ID, TheCocktailDB ingredient ID, Fichier des personnes décédées ID, POSIX locale identifier, National Museum in Warsaw ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: shadows, Sacrament conferred by, logo image within scope, BAMID film rating, ABC News Topic, number of rooms to rent
    • External identifiers: Portal da Literatura author ID, Base de Dados de Autores Portugueses ID, Parabola package, JAANUS ID, Studio di Fonologia Musicale RAI person ID, BiblioLMC ID, Le Lettere di Theodor Mommsen agli Italiani ID, StrategyWiki page, Encyclopedia of Brno Object ID, Holocaust.cz ID, Australian Fungi ID, DeCS ID, Australian Lichen ID, KBR Catalogue ID, Enciclopedia del Museo del Prado ID, The Language Council of Norway Term ID, Red Cross FDRS ID, Xinjiang Data Project identifier, SISSCO ID, SEARCH on line catalogue ID, 45cat release ID, Aracne author ID
  • Query examples:
    • Red Cross and Red Crescent societies
    • The people of the government of Bangladesh on 13 January 2005 (Source)
    • Buildings in the Basque Country dedicated to San Roque (Source)
    • List of words for "beard" in Eighth Schedule languages (Source)
    • Map of train services starting at Howrah station (Source)
    • Map of big sculptures of New Zealand (Source)
    • Map of mosques in Bangladesh according to architectural style (Source)
    • UK deaths per month since 2005 split by sex/gender (Source)
    • Timeline of Indian cricket tours abroad (Source)
    • Timeline of inception of Mexican universities (Source)
    • Mangifera species and mango cultivars (Source)
    • Locations where The Antartic Circumpolar Voyage expedition passed (Source)
    • English Language forms missing an audio pronunciation -- you can contribute via LinguaLibre
  • Newest WikiProjects:
    • WikiProject Greek War of Independence, development of content relative to the Greek War of Independence (Q182062) (this year is the 200th anniversary, from its beginning in 1821)

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:07, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-03

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all wikis from 21 January (calendar).

Future changes

• The Growth team plans to add features to get more visitors to edit to more Wikipedias. You can help translating the interface.
• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for a short time on 26 January at 07:00 (UTC). [57]
• MassMessage posts could be automatically timestamped in the future. This is because MassMessage senders can now send pages using MassMessage. Pages are more difficult to sign. If there are times when a MassMessage post should not be timestamped you can let the developers know.

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

16:09, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Hexagon article

Hi, Thanks for the encouragement. I don't know how to talk to you without creating a new section, which I have done here. I got feedback that my article rewrite was too informal but have not been able to get clarification. Apparently KGirl is too busy to talk to me. I also got feedback to do incremental revisions rather than a rewrite, so I made an incremental revision. Hopefully it will stick. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Phoenix-anna/sandbox/Hexagon_Qualcomm Qualcomm_Hexagon

Phoenix-anna (talk) 12:16, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Hi, Anna, sorry I left you hanging. New section for a new discussion is the way to go with these talk pages, so definitely the right approach here. (Before they introduced the mw:Echo notification system, posting to user-talk like this was the only way to get someone's attention.) I’m not sure how best to go forward, but have some tentative thoughts (and piecewise updates rather than all-at-once replacement was one of them). I’ll post about procedural matters at User talk:Phoenix-anna/sandbox/Hexagon Qualcomm so that the discussion stays with the draft. — Pelagic ( messages ) – (23:54 Thu 21, AEDT) 12:54, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #455

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

• Discussions
  • Other: Tool ideas/ImproveWikidata

• Events
  • Past: Linked Open Storytelling - Winter School 2021 - Fellow-Programm Freies Wissen (in German) (reply on YouTube)
  • Upcoming: SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, February 16 at 18:00 CET
  • Upcoming: Bug triage hour about Lexemes, February 16
  • Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #32 - YouTube, Facebook, February 20
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #50, February 21

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blog post: The promise of Wikidata: How journalists can use the crowdsourced open knowledge base as a data source, by Monika Sengul-Jones
  • Blog post: Data donation to Wikidata, part 2: country/subject dossiers of the 20th Century Press Archives (by Joachim Neubert, ZBW Labs)
  • Blog post: Bibliography and Citations of Hausa Folklore by Anasskoko
  • Video: Querying Linked (Wiki)data with SPARQL ✨ (presentation by Lucas Werkmeister at rC3, 90 minutes)
  • Video: Wikidata editing #31 Free Software Day - YouTube, Facebook
  • Video: Knowledge Graphs for AI: Wikidata and beyond - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • UseAsRef script allows you to add references to statements using one external ID as source (see User:Bargioni/UseAsRef and this YouTube video for more information)

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Abstract Wikipedia presents prototypes of two tools that could help people to visualize, exemplify, and better guide our understanding of the coverage of lexicographic data in Wikidata.
  • Public Domain Tool, developed by the Flemish Institute for Archives automates the process of determining whether their collection items could be in the public domain.
  • Sizes of country items (like "Portugal" (Q45)) were recently reduced by 30% to 50% by moving a few economics properties to "economy of"-items (sample: "economy of Portugal" (Q1649355)). The item "economy of Portugal" is currently larger than "Portugal". This can simplify uses of country items that previously timed-out. Infoboxes can still access the properties with the link through "economy of topic" (P8744).
  • Later this week, the development team will enable a rate limit for assigning new item IDs. Bots and users who successfully create items should notice no change, since the rate limit is equal to the existing limit on all edits. However, bots that often fail to create items may start to see different error messages than usual. This will hopefully reduce the problem of skipped item IDs.
  • Guidelines and compensation for UX research lead by Wikimedia Germany (announcement)

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: service status information URL, first family name in Portuguese name, time played, coordinates of depicted place
    • External identifiers: CompositionToday composers showcase ID, Royal Museums Greenwich artwork ID, Saint Louis Art Museum artwork ID, AZLyrics.com song ID, Studio di Fonologia Musicale RAI person ID, WreckSite ID, SOUNZ contributor ID, Doktori.hu ID, Portal da Literatura ID, IPHAE ID, Play:Right ID, National Portrait Gallery (London) artwork ID, Xinjiang Data Project identifier, CITWF title ID, Union Catalog of Armenian Continuing Resources ID, Saxony-Anhalt cultural heritage object ID, FloGrappling ID, Can I use feature ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: National Gallery of Art Library Bibliographic ID, letterer, set during recurring event, number of references, sensors, Applying institution
    • External identifiers: Lexikon Literatur in Tirol, Danmarks Adresseregister named street ID, Baidu Baike ID (2), Kickstarter username, Protagonisti della storia delle scienze della mente ID, Curling.fi player ID, RILM ID, Swiss vote ID, svoyak.info player ID, Germanistenverzeichnis, Svenska Institutet i Rom ID, CinemaRx title ID, Sinemalar title ID, English Placenames MADS ID, Armenian Book ID, identifiant inventaire Occitanie, AaRC title ID, Biblioteca Iglesia Nacional Española en Roma ID, BFS ID, Dizionario biografico online degli anarchici italiani ID, JedeSchule.de ID, bashenc.online ID, Svoya Igra television player ID, Wisconsin Architecture and History Inventory ID
  • Query examples:
    • Spanish Wikipedia articles about women astronauts (Source)
    • Websites related to works in the Women's & Gender History DH list (Source)
    • List of states with more than one official language (Source)
    • Location of the organizations in the Name Assigning Authority Number (NAAN) registry (Source)
    • List of locations named after the planned language Esperanto or its founder, L. L. Zamenhof
    • Use the MediaWiki API to get the content of a Wikipedia category into a query
    • Number of scholarly articles sharing their datasets (Source)
    • Most specific taxon that includes two given species (Source)

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 17:22, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #456

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

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Dr.üsenfieber - RfP scheduled to end after 24 February 2021 14:19 (UTC)
  • New request for comments: P155/P156 as qualifiers only, rather than as main statements

• Events
  • Past: Wikidata bug triage hour about Lexemes. Notes available here
  • Past: Online Talk Show on Fri, Feb 19, 2021, by Wikimedia Indonesia and Fariz Darari - Take a peek into the data warehouse of Wikimedia projects (= Wikidata): Youtube link
  • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Adding bibliographic data to Wikidata with Jason Evans, Wikimedian in residence at the Wales National Library, Tuesday, February 23rd.[58]
  • Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #33 - YouTube, Facebook, February 27
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #51, February 28

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogpost: Wikidata and the sum of all video games − 2020 edition
  • Video: Basic tutorial on how to annotate an article with Wikidata tags for the ANN project - YouTube
  • Video: The Wikidata community: tools to communicate, ask for help, exchange ideas and opinions (in Italian) - YouTube
  • Video: REfB (Reference Bot): Adding new references to WikiData statements by Houcemeddine Turki - YouTube
  • Video: Wikidata editing #32 - YouTube, Facebook
  • Video: Knowledge graphs lecture - RDF, Wikidata, SHACL, ShEx (in Russian) - YouTube
  • Podcast: Adam Shorland talks about Wikidata and Wikibase on Between The Brackets Mediawiki podcast.

• Tool of the week
  • LexemeForms-SearchPage adds links on the search results page for creating new lexemes using the Lexeme Forms tool based on the languages in your Babel box.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Vglist is a video game library tracking web app that is mostly based on Wikidata.
  • WMF Board of Trustees - Call for feedback: Community Board seats: Meetings with the Wikidata community on Feb 24 and Mar 3.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: coordinates of depicted place, thesis committee member, number of at bats
    • External identifiers: IPHAE ID, Play:Right ID, National Portrait Gallery (London) artwork ID, Xinjiang Data Project identifier, CITWF title ID, Union Catalog of Armenian Continuing Resources ID, Saxony-Anhalt cultural heritage object ID, FloGrappling ID, Can I use feature ID, CollectieGelderland-creator-ID, VAi building ID, Heritage Information System ID in the database of cultural heritage in Austria, Joods Monument ID, Lumni person ID, Open Tree of Life ID, Wurdboek fan de Fryske taal GTB ID, People Australia ID, Biographical Dictionary of the Czech Lands ID, EMS ID, Spletni biografski leksikon znanih Primorcev in Primork ID, Svenska Institutet i Rom ID, Lexikon Literatur in Tirol ID, Curling.fi player ID, De Lakenhal artwork ID, Hauts-de-France Inventory identifier, Tree of Life contributor ID, Taiwan River Code, RILM ID, playDB artist ID, Rate Your Music genre ID, XXXBios transgender performer ID, Centre-Val de Loire Inventory identifier, Occitanie Inventory identifier, playDB play ID, Biblioteca Franco Serantini ID, Biblioteca Iglesia Nacional Española en Roma ID, Germanistenverzeichnis ID, uta-net.com song ID, uta-net.com artist ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: sensors, Applying institution, FAQ url, digital distribution platform, Bandcamp Tag, Anzahl der Staffeln, PDDikti ID, template applies category, workers represented by, alt text, demographics of topic
    • External identifiers: AaRC title ID, Dizionario biografico online degli anarchici italiani ID, JedeSchule.de ID, bashenc.online ID, Svoya Igra television player ID, Wisconsin Architecture and History Inventory ID, TaDiRAH ID (2), Oklahoma's NRHP ID, Sauvons nos tombes cemetery ID, Discogs genre ID, Sauvons nos tombes person ID, Odnoklassniki user numeric ID, CPC-PR ID, Obituaries Australia ID, Indigenous Australia ID, Women Australia ID, AIATSIS Subject Thesaurus ID, Biografisches Handbuch – Todesopfer der Grenzregime am Eisernen Vorhang ID, Filmitalia film ID, Filmitalia person ID, Resident Advisor Venue ID, GB1900 ID, AIATSIS Place Thesaurus ID, Mixcloud ID, Labour Australia ID, Mexicana Repositorio, Science Magazine author ID, Everipedia ID, ARAE ID, Archivo Linz de la Transición Española ID, Museo Nacional de la Estampa ID, NParks Flora & Fauna Web ID, identifiant inventaire Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, identifiant inventaire Île-de-France, identifiant inventaire Normandie, identifiant inventaire Pays de la Loire, identifiant inventaire Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, Diccionari de la traducció catalana ID
  • Query examples:
    • List of vegan restaurants
    • List of food that are iconic to particular countries (Source)
    • Map of monuments in Lower Saxony, Germany (Source)
    • Map of former plantations in Surinam (Source)
    • Map of Wats in Thailand - (Source)
    • Localities in Mexico and contain 𝐒𝐚n in their name (Source)
    • Female mycologists born pre-1900, sorted by number of sitelinks (Source)
    • Women scientists who were born between the year 1500 and 1900 (Source)

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 14:05, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-08

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

Recent changes

• The visual editor will now use MediaSearch to find images. You can search for images on Commons in the visual editor when you are looking for illustrations. This is to help editors find better images. [59]
• The syntax highlighter now works with more languages: Futhark, Graphviz/DOT, CDDL and AMDGPU. [60]

Problems

• Editing a timeline might have removed all text from it. This was because of a bug and has been fixed. You might need to edit the timeline again for it to show properly. [61]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 February. It will be on all wikis from 25 February (calendar).

Future changes

• There is a user group for developers and users interested in working on Wikimedia wikis with the Rust programming language. You can join or tell others who want to make your wiki better in the future.

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

---

00:16, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Test

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Pelagic&action=edit&section=new&dtenable=0

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Pelagic&action=edit&section=new&dtenable=1

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Pelagic&action=edit&section=new&something=blah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Pelagic?action=edit&section=new

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Pelagic&action=edit&section=new

Pelagic ( messages ) – (06:08 Mon 01, AEDT) 19:08, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 February 2021

• News and notes: Maher stepping down

• Disinformation report: A "billionaire battle" on Wikipedia: Sex, lies, and video

• Opinion: The call for feedback on community seats is a distraction

• In the media: Corporate influence at OSM, Fox watching the hen house

• News from the WMF: Who tells your story on Wikipedia

• Recent research: Take an AI-generated flashcard quiz about Wikipedia; Wikipedia's anti-feudalism

• Featured content: A Love of Knowledge, for Valentine's Day

• Traffic report: Does it almost feel like you've been here before?

• Gallery: What is Black history and culture?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:30, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #457

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

• Discussions
  • Closed request for adminship: Dr.üsenfieber (unsussesful)
  • New request for comments: P155/P156 as qualifiers only, rather than as main statements

• Events
  • Upcoming: SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, March 2 at 18:00 CET
  • Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #34 Open Data Day - YouTube, Facebook, March 6
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #52, March 7
  • Upcoming: Wikidata bug triage hour about Lexemes, March 22nd
  • Upcoming: Wikidata-based Data Sprint hosted by the University of New Brunswick. One Wikidata data set will be provided on 11th March 2021 and various teams will have 2 hours to run a set of SPARQL queries against the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) and showcase their results.

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogpost: Wikidata and Correspondence Archives (Enriching basic metadata with a knowledge graph)
  • Blogpost: The promise of Wikidata - How journalists can use the crowdsourced open knowledge base as a data source (at DataJournalism.com)
  • Video: Accra Archive Wikidata and Wikipedia Workshop (GLAMS Campaign Ghana) - YouTube
  • Video: COVID-19 coverage on Wikidata - YouTube
  • Video: Identify and describe items of bibliographic interest (articles, monographs, authors) on Wikidata (in Italian) - YouTube
  • Video: Visualizing the global research ecosystem via Wikidata and Scholia - YouTube
  • Video: Demo: How to upload new bibliography and create dashboards on Wikidata - YouTube
  • Video: Reconciliation Open Refine Wikidata (in Swedish) - YouTube
  • Video: Reconciling researchers to Wikidata via Google Sheets - YouTube
  • Video: LIVE Wikidata editing #33 - YouTube, Facebook
  • Video: How to create new Wikidata item (in Dutch) - YouTube
  • Video: Merging Wikidata items (in Dutch) - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • EditSum, a new user script which allows to attach custom summary text to any label/statement/sitelink/etc. modification.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • User:Nikki/LexemeInterwikiLinks.js, is a userscript that adds Wiktionary interwiki links in the sidebar on Lexeme pages. (It links to pages corresponding to the first lemma and puts the lexeme language's Wiktionary first, followed by languages in the user's Babel box).
  • User:Lucas Werkmeister/addStatementCountsToCategories.js, is a userscript that shows the number of statements of the linked item for all pages in a category.
  • Shared Citations, a proposal arising from the WikiCite project, for a central reference management database supporting all Wikimedia projects, with significant relationship to Wikidata. Seeking feedback.
  • Modèle:Indice de diversité de genre (Template:Gender diversity index) is a new template in the French Wikipedia which use P21 (gender property) to count the number of people by gender mentioned in an article. It helps to find articles which "forget" to cite women.
  • Lexeme JSON dumps are now available as a collection of individual lexeme data in the regular JSON format, separate from the regular Wikidata dumps containing Items and Properties. phab:T264883
  • We found a way to improve the performance of scrolling on the Item page by changing how we move the Property labels as you scroll through the page. You should see the effect after the next deployment.
  • BBC Things includes links to Wikidata to provide a single reference for the growing collection of entities that matter to the BBC and their audiences.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: number of at bats, number of hits, bases on balls, runs batted in, letterer, sensors, FAQ URL, set during recurring event, stolen bases, doubles hit, triples hit
    • External identifiers: Germanistenverzeichnis ID, uta-net.com song ID, uta-net.com artist ID, AllMusic genre/style ID, DicoPolHiS ID, EuroBabeIndex.com ID, Sauvons nos tombes cemetery ID, LombardiaBeniCulturali archive producer person ID, LombardiaBeniCulturali archive producer organization ID, LombardiaBeniCulturali archive producer family ID, BookBub author ID, TlF artist ID, Encyclopédie berbère article ID, Protagonisti della storia delle scienze della mente ID, English Placenames MADS ID, Norwegian State Administration Database ID, teatral.ro play/theater ID, CineFAN.ro title ID, CinemaRX title ID, Sinemalar title ID, Swissvote ID, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté inventory identifier, Île-de-France inventory identifier, Normandie inventory identifier, Pays de la Loire inventory identifier, Wisconsin Architecture and History Inventory ID, Dizionario biografico online degli anarchici italiani ID, Swedish Literature Bank place ID, Opera Online conductor ID, Discogs genre ID, Discogs style ID, Danmarks Adresseregister named street ID, bashenc.online ID, Provenio UUID, JedeSchule.de ID, ARAE ID, Encyclopedia Titanica ID, U.S. Masters Swimming ID, DzygaMDB person ID, NLS place type ID, Archivo Linz de la Transición Española ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: demographics of topic, strikeouts, district heating, number of signatories, opt-out, payer, secondary topic, grant number, Future Salaries ID, Index égalité professionnelle F/H, Commons incompatible image URL, verbal ability
    • External identifiers: Diccionari de la traducció catalana ID, ANPI person ID, ANPI person numeric ID, APS author ID, EEVA author ID, Archives West finding aid ID, BiographySampo person ID, Discord server numeric ID, Discord user numeric ID, CUT ID, Amathus ID, EUC ID, UPSA ID, RePEc EconPapers ID, Dark Horse contributor ID, ComiXology publisher ID, Austrian Newspapers Online ID, Cyprus Library ID, MyMusic artist ID, LFCHistory.net player ID, MeSH qualifier ID
  • Query examples:
    • Hungarian church buildings sorted by confessions (Source)
    • Where Czechs most died if not in their place of birth (Source)
    • Most popular tonalities (Source)
  • Newest WikiProjects:
    • WikiProject Templates for templates in Wikidata

• Development
  • Working on first version of small tool that lets you get the average ORES quality score for a list of Items and find the lowest-quality Items in the batch so it's easier to improve them.
  • Taking a closer look at what larger improvements we want to make to Lexemes later this year.
  • Thinking through different ways how we can technically get mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases so we can later expose them.
  • Thinking through what the first version of the REST API should contain and what should come later.
  • Fixed an issue with whitespaces when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
  • Made sure all languages show up in the language selector for monolingual text Properties at least with their language code because them not showing up was very confusing (phab:T124758)
  • Fixed an issue with generating correct links for external IDs with + (phab:T271126)
  • Fixing an issue with Property selector not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
  • Continuing to build out the Query Builder and focusing on input for quantity and date queries (phab:T268942 and phab:T272697)
  • Due to the planned delay of the release of MediaWiki 1.36, the Wikibase team has been working on preparing a Wikibase update that includes new functionality (such as the “Federated Properties” feature) based on v1.35. To that end, we started backporting certain features and fixes into the Wikibase 1.35 release. Follow our progress here.

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 14:45, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-09

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

Recent changes

• Wikis using the Growth team tools can now show the name of a newcomer's mentor anywhere through a magic word. This can be used for welcome messages or userboxes.
• A new version of the VideoCutTool is now available. It enables cropping, trimming, audio disabling, and rotating video content. It is being created as part of the developer outreach programs.

Problems

• There was a problem with the job queue. This meant some functions did not save changes and mass messages were delayed. This did not affect wiki edits. [62]
• Some editors may not be logged in to their accounts automatically in the latest versions of Firefox and Safari. [63]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 March. It will be on all wikis from 4 March (calendar).

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

---

19:06, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #17

Welcome to the seventeenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Structured tasks

Add a link: the team is continuing to engineer on our first "structured task", which will break down the workflow of adding wikilinks to articles, and assist newcomers with an algorithm to identify words and phrases that could be made into links.

Add an image: even as we build our first structured task, we have been thinking about the next one. "Add an image" is a structured task in which newcomers would be recommended images from Wikimedia Commons to add to unillustrated articles. This is an ambitious idea with many details to consider. We have already learned a lot from community members, and we encourage everyone to look at the project page and join the discussion.

Moving forward: more wikis to get the features

Last November, our team published the analysis of the impact of newcomer tasks. We announced that we found that the Growth features, and particularly newcomer tasks, lead to increased editing from newcomers. Because of these results, we believe all Wikipedias should implement these features.

We have started to contact more wikis to deploy the features, including Wikipedias of all sizes. Bengali Wikipedia recently began using Growth features, and Danish, Thai, Indonesian, and Romanian Wikipedias will be coming soon. Please contact us if you have questions regarding deployment.

We are looking for translators who can help by translating the interface. Translating is done on Translatewiki.net (it requires a different account that your Wikimedia one). Communities that already have the Growth features being deployed are invited to check on the translations. Access translations here.

Variant testing

As mentioned in our previous newsletter, we ran a test of two variants of the newcomer homepage, meant to find a version that increases users completing suggested edits. We have completed the experiment, and learned that one of the variants leads to more edits on desktop while the other leads to more edits on mobile. Therefore, we will deploy the strongest variants for each platform to all newcomers.

News for mentors

Mentor dashboard: we have interviewed mentors from several communities as we plan a mentor dashboard feature, which would help mentors track the progress of their mentees. We encourage all mentors to share their thoughts on tools that would help them.

Magic word for mentors: it is now possible to use a magic word, {{#mentor}}, to display the name of a given newcomer's mentor. This can be used on welcome messages, userboxes, etc.

Help panel questions going to mentors: in most wikis, newcomers using the help panel ask questions to the help desk. On Czech Wikipedia, we have experimented with sending these questions to mentors instead. This simplifies the newcomer experience, and only led to a increase in mentorship questions of about 30%. We tried this in Arabic, Bengali, French and Vietnamese Wikipedias, and we are making it the default experience.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:02, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Something you may be interested in taking a look at

The first of many? :) (And yes – I know this is mystery meat navigation! :D) (Although... how do I get it to not act like the userboxes are on the right of the page all the way down? D:) DesertPipeline (talk) 05:17, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Never mind; fixed the userpage problem :D DesertPipeline (talk) 05:27, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

@DesertPipeline: awesome, hall of fame! Pelagic ( messages ) – (12:11 Fri 12, AEDT) 01:11, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #458

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

• Events
  • Past: SORSE - Wikidata as a research tool for data modelling and integration in the humanities (replay on YouTube)
  • Past: Open Data Day Taiwan 2021 2021-03-06 , Taipei (Q1867), Taichung (Q245023), Tainan (Q140631) and online stream (FB and Youtube)
  • Upcoming: OSM TW x Wikidata Taiwan Taipei (Q1867) Meetup 2021-03-08 Mozilla Community Space Taipei (Q61752245)
  • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: OCLC Research’s CONTENTdm Wikibase data model for pilot project to improve collection discoverability, Tuesday, March 9th.[64]
  • Upcoming: SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, March 9 at 18:00 CET
  • Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #35 - YouTube, Facebook, March 13
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #53, March 14

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • "Giving knowledge back to Wikipedia: Towards a Systematic Approach to Sync Factual Data across Wikipedia, Wikidata and External Data Sources" (by DBPedia)
  • Papers
    • Open Natural Products Research: Curation and Dissemination of Biological Occurrences of Chemical Structures through Wikidata
    • A paper describing COVIWD: COVIWD: COVID-19 Wikidata Dashboard
  • Videos
    • Wikidata and Abstract Wikipedia by Denny Vrandečić - YouTube
    • Working hour on items of bibliographic interest in Wikidata (in Italian) -YouTube
    • Open Data Day Taiwan 2021 -Youtube Live
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #34 Open Data Day - YouTube, Facebook

• Tool of the week
  • Panoviewer.js inserts an iframe from the Panoviewer tool to photosphere image (P4640) statements.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata has now items about nine million people: 99,991,000,000 to do (project chat)
  • A new browser for Wikidata is available: the SLING knowledge base browser by User:Mringgaard. It is lightning fast and entirely based on modern Web components.
  • Help choose focus languages for improvements to the lexicographic extension of Wikidata and Abstract Wikipedia. Nominations should be submitted by April 7, and the decision will be made by April 14 by the teams taking your comments into account.
  • Help to choose a design concept for the logo of the new Wikifunctions wiki. Voting ends before Monday March 15th 23:59 UTC.
  • PetScan can now generate KML map overlay data. E.g. University towns in Germany. (Map view)

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: supplement to, seismic classification, reissue of, staking percentage, affiliated worker organisation, demographics of topic, assessment outcome, notation writer
    • External identifiers: Archivo Linz de la Transición Española ID, Obituaries Australia ID, XXXBios female performer ID, RDA value vocabularies ID, Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists ID, Whiskybase distillery ID, NParks Flora & Fauna Web ID, Women Australia ID, Labour Australia ID, Indigenous Australia ID, Pontifical University of Salamanca ID, EEVA author ID, Nauvoo Community Project ID, Cyprus Library ID, Cyprus University of Technology ID, Amathus ID, European University Cyprus ID, Museo Nacional de la Estampa ID, Resident Advisor club ID, Diccionari de la traducció catalana ID, CPC-PR ID, Austrian Newspapers Online ID, Oklahoma's NRHP ID, ChemRxiv ID, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur Inventory ID, FFF player ID (new scheme), Physics Magazine author ID, Ligue 1 player ID, ANPI person numeric ID, Science Magazine author ID, Odnoklassniki user numeric ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: verbal ability, 易玩應用程序標識符, earned run average, named place on map, inhabitants of topic, consequence of text, writing style, applicant, co-applicant, Cantonese romanisation, repairability
    • External identifiers: MeSH qualifier ID, Encyclopedia of Ostrava person ID, Encyclopedia of Plzeň person ID, Stadtlexikon Karlsruhe, Museum of the jewish people ID, Encyclopaedia Herder concept ID, Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia ID, Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona author ID, Enciclopedia de Puerto Rico, PorcelanaBrasil ID, Eesti entsüklopeedia ID, Encyclopedia of Melbourne ID, Cyprus Bibliography ID, JaneladaHistoria ID, OsobnostiRegionu.cz ID, Encyclopedia of French Cultural Heritage in North America ID, Encyclopédie du patrimoine culturel de l'Amérique française ID, Inforegister ID, Terezín Memorial Database ID, AWB lemma ID, MWB lemma ID, MHDBDB lemma ID, Woerterbuchnetz.de IDs for Middle High German, Lëtzebuerger Online Dictionnaire ID, Woerterbuchnetz.de IDs for modern German, Das wissenschaftliche Bibellexikon im Internet ID
  • Query examples:
    • Deceased people with verified Twitter accounts (source)
    • members of Ludlamshöhle, a society in Vienna (1819-1826) (source)
    • Things discovered or invented by women (Source)
  • Newest WikiProjects:
    • Wikidata:WikiProject Early Modern England and Wales (WD:WP EMEW)
  • Newest database reports:
    • Gadget usage statistics - Includes gadgets enabled in preferences or common.js

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 17:01, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-10

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

Recent changes

• Section translation now works on Bengali Wikipedia. It helps mobile editors translate sections of articles. It will come to more wikis later. The first focus is active wikis with a smaller number of articles. You can test it and leave feedback.
• Flagged revisions now give admins the review right. [65]
• When someone links to a Wikipedia article on Twitter this will now show a preview of the article. [66]

Problems

• Many graphs have JavaScript errors. Graph editors can check their graphs in their browser's developer console after editing. [67]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 March. It will be on all wikis from 11 March (calendar).
• The New Discussion tool will soon be a new discussion tools beta feature for on most Wikipedias. The goal is to make it easier to start new discussions. [68]

Future changes

• There will be a number of changes to make it easier to work with templates. Some will come to the first wikis in March. Other changes will come to the first wikis in June. This is both for those who use templates and those who create or maintain them. You can read more.
• Reference Previews will become a default feature on some wikis on 17 March. They will share a setting with Page Previews. If you prefer the Reference Tooltips or Navigation-Popups gadget you can keep using them. If so Reference Previews won't be shown. [69][70]
• New JavaScript-based functions will not work in Internet Explorer 11. This is because Internet Explorer is an old browser that doesn't work with how JavaScript is written today. Everything that works in Internet Explorer 11 today will continue working in Internet Explorer for now. You can read more.

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

17:50, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #459

Selected items...

• Events
  • Upcoming: 30 Lexic-o-days, events and projects around lexicographical data, from March 15th to April 14th. (full schedule, details and links here)
  • Upcoming: Wikidata - The Linked Open Data Platform Everyone Can Contribute To (Public talk) - Registration link

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Internet Archive Scholar is launched - Wikidata is thanked in the acknowledgements
    • 10 basic but essential SPARQL queries for lexicographical data on Wikidata
    • Writing your own data to Wikidata using spreadsheets: Part 1
  • Videos
    • An initial look at the TopicTagger tool for Wikidata - YouTube

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Plant Humanities Lab is a website you can use to explore the cultural histories of plants and their influence on human societies.
  • DX Lab Art Index is an interactive database of over 18,000 nineteenth century Australian Artworks by over 2000 artists with links to Wikidata & compiled by volunteers over 10 years.
  • The new WDQS Streaming Updater is live as of March 15, 2021 on a pre-production test server for feedback. Available at https://query-preview.wikidata.org/. Release details here.

• Did you know?
  • Newest ... gender equality index, transitivity, script style
    • External identifiers: ... National Gallery of Art Library Bibliographic ID, ... Encyclopedia of Melbourne ID, ...
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Cantonese romanisation, repairability, Gedong Kirtya classification, Valence, has graphical element, ... Reason for unknown/no value, generalization of/generalized by, acronym, ... formé en même temps que, Suggested fields
    • External identifiers: ...

• Development
  • Creating a dashboard to break down the number of editors by namespace (phab:T275999)

Read the full report ·

A barnstar for you!

	The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar
	Thnx for helping at the teahouse :) Chefs-kiss (talk) 17:42, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-11

m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2021/11.

Recent changes

• Wikis that are part of the desktop improvements project can now use a new search function. The desktop improvements and the new search will come to more wikis later. You can also test it early.
• ...

23:21, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks

Hi Pelagic. Thanks for your help at teahouse. It has helped with supporting the last paragraph of this news story. Most appreciated. --Gryllida (talk) 21:03, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 42

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 42, January – February 2021

• New partnerships: PNAS, De Gruyter, Nomos
• 1Lib1Ref
• Library Card

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --11:27, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Help regarding MediaWiki

Hello Pelagic!

I'm Rafi. I Talked with you in the teahouse regarding the training of a group of editors. I'm a fresher in python and hope to learn other languages in the future. Recently I made a visit to MediaWiki and became astonished watching devs of the whole world working together just to develop open-source programs. I'm thinking of starting my journey there but feeling a lil bit confused. I've thought of starting with pywikibot. Is Talkpage feature available there too? If yes, then I can take help from you or other editors using your talkpage there. Thanks a lot and take love!! -Mrb Rafi (talk) 13:45, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Hi, Rafi! I’ve learnt some other programming languages in the past, but as yet I have no experience in Python or programming for MediaWiki. It’s something I thought I would like to learn "one day". You might have just inspired me to make a start. So whilst I might not be able to offer you experience, I’d be happy to stay in touch.

MediaWiki wiki has talk pages labelled "discussion". The difference is that most talk pages there use the Structured Discussions extension.

P.S. I just discovered at mw:manual:Pywikibot/PAWS that there’s a Jupyter Hub instance that we can use! Pelagic ( messages ) – (05:41 Fri 26, AEDT) 18:41, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Awesome Pelagic!! I've got a classmate then. XD. I think this link is quite helpful for new learners. I'm learned python from Coursera and have a very basic idea. Now I'm trying to learn about regular expressions. -Mrb Rafi (talk) 12:21, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-12

m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2021/12

Recent changes

• There is a Wikipedia app for KaiOS phones. They don't have a touch screen so readers navigate with the phone keys. There is now a simulator so you can see what it looks like.
• The reply tool and new discussion tool are now available as the "Discussion tools" beta feature in almost all wikis except German Wikipedia.

Changes later this week

• ...
• Syntax highlighting colours will change to be easier to read. This will soon come to the first wikis. [71]

Future changes

• Flagged revisions will no longer have multiple tags like "tone" or "depth". It will also only have one tier. This was changed because very few wikis used these features and they make the tool difficult to maintain. [72][73]
• ...

16:51, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #460

Selected items...

• Discussions
  • New request for comments: Signed Statements (T138708)

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Videos
    • Live editing lexemes YouTube, Facebook
    • Live editing lexemes (in French) by VIGNERON - YouTube
    • Introduction to Wikidata by Peteforsyth - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • Sparql_rc is a recent changes feed that only shows you changes in an area of Wikidata you care about. It now also supports Lexemes.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • erinnerungshort.de/kap/ is a data and photo research project and map visualization tool with federated license query from Structured Commons, by Raymond and Elya.
  • ~7500 person items have been enriched with the new property GEPRIS person ID (P4872), imported from a high quality dataset from the Q707283.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: ... Jyutping transliteration, Yale romanization, Cantonese Pinyin, Cantonese Transliteration Scheme transliteration, ... has graphical element
    • External identifiers: ... Cephalopod Ontology entity ID, ...
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: zugeschrieben, ... identifier shared with lexeme, introduced on, instances are former instances of, presentation template, voted on by, has supplier, キロ程
    • External identifiers: ... Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus ID, Thésaurus des sujets de base du gouvernement du Canada ID, Routes & Places ID, ...

• Development
  • Work on the first version of the Query Builder is nearing its end. Doing remaining work on querying for quantities, dates and ranges as well as polishing and bug fixing.
  • Fixed an issue where the termbox on Item pages used the wrong list of languages on the mobile version (phab:T275611)
  • Got feedback on the initial click-dummies for checking Wikidata's data against other databases to find mismatches

18:16, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 March 2021

• News and notes: A future with a for-profit subsidiary?

• Gallery: Wiki Loves Monuments

• In the media: Wikimedia LLC and disinformation in Japan

• News from the WMF: Project Rewrite: Tell the missing stories of women on Wikipedia and beyond

• Recent research: 10%-30% of Wikipedia’s contributors have subject-matter expertise

• From the archives: Google isn't responsible for Wikipedia's mistakes

• Essay: Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia

• Obituary: Yoninah

• From the editor: What else can we say?

• Arbitration report: Open letter to the Board of Trustees

• Traffic report: Wanda, Meghan, Liz, Phil and Zack

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:45, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #461

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

• Discussions
  • Closed request for adminship: Minorax, welcome onboard!

• Events
  • Ongoing: 30 Lexic-o-days, events and projects around lexicographical data, continues until April 14th. (full schedule, details and links here)
    • March 30: Live SPARQL queries about Lexemes in French by Vigneron
    • March 30: Abstract Wikipedia & Lexemes Q&A with Denny Vrandečić
    • April 1: Documentation Q&A with Dan Shick
    • April 5-11: Climate Lexeme Week
    • April 5: Abstract Wikipedia & Lexemes Q&A with Denny Vrandečić
  • Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #38 - YouTube, Facebook, April 3
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #56, April 4
  • Upcoming: WikiCommons metadata analysis tool is intended to be developed at the online hackathon at hack.glam.opendata.ch, 16-17 April 2021

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Dataroundtripping Wikidata - Wikicommons - Runestones pictures
  • Papers
    • FAIR and open multilingual clinical trials in Wikidata and Wikipedia
    • Painel de informação sobre a COVID-19: consultas SPARQL na Wikidata (Portuguese)
  • Videos
    • Live Wikidata editing #37 - YouTube, Facebook
    • Live SPARQL queries on Lexemes by Vigneron (in English): on Youtube

• Tool of the week
  • d:User:Nikki/LexemeEntitySuggester.js userscript is a proper entity suggester that gives a fixed set of properties for various languages.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Sitelinks links for two new Wikipedias can be entered: Atayal Wikipedia (Q105723660) and Seediq Wikipedia (Q105975521)

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: does not have cause, external georeferencing URL
    • External identifiers: Discord server numeric ID, France24 topic ID (French), France24 topic ID (English), France24 topic ID (Spanish), France24 topic ID (Arabic), PeriodO period ID, MHDBDB lemma ID, Portrait Archive ID, Porcelana Brasil ID, Slovník českých filosofů ID, Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology ID, Encyclopedia of French Cultural Heritage in North America ID, MWB lemma ID, Encyclopedia of Migration ID, Ministry of Education New Zealand school ID, Encyklopedie migrace ID, Tacoma-Pierce County Obituary Index ID, Encyclopedia of Mediterranean Humanism ID, Modernist Commons ID, Rombase ID (English), Filmitalia film ID, CNA topic ID, Fortalezas.org ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Ottoman Association ID, url text, audio transcription 2, OFDb person ID, won sets, Number of stitches
    • External identifiers: Biblio.com ID, Czech Encyclopedia of Theater identifiers (Czech and German), Identifiant des Collections du Louvre, Verified Handles VHID, Michigan State University Library Record Number, Washington Flora Checklist ID, Washington Flora Checklist species ID, Washington Rare Plant Field Guide ID, KATOTTH identifier, Viasona ID, Musikasten ID, Discover the networks, GCD publisher ID, Image Comics creator ID, BLPL ID, MnM ID, Arca author ID, Editorial Freelancers Association member ID, IFCVPF ID, American University of Beirut's Libraries Title ID, Dicionário Histórico-Biográfico Brasileiro ID, Burke Herbarium Image Collection ID, USCG MIC ID, Berlin Bezirkslexika identifiers, Burke Herbarium Image Collection contributor ID, Brapci author ID, ÖCV Biolex ID, OregonFlora taxon ID, Oregon Flora Image Project ID
  • Deleted properties:
  • Query examples:
    • Donald P. Bellisario credits as screenwriter or director
    • Interwiki table from P6720, with end date for prefixes that are no longer in use (source)
    • Index map of Ordnance Survey Old Series preparatory drawings, with georeferencer links (source)
    • Listed buildings in Wales that would be lost if the sea level rose by 70 metres (source)
    • Music releases with incomplete track lists, showing diff count (Source)
    • Date and place of birth of female musicians in Nigeria (Source)
    • Scholarly articles on multilingualism and bilingualism (Source)
    • Things in Czechia which changed coordinate location at some point (Source)
    • Images about women programmers (Source)
    • UK railway stations connected from Topsham railway station (Source)
    • Most awarded person affiliated with the Technical University of Denmark (Source)
  • Newest database reports: current TV seasons

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Suggested and open tasks!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 13:50, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-13

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

Recent changes

• Some very old web browsers don’t work well with the Wikimedia wikis. Some old code for browsers that used to be supported is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. [74]
• IRC recent changes feeds have been moved to a new server. Make sure all tools automatically reconnect to irc.wikimedia.org and not to the name of any specific server. Users should also consider switching to the more modern EventStreams. [75]

Problems

• When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split. It might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem. [76]
• Some translatable pages on Meta could not be edited. This was because of a bug in the translation tool. The new MediaWiki version was delayed because of problems like this. [77][78]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 March. It will be on all wikis from 1 April (calendar).

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

17:29, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

on merging Bonkei to Penjing

Hello Pelagic. Please join discussion in Talk:Penjing#Proposal to merge Bonkei to Penjing (April 2021)--HaussmannSaintLazare (talk) 02:53, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-14

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

Recent changes

• Editors can collapse part of an article so you have to click on it to see it. When you click a link to a section inside collapsed content it will now expand to show the section. The browser will scroll down to the section. Previously such links didn't work unless you manually expanded the content first. [79]

Changes later this week

• The citoid API will use for example 2010-12-XX instead of 2010-12 for dates with a month but no days. This is because 2010-12 could be confused with 2010-2012 instead of December 2010. This is called level 1 instead of level 0 in the Extended Date/Time Format. [80]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 April. It will be on all wikis from 8 April (calendar).

Future changes

• PAWS can now connect to the new Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 28 April. There is a new way to connect to the databases. Until 28 April both ways to connect to the databases will work. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech.

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

19:38, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

The Asgill Affair article

Hi Pelagic, I see you've been busy on this article. Since Henry Greville's article has him in the wrong regiment, please could you make the necessary correction? I happen to know how many weeks of work went into correcting the mistakes in General Washington's Dilemma by Katherine Mayo. There are some errors relative to the names and regiments of the thirteen officers drawing lots, of which Henry Greville was one. The 7th Earl Spencer mistranscribed the name of the writer of the eye-witness-account-of-the-drawing-of-lots letter. All references to The Hon. R. Fulke Greville, of the First Foot Guards, are now known to refer to Lieutenant and Captain The Hon. Henry Greville of the Second Regiment of Foot Guards (now known as the Coldstream Guards). All references to Asgylle and Asgyle refer to Lieutenant and Captain Charles Asgill of the First Regiment of Foot Guards (now known as the Grenadier Guards). Anne (talk) 15:42, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

No need to delete the unread message. It shows in my alerts. But since you say this specific concern is resolved, I won't ping back. I’ve reinstated the post for reference, and moved it to the bottom. One day I'll clean out all the newsletters and make this page easier to use. I pinged about the "Thirteen Officers" reference at Data; will await an answer there. Pelagic ( messages ) – (18:46 Sun 18, AEDT) 07:46, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, Pelagic, I was a bit concerned about changing Greville's regiment, given all the confusion over that, and his name, but was eventually persuaded by an admin to get on with it and do it, so I thought I would save you the bother of looking. If I am supposed to be replying to you elsewhere, I have had no notification, and don't know where to look for your comment. My IT skills are not up to coping well here (I'm not part of the computer generation). Anne (talk) 08:00, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, Anne, I must have inadvertently pinged you when pasting above. I just saw the quote from p. 100 that you provided at Talk:Sir Charles Asgill, 2nd Baronet#Henry Francis Greville. Thanks for sharing that. I can think of reasons why you may not have seen a notification from Wikidata; rather than running you from pillar to post, let's continue the discussion at Asgill's talk page. I have replied there. Pelagic ( messages ) – (08:15 Mon 19, AEDT) 21:15, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

References

Wikidata weekly summary #464

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

• Events
  • Past: Wikidata - HackaLOD Online sessions (replay in Dutch)
  • Upcoming: SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, April 20 at 18:00 CEST
  • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Alexandra Wong on experiences and workflows for linking archival collections to Wikidata. There will also be a recap of insights from the recent Canadian archivists’ panel on Wikidata by the University and College Archives Special Interest Section (UCASIS) of the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA). Agenda, April 20
  • Upcoming: Wikipedia Weekley Network - Biodiversity edition: iNaturalist place ID YouTube, Facebook, April 23
  • Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #41 - YouTube, Facebook, April 24
  • Upcoming: 25 April - WikidataDays Sessions II, an online editing session dedicated to democracy and political parties, coinciding with the celebration of Freedom Day.
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #59, April 25

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Wikibase: the Software for Open Data projects
  • Videos
    • Structured Data on Commons explained, with Andrew Lih, John Cummings and Pharos (Youtube)
    • Discovering history's notable people (audio). Using Wikidata and Wikipedia as the backbone, this project "construct[s] a new dataset of more than seven million notable individuals across recorded human history".
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #40 - YouTube, Facebook
    • Adding information through EntitySchemas to Wikidata Andra Waagmeester and Jose Labra
    • SPARQL query requests around lexicography mapping] by VIGNERON - YouTube
    • Fast Linking of Mathematical Wikidata Entities in Wikipedia Articles Using Annotation Recommendation - YouTube
    • Wiki2Prop: A Multimodal Approach for Predicting Wikidata Properties from Wikipedia - YouTube
    • Wikidata Lab XXVII: WikiProject Brazilian Laws - YouTube
    • Librarians and Wikidata. A short tour - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • User:So9q/Gadget-CreateNewEntity.js is a userscript to add a "create new item" link in the dropdown menu for when you want to * add an item to a property, but the item does not exist. (recently modified to support lexemes).

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Humaniki March Update: Public Launch of Alpha Release
  • Another history of Denelezh
  • Wikidata Lexeme Forms no longer automatically redirects you to login, so you can now use edit mode to view the forms of a lexeme in the “right” order. Here is an example.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: pH value, introduced on, ALA-LC romanization for Ukrainian
    • External identifiers: Generals of World War II ID, La Réunion des Livres ID, Humanitāro zinātņu virtuālā enciklopēdija concept ID, Humanitāro zinātņu virtuālā enciklopēdija person ID, Encyclopedia of Jewish Women ID, Urban Archive ID, GCD publisher ID, Letecká badatelna accident ID, Proveana ID, KATOTTH ID, La Fenice Theatre in Venice person ID, Politiklexikon ID, Europalexikon ID, National Inventory of Dams ID, Wissens-Aggregator Mittelalter und Frühe Neuzeit ID, Indigenous Lands in Brazil ID, Virginia House of Delegates ID, CAOI person ID, Encyklopedie antropologie ID, Our Campaigns race ID, Olympedia affiliations ID, ANPI place numeric ID, National Provider Identifier, Dicionário Histórico-Biográfico Brasileiro ID, Brapci author ID, Wikiroute ID, Biographia Benedictina ID, Periodical ID in a database of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, National Database of Laws and Regulations ID, Russians of Latvia ID, Rekhta author ID, Washington Rare Plant Field Guide ID, DzygaMDB film ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: translator name string, scope note, LIMA media artist ID, CofE archives ID, CofE archives name ID, CofE archives place ID, has artist file in, term in higher taxon, accessibility statement URL, Hotel des Causses
    • External identifiers: Dialnet thesis ID, IAU member ID, MileSplit ID, Australian Thesaurus of Education Descriptors ID, Malaysian school code, synonymer.se Swedish synonym ID, Prague City Gallery inventory number in Art for the City, Yukon Archives authority record ID, Cimiterium ID, Encyclopedia of Korean Culture ID, HERO-tunniste, Smithsonian Ark ID, Oregon Poetic Voices poet ID, J! Archive player ID, Gender Glossar ID, Beirut Arab University's Libraries Title ID, music austria ID, identifiant Localisation - Joconde du Service des musées de France, identifiant techniques - Joconde du Service des musées de France, identifiant utilisation - Joconde du Service des musées de France, identifiant représentation - Joconde du Service des musées de France, NC Highway Historical Marker Program ID
  • Query examples:
    • Artists on Spotify that lack a Spotify Artist ID (P1902) on Wikidata (Source)
    • Timeline of the discovery of elements in the periodic table (Source)
    • 19th-century depictions of sunflowers (Source)
    • Czech art collections by size (Source)
  • Newest WikiProjects: Cyprus

• Development
  • Finished work on the support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via the API (phab:T199896)
  • Got all feature work done on the first version of the Query Builder. It is now awaiting security review.
  • Statements linking to deleted Lexemes now indicate this similar to statements linking to deleted Items (phab:T277089)
  • Fixing a bug with misaligned grammatical features after an OOUI update (phab:T278522)
  • Finished work on the small tools to get the number of constraints violations and ORES scores for a list of Items. Will publish soon.
  • Did interviews with a few people about how they work around lexicographical data
  • Selected focus languages for continued work on lexicographical data and Abstract Wikipedia together with Abstract Wikipedia team. The selected ones are Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam and Dagbani. You can read more about it in the Abstract Wikipedia newsletter.
  • Gave input to WMF search platform team for a survey draft around the query service in order to better understand how to move forward with improvements

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 14:31, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-16

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

Recent changes

• Email to the Wikimedia wikis are handled by groups of Wikimedia editors. These volunteer response teams now use Znuny instead of OTRS. The functions and interface remain the same. The volunteer administrators will give more details about the next steps soon. [81][82]
• If you use syntax highlighting, you can see line numbers in the 2010 and 2017 wikitext editors when editing templates. This is to make it easier to see line breaks or talk about specific lines. Line numbers will soon come to all namespaces. [83][84][85]
• Because of a technical change there could be problems with gadgets and scripts that have an edit summary area that looks similar to this one. If they look strange they should use mw.loader.using('mediawiki.action.edit.styles') to go back to how they looked before. [86]
• The latest version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis last week. There was no Tech News issue last week.

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in two weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.

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

16:48, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 April 2021

• From the editor: A change is gonna come

• Disinformation report: Paid editing by a former head of state's business enterprise

• In the media: Fernando, governance, and rugby

• Opinion: The (Universal) Code of Conduct

• Op-Ed: A Little Fun Goes A Long Way

• Changing the world: The reach of protest images on Wikipedia

• Recent research: Quality of aquatic and anatomical articles

• Traffic report: The verdict is guilty, guilty, guilty

• News from Wiki Education: Encouraging professional physicists to engage in outreach on Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:33, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 April 2021

• From the editor: A change is gonna come

• Disinformation report: Paid editing by a former head of state's business enterprise

• In the media: Fernando, governance, and rugby

• Opinion: The (Universal) Code of Conduct

• Op-Ed: A Little Fun Goes A Long Way

• Changing the world: The reach of protest images on Wikipedia

• Recent research: Quality of aquatic and anatomical articles

• Traffic report: The verdict is guilty, guilty, guilty

• News from Wiki Education: Encouraging professional physicists to engage in outreach on Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:30, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #465

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

• Discussions
  • Other: Scientific papers' labels in other languages than English
• Events
  • Upcoming: Wikidata/Wikibase office hour, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday 28th April 2021 (18:00 Berlin time), on the Wikidata Telegram channel.
  • Upcoming: The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 29th April 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). Everyone is welcome to come and share out about your project or what you're working on around Wikibase.
  • Upcoming: OpenStreetMap TW x Wikidata Taiwan Taipei (Q1867) Meetup 2021-05-10
  • COSCUP 2021 CFP is now open
  • Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #42 - YouTube, Facebook, May 1
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #60, May 2

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • User:Lucas Werkmeister/P642 considered harmful
  • New extension: Wikibase EDTF by Professional.Wiki (Demo video)
  • Videos
    • OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Meetup #27 - Wikidata Lexeme Teaching - LBRY, Odysee
    • (Workshop) Introduction to Wikidata by Lucie Aimée Kaffee
    • Graphic Possibilities Comics Wikidata Tutorial
    • SPARQL tutorial (in Portuguese)
    • An Introduction to Wikidata (in Malayalam)
    • Wikidata tutorials in Albanian (1, 2, 3, 4)
    • SPARQL #Wikidata back to basics (in French)
    • (Workshop) #1Lib1Ref​ on Wikidata
    • Adding an article to Wikidata by DOI (in Portuguese) - YouTube
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #41 - YouTube, Facebook
    • Working with Zotero on WiKidata (in Italian) - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • User:So9q/AddNewLexemeMenu.js is a userscript that adds a section to the sidebar with links for creating new lexemes.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • WMDE built two tools to help editors get a better understanding of the quality of Wikidata's data in a specific area of interest. Try them out and let us know what you think.
    • Item Quality Evaluator
    • Constraint Violation Checker
  • Collaborative translation of Cita is now available on translatewiki.net. Cita is a Wikidata addon that adds citations metadata support to Zotero, using cites work (P2860) information from Wikidata, and enabling users to easily contribute missing data. Cita is currently under development with a WikiCite grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, and presentation workshops will be held on May 27th (Spanish) and May 31st (English). More info and pre-registration here.
  • RaiseWikibase is a tool for speeding up multilingual knowledge graph construction with Wikibase. Among other features, it can be utilized to create a mini Wikibase instance with Wikidata properties in a few minutes.
  • SPARQL-Blockly is a tool to visualise and construct SPARQL queries as visual blocks (Wikidata example)
  • Wikibase/FAQ is a living document of a list of frequently asked questions about Wikibase. Community members are welcome to contribute to it.
  • RIP Liz Marley
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: ALA-LC romanization for Ukrainian
    • External identifiers: ANPI place numeric ID, National Provider Identifier, Dicionário Histórico-Biográfico Brasileiro ID, Brapci author ID, Wikiroute ID, Biographia Benedictina ID, Periodical ID in a database of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, National Database of Laws and Regulations ID, Russians of Latvia ID, Rekhta author ID, Washington Rare Plant Field Guide ID, DzygaMDB film ID, Bioguiden movie theater ID, MovieMeter person ID, Biblioteca Digital Curt Nimuendajú ID, SonyLIV show ID, Gyldendals Teaterleksikon ID, IAU member ID, LIMA media artist ID, Singers.com ID, HistoryLink essay number, inventory number of a work of art in the Art for the City database, Cimiterium ID, Smithsonian Ark ID, Oregon Poetic Voices poet ID, Encyclopedia of Korean Culture ID, Malaysian school code, Trap Danmark ID, Finna ID, Berliner Bezirkslexikon: Mitte ID, Berliner Bezirkslexikon: Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf ID, Berliner Bezirkslexikon: Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg ID, Catalogue of the General State Archives ID, CofE archives ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: accessibility statement URL, symbol represents, main upper course, Political Graveyard geography ID, diel cycle, Taxon holotype location, Smithsonian trinomial prefix, Digital Atlas of Idaho taxon ID, hardware threading standard
    • External identifiers: music austria ID, identifiant Localisation - Joconde du Service des musées de France, identifiant utilisation - Joconde du Service des musées de France, identifiant représentation - Joconde du Service des musées de France, NC Highway Historical Marker Program ID, Forbes (Russia) profile ID, Indiana State Historical Marker Program ID, Digital DISCI ID, The Draft Review ID 2, Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte ID, Enzyklopädie des europäischen Ostens ID, National Historical Museums of Sweden agent ID, IUCN Green List ID, Gardens of the Roman Empire ID, Historic Hawai‘i Foundation ID, UNITER Award person ID, ID právnické osoby vedené Ministerstvem kultury ČR, CEV Team-ID, Anime Filler List show id, CEV Coach-ID, memento.wien person ID, MyBIS ID, Ultime lettere di condannati a morte e di deportati della Resistenza italiana person ID, am.hayazg.info ID, The Criterion Collection film ID, Digital Library of Armenian Literature author ID, Kielitoimiston sanakirja ID, Gopo Award ID, Director Identification Number, TheTVDB character ID, JECFA number, Norges Fotballforbund klubb ID, representatives1821.gr ID, Parliament of Romania person ID, Apple TV movie ID
  • Query examples:
    • Timeline of road vehicles crashing into Montague Street Bridge, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
    • Coal-fired power plants in Germany (Source)
    • Average lifespan by profession (Select the desired columns and get labels) (Source)
    • The number of natural disasters in various countries since 1970 (Source)
    • Heads of states/governments whose cause of death was a military casualty (Source)
    • List of French stations sorted by number of tracks (Source)
    • Relationship of the different Corona viruses (Source)
    • Map of about one third of the ancient trees in Bulgaria (Source)
    • Lexemes without statements or senses by language
  • Newest database reports: Doctor Who companions

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Take a list of cities in your country, add {{Item documentation}} in the talk page and have fun looking at people born in this place ordered by number of sitelinks. You may have some surprises!
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 16:46, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-17

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

Recent changes

• Templates have parameters that can have specific values. It is possible to suggest values for editors with TemplateData. You can soon see them as a drop-down list in the visual editor. This is to help template users find the right values faster. [87][88][89]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 April. It will be on all wikis from 29 April (calendar).

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

21:23, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-18

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

Recent changes

• Twinkle is a gadget on English Wikipedia. It can help with maintenance and patrolling. It can now be used on other wikis. You can get Twinkle on your wiki using the twinkle-starter GitHub repository.

Problems

• The content translation tool did not work for many articles for a little while. This was because of a bug. [90]
• Some things will not work for about a minute on 5 May. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This will affect the content translation tool and notifications among other things. This is because of an upgrade to avoid crashes. [91]

Changes later this week

• Reference Previews will become a default feature on a number of wikis on 5 May. This is later than planned because of some changes. You can use it without using Page Previews if you want to. The earlier plan was to have the preference to use both or none. [92][93]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 May. It will be on all wikis from 6 May (calendar).

Future changes

• The CSS classes .error, .warning and .success do not work for mobile readers if they have not been specifically defined on your wiki. From June they will not work for desktop readers. This can affect gadgets and templates. The classes can be defined in MediaWiki:Common.css or template styles instead. [94]

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

15:42, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #466

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

• Events
  • Past: Wikidata+Wikibase office hour happened on April 28th. See notes here (English).
  • Upcoming: International Museum Day, May 3-18, including a Wikidata competition
  • Upcoming: Basics about SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, May 4 at 18:00 CEST
  • Upcoming: Scholia - Open Bibliometrics for Researchers webinar on Zoom, May 5 at 10h30 UTC (free, but registration needed)
  • Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #42 - YouTube, Facebook, May 8
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #61, May 9
  • Upcoming: the next Wikidata bug triage hour will take place on May 17th on the topic of quality constraints
  • Upcoming: Wikimedia Hackathon, May 22-23. The call for proposals for the program is now open until May 9th for the main track (May 19th for the open rooms) More information

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • WBStack Infrastructure - current deployment and architecture of wbstack.com
  • Videos
    • Mix'n'match workshop in (Italian) - YouTube
    • SPARQL #Wikidata back to basics (in French) - YouTube
    • Wikidata Lab XXVIII: Metadata applications (a technical training on the process of metadata applications development) - YouTube
    • Upload workshop (in Dutch) - datacleaning, reconciliation, upload, embed metadata with exiftool & Upload images with Pattypan and link with Wikidata.
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #42 - YouTube, Facebook
    • Overview of all LIVE Wikidata editing episodes including topics and tools used to make search easier

• Tool of the week
  • Wikinegata is a platform for browsing interesting negations about Wikidata entities. (Overview video)

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Template:Item classification and Template:Item documentation now include more generic queries for classes: it include the number of subclasses, the number of instances, the number of instances by class, the list of instances and the list of most frequent properties for items of this class.
  • TP organization now includes generic queries for items of class school.
  • Over 3,000,000 usages of taxon name (P225)

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: field of usage, artist files at, accessibility statement URL, degrees day, Beirut Arab University's Libraries title ID
    • External identifiers: J! Archive player ID, CofE archives name ID, HERO ID, GLEI RAL, Archdiocese of Liverpool parish ID, Yukon Archives authority record ID, CofE archives place ID, NC Highway Historical Marker Program ID, National Historical Museums of Sweden agent ID, Australian Thesaurus of Education Descriptors ID, Enzyklopädie des europäischen Ostens ID, Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte ID, Oregon Flora Image Project ID, Digital DISCI ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Clubhouse account, Danmarks Tekniske Kulturarv book ID, hat Gedenkort, Secondary Archive artist ID, date of probate
    • External identifiers: LMIC musician ID, DC Books store book ID, ctext data entity ID, SAIA authority ID, AdServio school ID, Apple Music label ID, MacArthur Fellows Program ID, Encyclopedia of China Online Database ID, DHLE, APA Dictionary of Psychology entry, Scholarpedia article ID, Biology Online Biology Dictionary entry, Biblioteca di Santa Sabina ID, Biblioteche della Custodia di Terra Santa a Gerusalemme ID, Universal equine life number, Auschwitz Prisoners Database ID, Nevada SHPO marker ID, Sigla ID, Bing Entity ID, light characteristic, Lexikon der österreichischen Provenienzforschung ID, Identificativo Polo bibliografico della Ricerca, LTit person ID
  • Query examples:
    • List number of albums (Q482994) by language (P407) in descending order (Source)
    • Map of Scottish council areas (Source)
    • Databases with a SPARQL endpoint, sorted by number of ids known by Wikidata (Source)
    • List of actors and actresses who died during 2020 (Source)
  • Newest database reports: new screenwriters

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Suggested and open tasks!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:45, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #466

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

• Events
  • Past: Wikidata+Wikibase office hour happened on April 28th. See notes here (English).
  • Upcoming: International Museum Day, May 3-18, including a Wikidata competition
  • Upcoming: Basics about SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, May 4 at 18:00 CEST
  • Upcoming: Scholia - Open Bibliometrics for Researchers webinar on Zoom, May 5 at 10h30 UTC (free, but registration needed)
  • Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #42 - YouTube, Facebook, May 8
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #61, May 9
  • Upcoming: the next Wikidata bug triage hour will take place on May 17th on the topic of quality constraints
  • Upcoming: Wikimedia Hackathon, May 22-23. The call for proposals for the program is now open until May 9th for the main track (May 19th for the open rooms) More information

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • WBStack Infrastructure - current deployment and architecture of wbstack.com
  • Videos
    • Mix'n'match workshop in (Italian) - YouTube
    • SPARQL #Wikidata back to basics (in French) - YouTube
    • Wikidata Lab XXVIII: Metadata applications (a technical training on the process of metadata applications development) - YouTube
    • Upload workshop (in Dutch) - datacleaning, reconciliation, upload, embed metadata with exiftool & Upload images with Pattypan and link with Wikidata.
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #42 - YouTube, Facebook
    • Overview of all LIVE Wikidata editing episodes including topics and tools used to make search easier

• Tool of the week
  • Wikinegata is a platform for browsing interesting negations about Wikidata entities. (Overview video)

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Template:Item classification and Template:Item documentation now include more generic queries for classes: it include the number of subclasses, the number of instances, the number of instances by class, the list of instances and the list of most frequent properties for items of this class.
  • TP organization now includes generic queries for items of class school.
  • Over 3,000,000 usages of taxon name (P225)

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: field of usage, artist files at, accessibility statement URL, degrees day, Beirut Arab University's Libraries title ID
    • External identifiers: J! Archive player ID, CofE archives name ID, HERO ID, GLEI RAL, Archdiocese of Liverpool parish ID, Yukon Archives authority record ID, CofE archives place ID, NC Highway Historical Marker Program ID, National Historical Museums of Sweden agent ID, Australian Thesaurus of Education Descriptors ID, Enzyklopädie des europäischen Ostens ID, Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte ID, Oregon Flora Image Project ID, Digital DISCI ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Clubhouse account, Danmarks Tekniske Kulturarv book ID, hat Gedenkort, Secondary Archive artist ID, date of probate
    • External identifiers: LMIC musician ID, DC Books store book ID, ctext data entity ID, SAIA authority ID, AdServio school ID, Apple Music label ID, MacArthur Fellows Program ID, Encyclopedia of China Online Database ID, DHLE, APA Dictionary of Psychology entry, Scholarpedia article ID, Biology Online Biology Dictionary entry, Biblioteca di Santa Sabina ID, Biblioteche della Custodia di Terra Santa a Gerusalemme ID, Universal equine life number, Auschwitz Prisoners Database ID, Nevada SHPO marker ID, Sigla ID, Bing Entity ID, light characteristic, Lexikon der österreichischen Provenienzforschung ID, Identificativo Polo bibliografico della Ricerca, LTit person ID
  • Query examples:
    • List number of albums (Q482994) by language (P407) in descending order (Source)
    • Map of Scottish council areas (Source)
    • Databases with a SPARQL endpoint, sorted by number of ids known by Wikidata (Source)
    • List of actors and actresses who died during 2020 (Source)
  • Newest database reports: new screenwriters

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Suggested and open tasks!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 12:58, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 43

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 43, March – April 2021

• New Library Card designs
• 1Lib1Ref May

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --11:11, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #467

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

• Events
  • Ongoing
    • Wikidata contest for International Museum from May 3-18 2021
  • Upcoming
    • OpenStreetMap TW x Wikidata Taiwan Taipei (Q1867) Meetup 2021-05-10
    • Basics about SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, May 11 at 18:00 CEST
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #62, May 16
    • Wikidata Bug triage hour about constraints, May 17
    • COSCUP 2021 Call For Papers now open
    • Wikimedia Taiwan x NCKUHis Digital humanities Wikidata Workshop National Cheng Kung University (Q706708), 2021-05-29 ~ 2021-05-31

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • WBStack setting changes, Federated properties, Wikidata entity mapping & more (covering some of the recent UI and setting changes that happened on WBStack in the past months by Addshore
    • Academic ancestor graphs from Wikidata
  • Papers
    • Roderic D. M. Page, Wikidata and the Bibliography of Life, doi:10.1101/2021.05.04.442638
    • Friederike Ehrhart, et al. Aresource to explore the discovery of rare diseases and their causative genes (Q106708178), doi:10.1038/S41597-021-00905-Y
  • Videos
    • SPARQL #Wikidata​ retour aux bases #3 - YouTube
    • Wikidata, Linked Data… all the data! Knowledge representation for everybody - YouTube
    • Wikidata Nigeria tutorials on YouTube - How to contribute to Wikidata, add statements for streets named after a person
    • SPARQL Wikidata tutorial (in Portuguese) - YouTube
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #42 - YouTube, Facebook

• Tool of the week
  • User:Nikki/Ranker.js adds a link to the Ranker tool next to every property on an entity page.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The Wikibase spring release is now available! This new release is compatible with MediaWiki 1.35 and it contains new features: Federated Properties, WikibaseManifest & Wikibase Pingback.
  • May 2021 Query Builder updates: We finished usability testing of new features and incorporated feedback from users including people with visual impairments and RTL languages. It is now possible to query for dates and we're also looking into making the Query Builder discoverable from the Wikidata Query Service.
  • Template:Generic queries for filmmakers is a new wikidata template which defines generic SPARQL queries specific for filmmakers.
  • Template:Generic queries for occupations is a new wikidata template with generic queries for items of items such as occupations or professions
  • Wikimedia Foundation 2021 Board Elections has been announced. Please sign-up as an Election Volunteer if you'd like to support the elections. Election Volunteers serve as a bridge between the Elections Committee, the facilitation team and the movement.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: Digital Atlas of Idaho URL, identifier shared with lexeme, audio transcription
    • External identifiers: MyBIS species ID, Beirut Arab University's Libraries title ID, Gardens of the Roman Empire ID, Ultime lettere di condannati a morte e di deportati della Resistenza italiana person ID, NBM authority ID, MileSplit ID, Mixcloud ID, Forbes (Russia) profile ID, am.hayazg.info ID, bridgesport.ru player ID, APA Dictionary of Psychology entry, The Draft Review ID, Nevada SHPO marker ID, IUCN Green List ID, National Association of Teachers of Singing member ID, Danmarks Tekniske Kulturarv book ID, Auschwitz Prisoners Database ID, Biology Online Biology Dictionary entry, Biblioteca di Santa Sabina ID, Senate of Romania person ID, Chamber of Deputies of Romania person ID, LMIC musician ID, Scholarpedia article ID, Historic Hawai‘i Foundation place ID, Digital Library of Armenian Literature author ID, Den Danske Ordbog article ID, Den Danske Ordbog idiom ID, OpenCorporates register ID, Biblioteche della Custodia di Terra Santa a Gerusalemme ID, IBSF competition ID, SAIA authority ID, Football Association of Norway Club ID, music austria ID, Secondary Archive artist ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: official podcast, Danish redlist ID, Velocity Relative to Earth, athletics program, North Carolina session law
    • External identifiers: vedidk ID, MyBIS protected area ID, COG ID, Badok ID, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity person ID, DTB-Gerätturner-ID, Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy ID, UK Renewable Energy Planning Database ID, University of Washington Campus Map ID, Australian Music Centre composer ID, Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs - diplomatic mission IDs, SOUNZ work ID, Canadian Music Centre Composer Showcase ID, Repositório da Produção USP Person ID, Online Archive of California finding aid ID, SOSBrutalism ID, Microlepidoptera.nl ID, OSDN project, SOR bird ID, Companies Registration Office (Ireland) Registration Number, ToateAnimalele ID, Muziekencyclopedie ID
  • Query examples:
    • List of French firms without SIREN id (P1616) ordered by number of sitelinks with search links in annuaire-entreprises‧data‧gouv.fr : the query makes it easy to find the SIREN number (P1616) (source Property talk P1616)
    • Number of works per year by researchers supervised by Lars Kai Hansen (source)
    • Count of sitelinks of Nigerians on Wikidata (Source)
    • 30 largest cities with female mayor (Source)
    • Recent locations of boundary stones in Upper Lusatia (see pictures by clicking on the dots) (Source)
    • Types of items in Australia that don't have identifier properties (Source)

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 13:22, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-19

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 May. It will be on all wikis from 13 May (calendar).

Future changes

• You can see what participants plan to work on at the online Wikimedia hackathon 22–23 May.

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

15:09, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-20

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

Recent changes

• There is a new toolbar in the Reply tool. It works in the wikitext source mode. You can enable it in your preferences. [95] [96] [97]
• Wikimedia mailing lists are being moved to Mailman 3. This is a newer version. For the character encoding to work it will change from UTF-8 to utf8mb3. [98][99]
• An earlier issue of Tech News said that the citoid API would handle dates with a month but no days in a new way. This has been reverted for now. There needs to be more discussion of how it affects different wikis first. [100]

Changes later this week

• MediaWiki:Pageimages-blacklist will be renamed MediaWiki:Pageimages-denylist. The list can be copied to the new name. It will happen on 19 May for some wikis and 20 May for some wikis. Most wikis don't use it. It lists images that should never be used as thumbnails for articles. [101]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 May. It will be on all wikis from 20 May (calendar).

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

13:48, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #468

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

• Discussions
  • New request for comments:
    • Separating "citations" from all Wikipedia articles by using Wikidata
    • IP Masking Engagement
  • Closed request for comments:
    • Allow for Wikidata items to be created that only link to a single Wikimedia Commons category (Wikidata notability discussion). Outcome --> no change to WD:N
    • Inverse constraint on cause-and-effect properties. Outcome --> constraints were removed

• Events
  • Ongoing:
    • Data literacy snacks - Talk about "Wikibase knowledge graphs for data management & data science" on 23rd of June. For registration, send e-mail to infoberd-bw.de
  • Upcoming
    • SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, May 18 at 18:00 CEST
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Mahir Morshed will be discussing Lexemes in Wikidata; Agenda, May 18th.
    • May 21-22, 2021 [102] Boston Rock City: Explore Wikidata and Learn About Local Music: Boston Public Library is partnering with Harvard Library for a guided exploration of Wikidata and local music history. Join us for two days of music and Wikidata editing; no prior experience or punk cred necessary! This public event is free to all and will take place via Zoom; please register in advance. The subject of this project is the Arthur Freedman Collection, and audiovisual archive that captures over four decades of Boston rock music performances. We’ll provide: instructions, tools, data sources, visualizations, optional Discord chat, and a soundtrack. If you have questions, please contact Harvard Library staff member Peter Laurence at laurenc@fas.harvard.edu.
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #63, May 23
    • OpenStreetMap Taiwan x Wikidata Taiwan Taipei (Q1867) Meetup 2021-06-07 Mozilla Community Space Taipei (Q61752245).

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Papers
    • Hiba Arnaout et al, Negative Knowledge for Open-world Wikidata (full text link)
  • Videos
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #44 - YouTube
      • Link to all the Wikipedia Weekly Network/Live Wikidata Editing sessions by Ainali and Abbe98
    • Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons und Wikipedia bearbeiten 2021/001 (in German) - YouTube
    • SPARQL #Wikidata retour aux bases #4 - YouTube
    • How to use Wikidata to list nearby tourist places on a web page (in French) - YouTube
    • How to add lexemes to Wikidata (in Swedish) - YouTube
    • How to edit library data in Wikidata (in Italian) - YouTube
    • Editing the drawings in the Gambara Bovardi collection at the Levi Foundation in Venice on Wikidata (in Italian) - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • User:Lucas Werkmeister/hyphenation-point.js is a user script that replaces any | characters with U+2027 HYPHENATION POINT when editing hyphenation snaks.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • 20k+ DOIs of Chinese language scientific journal articles have now been added to WD, thanks to scraping->validation->matching->quickstatements workflow built by Stevenliuyi (via a WikiCite eScholarship)
  • Template:Annotate QID (currently on en. & de.Wikisource) allows names and other terms in texts to be semantically annotated with the equivalent QIDs. sv.Wikisource has a similar template.
  • Template:Item documentation displays Template:Generic queries for occupations for items of class occupation (Q12737077) and Template:Generic queries for filmmakers for items with occupation (P106) filmmaker (Q2526255)
  • Wikimedia Foundation 2021 Board Elections has been announced. Please sign-up as an Election Volunteer if you'd like to support the elections. Election Volunteers serve as a bridge between the Elections Committee, the facilitation team and the movement.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: identifier shared with lexeme, audio transcription, counterpart position, earned run average, official podcast, diel cycle, intended background color, scope note
    • External identifiers: LMIC musician ID, Scholarpedia article ID, Historic Hawai‘i Foundation place ID, Digital Library of Armenian Literature author ID, Den Danske Ordbog article ID, Den Danske Ordbog idiom ID, OpenCorporates register ID, Biblioteche della Custodia di Terra Santa a Gerusalemme ID, IBSF competition ID, SAIA authority ID, Football Association of Norway club ID, music austria ID, Secondary Archive artist ID, Editorial Freelancers Association member ID, MacArthur Fellows Program ID, representatives1821.gr ID, Memento Vienna person ID, universal equine life number, Encyclopedia of China Online Database ID, Indiana State Historical Marker Program ID, Apple Music label ID (US version), bio.se movie theater ID, MyBIS protected area ID, Dialnet thesis ID, hPSCreg cell line ID, Michigan State University Library Comic Art Collection Record Number, LTit person ID, JECFA number, Badok ID, Sigla ID, DCinemaToday company ID, CEV coach ID, CEV team ID, Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy ID, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity ID, AdServio ID, PeakVisor peak ID, PeakVisor range ID, PeakVisor area ID, PeakVisor park ID, Anime Filler List show ID, Anime Filler List episode slug, Australian Music Centre composer ID, Danish 2010 redlist identifier, synonymer.se ID, SOUNZ work ID, vedidk ID, Microlepidoptera.nl ID, UNITER Award person ID, sense on DHLE
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: infects, setlist, oral history at, DIVA author ID, DIVA record ID, type of lens
    • External identifiers: ToateAnimalele ID, Muziekencyclopedie ID, CDep.Ro NGO ID, causesanti.va ID, Adevărul topic ID, bathingWaterIdentifier, Scenic Washington scenic drives and road trips ID, Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts ID, cIMeC.Ro Museum ID, Newspaper Genre List ID, Styria Museum ID, What Works Clearinghouse study ID, WUA author ID, hush.am person ID, Archive Alsharekh person ID, Douban series ID, RomArchive IDs, Moths and Butterflies of Europe and North Africa ID, Scholasticon person ID, Japan PlayStation Software Database ID, WMF lang code
  • Deleted properties: iFixit repairability score (P7478)
  • Query examples:
    • Number of species belonging to the different IUCN conservation categories (Source)
    • List of Wikimedia language codes (Source)
    • Plant genera that honor women (Source)
    • Poets whose fathers are lawyers (Source)
    • Phrase-book for types of food (mapping Catalan and English) (Source)

• Development
  • Fixed the entity usage dashboards that no longer showed data due to technical issues. It tracks how much data from Wikidata is used on the other Wikimedia projects. (phab:T279762)
  • Configured the Property Suggester to not suggest Google Knowledge Graph ID (P2671) and Wolfram Language entity code (P4839) (phab:T280779)
  • Investigated remaining issue with updating the page_props table on the client wikis, which is confusing some bots making use of that table (phab:T280627)
  • Fixed an issue in the Query Builder where it got confused when adding several conditions with the same Property (phab:T279945)
  • Working on tracking the number of edits per namespace over time (phab:T281356)
  • Working on fixing a bug where old revisions of Items have edit buttons but should not (phab:T281587)
  • Fixing an issue where value suggestions are not showing all values that are defined in the property constraint (phab:T280650)

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Near 6,100 items have the Template:Item documentation in their talk page. Help deploy this template.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:18, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #18

Welcome to the eighteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Structured tasks

A screenshot of "add a link" feature in development in beta.

"Add a link" is now being tested in production and is nearing release on our four pilot wikis (Arabic, Czech, Vietnamese, and Bengali Wikipedias). We'll be doing final tests this week and next week, and then plan to deploy to the four wikis either during May 24 week, or May 31 week. After two weeks, we will analyze the initial data to identify any problems or trends. We expect that this feature will engage new kinds of newcomers in easy and successful edits. If things are going well after four weeks, we'll progressively deploy it to the wikis with Growth features.

News for mentors

Mockup of the Mentor dashboard.

• We are currently working on a Mentor dashboard. This special page aims to help mentors be more proactive and be more successful at their role. The first iteration will include a table that shows an overview of the mentors current mentees, a module with their own settings, and a module that will allow them to store their best replies to their mentees questions.
• We've conducted our quarterly audit on Growth's four pilot wikis to see the activity of mentors. It appears that the vast majority of mentors are active.

Community configuration

Community configuration editing form under development

We are working on project to allow communities to manage the configuration of the Growth features on their own. In the past, communities have needed to work directly with the Growth team to set up and alter the features. We plan to put this capability in the hands of administrators, through an easy-to-use form, so that the features can be easily tailored to fit the needs of each community. While we developed it initially for Growth features, we think this approach could have uses in other features as well. We'll be trying this on our pilot wikis in the coming weeks, and then we'll bring it to all Growth wikis soon after. We hope you check out the project page and add any of your thoughts to the talk page.

Scaling

• Growth features are now available on 35 wikis. Here is the list of the most recent ones: Romanian Wikipedia, Danish Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Esperanto Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Catalan Wikipedia.
• A new group of Wikipedias has been defined for the deployment of Growth features. Please contact us if you have questions about the deployment process, or if your community likes to get the features in advance.
• After discussion with the English Wikipedia community, the Growth features will be tested on a small percentage of new accounts. At the moment, registered users can test the features by turning them on in their preferences.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:23, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #469

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

• Events
  • Past
    • HackaLOD Online: Estimating the interest of art relationships with Wikidata - YouTube
  • Ongoing
    • #1Lib1Ref Campaign by IFLA Wikidata Working Group (May 15 - June 5)
      • #1Lib1Ref Campaign in Italy, as part of the IFLA Wikidata Working Group campaign (May 15 - June 5); more than 10k references have already been added (see the dashboard for more details)
  • Upcoming
    • The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 27th May 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). Everyone is welcome to come and share out about your project or what you're working on around Wikibase.
    • 27/05 (17h UTC): Wikidata Lab XXIX: Roundtripping process with Ederporto, Pharos e Susannaanas (in English), on YouTube
    • SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, May 25 at 18:00 CEST
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #45 - YouTube, Facebook, May 29 at 18:00 UTC
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #64, May 30
    • LD4 Wikibase Working Hour: The history, present and future of WBStack & WBaas (Wikibase as a service) 27 May 2021, 1PM Eastern US. Please fill in this form to register!

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • KELM: Integrating Knowledge Graphs with Language Model Pre-training Corpora. Wikidata was used to generate sentences to train a language model.
    • An Introduction to Knowledge Graphs
  • Videos
    • Wikimedia Hackathon 2021 - Main track - Saturday 22
    • Curating bibliographic metadata of scholarly publications: demo of Wikidata-based Scholia workflows
    • Demo of Ordia, a Wikidata tool to visualize lexicographic information from Wikidata
    • Adding references to Wikidata items, as part of #1Lib1Ref campaign (in Italian)

• Tool of the week
  • User:Jon Harald Søby/compact items.css is a stylesheet that shrinks the vertical space items take up on your screen, reducing the need to scroll to get an overview of an item. (screenshot)

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The prefix [[lexemes:]] allows to link to a search for lexemes on any Wikimedia wiki. Sample: lexemes:describe (project chat announcement).
  • The wikidata-lang JS module got a major update, and now makes accessible pre-generated mappings between Wikidata ids, Wikimedia language code (P424), ISO 639-1 code (P218), ISO 639-2 code (P219), ISO 639-3 code (P220), and ISO 639-6 code (P221), that can also be used by non-JS programs by fetching the desired JSON. Examples:
    • mapping of Wikimedia language codes to Wikidata ids
    • mapping of ISO 639-2 to Wikimedia language codes
  • Wikidata-related projects that have been developed/improved during the Wikimedia Hackathon 2021:
    • User:Lucas_Werkmeister/Ranker - Finished and announced the batch modes for the Ranker tool, allowing users to edit the ranks of statements in Wikidata or Structured Data on Commons in bulk
    • Wikidata Lexeme Forms: Portuguese modal adverb - Deployed support for Portuguese modal adverbs in the Wikidata Lexeme Forms tool
    • User:Jon Harald Søby/addSenseImage.js - User script to add images to sense statements on lexemes
    • Wikidata:Tools/Enhance user interface#identifierInput.js - fixing a bug in IdentifierInput.js gadget for Wikidata to better handle when a property has no format restraints

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: type of lens, oral history at, official map URL
    • External identifiers: The Criterion Collection film ID, Lexikon der österreichischen Provenienzforschung ID, Apple TV movie ID, Canadian Music Centre Composer Showcase ID, causesanti.va ID, Muziekencyclopedie ID, North Carolina session law, #SOSBrutalism ID, Online Archive of California finding aid ID, Museums in Styria ID, Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts person ID, SOR bird ID, ToateAnimalele ID, Polo bibliografico della ricerca entity ID, Polo bibliografico della ricerca author ID, OSDN project, Scholasticon person ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: music for work, in sense, academic calendar type
    • External identifiers: Romanistenlexikon ID, Buzer.de law identification, senato.archivioluce.it person ID, Apple TV show ID, Apple TV episode ID, Australian Music Centre work ID, fondoambiente.it ID, Unified book number, GLEI ELF, RBF event ID, Poetsgate poet ID, Badkartan.se ID, Book Owners Online person ID, ifixit device ID, Price One Penny Author ID, Price One Penny Publisher ID, Price One Penny Work ID, Medical Institution Code, AlternativeTo software ID, RoBasketballFed IDs, Online Coins of the Roman Empire ID, bathingWaterIdentifier, Enciclopedia della Matematica ID
  • Query examples:
    • Danish idioms (Source)
    • Map of coronavirus research organizations active from before 2020 (Source)
    • Scholarly articles about COVID-19 with "Wikipedia" in the title
    • 20th-century UK parliaments with count of father/mother who were MPs (Source)
    • The tallest known female politicians (Source)
    • Writing systems/characters and their year of appearance (Source)
    • Nocturnal animals based on diel cycle (Source)
  • Newest database reports: Doctor Who episodes (new series)

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:45, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-21

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

Recent changes

• The Wikimedia movement has been using IRC on a network called Freenode. There have been changes around who is in control of the network. The Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts have decided to move to the new Libera Chat network instead. This is not a formal decision for the movement to move all channels but most Wikimedia IRC channels will probably leave Freenode. There is a migration guide and ongoing Wikimedia discussions about this.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 May. It will be on all wikis from 27 May (calendar).

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

17:05, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #470

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

• Discussions
  • Closed request for comments:
    • Cleaning up the ontology of anonymous. Outcome: New model adopted, documentation updated.

• Events
  • Past
    • Wikibase Community User Group monthly meetings- May 2021
    • How to add references on Wikidata (# 1Lib1Ref 2021) - working hour (2)
    • SPARQL #Wikidata divers
      • Session du mardi 18 mai
      • Session du mardi 25 mai
  • Upcoming
    • SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, June 1 at 18:00 CEST
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Affinity Group Co-facilitators will recap the last year, introduce plans for the coming year, and receive suggestions from the community for future sessions.; [103], June 1st.
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #65, June 6
    • Meta meeting of the Wikibase Community User Group, to solve issues related to its affilation to the Wikimedia Foundation, June 9
    • Wikidata Bug Triage Hour about quality constraints, June 17

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Papers
    • Mapping of ImageNet and Wikidata for Knowledge Graphs Enabled Computer Vision
  • Videos
    • Wikidata Lab XXIX: Roundtripping process
    • Use of VanderBot Wikidata API writing script (testing)
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #45 - YouTube, Facebook

• Tool of the week
  • User:So9q/ordia-link.js - is a script to add a link to Ordia in the Tools section on items.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Call to participation in interview study to building a recommender system that can help improve the editing experience in Wikidata: Researchers at King's College London develop a personalized recommendation system to suggest Wikidata items for the editors based on their interests and preferences. The researchers are inviting volunteers to interview them about their current ways to choose the items you work on in order to understand the factors that might influence such a decision.
  • dewiki considered, but rejected the introduction of local short descriptions to replace those from Wikidata
  • User:Nikki/LexemeEntitySuggester.js was improved to now
    • automatically suggests the existing senses/forms when using demonstrates sense/form
    • automatically suggests items (based on the lemma matching the label or an alias) when using item for this sense
    • and searches for lemmas exactly matching the input when using synonym, antonym, hyperonym or pertainym

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: district heating grid
    • External identifiers: DiVA authority-person, CDep.Ro NGO ID, WUA author ID, hush.am person ID, Moths and Butterflies of Europe and North Africa ID, What Works Clearinghouse study ID, PoetsGate poet ID, Repositório da Produção da USP person ID, ctext data entity ID, Australian Music Centre work ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Martian coordinates, gobbledygook
    • External identifiers: Nevada Women's History Project ID, AADFI member ID, Bod-Inc Online author ID, Erfgoedkaart ID, Price One Penny Periodical ID, Price One Penny Library ID, composers.am person ID, armradioarchive.am person ID, Armeniapedia ID, Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers ID, AZGS Document Repository ID, electronic Essential Medicines List medicine ID, PAS member ID, ℒoviℱm Top Songs ID, 20th Century Chinese Biographical Database ID, Dizionario Biografico dell'Educazione (1800-2000) ID, BIU Santé image bank ID, cadastral plot in France, Internet Game Database developer ID, allabolag.se person ID, Olschki author ID
  • Query examples:
    • People with bird-like surnames in Czech (Source)
    • Properties used to link from preprints (Q580922) to scholarly articles (Q13442814) (Source)
    • Birthplace of Spanish poets (Source)
    • UK Parliaments since 1801 with number of members, number of distinct member-terms, and count of missing seats/parties. (Source)
  • Newest database reports: Fresnel lenses of lighthouses

• Development
  • Italian Wikiversity used Lua on their Recent Changes SpecialPage via overwriting a MediaWiki message. Our code used to not expect that, now it does. (phab:T283240)
  • Updating the panel that tracks Wikidata edits over time in different namespaces to include all namespaces (phab:T281356)
  • Working on adding a new constraints type for Lexemes (phab:T200689)
  • Working on designs for improving Special:NewLexeme
  • Working on designs for the system to find mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases
  • Fixing some malformed globe-coordinate precisions in the database (phab:T283576)

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 13:16, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-22

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

Problems

• There was an issue on the Vector skin with the text size of categories and notices under the page title. It was fixed last Monday. [104]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

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

17:04, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Epping, New South Wales

Hello! I saw that you became involved at the aforementioned article talk page disagreement on west/north and using more specific language. I'm planning to provide a third opinion on it, but I'm not sure if you are involving yourself in the discussion or planning to provide a 3O yourself. Either way, I cannot (or rather will not) take on 3Os that involve more than two editors, so thank you for participating! Sennecaster (What now?) 12:30, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #471

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

• Events
  • Past:
    • Wikimedia Hackathon 2021 (replay) "Wikidata Live Querying" by Lucas Werkmeister
    • SPARQL #Wikidata Préfixes 1/2 (in French) - YouTube
  • Upcoming:
    • Meta meeting of the Wikibase Community User Group, Wednesday, June 9, 16:00 UTC
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #46 - YouTube, Facebook, June 12 at 18:00 UTC
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #66, June 13
    • (Dutch) 16 june 2021, 15.00-16.30 CEST, "Universiteitsbibliotheek: Bijzondere Collecties zichtbaar en vindbaar maken in Wikidata", during "Digitaal Erfgoed @UM | zichtbaar, bruikbaar, houdbaar"

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • "Wikidata and R: a perfect pair" by Evolution and evolvability and Canley. A WikiCite eScholarship.
    • "Brazil’s Laws: Modeling the Brazilian legislation in Wikidata", by Ederporto. A WikiCite project grant project.
  • Papers
    • (Preprint) KGPool: Dynamic Knowledge Graph Context Selection for Relation Extraction (Wikidata dataset used in evaluation)
    • (Article) “Wikidata Projects in Times of COVID-19: IUPUI Libraries’ Engagement in Open Knowledge”
    • (Presentation) Explore, Analyse and Translate Multilingual Wikidata Properties by User:Jsamwrites at Contribuling
  • Videos
    • Understanding data import into Wikidata via Quickstatements (in Portuguese) - YouTube
    • Workshop for "Cita": a Wikidata addon for Zotero, hosted by Diegodlh - English & en español. A WikiCite grant project.
    • Wikidata: Municipalities of Romania + a map of places in Kuopio - YouTube
    • Wikidata Editing training (in Tamil) - YouTube
    • Excursus: Wikidata Knowledge Graph - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • Wikidata Image Positions is a tool to show and add relative position within image (P2677) qualifiers on depicts (P180) statements on Wikidata items as areas on the item’s image (P18).

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: none
    • External identifiers: Badkartan.se ID, Eionet bathingWaterIdentifier, ifixit device ID, AlternativeTo software ID, Price One Penny author ID, Nevada Women's History Project ID, Treccani's Enciclopedia della Matematica ID, Price One Penny work ID, Price One Penny library ID, Price One Penny publisher ID, Dizionario Biografico dell'Educazione (1800–2000) ID, Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers ID, Romanistenlexikon ID, composers.am person ID, Armeniapedia ID, OpenCorporates register jurisdiction, armradioarchive.am person ID, PANGO lineage code, AZGS Document Repository ID, AADFI member ID, electronic Essential Medicines List medicine ID, Japan PlayStation Software Database ID, Erfgoedkaart ID, Romanian diplomatic mission ID, Foreign diplomatic mission in Romania ID, PAS member ID, fondoambiente.it ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Range, not found in, LdiF person ID, board game mechanism, Date of resignation
    • External identifiers: DIP-ID, Castforward ID, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti member ID, EBAF ID, FCCOS ID, Dutch Caribbean Species Register ID, TBDB ID, cirkev.cz bohoslužby ID, Ropiky.net pillbox ID, GCD creator ID
  • Query examples:
    • Properties used to describe themselves (Inspiration)
    • Most common name in Germany by year of birth (Source)
    • Famous (not French) people born in France (Source)

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:02, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-23

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 June. It will be on all wikis from 10 June (calendar).

Future changes

• The Wikimedia movement uses Phabricator for technical tasks. This is where we collect technical suggestions, bugs and what developers are working on. The company behind Phabricator will stop working on it. This will not change anything for the Wikimedia movement now. It could lead to changes in the future. [105][106][107]
• Searching on Wikipedia will find more results in some languages. This is mainly true for when those who search do not use the correct diacritics because they are not seen as necessary in that language. For example searching for Bedusz doesn't find Będusz on German Wikipedia. The character ę isn't used in German so many would write e instead. This will work better in the future in some languages. [108]
• The CSRF token parameters in the action API were changed in 2014. The old parameters from before 2014 will stop working soon. This can affect bots, gadgets and user scripts that still use the old parameters. [109][110]

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

20:01, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #472

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

• Events
  • Past
    • SPARQL #Wikidata Préfixes 2/2 (session 8) - YouTube
    • Open Repositories 2021: Wikidata Integration with Repository Contents - YouTube
    • Information Service Engineering 2021
      • SPARQL complex queries, SPARQL aggregation and variable assignment, Wikidata SPARQL examples
      • SPARQL Federated Queries, DBpedia and Wikidata, SPARQL query aggregation and variable assignment
  • Upcoming
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Diego de la Hera on Cita, a Wikidata add-on for Zotero. Agenda, June 15
    • Wikidata Bug Triage Hour about quality constraints, June 17
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #47 - YouTube, Facebook, June 19 at 18:00 UTC
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #67, June 20
    • OpenStreetMap TW x Wikidata Taiwan Taipei (Q1867) Meetup 2021-07-05

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Videos
    • Gateway into Linked Data: Breaking silos with Wikidata - YouTube
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #46 - YouTube, Facebook

• Tool of the week
  • SPARQL Jupyter notebooks in PAWS: PAWS is a wikitech services which allows to run Jupyter notebooks. There is a SPARQL kernel which makes it possible to run SPARQL queries. See this example notebook.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata Community/Diversity 2021 Survey has been published. The results are meant to serve as a baseline to see how the community might (not) change in the future.
  • WikidataCon 2021: A sustainable future for Wikidata. Information about "the conference theme, its three-day program structure and a special project on diversity taking place before the conference itself".
  • The call for candidates for 2021 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections has begun on June 9. The last date to apply is June 29, 2021.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: personality trait of fictional character
    • External identifiers: Dizionario Biografico dell'Educazione (1800–2000) ID, Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers ID, Romanistenlexikon ID, composers.am person ID, Armeniapedia ID, OpenCorporates register jurisdiction, armradioarchive.am person ID, PANGO lineage code, AZGS Document Repository ID, AADFI member ID, electronic Essential Medicines List medicine ID, Japan PlayStation Software Database ID, Erfgoedkaart ID, Romanian diplomatic mission ID, Foreign diplomatic mission in Romania ID, PAS member ID, fondoambiente.it ID, Olschki author ID, French Etalab parcel visualization code, Geneanet family name ID, Online Coins of the Roman Empire ID, senato.archivioluce.it person ID, DIP ID, Newspaper Genre List ID, Dutch Caribbean Species Register ID, Internet Game Database developer ID, Book Owners Online person ID, Bod-Inc Online author ID, Burke Herbarium Image Collection ID, Ropiky.net pillbox ID, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti member ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: LdiF person ID, board game mechanism, Date of resignation, sex or gender of the position, regime, earliest known OpenTimestamps, Biblioteca Nacional de Maestros, named after lexeme
    • External identifiers: TBDB ID, cirkev.cz bohoslužby ID, GCD creator ID, Memobase ID, Central records of collections ID, Musica Baltica person ID, Standard Citation Forms ID, Montana Field Guide species ID, PRISM Break project ID, Idaho Species ID, Room of Names ID, ZKM person ID, fotodok ID, IFFR film director ID, EUIPO OoC-name id, Gutenberg Biographics ID, EUIPO OoC-work id, Games@Mail.ru ID, museumPASSmusées ID, Handlingar.se, NAD agent ID, Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung person ID, OlympicsIL ID
  • Query examples:
    • Lakes within 10 km of Berlin
    • Old bath pictures from Swedish Digitalmuseum
    • Bath water in Sweden with distance to the center of the lake it is connected to
    • Bath water in Sweden located in Nature reserves (protected area, geojson)
    • Map of the standard English and Welsh spellings of all places in the database (Source)
    • Films directed by Agnès Varda and their publication date (Source)
    • List of women who hold or have held the position of rector at a university (Source)
  • Schema examples:
    • EntitySchema:E319 - European bath waters
  • Newest WikiProjects:
    • Wikidata:WikiProject European Bath Waters - Europe is open up and its summer - lets add bath waters to Wikidata

• Development
  • Working on no longer using the Query Service to evaluate Constraints Checks regular expressions (this should make our checks faster and allow for further improvements) (phab:T176312)
  • Changing the rate limits for assigning Item IDs further, which should result in even fewer Q-IDs being skipped in the future (phab:T284538)
  • Finalizing the concepts for a tool to help work on mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases/websites/...

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 14:41, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-24

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

Recent changes

• Logged-in users on the mobile web can choose to use the advanced mobile mode. They now see categories in a similar way as users on desktop do. This means that some gadgets that have just been for desktop users could work for users of the mobile site too. If your wiki has such gadgets you could decide to turn them on for the mobile site too. Some gadgets probably need to be fixed to look good on mobile. [111]
• Language links on Wikidata now works for multilingual Wikisource. [112]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• In the future we can't show the IP of unregistered editors to everyone. This is because privacy regulations and norms have changed. There is now a rough draft of how showing the IP to those who need to see it could work.
• German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC. [113]
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 28 June. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [114][115]

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

20:25, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Question from I-U-She Thomas (14:56, 15 June 2021)

How to make a new article if, I'm a new user --I-U-She Thomas (talk) 14:56, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

Hi, @I-U-She Thomas, sorry I didn't answer, I've been inactive for a bit. What kind of article are you interested in creating? (I'll hop over to your user pages in a sec and see how you've been doing.) Pelagic (talk) 10:38, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

Editing news 2021 #2

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this newsletter

When newcomers had the Reply tool and tried to post on a talk page, they were more successful at posting a comment. (Source)

Earlier this year, the Editing team ran a large study of the Reply Tool. The main goal was to find out whether the Reply Tool helped newer editors communicate on wiki. The second goal was to see whether the comments that newer editors made using the tool needed to be reverted more frequently than comments newer editors made with the existing wikitext page editor.

The key results were:

• Newer editors who had automatic ("default on") access to the Reply tool were more likely to post a comment on a talk page.
• The comments that newer editors made with the Reply Tool were also less likely to be reverted than the comments that newer editors made with page editing.

These results give the Editing team confidence that the tool is helpful.

Looking ahead

The team is planning to make the Reply tool available to everyone as an opt-out preference in the coming months. This has already happened at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.

The next step is to resolve a technical challenge. Then, they will deploy the Reply tool first to the Wikipedias that participated in the study. After that, they will deploy it, in stages, to the other Wikipedias and all WMF-hosted wikis.

You can turn on "Discussion Tools" in Beta Features now. After you get the Reply tool, you can change your preferences at any time in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion.

–Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

00:27, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #473

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

• Events
  • Upcoming
    • The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 24th June 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). This month we'll have a team member from Wikibase Stakeholders Group talk briefly about their work, and then we'll welcome people to share out about their work around Wikibase. We'll leave some space in the agenda to discuss meta issues related to the Wikibase Community Usergroup.
    • SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in English by Vigneron, June 22 at 18:00 CEST
    • 24/06 (17:30 UTC): Wikidata Lab XXX: Roundtripping process for tainacan with Ederporto and Dalton Lopes Martins (https://tainacan.org/en/ Tainacan) (in English), on YouTube
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #68, June 27
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #47 - YouTube, Facebook, June 26 at 18:00 UTC

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Papers
    • Beyond VIAF. Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries (with detailed statistics on VIAF and Wikidata)
  • Videos
    • Using OpenRefine and creating wikidata schema - YouTube
    • Query SPARQL Wikidata around genealogy (in French) - YouTube
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #47 - YouTube, Facebook
    • Global Open Initiative Foundation editing session - Adding statements about Ghanaian Members of Parliament using OpenRefine - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • Template:PositionHolderHistory displays the full list of position holders for a given position.
  • Template:Generic queries for positions new template with generic queries for positions.

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

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: not found in, named place on map
    • External identifiers: Ropiky.net pillbox ID, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti member ID, Memobase ID, Standard Citation Forms for Rare Materials Cataloging ID, Skipsrevyen ID, EBAF authority ID, LdiF person ID, Musica Baltica person ID, EGID, RBF event ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: named after lexeme, replacement value, Qualis rank, role of component, table of contents available at URL, DICOM modality page, Flemish Heritage Themes ID
    • External identifiers: OlympicsIL ID, EBIDAT ID, Crosscut author ID, identifier BNM, Chidlovski.Com USSR national ice hockey team player ID, Handzone player ID, BES-Net user ID, Hokej.cz player ID, Research Resource Identifier, VK artist ID, MonumentalTrees.com, Lexikon Westfälischer Autorinnen und Autoren person ID, E-Flora BC species ID, E-Fauna BC species ID, Villo! station ID, LexM ID
  • Query examples:
    • Map of public bookcases
    • SPARQL Jupyter notebook to explore generic queries for positions (using PAWS)
    • Biographies that can be linked in different Wikipedias (apart from deWP) (Source)
    • Vulnerable, endangered or extinct languages with number of lexemes in Wikidata (Source)
    • Articles in English Wikipedia about women that have the good article badge but do not have an article written in Spanish (Source)
  • Newest WikiProjects:
    • Wikidata:WikiProject Outdoor Gyms

• Development
  • Fixed a bug that broke the "Add sitelink" popup on Commons (phab:T284854)
  • Working on a fix for suggesters popping up unexpectedly when tabbing quickly (phab:284219)
  • Reviewing code for a new Property Suggester by a student (phab:T284820)
  • Mismatch Finder: Working on a tool to work through mismatching data between Wikidata and external databases. Your feedback is welcome on Wikidata talk:Mismatch Finder
  • Curious Facts: We developed a tool to help editors check random curious facts on Wikidata. Try it and give us your feedback on Wikidata talk:Curious Facts
  • Kicked off our continued work on Wikidata-Wikibase federation (Federation v2) with preparatory work, including:
    • Testing infrastructure investigation and decision
    • Investigation: How to refer to entities that have the same IDs as the source wikibase entities

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:23, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-25

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

Recent changes

• The otrs-member group name is now vrt-permissions. This could affect abuse filters. [116]

Problems

• You will be able to read but not edit German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC. [117]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 June. It will be on all wikis from 24 June (calendar).

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

15:48, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 June 2021

• News and notes: Elections, Wikimania, masking and more

• In the media: Boris and Joe, reliability, love, and money

• Disinformation report: Croatian Wikipedia: capture and release

• Recent research: Feminist critique of Wikipedia's epistemology, Black Americans vastly underrepresented among editors, Wiki Workshop report

• Traffic report: So no one told you life was gonna be this way

• News from the WMF: Searching for Wikipedia

• Humour: Wikipedia's best articles on the world's strangest things

• WikiProject report: WikiProject on open proxies interview

• Forum: Is WMF fundraising abusive?

• Discussion report: Reliability of WikiLeaks discussed

• Obituary: SarahSV

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:15, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #474

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

• Discussions
  • New request for comments: Automatic analysis and breakdown of links (for social accounts reference)

• Events
  • Past:
    • log of Wikibase Live session 2021-06-24
  • Upcoming:
    • SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, June 28 at 18:00 CEST
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Robert Chavez (Northeastern University) will provide an introduction to SPARQL and using the Wikidata Query Service.; [118], June 29th.
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #69, July 4

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • A Journey Into Wikidata with Five Indigenous Artists
    • Adding Data to Wikidata is Efficient with QuickStatements
  • Papers
    • Which methods are the most effective in enabling novice users to participate in ontology creation? A usability study (compares Wikidata to other knowledge modelling tools)
  • Videos
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #47 - YouTube, Facebook, for the #ArcticKnot.
    • SPARQL queries live on Twitch about lexicography and lexemes by Vigneron, for the #ArcticKnot.
    • Wikidata Lab XXX: Roundtripping process for Tainacan - YouTube
    • Creating a new faculty item in Wikidata - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu68LM5NicM YouTube
    • Writing data to Wikidata, Wikidata Sandbox items

• Tool of the week
  • Template:Item documentation now includes Template:Generic queries for positions. It can be used for every position item in the talk page. See example with head of the United Nations Secretariat.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata Community/Diversity 2021 Survey has been published. The results are meant to serve as a baseline to see how the community might (not) change in the future. Feel free to give us your feedback on this discussion page.
  • Call for candidates for the 2021 election to the position of primary contact for the Wikibase Community User Group. Applicants should present themselves on this page before 2021-07-08 17:00 (UTC), after which voting will commence.
  • Bodh is a new tool to edit Lexemes by hand on a larger scale.
  • Wikidata Vertical Analysis by AKhatun (WMF)
  • Wikidata Lexeme Forms now supports Igbo nouns
  • Wikidata Lexeme Forms now supports Malayalam proper nouns
  • A new version of the Open Art Browser allows discovering works of art in the new section "Types", which presents you more than 1500 expressions of art. Explore it!

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: date of resignation, curid, consequence of text
    • External identifiers: RBF event ID, cirkev.cz Catholic services ID, Olympic Committee of Israel athlete ID, ZKM person ID, Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung person ID, Fotodok ID, museumPASSmusées ID, Burke Herbarium Image Collection contributor ID, Vindskyddskartan.se ID, Hokej.cz player ID, Franciscan Center of Christian Oriental Studies ID, Companies Registration Office (Ireland) Registration Number
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: delta of, Astrological sign, announced at, contact point (2)
    • External identifiers: WTA-Trainer-ID, Villo! station ID, LexM ID, Classical Archives composer ID, UFC ID, Tapology ID, Bellator ID, Bauforschung Baden-Württemberg Objekt-ID, FightMatrix ID, World Curling Federation Championship ID, Ethereum token address, Legie 100 legionary ID, PsycNET ID, Index Theologicus ID, MK ID, CCC in Idaho Collection ID, Gameblog.fr game ID, African Film Database ID, Games und Erinnerungskultur Datenbank ID, Great Ukrainian Encyclopedia Online ID, Native-Land.ca Territory ID, Native-Land.ca Language ID, Great Encyclopedia of Cyril and Methodius ID, HockeyLive player ID, eishockey.info player ID
  • Query examples:
    • Street names in Alsatian (source)
    • What kind of places in Wales host public toilets? (Source)
    • UK Health Ministers and their occupations on Wikidata (Source)
    • Count of statements by property for theatrical plays (Source)
    • Things dedicated to St. John the Baptist (Source)

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:03, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-26

Selected tech news from the Wikimedia technical community.

Recent changes

• Wikis with the Growth features now can configure Growth features directly on their wiki. This uses the new special page Special:EditGrowthConfig. [119]
• Wikisources have a new OCR tool. If you don't want to see the "extract text" button on Wikisource you can add .ext-wikisource-ExtractTextWidget { display: none; } to your common.css page. [120]

[...]

Future changes

• Threshold for stub link formatting, thumbnail size and auto-number headings can be set in preferences. They are expensive to maintain and few editors use them. The developers are planning to remove them. Removing them will make pages load faster. You can read more and give feedback.
• A toolbar will be added to the Reply tool's wikitext source mode. This will make it easier to link to pages and to ping other users. [121][122]

16:31, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Question from Samuraisamasan (17:25, 2 July 2021)

how can i launch/start a page --Samuraisamasan (talk) 17:25, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Hi, Samuraisamasan, and welcome to Wikipedia!

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and our main pages are articles about notable topics. We're not a social media or promotional site.

So the first question you have to ask yourself is:

• Is the thing I want to write about suitable for Wikipedia? Does it meet the inclusion criteria? And is there enough reliable information out there that I can source to write an article from?

If you think it is suitable, the next question is:

• Does it already exist on Wikipedia? Maybe under a different name, or as a section of a broader article?
  • If so, is it better to improve or expand the existing coverage instead of creating a new page / separate article?

If you're still convinced that a new page is warranted, you could start a new draft article in your User: space or in Draft: space. Then when you think it's ready, you submit it for review. Before I give you details on that process, though, I think it's worth discussing what you want to write about and why. What is the page that you would like to create?

I hope that makes sense: I'm new to one-on-one mentoring, and this current mentoring feature is new.

(P.S. Apologies about all the newsletters on this page, I hope to clean them up soon.)

— Pelagic (talk) 10:11, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #475

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

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship:
    • Allenwang6212a (RfP scheduled to end after 6 July 2021 06:09 UTC)

• Events
  • Past:
    • Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #49 - YouTube
  • Upcoming:
    • SPARQL queries live on Twitch in French by Vigneron, July 6 at 18:00 CEST (UTC+2)

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Schema explorers and how they can help guide adoption of common standards
    • Tackling Technical Debt, big and small, in Wikidata and Wikibase
  • Papers
    • A Study of the Quality of Wikidata
    • Beyond VIAF: Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries
  • Videos
    • (workshop) Editing Wikidata items about Ghanaian parliamentarians - YouTube
    • Adding descriptions and statements to Wikidata using Quickstatements - YouTube
    • Editing Wikidata (in German) - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • User:Nikki/AnchorLinks.js is a userscript that adds a small link before property labels and statement values on entity pages to provide a clickable/copiable link to that section of the page.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • A job opening for a fullstack developer to work on integrating Wikidata with expert-curated knowledge on invasion biology

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: voted on by, Qualis rank, author given names, author last name, delta of
    • External identifiers: Gutenberg Biographics ID, Idaho Species ID, Montana Field Guide species ID, Classical Archives composer ID, Crosscut author ID, E-Fauna BC species ID, E-Flora BC species ID, LexM ID, BES-Net user ID, VK artist ID, Legie 100 legionary ID, Buzer.de law identification, Games@Mail.ru ID, World Curling Federation Championship ID, FOIH themes ID, African Film Database ID, Gameblog.fr game ID, CCC in Idaho Collection ID, Monumental Trees ID, Bauforschung Baden-Württemberg Objekt-ID, Director Identification Number, GCD creator ID, Handzone player ID, Games und Erinnerungskultur Datenbank ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: code name, International Tables for Crystallography space group number, Impact factor, dependency grammar relations, biological target, URL for citizen's initiatives, incubator, project state
    • External identifiers: fotoCH photographer ID, Raakvlak inventory number, cultural broadcasting archive station ID, National Diet Library Persistent ID, MANTO ID, e-Rad researcher ID, WMO code
  • Query examples:
    • List of pairs of senses on the same lexeme that have the same gloss in at least one language (Source)
    • Which British Monarch saw most US Presidents; which US President saw most British Monarchs? (graph view) (dimensions view) (Source)
    • All paintings (Q3305213) that depict (P180) a painting (Source)
    • Count of qualifiers used in performer (P175) statements (Source)
    • Scientific and Commons names of animals which are threatened as per IUCN Red List (Source)
    • Latin American female mathematicians who are not on spanish Wikipedia but have an article in another language (Source)
    • US Governors and their religion, if listed (Source)
    • Living soccer players whose birthday is on January 1st (Source)
    • Museums nearby Cēsis (Q107582) (Source)
    • Distribution of public toilets per administrative units in Wales (Source)

• Development
  • Mismatch Finder: We continued the work on building the basic store that in the future will hold mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases/websites/catalogs/... These mismatches will then be used in the Mismatch Finder website and other tools to easily review them.
  • Improved the namespace behavior of the CommonsLink constraint so that it now produces less false positives (phab:T237920)
  • Working on adding a magic word to allow pages to be excluded from Special:UnconnectedPages on Wikipedias and co (phab:T97577)
  • Language names in Scots (sco) were updated (phab:T285076)
  • A task to complete language names in Dutch (nl) is being filled (phab:T231748)
  • A language code for an undetermined Mixtec language is being determined (phab:T155419)

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:08, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-27

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

Tech News

• The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 19 July.

Recent changes

• AutoWikiBrowser is a tool to make repetitive tasks easier. It now uses JSON. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPageJSON and Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Config. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/Version has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/VersionJSON. The tool will eventually be configured on the wiki so that you don't have to wait until the new version to add templates or regular expression fixes. [123]

Problems

• InternetArchiveBot helps saving online sources on some wikis. It adds them to Wayback Machine and links to them there. This is so they don't disappear if the page that was linked to is removed. It currently has a problem with linking to the wrong date when it moves pages from archive.is to web.archive.org. [124]

Changes later this week

• The tool to find, add and remove templates will be updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It will come to the first wikis on 7 July. It will come to more wikis later this year. [125][126]
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• Some Wikimedia wikis use Flagged Revisions or pending changes. It hides edits from new and unregistered accounts for readers until they have been patrolled. The auto review action in Flagged Revisions will no longer be logged. All old logs of auto-review will be removed. This is because it creates a lot of logs that are not very useful. [127]

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

17:31, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #476

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

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship:
    • Emu (RfP scheduled to end after 13 July 2021 11:49 UTC)
    • -akko (RfP scheduled to end after 16 July 2021 06:31 UTC)
  • Closed request for adminship:
    • Allenwang6212a (unsuccessful)

• Events
  • Past:
    • LIBER 2021 - Panel Discussion: Why use Wikidata or not - YouTube
    • SPARQL Wikidata divers. Session of Tuesday, June 29 (in French) - YouTube
    • SPARQL Wikidata Wikisource. Tuesday, July 6 session (in French) - YouTube
  • Upcoming:
    • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday 28th July 2021 at 16:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. This month we will also be having a guest presentation about Toolhub by Srishti Sethi from the Wikimedia Foundation.
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Carlo Bianchini (University of Pavia), Stefano Bargioni (Pontifical University Santa Croce (Rome)), and Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo (University of Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore) will discuss their recent project and article “Beyond VIAF: Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries”.; [128], July 13th.
    • Upcoming Search Platform Office Hours—July 14th, 2021. Come and ask anything related to Wikimedia search, Wikidata Query Service, Wikimedia Commons Query Service, etc.!
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #71, July 18

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Improving Wikidata-Wikisource Integration, July 7, 2021 by Krishna Chaitanya Velaga
    • A first look at Wikidata through Github Copilot by Addshore
  • Papers
    • A Study of the Quality of Wikidata (Q107425133), by Kartik Shenoy et al, published 1 July 2021, explores the use of three indicators - deleted statements that are not replaced; deprecated statements; and constraint violations - as a framework for evaluating data quality.
  • Videos
    • Introduction to OpenRefine for batch Wikidata editing (YouTube, ca. 1 hr 40 min) by Spinster. Recording of a training for the Wiki World Heritage User Group.
    • Editing Wikidata items about Ghanaian parliamentarians (Global Open Initiative Foundation workshop) - YouTube
    • Editing Lexicographical data in Dagbani (ʒiɛɣu) (Dagbani Wikimedians User Group workshop) - YouTube
    • Wikidata Workshop by Juan Antonio Pastor at the University of Murcia (in Spanish) - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • Schafe vorm Fenster is a project to build up a calendar for rural villages in Vorpommern-Greifswald using Wikidata to get images and short descriptions for the villages. (See example)

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata now has over 9,000 Properties! You can see the development over the past 5 years and which datatype is represented the most here.
  • Wikimedia Deutschland to receive a grant from Arcadia to work on minority languages
  • The Wikidata development has a new space to receive bug reports and feature requests: Wikidata:Report a technical problem. You may also continue to report issues to Wikidata:Contact the development team but until the end of July when the page will be permanently protected and archived.
  • OpenRefine has two Junior Developer job openings (paid contractor positions; part-time, fully remote) for building Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons functionality
    1. Junior Developer - Wikimedia Development (6 months, from September 2021 till February 2022)
    2. Junior Developer - OpenRefine Development (8 months, from November 2021 till June 2022)
  • For 2021 WMF Board of Trustees election, there are 20 candidates. Community members can know and participate in the campaign activities here.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: taxon range, image of entrance, replacement value, announced at
    • External identifiers: Monumental Trees ID, Bauforschung Baden-Württemberg Objekt-ID, Director Identification Number, GCD creator ID, Handzone player ID, Games und Erinnerungskultur Datenbank ID, Lexikon Westfälischer Autorinnen und Autoren person ID, cIMeC.Ro museum ID, Research Resource Identifier, Swedish National Archive agent ID, Room of Names ID, Native Land territory ID, Native Land language ID, eishockey.info player ID, HockeyLive player ID, fotoCH photographer ID, UFC ID, 20th Century Chinese Biographical Database ID, FightMatrix ID, EBIDAT ID, Bellator ID, WTA-Trainer-ID, Tapology ID, Chidlovski.Com USSR national ice hockey team player ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: URL for citizen's initiatives, incubator, project state, edition-version, Città e Cattedrali ID, release of, translation of, match event, Igromania series ID, alternative title, Classification of the Functions of Government
    • External identifiers: WMO code, Enciclopedia Dantesca ID, FINA Athlete ID 2021, IFPNI author ID, Steam Greenlight ID, Adventure Corner ID, Pladias ID, código centro docente CEICE, Media Bias/Fact Check ID, abART term ID, US-Ski-&-Snowboard-Athleten-ID, Freeview Australia show ID, Kartridge game ID
  • Query examples:
    • Subclasses of Q732577 'publication' found by the Gather, Apply & Scatter service (source)
    • Places more or less on Papa Stour (using P1332-P1335 to constrain a wikibase:around search)
    • Map of Sweden's outdoor gyms (Source)
  • Newest database reports: language names in Dutch (Wikidata, Wikipedia and MediaWiki)

• Development
  • Mismatch Finder (a tool to review mismatches between Wikidata and other databases): We continued initial development of the store part of the tool. We focused on the upload of new mismatches. (phab:project/view/5422)
  • Discussion on how do describe the types of mismatches reviewed in Mismatch Finder (phab:T285849)
  • We introduced a magic word that can be used to exclude a page from Special:UnconnectedPages on Wikipedia and co. This will make the special page more useful to find pages on Wikipedia and co that should be added to an Item on Wikidata as sitelinks. (phab:T97577).
  • We reduced the number of Wikidata edits that show up in the watchlist and recent changes of Wikipedia and co by not triggering entries for a number of Wikidata edits that do not influence the article (phab:T286193)
  • Property Suggester: We are reviewing patches by a student working on an improved Property Suggester.
  • Working on improving how deprecated statements are handled when checking “type” and “value type” constraints" (phab:T170401)
  • Working on fixing a bug where the entity suggestions are opened when a valid value is already selected (phab:T285102)
  • Wikidata-Wikibase federation (Federation v2): We investigated How to refer to entities that have the same IDs as the source wikibase entities. You can read the ADR here

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 16:14, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-29

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

Recent changes

• The tool to find, add and remove templates was updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It was supposed to come to the first wikis on 7 July. It was delayed to 12 July instead. It will come to more wikis later this year. [129][130]
• Special:UnconnectedPages lists pages that are not connected to Wikidata. This helps you find pages that can be connected to Wikidata items. Some pages should not be connected to Wikidata. You can use the magic word __EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__ on pages that should not be listed on the special page. [131]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 July. It will be on all wikis from 22 July (calendar).

Future changes

• How media is structured in the parser's HTML output will soon change. This can affect bots, gadgets, user scripts and extensions. You can read more. You can test it on Testwiki or Testwiki 2.
• The parameters for how you obtain tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can read more.

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

15:30, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #478

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

• Events
  • Past:
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Carlo Bianchini (University of Pavia), Stefano Bargioni (Pontifical University Santa Croce (Rome)), and Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo (University of Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore) will discuss their recent project and article “Beyond VIAF: Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries”.; July 13th.
  • Upcoming:
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #72, July 25
    • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday 28th July 2021 at 16:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. This month we will also be having a guest presentation about Toolhub by Srishti Sethi from the Wikimedia Foundation.
    • The next Wikibase live session is at 16:00 UTC on Thursday 29th July 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). This month, we welcome Luca Mauri to give a presentation about installing Wikibase from scratch.

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Wikipedia Citations in Wikidata English & Italian by OpenCitations, report on a WikiCite grant project.
    • Opportunities to improve integration between Wikisource and Wikidata (part 2 of a WikiCite blogpost series) by KCVelaga & Satdeep Gill
    • Finding gendered street names. A step-by-step walkthrough with R
    • Introducing the MathFoldr Project
  • Videos
    • Tutorial: Introduction to the Wikidata lexicographical data project (by Mahir256) - YouTube
    • Bringing IIIF Manifests to Life in Wikidata with Mirador 3 (2021 IIIF Annual Conference) - YouTube
    • Moving Wikipedia's InfoBox to Wikidata (in Taiwanese) - YouTube
  • Notebooks
    • Using xtools created pages and wikidata API to measure gender statistics about articles created by a user (Jupyter notebook using R kernel in the PAWS webservice)
    • Gender diversity in articles about academic disciplines in the French wikipedia (Jupyter notebook using R kernel in the PAWS webservice).
    • A first look at featured articles in Wikipedia in French using Wikidata (SPARQL Jupyter notebook using PAWS)

• Tool of the week
  • searchy.toolforge.org is a semantic search engine to find articles on a topic and filter results by metascientific info (gender and region).

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Scholia gets an upgrade and 1 click import of new scientific paper via citation-js and QS
  • For 2021 WMF Board of Trustees election, there are 20 candidates. Among them, active Wikidata contributors Mike Peel, Laurentius and Rosiestep. Community members can know and participate in the campaign activities here.
  • Sitelinks to the recently created Tachelhit Wikipedia and Dagbani Wikipedia are being added.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: URL for citizen's initiatives, International Tables for Crystallography space group number, number of request signatories, translation of
    • External identifiers: Enciclopedia Dantesca ID, Città e Cattedrali ID, MANTO ID, WMO code, IFPNI author ID, Landshuth ID, Pladias ID, Central records of collections ID, Podchaser creator ID, Steam Greenlight game ID, CEICE school code
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: UEFA stadium category, URL for freedom of information requests, Legal History, bridge number, Notable role, inventory number, Weverse user ID, ITU radio emission designation
    • External identifiers: IRIS SNS author ID, eBru ID, Daum Cafe ID, Douyin Video ID, Royal Ontario Museum ID, maPZS trails/locations ID, SDBM IDs, Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts ID, The New Yorker ID, Looted Cultural Assets Database ID, Marmiton ID, Enciclopedia del Cinema ID, PubFacts author ID
  • Query examples:
    • List of all stages of all tour de France (source)
    • Comparing gender statistics about people cited in an article across several articles (source)
    • Swedish Supreme Court judges who citing reports by commissions they themselves took part in (Source)
    • Map public organizations that allow one to fill citizen's initiatives online (Source)
    • Unemployment rate in Sweden by year (1970-2020) (Source)
    • Serious plane crashes with only one survivor (Source)
    • Mayors' genders of U.S. cities above 100k population (Source)
    • Global usage of pronouns (in English Language) (Source)
    • Number of causes of death (P509) 2019-2021 separated by year so that a comparison of the causes of death before and during the pandemic can also be seen (Source)
  • Newest WikiProjects: Wikidata:WikiProject_Medieval_Nobility
  • Newest database reports: language names in Italian (Wikidata, Wikipedia and MediaWiki)

• Development
  • Mismatch Finder: Continued working on the store part. It can import first mismatches now.
  • Fixing an issue where month and year are sometimes parsed as the first day of the month (phab:T233105)
  • Fixing an issue with adding sitelinks for some of the newer Wikipedias (phab:T285919)
  • Working on improving the Lua usage tracking for redirected Items (phab:T280910)
  • SPARQL was amended on the 4th July to use the report #title, if present, as the anchor for the 'Try it' link. (example)

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:34, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Question from 124def (11:59, 26 July 2021)

hello what is the purpose of a mentor?. --124def (talk) 11:59, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

Hi, 124def, that's a good question! The mentoring feature is something that's being developed by the Wikimedia Foundation's Growth Team, which makes it easier to find help or ask questions. I guess the idea is that a one-on-one mentor could be a more personal alternative to the Teahouse, and provide another route to make initial connections with the community. From Wikimedia's side, the purpose is to attract and retain more people; from your side the purpose is to have someone who you can approach for advice. So feel free to ask me anything! (To reply here, hit the "edit source" link next to the heading above, or enable Discussion Tools in beta features.) ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 11:16, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 45

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 45, May – June 2021

• Library design improvements continue
• New partnerships
• 1Lib1Ref update

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --11:04, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Question from Sourav Biswas. (Sports Motivator) (15:26, 1 August 2021)

I'm interested to provide motivation in sports (sports person) --Sourav Biswas. (Sports Motivator) (talk) 15:26, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi, Sourav. You may find some relevant information at sport psychology, coach (sport), or motivational speaker. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 23:12, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Question from SOUTHIE18 on Help:Getting started (00:15, 4 August 2021)

Hello, I'm Southie a new editor. I'm a writer or better say a freelancer before I joined Wikipedia as an editor. my question is how does someone get paid here or is it volunteer work? --SOUTHIE18 (talk) 00:15, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi, SOUTHIE18, it's volunteer. Contribution by people who are being paid outside Wikipedia isn't completely prohibited, but is very strongly discouraged, and must be declared. See WP:PAID. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 22:35, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

Question from MadeOfAtoms on Talk:Enantiomer (07:19, 4 August 2021)

Hi Pelagic, thanks a lot for fielding questions. I posted at Talk:Enantiomer#Merge? promoting a merge, but note that the discussion is old and shadowed by new posts. Is it likely that watchers will see it adequately? Or is it helpful to re-start the proposal with a new category, referring back? Moving the discussion to the bottom sounds like a bad ideas since the edits will be ascribed to me in e.g. WikiBlame rather than to the authors. Posting to the merge partner Chirality (chemistry) sounds like a good idea but I don't want to fragment the discussion. Finally I can go by the template usage at the proposal to merge e.g. Red shift and Blue shift in order to put up banners at both, but want to ask for your guidance first. For example, should I be prepared to do the merge myself if it is supported? And finally, I can just be WP:BOLD and do stuff instead of bugging you. –MadeOfAtoms (talk) 07:19, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi, MadeOfAtoms, sorry for delayed reply. I imagine there will be a fair bit of work involved integrating the two articles, so it could be useful if you can get others who support the merge to help. Pragmatically, though, you may have to do a lot of the heavy lifting yourself. Do you want to jump in and go "yes I am proposing this!". Or do you want to ask around first? DMacks may have an opinion, and you can post at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chemistry. If you do start a new proposal, definitely add banner templates to the articles and start a new talk-page section. (FWIW, I'd be inclined to not merge, and have chirality as a general overview, but that’s just me.) ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 22:17, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm happy to opine, but I'm not sure about what. Opinion about the process (technical assistance)? Opinion about the substance of the proposal itself? DMacks (talk) 02:49, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

More about the substance, @DMacks, in the sense of "is it likely to be a strongly-opposed snowball, or is it worth discussing?". But on the process side, maybe my answer should have been "propose a merge and see what happens" rather than "test the waters first". ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 06:55, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks very much for your answers. My opinion is that Enantiomer belongs with Chirality (chemistry), and it's helpful to merge them, because they refer to the same concept — a molecule is an enantiomer (and has an enantiomer) if and only if it's chiral. It's confusing for readers to hunt for for the reason for two different treatments, when they cover the same ground. Everything in Enantiomer is or should be in Chirality, in my opinion, so there's no helpful reduction of the article size obtained by keeping them apart. Chirality isn't in danger of growing too big anyway.

I'll continue to work my way through both articles, making improvements where I see the chance, and I'm sure chemists will let me know if I'm not helping. That will get me familiar with the grubby details and assess whether I'm up to the job of making a well-organized article. If so, then propose it according to WP:MERGE. Of course I will gladly yield or share the load if other editors have more time and expertise. I'll need a tool or expert help to find and fix the links in other articles that point into sections here, some of which will get renamed (there are about 2000 incoming links total). Let me know if you have more suggestions. –MadeOfAtoms (talk) 08:52, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

I suspect it may be opposed. I would definitely not recommend spending a lot of time working on converging them prior to a formal discussion that is advertised at WPCHEM in case the consensus is to keep them even more distinct than they were originally. DMacks (talk) 05:47, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, really appreciate the input, DMacks. Notifying MadeOfAtoms. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 12:30, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks to you both, and for your assessment DMacks. To reduce so much redundant explanation of the same things in Chirality (chemistry) and Enantiomer, I'll try trimming Enantiomer to a concise summary and point to Chirality for more. The closer I look, the less I see how they can be distinct (in chemistry) except for detailed word usage; do you think there is anything that goes in Enantiomer that doesn't belong in Chirality? Will talk at Enantiomer and WP:CHEM before trying any big changes. –MadeOfAtoms (talk) 00:39, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Question from Carl Friedrik (13:09, 4 August 2021)

Hi, how do I know I have been autoconfirmed? Thanks - Jordan --Carl Friedrik (talk) 13:09, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

User account has been blocked. I can't see the deleted draft, but, from a web search, Carl Friedrik appears to be a brand of leatherware. Jordan, please see the links posted at User talk:Carl Friedrik, especially WP:PAID and WP:USERNAME. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 22:46, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	helo Ryan18088 (talk) 08:25, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi, Ryan18088, thanks for the barnstar! Sorry I didn't reply earlier; I didn't know what to say. *blush* 😊

Question from ResarfX (03:18, 9 August 2021)

Why isnt the TOC available on a mobile, you have to scroll a lot to the section you are after. --ResarfX (talk) 03:18, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi, @ResarfX! That's interesting. On a tablet or if I turn my phone sideways, then I see an expandable "Contents" line below the info-box. But a narrow layout with phone upright has no TOC. I guess that's balanced by the sections being initially collapsed on phone. (My personal peeve is that once I have read to the bottom of a section, then to collapse it I have to scroll back up.) The mobile app experience is very different. On iOS at least, there is a TOC overlay or sidebar that you show by tapping a button. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 17:16, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Question from Data Storyteller (20:52, 12 August 2021)

Hello. I want to post a neutral article about a company that I still do contract work for. Should I have an editor review it for notability and COI? --Data Storyteller (talk) 20:52, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi, Data Storyteller. Yes it should be reviewed. The recommended process is WP:AFC (Articles for Creation). If it's OneScreen Solutions you're thinking of, I have my doubts whether there will be enough independent coverage, but good luck. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 14:35, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Question from Iesht on BBC Hindi (12:48, 19 August 2021)

I want to edit on page but you haven't uploaded it --Iesht (talk) 12:48, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Hello, Iesht, welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Pelagic and I have been assigned randomly to be your "mentor" who answers questions. You can also post at the Wikipedia:Teahouse to get opinions from a broader range of Wikipedians.

Looking at your contribution history, you made three changes to BBC Hindi that were all "reverted". That means your edits were successfully uploaded, but other people came along and undid them.

In this case they were right to do so. I know you mean well, but there were several aspects of your edits that were problematic. I'm happy to go through those with you if you want to know.

Keep practicing on Draft:Air cityland, that's a great way to learn wiki formatting, templates, and so on. I couldn't find anything about Air Cityland on a web search: is there any information about it online, or only in books? ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 22:04, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #482

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

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: MusikBot II (RfP scheduled to end after 26 August 2021 03:07 UTC)

• Events
  • Upcoming:
    • The next Wikibase live session is at 16:00 UTC on Thursday 26th August 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). You're welcome to come and share your work around Wikibase.
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Érica Azzellini and Éder Porto on MBABEL, a tool which creates seed Wikipedia articles based on Wikidata statements. Agenda with call link, August 24.
    • BiCIKL Hackathon at the Meise Botanic Garden, September 20 - 24. Theme: adding articles/items about “Hidden women in science” on Wikipedia/Wikidata. If you're interested to participate, please write to maarten.trekelsplantentuinmeise.be
  • Past:
    • Wikimania 2021 Wikidata related events (summary of sessions and community gatherings related to Wikidata and Wikibase)
      • Neat and tidy: data quality on Wikidata
      • Integrating Wikidata into the Wikimedia projects
    • Preparing languages for natural language generation using Wikidata lexicographical (Arctic Knot 2021)

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Articles
    • 50 cool new things you can now do with KB’s collection highlights -

      

      In this series of 5 articles we show the added value of putting images and metadata of digitised collection highlights of the KB, national library of the Netherlands, into the Wikimedia infrastructure. By putting our collection highlights into Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, dozens of new functionalities have been added. As a result of Wikifying this collection in 2020, you can now do things with these highlights that were not possible before. Article by OlafJanssen, DanielleJWiki and 1Veertje_(KB)
  • Blogs
    • Organizing the Public Data about a Researcher - Charles Tapley Hoyt
    • The Invisible Citation Commons - Phoebe Ayers and Samuel J. Klein
    • The Wikidata data model and your SPARQL queries - Bob DuCharme
    • Wikidata or scraping Wikipedia - Denny Vrandečić
  • Videos
    • Introduction to Wikidata SPARQL query service (in Arabic) - YouTube

• Tools of the week
  • Python script to Add structured data to files on Wikimedia Commons from an Excel sheet (Github) - by OlafJanssen

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata:Query Builder has been deployed: Try it!
  • The "Wikidata Quickstatements" translator which lets users transfer metadata about citation sources from Zotero into Wikidata, no longer needs to be manually installed. Existing manually-installed versions should update automatically, like other translators.
  • Wikidata Query Service scaling updates for Aug 2021

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: UEFA stadium category, mix or remix of
    • External identifiers: Palynodata taxa ID, CDDA designationTypeCode, PsycNET ID, Penguin Random House author ID, Palynodata publications ID, Mapping the Lives ID, WiiG game ID, SNK ID, arheologi.ro ID, Enciclopedia dell'Arte Antica ID, Asian Historical Architecture structure ID, Likee username
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: hunting areas, number of evacuated, External wiki, Код Энциклопедия ислама (второе издание), SCTA ID
    • External identifiers: TeamNL player ID, Finnish National Gallery ID, Online Begraafplaatsen memorial ID, NDL earlier law ID, Cinemaitaliano IDs, KNHB ID, Deutsche-Sporthilfe-ID, Convict Records ID, Australian Medical Pioneers Index, YouTube Music, Gujarati Vishwakosh entry, WikiApiary farm, copyright registration, Mozilla extension ID, NRK TV-ID, Enciclopedia dell'Arte Medievale ID, ECO code
  • Query examples:
    • Predicates implicated in non-scholarly-article item bloat (source)
    • Church of Scotland Synods as Geoshapes (Source)
    • Map of the origin of Balinese palm-leaf manuscripts, current location (Source)
    • Current principal local authorities in England

• Development
  • Deployed the new shiny Query Builder to https://query.wikidata.org/querybuilder
  • Edits to labels, descriptions and aliases on mobile are now also tagged as edits made via the user interface. All edits made via the user interface are now tagged as such. (phab:T286775)
  • ArticlePlaceholder pages will now indicate that they are generated by the ArticlePlaceholder thanks to a patch by Luca (phab:T124191)
  • Working on making it possible to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
  • Adding a new constraint type to ensure Items have a label in a certain language (phab:T195178)

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 14:47, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-34

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

Recent changes

• The Score extension (<score> notation) has been re-enabled on public wikis and upgraded to a newer version. Some musical score functionality may no longer work because the extension is only enabled in "safe mode". The security issue has been fixed and an advisory published.

Problems

• You will be able to read but not edit some wikis for a few minutes on 25 August. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. During this time, operations on the CentralAuth will also not be possible.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 August. It will be on all wikis from 26 August (calendar).

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

21:57, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

Read-only reminder

A maintenance operation will be performed on Wednesday August 25 06:00 UTC. It should only last for a few minutes.

Also during this time, operations on the CentralAuth will not be possible (GlobalRenames, changing/confirming e-mail addresses, logging into new wikis, password changes).

For more details about the operation and on all impacted services, please check on Phabricator.

A banner will be displayed 30 minutes before the operation.

Please help your community to be aware of this maintenance operation. Thank you!

20:33, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 August 2021

• News and notes: Enough time left to vote! IP ban

• In the media: Vive la différence!

• Wikimedians of the year: Seven Wikimedians of the year

• Gallery: Our community in 20 graphs

• News from Wiki Education: Changing the face of Wikipedia

• Recent research: IP editors, inclusiveness and empathy, cyclones, and world heritage

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Days of the Year Interview

• Traffic report: Olympics, movies, and Afghanistan

• Community view: Making Olympic history on Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:44, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

American politics discretionary sanctions notice

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in post-1992 politics of the United States and closely related people. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 03:55, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #483

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

• Events
  • Upcoming:
    • Wikidata Labs XXXI in English on the topic of Reimagining Wikidata from the margins, August 31
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #51 - YouTube, Facebook, September 4 at 18:00 UTC
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #77, September 5
    • Data Quality Days, September 8-15, a series of community-powered events on the topic of data quality. If you're interested in presenting a tool or a topic, feel free to add something to the schedule.
    • Wikidata Bug Triage Hour about data quality, September 13
    • Upcoming Search Platform Office Hours—September 1st, 2021 Come with anything related to Wikimedia search, Wikidata Query Service, Wikimedia Commons Query Service, etc.!
  • Past
    • Wikibase Live session (August 26th, 2021) logs
    • RubyConfTW 2021
      • Wikidata basics (in Chinese)
      • Wikidata and Open Streetmaps (in Chinese)
      • Using the MediaWiki open data API to solve data description problems (in Chinese)
      • Moving Wikipedia's Infobox to Wikidata's Property:Taiwanese place names (in Chinese)

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Why Are Citations Not Part of Discussions on Open Knowledge?
    • Mapping Diversity Puts The Gender Gap of Toponymy On Paper (in Italian)
  • Videos
    • Wikidata: Behind the Scenes of the Great Wikipedia Data Repository (in Spanish)
    • Bring data from Wikidata and any other LOD Knowledge Graph to your Roam graph
  • Notebooks
    • What are the Wikipedia articles you've created about? a notebook which show how to compute statistics about the articles you've created in Wikipedia by "instance of" (P31) property

Wikidata2Ical

• Tool of the week
  • Wikidata2ical provides an ical file for each wikidata entity that has start time (P580) and end time (P582).

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Depictor is a mobile-friendly tool to verify if people depicted on Wikimedia Commons are the same, and adds structured data statements (using Wikidata)
  • Wikibase Installation & Updating survey has been published!
  • The Board of Trustees election has started. Votes will be accepted until 23:59 31 August 2021 (UTC). View candidate statements, verify your eligibility and vote now.
  • Nicolas Vigneron (User:VIGNERON, User:VIGNERON en résidence) has started a one-year residence at the libraries of Clermont-Ferrand, more info and batch upload to come
  • WikidataCon update: news about the online conference, grants for affiliates in Latin America and Carribean, glimpse on the keynotes topics and next steps

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: UEFA stadium category, remix of, container, release of
    • External identifiers: Palynodata publications ID, Mapping the Lives ID, WiiG game ID, SNK ID, arheologi.ro ID, Enciclopedia dell'Arte Antica ID, Asian Historical Architecture structure ID, Likee username, Team Deutschland Paralympics ID, BMC ID, Kartridge game ID, ISL ID, Penguin Random House book ID, Daum Cafe ID, Freeview show ID, Unconsenting Media ID, TeamNL athlete ID, Volleybox ID, COD ID, allabolag.se person ID, Great Encyclopedia of Cyril and Methodius entry ID, GSSO ID, Fontaines de France ID, KNHB ID, DC Books book ID, Igromania developer/publisher ID, Deutsche Sporthilfe ID, Finnish National Gallery artwork ID, Igromania series ID, National Diet Library Persistent ID, Svenska ord ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: number of evacuated, External wiki, Код Энциклопедия ислама (второе издание), SCTA ID, uses natural resource, created for, number of triples, reprinted in, Eneström Number, літературний редактор
    • External identifiers: Convict Records ID, Australian Medical Pioneers Index, YouTube Music, Gujarati Vishwakosh entry, WikiApiary farm, copyright registration, Mozilla extension ID, NRK TV-ID, Enciclopedia dell'Arte Medievale ID, ECO code, Government Publications Number, Food.com ID, Dewan Negara ID, Dewan Rakyat ID, BBC Food ID, IRIS UNIPV author ID, IRIS Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II author ID, IndieMag game ID, Bleus Handisport-ID, Overnia, Edizioni Ares author ID, hmmlid, e-Maapõu stratigraphy ID, Al-Jazeera author ID, Naver Post member ID, eAmbrosia ID, DC Character ID, Postimees topic ID
  • Query examples:
    • Map of Items in Sweden with coordinate location and elevation above sea-level statements (Source)
    • Map of UK's most extreme cities (Source)
    • All current principal Local Authorities in England (Source)

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 12:58, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-35

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

Recent changes

• Some musical score syntax no longer works and may needed to be updated, you can check Category:Pages with score rendering errors on your wiki for a list of pages with errors.

Problems

• Musical scores were unable to render lyrics in some languages because of missing fonts. This has been fixed now. If your language would prefer a different font, please file a request in Phabricator. [132]

Changes later this week

• The parameters for how you obtain tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can read more about this.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 September. It will be on all wikis from 2 September (calendar).

Future changes

• You will be able to read but not edit Commons for a few minutes on 6 September. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 13 September. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [133]

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

15:59, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #484

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

• Events
  • Upcoming:
    • Data Quality Days - a week of all things data quality around Wikidata from Septempber 8th to 15th. Check the schedule, join sessions and add more if you would like to facilitate a discussion or workshop!
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: developing Wikidata tools and gadgets with Andrew Lih. [134], Sep 7th.
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #52 - YouTube, Facebook, September 11 at 18:00 UTC
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #78, September 12

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • A new R package for exploring the wealth of information stored by Wikidata: tidywikidatar
    • A global directory of official governmental online accounts and services, by Albin Larsson and Jan Ainali
  • Papers
    • Creating and Querying Personalized Versions of Wikidata on a Laptop
    • Type or Individual? Evidence of Large-Scale Conceptual Disarray in Wikidata
  • Videos
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #51 - YouTube, Facebook
    • Wikidata Lab XXXI: Reimagining Wikidata from the margins
  • Other
    • Wikipedia Is Trying to Transcend the Limits of Human Language
    • Ancient Hellenistic philosophers, visualized as a chain from master to student (Source)
    • Generating text with Ninai and Udiron (prototyping using Wikidata items and lexemes in text generation)
    • Over 3000 landscape paintings 'depict' something with coordinates. You can now browse them by country (Source)

• Tool of the week
  • Template:Generic queries for authors : new generic queries template designed for authors (fiction and non-fiction). Feedback and translations are welcome.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • User:SuccuBot has made its 100.000.000th edit. It is the first user account in Wikidata to reach this milestone.
  • In the frame of a Google Summer of Code project a new tool, called WikidataComplete was created. The tool smoothly integrates in the Wikidata UI and proposes new statements extracted by machine learning algorithms. Editors are asked to either approve or reject them. To activate it check here for a short tutorial check here. Any feedback is welcome here.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: none
    • External identifiers: National Diet Library persistent work ID, Svensk ordbok ID, ECO code, izeltlabuak.hu ID, Food.com ID, Jornal do Vôlei ID, MART catalog person ID, IRIS UNINA author ID, IRIS UNIPV author ID, Overnia ID, HandiSport Équipes de France ID, Cinemaitaliano person ID, Cinemaitaliano film ID, Mozilla extension ID, Enciclopedia dell'Arte Medievale ID, DC Character ID, Media Bias/Fact Check ID, Australian Medical Pioneers Index ID, eAmbrosia ID, Edizioni Ares author ID, Al-Jazeera author ID, Center for Turkish Cinema Studies film ID, Civilisti Italiani member ID, Government Publications Number, Global Location Number, Iași Central University Library ID, Encyclopaedia of Islam (second edition) ID, Gujarati Vishwakosh entry
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: літературний редактор, Rotten Tomatoes score
    • External identifiers: Eneström Number, Télé-Loisirs ID, PDDikti higher education institution ID, HMS, Barnivore ID, RAWG game ID, Materials Project material ID, INAPP IDs, INAPP Thesaurus ID, Fondation du patrimoine ID, Slangopedia ID, Festivaletteratura person ID, Urban Dictionary ID, Indonesian Museum National Registration System ID, Enciclopedia dello Sport ID, Glitchwave genre ID, Endemia.nc animal ID, Yiddish Dictionary Online ID, Casefile ID, Every Noise at Once ID, museum-digital place ID, EPA Facility Registry Service ID
  • Query examples:
    • Paintings by Waldmüller in the Belvedere, Vienna - Austria (Source)
    • Coauthors of coauthors of Birgit Meldal (Q46168094) that have never directly coauthored a paper with her (Source)
    • Country-level citation network in biometrics (Scholia) (Source)
    • Council Information Systems with OParlOrg API endpoints (Q47450936) (Source)

• Development
  • Continued work on the Mismatch Finder. We are now working on creating the page where mismatches will be listed for review.
  • Worked on support for "separators" parameter for distinct value constraints (phab:T277855)
  • Made it possible to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
  • Added a new constraint type to ensure that the Item has a label in a particular language (phab:T195178)
  • Added a button for the Query Builder to query.wikidata.org to make the Query builder discoverable (phab:T276210) - integration in the example dialog is still in progress (phab:T280229)
  • We started work on some behind-the-scenes improvements to the way Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects are notified about a change that affects their articles. (They need this notification so the article can be purged and show the latest data from Wikidata again. It is also required for showing the edit in the watchlist and recent changes on those wikis. This should have no visible impact for editors but is needed maintenance work.

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Deploy d:Template:Item documentation in the talk page of each item.
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 14:21, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-36

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

Recent changes

• The wikis that have Growth features deployed have been part of A/B testing since deployment, in which some newcomers did not receive the new features. Now, all of the newcomers on 21 of the smallest of those wikis will be receiving the features. [135]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• In 2017, the provided jQuery library was upgraded from version 1 to 3, with a compatibility layer. The migration will soon finish, to make the site load faster for everyone. If you maintain a gadget or user script, check if you have any JQMIGRATE errors and fix them, or they will break. [136][137]
• Last year, the Portuguese Wikipedia community embarked on an experiment to make log-in compulsory for editing.  The impact report of this trial is ready. Moving forward, the Anti-Harassment Tools team is looking for projects that are willing to experiment with restricting IP editing on their wiki for a short-term experiment. Learn more.

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

15:19, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

Question from Meekrab2012 on Talk:Water management in greater Tegucigalpa (19:52, 9 September 2021)

Bubbles Yes --Meekrab2012 (talk) 19:52, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

Bobbles No

...

Hi Meekrab, it looks like you've been experimenting with Wikipedia, which is great. But please don't move article pages around as a test. I'll leave a message on your talk page soon, after I work out how to fix Tertiary Sources etc. Feel free to contact me for advice. You can also ask questions at the Wikipedia:Teahouse, which is a Q&A board with a faster turnaround, but is more highly visible. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 17:25, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #485

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

• Events
  • Upcoming:
    • WikidataCon update: you can now check in the program of the first day of the online conference
    • Transbordados: WikidataCon's preconference for Latin America - September 14, 21 and 28 (21h UTC) - with simultaneous translation for Portuguese and Spanish, via YouTube - set of events to discuss Wikidata and decoloniality, knowledge organization and digital dissemination of collections in Latin America contexts. Join us!
      • 14/09 - Towards a decolonial wiki: overflowing knowledge from the Latin American horizon - speakers: Amanda Jurno (Wiki Movimento Brasil), Bianca Santana (journalist, writer and activist) and Silvia Gutiérrez (El Colégio de México) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
      • 21/09 - The universe of libraries: Wikidata and the multiplication of knowledge potencies - speakers: Lilian Viana (GLAM das Bibliotecas da USP) and Maurício Genta (Wikimedia Argentina e Biblioteca Nacional da Argentina) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
      • 28/09 - Digital collections and Wikidata: organizing a network of knowledge - speakers: Evelin Heidel (a.k.a. Scann; Wikimedistas do Uruguai) and Karen Worcman (Museu da Pessoa) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
    • Demo of the Query Builder live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 14 at 18:00 CEST
  • Ongoing:
    • Data Quality Days - several sessions happened over the past days and more are coming this week. Recordings, slides and notes are linked in the program
  • Past:
    • Forex - 36C3 Wikipaka WG: Live querying: let’s explore Wikidata together! - YouTube

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Papers
    • Linking Data and Descriptions on Moths Using the Wikimedia Ecosystem Part of collection TDWG Proceedings 2021
  • other
    • Ainali talks about Wikidata on The World According to Wikipedia podcast.

• Tool of the week
  • Wwwyzzerdd for Wikidata is a browser extension that allows you to view and edit Wikidata information from Wikipedia (demo video). Install it in Firefox or Chrome

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Face The Facts mobile app allows you to scan election posters and see the true facts about politicians.
  • Wikidata now has over 150,000 Senses on Lexemes!

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: GRAC rating
    • External identifiers: Center for Turkish Cinema Studies film ID, Civilisti Italiani member ID, Government Publications Number (Taiwan), Global Location Number, Iași Central University Library ID, Encyclopaedia of Islam (second edition) ID, Gujarati Vishwakosh entry, Télé-Loisirs ID, Anagrafe degli studiosi ID, e-Maapõu stratigraphy ID, INAPP Thesaurus ID, Douyin video ID, IndieMag game ID, INAPP author ID, TBDB ID, Enciclopedia dello Sport ID, INAPP work ID, Fondation du patrimoine ID, Endemia.nc animal taxon ID, Gry Online game ID, Encyclopaedia of Islam (first edition) ID, Encyclopaedia of Islam (third edition) ID, Festivaletteratura person ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Mexican Video Game content classification category, NZTCS conservation status, Unique Identifier, relevant date for copyright, Allaboutjazz musician ID, Google Fonts ID
    • External identifiers: museum-digital place ID, EPA Facility Registry Service ID, thefreedictionary dictionary term ID, TermCymru ID, Bildatlas-Künstler-ID, Lexicon of Medieval Nordic Law ID, NZTCS ID, Australian Research Council Grant ID, PSC, SAM id, Dictionary of Old Norse Prose ID, Norsk Akademis Ordbok ID, Swedish Food Agency food ID, e-Maapõu locality ID, Grand dictionnaire terminologique ID, Kallías, Owler company ID
  • Query examples:
    • List of movies with Jean-Paul Belmondo ordered by number of sitelinks (based on source via d:Template:Generic queries for actors)
    • List of actors with whom Jean-Paul Belmondo has played the most (based on source via d:Template:Generic queries for actors)
    • count of movies with Jean-Paul Belmondo by decade
    • List of characters in Tintin ordered by number of apparitions (source)
    • People with no birth/death/floruit dates but which have a position from which dates can be inferred (source)
    • Map of the origin of diamond open access journal (Q108440863) publications (source)
    • Map of place names in Ghana ending with "li", "ti", "om" (source)
• Development
  • Mismatch Finder: The website part of the tool is taking shape but is not quite functional yet. We worked on creating the results page. You can see the current very much not finished state at https://mismatch-finder.toolforge.org/
  • Linked the Query Builder from the Query Service so it is discoverable (phab:T280229)
  • Finished work on normalizing filenames when linking to media files on Commons (phab:T251480)
  • All new wbstack.com wikis will now be created with elastic search support, including Wikibase indexes! All existing sites will have elastic search soon! (Source)

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:06, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-37

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

Recent changes

• 45 new Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features. [138]
• A majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features. The Growth team has published an FAQ page about the features. This translatable FAQ covers the description of the features, how to use them, how to change the configuration, and more.

Problems

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 14 September. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [139]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 September. It will be on all wikis from 16 September (calendar).
• Starting this week, Wikipedia in Italian will receive weekly software updates on Wednesdays. It used to receive the updates on Thursdays. Due to this change, bugs will be noticed and fixed sooner. [140]
• You can add language links in the sidebar in the new Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet. [141]
• The syntax highlight tool marks up code with different colours. It now can highlight 23 new code languages. Additionally, golang can now be used as an alias for the Go programming language, and a special output mode has been added to show a program's output. [142][143]

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

15:32, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #486

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

• Events
  • Upcoming:
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Bionomia and maintaining Wikidata synchrony with David Shorthouse (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada). [144], Sep 21st.
    • Lightning Talk: Wikidata in your Civic Tech project | Summit 2021 - YouTube
  • Ongoing:
    • The Creative Commons Global Summit and Hack4OpenGLAM hackathon take place from September 20 until 24 (fully online). Several sessions and projects are related to Wikidata and/or Wikibase (see schedule search).
  • Past:
    • Data Quality Days:
      • Periodic editathons as a way to improve data quality on Wikidata: an experiment in Italy - YouTube
      • Bringing Czech authority files into 21st century: Integration with Wikidata - YouTube

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Videos
    • Mapping the Scottish Reformation - using Wikidata, Wikipedia's sister project - YouTube
    • OpenSym 2021: WDProp: Web Application to Analyse Multilingual Aspects of Wikidata Properties - YouTube
    • Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #53 (user scripts and gadgets that can help you edit) - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • User:Inductiveload/scripts/ShowQsAndPs shows the Q and P IDs on Items.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • OpenRefine has started development of features for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons. Sign up here if you want to receive occasional updates on a Wikimedia talk page of your choice.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: created for, Candomblé nation, NZTCS conservation status, Mexican video game rating category
    • External identifiers: INAPP author ID, TBDB ID, Enciclopedia dello Sport ID, INAPP work ID, Fondation du patrimoine ID, Endemia.nc animal taxon ID, Gry-Online game ID, Encyclopaedia of Islam (first edition) ID, Encyclopaedia of Islam (third edition) ID, Festivaletteratura person ID, Every Noise at Once ID, Spotify show episode ID, Online Begraafplaatsen cemetery ID, Bing entity ID, TermCymru ID, NZTCS ID, Online Begraafplaatsen person ID, UK Renewable Energy Planning Database ID, ICCD ID - Santuari Cristiani, Naver Post member ID, Swedish Food Agency food ID, Dictionary of Old Norse Prose ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: relevant date for copyright, issuing agency, Hardy's Guide to Marine Gastropods ID, main subject for, type host taxon, has thematic relation, location of lexeme usage, ODOT county code, illustrative content
    • External identifiers: e-Maapõu locality ID, Grand dictionnaire terminologique ID, Google Fonts ID, Kallías, Owler company ID, Vietherb species ID, Vietherb metabolite ID, Allrugby, SLSP editions ID, Issuu ID, XXI Secolo ID, Journées européennes du patrimoine ID, Peoples.ru ID, musik-sammler.de artist ID, HJP ID, NVE reservoir ID, Biografija.ru ID, Madrean Discovery Expeditions Flora Database ID, Madrean Discovery Expeditions Fauna Database ID, IRIS Tuscany IDs, Joshua Project people group ID, Flipboard ID, Washington Rare Plant Field Guide (2021- Version) ID, Gente di Tuscia ID, Poetsgate poem ID, AdoroCinema person ID, Zenodo Communities ID, National Union Catalog ID
  • Query examples:
    • Biological taxa named after (metal (and other) music bands
    • Works by Dante Alighieri (1265 - September 13/14, 1321)
    • Cumulative page views for candidates in Czech parliamentary election 2021, split by party (Source)

• Development
  • The new Streaming Updater for Wikidata Query Service will be in production 18 Oct 2021
  • Working on changing the way sitelinks to Wikimedia Commons are created from Item data; now using topic's main category (P910) and category related to list (P1754) before Commons category (P373) (T232927)
  • Continuing the work on the Mismatch Finder. This week we focused on the remaining groundwork for showing the first mismatches for review.
  • Continuing to work on improvements to the underlying system of how edits are propagated from Wikidata to the other Wikimedia projects.
  • Implemented two improvements for constraints: the “distinct values” constraint type now supports the “separator” parameter (phab:T277855) and we no longer check qualifiers on some unusual™ properties (phab:T235292)
  • Adding tags to some of the remaining UI edits that didn't get them yet for edits on Lexemes (phab:T290950)
  • Making it possible to add tags to some remaining Lexeme API modules (phab:T290951)
  • Fixed a bug in the Query Builder where it didn't show labels when opening an existing visual query from a shared link (phab:T280684)
  • Made the Query Builder more visible in the Query Service UI (phab:T280229)

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:14, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-38

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

Recent changes

• Growth features are now deployed to almost all Wikipedias. For the majority of small Wikipedias, the features are only available for experienced users, to test the features and configure them. Features will be available for newcomers starting on 20 September 2021.
• MediaWiki had a feature that would highlight local links to short articles in a different style. Each user could pick the size at which "stubs" would be highlighted. This feature was very bad for performance, and following a consultation, has been removed. [145]
• A technical change was made to the MonoBook skin to allow for easier maintenance and upkeep. This has resulted in some minor changes to HTML that make MonoBook's HTML consistent with other skins. Efforts have been made to minimize the impact on editors, but please ping Jon (WMF) on wiki or in phabricator if any problems are reported.

Problems

• There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of an accidental restart of the search servers. [146]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 September. It will be on all wikis from 23 September (calendar).
• The meta=proofreadpage API has changed. The piprop parameter has been renamed to prpiprop. API users should update their code to avoid unrecognized parameter warnings. Pywikibot users should upgrade to 6.6.0. [147]

Future changes

• The Reply tool will be deployed to the remaining wikis in the coming weeks. It is currently part of "Discussion tools" in Beta features at most wikis. You will be able to turn it off in Editing Preferences. [148]
• The previously announced change to how you obtain tokens from the API has been delayed to September 21 because of an incompatibility with Pywikibot. Bot operators using Pywikibot can follow T291202 for progress on a fix, and should plan to upgrade to 6.6.1 when it is released.

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

18:30, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 46

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 46, July – August 2021

• Library design improvements deployed
• New collections available in English and German
• Wikimania presentation

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --11:15, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 September 2021

• News and notes: New CEO, new board members, China bans

• In the media: The future of Wikipedia

• Opinion: Wikimedians of Mainland China were warned

• Op-Ed: I've been desysopped

• Disinformation report: Paid promotional paragraphs in German parliamentary pages

• Discussion report: Editors discuss Wikipedia's vetting process for administrators

• Recent research: Wikipedia images for machine learning; Experiment justifies Wikipedia's high search rankings

• Community view: Is writing Wikipedia like making a quilt?

• Traffic report: Kanye, Emma Raducanu and 9/11

• News from Diff: Welcome to the first grantees of the Knowledge Equity Fund

• WikiProject report: The Random and the Beautiful

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:58, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Question from Andre Tyme Little (10:49, 27 September 2021)

I am reading about Religion and Christianity. I would like to know if there are any mentors that are male that can go over some of the pages that I have saved. --Andre Tyme Little (talk) 10:49, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

Hi, Andre, I don't tell people on Wikipedia whether I'm male or female. Where have you saved the pages? I don't see any edits for your user account, apart from this one.

You could also also ask the folk at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Christianity/Noticeboard

Cheers! ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 11:11, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Selection from Wikidata weekly summary #487

A selection of highlights of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Papers
    • WDProp: Web Application to Analyse Multilingual Aspects of Wikidata Properties, OpenSym 2021, 15-17 September 2021 (Slides, source code, Short Video)
  • Videos
    • Demo: create Wikidata lexemes from Goethe's "Der Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären" - YouTube
    • Demo of adding a string to Wikidata as a lexeme and linking it to the corresponding Wikidata item - YouTube (Also covers using Ordia to find words in a text that are missing lexeme L-items.)

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: ..., music created for, issuing agent of work, ... relevant date for copyright, inscription image, Hardy's Guide to Marine Gastropods URL
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: WikiProject importance scale rating, predicate for, eHive ID
  • Newest database reports: top missing properties by number of sitelinks/P26 (works again)

• Development
  • Changed the formatting of low year numbers so that they now show as e.g. “5 CE” instead of “5” to reduce ambiugity in dates like “March 5 (CE)” (phab:T104750)
  • Working on fixing an issue where two Properties could have the same label in a given language (phab:T289473)
  • Working on preventing a few more cases where two Items could have the same sitelink (phab:T291377)
  • Mismatch Finder: Continuing to work on showing mismatches on the results page so that they can be reviewed
  • Continuing to work on technical improvements to how changes on Wikidata are propagated to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects

Read the full report · 13:45, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-39

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

Recent changes

• iOS 15 has a new function called Private Relay (Apple website). This can hide the user's IP when they use Safari browser. This is like using a VPN in that we see another IP address instead. It is opt-in and only for those who pay extra for iCloud. It will come to Safari users on OSX later. There is a technical discussion about what this means for the Wikimedia wikis.

Problems

• Some gadgets and user-scripts add items to the portlets (article tools) part of the skin. A recent change to the HTML may have made those links a different font-size. This can be fixed by adding the CSS class .vector-menu-dropdown-noicon. [149]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 September. It will be on all wikis from 30 September (calendar).
• The GettingStarted extension was built in 2013, and provides an onboarding process for new account holders in a few versions of Wikipedia. However, the recently developed Growth features provide a better onboarding experience. Since the vast majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features, GettingStarted will be deactivated starting on 4 October. [150]
• A small number of users will not be able to connect to the Wikimedia wikis after 30 September. This is because an old root certificate will no longer work. They will also have problems with many other websites. Users who have updated their software in the last five years are unlikely to have problems. Users in Europe, Africa and Asia are less likely to have immediate problems even if their software is too old. You can read more.
• You can receive notifications when someone leaves a comment on user talk page or mentions you in a talk page comment. Clicking the notification link will now bring you to the comment and highlight it. Previously, doing so brought you to the top of the section that contained the comment. You can find more information in T282029.

Future changes

• The Reply tool will be deployed to the remaining wikis in the coming weeks. It is currently part of "Discussion tools" in Beta features at most wikis. You will be able to turn it off in Editing Preferences. See the list of wikis. [151]

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

22:20, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

Question from Ddfseople (12:51, 29 September 2021)

How do I insert pictures? --Ddfseople (talk) 12:51, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Hi, Ddfseople, and welcome to Wikipedia! If you're using the Visual Editor, click/tap on the Insert menu and choose Images and media. Type your search term and choose an image. Then adjust the properties on the inserted image if needed. The steps are described, with illustrations, at Help:VisualEditor#Editing images and other media files.

If you don't find anything good via that search, you might try c:Special:MediaSearch or c:Special:Search in a separate tab.

There is also information at Help:Pictures, which is more oriented toward "Source" mode editing.

Hope that helps! ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 10:55, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-40

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

Recent changes

• A more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them has been enabled for the following 10 wikis: mediawiki.org, the Italian, Catalan, Hebrew and Vietnamese Wikipedias, French Wikisource, and English Wikivoygage, Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikinews. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist on those wikis you can let the developers know.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 October. It will be on all wikis from 7 October (calendar).
• Some gadgets and bots that use the API to read the AbuseFilter log might break. The hidden property will no longer say an entry is implicit for unsuppressed log entries about suppressed edits. If your bot needs to know this, do a separate revision query. Additionally, the property will have the value false for visible entries; previously, it wasn't included in the response. [152]
• A more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them will be enabled for all production wikis. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist you can let the developers know.

Future changes

• You can soon get cross-wiki notifications in the iOS Wikipedia app. You can also get notifications as push notifications. More notification updates will follow in later versions. [153]
• The JavaScript variables wgExtraSignatureNamespaces, wgLegalTitleChars, and wgIllegalFileChars will soon be removed from mw.config. These are not part of the "stable" variables available for use in wiki JavaScript. [154]
• The JavaScript variables wgCookiePrefix, wgCookieDomain, wgCookiePath, and wgCookieExpiration will soon be removed from mw.config. Scripts should instead use mw.cookie from the "mediawiki.cookie" module. [155]

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

16:28, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #488

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

• Discussions
  • Closed request for adminship: BrokenSegue. Welcome onboard \o/

• Events
  • Upcoming
    • OSM TW x Wikidata Taiwan Taipei (Q1867) Meetup 2021-10-04, Mozilla Community Space Taipei (Q61752245)
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Stephanie Sapienza and Emily Frazier on Unlocking the airwaves, a digital archive project that compiles early educational public radio content from the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB). Agenda with call link, October 5.
    • SPARQL queries live on Twitch in French, by Vigneron, October 5 at 18:00 CEST
  • Ongoing:
    • New Wikidata Lexemes Challenge! Help to improve lexicographical data on Wikidata. This week's theme: Seasons.
  • Past
    • Wikibase Live session logs (September 2021)
    • LD4 - video presentation start 05:00 Keepin 'N Sync... with wikidata ... and ORCID...and GBIF - slides by David Shorthouse
      • The Magnus list that was mentioned at 27:00 (please update list)
      • Ticket created related to problem mentioned with WD objects getting deleted - T291659
    • 2021-09-30, Talk "COVIWD: COVID-19 Wikidata Dashboard" at Seminar Pekanan IR-NLP — slides in English, video in Indonesian (source)

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • What can querying Wikidata do for me?
    • https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/10/01/synchronising-wikidata-and-wikipedia-an-outreachy-project/
  • Papers: Representing COVID-19 information in collaborative knowledge graphs: The case of Wikidata
  • Videos
    • Introduction to Wikidata for beginners Part. 1 (in Portuguese) - YouTube
    • How to work with Wikidata in the library (in Italian) - YouTube

• Tool of the week
• ItemSubjector is Python console tool that helps add main subject (P921) to groups of items in a semi-automatic way.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • You can nominate your favorite Wikidata projects (tools, community initiatives, WikiProjects...) until October 10th for the WikidataCon Community Awards
  • You can also sign up for a slot at the birthday presents lightning talks session at WikidataCon 2021 to present your gift for Wikidata birthday until October 16
  • Submissions for day 2 and 3 of WikidataCon are still open. You can submit sessions about a variety of topics until October 20

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: App Store age rating, music created for, issuing agent of work, FLOSS development policy URL, relevant date for copyright, inscription image, Hardy's Guide to Marine Gastropods URL, number of evacuated, template populates category, number of tries marked, madhhab
    • External identifiers: Australian Research Council Grant ID, Grand dictionnaire terminologique ID, Materials Project material ID, All.Rugby player ID, swisscovery edition ID, e-Maapõu locality ID, Online Begraafplaatsen memorial ID, PoetsGate poem ID, NVE reservoir ID, FLORE author ID, USiena air author ID, IRIS IMT author ID, Journées européennes du patrimoine ID, Peoples.ru person ID, Kallías ID, Convict Records of Australia ID, Croatian Language Portal identifier, Issuu ID, Flipboard ID, Umění pro město ID, BBC Food ID, Baijiahao ID, Inventory of Heritage Artefacts institution ID, Inventory of Heritage Artefacts object ID, Vietherb species ID, Vietherb metabolite ID, Zenodo communities ID, XXI Secolo ID, Indonesian Museum National Registration System ID, Postimees topic ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: WikiProject importance scale rating, predicate for, eHive ID, original description, Bowers acronym, mul label property, stylized name
    • External identifiers: Database of Czech amateur theater ID, National Gallery Prague work ID, George Eastman Museum artist ID, All.Rugby club ID, Sachsens-Schlösser-Kennung, Dizionario di Economia e Finanza ID, Densho Encyclopedia ID, AsianWiki ID, Channel One Russia show ID, DWDS lemma ID, WDG lemma ID, company code (RICS), IRIS Sapienza author ID, AFNIL publisher ID, Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) identifier, TMOK ID, Kastra ID, Indigenous Corporation Number, United Nations Treaty Collection object ID, Österreichischer Fußball-Bund ID, MYmovies-Personenkennung, IGI Global Dictionary ID, L'Unificazione ID, EMBO member ID
  • Query examples:
    • Women born in Nigeria with an article in Basque for Listeria (Source)
    • Still life paintings by women (Source)
    • Map of cemeteries in New Zealand (Source)
    • Right Livelihood Award laureates (Source)
    • Chelsea FC players, with English Wikipedia article, Commons image, etc (Source)
  • Newest database reports: Missing properties by number of sitelinks: P22 (father) (works again)

• Development
  • Finished preventing a case where the same sitelink could be added to two different Items (phab:T291377)
  • Continuing work on the Mismatch Finder. Currently focusing on showing the details of the mismatches to the person reviewing mismatches.
  • Continued work on not allowing two Properties to have the same label after undo/revert (phab:T289473)
  • Continuing work on improving how changes on Wikidata are propagated to Wikipedia and the other other Wikimedia projects. The new system is being rolled out to all wikis now. It should not change anything for editors and just be a technical improvement in the backend.

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Suggested and open tasks!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 16:37, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-41

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 October. It will be on all wikis from 14 October (calendar).

• The "auto-number headings" preference is being removed. You can read phab:T284921 for the reasons and discussion. This change was previously announced. A JavaScript snippet is available which can be used to create a Gadget on wikis that still want to support auto-numbering.

Meetings

• You can join a meeting about the Desktop Improvements. A demonstration version of the newest feature will be shown. The event will take place on Tuesday, 12 October at 16:00 UTC. See how to join.

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

15:29, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #489

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

• Events
  • Upcoming:
    • We’re celebrating the 9th birthday of Wikidata on October 29 during the WikidataCon 🎂 Did you know that you can participate in the celebration by preparing a birthday present or attending events? Here’s how you can get involved!
    • Wikidata/Wikibase office hour, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday 20th October 2021 (18:00 Berlin time), on the Wikidata Telegram channel.
    • Upcoming: WMF search platform team office hour, Wednesday, October 13th, 2021 at 15:00-16:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PDT / 11:00-12:00 EDT / 17:00-18:00 CEST. Etherpad, Google Meet. You can come and chat about the Wikidata & Commons Query Service.
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #57 - YouTube, Facebook, October 16 at 18:00 UTC
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #83, October 17
  • Ongoing:
    • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #11, Perception and Senses

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Wikidata in African Language Communities
    • Media art on Wikipedia wants to make collections and metadata more accessible (in Dutch)
  • Papers
    • Modeling and Documenting Queer Voices and Topics on Wikidata, Panel on Metadata and Gender Diversity, Amber Billey, Clair A Kronk, John Samuel, Rachel Ivy Clarke, Sayward Schoonmaker, DCMI Virtual 2021, October 8, 2021, Slides
  • Videos
    • Introduction to Wikidata for beginners. Part 2 (in Italian) - YouTube
    • Introduction to Wikidata (in Spanish) - YouTube
    • Scripts and gadgets in Wikidata (in French) - YouTube
    • Wikidata Workshop 2021 - Coupling Wikipedia Categories with Wikidata Statements for Better Semantics - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • Neguess is a Wikidata entity guessing game with negative clues. (demo video)

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • You can nominate your favorite Wikidata projects (tools, community initiatives, WikiProjects...) until October 10th for the WikidataCon Community Awards
  • You can also sign up for a slot at the birthday presents lightning talks session at WikidataCon 2021 to present your gift for Wikidata birthday until October 16
  • Submissions for day 2 and 3 of WikidataCon are still open. You can submit sessions about a variety of topics until October 20
  • Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a Graph Consultant to help migrate the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) from Blazegraph to a different RDF store. Apply here!
  • The WMF Search team will begin data transfer for the new Streaming Updater today (11 Oct 2021).

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: dissertation program, date of probate
    • External identifiers: Densho Encyclopedia ID, Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) identifier, DWDS lemma ID, Dizionario di Economia e Finanza ID, National Gallery Prague work ID, Hill Museum & Manuscript Library ID, Database of Czech Amateur Theater person ID, WDG lemma ID, The World Factbook country ID, AFNIL publisher ID, RICS company code, Greek Castles ID, Gente di Tuscia ID, Lexicon of Medieval Nordic Law ID, Product and Service Code, SAM ID, IRIS Sapienza author ID, museum-digital place ID, Det Norske Akademis Ordbok ID, PDDikti ID, VI.BE platform ID, Owler company ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: registration number, present in non-fictional work, NIK (Nomor Induk Kependudukan), reports to, excitation energy, merger, split-off, choreography for
    • External identifiers: AllSides ID, Apple maps id, Enciclopedia dei ragazzi ID, NLI archive ID, CANTIC ID, Bat Sheva Archive ID, Research Vocabularies Australia ID, Australian Reptile Online Database ID, Chi era Costui - Plaque ID, Research Data Australia ID, Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience Knowledge Hub resource ID, Parliament of Australia MP ID, Trove work ID, Geographical Names Board of NSW geoname ID, Arachne.org.au ID, Remontees-mecaniques.net ID, Apple Music track ID
  • Query examples:
    • Share of women for each Nobel prize (source)
    • Nobel Prize statistics on number of recipients for award wrt. gender (interactive plot) (source)
    • Share of women among Nobel prize winners by decade
    • Notable books on linked data, semantic technologies, and semantic knowledge graphs (source)
    • Benelux railway stations connected from Brussels-South railway station (Q800587) (source)
    • Date of opening and closing of railway stations in Denmark (Source)
    • Map or Talaiotic archeological culture sites located in the Menorca island in Spain (source)
    • Location of all the meteorological stations in Navarre (source)
    • Photos of participants in the Pandora Papers (source)
    • Diameter, size and mass of balls (source)
    • French departments with their shape
    • Longest rivers located in France and which did not gave their name to a department (source)
    • Statues measuring more than 30 m in height (excluding the pedestal) (Source)

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:36, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

Question from Ntshanka on Help:Getting started (13:38, 16 October 2021)

Hello how can I watch watchlist --Ntshanka (talk) 13:38, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

Hi, @Ntshanka! Sorry for delayed reply, I've been busy IRL. There is some information at Help:Watchlist, though the screen-shots there are from the desktop website (Vector skin). (On the mobile site (Minerva skin) I tap the 👤 icon in the top-right and there is a Watchlist item in the drop-down. But I have a set of features turned on called AMC.) I'm guessing that you would have an icon with three lines ("hamburger menu") in the top left? Tap that and you should see "... Ntshanka, Watchlist, Contributions ..." in the list. Choose Watchlist to view yours (possibly empty so far).

To "watch a page" (that is, to add it to your watch list) look for a bar across the top of the page with icons ^文_A ⭐️ ⏰ ✏️. Tap the star. Then you should get a pop-up asking if you want to add it permanently, 6 months, etc. Tap the star again to unwatch.

There is a lot more that could be said about using the list, but to get you started, that's where the key controls are on mobile.

Welcome to Wikipedia! ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 18:02, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Question from Ntshanka on User talk:Pelagic (13:40, 16 October 2021)

Hello how can I do hair waves --Ntshanka (talk) 13:40, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

Maybe a blow-wave with a Hair dryer, or a chemical Perm (hairstyle)? Wikipedia doesn't have how-to type content, and I couldn't find anything relevant about hairdressing on Wikibooks or Wikiversity. Your best bet would be a web search. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 18:09, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #490

Selected items from what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • New request for comments
    • ...
    • Should previously linked Wikipedia articles be separated?

• Events
  • Upcoming:
    • We’re celebrating the 9th birthday of Wikidata on October 29 during the WikidataCon 🎂 Did you know that you can participate in the celebration by preparing a birthday present or attending events? Here’s how you can get involved!
    • ...
  • Ongoing:
    • ...
    • #12MonthsofOSM, mapping historical features

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • ...
    • Learning to edit Wikidata is challenging; we aim to make it easier with this interactive course
    • Manuscripts on Wikidata: the state of the art? by Martin Poulter
    • Digital scholarship in archives: A data case study
  • Papers
    • Accepted papers for the Wikidata Workshop at ISWC have been published: https://wikidataworkshop.github.io/2021/
    • Detecting Cross-Language Plagiarism using Open Knowledge Graphs

...

• • Other:
    • Research project: How can museums improve the usability of collection APIs?

• Tool of the week
  • Snowman is a static site generator for SPARQL backend (source)

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • ...
  • Sina Ahmadi has released a SPARQL query generator for lexicographical data
  • Wikidata reached the 10000th numbered property, with the creation of P10000 Research Vocabularies Australia. (There are currently 9285 pages in the Property namespace.)
  • Wikidata now has over 600,000 Lexemes!
  • Learn Wikidata is an online interactive course created by the Vanderbilt University thanks to a WikiCite grant and available in English, Spanish and Chinese. More information here.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: catalogue raisonné, predicate for, has thematic relation, illustrative content, ITU radio emission designation, isotopically modified form of, stylized name, record number,excitation energy
    • External identifiers: WDG lemma ID, The World Factbook country ID, ...museum-digital place ID, ... copyright registration, ... Literature.com book ID, Literature.com ebook ID, CantoDict word ID, CantoDict character ID, ...
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: merger, split-off, choreography for, classification, compartmentalisation, or information category for this document, ... heading, Conway polyhedron notation
    • External identifiers: Australian Reptile Online Database ID, Research Data Australia ID, ... Parliament of Australia MP ID, Trove work ID, Geographical Names Board of NSW geoname ID, Apple Music track ID, ... Birdata ID, ... Australian Trade Mark Number, Australian Prints + Printmaking artist ID, Australian Prints + Printmaking work ID, ... NSW Parliament Member ID, Australian Statistical Geography 2021 ID, ...

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

Read the full report · 13:50, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Question from Jmarks13 on Draft:Thomas Pölzler (14:41, 18 October 2021)

Hello! I am trying to add links to other wiki pages in a new wiki page I am creating. I amusing Visual Editor. When I highlight a term and then click on the link icon, I get a window which gives me the options to "Edit" or remove the link. But all I want to do is add the link. It does not seem to give me the option to do this Thanks. --Jmarks13 (talk) 14:41, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Hi, @Jmarks13. Sorry for delayed reply, I've been busy IRL. (Might have to take myself off the helpers' list.) Usually Edit/Remove is when you click on an existing link. I couldn't reproduce the behaviour using the link icon on the toolbar. Tried a double-click instead of a single click, but still didn't happen for me. Is it still occurring for you? ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 17:29, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-42

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

Recent changes

• Toolhub is a catalogue to make it easier to find software tools that can be used for working on the Wikimedia projects. You can read more.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 October. It will be on all wikis from 21 October (calendar).

Future changes

• The developers of the Wikipedia Android app are working on communication in the app. You can now answer questions in survey to help the development.
• 3–5% of editors may be blocked in the next few months. This is because of a new service in Safari, which is similar to a proxy or a VPN. It is called iCloud Private Relay. There is a discussion about this on Meta. The goal is to learn what iCloud Private Relay could mean for the communities.
• Wikimedia Enterprise is a new API for those who use a lot of information from the Wikimedia projects on other sites. It is a way to get big commercial users to pay for the data. There will soon be a copy of the Wikimedia Enterprise dataset. You can read more. You can also ask the team questions on Zoom on 22 October 15:00 UTC.

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

20:52, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #491

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

• Events
  • Upcoming:
    • WikidataCon is happening this week! Don’t forget to register if you want to attend!
    • ISKO UK Hands-on Meetup - Introduction to Wikibase (register on meetup)
    • WikidataCon Bioblitz (During WikidataCon)
  • Ongoing:
    • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #13, Death
  • Past:
    • Wikidata+Wikibase office hour log (2021-10-20)
    • Wikiarabia Algeria 2021: Wikibase Presentation - Mohammed Sadat Abdulai and Georgina Burnett
    • Talk at Wikidata Workshop 2021 - Mathematics In Wikidata
    • LibreOffice Conference 2021 - Enhancing a spellcheck dictionary by Wikidata Lexemes
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #58 - YouTube, Facebook
    • Wikipedia Weekly Network: Wikipedia podcast section #152 - Wikidata + Wikipedia: fact templates (in Swedish)
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #84

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • The Buggregator
    • AutoDesc Reloaded by Magnus Manske
    • Awesome Wikidata notebooks
    • Close to the Edge - Graph Databases through 1970s Prog Rock
  • Videos
    • How to upload Australian Faunal Directory IDs to Wikidata using OpenRefine. Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV
    • PhysWikiQuiz - a Physics Formula Question Generation and Test Engine using Wikidata in Education - YouTube
    • Timelapse of churches in the Americas (Wikidata, QGIS) - YouTube
    • UseAsRef 2.0 - adding references using external IDs and other statements on Wikidata - YouTube
    • Addressing the gender gap - Wikidata and SPARQL queries (in French) - YouTube
    • Understanding Wikidata: a free and open knowledge base (in French) - YouTube
    • WikidataTutorial: Learn how to edit / create items on Wikidata (in French) - YouTube
    • Linked Data and Wikidata (in Italian) - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • User:Bargioni/UseAsRef has now a 2.0 version, allowing to use as references not only external IDs but also some other properties (P1343, P973, P8214 etc.)

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • QID ("Initialism of Q-identifier, a unique identifier for an item in Wikidata. [from 2012]") now has an entry in Wiktionary
  • The 3^rd edition of the Coolest Tool Award is looking for nominations (see announcement on wikimedia-l). Please submit your favorite tools by October 27^th. The awarded projects will be announced and showcased in a virtual ceremony in December.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: stylized name, record number, excitation energy
    • External identifiers: Bat Sheva Archive ID, Literature.com book ID, Literature.com ebook ID, CantoDict word ID, CantoDict character ID, MYmovies person ID, Chi era Costui plaque ID, Bowers acronym, Turkish Cinema Archive Database person ID, Research Vocabularies Australia ID, Austrian Football Association player ID, Dewan Negara ID, Arachne.org.au ID, Dewan Rakyat ID, Remontees-mecaniques.net ID, AllSides ID, Birdata ID, Geographical Names Board of NSW geoname ID, IRIS GSSI author ID, IRIS IUSS author ID, SISSA Digital Library author ID, NSW Parliament member ID, SNSF person ID, FFCAM ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Conway polyhedron notation, Nombre de voies routières, Museu da Pessoa Story, Official forum, Properties for legislation, Stack Exchange user ID
    • External identifiers: Toolhub ID, Spotify user ID, Dizionario di Medicina ID, Dizionario delle Scienze Fisiche ID, ORIAS number, Meetup group id, UAE ID, Tennis Abstract player ID, Museu da Pessoa person ID, SoccerPunter player ID, allplayers.in.ua player ID, pfl.uz player ID, ua-football.com player ID, Offshore leaks database ID, Snob.ru author ID, TASS Encyclopedia ID, Corporate Identification Number (CIN) in India, DFIH financier ID, DFIH business ID, Chuvash Encyclopedia ID, Kola Encyclopedia ID, IndexCat ID, Lithuanian Heritage Registry code, Penza Encyclopedia ID, SEKO-ID, Musées Nationaux Récupération ID, Women in the Legislature ID, Dissernet person ID, Dissernet institution ID, Dissernet journal ID, Enciclopedia di Roma person ID, Vokrug.tv show ID
  • Query examples:
    • Map of mosques (Source)
    • Documents from the Boyer collection by decades, subjects most represented (Source)
    • Pronouns of people in different languages (Source)
    • Twitter accounts of libraries in Switzerland (Source)
    • Images of cell types in Wikidata (Source)
    • Map of the place of death of people born in Puy-de-Dôme (Source)
    • Graph of NFDI consortia with their fields of work, the map of (co-)applicants, (Source)
    • Places where people in South-America work who published on Wikidata (Source)
    • Rail link between Narvik and Singapore (Source)

• Development
  • The new WDQS Streaming Updater now fully shipped to production. This will help the Query Service better deal with the amount of edits happening on Wikidata. (more information)
  • Mismatch Finder: Continuing work on the results page where mismatches are shown for review. We are focusing on showing all necessary information for a mismatch to make a good determination if it is a mismatch in Wikidata, the external source or neither.
  • Finishing the work on the new change dispatching system that improves how Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects are notified about edits happening on Wikidata that affect them. Currently tying up some lose ends.
  • Preparing for WikidataCon.

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 14:31, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-43

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

Recent changes

• The Coolest Tool Award 2021 is looking for nominations. You can recommend tools until 27 October.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 October. It will be on all wikis from 28 October (calendar).

Future changes

• Diff pages will have an improved copy and pasting experience. The changes will allow the text in the diff for before and after to be treated as separate columns and will remove any unwanted syntax. [156]
• The version of the Liberation fonts used in SVG files will be upgraded. Only new thumbnails will be affected. Liberation Sans Narrow will not change. [157]

Meetings

• You can join a meeting about the Community Wishlist Survey. News about the disambiguation and the real-time preview wishes will be shown. The event will take place on Wednesday, 27 October at 14:30 UTC. See how to join.

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

20:07, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #19

Welcome to the nineteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in Wikimedia projects.

Structured tasks

"Add an image" prototype, showing suggested image for the article

• "Add a link" is the team's first structured task. It uses machine-learning to suggest wikilinks as easy edits for newcomers. It was deployed in May 2021 on four Wikipedias and then in July on eight more Wikipedias after we evaluated the initial results. So far, we've seen a high level of engagement from newcomers. Communities that have the feature suggested valuable ideas for improvement. We'll work on improvements and then contact more communities to deploy it.
• "Add an image" is the team's second structured task, currently in development. It is an editing task that suggests Commons images for unillustrated Wikipedia articles. We have conducted many community discussions and tests. Then, we've decided to build a first prototype. We'll first deploy it only to our pilot Wikipedias, to learn whether newcomers can be successful with the task. The project page contains links to interactive prototypes. We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. These prototypes have already been tested by newcomers, in English and Spanish.

News for mentors

• The Mentor dashboard is available at our pilot wikis: Arabic, Czech, and Bengali Wikipedias. It will soon be available at a few more volunteering wikis, as a test. [158]
• At wikis where the mentor dashboard is deployed, a new filter is available for mentors. Mentors can monitor their mentees' activity in Watchlist and RecentChanges, so they can help support their mentees' work. For privacy reasons, this filter can't be accessed by someone else than the mentor itself. This filter only filters mentees assigned to the mentor. This filter is not visible for people who are not listed as mentors [159]

Community configuration

• Communities now have the ability to configure how Growth features behave on their own wikis. At Special:EditGrowthConfig, community members can add a list of volunteer mentors, alter the templates used for suggested edits, update help links, and more. This special page is editable by administrators and interface admins.

Scaling

• We are proud to announce that all Wikipedias now have the Growth features! Thank you to all the community members who helped the team build the features and bring them to their wikis. The only exception is Chinese Wikipedia (zh), for technical reasons. [160]
• The wikis that have Growth features deployed have been part of A/B testing since deployment, in which some newcomers did not receive the new features. Now, all of the newcomers on 280 of the smallest of those Wikipedias have the features. [161][162]
• A test is undergoing at English Wikipedia: 25% of newcomers receive the Growth features. The results from this test will be part of a discussion of how to proceed on that wiki.
• Now that Growth features are available at Wikipedia, the Growth team considers to extend them to other projects. Some Wikisource users have expressed some interest in getting Growth features. There is currently a discussion about implementing them on Wikisource.

News for communities

• Do you have questions about the Growth features? This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work.
• The Growth features were recently used in a test amongst Latin American donors to give donors the opportunity to learn to edit. You can see the results here.
• Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, by translating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.
• Help:GettingStarted was a feature developed in 2013, which directed newcomers to articles that needed editing. We recently removed this feature from all wikis, because it has been replaced by the Growth features.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:36, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 October 2021

• From the editor: Different stories, same place

• News and notes: The sockpuppet who ran for adminship and almost succeeded

• In the media: China bans, and is there intelligent life on this planet?

• Opinion: A photo on Wikipedia can ruin your life

• Discussion report: Editors brainstorm and propose changes to the Requests for adminship process

• Recent research: Welcome messages fail to improve newbie retention

• Community view: Reflections on the Chinese Wikipedia

• Traffic report: James Bond and the Giant Squid Game

• Technology report: Wikimedia Toolhub, winners of the Coolest Tool Award, and more

• Serendipity: How Wikipedia helped create a Serbian stamp

• Book review: Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality

• WikiProject report: Redirection

• Humour: A very Wiki crossword

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:15, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #492

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

• Discussions
  • New request for comments: handling of data objects for pages in the project namespace

• Events
  • Upcoming:
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Sam Oyeyele will join us to discuss the AfroCine project. doc, Nov. 2nd.
    • Upcoming Search Platform Office Hours—November 3rd, 2021. Time: 16:00-17:00 GMT / 09:00-10:00 PDT / 12:00-13:00 EDT / 17:00-18:00 CET & WAT. Come and ask anything related to Wikimedia search, Wikidata Query Service, Wikimedia Commons Query Service, etc.!
  • Ongoing:
    • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #14, COP26
  • Past:
    • WikidataCon 2021 happened \o/
      • Documentation of the sessions are currently ongoing. It may take a few weeks to publish all 80 hours of content but you can already watch some of them (linked from each session's Etherpad).
      • Wikidatapink pony session (a meetup where participants shared wishes and feature requests about Wikidata to the development team)
      • List of birthday presents
        • WikidataComplete gadget by Dhairya3124
        • Wikidata Subgraph Analysis by Aisha Khatun
        • UseAsRef 2.0 by Epìdosis
        • KGTK project by Pedro Szekely
        • Wikidata Map (series of updates of the all-coordinates-on-wikidata, made available at commons:Wikidata map) by Addshore
        • Special episode of Wikipediapodden with an interview with Denny about Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions by Ainali
        • Lua access for Lexemes on beta by LydiaPintscher
        • Editathon documentation page by bunch of lovely glam professionals
        • Learn wikidata course by Clifford Anderson and co
        • Wikxhibit by Tarfah Alrashed
        • Integraality updates by Jean-Frédéric
        • iNaturalist BioBlitz by Pigsonthewing

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blog post
    • Challenge A to Z 2021 (in French)
  • Papers
    • Complex Portal 2022: new curation frontiers about the Complex Portal (Q47196990) <> Wikidata connection
    • (fr) Les libellés francophones genrés dans Wikidata (notebook Observablehq)
  • Videos
    • Working hour on preferences and common.js Wikidata (in Italian) - YouTube
    • Semantic web tutorial # 3 | What is Wikidata? (in French) - YouTube
    • SPARQL queries around Boyer collection of the Clermont Auvergne Métropole heritage library (in French) - YouTube
    • New Item creation (in Japanese) - YouTube
  • Research projects
    • Creating and evolving knowledge graphs at scale for explainable AI

• Tool of the week
  • Cemeteries.wiki by Yamen is a project to display Dataviz and statistics about cemeteries all over the world. (2021-11-01)
  • ... and remember you can propose a new tool or gadget!

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Graph Consultant to help migrate the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) from Blazegraph to a different RDF store. Apply here!

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: term in higher taxon, official forum
    • External identifiers: NatureScot Sitelink ID, Refuges.info ID, Dizionario delle Scienze Fisiche ID, George Eastman Museum people ID, Parliament of Australia MP ID, UAE University Libraries ID, Dizionario di Medicina ID, Museu da Pessoa person ID, Indigenous Corporation Number, Toolhub ID, Research Data Australia ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: date of recording, Candidate position, MTBdata
    • External identifiers: Vokrug.tv person ID, Standing Waters Database ID, State Duma person ID, Federation Council person ID, Enciclopedia della Scienza e della Tecnica ID, FRACS profile ID, NER portfolio ID, Triple J Unearthed artist ID, SEEK company ID, Levels.fyi company ID, romaq.org ID, NWT Species ID, IRIS UNISA author ID, Nederlandse Voornamenbank ID, IRIS Verona author ID, IRIS UNIMI author ID, IRIS UNIURB author ID, Australian Charities and Not‑for‑profits Register Charity ID, IRIS UNIBO author ID, Québec Enterprise Number, Douyin User ID, ACE Repertory publisher ID, ACE Repertory writer ID, Indonesian Hospital ID
  • Query examples:
    • Map of French bridges and tunnels carrying an high-speed railway line
    • List of Wikidata item's labels which are same as male form and different from female form in French (ie using the generic as male form) (source)
    • List of Wikidata item's labels which are same as male form and different from female form in English (ie using the generic as male form)(source)
    • consorts of Selim III (source)
    • Coordinates of the birthplaces of people with family name Autrique (Source)
    • Coordinates of battles (Source)
    • Geographical distribution of votive boats historic monuments in France (Source)
    • Relationship among accepted NFDI consortia (Source)
  • Newest database reports: top missing property by number of identifiers: spouse (P26)

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 16:37, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

from Tech News: 2021-44

Selected tech news from Tech News: 2021-44.

Recent changes

• There is a limit on the amount of emails a user can send each day. This limit is now global instead of per-wiki. This change is to prevent abuse. [163]

...

20:27, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #493

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

• Events
  • Upcoming
    • Live about SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French, by Vigneron, November 9 at 18:00 CET
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #61 - YouTube, Facebook, November 13 at 19:00 UTC
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #86, November 14 at 13.00 UTC
    • Wikidata webinar at the Goethe Institute in Athens (Greek). Nov 8, 2021 17:00 UTC+1
    • Next installment of the LD4 Wikibase Working Hour! Monday 15 November 2021, 3PM - 4PM Eastern (Time zone converter). Registration: Zoom registration link
  • Ongoing
    • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #15, COP26 (2/2)
  • Past
    • Documentation of the WikidataCon 2021 sessions are currently ongoing. It may take a few weeks to publish all 80 hours of content but you can already watch some of them (from each session's Etherpad)
    • Wikidata SPARQL tutorial around the Saint-Brieuc museum (in French)

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Media
    • User:Theklan at Radio Euskadi (Q3100760): Wikidata: una base de datos editable, multilingüe, libre y con datos de todo conocimiento (Spanish)
  • Blogs
    • TIB at WikidataCon: Part 1 , Part 2
    • With help of their prof, U of T students go from being Wikidata novices to international conference presenters
    • Crowdsourcing the Scene at the Boston Rock City Edit-a-Thon
  • Videos
    • Basic tutorial on how to improve Wikidata items (in Italian) - YouTube
    • Metadata of cultural institutes: import strategies on Wikidata in the case of the Tuscany Region (in Italian) - YouTube
    • Wikidata for 5-star Linked Open Databases: a case study of PanglaoDB - YouTube
    • Using Wikidata entities and properties in schema.org markup and linked data - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • are occupation labels gender neutral? a tool to explore gender neutrality of labels in different languages.
  • RAWGraphs, a dataviz tool which allows SPARQL queries (source)

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • New strategies for Wikidata and the Wikibase Ecosystem published and waiting for your feedback. Add your comments!
  • OpenRefine 3.5.0 was released

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: Museu da Pessoa History, Conway polyhedron notation
    • External identifiers: Tennis Abstract player ID, Women in the Legislature ID, StopGame ID, Enciclopedia di Roma person ID, Biografija.ru ID, Derrieux agency person ID, Kola Encyclopedia ID, Penza Encyclopedia ID, Enciclopedia della Scienza e della Tecnica ID, Musées Nationaux Recuperation ID, Lithuanian Heritage Registry code, Nynorskordboka-ID, Bokmålsordboka-ID, Indonesian parliament candidate ID 2019, Trove work ID, Vokrug.tv show ID, Apple maps ID, Federation Council person ID, Meetup group id, Glitchwave genre ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: original catalog description, Kanobu ID, Yandex.Question person ID, 発車メロディ
    • External identifiers: Listen Notes podcast ID, WhatsApp number, CNKI Journal ID, Baidu Scholar Journal ID, AllHomes research location ID, Domain suburb profile ID, Coles Online product ID, Woolworths product ID, Maritime Business Directory ID, Oslo Byleksikon ID, NVE Bre ID, Databáze-her.cz ID, FederalPress Encyclopedia ID, babesdirectory, DHAC ID, Naver TV ID, IJF competition ID, JudoInside competition ID, live.ijf competition ID, FAOLEX No, EJU competition ID, The-Sports.org competition ID, StarHit ID, Nasha Versia ID, LocalWiki ID, ESPN MMA fighter ID, Comparably company ID, Spanish Cultural Heritage thesauri ID, Dr. Duke's Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases Chemical ID
  • Query examples:
    • Number of virtual twins (pair with the same dates of birth and death) in Wikidata (source)
    • People recently buried in a cemetery nearby without an image of the grave (P1442) on Wikidata (source)
    • List of lexemes in French associated with occupation items (source)
    • Towns with less than 1000 people that have a cathedral (Source)
    • Musical works based on literary works (Source)
    • Main surnames of people born in the Puy-de-Dôme, France (Source)
    • Members of the Ukrainian national sports team (Source)

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 14:33, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-45

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

Recent changes

• Mobile IP editors are now able to receive warning notices indicating they have a talk page message on the mobile website (similar to the orange banners available on desktop). These notices will be displayed on every page outside of the main namespace and every time the user attempts to edit. The notice on desktop now has a slightly different colour. [164][165]

Changes later this week

• Wikidata will be read-only for a few minutes on 11 November. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [166]
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• In the future, unregistered editors will be given an identity that is not their IP address. This is for legal reasons. A new user right will let editors who need to know the IPs of unregistered accounts to fight vandalism, spam, and harassment, see the IP. You can read the suggestions for how that identity could work and discuss on the talk page.

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

20:35, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 47

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 47, September – October 2021

• On-wiki Wikipedia Library notification rolling out
• Search tool deployed
• New My Library design improvements

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --16:58, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #494

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

• Discussions
  • New request for comments: Create massive changes in one property for spesific categories/properties?

• Events
  • Upcoming
    • Next Bug Triage Hour on API issues. Monday 15th November at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time, see other time zones) (Etherpad)
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Éder Porto will be discussing adding journal articles to Wikidata Wikipedia and Academic Libraries: A Global Project/Chapter 17. doc, Nov. 16th.
    • Open Source Publishing Tools in Wikidata, 16 November 2021. Part of the Open Publishing Fest.
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #62 - YouTube, Facebook, November 20 at 19:00 UTC
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #87, November 21 at 13.00 UTC
  • Ongoing:
    • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #16, Books
  • Past
    • Introduction to Wikidata: GWMAB con IAML Italia replay (in Italian)
    • WikiData4Education_Aligning the sum of all knowledge with school curricula, WikiIndaba (replay)

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Wikidata and open infrastructure: a request for participation
    • Own metadata for own blog posts - science communication and bibliographies with open data and Wikidata
    • How we're tracking elections in symbiosis with Wikidata
    • Recent updates and improvements to Wikidata Query Service
      • How we learned to stop worrying and loved the (event) flow
      • The trouble with triples
      • Getting the WDQS Updater to production: a tale of production readiness for Flink on Kubernetes at WMF
  • Videos
    • Fuzheado and T Cells to demonstrate how to discover, track and work with sets of Wikidata - YouTube
    • Wikidata Introduction course (in German) - 1, 2, 3, 4
    • Wikidata in Educational Institutions / Academic research at Wikimedia Polska / Wikidata Govdirectory - YouTube
  • Podcasts
    • Siobhan Leachman - Wikimedia Editor and Citizen Scientist

• Tool of the week
  • Plantilla:Infotaula persona, infobox for people on Catalan Wikipedia with extensive use of Wikidata, used 175000 times, with Bridge editing. Sample use at ca:Frits Zernike.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • [Feedback Requested] Introducing a dedicated section on Wikidata Item pages for classifying properties
  • New strategies for Wikidata and the Wikibase Ecosystem published and waiting for your feedback. Add your comments!
  • What kind of articles have you created? an Observable notebook which use Wikidata API to get the value of P31 for the list of articles created by a user.
  • OpenRefine is hiring a part-time Project director (paid position).
  • Hewell public beta app: is a virtual tour guide that automatically finds interesting things around you whether you're in a new city or your hometown.
  • Full Fact is using the MediaWiki Action API in their workflow to help add some Wikidata identifiers to their mark-up.
  • Magnus replaced some live SPARQL queries in Mix’n’match with a database cache. Main page now loads faster.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: none
    • External identifiers: Nederlandse Voornamenbank ID, Standing Waters Database ID, Vokrug.tv person ID, Atlas Project of Roman Aqueducts ID, IRIS UNIURB author ID, IRIS Verona author ID, IRIS UNISA author ID, IRIS UNIMI author ID, IRIS UNIBO author ID, Philosophica ID, Castforward ID, Baidu Scholar journal ID, Academy of Russian Television person ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Tabakalera ID, mathematical symbol, included as part, specific impulse by weight, Newgrounds username
    • External identifiers: 7 Days person ID, DBLP event ID, Osmose Agency person ID, Author ID from the Modern Discussion website, IRIS Umbria IDs, biografiA ID, Global Geoparks Network ID (new), identifiant Numelyo
  • Query examples:
    • List of properties which have instances or subclass of humans as possible value with male and female form in French (source)
    • Different people with same label / birthday / occupation in a specified year
    • Narrative locations of the book Itinerary from Paris to Mont-d'Or (Source)
    • Maps of tombs of unknown soldiers (Source)
    • Most common first names (> 5) among people with a Wikidata item and born in Auvergne (Source)
    • Student-Teacher relationship based on entries in 'Das Geistige Berlin' (1897) (Source)
    • Relative frequency of reasons MPs' terms end, since 1870 (Source)
  • Newest database reports: recently ended TV series

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 14:35, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-46

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

Recent changes

• Most large file uploads errors that had messages like "stashfailed" or "DBQueryError" have now been fixed. An incident report is available.

Problems

• Sometimes, edits made on iOS using the visual editor save groups of numbers as telephone number links, because of a feature in the operating system. This problem is under investigation. [167]
• There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of a configuration error. [168]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 November. It will be on all wikis from 18 November (calendar).

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

22:05, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #495

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

• Discussions
  • New request for comments:
    • Wikidata:Requests for comment/How to avoid to use male form as a generic form in property labels in French ?

• Events
  • Upcoming
    • The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 GMT on Thursday 25th November 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). All are welcome!
    • Editing Scottish government agencies at CTC24 – Open In Practice, November 27-28
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #63 - YouTube, Facebook, November 27 at 19:00 UTC
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #88, November 28 at 13.00 UTC
    • ISKO UK Hands-on Meetup - Introduction to Wikibase (November 23rd 2021 13:00 Berlin time) (register on meetup)
  • Ongoing
    • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #17, Bread
  • Past
    • Bug Triage Hour on API issues (log)

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Using Wikidata to promote epistemic equity
    • How Penn's Librarians are Using Linked Data to Make the Web Better
  • Videos
    • How to use the Wikidata query service without having experience with the SPARQL language (Wikidata Query Builder) (in Spanish) - YouTube
    • Bringing Linked Data into Libraries via Wikidata - YouTube
    • Presenting the project for integrating data from the Ricordi Archive into Wikimedia projects (in Italian) - YouTube
    • Wikidata for 5-star Linked Open Bio-Ontologies - YouTube
    • ENDORSE Follow up event: Wikibase and the EU Knowledge Graph as a use case - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • WikiCite Search is a bibliographic search engine for Wikidata that finds articles either by searching for keywords, or by string matching.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikimedia Deutschland is looking for a Full-Stack Developer and Partner Relationships Manager to join the Wikidata/Wikibase team.
  • Are you doing research around Wikidata? There is a new fund to support research work around the Wikimedia projects that you can apply to.
  • This post about the question of the week is showing how questions can be answered over Wikidata. Also it gives some insights on how Google and Siri are using Wikidata.
  • A new openly accessible book on knowledge graphs has been published by prominent researchers in the field.
  • The latest version of WordNet released now links to Wikidata for many entries
  • [Feedback Requested] Introducing a dedicated section on Wikidata Item pages for classifying properties
  • New strategies for Wikidata and the Wikibase Ecosystem published and waiting for your feedback. Add your comments!

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: train melody
    • External identifiers: SEKO ID, NWT Species ID, IJF competition ID, JudoInside competition ID, SEEK company ID, Tabakalera ID, IRIS UNIPG author ID, EXQUIRITE author ID, State Duma person ID, ESPN MMA fighter ID, Dr. Duke's Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases chemical ID, CREPČ institution ID, CREPČ person ID, Spanish Cultural Heritage thesauri ID, Maritime Business Directory ID, FAOLEX No, EJU competition ID, Australian Charities and Not‑for‑profits Register Charity ID, CJFD journal ID, Offshore leaks database ID, Osmose Agency person ID, biografiA ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Rehearses at, image with color chart, Wallet Address, dpi, project of, outcome, introduced by, IMA Symbol, Ghana Place Names URL, CSS code, Deity, number of teachers
    • External identifiers: Newgrounds username, identifiant Numelyo, Genie artist ID, Genie album ID, Genie song ID, Genie media ID, Naver VIBE track ID, Naver VIBE video ID, Bugs! track ID, Bugs! music video ID, Melon music video ID, Rutube channel ID, Saint Petersburg Encyclopedia ID, Nintendo64EVER ID, N64-Database ID, MedlinePlus drug identifier, Web Encyclopedia of Kyiv ID, Database of Czech librarians ID, Coub channel ID, Catalog of arthistoricum.net ID, identifiant OùVoir.Ça, kino-teatr.ru film ID 2, CH district ID, Volgograd Oblast address register, identifiant Initiale, AbeBooks ID, Sceneweb organization ID, SensCritique work ID, Library of Congress providers ID, Irkipedia ID, Delovaya Stolitsa ID, Baseball Prospectus ID, NT Place Names Register ID, Place Names of New Brunswick ID, IRIS polytechnic universities IDs
  • Query examples:
    • Numbers from 0 to 20 sorted alphabetically thanks to lexicographical data (source)
    • Given names of French fictional characters, as chosen by French / non-French authors (Source)
    • Map of members of the International Society of Biocuration (historical and current; affiliation and education institutions) (Source)
    • UK MPs and their reason for *finally* leaving office (Source)
    • Number of new UK MPs at each general election since 1870 (new = never served before) (Source)
    • Crewe Alexandra players from Crewe (Source)
    • Chronological timeline of people buried in Cimetière des Carmes (Source)
    • Stops in the travel routes of Wilhelm Müller on his way from Leipzig to Bad Schandau in 1820/21 (Source)

• Development
  • Working on displaying the grammatical features of Lexemes in a particular order in the UI (phab:T232557)
  • Mismatch Finder: continuing polishing before first release. Focusing on making API documentation available and adding a footer to the site
  • The ongoing work on MediaWiki skin improvements especially for Wikipedia will break the search box for Wikidata. We're working on addressing this. (phab:T275251)
  • Migrating a number of components to vue 3 to keep up with the rest of MediaWiki (phab:T294465)

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 16:00, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-47

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

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
• The template dialog in VisualEditor and in the new wikitext mode Beta feature will be heavily improved on a few wikis. Your feedback is welcome.

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

20:01, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

ArbCom 2021 Elections voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2021 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 6 December 2021. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate in the 2021 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:06, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 November 2021

• In the media: Denial: climate change, mass killings and pornography

• WikiCup report: The WikiCup 2021

• Deletion report: What we lost, what we gained

• From a Wikipedia reader: What's Matt Amodio?

• Arbitration report: ArbCom in 2021

• Discussion report: On the brink of change – RFA reforms appear imminent

• Technology report: What does it take to upload a file?

• WikiProject report: Interview with contributors to WikiProject Actors and Filmmakers

• Serendipity: "Did You Know ..." featured a photo of the wrong female WWII pilot

• News from Diff: Content translation tool helps create one million Wikipedia articles

• Traffic report: Reporting ticket sales on the edge of the Wiki, if Eternals should fail

• Recent research: Vandalizing Wikipedia as rational behavior

• Humour: A very new very Wiki crossword

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:47, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #496 (trimmed)

Trimmed selection of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Project chat: Wikidata phase 1 regression (interwikis no longer visible in new layout used by some Wikipedias and its impact on minority languages)

• Events
  • Upcoming
    • ...
  • Ongoing
    • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #18, Horse
  • Past
    • ...

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Blog post on how Wikimedia Sweden has worked with two museums to open up their data and make it available on Wikidata (in Swedish)
    • Indigenous knowledge on Wikipedia and Wikidata
  • Videos
    • ...

• Tool of the week
  • New gadget available in the preferences: "compact items" makes the interface on item pages more compact (it was previously a gadget for common.css)

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • ...
  • New strategies for Wikidata and the Wikibase Ecosystem published and waiting for your feedback. Add your comments!

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: death rate, image with color chart
    • External identifiers: Australian Prints + Printmaking artist ID, Australian Prints + Printmaking work ID, Dissernet institution ID, DHAC ID, Bildatlas-Künstler-ID, AHPRA registration number, FRACS Find a Surgeon profile ID, Databáze her ID, 7 Days person ID, Oùvoir.ça film ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Corruption Perceptions Index, surrounds the enclave, Harvard Art Museums ID, GISAID identifier, Nextstrain identifier, homophone lexeme, Numista
    • External identifiers: identifiant base Enluminures, The World of Shakespeare ID, oKino.ua film ID, kinobaza.com.ua film ID, kinobaza.com.ua actor ID, oKino.ua actor ID, Natural History Museum (London) person ID, svpressa.ru ID, Russian Academy of Sciences person ID, The Parliamentary Newspaper ID, Lib.ru author ID, politika-crimea.ru person ID, Institute of the History of Ukraine scientist ID, centrasia.org person ID, Music of Armenia ID, Encyclopedia of Transbaikalia ID
  • Query examples:
    • Number of items without any statements (last week: more than 1,300,000)
    • Number of items without any statements by sitelinks (sample: 1757 items link to nlwiki, but have no statements).
    • Taxa named after women (by place of birth) (Source)
    • List of articles on Blaise Pascal in all Wikipedias, sorted by decreasing article size (Source)
    • Texts on French Wikisource by people born in Puy-de-Dôme (Source)
    • List of countries by the highest elevation point (Source)
    • Number of distinct (UK parliament) seats returning someone who chose to sit elsewhere each year, 1830-1910 (Source)
    • List of services that support the OpenRefine Reconciliation service (Source)
    • Things depicted in art works in the Khalili Collections (Source)
    • Images of Wikidata's items linked to UBERON ids (Source)
    • Population density of administrative subdivisions exceeding 100,000 km² and 100 inhabitants / km² (Source)
    • List of government agencies in Scotland (Source)
    • Which day of the week people died on in the Mauthausen concentration camp (Source)

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 14:55, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Question from Mschulz75 on User:Mschulz75/sandbox (14:29, 30 November 2021)

Meiosis is associated with the _____. --Mschulz75 (talk) 14:29, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

@Mschulz75: ... division of cells. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 10:03, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #497

Selected highlights of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Bringing together journalists, the public, and Wikidata to understand our world
    • Reflection on filling a new Wikidata item by Addshore

• Tool of the week
  • Weaviate big graph (source) is a vectorised search engine which returns similar items in Wikidata.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: specific impulse by weight
    • External identifiers: ... Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience Knowledge Hub ID, ... Australian Statistical Geography 2021 ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Harvard Art Museums ID, ... homophone lexeme, ...
    • External identifiers: ... Baidu Baike LemmaID, ...
  • Query examples:
    • ...
    • List of people born in Cook Islands (source)
    • ...
    • Artworks picturing snow (source)
    • Graph of football players who died per year (source)
    • Things depicted in art works of the Khalili Collections (source)
    • ...
    • German cities whose names are also verbs (using Lexemes) (source)
    • Railway stations in the Baltics (source, see the full thread for more queries)

• Development
  • ...
  • Finished work on small tool to show Items recently edited by several accounts to surface current events.

Read the full report · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:49, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-49

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

Problems

• MediaWiki 1.38-wmf.11 was scheduled to be deployed on some wikis last week. The deployment was delayed because of unexpected problems.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 December. It will be on all wikis from 9 December (calendar).
• At all Wikipedias, a Mentor Dashboard is now available at Special:MentorDashboard. It allows registered mentors, who take care of newcomers' first steps, to monitor their assigned newcomers' activity. It is part of the Growth features. You can learn more about activating the mentor list on your wiki and about the mentor dashboard project.
• The predecessor to the current MediaWiki Action API (which was created in 2008), action=ajax, will be removed this week. Any scripts or bots using it will need to switch to the corresponding API module. [169]
• An old ResourceLoader module, jquery.jStorage, which was deprecated in 2016, will be removed this week. Any scripts or bots using it will need to switch to mediawiki.storage instead. [170]

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

21:58, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #498

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

• Events
  • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Lightning talks on WikiProject Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, Wikidata use for a site-specific archaeological case study (Dura-Europos, Syria), and round tripping Wikidata into Alma using Alma Refine. Agenda, Dec. 14th.

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Enriching Claim Reviews - Sharing Experience From Factchecking (schema.org/ Full Fact)
    • Most liked Wikidata tweets (addshore)
    • Updates on the Wikidata map in 2021 (addshore)
  • Papers
    • Lukas Schmelzeisen, Corina Dima, Steffen Staab: "Wikidated 1.0: An Evolving Knowledge Graph Dataset of Wikidata's Revision History", https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05003v1
    • "ARTchives: a Linked Open Data native catalogue of art historians’ archive" crowdsourcing curated information on notable art historians’ archives (including Wikidata) - paper, tool

• Tool of the week
  • Explore gender diversity in a single Wikipedia article using Wikidata's API and SPARQL
  • embeds.js: This script shows embeds on external identifier statements such as YouTube videos, Twitter tweets, Spotify playlists, Genius lyrics, and more!

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Blazegraph failure playbook now available
  • Initial version of Lua access to Lexemes to be deployed on Bengali and Basque Wiktionaries
  • When creating new Wikidata statements in QuickStatements, you can now create multiple “reference groups” (documentation)

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: IMA Mineral Symbol, protective marking, recording date
    • External identifiers: Natural History Museum (London) person ID, Indonesian Hospital ID, Music of Armenia ID, New Index of Middle English Verse ID, World of Shakespeare ID, AllHomes research location ID, Australian Trade Mark Number, Harvard Art Museums ID, BookDepository publisher ID, Catalog of arthistoricum.net ID, Database of Czech librarians ID, German Newspaper Portal ID, Enciclopedia d'arte italiana ID, Dissernet journal ID, Dissernet person ID, centrasia.org person ID, The Parliamentary Newspaper ID, Saint Petersburg Encyclopedia ID, Russian Academy of Sciences person ID, Place Names of New Brunswick ID, Pandora track ID, Nintendo64EVER ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: alphabetical index, International Standard Content Number ISCN, Number of likes, homophone form, Roovet Sound
    • External identifiers: National Library of Ireland ID, Famitsu game ID, JSTOR artwork ID, NYPL Copyright Entries, Kinomania.ru film ID, Kinomania.ru actor ID, Homosaurus ID (V3), Irish Times Profile ID, All About Birds ID, Slovak Theatre Virtual Database, Digital Mechanism and Gear Library ID, f6s id, IRIS Marche IDs, Viber group ID, Parque de la Memoria ID, AAGM Artwork ID, Muz-TV ID, MTV Russia ID
  • Query examples:
    • French departments with more population than all their neighbour departements (source)
    • Map of places names after horses (source)
    • Latvian citizens by occupation (source)
    • Map of the mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (source)
  • Newest WikiProjects: Cities

• Development
  • Mismatch Finder: Developed a user script to show a notification on an Item if the Mismatch Finder has an unreviewed mismatch for it.
  • Preparing for Lexeme Lua access to be enabled on the first wikis. (phab:T294637, phab:T294159)
  • Continuing work on migrating the termbox to vue3 (phab:T296202)

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Suggested and open tasks!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:19, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	You are doing great, even though you fall behind you are doing great and we all recognize that. Thank you. Mschulz75 (talk) 22:09, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-50

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

Recent changes

• There are now default short aliases for the "Project:" namespace on most wikis. E.g. On Wikibooks wikis, [[WB:]] will go to the local language default for the [[Project:]] namespace. This change is intended to help the smaller communities have easy access to this feature. Additional local aliases can still be requested via the usual process. [171]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 December. It will be on all wikis from 16 December (calendar).

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

22:26, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Question from XybxrG on User talk:XybxrG (15:52, 17 December 2021)

Hi there I Just wanna ask what can i do to fix this problem. --XybxrG (talk) 15:52, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Question from XybxrG on User talk:XybxrG (16:08, 17 December 2021)

Hi sir i want to publish my page --XybxrG (talk) 16:08, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Question from XybxrG on User:XybxrG (08:37, 18 December 2021)

Hi there please publish my page --XybxrG (talk) 08:37, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Hi, @XybxrG, you've already "published" your user profile, but it reads like you're attempting to write an article about Sipho Malaza. For Sipho to have an encyclopedia article, he needs to be notable in the Wikipedia sense. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 10:39, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #499

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

• Discussions
  • New request for comments:
    • Creating new Wikidata items for all Commons categories
  • Other:
    • SPARQL query service (SDC) mandatory authentication considered harmful

• Events
  • Upcoming:
    • The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 GMT on Thursday 30th December 2021 (17:00 Berlin time). This month we will have a guest presentation by the team at The Semantic Lab at Pratt Institute. They will present how they are using Linked Open Data (LOD) in their projects with the help of Wikibase. All are welcome!
    • Next Wikidata Bug Triage Hour: January 13th at 17:00 UTC. Open discussion, bring your favorite Phabricator task.
  • Ongoing:
    • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #21, Celebration
  • Past:
    • EduWiki Live on the theme of Wikidata and Curriculum Digitization. (replay)
    • Wikidata workshop (in Italian) (replay)
    • Semantic Web in Libraries: SWIB21 (replay)
      • From string to thing: Wikidata based query expansion
      • Representing the Luxembourg Shared Authority File based on CIDOC-CRM in Wikibase

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Wikidata user and project talk page connection graph
    • Images from Wellcome Collection pass 1.5 billion views on Wikipedia
    • Integrating the PM20 companies archive: part 3 of the data donation to Wikidata
    • Parliamentary debates are made more transparent and accessible with Wikidata
    • A parliamentary document says more than a thousand words (in Swedish)
    • The Longest Serving MP in Sweden
    • "With artificial intelligence, common sense is uncommon. "To help overcome this challenge, researchers use several sources of commonplace knowledge like Wikidata to obtain a “reasoned” AI response."
  • Papers
    • A botanical demonstration of the potential of linking data using unique identifiers for people
    • Survey on English Entity Linking on Wikidata
  • Videos
    • Tutorial for Wikidata Mix'n'Match tool for database pairing (in Czech) - YouTube
    • SPARQL queries on Wikidata - basic level (in Italian) - YouTube
    • Presentation about the Wikidata community (in Italian) - YouTube
    • Wikidata Advanced Course (in German) by OpenGLAM Switzerland - YouTube
      • Introduction
      • Concept of Linked Open Data
      • SPARQL-Queries
      • Automatic data import
    • Querying Wikidata: Museums, Volcanoes (in French) - YouTube
    • Wikidata Fundamentals (in French) by CAPACOA - YouTube
      • Triplets, licenses
      • Item, references and qualifiers, history tab
      • Creation of a user account. Creation of a new items
    • Wikidata Workshop: The basics by CAPACOA - YouTube
      • Wikimedia Foundation licenses, item, semantic triples
      • User creation
      • Searching and editing an item
    • Vector Search through Wikidata with Weaviate - YouTube
    • Creating items on Wikidata using OpenRefine (without sound — subtitles only) - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • NoclaimsBot adds the first statements on items without claims based on templates used on the linked Wikipedia article.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The 500th Wikidata weekly summary is 2 issues away. We are putting together interesting things related to the number 500 to include in that issue. Do you know any Wikidata facts or queries or anything cool related to 500? Please add them to Wikidata:Status updates/Next#Welcome to the 500th Weekly Summary!
  • Wikimedia Commons Query Service (WCQS), currently in beta, will soon be in production with a planned General Availability date of 1 Feb 2022. See the Upcoming General Availability release discussion page for more details.
  • Seth started an essay to summarize the multiple data-related projects going on between Wikimedia Projects at the moment: User:Lectrician1/The grand mess of data on Wikimedia.
  • When creating new Wikidata statements in QuickStatements, you can now create multiple “reference groups” by using “!Sxx” instead of “Sxx” syntax to start a new reference group.
  • Wikimedia Deutschland is running a survey to evaluate Wikibase Installation and Updating experience for users. Please answer a few questions so we can continue to identify areas of improvement for users. Survey links
    • Wikibase Installation Survey
    • Wikibase Software Updating Survey
  • Open positions at Wikimedia Deutschland in the Wikidata/Wikibase teams
    • Engineering Director
    • Full-Stack Developer

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: iTunes genre
    • External identifiers: Pandora album ID, Indonesian College Code, Institute of History of Ukraine ID, Academy of Athens authority ID, ThENC@ ID, CDAEM person ID, Famitsu game ID, EPA Facility Registry Service ID, Levels.fyi company ID, U-PAD author ID, CAMPUS author ID, Original Esperanto Literature author ID, iTunes genre ID, Rutube channel ID, Nasha Versia ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Category for work of subject, Honorary citizens category of entity, Kanobu numeric ID, cadastral district, official shop URL, website, documented files
    • External identifiers: street number in Austria, EU Whoiswho ID, Dicionario da Real Academia Galega, Österreichische Schulkennzahl, iCSO ID, Bloomsbury Fashion Central ID, Lur Encyclopedia ID, Zürich Herbaria collector ID, KSH code (historical), Encyclopedia of Krasnoyarsk Krai ID, WikiStrinda ID, Bokselskap.no ID, Film.ru film ID, Film.ru actor ID, Artland artist ID, Artland gallery ID, ILAB ID, UNESCO ICH ID, Maritimt Magasin skips ID
  • Query examples:
    • Shijian (SJ 实践) experimental satellites (source)
    • Age of living Hawthorn FC players (source)
    • People died on their 50th birthday (Source)
    • Relationship between London School of Economics doctoral advisors and students (source)
    • Map of twinned towns (or partners) of municipalities of Puy-de-Dôme (source)
    • Map of the places named in reference the horse (source)
    • Map of bridges in Kaliningrad (source)
    • Latvian citizens by occupation (source)
    • Wikidata items which are the most linked by lexemes using the property “item for this sense” (source)
    • Actors in Christmas movies: by frequency, with film titles and sample film item (source)
    • Filming locations of Christmas movies, with film titles and sample film item (source)
    • Recent Christmas movies lacking filming location (source)

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:36, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-51

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

Tech News

• Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 10 January 2022.

Recent changes

• Queries made by the DynamicPageList extension (<DynamicPageList>) are now only allowed to run for 10 seconds and error if they take longer. This is in response to multiple outages where long-running queries caused an outage on all wikis. [172]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.

Future changes

• The developers of the Wikipedia iOS app are looking for testers who edit in multiple languages. You can read more and let them know if you are interested.
• The Wikimedia Cloud VPS hosts technical projects for the Wikimedia movement. Developers need to claim projects they use. This is because old and unused projects are removed once a year. Unclaimed projects can be shut down from February. [173]

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

22:04, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #500

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

• Welcome to the 500th Weekly Summary!
  • Item #500 is Citrus ×limon; Property #500 is exclave of; and Lexeme #500 is "കുടുംബം" - Malayalam for “family”.
  • “Roughly” 500 people were participants at WikidataCon 2021
  • Q207742 is about the natural number 500
  • Q560388 disambiguates "500" for Wikipedias in 14 languages.
  • The Roman numeral for 500 is "D"
  • Timeline of places when they had a population of exactly 500
  • Wikidata was 500 days old on Friday 14 March 2014. It will be 500 weeks old on Tuesday 31 May 2022

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Ameisenigel (RfP scheduled to end after 27 December 2021 15:57 UTC)

• Events
  • Upcoming:
    • The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 GMT on Thursday 30th December 2021 (17:00 Berlin time). This month we will have a guest presentation by the team at The Semantic Lab at Pratt Institute. They will present how they are using Linked Open Data (LOD) in their projects with the help of Wikibase. All are welcome!
    • Next Wikidata Bug Triage Hour: January 13th at 17:00 UTC. Open discussion, bring your favorite Phabricator task.
    • Coolest Tools Awards on Friday 14 January 2022, 17:00 UTC
  • Ongoing:
    • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #22, New Year
  • Past:
    • Wikidata. Lecture - master class in Russian is 16:07 GMT on Sunday 26th December 2021 (19:07 Moscow time) in Minsk Hackerspace. For those who are not familiar and want to know what it is.
    • WikidataCon 2021 (replay on YouTube)
      • Wikidata talks:
        • Improving Women's Biographies through Wikidata - Experiences from Women in Red and the Smiths. Inst.
        • A Wikidata university course? Lessons learned from featuring Wikidata in an elective course at TAU.
        • Linking Indian Local Self Government's Structured Data with Wikidata and OpenStreetMap
        • Finding new pathways of collaborating for a sustainable Wikidata software development
        • How can we reimagine Wikidata from the margins? Conversation with Maryana Iskander
        • Wikidata at Texas A&M University Libraries: Enhancing Discovery for Dissertations
        • Wiki API Connector - Simplifying ETL workflows from open APIs to Wikidata/Commons
        • IG WIKIDATA HUB - The Journey towards building a WIKIDATA community in Nigeria
        • Integration of Wikidata 4OpenGLAM into data and information science curricula
        • Description from Wikidata on sister projects and concerns about vandalism
        • Knowledge Quality In Wikidata: Vandalism Insights and Data Collaborations
        • Shared Citations - A proposed citation management database for Wikimedia
        • Analyzing, visualizing and improving Wikidata using the Wolfram Language
        • Challenges and Lessons from a Pilot Project: Christian Hymns in Wikidata
        • Wikidata for authority control: sharing museum knowledge with the world
        • Wikidata supporting open student research projects in plant chemistry
        • A world in which 99% of Wikidata’s editors never come to Wikidata.org
        • Linking the Art in the Christian Tradition (ACT) database to Wikidata
        • Global templates: Towards a New Age of Cross-wiki Data Collaboration
        • From QRPedia to AudioQRPedia : how to improve QRPedia using Wikidata
        • Sister projects: Wiki Loves Monuments presentations and discussion
        • From Google Scholar to Wikidata: The RIDC NeuroMat Experience
        • Assessing the quality of sources in Wikidata across languages
        • IFLA Wikidata Working Group: Updates from the library field
        • A process to roundtrip Wikidata into Alma using Alma Refine
        • Arrange river data in Taiwan by Wikidata and OpenStreetMap
        • Look both ways: integrating Wikidata and OpenStreetMap
        • Wikidata in the Classroom: Updates from North America
        • Learning Wikidata in 8 Weeks as a Smithsonian Intern
        • Wikidata-based Narratives for Research and Education
        • Measuring Political Elite Networks with Wikidata
        • Sorting out industry classifications in Wikidata
        • Systematic Review Automation driven by Wikidata
        • The Lindy Effect in Wikidata User Retention
        • Non-binary Gender Identities in Wikidata
        • Measuring and monitoring data quality
        • Wikidata & Education: A Global Panel
        • Integrating Wikidata into education
        • Integrating Wikidata into education
        • Wikidata in Australia showcase
        • Wikidata and R: a perfect pair
        • Writing schemas for Wikidata
        • Overview of ontology issues
        • Wikidata and OCCRP
      • Wikibase talks:
        • Open meeting of the Wikibase Stakeholder Group and interactive roadmapping session
        • How can Wikimedia Deutschland enable an ecosystem of developers around Wikibase?
        • Wikibase as an infrastructure for Knowledge Graphs: The EU Knowledge Graph
        • "A Wikibase for what?" - diverse users at the edge of the graph
        • Wikibase lightning talks: data upload and extensions session
        • How to open Authority Control system - The GND & Wikibase
        • Wikibase Community User Group meeting and track roundup
        • Pre-launch Announcement and Preview of Wikibase.Cloud
        • Wikibase as RDM infrastructure within NFDI4Culture
        • Wikibase lightning talks: inspiration session
        • Wikibase for Citations on Wikipedia

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Why you need to understand Wikidata, no matter what field you’re in
  • Papers
    • Improving the Question Answering Quality using Answer Candidate Filtering based on Natural-Language Features
    • Algorithmic amplification of politics on Twitter
  • Videos
    • SPARQL queries on Wikidata - advanced level (in Italian) - YouTube
    • How to link items to Dagbani Wikipedia articles using databox by Dnshitobu - YouTube
    • Alias names in Wikidata - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • Articles created by country of citizenship : a javascript notebook which looks at the distribution of articles created by a user by country of citizenship (P27). It uses Wikidata's API through wikibase-sdk library.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • WDQS State of the Union, Dec 2021 now available.
  • If you are using the Modern Vector skin on Wikidata then search might break for you near the end of January for a few days. To fix it you can temporarily switch back to the Vector skin. A proper fix is being worked on in phab:T275251.
  • Wikimedia Deutschland is running a survey to evaluate Wikibase Installation and Updating experience for users. Please answer a few questions so we can continue to identify areas of improvement for users. Survey links
    • Wikibase Installation Survey
    • Wikibase Software Updating Survey
  • Open positions at Wikimedia Deutschland in the Wikidata/Wikibase teams
    • Engineering Director
    • Full-Stack Developer

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: type host, CSS code
    • External identifiers: Rutube channel ID, Nasha Versia ID, Irkipedia ID, Babesdirectory ID, Numelyo ID, ua-football.com player ID, soccerpunter.com player ID, pfl.uz player ID, PGM author ID, Irish Times profile ID, politika-crimea.ru person ID, Kinomania.ru actor ID, Kinomania.ru film ID, bards.ru person ID, kinobaza.com.ua actor ID, kinobaza.com.ua film ID, Zürich Herbaria collector ID, N64-Database ID, Channel One Russia show ID, Kanobu ID, Lambic.Info ID, Smotrim.ru film ID, CH district ID, Digital Index of Middle English Verse ID, Genie album ID, Genie song ID, Genie artist ID, Austrian school ID, DFIH business ID, Corporate Identification Number (CIN) in India, Ruskino actor ID, Ruskino film ID, Joconde use ID, JSTOR artwork ID, Dicionario da Real Academia Galega ID, Bloomsbury Fashion Central ID, MTBdata ID, All About Birds ID, Homosaurus ID (V3), GISAID identifier, oKino.ua actor ID, Library of Congress providers ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: documented files, start and end time in video, is an individual of a taxon, facilitates flow of, LKI ID, service hosted by, service hosted at, everyeye.it ID
    • External identifiers: Artland artist ID, Artland gallery ID, ILAB ID, UNESCO ICH ID, Maritimt Magasin skips ID, AMPAS collections item ID, Kinofilms.ua actor ID, Kinofilms.ua film ID, Artland fair ID, Archivio Storico dell'Università degli Studi di Cagliari person ID, Regroupement Québécois de la danse (RQD) ID, NatureServe Explorer ID, Key Biodiversity Areas factsheet ID, CNSflora ID, Rusactors actor ID, Rusactors film ID, eurasian-defence.ru person ID, artchive person ID, nzs.si player ID, Der Spiegel topic ID, NLC Bibliography ID, PKULaw CLI Code, LGBT Info Wiki ID
  • Query examples:
    • Places that appear in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Great Russian Encyclopaedia, the Great Catalan Encyclopaedia and the Store Norske Leksikon, (ordered by country) (source)
    • Christmas traditions around the world (with pictures) (source)
    • UK parties since 1935 that have only ever been represented by a single MP (source)
    • Brazilians with most Wikipedia pages across languages (source)

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

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 14:28, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 December 2021

• From the editor: Here is the news

• News and notes: Jimbo's NFT, new arbs, fixing RfA, and financial statements

• Serendipity: Born three months before her brother?

• In the media: The past is not even past

• Recent research: STEM articles judged unsuitable for undergraduates below the first paragraph

• Arbitration report: A new crew for '22

• By the numbers: Four billion words and a few numbers

• Deletion report: We laughed, we cried, we closed as "no consensus"

• Gallery: Wikicommons presents: 2021

• Traffic report: Spider-Man, football and the departed

• Crossword: Another Wiki crossword for one and all

• Humour: Buying Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:08, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #501

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

• Events
  • Upcoming:
    • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, January 19th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group.
    • SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, January 4 at 19:00 CEST
  • Ongoing:
    • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #23, Residence
  • Past:
    • Wikibase live session (December 2021) - log

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • How to get Wikidata claims from Wikipedia sitelinks using Wikidata API ?
  • Videos
    • Working hour - Wikidata SPARQL querries (in Italian) - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • Wikidata's Q item explorer: Show claims where the item is the subject of the statement but doesn't show statements where the item is the target value.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Documentation of the WikidataCon 2021 presenting the key tools and lessons learned from the organizing team
  • Results of the WikidataCon 2021 participants survey
  • Video recordings of the WikidataCon 2021 are currently being uploaded

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: number of triples, URL for freedom of information requests, official shop URL, facilitates flow of, next level in hierarchy
    • External identifiers: Norgeshistorie ID, Numista mint ID, Austrian Street ID, F6S ID, EU Whoiswho ID, DFIH financier ID, Express Gazeta ID, All-Science Journal Classification Codes, Repertorium Biblicum Medii Aevi ID, Numista coin ID, Comparably company ID, Folketinget actor ID, Coub channel ID, Sachsens-Schlösser-Kennung, Index of Middle English Verse ID, Stack Exchange user ID, Listen Notes podcast ID, Casefile ID, ILAB ID, Oslo Byleksikon ID, Slovak Theatre Virtual Database ID, CNSflora ID, Baseball Prospectus ID, UNESCO ICH ID, Artland artist ID, Genie media ID, Regroupement québécois de la danse (RQD) ID, Archivio Storico dell'Università degli Studi di Cagliari person ID, National Library of Ireland ID, Viber group ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: cantilever sign, yield rate, Stalin Memo ID, Name in Swedish government, reference image
    • External identifiers: FID ID, Labyrinth database ID, doollee.com playwright ID, doollee.com play ID, doollee.com literary agent ID, doollee.com play publisher ID, people.su person ID, Biographe.ru ID, Filmovamista.cz film ID, ICPSR Subject Thesaurus ID, Hermitage Museum ID, ICPSR Personal Names Authority List ID, ICPSR Organization Names Authority List ID, ICPSR Geographic Names Thesaurus ID, Clavis Apocryphorum Novi Testamenti ID, Clavis Apocryphorum Veteris Testamenti ID, Tretyakov Gallery ID, Maritimt Magasin skips ID, ARCHER ID, Pipe Organ Database ID, Washington Native Plant Society Plant Directory ID, TVFPlay series ID, UKÄ standard classification of Swedish science topics 2016
  • Query examples:
    • Map of New Zealand suburbs (source)
    • Graph of influences in the Age of Enlightenment (source)
    • Family names shared by astronauts (along with how often they occur in Wikidata) (source)
    • Bills and coins of Brazilian Real (with pictures) (source)
    • People awarded by the French Legion of Honour on Dec 31, 2021 (source)
    • Average height of people named Joe (Source)
    • Indian writers who died in 1961 (Source)

• Development
  • Due to the winter holidays, no development has happened for Wikidata in the last two weeks.

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 13:45, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Happy New Year!

Pelagic,
Thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia, and a Happy New Year to you and yours! Itcouldbepossible^Talk 12:12, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

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– Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year}} to user talk pages.

ItcouldbepossibleTalk 12:12, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, @Itcouldbepossible, I also hope you had a great New Year! ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 11:10, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

@Pelagic Yes, I had. May yours be nice too. Itcouldbepossible^Talk 12:39, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

And one more thing, why don't you archive your talk page? It has got scary big. Itcouldbepossible^Talk 12:41, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Wikidata #502 (trimmed)

A selection from the overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events
  • Upcoming:
    • ...
    • Upcoming Search Platform Office Hours. Date: Wednesday, January 12th, 2022. Time: 16:00-17:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PST / 11:00-12:00 EST / 17:00-18:00 CET & WAT
    • SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, January 12 at 19:00 CEST (exceptionally on Wednesday)
    • ...
  • Ongoing:
    • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #24, Antonyms
    • Creating, maintaining and updating Shape Expressions as EntitySchemas in the Wikimedia ecosystem. International SWAT4HCLS Conference. 10 - 13 Jan 2022. Register!

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • An introduction to Observable for Wikidata users
    • 10 useful things about Wikidata & SPARQL that I wish I knew earlier
  • Videos
    • ...
    • WIkimedia CEE Online Meeting 2021
      • Implementing Wikidata in Educational Institutions — CEE Challenges and Opportunities - YouTube
      • Add your country to the Wikidata Govdirectory - YouTube
      • Wikidata automatization and integration with web resources - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • OneZoom "tree of life explorer" is an interactive map of the evolutionary links between all living things known to science using Wikidata.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The Celtic Knot Conference (dedicated to underserved languages on the Wikimedia project, with a strong focus on Wikidata and lexicographical data) will take place online in 2022. You can help the organizers with giving input on topics you'd like to see at the conference. Feel free to fill in the survey before January 17.
  • The page Wikidata:WikiProject Duplicates/Wikipedia mergers has been created, in order to facilitate users when they find duplicate articles in a Wikipedia whose language is unfamiliar to them:
    • if you want to declare that you are available for merging duplicate articles in one or more given Wikipedias, please add your name to this page
    • if you want to find some user able to merge articles in a certain Wikipedia, you can see if there are already available users for that Wikipedia and contact them directly
  • ...
  • Post WikidataCon 2021
    • Documentation of the WikidataCon 2021 presenting the key tools and lessons learned from the organizing team
    • Results of the WikidataCon 2021 participants survey
    • Video recordings of the WikidataCon 2021 are currently being uploaded

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: official shop URL, facilitates flow of, next level in hierarchy, is an individual of taxon, reference image, <highlight>associated cadastral district</highlight>
    • External identifiers: ... NatureServe Explorer ID, NT Place Names Register ID, ...
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: TV3 programme ID, Chief/Naa/Traditional ruler, results in quality, official jobs URL, relative, director of publication, Business valuation, 議案番号
    • External identifiers: ... Numista type number, ... DFG Science Classification, ... AMS Glossary of Meteorology ID, ...
  • Query examples:
    • Authors without field of work but with topic-tagged publications
    • Compound first names starting with "John" (and the number of uses on Wikidata) (Source)
    • Presidents of Brazil with the most awards (Source)
    • Locations of parishes across Scotland (Source)
    • Map of where Roman Catholic Popes were born (Source)
    • Birth place of people who are described in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Great Russian Encyclopedia, the Great Catalan Encyclopedia and the Store Norske Leksikon (Source)
    • Various kinds of New Year's celebrations in the world (Source)
    • World map of recent censuses known at Wikidata for each decade (source) select decade on the right side
    • Non-English labels for a set of objects, with the names of the languages (source)

• Development
  • Getting the Wikidata:Mismatch Finder ready for release. Focusing on adding statistics.
  • Fixed an issue where statement editing was broken in some older browser (phab:T298001)
  • Made it so that grammatical features on a Form of a Lexeme can be ordered consistently across all Lexemes (phab:T232557)
  • Working on an issue where changes from Wikidata don't get sent to the other wikis for the initial adding of the sitelink to an Item (phab:T233520)

• Looking back at 2021
  • Developments rolled out in 2021:
    • New updater for the Wikidata Query Service to help it keep up with the large number of edits on Wikidata
    • Query Builder to make it easier for people to create SPARQL queries without having to know SPARQL
    • Item Quality Evaluator to make it easy to find the highest and lowest quality Items in a topic area
    • Constraints Violations Checker is a small command-line tool that gives constraint violation statistics for a set of Items to make it easier to find the Items that need more work
    • Curious Facts finds anomalies in the data in Wikidata and offers them up for review and amusement
    • Wikidata Map to see the distribution of Wikidata's Items across the world and the connections between them
    • Current Events to make it easy to see what's currently a hot topic in the world and being edited a lot on Wikidata
  • New entities in 2021:
    • Items Q104595000 (approx.) to Q110342868
    • Properties P9003 to P10223
    • Lexemes L400170 (approx.) to L625164

Read the full report · 15:12, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-02

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

Recent changes

• A oauth_consumer variable has been added to the AbuseFilter to enable identifying changes made by specific tools. [174]
• Gadgets are now able to directly include JSON pages. This means some gadgets can now be configured by administrators without needing the interface administrator permission, such as with the Geonotice gadget. [175]
• Gadgets can now specify page actions on which they are available. For example, |actions=edit,history will load a gadget only while editing and on history pages. [176]
• Gadgets can now be loaded on demand with the withgadget URL parameter. This can be used to replace an earlier snippet that typically looks like withJS or withCSS. [177]
• At wikis where the Mentorship system is configured, you can now use the Action API to get a list of a mentor's mentees. [178]
• The heading on the main page can now be configured using MediaWiki:Mainpage-title-loggedin for logged-in users and MediaWiki:Mainpage-title for logged-out users. Any CSS that was previously used to hide the heading should be removed. [179] [180]
• Four special pages (and their API counterparts) now have a maximum database query execution time of 30 seconds. These special pages are: RecentChanges, Watchlist, Contributions, and Log. This change will help with site performance and stability. You can read more details about this change including some possible solutions if this affects your workflows. [181]
• The sticky header has been deployed for 50% of logged-in users on more than 10 wikis. This is part of the Desktop Improvements. See how to take part in the project.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 January. It will be on all wikis from 13 January (calendar).

Events

• Community Wishlist Survey 2022 begins. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.

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

01:22, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #503

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

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: MSGJ (RfP scheduled to end after 20 January 2022 17:45 UTC)

• Events
  • Upcoming:
    • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, January 19th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team present what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
    • SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, January 18 at 19:00 CEST
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #67 - YouTube, Facebook, January 22 at 19:00 UTC
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #93, January 23 at 13.00 UTC
  • Ongoing:
    • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #25, Volcano
    • #1Lib1Ref campaign runs runs from January 15th to February 5th. Contribute by creating Wikidata items for texts and authors on Wikisource.
  • Past:
    • Bug Triage Hour (log). The next session will be announced here in the Wikidata Weekly Summary and on the Wikidata mailing-list.
    • Wikimedia Coolest Tool Award 2021 (replay on YouTube)

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • Tour de France's stage winners an Observable notebook to explore Tour de France's data using SPARQL and Observable's Plot library.
    • Wikidata, Open Infrastructures, Recognition & Rewards
    • Equal Street Names Wiesbaden
  • Videos
    • Using Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata to mport a book into Wikisource -YouTube
    • Musicbrainz.org and wikidata.org - What can we learn from the designs and how to use the API's to extract information - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • Wiki History Game is a game based on Wikidata where you have to put events in order of when they happened.
  • GraphQL demo for WikiCite is a simple GraphQL interface to Wikidata.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Do you have an idea you want to explore & want to investigate it using Wikidata? Apply for a WMAU fellowship grant.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: reference image, associated cadastral district, admission yield rate
    • External identifiers: Triple J Unearthed artist ID, Parque de la Memoria ID, Bokselskap.no ID, Digital Mechanism and Gear Library ID, oKino.ua film ID, AMPAS collections item ID, Pipe Organ Database organ ID, UNICA IRIS author ID, IRIS UNISS author ID, AMS Glossary of Meteorology ID, EtymWb lemma ID, Offizielle Deutsche Charts album ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Business valuation, 議案番号, podcast image url, list of TV show episode, XJustiz registration court ID, LinkedIn showcase ID, religious community
    • External identifiers: Bergen byleksikon ID, CNGAL Entry ID, Amazon podcast ID, Podchaser numeric ID, Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English ID, Football Federation of Armenia ID, Union of Bulgarian Composers ID, Habr company ID, Douban book Works ID, German Lobbyregister-ID, Google Arts & Culture entity ID2, Vesti.ru dossier ID, Catalogue of Life ID 2, Orthodoxie.com topic ID, Encyclopedia of Russian Jewry ID, Wikisimpsons ID, Réseau documents d'artistes ID, Millattashlar ID, Transphoto city ID, IRIS national research institutes IDs
  • Query examples:
    • Things that turned 20 years old today (source)
    • Irish artists and their relationships (source)
    • Eating or drinking establishments near you (1.5 radius) (source)
    • Most common day for UK by-elections since 1880 (source)

• Development
  • Fixed an issue where making changes with sitelinks were not fully dispatched to the clients (phab:T233520)
  • Mismatch Finder: Improved the texts in the tool to be more understandable after testing
  • Mismatch Finder: added a way to get statistics about all the reviews that have been done in the tool and what is still awaiting review
  • Special:NewLexeme: kicked off the development work to improve the page in order to make it more understandable

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:25, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-03

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

Recent changes

• When using WikiEditor (also known as the 2010 wikitext editor), people will now see a warning if they link to disambiguation pages. If you click "Review link" in the warning, it will ask you to correct the link to a more specific term. You can read more information about this completed 2021 Community Wishlist item.
• You can automatically subscribe to all of the talk page discussions that you start or comment in using DiscussionTools. You will receive notifications when another editor replies. This is available at most wikis. Go to your Preferences and turn on "Automatically subscribe to topics". [182]
• When asked to create a new page or talk page section, input fields can be "preloaded" with some text. This feature is now limited to wikitext pages. This is so users can't be tricked into making malicious edits. There is a discussion about if this feature should be re-enabled for some content types.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 January. It will be on all wikis from 20 January (calendar).

Events

• Community Wishlist Survey 2022 continues. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.

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

19:54, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #504

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

• Discussions
  • Closed request for adminship: MSGJ (Successful). Welcome onboard \o/

• Events
  • Upcoming:
    • The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 27th January 2022 (17:00 Berlin time). What are you working on around Wikibase? You're welcome to come and share your project with the community.
    • Editing with OpenRefine live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, January 25 at 19:00 CET (UTC+1)
    • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Professor Pascal Martinolli speaking on tabletop role-playing game citations practices and Wikidata, January 25th.
    • LIVE Wikidata editing #68 - YouTube, Facebook, January 29 at 19:00 UTC
    • Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #94, January 30 at 13.00 UTC
    • Online workshop in French about Breton lexicographical data, by Envlh and Vigneron, January 30 at 15:00 CET (UTC+1)
    • On Tuesday, February 22, the OpenRefine team hosts a community meetup to present current and future work on Structured Data on Commons support in OpenRefine.
  • Ongoing:
    • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #26, Bees
    • #1Lib1Ref campaign runs runs from January 15th to February 5th. Contribute by creating Wikidata items for texts and authors on Wikisource.
  • Past:
    • Wikidata/Wikibase office hour (2022-01-19)

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • The CIA lost track of who runs the UK, so I picked up the slack featured on Hacker News
    • Solving Wordle, Sutom, and al. with SPARQL queries on Wikidata
    • Wikitrivia is a web game that challenges your knowledge of historical dates
    • Wikitrivia, the viral game that tests how much you know about history (in Spanish)
    • 100 Women in Science in Smithsonian History
  • Papers
    • Wikidata: a new perspective towards universal bibliographic control
    • Wikidata for Digital Preservationists: New DPC Technology Watch Guidance Note now available on general release
  • Videos
    • [WORKSHOP] Wikidata and libraries: tools for information managers (in Spanish) - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • Comparator compare the list of cited entities across two different wikipedia articles using Wikidata and SPARQL

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata Lexemes forms:
    • Now supports the Odia language
    • Substantially expanded template for Spanish verbs
  • How many triples are added when certain edits are made? ... User:Mahir256/Triples

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: admission yield rate, Corruption Perceptions Index, category for honorary citizens of entity, podcast image url
    • External identifiers: AMS Glossary of Meteorology ID, EtymWb lemma ID, Offizielle Deutsche Charts album ID, ARCHER ID, Senators of Spain (1834-1923) ID, AdoroCinema person ID, Kinofilms.ua film ID, Kinofilms.ua actor ID, kino-teatr.ru film ID, Hermitage Museum work ID, Engineer's Line Reference, Archive ouverte UNIGE ID, Union of Bulgarian Composers ID, AsianWiki ID, ENEA-IRIS Open Archive author ID, METRICA author ID, Encyclopedia of Russian Jewry ID, TVFPlay series ID, Orthodoxie.com topic ID, Slangopedia ID, OpenAlex ID, iCSO ID, Indeed company ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: LinkedIn showcase ID, religious community, subpopulation 3, type of register, identifier in a register, phrase in hiero markup
    • External identifiers: Vesti.ru dossier ID, Catalogue of Life ID 2, XJustiz registration court ID, Wikisimpsons ID, Réseau documents d'artistes ID, Millattashlar ID, Transphoto city ID, Grand Duchy of Lithuania Encyclopedia ID, Archivio Biografico Comunale (Palermo) ID, Sceneweb artist ID, Index to Organism Names ID, Leopoldina member web site ID, Dico en ligne Le Robert ID, LastDodo-area-id, SberZvuk ID, North Data company ID, Gardens Navigator ID, SAHRA heritage objects ID, ezeri.lv ID, SAHA player ID, norsk fangeregister fangeleir ID, Mnemosine ID, World Economic Forum ID, Apple Podcasts podcast episode ID
  • Query examples:
    • Map of tramways in France
    • Map of categories for honorary citizens (source)
    • Map of the Medieval universities and its founding date (source)
    • Camps/subcamps within a 20km radius of your location (source)
    • Taxa found at Fazenda Tamanduá (Sertão of Paraíba - Brazil) (source)
    • Birthplace of Rabbis (source)
    • Italian parliamentarians and ministers aged between 50 and 80 (source)
    • Female Irish scientists in Wikidata without a Wikipedia article (source)
    • Places in the Hautes-Alpes that are the subject of an article on Wikipedia in at least 10 languages (source)

• Development
  • Enabling usage tracking specifically for statements on Waray, Armenian and Cebuano Wikipedias (phab:T296383, phab:T296382, phab:T296384)
  • Implementing basic version of mul language code and deploying it to Test Wikidata (phab:T297393)
  • Preparing an event centered on reusing Wikidata's data
  • Mismatch Finder: Been in touch with people who can potentially provide the first mismatches to load into the new tool for the launch. Finalized the statistics part.

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

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
  • Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
  • Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 14:55, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-04

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 January. It will be on all wikis from 27 January (calendar).
• The following languages can now be used with syntax highlighting: BDD, Elpi, LilyPond, Maxima, Rita, Savi, Sed, Sophia, Spice, .SRCINFO.
• You can now access your watchlist from outside of the user menu in the new Vector skin. The watchlist link appears next to the notification icons if you are at the top of the page. [183]

Events

• You can see the results of the Coolest Tool Award 2021 and learn more about 14 tools which were selected this year.
• You can translate, promote, or comment on the proposals in the Community Wishlist Survey. Voting will begin on 28 January.

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

21:37, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 January 2022

• Special report: WikiEd course leads to Twitter harassment

• News and notes: Feedback for Board of Trustees election

• Interview: CEO Maryana Iskander "four weeks in"

• Black History Month: What are you doing for Black History Month?

• Deletion report: Ringing in the new year: Subject notability guideline under discussion

• WikiProject report: The Forgotten Featured

• Arbitration report: New arbitrators look at new case and antediluvian sanctions

• Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2021

• Gallery: No Spanish municipality without a photograph

• Obituary: Twofingered Typist

• Op-Ed: Identifying and rooting out climate change denial

• Essay: The prime directive

• Opinion: Should the Wikimedia Foundation continue to accept cryptocurrency donations?

• In the media: Fuzzy-headed government editing

• Recent research: Articles with higher quality ratings have fewer "knowledge gaps"

• Serendipity: Pooh entered the Public Domain – but Tigger has to wait two more years

• Crossword: Cross swords with a crossword

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:21, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #505 (pruned)

Trimmed selection of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • New requests for permissions/Bot:
    • GretaHeng18bot
    • Pi bot 24
    • SchoolBot
    • companyBot

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Press
    • "Massive open index of scholarly papers launches" - called OpenAlex, it draws its data from sources including Wikidata
  • Blogs
    • …
    • Smithsonian Libraries and Archives & Wikidata: Using Linked Open Data to Connect Smithsonian Information
    • The origin of the gender gap
  • Videos
    • …
    • Working with Siegfried, Wikidata, and Wikibase

• Tool of the week
  • Basque version of Wordle using Wikidata's lexicographic data. Check it out!

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • WDQS scaling update for Jan 2022 available here. We will be trying to do monthly updates starting this month.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: … dpi for original size, … official jobs URL
    • External identifiers: … OpenAlex ID, … Google Arts & Culture entity ID, Sceneweb artist ID, … Unified book number
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: has member, register in Germany, … time in the pouch, semantic gender, …
    • External identifiers: … identifiant Les Archives du spectacle (organisme), …
  • Query examples:
    • …
    • Items with "language of work or name = Toki Pona" as qualifier
    • …
    • Birthplaces of US Presidents, Russian emperors, Roman emperors (source)
    • …

• Development
  • Continuing work on adding the mul language code for labels, descriptions and aliases. (phab:T297393)
  • …
  • Continuing work on making sure the Wikidata search box works with the new Vector skin improvements (phab:T296202)
  • Mismatch Finder: Debugging some issues with the first files we got with mismatches that we can load into the Mismatch Finder

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:44, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Question from Kalimbassieris Maritime (09:42, 2 February 2022)

Hello, we are a shipping company and would like to create a page for our company on wikipedia. Could i please ask for your assistance? Thank you, Maria --Kalimbassieris Maritime (talk) 09:42, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi, @Maria, sorry to be the bearer of bad news. To be "notable" enough for an encyclopaedia article on Wikipedia, KM would need to have been written about in some depth (not just directory listings) by independent (not just interviews or press releases) sources. The guidelines are Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies) ("NORG") and Wikipedia:Notability ("GNG").

Wikipedia is at at the end of the information pipeline: you get written about elsewhere first, then as a result you get written about in WP, not vice versa.

If your aim is to have a Google Knowledge Panel, some other strategies could include: creating a Wikidata item, signing up for a Google MyBusiness account, publishing some engaging content on your website, and embedding the right metadata markup on your site.

Best wishes for success in promoting your company. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 07:47, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Scratch that last bit. It seems you already have a Google Knowledge Panel. (I normally use Duck; should have checked Goo first.) ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 07:55, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #506

Selected items from what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • ...

• Events
  • ...
  • Past:
    • ...
    • Jan Ainali, GovDirectory. Using Wikidata to Connect Constituents With Their Government - Civic Hacker Summit, November 2021

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Blogs
    • How-to: Matching multilingual thesaurus concepts with OpenRefine
    • Wikidata and the sum of all video games − 2021 edition, by Jean-Frédéric
    • Importing a Breton dictionary from Wikisource into Wikidata lexicographical data, by Envlh
    • Profiling a Wikibase item creation on test.wikidata.org by Addshore
    • Fast Bulk Import Into Wikibase
  • Papers
    • XAlign: Cross-lingual Fact-to-Text Alignment and Generation for Low-Resource Languages
  • Videos
    • ...
    • Wikidata workshop: interwiki links (Questions) - 1, 2 & 3 (YouTube)

• Tool of the week
  • Wikidata edit map by Denny puts a dot on the map whenever an Item with a geocoordinate is edited.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: dpi for A4 printing, time in the pouch, semantic gender
    • External identifiers: ... , ICPSR Geographic Names Thesaurus ID, ICPSR Organization Names Authority List ID, ICPSR Personal Names Authority List ID, ICPSR Subject Thesaurus ID, ...
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: HSK ID, sports in region, Computational complexity, YouTube video
    • External identifiers: ...
  • Deleted properties:
    • "Scoresway soccer person ID" (P3043)
    • "SSR WrittenForm ID" (P1849)
    • "FFF female player ID" (P4886)
    • "FFF male player ID" (P4883)
  • Query examples:
    • ...

• Development
  • Mismatch Finder: Tracking down one last issue with the upload of mismatch files. Once that is fixed we are ready to release the tool.
  • Lexicographical data: Started coding on the rewrite of Special:NewLexeme to make it easier to understand and use.

...

Read the full report · 15:26, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-06 (pruned)

Selected tech news from the Wikimedia technical community.

Recent changes

• English Wikipedia recently set up a gadget for dark mode. You can enable it there, or request help from an interface administrator to set it up on your wiki (instructions and screenshot).
• ...

...

21:14, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Question from OOF881 (23:22, 9 February 2022)

What do I do if I make a mistake when editing an article? --OOF881 (talk) 23:22, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Replied at User talk:OOF881#Reversing mistakes. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 04:46, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

Request for Mentorship

Hello Pelagic,

I found you in the list from the Wikipedia:Growth Team features/Mentor list which I went through completely and chosen you mostly by your tech affinity. I'm specialized in IT topics and work in favor of civil rights and privacy as you can see as part of my self-introduction on my user page. Now I'm looking for a mentor to have a starting point here in the community. ARoseWolf is sadly not technical and thus I would flood her with IT topics.

Are you available for mentorship? Are you by chance available on IRC?

Greets GavriilaDmitriev (talk) 10:08, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-07

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

Recent changes

• Purging a category page with fewer than 5,000 members will now recount it completely. This will allow editors to fix incorrect counts when it is wrong. [184]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 February. It will be on all wikis from 17 February (calendar).
• In the AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function has been updated so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [185]

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

19:17, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Question from Iamhere1234567 (07:59, 15 February 2022)

How does a person or anything get listed on this web please?? I want to add some Bhutanese actors... --Iamhere1234567 (talk) 07:59, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-08

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

Recent changes

• Special:Nuke will now provide the standard deletion reasons (editable at MediaWiki:Deletereason-dropdown) to use when mass-deleting pages. This was a request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. [186]
• At Wikipedias, all new accounts now get the Growth features by default when creating an account. Communities are encouraged to update their help resources. Previously, only 80% of new accounts would get the Growth features. A few Wikipedias remain unaffected by this change. [187]
• You can now prevent specific images that are used in a page from appearing in other locations, such as within PagePreviews or Search results. This is done with the markup class=notpageimage. For example, [[File:Example.png|class=notpageimage]]. [188]
• There has been a change to the HTML of Special:Contributions, Special:MergeHistory, and History pages, to support the grouping of changes by date in the mobile skin. While unlikely, this may affect gadgets and user scripts. A list of all the HTML changes is on Phabricator.

Events

• Community Wishlist Survey results have been published. The ranking of prioritized proposals is also available.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 February. It will be on all wikis from 24 February (calendar).

Future changes

• The software to play videos and audio files on pages will change soon on all wikis. The old player will be removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [189][190]
• Toolforge's underlying operating system is being updated. If you maintain any tools there, there are two options for migrating your tools into the new system. There are details, deadlines, and instructions on Wikitech. [191]
• Administrators will soon have the option to delete/undelete the associated "talk" page when they are deleting a given page. An API endpoint with this option will also be available. This was a request from the 2021 Wishlist Survey.

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

19:11, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

Question from Kttpulliam (19:44, 25 February 2022)

Hello Pelagic, I am the author of 14 books plus 3 paperback reprints. I have created a Wikipedia page and want to publish it. How should I do this? Format? Should I have a friend upload it? My author name is different from my Wiki user name. KathleenTT --Kttpulliam (talk) 19:44, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 February 2022

• From the team: Selection of a new Signpost Editor-in-Chief

• News and notes: Impacts of Russian invasion of Ukraine

• Opinion: Why student editors are good for Wikipedia

• Special report: A presidential candidate's team takes on Wikipedia

• In the media: Wiki-drama in the UK House of Commons

• Serendipity: War photographers: from Crimea (1850s) to the Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022)

• Technology report: Community Wishlist Survey results

• WikiProject report: 10 years of tea

• Featured content: Featured Content returns

• Deletion report: The 10 most SHOCKING deletion discussions of February

• Recent research: How editors and readers may be emotionally affected by disasters and terrorist attacks

• Arbitration report: Parties remonstrate, arbs contemplate, skeptics coordinate

• By the numbers: Does birthplace affect the frequency of Wikipedia biography articles?

• Gallery: The vintage exhibit

• Traffic report: Euphoria, Pamela Anderson, lies and Netflix

• News from Diff: The Wikimania 2022 Core Organizing Team

• Crossword: A Crossword, featuring Featured Articles

• Humour: Notability of mailboxes

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:21, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-09

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

Recent changes

• When searching for edits by change tags, e.g. in page history or user contributions, there is now a dropdown list of possible tags. This was a request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. [192]
• Mentors using the Growth Mentor dashboard will now see newcomers assigned to them who have made at least one edit, up to 200 edits. Previously, all newcomers assigned to the mentor were visible on the dashboard, even ones without any edit or ones who made hundred of edits. Mentors can still change these values using the filters on their dashboard. Also, the last choice of filters will now be saved. [193][194]
• The user group oversight was renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. You may need to update any local references to the old name, e.g. gadgets, links to Special:Listusers, or uses of NUMBERINGROUP.

Problems

• The recent change to the HTML of tracking changes pages caused some problems for screenreaders. This is being fixed. [195]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 March. It will be on all wikis from 3 March (calendar).

Future changes

• Working with templates will become easier. Several improvements are planned for March 9 on most wikis and on March 16 on English Wikipedia. The improvements include: Bracket matching, syntax highlighting colors, finding and inserting templates, and related visual editor features.
• If you are a template developer or an interface administrator, and you are intentionally overriding or using the default CSS styles of user feedback boxes (the classes: successbox, messagebox, errorbox, warningbox), please note that these classes and associated CSS will soon be removed from MediaWiki core. This is to prevent problems when the same class-names are also used on a wiki. Please let us know by commenting at phab:T300314 if you think you might be affected.

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

22:58, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Question from Samkelo Hlongwane VRY on Benny Boom (10:53, 5 March 2022)

Hello . I would like to ask you how to edit a page on Wikipedia? --Samkelo Hlongwane VRY (talk) 10:53, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

Question from Samkelo Hlongwane VRY on Benny Boom (10:54, 5 March 2022)

Hello . I would like to ask you how to edit a page on Wikipedia? --Samkelo Hlongwane VRY (talk) 10:54, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

Replied at User talk:Samkelo Hlongwane VRY#Reply, how to edit. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 03:41, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-10

Problems

• There was a problem with some interface labels last week. It will be fixed this week. This change was part of ongoing work to simplify the support for skins which do not have active maintainers. [196]

21:15, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-11

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

Recent changes

• In the Wikipedia Android app it is now possible to change the toolbar at the bottom so the tools you use more often are easier to click on. The app now also has a focused reading mode. [197][198]

Problems

• There was a problem with the collection of some page-view data from June 2021 to January 2022 on all wikis. This means the statistics are incomplete. To help calculate which projects and regions were most affected, relevant datasets are being retained for 30 extra days. You can read more on Meta-wiki.
• There was a problem with the databases on March 10. All wikis were unreachable for logged-in users for 12 minutes. Logged-out users could read pages but could not edit or access uncached content then. [199]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (calendar).
• When using uselang=qqx to find localisation messages, it will now show all possible message keys for navigation tabs such as "View history". [200]
• Access to Special:RevisionDelete has been expanded to include users who have deletelogentry and deletedhistory rights through their group memberships. Before, only those with the deleterevision right could access this special page. [201]
• On the Special:Undelete pages for diffs and revisions, there will be a link back to the main Undelete page with the list of revisions. [202]

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation has announced the IP Masking implementation strategy and next steps. The announcement can be read here.
• The Wikipedia Android app developers are working on new functions for user talk pages and article talk pages. [203]

Events

• The Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 will take place as a hybrid event on 20-22 May 2022. The Hackathon will be held online and there are grants available to support local in-person meetups around the world. Grants can be requested until 20 March.

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

22:06, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #20

Welcome to the twentieth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in Wikimedia projects.

Suggested edits

As of February, 300,000 suggested edits have been completed since the feature was first deployed in December 2019.

Add a link is the team's first structured task, deployed in May 2021. It has improved outcomes for newcomers. The team is now working on a second iteration based on community feedback and data analysis. Improvements will include: improved algorithmic suggestions, guardrails to prevent too many similar links to be added, and clearer encouragement for users to continue making edits. After adding these improvements, we will deploy this task to more Wikipedias.

Add an image is the second structured task built by our team. It was deployed in November 2021 to four pilot Wikipedias. This is a more challenging task for newcomers. However, it adds more value to articles (so far, over 1,000 images have been added). We are currently learning from communities and from the data on what is working well and what needs improvements. The project page contains links to interactive prototypes. We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. We will soon deploy this task to more Wikipedias as a test.

"Add a link" and "Add an image" now both have a limitation on how many of these tasks newcomers can do per day. It is meant to discourage careless newcomers from making too many problematic edits.

Positive reinforcement

Over the last two years, the Growth team has focused on building suggested edits: easy tasks for newcomers to start with. We have learned with this experience that these tasks help many newcomers to make their first edits. Now, the team is starting a new project : "positive reinforcement". Its goal is to make newcomers proud of their editing and to make them want to come back for more of them. With the positive reinforcement project, we are considering three kinds of features:

• Impact stats: give newcomers the ability to see how many people read the articles they edit.
• Leveling up: encourage newcomers to progress from easier tasks to harder tasks.
• Personalized praise: encourage mentors and other editors to "thank" and award newcomers for good work.

This project is just beginning, and we hope for community thoughts on the direction. We know that things can wrong if we offer the wrong incentives to newcomers, so we want to be careful. Please visit the talk page to help guide the project!

News for mentors

• The mentor dashboard is available at all wikis. It helps mentors see who their mentees are and keep track of their activity. It is automatically activated where a list of mentors has been created. If you need assistance to create a list of mentors, please contact us.
• The mentor dashboard has a new module: settings. It is now possible for mentors to define their status (active or away). They can specify the volume of questions they want to receive, and they can claim mentees in an easier way. It is also possible for mentors to quit, which will automatically reassign their mentees to other mentors.
• We are working on an ability for a mentee to opt-out (and back in) to having a mentor.
• Previously, in the table that displays mentees activity, the filters displayed all mentees, even the ones with zero edits or lots of edits. We have changed this so that only mentees with between 1 and 500 edits are visible by default. Mentors can change this value in their filters.
• We are currently working on a special page for mentors to sign-up.

Some wikis have created userboxes that mentors can display on the user pages. If your wiki has one, please link it to Wikidata!

Scaling

Previously, at most Wikipedias, only 80% of newcomers were getting the Growth features. This was done for experimentation, to have a control group. We have changed this setting. Now 100% of new accounts at all Wikipedias get the Growth features (except a few, kept as test wikis). We invite communities to update their onboarding documentation and tutorials. Please include the Growth features in it. To help you, we have created an help page that can be translated and adapted to your wiki.

How to help

Do you have questions about the Growth features? This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work. We regularly update it.

Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, by translating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:12, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Question from Unknown1385 (06:53, 17 March 2022)

hello --Unknown1385 (talk) 06:54, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Question from Unknown1385 (06:55, 17 March 2022)

hello im new to wikipedia and i cant edit pls help me --Unknown1385 (talk) 06:55, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Hi, Unknown1385, what do you want to edit? I see that you edited your sandbox, so I assume this is about more than just the mechanics of clicking the Edit button. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 15:46, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-12

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

New code release schedule for this week

• There will be four MediaWiki releases this week, instead of just one. This is an experiment which should lead to fewer problems and to faster feature updates. The releases will be on all wikis, at different times, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. You can read more about this project.

Recent changes

• You can now set how many search results to show by default in your Preferences. This was the 12th most popular wish in the Community Wishlist Survey 2022. [204]
• The Jupyter notebooks tool PAWS has been updated to a new interface. [205]

Future changes

• Interactive maps via Kartographer will soon work on wikis using the FlaggedRevisions extension. Please tell us which improvements you want to see in Kartographer. You can take this survey in simple English. [206]

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

15:59, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 49

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 49, January – February 2022

• New library collections
• Blog post published detailing technical improvements

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --10:06, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

User page templates (22:23, 26 March 2022)

Are there templates to make it easier to create a user page? --Osalbahr (talk) 22:23, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

Question from Osalbahr (22:26, 26 March 2022)

I noticed in the Arabic Wikipedia that I can use a bot to suggest adding links between articles in the suggested edits section. Is there a way to do bot-assisted edits in the English Wikipedia? --Osalbahr (talk) 22:26, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 March 2022

• From the Signpost team: How The Signpost is documenting the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

• News and notes: Of safety and anonymity

• Eyewitness Wikimedian, Kharkiv, Ukraine: Countering Russian aggression with a camera

• Eyewitness Wikimedian, Vinnytsia, Ukraine: War diary

• Eyewitness Wikimedian, Western Ukraine: Working with Wikipedia helps

• Disinformation report: The oligarchs' socks

• In the media: Ukraine, Russia, and even some other stuff

• Recent research: Top scholarly citers, lack of open access references, predicting editor departures

• Wikimedian perspective: My heroes from Russia, Ukraine & beyond

• Discussion report: Athletes are less notable now

• Technology report: 2022 Wikimedia Hackathon

• Arbitration report: Skeptics given heavenly judgement, whirlwind of Discord drama begins to spin for tropical cyclone editors

• Traffic report: War, what is it good for?

• Deletion report: Ukraine, werewolves, Ukraine, YouTube pundits, and Ukraine

• Gallery: "All we are saying is, give peace a chance..."

• From the archives: Burn, baby burn

• Essay: Yes, the sky is blue

• Tips and tricks: Become a keyboard ninja

• On the bright side: The bright side of news

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:51, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

Question from Osalbahr (09:14, 28 March 2022)

Hello. What do you think of what I added in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Terasail#Reverted_edit_-_number_of_occurrences_of_flagship_in_Apple_Store ? Is that how reverts are usually discussed, or would it be more appropriate to have the discussion in Apple Store's talk page by pinging Terasail. I'm not sure how pinging works. --Osalbahr (talk) 09:14, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Trimmed Tech News: 2022-13

Recent changes

• There is a simple new Wikimedia Commons upload tool available for macOS users, Sunflower.

...

19:53, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Trimmed Tech News: 2022-14

...

Future changes

• ...
• Over the next few months, the "Add a link" Growth feature will become available to more Wikipedias. Each week, a few wikis will get the feature. You can test this tool at a few wikis where "Link recommendation" is already available.

21:00, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-15

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

Recent changes

• There is a new public status page at www.wikimediastatus.net. This site shows five automated high-level metrics where you can see the overall health and performance of our wikis' technical environment. It also contains manually-written updates for widespread incidents, which are written as quickly as the engineers are able to do so while also fixing the actual problem. The site is separated from our production infrastructure and hosted by an external service, so that it can be accessed even if the wikis are briefly unavailable. You can read more about this project.
• On Wiktionary wikis, the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [207][208]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 April. It will be on all wikis from 14 April (calendar).

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

19:43, 11 April 2022 (UTC)

Question from Vandy 1989 (06:14, 16 April 2022)

Sulochana Das page written with valid and independent sources but moved to draft ? --Vandy 1989 (talk) 06:14, 16 April 2022 (UTC)

Hi, Vandy, local-government politicians aren't considered inherently notable for a global readership on English Wikipedia. To give an example of female mayors near where I live: (ex-)Mayor of The Hills Shire Yvonne Keane has had media coverage (here's a few I found on a quick search: [209], [210], [211]), but doesn't yet have a Wikipedia article, whereas Lord Mayor of Sydney Clover Moore does.

You could check at Oriya Wikipedia to see if they are less strict than English Wikipedia.

I understand that, in the interest of open and accountable government, it could be good to have records for all political candidates and appointees. Some countries already have reliable official registers of such things. Perhaps that could also be a use case for Wikidata. Sulochana Das (Q62593461) appears to be a different writer with the same name?

⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 01:19, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

Understand your concern....

please do the needful for Draft:Badri Lal Yadav article.

If I have any doubt further contact you Vandy 1989 (talk) 01:28, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

I'm not an AFC reviewer; Curbon7 has moved that one from draft to main. As a state-level chief minister, there is a stronger presumption of notability. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 14:54, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

trimmed Tech News: 2022-16

Selected items for review or reference. Full version at 2022

Changes later this week

• ...
• Administrators will now have the option to delete/undelete the associated "Talk" page when they are deleting a given page. An API endpoint with this option is also available. This concludes the 11th wish of the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey.
• On selected wikis, 50% of logged-in users will see the new table of contents. When scrolling up and down the page, the table of contents will stay in the same place on the screen. This is part of the Desktop Improvements project. [212]
• ...

Future changes

• Kartographer will become compatible with FlaggedRevisions page stabilization. Kartographer maps will also work on pages with pending changes. [213] The Kartographer documentation has been thoroughly updated. [214] [215] [216]

23:10, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

Question from Vandy 1989 (06:07, 19 April 2022)

Please look in to Yadav article page , my hard work edited was removed but added with relevant sources. please so the needful from your end....thanks... --Vandy 1989 (talk) 06:07, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Question from Vandy 1989 (03:06, 21 April 2022)

Please look in my talk page in section Draft:Muslim-Yadav formula for the article you are my mentor so please take care, you can see so many independent sources / link has been added by me but page moved to draft

feeling so bad............................. --Vandy 1989 (talk) 03:06, 21 April 2022 (UTC)

Hi, Vandy, without any knowledge of Indian politics, it was a bit hard to follow, but I gave it a go. I haven't read all the references; here are some intitial impressions:

• For the beginning of the article, it seems to be all about RJD and Bihar. I was wondering "why not make this a section in RJD article?" Then I eventually looked at one of the refs for Samajwadi and discovered they are in UP. Perhaps mention this in the lead/intro section, so that the reader has a better idea of the article's scope.
• There is a lot of extra information that isn't directly related to M-Y voting:
  • Draft:Muslim-Yadav formula#Prominent members of Rashtriya Janata Dal – there is already Rashtriya Janata Dal#Prominent members
  • Draft:Muslim-Yadav formula#Influence of Shahabuddin in Bihar – it's unclear how the story about Mohammad Shahabuddin is relevant.
• Though jargon terms like "M-Y equation", are used in the sources, they are unlikely to be understood by a general audience. For most people "equation" and "formula" have a very different meaning. So you need to explain what the "M-Y formula" is. Instead of The Muslim-Yadav formula is a political formula, you could write something like "The Muslim-Yadav formula was a political strategy of appealing to Muslim and Yadav voters in Bihar ..."
• It's not clear to me from the article how Samajwadi party in UP ralates to M-Y voting in Bihar. One source says "... M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) formula that has catapulted it to power in Uttar Pradesh more than once." You need to make that explicit. I would write something like "The Samajwadi Party has also used the Muslim and Yadav vote to gain power in Uttar Pradesh. However in 2021, SP claimed to shift its focus away from casteism, saying 'In the new SP, M-Y stands for Mahila (women) and Youth'."

Hope that helps, ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 14:38, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

@Pelagic noted from end suggestions and I'll write on this page shortly in more details. Vandy 1989 (talk) 17:22, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 April 2022

• News and notes: Double trouble

• In the media: The battlegrounds outside and inside Wikipedia

• Special report: Ukrainian Wikimedians during the war

• Eyewitness Wikimedian, Vinnytsia, Ukraine: War diary (Part 2)

• Technology report: 8-year-old attribution issues in Media Viewer

• Featured content: Wikipedia's best content from March

• In focus: Editing difficulties on Russian Wikipedia

• Gallery: A voyage around the world with WLM winners

• Interview: On a war and a map

• Serendipity: Wikipedia loves photographs, but hates photographers

• Traffic report: Justice Jackson, the Smiths, and an invasion

• Recent research: Student edits as "civic engagement"; how Wikipedia readers interact with images

• News from the WMF: How Smart is the SMART Copyright Act?

• Essay: The problem with elegant variation

• Humour: Really huge message boxes

• From the archives: Wales resigned WMF board chair in 2006 reorganization

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:42, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-17

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

Recent changes

• On many wikis (group 1), the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [217][218]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 April. It will be on all wikis from 28 April (calendar).
• Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 26 April at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
• Some very old browsers and operating systems are no longer supported. Some things on the wikis might look weird or not work in very old browsers like Internet Explorer 9 or 10, Android 4, or Firefox 38 or older. [219]

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

22:54, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-18

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

Recent changes

• On all remaining wikis (group 2), the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [220][221]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 May. It will be on all wikis from 5 May (calendar).

Future changes

• The developers are working on talk pages in the Wikipedia app for iOS. You can give feedback. You can take the survey in English, German, Hebrew or Chinese.
• Most wikis will receive an improved template dialog in VisualEditor and New Wikitext mode. [222] [223]
• If you use syntax highlighting while editing wikitext, you can soon activate a colorblind-friendly color scheme. [224]
• Several CSS IDs related to MediaWiki interface messages will be removed. Technical editors should please review the list of IDs and links to their existing uses. These include #mw-anon-edit-warning, #mw-undelete-revision and 3 others.

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

19:32, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-19

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

Recent changes

• You can now see categories in the Wikipedia app for Android. [225]

Problems

• Last week, there was a problem with Wikidata's search autocomplete. This has now been fixed. [226]
• Last week, all wikis had slow access or no access for 20 minutes, for logged-in users and non-cached pages. This was caused by a problem with a database change. [227]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [228]
• Incompatibility issues with Kartographer and the FlaggedRevs extension will be fixed: Deployment is planned for May 10 on all wikis. Kartographer will then be enabled on the five wikis which have not yet enabled the extension on May 24.
• The Vector (2022) skin will be set as the default on several more wikis, including Arabic and Catalan Wikipedias. Logged-in users will be able to switch back to the old Vector (2010). See the latest update about Vector (2022).

Future meetings

• The next open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place on 17 May. The following meetings are currently planned for: 7 June, 21 June, 5 July, 19 July.

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

15:21, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-20

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

Changes later this week

• Some wikis can soon use the add a link feature. This will start on Wednesday. The wikis are Catalan Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia. This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [229]
• The Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 will take place online on May 20–22. It will be in English. There are also local hackathon meetups in Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Nigeria and the United States. Technically interested Wikimedians can work on software projects and learn new skills. You can also host a session or post a project you want to work on.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 May. It will be on all wikis from 19 May (calendar).

Future changes

• You can soon edit translatable pages in the visual editor. Translatable pages exist on for examples Meta and Commons. [230]

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

18:57, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-21

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

Recent changes

• Administrators using the mobile web interface can now access Special:Block directly from user pages. [231]
• The www.wiktionary.org portal page now uses an automated update system. Other project portals will be updated over the next few months. [232]

Problems

• The Growth team maintains a mentorship program for newcomers. Previously, newcomers weren't able to opt out from the program. Starting May 19, 2022, newcomers are able to fully opt out from Growth mentorship, in case they do not wish to have any mentor at all. [233]
• Some editors cannot access the content translation tool if they load it by clicking from the contributions menu. This problem is being worked on. It should still work properly if accessed directly via Special:ContentTranslation. [234]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 May. It will be on all wikis from 26 May (calendar).

Future changes

• Gadget and user scripts developers are invited to give feedback on a proposed technical policy aiming to improve support from MediaWiki developers. [235]

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

00:19, 24 May 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 May 2022

• From the team: A changing of the guard

• News and notes: 2022 Wikimedia Board elections

• Community view: Have your say in the 2022 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections

• Opinion: The Wikimedia Endowment – a lack of transparency

• In the media: Putin, Jimbo, Musk and more

• Special report: Three stories of Ukrainian Wikimedians during the war

• In focus: Measuring gender diversity in Wikipedia articles

• Discussion report: Portals, April Fools, admin activity requirements and more

• WikiProject report: WikiProject COVID-19 revisited

• Technology report: A new video player for Wikimedia wikis

• Featured content: Featured content of April

• Interview: Wikipedia's pride

• Serendipity: Those thieving image farms

• Recent research: 35 million Twitter links analysed

• Tips and tricks: The reference desks of Wikipedia

• Traffic report: Strange highs and strange lows

• News from Diff: Winners of the Human rights and Environment special nomination by Wiki Loves Earth announced

• News from the WMF: The EU Digital Services Act: What’s the Deal with the Deal?

• Video: How the entire country of Qatar was blocked from editing

• Gallery: Diving under the sea for World Oceans Day

• From the archives: The Onion and Wikipedia

• Essay: How not to write a Wikipedia article

• Humour: A new crossword

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:47, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-22

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

Recent changes

• In the AbuseFilter extension, an ip_in_ranges() function has been introduced to check if an IP is in any of the ranges. Wikis are advised to combine multiple ip_in_range() expressions joined by | into a single expression for better performance. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [236]
• The IP Info feature which helps abuse fighters access information about IPs, has been deployed to all wikis as a beta feature. This comes after weeks of beta testing on test.wikipedia.org.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 June. It will be on all wikis from 2 June (calendar).
• Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 31 May at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
• The New Topic Tool will be deployed for all editors at most wikis soon. You will be able to opt out from within the tool and in Preferences. [237][238]
• The list=usercontribs API will support fetching contributions from an IP range soon. API users can set the uciprange parameter to get contributions from any IP range within the limit. [239]
• A new parser function will be introduced: {{=}}. It will replace existing templates named "=". It will insert an equal sign. This can be used to escape the equal sign in the parameter values of templates. [240]

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

20:27, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

Editing newsletter 2022 – #1

Read this in another language • Subscription list for the multilingual newsletter • Local subscription list

New editors were more successful with this new tool.

The New topic tool helps editors create new ==Sections== on discussion pages. New editors are more successful with this new tool. You can read the report. Soon, the Editing team will offer this to all editors at most WMF-hosted wikis. You can join the discussion about this tool for the English Wikipedia is at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Enabling the New Topic Tool by default. You will be able to turn it off in the tool or at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion.

The Editing team plans to change the appearance of talk pages. These are separate from the changes made by the mw:Desktop improvements project and will appear in both Vector 2010 and Vector 2022. The goal is to add some information and make discussions look visibly different from encyclopedia articles. You can see some ideas at Wikipedia talk:Talk pages project#Prototype Ready for Feedback.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

23:14, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 50

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 50, March – April 2022

• New library partner - SPIE
• 1Lib1Ref May 2022 underway

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --12:52, 1 June 2022 (UTC) (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-23

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 June. It will be on all wikis from 9 June (calendar).
• A new str_replace_regexp() function can be used in abuse filters to replace parts of text using a regular expression. [241]

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

02:45, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-24

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

Recent changes

• All wikis can now use Kartographer maps. Kartographer maps now also work on pages with pending changes. [242][243]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 June. It will be on all wikis from 16 June (calendar).
• Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 14 June at 06:00 UTC (targeted wikis). [244]
• Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Abkhazian Wikipedia, Achinese Wikipedia, Adyghe Wikipedia, Afrikaans Wikipedia, Akan Wikipedia, Alemannisch Wikipedia, Amharic Wikipedia, Aragonese Wikipedia, Old English Wikipedia, Syriac Wikipedia, Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, Asturian Wikipedia, Atikamekw Wikipedia, Avaric Wikipedia, Aymara Wikipedia, Azerbaijani Wikipedia, South Azerbaijani Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [245]
• The New Topic Tool will be deployed for all editors at Commons, Wikidata, and some other wikis soon. You will be able to opt out from within the tool and in Preferences. [246][247]

Future meetings

• The next open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place today (13 June). The following meetings will take place on: 28 June, 12 July, 26 July.

Future changes

• By the end of July, the Vector 2022 skin should be ready to become the default across all wikis. Discussions on how to adjust it to the communities' needs will begin in the next weeks. It will always be possible to revert to the previous version on an individual basis. Learn more.

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

16:57, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-25

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

Recent changes

• The Wikipedia App for Android now has an option for editing the whole page at once, located in the overflow menu (three-dots menu ). [248]
• Some recent database changes may affect queries using the Quarry tool. Queries for site_stats at English Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikidata will need to be updated. Read more.
• A new user_global_editcount variable can be used in abuse filters to avoid affecting globally active users. [249]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 June. It will be on all wikis from 23 June (calendar).
• Users of non-responsive skins (e.g. MonoBook or Vector) on mobile devices may notice a slight change in the default zoom level. This is intended to optimize zooming and ensure all interface elements are present on the page (for example the table of contents on Vector 2022). In the unlikely event this causes any problems with how you use the site, we'd love to understand better, please ping Jon (WMF) to any on-wiki conversations. [250]

Future changes

• The Beta Feature for DiscussionTools will be updated throughout July. Discussions will look different. You can see some of the proposed changes.
• Parsoid's HTML output will soon stop annotating file links with different typeof attribute values, and instead use mw:File for all types. Tool authors should adjust any code that expects: mw:Image, mw:Audio, or mw:Video. [251]

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

20:17, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

Question from Bobpurvey1 on User:Bobpurvey1/Sandbox (19:34, 12 August 2022)

Hi. It appears tht upon "Publishing" the formatting changed. Also, I believe the links to references were deleted. Ben Marcuse had, just recently, tried to submit a version that was unacceptsble and then he seems to have given up. --Bobpurvey1 (talk) 19:34, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

Editing news 2022 #2

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

The [subscribe] button shortens response times.

The new [subscribe] button notifies people when someone replies to their comments. It helps newcomers get answers to their questions. People reply sooner. You can read the report. The Editing team is turning this tool on for everyone. You will be able to turn it off in your preferences.

–Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:35, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

BTW, you have two links at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter, so you're getting two copies. If you only want one, please remove the other page from the list. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:39, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-35

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

Recent changes

• The Realtime Preview is available as a Beta Feature on wikis in Group 2. This feature was built in order to fulfill one of the Community Wishlist Survey proposals. Please note that when this Beta feature is enabled, it may cause conflicts with some wiki-specific Gadgets.

Problems

• In recent months, there have been inaccurate numbers shown for various Special:Statistics at Commons, Wikidata, and English Wikipedia. This has now been fixed. [252]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 August. It will be on all wikis from 1 September (calendar).
• Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 30 August at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 1 September at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation wants to improve how Wikimedia communities report harmful incidents by building the Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS) to make it easy and safe for users to make reports. You can leave comments on the talk page, by answering the questions provided. If you have ever faced a harmful situation that you wanted to report/reported, join a PIRS interview to share your experience. To sign up please email Madalina Ana.

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

23:03, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

VickyBenz / Teahouse

Hi Pelagic

I'm just back from vacation, hence my late reply to your ping.

The usual process for people who aren't following Newcomers tasks' instructions is the same as for any kind of poor quality edit. Someone has to tell the user that they are doing things wrongly and explain how to improve their edits. If they don't will to take the advice into consideration, then advice escalate to sanction. Same as usual! :)

ForVickyBenz's defense, the instructions about copyediting aren't about links, so this user wasn't working following faulty instructions. There is a separate task about linking. Ans we have an even more specific task about linking (not yet available at English Wikipedia), where users are even more guided.

Let me know if you have any question! Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:58, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi, Trizek (WMF), welcome back! Hope you had a good vacation. I agree, it's not faulty instructions. Just seems that the user wasn't reading them. I thought that maybe they weren't being shown the cleanup template which would tell them an article had been flagged for tone not grammar, but it displays fine for me on the mobile site. I don't know what could be done to make the instructions more obvious: likely nothing needs to be done.

Guided tasks lead to high volume of edits from well-meaning people. We as a community need to find a way to tactfully guide them without biting.

This user's edits are all reverted now, though might not have been if someone else hadn't raised the issue at the Teahouse. I guess you collect statistics on reverted suggest-an-edits. Do you analyse for number of users having majority reversion on their newcomer tasks? Apologies if pinging you was unwarranted.

I saw discussion elsewhere about having separate templates for newbie-friendly cleanup versus hard cleanup. That seems like a good idea, but making it happen would be difficult.

. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 21:23, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi! I randomly checked a few of VickyBenz's edits. None of the templates displayed on the article they edited are about adding links. They were all about tone and being written in a subjective manner. The templates are a warning as they , but they don't really explain, or give a hint, on how to fix things; maybe there is something to do there. This user may have not understood how things work on Wikipedia. The steps presented by the copyediting Growth task are about fixing spelling and grammar errors and rewriting sentences so that they do not contain opinions, not about adding links. They are quite aligned with what the templates warn people about. So I agree on the fact that this user has apparently not read the instructions, alas.

To increase the chances to having well-meaning people to edit more, there are indeed some improvements that can be made, like thinking about action-oriented templates. But I know it might be difficult (I went though that path at my home wiki). Also, having more people volunteering to be mentors would definitely help: newcomers make more successful edits when they know that they have someone they can find if they have a question. Unfortunately, the Teahouse is not an easy place to discover.

We indeed collect rever trates, but they give us a trend, not a direct highlight on a given user. Also, reverts are not always well used: some users revert a nearly-perfect edit instead of fixing what misses.

No problem pinging me for these cases (on the contrary, I'm always happy to reply to direct questions), but you'd have had a quicker response by posting on Wikipedia:Growth Team features' talk page. :)

Best, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:57, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-36

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 September. It will be on all wikis from 8 September (calendar).
• Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 6 September at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 8 September at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
• On Special pages that only have one tab, the tab-bar's row will be hidden in the Vector-2022 skin to save space. The row will still show if Gadgets use it. Gadgets that currently append directly to the CSS id of #p-namespaces should be updated to use the mw.util.addPortletLink function instead. Gadgets that style this id should consider also targeting #p-associated-pages, the new id for this row. Examples are available. [253][254]

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

23:20, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of File:Pelagic-dark-vector-1.jpeg

The file File:Pelagic-dark-vector-1.jpeg has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Unused Wikipedia screenshot. Out of scope.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated files}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the file's talk page.

Please consider addressing the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated files}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and files for discussion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. --Minorax^«¦talk¦» 02:18, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

Update to commentlinks.js gadget

I am about to update my comment links gadget to link the comment's timestamp rather than add a separate [ link ] button. If you prefer the old style, that gadget will be available at commentlinks-v1.js. As before, this gadget is experimental and may stop working at any time, see T275729 for the task to make this a proper feature. Thanks, ESanders (WMF) (talk) 12:08, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

re Tech News: 2022-46

• At Wikidata, an interwiki link can now point to a redirect page if certain conditions are met. This new feature is called sitelinks to redirects. It is needed when one wiki uses one page to cover multiple concepts but another wiki uses more pages to cover the same concepts. Your feedback on the talkpage of the new proposed guideline is welcome. [255]
• …
• Wikis where mobile DiscussionTools are enabled (these ones) will soon use full CSS styling to display any templates that are placed at the top of talk pages. To adapt these “talk page boxes” for narrow mobile devices you can use media queries, such as in this example. [256]
• Starting in January 2023, Community Tech will be running the Community Wishlist Survey (CWS) every two years. This means that in 2024, there will be no new proposals or voting.

…

MediaWiki message delivery 21:53, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

• site links to redirects – about time!
• talk page templates – 🤔
• community wishlist survey now biannual – 😡

. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 20:19, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-47

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

Recent changes

• The display of non-free media in the search bar and for article thumbnails in Special:Search has been deactivated. Further details are in T320661.

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
• Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 22 November at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 24 November at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:19, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #23

Welcome to the twenty-third newsletter from the Growth team!

Highlights

• Mentorship: We released the new structured mentor list to all wikis. This change makes mentorship easier to setup, manage and use.
• Positive reinforcement: An improved impact module is available for testing.

Screenshot of the positive reinforcement module improvements.

Positive reinforcement: an improved impact module to test

The goal of the Growth team is to encourage newcomers to try editing for the first time, and encourage them to keep editing. We want to increase newcomers' motivation by showing them how impactful their edits are.

Newcomers have access to an impact module; you can find yours at Special:Impact. The revised impact module provides new editors with more context about their impact. It will display the number of edits, the number of thanks received, the last time they edited, the number of consecutive days they edited, and the number of views for the articles they edited.

This module will soon be available at our pilot wikis starting December 1. You can already test this new module at Beta Wikipedia. For safety reasons, do not use your regular account and password at Beta wiki. Create a new, specific account for this wiki, with a different password.

Structured tasks: improvements based on patroller feedback

After the deployment of Structured tasks, we received feedback from various communities regarding how patrollers of recent changes were feeling overwhelmed by an increase in edits to check, and how some edits were poor quality or of poor relevance.

We made several improvements based on the feedback we received. Several points of improvement have already been addressed:

• Patroller fatigue:
  • By default, newcomers can complete up to 25 "add a link" tasks and 25 "add an image" tasks per day. If patrollers are overburdened, each community can use Special:EditGrowthConfig to lower that limit.

• Quality of edits: what constitutes a "quality edit" is not a well defined concept. We initiated a discussion and summarized our findings. We also worked on the following improvements:
  • Add a Link
    • Underlinked articles are now prioritized, so it's less likely that newcomers are adding links to articles that are already have a lot of links.
    • The confidence score was increased, so suggestions are more likely to be accurate.
    • The default number of suggested links per article has been lowered to 3. This can be changed at Special:EditGrowthConfig. Communities can also exclude articles containing certain templates or categories from being suggested.
  • Add an Image
    • Lists will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
    • Disambiguation pages will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
    • We have many further improvements we plan to make to "add an image" in early 2023. [257]

The Positive Reinforcement project will also address some of the concerns around encouraging newcomers to progress to higher value edits. The Growth team will soon work on strategies geared at "Leveling up" newcomers so they progress from easy to more difficult tasks.

Recent changes

• All Wikipedias now have the same onboarding experience. Previously, at a few wikis, 20% of new accounts didn't get the Growth features when they created their account. These 20% of new accounts were used as a control group, in order to know if the Growth features were changing newcomers' behavior. Experiments have shown that Growth features improve activation and retention, and as we want to provide the same onboarding experience at all Wikipedias, we have decided to remove the control groups. We will utilize control groups when testing new features, and German Wikipedia keeps a control group at their request. [258]
• The quality score for "add a link" suggestions will change. We will suggest less links for each article, but they will be more accurate. We will first deploy it at our pilot wikis, and then to all other wikis where this feature is available. [259][260]
• Growth's features FAQ has been updated and expanded. This page centralizes all the information about Growth features. We invite you to read it, and, if you can, to translate it.

News for mentors

• All Wikipedias can now setup and manage a mentorship program in an easier way.
  • We changed the process to make it more reliable, easier to improve and easier to use.
  • Wikipedias where mentorship hasn't been enabled yet can turn mentorship on following a new process. When done, mentors can sign-up by visiting Special:MentorDashboard.
  • Wikipedias where the list of mentors already existed have been converted to the new system.
  • A new special page — Special:ManageMentors — now displays the list of mentors. This page can be transcluded on any other page. There are also new processes to signup as a mentor or to quit mentorship, and we improved community mentorship management.
• The Mentor dashboard's "Your mentees" module will have a new footer, called "Recent changes by your mentees". This footer will include a link to Recent changes, where mentors can see only edits made by their own mentees. [261]

Deployments

• Add a link has been deployed to a 5th round of wikis. [262]

Improving this newsletter

We plan to have a more regular newsletter, every two months. We also want to know if the current format suits you! Let us know what you like, what you like less and your suggestions of improvements: leave us a comment, in your preferred language.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:57, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

HNY

Happy New Year from Sydney. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 13:05, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 January 2023

• News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation ousts, bans quarter of Arabic Wikipedia admins

• In the media: Odd bedfellows, Elon and Jimbo, reliable sources for divorces, and more

• Interview: ComplexRational's RfA debrief

• Technology report: Wikimedia Foundation's Abstract Wikipedia project "at substantial risk of failure"

• Essay: Mobile editing

• Arbitration report: Arbitration Committee Election 2022

• Recent research: Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement in talk page disputes

• Serendipity: Wikipedia about FIFA World Cup 2022: quick, factual and critical

• Featured content: Would you like to swing on a star?

• Traffic report: Football, football, football! Wikipedia Football Club!

• CommonsComix: #4: The Course of WikiEmpire

• From the archives: Five, ten, and fifteen years ago

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:46, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-02

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

Recent changes

• You can use tags to filter edits in the recent changes feed or on your watchlist. You can now use tags to filter out edits you don't want to see. Previously you could only use tags to focus on the edits with those tags. [263]
• Special:WhatLinksHere shows all pages that link to a specific page. There is now a prototype for how to sort those pages alphabetically. You can see the discussion in the Phabricator ticket.
• You can now use the thanks function on your watchlist and the user contribution page. [264]
• A wiki page can be moved to give it a new name. You can now get a dropdown menu with common reasons when you move a page. This is so you don't have to write the explanation every time. [265]
• Matrix is a chat tool. You can now use matrix: to create Matrix links on wiki pages. [266]
• You can filter out translations when you look at the recent changes on multilingual wikis. This didn't hide translation pages. You can now also hide subpages which are translation pages. [267]

Changes later this week

• Realtime preview for wikitext is a tool which lets editors preview the page when they edit wikitext. It will be enabled for all users of the 2010 wikitext editor. You will find it in the editor toolbar.
• Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 10 January at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 12 January at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 January. It will be on all wikis from 12 January (calendar).

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:06, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 16 January 2023

• From the team: We heard zoomers liked fortnights: the biweekly Signpost rides again

• Special report: Coverage of 2022 bans reveals editors serving long sentences in Saudi Arabia since 2020

• News and notes: Revised Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines up for vote, WMF counsel departs, generative models under discussion

• In the media: Court orders user data in libel case, Saudi Wikipedia in the crosshairs, Larry Sanger at it again

• Technology report: View it! A new tool for image discovery

• In focus: Busting into Grand Central

• Serendipity: How I bought part of Wikipedia – for less than $100

• Gallery: What is our responsibility when it comes to images?

• Humour: New geologically speedy deletion criteria introduced

• Opinion: Good old days, in which fifth-symbol-lacking lipograms roam'd our librarious litany

• Featured content: Flip your lid

• Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2022

• From the archives: Five, ten, and fifteen years ago

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:14, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-03

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

Problems

• The URLs in "prev" links on page history now contain diff=prev&oldid=[revision ID] in place of diff=[revision ID]&oldid=[revision ID]. This is to fix a problem with links pointing to incorrect diffs when history was filtered by a tag. Some user scripts may break as a result of this change. [268]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 January. It will be on all wikis from 19 January (calendar).
• Some changes to the appearance of talk pages have only been available on Talk: and User talk: namespaces. These will be extended to other talk namespaces, such as Wikipedia talk:. They will continue to be unavailable in non-talk namespaces, including Wikipedia: pages (e.g., at the Village Pump). You can change your preferences (beta feature). [269]
• On Wikisources, when an image is zoomed or panned in the Page: namespace, the same zoom and pan settings will be remembered for all Page: namespace pages that are linked to a particular Index: namespace page. [270]
• The Vector 2022 skin will become the default for the English Wikipedia desktop users. The change will take place on January 18 at 15:00 UTC. Learn more.

Future changes

• The 2023 edition of the Community Wishlist Survey, which invites contributors to make technical proposals and vote for tools and improvements, starts next week on 23 January 2023 at 18:00 UTC. You can start drafting your proposals in the CWS sandbox.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:08, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 54

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 54, November – December 2022

• New collections:
  • British Newspaper Archive
  • Findmypast
  • University of Michigan Press
  • ACLS
  • Duke University Press
• 1Lib1Ref 2023
• Spotlight: EDS Refine Results

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --14:14, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-04

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

Problems

• Last week, for ~15 minutes, all wikis were unreachable for logged-in users and non-cached pages. This was caused by a timing issue. [271]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 January. It will be on all wikis from 26 January (calendar).
• If you have the Beta Feature for DiscussionTools enabled, the appearance of talk pages will add more information about discussion activity. [272][273]
• The 2023 edition of the Community Wishlist Survey (CWS), which invites contributors to make technical proposals and vote for tools and improvements, starts on Monday 23 January 2023 at 18:00 UTC.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:44, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-05

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

Problems

• Last week, for ~15 minutes, some users were unable to log in or edit pages. This was caused by a problem with session storage. [274]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 February. It will be on all wikis from 2 February (calendar).

Future changes

• Wikis that use localized numbering schemes for references need to add new CSS. This will help to show citation numbers the same way in all reading and editing modes. If your wiki would prefer to do it yourselves, please see the details and example CSS to copy from, and also add your wiki to the list. Otherwise, the developers will directly help out starting the week of February 5.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:03, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #24

Welcome to the twenty-fourth newsletter from the Growth team!

Newcomer experience projects

The Growth team partnered with other WMF teams to conduct several experiments around increasing account creation and new editor retention. Results from four of these experiments are now available:

• Thank you pages & banners - Encourage donors to create accounts through thank you pages and banners.
• Marketing experiment - Run ads on-wiki and off-wiki to see how this impacts account activation.
• "Add an image" GLAM events - Host GLAM events that focus on using the "Add an image" tool.
• Welcome emails - Experiment sending welcome emails to newly created accounts.

Newcomer tasks

• Several communities suggested improving "add a link", by suggesting underlinked articles first. We released this change to Growth pilot wikis. We will review the data and collect feedback before considering releasing it to more wikis. [275]
• The deployment of the "add a link" to all Wikipedias is still in progress. Suggested links use a prediction model, which has to be trained. The deployments will resume after we finish training all models. [276]

Mentorship

• When someone wants to signup as a mentor, they are now informed if they don't meet the defined criteria. [277]
• Workshop hosts asked us to have workshop attendees assigned to them. They can soon use a custom URL parameter. This way, workshop hosts will continue mentoring the event's attendees after the workshop. It will be available in February. [278]
• Have you considered to help new editors on your wiki, by signing up to be a Mentor?
  • Please visit Special:MentorDashboard to check on the conditions to be a mentor, and sign up.
  • If your wiki does not have Mentorship enabled, consider setting it up. The Growth team can provide advice and assist as needed. Please ping Trizek (WMF) for assistance.

Other news

• In Special:SpecialPages, Growth experiments now have their own section. [279]
• This newsletter will have a new publication period, 6 times a year: January, March, May, July, September, November.

Translations

• Newsletter translation: We are looking for translators for this newsletter. If you are interested and have the needed English language proficiency to assist, then please add your name to this list. You will receive an invite on your talk page to translate the newsletter when it is ready.
• Interface translation: You can also help by translating the interface, or reviewing translations to make them more inclusive. Interface translations are hosted at translatewiki.net.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.• Help with translations

14:44, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 4 February 2023

• From the editor: New for the Signpost: Author pages, tag pages, and a decent article search function

• News and notes: Foundation update on fundraising, new page patrol, Tides, and Wikipedia blocked in Pakistan

• Section 230: Twenty-six words that created the internet, and the future of an encyclopedia

• Disinformation report: Wikipedia on Santos

• Special report: Legal status of Wikimedia projects "unclear" under potential European legislation

• In the media: Furor over new Wikipedia skin, followup on Saudi bans, and legislative debate

• Op-Ed: Estonian businessman and political donor brings lawsuit against head of national Wikimedia chapter

• Opinion: Study examines cultural leanings of Wikimedia projects' visual art coverage

• Recent research: Wikipedia's "moderate yet systematic" liberal citation bias

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Organized Labour

• Tips and tricks: XTools: Data analytics for your list of created articles

• Featured content: 20,000 Featureds under the Sea

• Traffic report: Films, deaths and ChatGPT

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:45, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 20 March 2023

• News and notes: Wikimania submissions deadline looms, Russian government after our lucky charms, AI woes nix CNET from RS slate

• Eyewitness: Three more stories from Ukrainian Wikimedians

• In the media: Paid editing, plagiarism payouts, proponents of a ploy, and people peeved at perceived preferences

• Featured content: Way too many featured articles

• Interview: 228/2/1: the inside scoop on Aoidh's RfA

• Traffic report: Who died? Who won? Who lost?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:17, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 April 2023

• News and notes: Staff departures at Wikimedia Foundation, Jimbo hands in the bits, and graphs' zeppelin burns

• In the media: Contested truth claims in Wikipedia

• Obituary: Remembering David "DGG" Goodman

• Arbitration report: Holocaust in Poland, Jimbo in the hot seat, and a desysopping

• Opinion: What Jimbo's question revealed about scamming

• Op-Ed: Wikipedia as an anchor of truth

• Special report: Signpost statistics between years 2005 and 2022

• News from the WMF: Collective planning with the Wikimedia Foundation

• Featured content: In which we described the featured articles in rhyme again

• From the archives: April Fools' through the ages, part two

• Humour: The law of hats

• Traffic report: Long live machine, the future supreme

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:17, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-18

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

Recent changes

• The content attribution tools Who Wrote That?, XTools Authorship, and XTools Blame now support the French and Italian Wikipedias. More languages will be added in the near future. This is part of the #7 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [280][281][282]
• The Video2commons tool has been updated. This fixed several bugs related to YouTube uploads. [283]
• The Special:Preferences page has been redesigned on mobile web. The new design makes it easier to browse the different categories and settings at low screen widths. You can also now access the page via a link in the Settings menu in the mobile web sidebar. [284]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 May. It will be on all wikis from 4 May (calendar).

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:43, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 8 May 2023

• News and notes: New legal "deVLOPments" in the EU

• In the media: Vivek's smelly socks, online safety, and politics

• Recent research: Gender, race and notability in deletion discussions

• Featured content: I wrote a poem for each article, I found rhymes for all the lists; My first featured picture of this year now finally exists!

• Arbitration report: "World War II and the history of Jews in Poland" approaches conclusion

• News from the WMF: Planning together with the Wikimedia Foundation

• Special report: There Shall Be Seasons Refreshing – Stories from WikiConference India 2023

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:25, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-19

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

Recent changes

• Last week, Community Tech released the first update for providing better diffs, the #1 request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. This update adds legends and tooltips to inline diffs so that users unfamiliar with the blue and yellow highlights can better understand the type of edits made.
• When you close an image that is displayed via MediaViewer, it will now return to the wiki page instead of going back in your browser history. This feature request was voted #65 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [285]
• The SyntaxHighlight extension now supports wikitext as a selected language. Old alternatives that were used to highlight wikitext, such as html5, moin, and html+handlebars, can now be replaced. [286]
• Preloading text to new pages/sections now supports preloading from localized MediaWiki interface messages. Here is an example at the Czech Wikipedia that uses preload=MediaWiki:July. [287]

Problems

• Graph Extension update: Foundation developers have completed upgrading the visualization software to Vega5. Existing community graphs based on Vega2 are no longer compatible. Communities need to update local graphs and templates, and shared lua modules like de:Modul:Graph. The Vega Porting guide provides the most comprehensive detail on migration from Vega2 and here is an example migration. Vega5 has currently just been enabled on mediawiki.org to provide a test environment for communities. [288]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (calendar).
• Until now, all new OAuth apps went through manual review. Starting this week, apps using identification-only or basic authorizations will not require review. [289]

Future changes

• During the next year, MediaWiki will stop using IP addresses to identify logged-out users, and will start automatically assigning unique temporary usernames. Read more at IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation/Updates. You can join the discussion about the format of the temporary usernames. [290]
• There will be an A/B test on 10 Wikipedias where the Vector 2022 skin is the default skin. Half of logged-in desktop users will see an interface where the different parts of the page are more clearly separated. You can read more. [291][292]
• jquery.tipsy will be removed from the MediaWiki core. This will affect some user scripts. Many lines with .tipsy( can be commented out. OO.ui.PopupWidget can be used to keep things working like they are now. You can read more and read about how to find broken scripts. [293]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:34, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-20

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

Problems

• Citations that are automatically generated based on ISBN are currently broken. This affects citations made with the VisualEditor Automatic tab, and the use of the citoid API in gadgets and user scripts. Work is ongoing to restore this feature. [294]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 May. It will be on all wikis from 18 May (calendar).
• Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Gorontalo Wikipedia, Hausa Wikipedia, Hakka Chinese Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Fiji Hindi Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Upper Sorbian Wikipedia, Haitian Creole Wikipedia, Interlingua Wikipedia, Interlingue Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Iloko Wikipedia, Ingush Wikipedia, Ido Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Inuktitut Wikipedia, Jamaican Patois Wikipedia, Javanese Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [295]

Future changes

• There is a recently formed team at the Wikimedia Foundation which will be focusing on experimenting with new tools. Currently they are building a prototype ChatGPT plugin that allows information generated by ChatGPT to be properly attributed to the Wikimedia projects.
• Gadget and userscript developers should replace jquery.cookie with mediawiki.cookie. The jquery.cookie library will be removed in ~1 month, and staff developers will run a script to replace any remaining uses at that time. [296]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:43, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 May 2023

• News and notes: Golden parachutes: Record severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

• In the media: History, propaganda and censorship

• Arbitration report: Final decision in "World War II and the history of Jews in Poland"

• Recent research: Create or curate, cooperate or compete? Game theory for Wikipedia editors

• Featured content: A very musical week for featured articles

• Traffic report: Coronation, chatbot, celebs

• WikiProject report: Wikipedians Convene for Queering Wikipedia 2023: The First International LGBT+ Wikipedia Conference

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:40, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-21

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

Recent changes

• The "recent edits" time period for page watchers is now 30 days. It used to be 180 days. This was a Community Wishlist Survey proposal. [297]

Changes later this week

• An improved impact module will be available at Wikipedias. The impact module is a feature available to newcomers at their personal homepage. It will show their number of edits, how many readers their edited pages have, how many thanks they have received and similar things. It is also accessible by accessing Special:Impact. [298]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).

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

16:53, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 56

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 56, March – April 2023

• New partner:
  • Perlego
• Library access tips and tricks
• Spotlight: EveryBookItsReader

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --10:03, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #26

Welcome to the twenty-sixth newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations

One million Suggested Edits

We passed the 1 million Suggested edits milestone in late April!

• The Suggested edits feature (AKA Newcomer tasks) increase newcomer activation by ~12%, which flows on through to increased retention. (source)
• Suggested edits increase the number of edits newcomers complete in their first two weeks and have a relatively low revert rate. (source)
• Suggested edits are available on all Wikipedia language editions.
• Newer Suggested edits, like Add a link and Add an image, aren’t yet deployed to all wikis, but these structured tasks further increase the probability that newcomers will make their first edit. (source)

Positive reinforcement

Positive reinforcement aims to encourage newcomers who have visited our homepage and tried Growth features to keep editing.

• The new Impact module was released to Growth pilot wikis in December 2022, and we are now scaling the feature to another ten wikis. [299]
• The Leveling up features are deployed at our pilot wikis.
• The Personalized praise features were deployed at our pilot wikis on May 24. Mentors at pilot wikis will start to receive notifications weekly when they have “praise-worthy” mentees. Mentors can configure their notification preferences or disable these notifications.

Add an image

• We are creating a new section-level variation of the “add an image” task. We have tested the accuracy of suggestions, and the development of this new task is well-underway. [300]

Other updates

• We are progressively releasing Add a link to more wikis. [301]
• After adding Thanks to Recent Changes, Watchlist and Special:Contributions, we investigated Thanks usage on the wikis. There is no evidence that thanks increased after the feature was added on more pages.
• We helped with code review for the 2023 Community Wish to add Notifications for user page edits. [302]
• We have been attending several community events, that we documented in our Growth’s Community events report.

What's next for Growth?

• We shared an overview of Growth annual planning ideas, and have started community discussion about these potential projects. We would love to hear your feedback on these ideas!

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:14, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-22

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

Recent changes

• Citations can once again be added automatically from ISBNs, thanks to Zotero's ISBN searches. The current data sources are the Library of Congress (United States), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (French National Library), and K10plus ISBN (German repository). Additional data source searches can be proposed to Zotero. The ISBN labels in the VisualEditor Automatic tab will reappear later this week. [303]
• The page Special:EditWatchlist now has "Check all" options to select all the pages within a namespace. This feature request was voted #161 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [304]

Problems

• For a few days earlier this month, the "Add interlanguage link" item in the Tools menu did not work properly. This has now been fixed. [305]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 May. It will be on all wikis from 1 June (calendar).
• VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on small and medium wikis this week. Large wikis will follow in the coming weeks. This is part of the effort to move Parsoid into MediaWiki core. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here. [306]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:00, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 5 June 2023

• News and notes: WMRU director forks new 'pedia, birds flap in top '22 piccy, WMF weighs in on Indian gov's map axe plea

• In the media: Section 230 stands tall, WP vs. UK bill, Miss Information dissed again

• Featured content: Poetry under pressure

• Traffic report: Celebs, controversies and a chatbot in the public eye

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:22, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-23

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

Recent changes

• The RealMe extension allows you to mark URLs on your user page as verified for Mastodon and similar software.
• Citation and footnote editing can now be started from the reference list when using the visual editor. This feature request was voted #2 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [307]
• Previously, clicking on someone else's link to Recent Changes with filters applied within the URL could unintentionally change your preference for "Group results by page". This has now been fixed. [308]

Problems

• For a few days last week, some tools and bots returned outdated information due to database replication problems, and may have been down entirely while it was being fixed. These issues have now been fixed. [309]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).
• Bots will no longer be prevented from making edits because of URLs that match the spam blacklist. [310]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:50, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-24

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

Recent changes

• The content attribution tools Who Wrote That?, XTools Authorship, and XTools Blame now support the Dutch, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, Polish and Portuguese Wikipedias. This was the #7 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [311]
• The Search Preview panel has been deployed on four Wikipedias (Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian and Norwegian). The panel will show an image related to the article (if existing), the top sections of the article, related images (coming from MediaSearch on Commons), and eventually the sister projects associated with the article. [312]
• The RealMe extension now allows administrators to verify URLs for any page, for Mastodon and similar software. [313]
• The default project license has been officially upgraded to CC BY-SA 4.0. The software interface messages have been updated. Communities should feel free to start updating any mentions of the old CC BY-SA 3.0 licensing within policies and related documentation pages. [314]

Problems

• For three days last month, some Wikipedia pages edited with VisualEditor or DiscussionTools had an unintended __TOC__ (or its localized form) added during an edit. There is a listing of affected pages sorted by wiki, that may still need to be fixed. [315]
• Currently, the "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is broken. Existing {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords incorrectly appear as missing templates in VisualEditor. Developers are exploring how to fix this. In the meantime, those wishing to edit the default sortkey of a page are advised to switch to source editing. [316]
• Last week, an update to the delete form may have broken some gadgets or user scripts. If you need to manipulate (empty) the reason field, replace #wpReason with #wpReason > input. See an example fix. [317]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (calendar).
• VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on English Wikipedia on Monday, and all other large wikis on Thursday. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here. [318]

Future changes

• From 5 June to 17 July, the Foundation's Security team is holding a consultation with contributors regarding a draft policy to govern the use of third-party resources in volunteer-developed gadgets and scripts. Feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome at Third-party resources policy on meta-wiki.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 14:49, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 19 June 2023

• News and notes: WMF Terms of Use now in force, new Creative Commons licensing

• In the media: English WP editor glocked after BLP row on Italian 'pedia

• Featured content: Content, featured

• Recent research: Hoaxers prefer currently-popular topics

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:10, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-25

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

Recent changes

• Flame graphs are now available in WikimediaDebug. [319][320]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
• There is now a toolbar search popup in the visual editor. You can trigger it by typing \ or pressing ctrl + shift + p. It can help you quickly access most tools in the editor. [321][322]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:07, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-26

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

Recent changes

• The Action API modules and Special:LinkSearch will now add a trailing / to all prop=extlinks responses for bare domains. This is part of the work to remove duplication in the externallinks database table. [323]

Problems

• Last week, search was broken on Commons and Wikidata for 23 hours. [324][325]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
• The Minerva skin now applies more predefined styles to the .mbox-text CSS class. This enables support for mbox templates that use divs instead of tables. Please make sure that the new styles won't affect other templates in your wiki. [326][327]
• Gadgets will now load on both desktop and mobile by default. Previously, gadgets loaded only on desktop by default. Changing this default using the |targets= parameter is also deprecated and should not be used. You should make gadgets work on mobile or disable them based on the skin (with the |skins= parameter in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition) rather than whether the user uses the mobile or the desktop website. Popular gadgets that create errors on mobile will be disabled by developers on the Minerva skin as a temporary solution. [328]
• All namespace tabs now have the same browser access key by default. Previously, custom and extension-defined namespaces would have to have their access keys set manually on-wiki, but that is no longer necessary. [329]
• The review form of the Flagged Revisions extension now uses the standardized user interface components. [330]

Future changes

• How media is structured in the parser's HTML output will change in the coming weeks at group2 wikis. This change improves the accessibility of content. You may need to update your site-CSS, or userscripts and gadgets. There are details on what code to check, how to update the code, and where to report any related problems. [331]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 16:17, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 3 July 2023

• News and notes: Online Safety Bill: Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia UK launch open letter

• Disinformation report: Imploded submersible outfit foiled trying to sing own praises on Wikipedia

• In the media: Journo proposes mass Wiki dox, sponsored articles on Fandom, Section 230 discussed

• Featured content: Incensed

• Traffic report: Are you afraid of spiders? Arnold? The Idol? ChatGPT?

• Humour: United Nations dispatches peacekeeping force to Wikipedia policy discussions

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:15, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-27

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

Recent changes

• As part of the rolling out of the audio links that play on click wishlist proposal, small wikis will now be able to use the inline audio player that is implemented by the Phonos extension. [332]
• From this week all gadgets automatically load on mobile and desktop sites. If you see any problems with gadgets on your wikis, please adjust the gadget options in your gadget definitions file. [333]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 July. It will be on all wikis from 6 July (calendar).

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:49, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-28

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

Recent changes

• The Section-level Image Suggestions feature has been deployed on seven Wikipedias (Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Catalan, Hungarian, Finnish and Norwegian Bokmål). The feature recommends images for articles on contributors' watchlists that are a good match for individual sections of those articles.
• Global abuse filters have been enabled on all Wikimedia projects, except English and Japanese Wikipedias (who opted out). This change was made following a global request for comments. [334]
• Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool for administrators to help fight spam. It provides a clearer interface for blocking plain domains (and their subdomains), is more easily searchable, and is faster for the software to process for each edit on the wiki. It does not support regex (for complex cases), nor URL path-matching, nor the MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist, but otherwise it replaces most of the functionalities of the existing MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. There is a Python script to help migrate all simple domains into this tool, and more feature details, within the tool's documentation. It is available at all wikis except for Meta-wiki, Commons, and Wikidata. [335]
• The WikiEditor extension was updated. It includes some of the most frequently used features of wikitext editing. In the past, many of its messages could only be translated by administrators, but now all regular translators on translatewiki can translate them. Please check the state of WikiEditor localization into your language, and if the "Completion" for your language shows anything less than 100%, please complete the translation. See a more detailed explanation.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).
• The default protocol of Special:LinkSearch and API counterparts has changed from http to both http and https. [336]
• Special:LinkSearch and its API counterparts will now search for all of the URL provided in the query. It used to be only the first 60 characters. This feature was requested fifteen years ago. [337]

Future changes

• There is an experiment with a ChatGPT plugin. This is to show users where the information is coming from when they read information from Wikipedia. It has been tested by Wikimedia Foundation staff and other Wikimedians. Soon all ChatGPT plugin users can use the Wikipedia plugin. This is the same plugin which was mentioned in Tech News 2023/20. [338]
• There is an ongoing discussion on a proposed Third-party resources policy. The proposal will impact the use of third-party resources in gadgets and userscripts. Based on the ideas received so far, policy includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, some best practices and exemption requirements such as code transparency and inspectability. Your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on on the policy talk page.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:52, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 July 2023

• News and notes: Big bux hidden beneath wine-dark sea as we wait for the Tides to go out?

• In the media: Tentacles of Emirates plot attempt to ensnare Wikipedia

• Obituary: David Thomsen (Dthomsen8) and Ingo Koll (Kipala)

• News from the WMF: ABC for Fundraising: Advancing Banner Collaboration for fundraising campaigns

• In focus: Are the children of celebrities over-represented in French cinema?

• Tips and tricks: What automation can do for you (and your WikiProject)

• Recent research: Wikipedia-grounded chatbot "outperforms all baselines" on factual accuracy

• Humour: New fringe theories to be introduced

• Cobwebs: If you're reading this, you're probably on a desktop

• Featured content: Scrollin', scrollin', scrollin', keep those readers scrollin', got to keep on scrollin', Rawhide!

• Traffic report: The Idol becomes the Master

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:01, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-29

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

Recent changes

• We are now serving 1% of all global user traffic from Kubernetes (you can read more technical details). We are planning to increment this percentage regularly. You can follow the progress of this work.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (calendar).
• MediaWiki system messages will now look for available local fallbacks, instead of always using the default fallback defined by software. This means wikis no longer need to override each language on the fallback chain separately. For example, English Wikipedia doesn't have to create en-ca and en-gb subpages with a transclusion of the base pages anymore. This makes it easier to maintain local overrides. [339]
• The action=growthsetmentorstatus API will be deprecated with the new MediaWiki version. Bots or scripts calling that API should use the action=growthmanagementorlist API now. [340]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:06, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 57

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 57, May – June 2023

• Suggestion improvements
• Favorite collections tips
• Spotlight: Promoting Nigerian Books and Authors

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --11:22, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-30

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

Recent changes

• On July 18, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a survey about the technical decision making process for people who do technical work that relies on software that is maintained by the Foundation or affiliates. If this applies to you, please take part in the survey. The survey will be open for three weeks, until August 7. You can find more information in the announcement e-mail on wikitech-l.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).

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

MediaWiki message delivery 02:18, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-31

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

Recent changes

• The Synchronizer tool is now available to keep Lua modules synced across Wikimedia wikis, along with updated documentation to develop global Lua modules and templates.
• The tag filter on Special:NewPages and revision history pages can now be inverted. For example, you can hide edits that were made using an automated tool. [341][342]
• The Wikipedia ChatGPT plugin experiment can now be used by ChatGPT users who can use plugins. You can participate in a video call if you want to talk about this experiment or similar work. [343]

Problems

• It was not possible to generate a PDF for pages with non-Latin characters in the title, for the last two weeks. This has now been fixed. [344]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (calendar).
• Starting on Tuesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [345]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:52, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 August 2023

• News and notes: City officials attempt to doxx Wikipedians, Ruwiki founder banned, WMF launches Mastodon server

• In the media: Truth, AI, bull from politicians, and climate change

• Disinformation report: Hot climate, hot hit, hot money, hot news hot off the presses!

• Obituary: Donald Cram, Peter McCawley, and Eagleash

• Tips and tricks: Citation tools for dummies!

• Humour: Does Wikipedia present neutral perspectives?

• In focus: Journals cited by Wikipedia

• Opinion: Are global bans the last step?

• Featured content: Featured Content, 1 to 15 July

• Traffic report: Come on Oppie, let's go party

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:38, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #27

Welcome to the twenty-seventh newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations

Annual plan for Growth

We shared our annual plan, for the period July 2023 - June 2024.

Our first project of the year will be Community configuration 2.0, which helps editors with extended rights transparently and easily configure important on-wiki functionality.

After we finish work on Community configuration 2.0, we will hope to fit in one of the following projects:

• Article creation: This project aims to provide new editors with better guidance and guardrails in the article creation process, with the intention of lightening the load of new page reviewers.
• Non-editing participation: This project aims to create low-risk ways for readers to participate in Wikipedia with the intention of funneling more readers into contributing to the Wikimedia movement.

Please let us know what you think about these projects on the related talk page, or Growth's annual plan talk page.

Suggested edits

The new "Add an image" section-level task

We released a new Section-level “add an image” structured task to Growth pilot wikis (Arabic, Bengali, Czech, and Spanish). This task was part of the Structured Data Across Wikipedia project. We are monitoring the edits made, and we look for community feedback as well.

Suggested Edits are now receiving topic predictions via the new Language-Agnostic Topic Classification. This change affects non-English Wikipedia wikis. It will ensure newcomers receive a greater diversity of task recommendations. Before, as this feature was a test, English Wikipedia was used to select topics. The change is gradual as lists of topics are refreshed when they become empty. The Research team will evaluate the impact in a few months. [346]

Starting on August 1, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link": Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia.

Mentorship

The Growth team provides dedicated features to establish a mentorship program for newcomers. Every newcomer gets a volunteer mentor who provides encouragement and answers questions. Communities can set up or join this mentorship system by visiting Special:ManageMentors. This mentorship system is configurable by the community at Special:EditGrowthConfig.

More communities have implemented mentorship. A Wikimedia Foundation data scientist will be looking at the impact of Mentorship. We will look at the impact on Spanish and English Wikipedia. [347]

The Growth team will also host a Mentoring new editors on Wikipedia session at Wikimania 2023 in Singapore. Workshop attendees will help brainstorm improvements to Growth’s mentorship features.

Positive reinforcement

We will share more complete experiment analysis for all the three parts of the Positive reinforcement project soon. At the moment, the new Impact module, Leveling up, and Personalized praise are still being A/B tested on the Growth team's pilot wikis.

In the meantime, initial leading indicators for the Personalized praise project have been published. Although this is still a relatively small sample, results seem healthy. They show that Mentors are indeed receiving notifications and clicking through to view their praise-worthy mentees.

Growth contributes to IP Editing migration

The Growth team is currently focusing on IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation. It is a project that touches many different Wikimedia Foundation teams. The Growth team will focus on temporary accounts through two main points:

• the user experience of a logged-out user, that switches to a temporary account,
• change Growth-owned extensions and features, so that they work as expected with temporary accounts. [348]

Community Configuration 2.0

We are still in the early planning stage of the Community Configuration 2.0 project:

• We are gathering internal Wikimedia Foundation teams' needs, so as community feedback. [349]
• We have started to investigate design improvements. [350]
• We are also reviewing similar tools that are part of other products. [351]

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

12:42, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-32

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

Recent changes

• Mobile Web editors can now edit a whole page at once. To use this feature, turn on "⧼Mobile-frontend-mobile-option-amc⧽" in your settings and use the "Edit full page" button in the "More" menu. [352]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

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MediaWiki message delivery 21:19, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-33

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

Recent changes

• The Content translation system is no longer using Youdao's machine translation service. The service was in place for several years, but due to no usage, and availability of alternatives, it was deprecated to reduce maintenance overheads. Other services which cover the same languages are still available. [353]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (calendar).
• Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Latin Wikipedia, Ladino Wikipedia, Luxembourgish Wikipedia, Lak Wikipedia, Lezghian Wikipedia, Lingua Franca Nova Wikipedia, Ganda Wikipedia, Limburgish Wikipedia, Ligurian Wikipedia, Lombard Wikipedia, Lingala Wikipedia, Latgalian Wikipedia, Latvian Wikipedia, Maithili Wikipedia, Basa Banyumasan Wikipedia, Moksha Wikipedia, Malagasy Wikipedia, Armenian Wikipedia, Kyrgyz Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [354]

Future changes

• A few gadgets/user scripts which add icons to the Minerva skin need to have their CSS updated. There are more details available including a search for all existing instances and how to update them.

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MediaWiki message delivery 05:58, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 August 2023

• News and notes: Dude, Where's My Donations? Wikimedia Foundation announces another million in grants for non-Wikimedia-related projects

• In the media: An accusation of bias from Brazil, a lawsuit from Portugal, plagiarism from Florida

• In focus: 2023 Good Article Nomination drive is underway: get your barnstars here!

• Special report: Thirteen years later, why are most administrators still from 2005?

• Tips and tricks: How to find images for your articles, check their copyright, upload them, and restore them

• Cobwebs: Getting serious about writing

• Opinion: Copyright trolls, or the last beautiful free souls on this planet?

• Serendipity: Why I stopped taking photographs almost altogether

• Featured content: Barbenheimer confirmed

• Humour: Arbitration Committee to accept case against Right Honorable Frimbley Cantingham, 15th Viscount Bellington-upon-Porkshire

• Traffic report: 'Cause today it just goes with the fashion

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:17, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-34

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

Recent changes

• The GDrive to Commons Uploader tool is now available. It enables securely selecting and uploading files from your Google Drive directly to Wikimedia Commons. [355]
• From now on, we will announce new Wikimedia wikis in Tech News, so you can update any tools or pages.
  • Since the last edition, two new wikis have been created:
    • a Wiktionary in Pa'O (wikt:blk:) [356]
    • a Wikisource in Sundanese (s:su:) [357]
  • To catch up, the next most recent six wikis are:
    • Wikifunctions (f:) [358]
    • a Wiktionary in Mandailing (wikt:btm:) [359]
    • a Wikipedia in Ghanaian Pidgin (w:gpe:) [360]
    • a Wikinews in Gungbe (n:guw:) [361]
    • a Wiktionary in Kabardian (wikt:kbd:) [362]
    • a Wikipedia in Fante (w:fat:) [363]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).

Future changes

• There is an existing stable interface policy for MediaWiki backend code. There is a proposed stable interface policy for frontend code. This is relevant for anyone who works on gadgets or Wikimedia frontend code. You can read it, discuss it, and let the proposer know if there are any problems. [364]

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

15:23, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-35

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

Recent changes

• As part of the changes for the better diff handling of paragraph splits, improved detection of splits is being rolled out. Over the last two weeks, we deployed this support to group0 and group1 wikis. This week it will be deployed to group2 wikis. [365]
• All Special:Contributions pages now show the user's local edit count and the account's creation date. [366]
• Wikisource users can now use the prpbengalicurrency label to denote Bengali currency characters as page numbers inside the <pagelist> tag. [367]
• Two preferences have been relocated. The preference "Enable the visual editor" is now shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis. Previously it was shown on the "Beta features" tab at some wikis. The preference "Use the wikitext mode inside the visual editor, instead of a different wikitext editor" is now also shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis, instead of the "Beta features" tab. [368][369]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).
• New signups for a Wikimedia developer account will start being pushed towards idm.wikimedia.org, rather than going via Wikitech. Further information about the new system is available.
• All right-to-left language wikis, plus Korean, Armenian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Bulgarian Wikipedias, will have a link in the sidebar that provides a short URL of that page, using the Wikimedia URL Shortener. This feature will come to more wikis in future weeks. [370]

Future changes

• The removal of the DoubleWiki extension is being discussed. This extension currently allows Wikisource users to view articles from multiple language versions side by side when the <=> symbol next to a specific language edition is selected. Comments on this are welcomed at the phabricator task.
• A proposal has been made to merge the second hidden-categories list (which appears below the wikitext editing form) with the main list of categories (which is further down the page). More information is available on Phabricator; feedback is welcome!

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MediaWiki message delivery 13:58, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 August 2023

• From the editor: Beta version of signpost.news now online

• News and notes: You like RecentChanges?

• In the media: Taking it sleazy

• Recent research: The five barriers that impede "stitching" collaboration between Commons and Wikipedia

• Draftspace: Bad Jokes and Other Draftspace Novelties

• Humour: The Dehumourification Plan

• Traffic report: Raise your drinking glass, here's to yesterday

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:44, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-36

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

Recent changes

• EditInSequence, a feature that allows users to edit pages faster on Wikisource has been moved to a Beta Feature based on community feedback. To enable it, you can navigate to the beta features tab in Preferences. [371]
• As part of the changes for the Generate Audio for IPA and Audio links that play on click wishlist proposals, the inline audio player mode of Phonos has been deployed to all projects. [372]
• There is a new option for Administrators when they are changing the usergroups for a user, to add the user’s user page to their watchlist. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API. [373]
• One new wiki has been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Talysh (w:tly:) [374]

Problems

• The LoginNotify extension was not sending notifications since January. It has now been fixed, so going forward, you may see notifications for failed login attempts, and successful login attempts from a new device. [375]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (calendar).
• Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Eastern Mari Wikipedia, Maori Wikipedia, Minangkabau Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Mongolian Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Western Mari Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Maltese Wikipedia, Mirandese Wikipedia, Erzya Wikipedia, Mazanderani Wikipedia, Nāhuatl Wikipedia, Neapolitan Wikipedia, Low German Wikipedia, Low Saxon Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Newari Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Novial Wikipedia, N'Ko Wikipedia, Nouormand Wikipedia, Northern Sotho Wikipedia, Navajo Wikipedia, Nyanja Wikipedia, Occitan Wikipedia, Livvi-Karelian Wikipedia, Oromo Wikipedia, Oriya Wikipedia, Ossetic Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Pangasinan Wikipedia, Pampanga Wikipedia, Papiamento Wikipedia, Picard Wikipedia, Pennsylvania German Wikipedia, Palatine German Wikipedia, Norfuk / Pitkern Wikipedia, Piedmontese Wikipedia, Western Punjabi Wikipedia, Pontic Wikipedia, Pashto Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [376][377]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:31, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-37

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

Recent changes

• ORES, the revision evaluation service, is now using a new open-source infrastructure on all wikis except for English Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two will follow this week. If you notice any unusual results from the Recent Changes filters that are related to ORES (for example, "Contribution quality predictions" and "User intent predictions"), please report them. [378]
• When you are logged in on one Wikimedia wiki and visit a different Wikimedia wiki, the system tries to log you in there automatically. This has been unreliable for a long time. You can now visit the login page to make the system try extra hard. If you feel that made logging in better or worse than it used to be, your feedback is appreciated. [379]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
• The Technical Decision-Making Forum Retrospective team invites anyone involved in the technical field of Wikimedia projects to signup to and join one of their listening sessions on 13 September. Another date will be scheduled later. The goal is to improve the technical decision-making processes.
• As part of the changes for the Better diff handling of paragraph splits wishlist proposal, the inline switch widget in diff pages is being rolled out this week to all wikis. The inline switch will allow viewers to toggle between a unified inline or two-column diff wikitext format. [380]

Future changes

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 20 September. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [381]
• The Enterprise API is launching a new feature called "breaking news". Currently in BETA, this attempts to identify likely "newsworthy" topics as they are currently being written about in any Wikipedia. Your help is requested to improve the accuracy of its detection model, especially on smaller language editions, by recommending templates or identifiable editing patterns. See more information at the documentation page on MediaWiki or the FAQ on Meta.

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MediaWiki message delivery 21:06, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 58

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 58, July – August 2023

• New partners - De Standaard and Duncker & Humblot
• Tech tip: Filters
• Wikimania presentation

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --14:27, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 16 September 2023

• News and notes: Wikimedia power sharing – just an advisory role for the volunteer community?

• In the media: "Just flirting", going Dutch and Shapps for the defence?

• Obituary: Nosebagbear

• Serendipity: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no paywall, for thou, Wikipedia Library, art with me

• Featured content: Catching up

• Concept: Strange portal opened by CERN researchers brings Wikipedia articles from "other worlds"

• Traffic report: Some of it's magic, some of it's tragic

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:37, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-38

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

Recent changes

• MediaWiki now has a stable interface policy for frontend code that more clearly defines how we deprecate MediaWiki code and wiki-based code (e.g. gadgets and user scripts). Thank you to everyone who contributed to the content and discussions. [382][383]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (calendar).
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [384]
• All wikis will have a link in the sidebar that provides a short URL of that page, using the Wikimedia URL Shortener. [385]

Future changes

• The team investigating the Graph Extension posted a proposal for reenabling it and they need your input.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:18, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-39

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

Recent changes

• The Vector 2022 skin will now remember the pinned/unpinned status for the Table of Contents for all logged-out users. [386]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September (calendar).
• The ResourceLoader mediawiki.ui modules are now deprecated as part of the move to Vue.js and Codex. There is a guide for migrating from MediaWiki UI to Codex for any tools that use it. More details are available in the task and your questions are welcome there.
• Gadget definitions will have a new "namespaces" option. The option takes a list of namespace IDs. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages in the given namespaces.

Future changes

• New variables will be added to AbuseFilter: global_account_groups and global_account_editcount. They are available only when an account is being created. You can use them to prevent blocking automatic creation of accounts when users with many edits elsewhere visit your wiki for the first time. [387][388]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 27 October at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 16:49, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your support

Community Relations Award

On behalf of the Editing team and my own team, thank you for your support for the Talk pages project during the last several years. I expect the last piece of Discussion tools to graduate from Beta Features here in the coming months. The team couldn't have met its overall goals without your help, especially in the early days at this project. Thank you. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:25, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-40

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

Recent changes

• There is a new user preference for "Always enable safe mode". This setting will make pages load without including any on-wiki JavaScript or on-wiki stylesheet pages. It can be useful for debugging broken JavaScript gadgets. [389]
• Gadget definitions now have a new "contentModels" option. The option takes a list of page content models, like wikitext or css. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages with the given content models.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (calendar).

Future changes

• The Vector 2022 skin will no longer use the custom styles and scripts of Vector legacy (2010). The change will be made later this year or in early 2024. See how to adjust the CSS and JS pages on your wiki. [390]

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MediaWiki message delivery 01:25, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 3 October 2023

• News and notes: Wikimedia Endowment financial statement published

• In the media: History is written by whoever can harness the most editors

• Recent research: Readers prefer ChatGPT over Wikipedia; concerns about limiting "anyone can edit" principle "may be overstated"

• Featured content: By your logic,

• Concept: Wikipedia policies from other worlds: WP:NOANTLERS

• Poetry: "The Sight"

• Traffic report: There shall be no slaves in the land of lands, it's a Bollywood jam

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:31, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-41

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

Recent changes

• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Fon (w:fon:) [391]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (calendar).
• Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Swahili Wikipedia, Walloon Wikipedia, Waray Wikipedia, Wolof Wikipedia, Kalmyk Wikipedia, Xhosa Wikipedia, Mingrelian Wikipedia, Yiddish Wikipedia, Yoruba Wikipedia, Zhuang Wikipedia, Zeelandic Wikipedia, Min Nan Wikipedia, Zulu Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [392]
• At some wikis, newcomers are suggested images from Commons to add to articles without any images. Starting on Tuesday, newcomers at these wikis will be able to add images to unillustrated article sections. The specific wikis are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table. You can learn more about this feature. [393]
• In the mobile web skin (Minerva) the CSS ID #page-actions will be replaced with #p-views. This change is to make it consistent with other skins and to improve support for gadgets and extensions in the mobile skin. A few gadgets may need to be updated; there are details and search-links in the task.

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MediaWiki message delivery 14:37, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #28

Welcome to the twenty-eighth newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations

Community Configuration, concept A: Accordion style

Community Configuration, concept B: Dashboard style

Community configuration 2.0

• Community Configuration 2.0 is a feature that will enable Wikimedia communities to easily customize and configure features to meet their unique needs. This approach provides non-technical moderators with more independence and control over enabling/disabling and customizing features for their communities.
• Technical approach and associated tasks are detailed in this Epic task on Phabricator.
• Initial designs are drafted for two different approaches (see images). We will soon demo interactive prototypes to interested admins, stewards, and experienced editors (T346109). Please let us know if you have feedback on the design approach, or want to participate in prototype testing.

IP Masking

• The Growth team has been working on several updates to ensure Growth maintained features will be compatible with future IP Masking changes. This work has included code changes to: Recent Changes (T343322), Echo notifications (T333531), the Thanks extension (T345679) and Mentorship (T341390).
• Before December, the Growth team will initiate community discussions with the goal of migrating communities from Flow to DiscussionTools. This move aims to minimize the necessity for additional engineering work to make Flow compatible with IP Masking. (T346108)

Mentorship

• We assembled some resources for mentors at Mediawiki wiki. This resource page is translatable and will be linked from the mentor dashboard.
• We are working to resolve a bug related to mentors properly returning after being marked as "Away". (T347024)
• Half of newcomers at English Wikipedia get a mentor assigned to them. To ensure every newcomer receives mentorship, we need additional volunteer mentors at English Wikipedia to achieve a 100% coverage rate. We also encourage experienced users from other wikis to help newcomers at their own community.

Scaling Growth features

• We continue the deployment of the structured task "add a link" to all Wikipedias. We plan to scale the task to all Wikipedias that have link suggestions available by the end of 2023.
• We plan to scale the new Impact Module to all Wikipedias soon, but first we are investigating a bug with the job that refreshes the Impact Module data. (T344428)
• At some wikis, newcomers have access to the "add an image" structured task. This task suggests images that may be relevant to add to unillustrated articles. Newcomers at these wikis can now add images to unillustrated articles sections. (T345940) The wikis that have this task are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table.

Other news

• We disabled the “add an image” task temporarily (T345188) because there was a failure in the image suggestions pipeline (T345141). This is now fixed.
• You can read a report about the Growth team’s representation at Wikimania in Singapore here. Growth team members presented two sessions at Wikimania Singapore.
• After a 2.5 years-long collaboration with Bangala Wikipedia, we have decided to start a collaboration with another wiki. Swahili Wikipedia is now a pilot wiki for Growth experiments.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Trizek_(WMF) Talk 23:16, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-42

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

Recent changes

• The Unified login system's edge login should now be fixed for some browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera). This means that if you visit a new sister project wiki, you should be logged in automatically without the need to click "Log in" or reload the page. Feedback on whether it's working for you is welcome. [394]
• Edit notices are now available within the MobileFrontend/Minerva skin. This feature was inspired by the gadget on English Wikipedia. See more details in T316178.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 October. It will be on all wikis from 19 October (calendar).

Future changes

• In 3 weeks, in the Vector 2022 skin, code related to addPortletLink and #p-namespaces that was deprecated one year ago will be removed. If you notice tools that should appear next to the "Discussion" tab are then missing, please tell the gadget's maintainers to see instructions in the Phabricator task.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:45, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 23 October 2023

• News and notes: Where have all the administrators gone?

• In the media: Thirst traps, the fastest loading sites on the web, and the original collaborative writing

• Gallery: Before and After: Why you don't need to know how to restore images to make massive improvements

• Featured content: Yo, ho! Blow the man down!

• Traffic report: The calm and the storm

• News from Diff: Sawtpedia: Giving a Voice to Wikipedia Using QR Codes

• Humour: New citation template introduced for divine revelations, drug use, and really thinking about it

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:01, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-43

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

Recent changes

• There is a new Language and internationalization newsletter, written quarterly. It contains updates on new feature development, improvements in various language-related technical projects, and related support work.
• Source map support has been enabled on all wikis. When you open the debugger in your browser's developer tools, you should be able to see the unminified JavaScript source code. [395]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 October. It will be on all wikis from 26 October (calendar).

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:14, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

Moderator Tools newsletter - Issue #1

Welcome to the inaugural Moderator Tools newsletter! We’ll aim to publish new issues whenever we have big new updates about the projects we’re working on.

PageTriage

PageTriage NewPagesFeed - October 2023

We’ve now wrapped up our work to support the English Wikipedia’s New Pages Patrol community by tackling some major technical debt in the PageTriage extension. The final project update gives an overview of all the work that we did over the past 6 months.

Automoderator

We’re currently working on a project called Automoderator, which will enable communities to automatically revert bad edits based on community-defined settings. We’re looking for input and feedback on our plans so far, and have a number of questions on topics we need patrollers and administrators to help us understand better. In addition to the overview and questions on the main project page, we now have two sub-pages with more specific information:

Automoderator - model testing tool screenshot

• If you want to investigate Automoderator’s accuracy rate and check out how it would behave in practice, we’ve set up a testing process with data and scores so you can help us find new patterns we can take into consideration before Automoderator is deployed.
• The measurement plan is the first draft of our plan to measure whether Automoderator is achieving its goals and not having negative consequences. Want to propose some data for us to capture to help evaluate this project? This is the place to go!

Other

Our team has also been working to ensure that software we’re responsible for is updated to support temporary accounts. We’ve made changes to PageTriage, Nuke, and The Wikipedia Library.

Although we have active engineering projects ongoing, we're always happy to chat about your community's content moderation tool needs - feel free to get in contact at Talk:Moderator Tools.

Read past issues or sign up to this newsletter here. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:21, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-44

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

Recent changes

• The Structured Content team, as part of its project of improving UploadWizard on Commons, made some UX improvements to the upload step of choosing own vs not own work (T347590), as well as to the licensing step for own work (T347756).
• The Design Systems team has released version 1.0.0 of Codex, the new design system for Wikimedia. See the full announcement about the release of Codex 1.0.0.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (calendar).
• Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 2 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for many languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [396][397]
• Starting November 1, the impact module (Special:Impact) will be upgraded by the Growth team. The new impact module shows newcomers more data regarding their impact on the wiki. It was tested by a few wikis during the last few months. [398]

Future changes

• There is a proposed plan for re-enabling the Graph Extension. You can help by reviewing this proposal and sharing what you think about it.
• The WMF is working on making it possible for administrators to edit MediaWiki configuration directly. This is similar to previous work on Special:EditGrowthConfig. A technical RfC is running until November 08, where you can provide feedback.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:19, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 6 November 2023

• Arbitration report: Admin bewilderingly unmasks self as sockpuppet of other admin who was extremely banned in 2015

• In the media: UK shadow chancellor accused of ripping off WP articles for book, Wikipedians accused of being dicks by a rich man

• News and notes: Board candidacy process posted, editors protest WMF privacy measure, sweet meetups

• Opinion: An open letter to Elon Musk

• WikiCup report: The WikiCup 2023

• News from Wiki Ed: Equity lists on Wikipedia

• Recent research: How English Wikipedia drove out fringe editors over two decades

• Featured content: Like putting a golf course in a historic site.

• Wikidata: Evaluating qualitative systemic bias in large article sets on Wikipedia

• Traffic report: Cricket jumpscare

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:44, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-45

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

Recent changes

• In the Vector 2022 skin, the default font-size of a number of navigational elements (tagline, tools menu, navigational links, and more) has been increased slightly to match the font size used in page content. [399]

Problems

• Last week, there was a problem displaying some recent edits on a few wikis, for 1-6 hours. The edits were saved but not immediately shown. This was due to a database problem. [400]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).
• The Growth team will reassign newcomers from former mentors to the currently active mentors. They have also changed the notification language to be more user-friendly. [401][402]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:04, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 20 November 2023

• In the media: Propaganda and photos, lunatics and a lunar backup

• News and notes: Update on Wikimedia's financial health

• Traffic report: If it bleeds, it leads

• Recent research: Canceling disputes as the real function of ArbCom

• Wikimania: Wikimania 2024 scholarships

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:44, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-47

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

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [403][404]
• Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Quechua Wikipedia, Romansh Wikipedia, Romani Wikipedia, Rundi Wikipedia, Aromanian Wikipedia, Tarandíne Wikipedia, Rusyn Wikipedia, Kinyarwanda Wikipedia, Sanskrit Wikipedia, Sakha Wikipedia, Santali Wikipedia, Sardinian Wikipedia, Sicilian Wikipedia, Scots Wikipedia, Sindhi Wikipedia, Northern Sami Wikipedia, Sango Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, Sinhala Wikipedia, Slovak Wikipedia, Slovenian Wikipedia, Samoan Wikipedia, Somali Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Serbian Wikipedia, Sranan Tongo Wikipedia, Swati Wikipedia, Southern Sotho Wikipedia, Saterland Frisian Wikipedia, Sundanese Wikipedia, Silesian Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Tulu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tetum Wikipedia, Tajik Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkmen Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia, Tswana Wikipedia, Tongan Wikipedia, Tok Pisin Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Tsonga Wikipedia, Tatar Wikipedia, Twi Wikipedia, Tahitian Wikipedia, Tuvinian Wikipedia, Udmurt Wikipedia, Uyghur Wikipedia, Uzbek Wikipedia, Venda Wikipedia, Venetian Wikipedia, Veps Wikipedia, West Flemish Wikipedia, Volapük Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [405][406][407]
• The Vector 2022 skin will have some minor visual changes to drop-down menus, column widths, and more. These changes were added to four Wikipedias last week. If no issues are found, these changes will proceed to all wikis this week. These changes will make it possible to add new menus for readability and dark mode. Learn more. [408]

Future changes

• There is an update on re-enabling the Graph Extension. To speed up the process, Vega 2 will not be supported and only some protocols will be available at launch. You can help by sharing what you think about the plan.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:53, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 59

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 59, September – October 2023

• Spotlight: Introducing a repository of anti-disinformation projects
• Tech tip: Library access methods

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --16:15, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 4 December 2023

• News and notes: Beeblebrox ejected from Arbitration Committee following posts on Wikipediocracy

• In the media: Turmoil on Hebrew Wikipedia, grave dancing, Olga's impact and inspiring Bhutanese nuns

• Disinformation report: "Wikipedia and the assault on history"

• In focus: Tens of thousands of freely available sources flagged

• Comix: Bold comics for a new age

• Essay: I am going to die

• Featured content: Real gangsters move in silence

• Traffic report: And it's hard to watch some cricket, in the cold November Rain

• Humour: Mandy Rice-Davies Applies

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:09, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 December 2023

• Special report: Did the Chinese Communist Party send astroturfers to sabotage a hacktivist's Wikipedia article?

• News and notes: The Italian Public Domain wars continue, Wikimedia RU set to dissolve, and a recap of WLM 2023

• In the media: Consider the humble fork

• Discussion report: Arabic Wikipedia blackout; Wikimedians discuss SpongeBob, copyrights, and AI

• In focus: Liquidation of Wikimedia RU

• Technology report: Dark mode is coming

• Recent research: "LLMs Know More, Hallucinate Less" with Wikidata

• Gallery: A feast of holidays and carols

• Comix: Lollus lmaois 200C tincture

• Crossword: when the crossword is sus

• Traffic report: What's the big deal? I'm an animal!

• From the editor: A piccy iz worth OVAR 9000!!!11oneone! wordz ^_^

• Apocrypha: Local editor discovered 1,380 lost subheadings in ancient Signpost scrolls. And what he found was shocking.

• Humour: Guess the joke contest

• BJAODN: Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:58, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-02

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

Recent changes

• mediawiki2latex is a tool that converts wiki content into the formats of LaTeX, PDF, ODT, and EPUB. The code now runs many times faster due to recent improvements. There is also an optional Docker container you can install on your local machine.
• The way that Random pages are selected has been updated. This will slowly reduce the problem of some pages having a lower chance of appearing. [409]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar). [410][411]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:18, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 January 2024

• From the editor: NINETEEN MORE YEARS! NINETEEN MORE YEARS!

• Special report: Public Domain Day 2024

• Technology report: Wikipedia: A Multigenerational Pursuit

• News and notes: In other news ... see ya in court!

• In focus: The long road of a featured article candidate

• In the media: What is plagiarism? Oklahoma Disneyland? Reaching a human being at Wikipedia?

• WikiProject report: WikiProjects Israel and Palestine

• Obituary: Anthony Bradbury

• Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2023

• Crossword: everybody gangsta till the style sheets start cascading

• Comix: Conflict resolution

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:50, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-03

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

Recent changes

• Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. [412]
• Gadgets and personal user scripts may now use JavaScript syntax introduced in ES6 (also known as "ES2015") and ES7 ("ES2016"). MediaWiki validates the source code to protect other site functionality from syntax errors, and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. Previously, Gadgets could use the requiresES6 option. This option is no longer needed and will be removed in the future. [413]
• Bot passwords and owner-only OAuth consumers can now be restricted to allow editing only specific pages. [414]
• You can now thank edits made by bots. [415]
• An update on the status of the Community Wishlist Survey for 2024 has been published. Please read and give your feedback.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar). [416][417]
• Starting on January 17, it will not be possible to login to Wikimedia wikis from some specific old versions of the Chrome browser (versions 51–66, released between 2016 and 2018). Additionally, users of iOS 12, or Safari on Mac OS 10.14, may need to login to each wiki separately. [418]
• The jquery.cookie module was deprecated and replaced with the mediawiki.cookie module last year. A script has now been run to replace any remaining uses, and this week the temporary alias will be removed. [419]

Future changes

• Wikimedia Deutschland is working to make reusing references easier. They are looking for people who are interested in participating in individual video calls for user research in January and February.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:11, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-04

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

Problems

• A bug in UploadWizard prevented linking to the userpage of the uploader when uploading. It has now been fixed. [420]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 January. It will be on all wikis from 25 January (calendar). [421][422]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:02, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 60

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 60, November – December 2023

• Three new partners
• Google Scholar integration
• How to track partner suggestions

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --13:36, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-05

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

Recent changes

• Starting Monday January 29, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they are looking for, even if this comment was moved elsewhere. This will affect all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. You can read more about this change on Diff or on Mediawiki.org. [423]
• There are some improvements to the CAPTCHA to make it harder for spam bots and scripts to bypass it. If you have feedback on this change, please comment on the task. Staff are monitoring metrics related to the CAPTCHA, as well as secondary metrics such as account creations and edit counts.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 January. It will be on all wikis from 1 February (calendar). [424][425]
• On February 1, a link will be added to the "Tools" menu to download a QR code that links to the page you are viewing. There will also be a new Special:QrCode page to create QR codes for any Wikimedia URL. This addresses the #19 most-voted wish from the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [426]
• Gadgets which only work in some skins have sometimes used the targets option to limit where you can use them. This will stop working this week. You should use the skins option instead. [427]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:29, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 January 2024

• News and notes: Wikipedian Osama Khalid celebrated his 30th birthday in jail

• Opinion: Until it happens to you

• Disinformation report: How paid editors squeeze you dry

• In the media: Katherine Maher new NPR CEO, go check Wikipedia, race in the race

• In focus: The long road of a featured article candidate, part 2

• Recent research: Croatian takeover was enabled by "lack of bureaucratic openness and rules constraining [admins]"

• Comix: We've all got to start somewhere

• Traffic report: DJ, gonna burn this goddamn house right down

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:14, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-06

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

Recent changes

• The mobile site history pages now use the same HTML as the desktop history pages. If you hear of any problems relating to mobile history usage please point them to the phabricator task.
• On most wikis, admins can now block users from making specific actions. These actions are: uploading files, creating new pages, moving (renaming) pages, and sending thanks. The goal of this feature is to allow admins to apply blocks that are adequate to the blocked users' activity. Learn more about "action blocks". [428][429]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 February. It will be on all wikis from 8 February (calendar). [430][431]
• Talk pages permalinks that included diacritics and non-Latin script were malfunctioning. This issue is fixed. [432]

Future changes

• 24 Wikipedias with Reference Tooltips as a default gadget are encouraged to remove that default flag. This would make Reference Previews the new default for reference popups, leading to a more consistent experience across wikis. For 46 Wikipedias with less than 4 interface admins, the change is already scheduled for mid-February, unless there are concerns. The older Reference Tooltips gadget will still remain usable and will override this feature, if it is available on your wiki and you have enabled it in your settings. [433][434]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:20, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 February 2024

• News and notes: Wikimedia Russia director declared "foreign agent" by Russian gov; EU prepares to pile on the papers

• Disinformation report: How low can the scammers go?

• Gallery: Before and After: Why you don't need to touch grass to dramatically improve images of flora and fauna

• In the media: Speaking in tongues, toeing the line, and dressing the part

• Serendipity: Is this guy the same as the one who was a Nazi?

• Traffic report: Griselda, Nikki, Carl, Jannik and two types of football

• Crossword: Our crossword to bear

• Comix: Strongly

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:36, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-07

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

Recent changes

• The WDQS Graph Split experiment is working and loaded onto 3 test servers. The team in charge is testing the split's impact and requires feedback from WDQS users through the UI or programmatically in different channels. [435][436][437] Users' feedback will validate the impact of various use cases and workflows around the Wikidata Query service. [438][439]

Problems

• There was a bug that affected the appearance of visited links when using mobile device to access wiki sites. It made the links appear black; this issue is fixed.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (calendar). [440][441]
• As work continues on the grid engine deprecation,[442] tools on the grid engine will be stopped starting on February 14th, 2024. If you have tools actively migrating you can ask for an extension so they are not stopped. [443]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 05:47, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-08

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

Recent changes

• If you have the "Email me when a page or a file on my watchlist is changed" option enabled, edits by bot accounts no longer trigger notification emails. Previously, only minor edits would not trigger the notification emails. [444]
• There are changes to how user and site scripts load for Vector 2022 on specific wikis. The changes impacted the following Wikis: all projects with Vector legacy as the default skin, Wikivoyage, and Wikibooks. Other wikis will be affected over the course of the next three months. Gadgets are not impacted. If you have been affected or want to minimize the impact on your project, see this ticket. Please coordinate and take action proactively.
• Newly auto-created accounts (the accounts you get when you visit a new wiki) now have the same local notification preferences as users who freshly register on that wiki. It is effected in four notification types listed in the task's description.
• The maximum file size when using Upload Wizard is now 5 GiB. [445]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (calendar). [446][447]

• Selected tools on the grid engine have been stopped as we prepare to shut down the grid on March 14th, 2024. The tool's code and data have not been deleted. If you are a maintainer and you want your tool re-enabled reach out to the team. Only tools that have asked for extension are still running on the grid.
• The CSS filter property can now be used in HTML style attributes in wikitext. [448]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 15:35, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-09

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

Recent changes

• The mobile visual editor is now the default editor for users who never edited before, at a small group of wikis. Research shows that users using this editor are slightly more successful publishing the edits they started, and slightly less successful publishing non-reverted edits. Users who defined the wikitext editor as their default on desktop will get the wikitext editor on mobile for their first edit on mobile as well. [449]
• The mw.config value wgGlobalGroups now only contains groups that are active in the wiki. Scripts no longer have to check whether the group is active on the wiki via an API request. A code example of the above is: if (/globalgroupname/.test(mw.config.get("wgGlobalGroups"))). [450]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 29 February (calendar). [451][452]

Future changes

• The right to change edit tags (changetags) will be removed from users in Wikimedia sites, keeping it by default for admins and bots only. Your community can ask to retain the old configuration on your wiki before this change happens. Please indicate in this ticket to keep it for your community before the end of March 2024.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:21, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 2 March 2024

• News and notes: Wikimedia enters US Supreme court hearings as "the dolphin inadvertently caught in the net"

• Recent research: Images on Wikipedia "amplify gender bias"

• In the media: The Scottish Parliament gets involved, a wikirace on live TV, and the Foundation's CTO goes on record

• Obituary: Vami_IV

• Traffic report: Supervalentinefilmbowlday

• WikiCup report: High-scoring WikiCup first round comes to a close

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:02, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-10

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

Recent changes

• The Special:Book page (as well as the associated "Create a book" functionality) provided by the old Collection extension has been removed from all Wikisource wikis, as it was broken. This does not affect the ability to download normal books, which is provided by the Wikisource extension. [453]
• Wikitech now uses the next-generation Parsoid wikitext parser by default to generate all pages in the Talk namespace. Report any problems on the Known Issues discussion page. You can use the ParserMigration extension to control the use of Parsoid; see the ParserMigration help documentation for more details.
• Maintenance on etherpad is completed. If you encounter any issues, please indicate in this ticket.
• Gadgets allow interface admins to create custom features with CSS and JavaScript. The Gadget and Gadget_definition namespaces and gadgets-definition-edit user right were reserved for an experiment in 2015, but were never used. These were visible on Special:Search and Special:ListGroupRights. The unused namespaces and user rights are now removed. No pages are moved, and no changes need to be made. [454]
• A usability improvement to the "Add a citation" in Wikipedia workflow has been made, the insert button was moved to the popup header. [455]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (calendar). [456][457]

Future changes

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [458]
• The HTML markup of headings and section edit links will be changed later this year to improve accessibility. See Heading HTML changes for details. The new markup will be the same as in the new Parsoid wikitext parser. You can test your gadget or stylesheet with the new markup if you add ?useparsoid=1 to your URL (more info) or turn on Parsoid read views in your user options (more info).

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:45, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 61

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 61, January – February 2024

• Bristol University Press and British Online Archives now available
• 1Lib1Ref results

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --16:32, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-11

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (calendar). [459][460]
• After consulting with various communities, the line height of the text on the Minerva skin will be increased to its previous value of 1.65. Different options for typography can also be set using the options in the menu, as needed. [461]
• The active link color in Minerva will be changed to provide more consistency with our other platforms and best practices. [462]
• Structured data on Commons will no longer ask whether you want to leave the page without saving. This will prevent the “information you’ve entered may not be saved” popups from appearing when no information have been entered. It will also make file pages on Commons load faster in certain cases. However, the popups will be hidden even if information has indeed been entered. If you accidentally close the page before saving the structured data you entered, that data will be lost. [463]

Future changes

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [464][465]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:02, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-12

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

Recent changes

• The notice "Language links are at the top of the page" that appears in the Vector 2022 skin main menu has been removed now that users have learned the new location of the Language switcher. [466]
• IP info feature displays data from Spur, an IP addresses database. Previously, the only data source for this feature was MaxMind. Now, IP info is more useful for patrollers. [467]
• The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. [468][469][470]
• Communities can now customize the default reasons for undeleting a page by creating MediaWiki:Undelete-comment-dropdown. [471]

Problems

• RevisionSlider is an interface to interactively browse a page's history. Users in right-to-left languages reported RevisionSlider reacting wrong to mouse clicks. This should be fixed now. [472]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 March. It will be on all wikis from 21 March (calendar). [473][474]
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [475][476]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:37, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-13

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

Recent changes

• An update was made on March 18th 2024 to how various projects load site, user JavaScript and CSS in Vector 2022 skin. A checklist is provided for site admins to follow.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 March. It will be on all wikis from 28 March (calendar). [477][478]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:54, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 March 2024

• Technology report: Millions of readers still seeing broken pages as "temporary" disabling of graph extension nears its second year

• Interview: Interview on Wikimedia Foundation fundraising and finance strategy

• Special report: 19-page PDF accuses Wikipedia of bias against Israel, suggests editors be forced to reveal their real names, and demands a new feature allowing people to view the history of Wikipedia articles

• Op-Ed: Wikipedia in the age of personality-driven knowledge

• Recent research: "Newcomer Homepage" feature mostly fails to boost new editors

• News and notes: Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee Charter ratified

• In the media: "For me it’s the autism": AARoad editors on the fork more traveled

• Traffic report: He rules over everything, on the land called planet Dune

• Humour: Letters from the editors

• Comix: Layout issue

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:40, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-14

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

Recent changes

• Users of the reading accessibility beta feature will notice that the default line height for the standard and large text options has changed. [479]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 April. It will be on all wikis from 4 April (calendar). [480][481]

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation has an annual plan. The annual plan decides what the Wikimedia Foundation will work on. You can now read the draft key results for the Product and Technology department. They are suggestions for what results the Foundation wants from big technical changes from July 2024 to June 2025. You can comment on the talk page.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 03:34, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-15

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

Recent changes

• Web browsers can use tools called extensions. There is now a Chrome extension called Citation Needed which you can use to see if an online statement is supported by a Wikipedia article. This is a small experiment to see if Wikipedia can be used this way. Because it is a small experiment, it can only be used in Chrome in English.
• A new Edit Recovery feature has been added to all wikis, available as a user preference. Once you enable it, your in-progress edits will be stored in your web browser, and if you accidentally close an editing window or your browser or computer crashes, you will be prompted to recover the unpublished text. Please leave any feedback on the project talk page. This was the #8 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
• Initial results of Edit check experiments have been published. Edit Check is now deployed as a default feature at the wikis that tested it. Let us know if you want your wiki to be part of the next deployment of Edit check. [482][483]
• Readers using the Minerva skin on mobile will notice there has been an improvement in the line height across all typography settings. [484]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 April. It will be on all wikis from 11 April (calendar). [485][486]
• New accounts and logged-out users will get the visual editor as their default editor on mobile. This deployment is made at all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. [487]

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:35, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-16

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

Problems

• Between 2 April and 8 April, on wikis using Flagged Revisions, the "Reverted" tag was not applied to undone edits. In addition, page moves, protections and imports were not autoreviewed. This problem is now fixed. [488][489]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 April. It will be on all wikis from 18 April (calendar). [490][491]
• Default category sort keys will now affect categories added by templates placed in footnotes. Previously footnotes used the page title as the default sort key even if a different default sort key was specified (category-specific sort keys already worked). [492]
• A new variable page_last_edit_age will be added to abuse filters. It tells how many seconds ago the last edit to a page was made. [493]

Future changes

• Volunteer developers are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. Learn more.
• Four database fields will be removed from database replicas (including Quarry). This affects only the abuse_filter and abuse_filter_history tables. Some queries might need to be updated. [494]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:27, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-17

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

Recent changes

• Starting this week, newcomers editing Wikipedia will be encouraged to try structured tasks. Structured tasks have been shown to improve newcomer activation and retention. [495]
• You can nominate your favorite tools for the fifth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations will be open until May 10.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 April. It will be on all wikis from 25 April (calendar). [496][497]

Future changes

• This is the last warning that by the end of May 2024 the Vector 2022 skin will no longer share site and user scripts/styles with old Vector. For user-scripts that you want to keep using on Vector 2022, copy the contents of Special:MyPage/vector.js to Special:MyPage/vector-2022.js. There are more technical details available. Interface administrators who foresee this leading to lots of technical support questions may wish to send a mass message to your community, as was done on French Wikipedia. [498]

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:25, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 62

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 62, March – April 2024

• IEEE and Haaretz now available
• Let's Connect Clinics about The Wikipedia Library
• Spotlight and Wikipedia Library tips

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --11:02, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Growth News, April 2024

The Growth team will now send quarterly reports to keep you in the loop. Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work.

If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.

Community Configuration

Growth features are currently configurable at Special:EditGrowthConfig. This quarter we are working on making Community Configuration accessible for other MediaWiki developers while also moving Growth feature configuration to the new CommunityConfiguration extension.

An early version of Community Configuration can be tested at Spanish Beta Wikipedia. We plan to release the new Community Configuration extension to pilot wikis (Arabic and Spanish Wikipedia) in early May, 2024. The first non-Growth team feature to utilize Community Configuration will be Automoderator.

In parallel with the development, the Growth team will propose Community Configuration usage guidelines, Community Configuration design guidelines, and provide technical documentation.

Experiment Results

Add a Image experiment analysis results

The Growth team conducted an experiment to assess the impact of the “Add an Image” structured task on the Newcomer Homepage's "Suggested Edits" module. This analysis finds that the Add an Image structured task leads to an increase in newcomer participation on the mobile web platform, particularly by making constructive (non-reverted) article edits:

• The likelihood that mobile web newcomers make their first article edit (+17.0% over baseline)
• The likelihood that they are retained as newcomers (+24.3% over baseline)
• The number of edits they make during their first two weeks on the wiki (+21.8% over baseline)
• A lower probability of the newcomers' edits will be reverted (-3.3% over baseline).

Personalized praise experiment results

This feature was developed for Mentors as part of the Growth team's Positive Reinforcement project. When A/B testing on Spanish Wikipedia, we found no significant impact on retention, but we found a significant positive impact on newcomer productivity. However, we concluded that the results weren’t positive enough to justify the time investment from Mentors. We plan to discuss this feature with our pilot wikis, and consider further improvements before scaling this feature further. Meanwhile, communities willing to test the feature can ask to have it deployed. (T361763)

English donors encouraged to try editing

As in previous years, donors were directed to a Thank you page after donation (example). However, this year we tested a new “Try editing Wikipedia,” call to action on the Thank You page. This call to action linked to a unique account creation page. From this account creation page we were able to track Registrations and Activation (editing for the first time). During the English banner campaign, the Donor Thank you page led to 4,398 new accounts, and 441 of those accounts went on to constructively edit within 24 hours. (T352900)

Future work

Annual Plan

The Growth team and the Editing team will work on the WE1.2 Key Result in the coming fiscal year. We will start initial discussions with communities soon to help finalize our plans. (T361657)

Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module

We plan to A/B test adding a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We are early in the planning phase of this project that will take place first at our pilot wikis and wikis volunteering. We welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at our project talk page.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:55, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 April 2024

• In the media: Censorship and wikiwashing looming over RuWiki, edit wars over San Francisco politics, and another wikirace on live TV

• News and notes: A sigh of relief for open access as Italy makes a slight U-turn on their cultural heritage reproduction law

• WikiConference report: WikiConference North America 2023 in Toronto recap

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Newspapers (Not WP:NOTNEWS)

• Recent research: New survey of over 100,000 Wikipedia users

• Traffic report: O.J., cricket and a three body problem

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:49, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-18

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

Recent changes

Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.

• The appearance of talk pages changed for the following wikis: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia. These wikis participated to a test, where 50% of users got the new design, for one year. As this test gave positive results, the new design is deployed on these wikis as the default design. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at all wikis in the coming weeks. [499]
• Seven new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Betawi (w:bew:) [500]
  • a Wikipedia in Kusaal (w:kus:) [501]
  • a Wikipedia in Igala (w:igl:) [502]
  • a Wiktionary in Karakalpak (wikt:kaa:) [503]
  • a Wikisource in Burmese (s:my:) [504]
  • a Wikisource in Malay (s:ms:) [505]
  • a Wikisource in Georgian (s:ka:) [506]
• You can now watch message groups/projects on Translatewiki.net. Initially, this feature will notify you of added or deleted messages in these groups. [507]
• Dark mode is now available on all wikis, on mobile web for logged-in users who opt into the advanced mode. This is the early release of the feature. Technical editors are invited to check for accessibility issues on wikis. See more detailed guidelines.

Problems

• Kartographer maps can use an alternative visual style without labels, by using mapstyle="osm". This wasn't working in previews, creating the wrong impression that it wasn't supported. This has now been fixed. [508]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 May. It will be on all wikis from 2 May (calendar). [509][510]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 03:31, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-19

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

Recent changes

Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.

• The appearance of talk pages changed for all wikis, except for Commons, Wikidata and most Wikipedias (a few have already received this design change). You can read the detail of the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at remaining wikis in the coming weeks. [511][512]
• Interface admins now have greater control over the styling of article components on mobile with the introduction of the SiteAdminHelper. More information on how styles can be disabled can be found at the extension's page. [513]
• Wikimedia Enterprise has added article body sections in JSON format and a curated short description field to the existing parsed Infobox. This expansion to the API is also available via Wikimedia Cloud Services. [514]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 May. It will be on all wikis from 9 May (calendar). [515][516]
• When you look at the Special:Log page, the first view is labelled "All public logs", but it only shows some logs. This label will now say "Main public logs". [517]

Future changes

• A new service will be built to replace Extension:Graph. Details can be found in the latest update regarding this extension.
• Starting May 21, English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia will get the possibility to activate "Add a link". This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to all Wikipedias. These communities can activate and configure the feature locally. [518]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 16:42, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-20

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

Recent changes

• On Wikisource there is a special page listing pages of works without corresponding scan images. Now you can use the new magic word __EXPECTWITHOUTSCANS__ to exclude certain pages (list of editions or translations of works) from that list. [519]
• If you use the user-preference "Show preview without reloading the page", then the template-page feature "Preview page with this template (what's this?)" will now also work without reloading the page. [520]
• Kartographer maps can now specify an alternative text via the alt= attribute. This is identical in usage to the alt= attribute in the image and gallery syntax. An exception for this feature is wikis like Wikivoyage where the miniature maps are interactive. [521]
• The old Guided Tour for the "New Filters for Edit Review" feature has been removed. It was created in 2017 to show people with older accounts how the interface had changed, and has now been seen by most of the intended people. [522]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 May. It will be on all wikis from 16 May (calendar). [523][524]
• The Special:Search results page will now use CSS flex attributes, for better accessibility, instead of a table. If you have a gadget or script that adjusts search results, you should update your script to the new HTML structure. [525]

Future changes

• In the Vector 2022 skin, main pages will be displayed at full width (like special pages). The goal is to keep the number of characters per line large enough. This is related to the coming changes to typography in Vector 2022. Learn more. [526]
• Two columns of the pagelinks database table (pl_namespace and pl_title) are being dropped soon. Users must use two columns of the new linktarget table instead (lt_namespace and lt_title). In your existing SQL queries:
  1. Replace JOIN pagelinks with JOIN linktarget and pl_ with lt_ in the ON statement
  2. Below that add JOIN pagelinks ON lt_id = pl_target_id
  • See phab:T222224 for technical reasoning. [527][528]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:56, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 16 May 2024

• News and notes: Democracy in action: multiple elections

• Special report: Will the new RfA reform come to the rescue of administrators?

• Arbitration report: Ruined temples for posterity to ponder over – arbitration from '22 to '24

• In the media: Deadnames on the French Wikipedia, and a duel between Russian wikis

• Op-Ed: Wikidata to split as sheer volume of information overloads infrastructure

• Comix: Generations

• Traffic report: Crawl out through the fallout, baby

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:58, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-21

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

Recent changes

• The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title. [529]
• New changes have been made to the UploadWizard in Wikimedia Commons: the overall layout has been improved, by following new styling and spacing for the form and its fields; the headers and helper text for each of the fields was changed; the Caption field is now a required field, and there is an option for users to copy their caption into the media description. [530][531]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 May. It will be on all wikis from 23 May (calendar). [532][533]
• The HTML used to render all headings is being changed to improve accessibility. It will change on 22 May in some skins (Timeless, Modern, CologneBlue, Nostalgia, and Monobook). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in all other skins. The developers are also considering the introduction of a Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:02, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-22

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

Recent changes

• Several bugs related to the latest updates to the UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons have been fixed. For more information, see T365107 and T365119.
• In March 2024 a new addPortlet API was added to allow gadgets to create new portlets (menus) in the skin. In certain skins this can be used to create dropdowns. Gadget developers are invited to try it and give feedback.
• Some CSS in the Minerva skin has been removed to enable easier community configuration. Interface editors should check the rendering on mobile devices for aspects related to the classes: .collapsible, .multicol, .reflist, .coordinates, .topicon. Further details are available on replacement CSS if it is needed.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 May. It will be on all wikis from 30 May (calendar). [534][535]
• When you visit a wiki where you don't yet have a local account, local rules such as edit filters can sometimes prevent your account from being created. Starting this week, MediaWiki takes your global rights into account when evaluating whether you can override such local rules. [536]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:13, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-23

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

Recent changes

• It is now possible for local administrators to add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without JavaScript. Documentation is available. [537]
• The message name for the definition of the tracking category of WikiHiero has changed from "MediaWiki:Wikhiero-usage-tracking-category" to "MediaWiki:Wikihiero-usage-tracking-category". [538]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Kadazandusun (w:dtp:) [539]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 June. It will be on all wikis from 6 June (calendar). [540][541]

Future changes

• Next week, on wikis with the Vector 2022 skin as the default, logged-out desktop users will be able to choose between different font sizes. The default font size will also be increased for them. This is to make Wikimedia projects easier to read. Learn more.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:32, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 8 June 2024

• News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation publishes its Form 990 for fiscal year 2022-2023

• Technology report: New Page Patrol receives a much-needed software upgrade

• Deletion report: The lore of Kalloor

• In the media: National cable networks get in on the action arguing about what the first sentence of a Wikipedia article ought to say

• News from the WMF: Progress on the plan — how the Wikimedia Foundation advanced on its Annual Plan goals during the first half of fiscal year 2023-2024

• Opinion: Public response to the editors of Settler Colonial Studies

• Recent research: ChatGPT did not kill Wikipedia, but might have reduced its growth

• Featured content: We didn't start the wiki

• Essay: No queerphobia

• Special report: RetractionBot is back to life!

• Traffic report: Chimps, Eurovision, and the return of the Baby Reindeer

• Comix: The Wikipediholic Family

• Humour: Wikipedia rattled by sophisticated cyberattack of schoolboy typing "balls" in infobox

• Concept: Palimpsestuous

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:27, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-24

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

Recent changes

• The software used to render SVG files has been updated to a new version, fixing many longstanding bugs in SVG rendering. [542]
• The HTML used to render all headings is being changed to improve accessibility. It was changed last week in some skins (Vector legacy and Minerva). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in Vector-2022. The developers are still considering the introduction of a Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.
• The HTML markup used for citations by Parsoid changed last week. In places where Parsoid previously added the mw-reference-text class, Parsoid now also adds the reference-text class for better compatibility with the legacy parser. More details are available. [543]

Problems

• There was a bug with the Content Translation interface that caused the tools menus to appear in the wrong location. This has now been fixed. [544]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 June. It will be on all wikis from 13 June (calendar). [545][546]
• The new version of MediaWiki includes another change to the HTML markup used for citations: Parsoid will now generate a <span class="mw-cite-backlink"> wrapper for both named and unnamed references for better compatibility with the legacy parser. Interface administrators should verify that gadgets that interact with citations are compatible with the new markup. More details are available. [547]
• On multilingual wikis that use the <translate> system, there is a feature that shows potentially-outdated translations with a pink background until they are updated or confirmed. From this week, confirming translations will be logged, and there is a new user-right that can be required for confirming translations if the community requests it. [548]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:18, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-25

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

Recent changes

• People who attempt to add an external link in the visual editor will now receive immediate feedback if they attempt to link to a domain that a project has decided to block. Please see Edit check for more details. [549]
• The new Community Configuration extension is available on Test Wikipedia. This extension allows communities to customize specific features to meet their local needs. Currently only Growth features are configurable, but the extension will support other Community Configuration use cases in the future. [550][551]
• The dark mode beta feature is now available on category and help pages, as well as more special pages. There may be contrast issues. Please report bugs on the project talk page. [552]

Problems

• Cloud Services tools were not available for 25 minutes last week. This was caused by a faulty hardware cable in the data center. [553]
• Last week, styling updates were made to the Vector 2022 skin. This caused unforeseen issues with templates, hatnotes, and images. Changes to templates and hatnotes were reverted. Most issues with images were fixed. If you still see any, report them here. [554]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 June. It will be on all wikis from 20 June (calendar). [555][556]
• Starting June 18, the Reference Edit Check will be deployed to a new set of Wikipedias. This feature is intended to help newcomers and to assist edit-patrollers by inviting people who are adding new content to a Wikipedia article to add a citation when they do not do so themselves. During a test at 11 wikis, the number of citations added more than doubled when Reference Check was shown to people. Reference Check is community configurable. [557]
• Mailing lists will be unavailable for roughly two hours on Tuesday 10:00–12:00 UTC. This is to enable migration to a new server and upgrade its software. [558]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:46, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-26

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

Recent changes

• Editors will notice that there have been some changes to the background color of text in the diff view, and the color of the byte-change numbers, last week. These changes are intended to make text more readable in both light mode and dark mode, and are part of a larger effort to increase accessibility. You can share your comments or questions on the project talkpage. [559]
• The text colors that are used for visited-links, hovered-links, and active-links, were also slightly changed last week to improve their accessibility in both light mode and dark mode. [560]

Problems

• You can copy permanent links to talk page comments by clicking on a comment's timestamp. This feature did not always work when the topic title was very long and the link was used as a wikitext link. This has been fixed. Thanks to Lofhi for submitting the bug. [561]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 June. It will be on all wikis from 27 June (calendar). [562][563]
• Starting 26 June, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link at English Wikipedia, making this feature available for you to use at all wikis. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they were linked to, even if this comment has since been moved elsewhere. You can read more about this feature on Diff or on Mediawiki.org. [564]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:30, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-27

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

Recent changes

• Over the next three weeks, dark mode will become available for all users, both logged-in and logged-out, starting with the mobile web version. This fulfils one of the top-requested community wishes, and improves low-contrast reading and usage in low-light settings. As part of these changes, dark mode will also work on User-pages and Portals. There is more information in the latest Web team update. [565]
• Logged-in users can now set global preferences for the text-size and dark-mode, thanks to a combined effort across Foundation teams. This allows Wikimedians using multiple wikis to set up a consistent reading experience easily, for example by switching between light and dark mode only once for all wikis. [566]
• If you use a very old web browser some features might not work on the Wikimedia wikis. This affects Internet Explorer 11 and versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari older than 2016. This change makes it possible to use new CSS features and to send less code to all readers. [567][568]
• Wikipedia Admins can customize local wiki configuration options easily using Community Configuration. Community Configuration was created to allow communities to customize how some features work, because each language wiki has unique needs. At the moment, admins can configure Growth features on their home wikis, in order to better recruit and retain new editors. More options will be provided in the coming months. [569]
• Editors interested in language issues that are related to Unicode standards, can now discuss those topics at a new conversation space in MediaWiki.org. The Wikimedia Foundation is now a member of the Unicode Consortium, and the coordination group can collaboratively review the issues discussed and, where appropriate, bring them to the attention of the Unicode Consortium.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Mandailing (w:btm:) [570]

Problems

• Editors can once again click on links within the visual editor's citation-preview, thanks to a bug fix by the Editing Team. [571]

Future changes

• Please help us to improve Tech News by taking this short survey. The goal is to better meet the needs of the various types of people who read Tech News. The survey will be open for 2 weeks. The survey is covered by this privacy statement. Some translations are available.

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:57, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 4 July 2024

• News and notes: WMF board elections and fundraising updates

• Special report: Wikimedia Movement Charter ratification vote underway, new Council may surpass power of Board

• In focus: How the Russian Wikipedia keeps it clean despite having just a couple dozen administrators

• Discussion report: Wikipedians are hung up on the meaning of Madonna

• In the media: War and information in war and politics

• Sister projects: On editing Wikisource

• Obituary: Hanif Al Husaini, Salazarov, Hyacinth, and PirjanovNurlan

• Opinion: Etika: a Pop Culture Champion

• Gallery: Spokane Willy's photos

• Op-Ed: Why you should not vote in the 2024 WMF BoT elections

• Crossword: On a day of independence, beat crosswords into crossploughshares

• Humour: A joke

• Cobwebs: Counting to a billion — manuscripts don't burn

• Recent research: Is Wikipedia Politically Biased? Perhaps

• Traffic report: Talking about you and me, and the games people play

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:39, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-28

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

Recent changes

• At the Wikimedia Foundation a new task force was formed to replace the disabled Graph with more secure, easy to use, and extensible Chart. You can subscribe to the newsletter to get notified about new project updates and other news about Chart.
• The CampaignEvents extension is now available on Meta-wiki, Igbo Wikipedia, and Swahili Wikipedia, and can be requested on your wiki. This extension helps in managing and making events more visible, giving Event organizers the ability to use tools like the Event registration tool. To learn more about the deployment status and how to request this extension for your wiki, visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-wiki.
• Editors using the iOS Wikipedia app who have more than 50 edits can now use the Add an Image feature. This feature presents opportunities for small but useful contributions to Wikipedia.
• Thank you to all of the authors who have contributed to MediaWiki Core. As a result of these contributions, the percentage of authors contributing more than 5 patches has increased by 25% since last year, which helps ensure the sustainability of the platform for the Wikimedia projects.

Problems

• A problem with the color of the talkpage tabs always showing as blue, even for non-existent pages which should have been red, affecting the Vector 2022 skin, has been fixed.

Future changes

• The Trust and Safety Product team wants to introduce temporary accounts with as little disruption to tools and workflows as possible. Volunteer developers, including gadget and user-script maintainers, are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. The team has created documentation explaining how to do the update. Learn more.

Tech News survey

• Please help us to improve Tech News by taking this short survey. The goal is to better meet the needs of the various types of people who read Tech News. The survey will be open for 1 more week. The survey is covered by this privacy statement. Some translations are available.

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MediaWiki message delivery 21:29, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-29

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

Tech News survey

• Please help us to improve Tech News by taking this short survey. The goal is to better meet the needs of the various types of people who read Tech News. The survey will be open for 3 more days. The survey is covered by this privacy statement. Some translations are available.

Recent changes

• Wikimedia developers can now officially continue to use both Gerrit and GitLab, due to a June 24 decision by the Wikimedia Foundation to support software development on both platforms. Gerrit and GitLab are both code repositories used by developers to write, review, and deploy the software code that supports the MediaWiki software that the wiki projects are built on, as well as the tools used by editors to create and improve content. This decision will safeguard the productivity of our developers and prevent problems in code review from affecting our users. More details are available in the Migration status page.
• The Wikimedia Foundation seeks applicants for the Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). This group will bring technical contributors and Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform. Council members will evaluate and consult on the movement's product and technical activities, so that we develop multi-generational projects. We are looking for a range of technical contributors across the globe, from a variety of Wikimedia projects. Please apply here by August 10.
• Editors with rollback user-rights who use the Wikipedia App for Android can use the new Edit Patrol features. These features include a new feed of Recent Changes, related links such as Undo and Rollback, and the ability to create and save a personal library of user talk messages to use while patrolling. If your wiki wants to make these features available to users who do not have rollback rights but have reached a certain edit threshold, you can contact the team. You can read more about this project on Diff blog.
• Editors who have access to The Wikipedia Library can once again use non-open access content in SpringerLinks, after the Foundation contacted them to restore access. You can read more about this and 21 other community-submitted tasks that were completed last week.

Changes later this week

• This week, dark mode will be available on a number of Wikipedias, both desktop and mobile, for logged-in and logged-out users. Interface admins and user script maintainers are encouraged to check gadgets and user scripts in the dark mode, to find any hard-coded colors and fix them. There are some recommendations for dark mode compatibility to help.

Future changes

• Next week, functionaries, volunteers maintaining tools, and software development teams are invited to test the temporary accounts feature on testwiki. Temporary accounts is a feature that will help improve privacy on the wikis. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page. [572]
• Editors who upload files cross-wiki, or teach other people how to do so, may wish to join a Wikimedia Commons discussion. The Commons community is discussing limiting who can upload files through the cross-wiki upload/Upload dialog feature to users auto-confirmed on Wikimedia Commons. This is due to the large amount of copyright violations uploaded this way. There is a short summary at Commons:Cross-wiki upload and discussion at Commons:Village Pump.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. You can also get other news from the Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin.

MediaWiki message delivery 01:29, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 63

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 63, May – June 2024

• One new partner
• 1Lib1Ref
• Spotlight: References check

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --12:15, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 July 2024

• Discussion report: Internet users flock to Wikipedia to debate its image policy over Trump raised-fist photo

• News and notes: Wikimedia community votes to ratify Movement Charter; Wikimedia Foundation opposes ratification

• News from the WMF: Wikimedia Foundation Board resolution and vote on the proposed Movement Charter

• Essay: Reflections on editing and obsession

• In the media: What's on Putin's fork, the court's docket, and in Harrison's book?

• Obituary: JamesR

• Crossword: Vaguely bird-shaped crossword

• Humour: Joe Biden withdraws RfA, Donald Trump selects co-nom

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:31, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-30

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

Feature News

• Stewards can now globally block accounts. Before the change only IP addresses and IP ranges could be blocked globally. Global account blocks are useful when the blocked user should not be logged out. Global locks (a similar tool logging the user out of their account) are unaffected by this change. The new global account block feature is related to the Temporary Accounts project, which is a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors that are no longer made public.
• Later this week, Wikimedia site users will notice that the Interface of FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") is improved and consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface and Wikimedia's design system. The FlaggedRevs interface experience on mobile and Minerva skin was inconsistent before it was fixed and ported to Codex by the WMF Growth team and some volunteers. [573]
• Wikimedia site users can now submit account vanishing requests via GlobalVanishRequest. This feature is used when a contributor wishes to stop editing forever. It helps you hide your past association and edit to protect your privacy. Once processed, the account will be locked and renamed. [574]
• Have you tried monitoring and addressing vandalism in Wikipedia using your phone? A Diff blog post on Patrolling features in the Mobile App highlights some of the new capabilities of the feature, including swiping through a feed of recent changes and a personal library of user talk messages for use when patrolling from your phone.
• Wikimedia contributors and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) organisations can now learn and measure the impact Wikimedia Commons is having towards creating quality encyclopedic content using the Commons Impact Metrics analytics dashboard. The dashboard offers organizations analytics on things like monthly edits in a category, the most viewed files, and which Wikimedia articles are using Commons images. As a result of these new data dumps, GLAM organisation can more reliably measure their return on investment for programs bringing content into the digital Commons. [575]

Project Updates

• Come share your ideas for improving the wikis on the newly reopened Community Wishlist. The Community Wishlist is Wikimedia’s forum for volunteers to share ideas (called wishes) to improve how the wikis work. The new version of the wishlist is always open, works with both wikitext and Visual Editor, and allows wishes in any language.

Learn more

• Have you ever wondered how Wikimedia software works across over 300 languages? This is 253 languages more than the Google Chrome interface, and it's no accident. The Language and Product Localization Team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports your work by adapting all the tools and interfaces in the MediaWiki software so that contributors in our movement who translate pages and strings can translate them and have the sites in all languages. Read more about the team and their upcoming work on Diff.
• How can Wikimedia build innovative and experimental products while maintaining such heavily used websites? A recent blog post by WMF staff Johan Jönsson highlights the work of the WMF Future Audience initiative, where the goal is not to build polished products but test out new ideas, such as a ChatGPT plugin and Add a Fact, to help take Wikimedia into the future.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. You can also get other news from the Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin.

MediaWiki message delivery 00:02, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-31

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

Feature news

• Editors using the Visual Editor in languages that use non-Latin characters for numbers, such as Hindi, Manipuri and Eastern Arabic, may notice some changes in the formatting of reference numbers. This is a side effect of preparing a new sub-referencing feature, and will also allow fixing some general numbering issues in Visual Editor. If you notice any related problems on your wiki, please share details at the project talkpage.

Bugs status

• Some logged-in editors were briefly unable to edit or load pages last week. These errors were mainly due to the addition of new linter rules which led to caching problems. Fixes have been applied and investigations are continuing.
• Editors can use the IP Information tool to get information about IP addresses. This tool is available as a Beta Feature in your preferences. The tool was not available for a few days last week, but is now working again. Thank you to Shizhao for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Project updates

• There are new features and improvements to Phabricator from the Release Engineering and Collaboration Services teams, and some volunteers, including: the search systems, the new task creation system, the login systems, the translation setup which has resulted in support for more languages (thanks to Pppery), and fixes for many edge-case errors. You can read details about these and other improvements in this summary.
• There is an update on the Charts project. The team has decided which visualization library to use, which chart types to start focusing on, and where to store chart definitions.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in Czech (voy:cs:) [576]

Learn more

• There is a new Wikimedia Foundation data center in São Paulo, Brazil which helps to reduce load times.
• There is new user research on problems with the process of uploading images.
• Commons Impact Metrics are now available via data dumps and API.
• The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:08, 29 July 2024 (UTC)

Growth News, July 2024

Community Configuration

The Growth team released Community Configuration at all Wikipedias. You can access it at Special:CommunityConfiguration.

This new special page replaces Special:EditGrowthConfig. For now, all Growth features can be configured using Community Configuration. Configuration for AutoModerator (T365046) and other features will be available in the future.

You can help with translations. The interface translation is done at Translatewiki.net. You can also help translate the documentation.

If you attend Wikimania 2024, please join us for the session about Community configuration's future!

Current work

Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module

We will add a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We have released a simple version available to beta wikis. We will conduct an A/B test at our pilot wikis using the new Metrics Platform. We still welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at our project talk page.

Future work

Increase constructive activation on mobile

As part of the Growth team 2024/2025 Annual Plan, the Growth team will explore various ways to increase the percentage of newcomers who successfully start editing.

Editing a Wikipedia page requires too much context and patience. It means many trial and error for newcomers to contribute, meaning a steeper learning curve and potential discouraging reverts. To support a new generation of volunteers, we will increase the number and availability of smaller, structured, and more task-specific editing workflows (E.g. Edit Check and Structured Tasks). The Growth team will primarily focus on Structured Tasks, while working closely with the Editing team to ensure our work integrates well with Edit Check.

Stay informed

Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work. If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:08, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-32

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

Feature news

• Two new parser functions will be available this week: {{#dir}} and {{#bcp47}}. These will reduce the need for Template:Dir and Template:BCP47 on Commons and allow us to drop 100 million rows from the "what links here" database. Editors at any wiki that use these templates, can help by replacing the templates with these new functions. The templates at Commons will be updated during the Hackathon at Wikimania. [577][578]
• Communities can request the activation of the visual editor on entire namespaces where discussions sometimes happen (for instance Wikipedia: or Wikisource: namespaces) if they understand the known limitations. For discussions, users can already use DiscussionTools in these namespaces.
• The tracking category "Pages using Timeline" has been renamed to "Pages using the EasyTimeline extension" in TranslateWiki. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match.

Project updates

• Editors who help to organize WikiProjects and similar on-wiki collaborations, are invited to share ideas and examples of successful collaborations with the Campaigns and Programs teams. You can fill out a brief survey or share your thoughts on the talkpage. The teams are particularly looking for details about successful collaborations on non-English wikis.
• The new parser is being rolled out on Wikivoyage wikis over the next few months. The English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikivoyage were switched to Parsoid last week. For more information, see Parsoid/Parser Unification.

Learn more

• There will be more than 200 sessions at Wikimania this week. Here is a summary of some of the key sessions related to the product and technology area.
• The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available.
• The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New design previews for Translatable pages; Updates about MinT for Wiki Readers; the release of Translation dumps; and more.
• The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available.
• The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:41, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-32

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

Feature news

• Two new parser functions will be available this week: {{#dir}} and {{#bcp47}}. These will reduce the need for Template:Dir and Template:BCP47 on Commons and allow us to drop 100 million rows from the "what links here" database. Editors at any wiki that use these templates, can help by replacing the templates with these new functions. The templates at Commons will be updated during the Hackathon at Wikimania. [579][580]
• Communities can request the activation of the visual editor on entire namespaces where discussions sometimes happen (for instance Wikipedia: or Wikisource: namespaces) if they understand the known limitations. For discussions, users can already use DiscussionTools in these namespaces.
• The tracking category "Pages using Timeline" has been renamed to "Pages using the EasyTimeline extension" in TranslateWiki. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match.

Project updates

• Editors who help to organize WikiProjects and similar on-wiki collaborations, are invited to share ideas and examples of successful collaborations with the Campaigns and Programs teams. You can fill out a brief survey or share your thoughts on the talkpage. The teams are particularly looking for details about successful collaborations on non-English wikis.
• The new parser is being rolled out on Wikivoyage wikis over the next few months. The English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikivoyage were switched to Parsoid last week. For more information, see Parsoid/Parser Unification.

Learn more

• There will be more than 200 sessions at Wikimania this week. Here is a summary of some of the key sessions related to the product and technology area.
• The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available.
• The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New design previews for Translatable pages; Updates about MinT for Wiki Readers; the release of Translation dumps; and more.
• The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available.
• The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:42, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-33

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

Feature news

• AbuseFilter editors and maintainers can now make a CAPTCHA show if a filter matches an edit. This allows communities to quickly respond to spamming by automated bots. [581]
• Stewards can now specify if global blocks should prevent account creation. Before this change by the Trust and Safety Product Team, all global blocks would prevent account creation. This will allow stewards to reduce the unintended side-effects of global blocks on IP addresses.

Project updates

• Nominations are open on Wikitech for new members to refresh the Toolforge standards committee. The committee oversees the Toolforge Right to fork policy and Abandoned tool policy among other duties. Nominations will remain open until at least 2024-08-26.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in West Coast Bajau (w:bdr:) [582]

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:19, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 August 2024

• In the media: Portland pol profile paid for from public purse

• Recent research: STORM: AI agents role-play as "Wikipedia editors" and "experts" to create Wikipedia-like articles, a more sophisticated effort than previous auto-generation systems

• In focus: Twitter marks the spot

• News and notes: Another Wikimania has concluded.

• Special report: Nano or just nothing: Will nano go nuclear?

• Opinion: HouseBlaster's RfA debriefing

• Traffic report: Ball games, movies, elections, but nothing really weird

• Humour: I'm proud to be a template

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:49, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-34

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

Feature news

• Editors who want to re-use references but with different details such as page numbers, will be able to do so by the end of 2024, using a new sub-referencing feature. You can read more about the project and how to test the prototype.
• Editors using tracking categories to identify which pages use specific extensions may notice that six of the categories have been renamed to make them more easily understood and consistent. These categories are automatically added to pages that use specialized MediaWiki extensions. The affected names are for: DynamicPageList, Kartographer, Phonos, RSS, Score, WikiHiero. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match. Thanks to Pppery for these improvements. [583]
• Technical volunteers who edit modules and want to get a list of the categories used on a page, can now do so using the categories property of mw.title objects. This enables wikis to configure workflows such as category-specific edit notices. Thanks to SD001 for these improvements. [584][585]

Bugs status

• Your help is needed to check if any pages need to be moved or deleted. A maintenance script was run to clean up unreachable pages (due to Unicode issues or introduction of new namespaces/namespace aliases). The script tried to find appropriate names for the pages (e.g. by following the Unicode changes or by moving pages whose titles on Wikipedia start with Talk:WP: so that their titles start with Wikipedia talk:), but it may have failed for some pages, and moved them to Special:PrefixIndex/T195546/ instead. Your community should check if any pages are listed there, and move them to the correct titles, or delete them if they are no longer needed. A full log (including pages for which appropriate names could be found) is available in phab:P67388.
• Editors who volunteer as mentors to newcomers on their wiki are once again able to access lists of potential mentees who they can connect with to offer help and guidance. This functionality was restored thanks to a bug fix. Thank you to Mbch331 for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 18 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Project updates

• The application deadline for the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has been extended to September 16. Members will help by providing advice to Foundation Product and Technology leadership on short and long term plans, on complex strategic problems, and help to get feedback from more contributors and technical communities. Selected members should expect to spend roughly 5 hours per month for the Council, during the one year pilot. Please consider applying, and spread the word to volunteers you think would make a positive contribution to the committee.

Learn more

• The 2024 Coolest Tool Awards were awarded at Wikimania, in seven categories. For example, one award went to the ISA Tool, used for adding structured data to files on Commons, which was recently improved during the Wiki Mentor Africa Hackathon. You can see video demonstrations of each tool at the awards page. Congratulations to this year's recipients, and thank you to all tool creators and maintainers.
• The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available, and includes some highlights from Wikimania, an upcoming Language community meeting, and other news from the movement.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:50, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-35

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

Feature news

• Administrators can now test the temporary accounts feature on test2wiki. This was done to allow cross-wiki testing of temporary accounts, for when temporary accounts switch between projects. The feature was enabled on testwiki a few weeks ago. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Temporary Accounts is a project to create a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors which are no longer made public. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page.
• Later this week, editors at wikis that use FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") may notice that the indicators at the top of articles have changed. This change makes the system more consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface. [586]

Bugs status

• Editors who use the 2010 wikitext editor, and use the Character Insert buttons, will no longer experience problems with the buttons adding content into the edit-summary instead of the edit-window. You can read more about that, and 26 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Project updates

• Please review and vote on Focus Areas, which are groups of wishes that share a problem. Focus Areas were created for the newly reopened Community Wishlist, which is now open year-round for submissions. The first batch of focus areas are specific to moderator workflows, around welcoming newcomers, minimizing repetitive tasks, and prioritizing tasks. Once volunteers have reviewed and voted on focus areas, the Foundation will then review and select focus areas for prioritization.
• Do you have a project and are willing to provide a three (3) month mentorship for an intern? Outreachy is a twice a year program for people to participate in a paid internship that will start in December 2024 and end in early March 2025, and they need mentors and projects to work on. Projects can be focused on coding or non-coding (design, documentation, translation, research). See the Outreachy page for more details, and a list of past projects since 2013.

Learn more

• If you're curious about the product and technology improvements made by the Wikimedia Foundation last year, read this recent highlights summary on Diff.
• To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
  • Community Configuration - Shaping On-Wiki Functionality Together (55 mins) - about the Community Configuration project.
  • Future of MediaWiki. A sustainable platform to support a collaborative user base and billions of page views (30 mins) - an overview for both technical and non technical audiences, covering some of the challenges and open questions, related to the platform evolution, stewardship and developer experiences research.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:29, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-36

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

Weekly highlight

• Editors and volunteer developers interested in data visualisation can now test the new software for charts. Its early version is available on beta Commons and beta Wikipedia. This is an important milestone before making charts available on regular wikis. You can read more about this project update and help to test the charts.

Feature news

• Editors who use the Special:UnusedTemplates page can now filter out pages which are expected to be there permanently, such as sandboxes, test-cases, and templates that are always substituted. Editors can add the new magic word __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ to a template page to hide it from the listing. Thanks to Sophivorus and DannyS712 for these improvements. [587]
• Editors who use the New Topic tool on discussion pages, will now be reminded to add a section header, which should help reduce the quantity of newcomers who add sections without a header. You can read more about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
• Last week, some Toolforge tools had occasional connection problems. The cause is still being investigated, but the problems have been resolved for now. [588]
• Translation administrators at multilingual wikis, when editing multiple translation units, can now easily mark which changes require updates to the translation. This is possible with the new dropdown menu.

Project updates

• A new draft text of a policy discussing the use of Wikimedia's APIs has been published on Meta-Wiki. The draft text does not reflect a change in policy around the APIs; instead, it is an attempt to codify existing API rules. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome on the proposed update’s talk page until September 13 or until those discussions have concluded.

Learn more

• To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
  • Charts, the successor of Graphs - A secure and extensible tool for data visualization (25 mins) – about the above-mentioned Charts project.
  • State of Language Technology and Onboarding at Wikimedia (90 mins) – about some of the language tools that support Wikimedia sites, such as Content/Section Translation, MinT, and LanguageConverter; also the current state and future of languages onboarding. [589]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:04, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 4 September 2024

• News and notes: WikiCup enters final round, MCDC wraps up activities, 17-year-old hoax article unmasked

• In the media: AI is not playing games anymore. Is Wikipedia ready?

• Recent research: Simulated Wikipedia seen as less credible than ChatGPT and Alexa in experiment

• News from the WMF: Meet the 12 candidates running in the WMF Board of Trustees election

• Wikimania: A month after Wikimania 2024

• Serendipity: What it's like to be Wikimedian of the Year

• Traffic report: After the gold rush

• Humour: Local man halfway through rude reply no longer able to recall why he hates other editor

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:28, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-37

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

Feature news

• Starting this week, the standard syntax highlighter will receive new colors that make them compatible in dark mode. This is the first of many changes to come as part of a major upgrade to syntax highlighting. You can learn more about what's to come on the help page. [590][591]
• Editors of wikis using Wikidata will now be notified of only relevant Wikidata changes in their watchlist. This is because the Lua functions entity:getSitelink() and mw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid) will have their logic unified for tracking different aspects of sitelinks to reduce junk notifications from inconsistent sitelinks tracking. [592]

Project updates

• Users of all Wikis will have access to Wikimedia sites as read-only for a few minutes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [593]
• Contributors of 11 Wikipedias, including English will have a new MOS namespace added to their Wikipedias. This improvement ensures that links beginning with MOS: (usually shortcuts to the Manual of Style) are not broken by Mooré Wikipedia (language code mos). [594]

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MediaWiki message delivery 18:49, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 64

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 64, July – August 2024

• The Hindu Group joins The Wikipedia Library
• Wikimania presentation
• New user script for easily searching The Wikipedia Library

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --16:33, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-38

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

Improvements and Maintenance

• Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes.
• The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements. [595]
• References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed. [596]
• It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order. [597]
• Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases from both Quarry and Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
• Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes mw-message-box need to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newer cdx-message group of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation, and an example update), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best. [598]

Technical project updates

• Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible. [599]

Tech in depth

• The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
• To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
  • Hackathon Showcase (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available in the Phabricator task.
  • Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:59, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-39

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

Weekly highlight

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday September 25 at 15:00 UTC. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.

Updates for editors

A screenshot of the interface for the Alt Text suggested-edit feature

• Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see the Alt Text suggested-edit experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback on the discussion page.
• The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. The most noticeable changes for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes.
• It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within <syntaxhighlight> tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax {{…}} are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [600]
• Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [601][602]
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• From Wikimedia Enterprise:
  • The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained on the project's blog post. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too.
  • The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.

In depth

• The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of the WDQS Graph Split project, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly" and "main" subgraphs of Wikidata. The query.wikidata.org endpoint will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please see the announcement on Wikidata.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:33, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 September 2024

• In the media: Courts order Wikipedia to give up names of editors, legal strain anticipated from "online safety laws"

• Community view: Indian courts order Wikipedia to take down name of crime victim, editors strive towards consensus

• Serendipity: A Wikipedian at the 2024 Paralympics

• Opinion: asilvering's RfA debriefing

• News and notes: Are you ready for admin elections?

• Gallery: Are Luddaites defending the English Wikipedia?

• Recent research: Article-writing AI is less "prone to reasoning errors (or hallucinations)" than human Wikipedia editors

• Traffic report: Jump in the line, rock your body in time

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:10, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-40

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

Updates for editors

• Readers of 42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use the night-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. The recommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
• Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding ?veaction=editsource to the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set in your preferences. [603]
• For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin. Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences. [604]
• The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki. Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progress on Spanish Wikipedia and on Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
• View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki should check if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.

In depth

• The server switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes. [605]

Meetings and events

• October 4–6: WikiIndaba Conference's Hackathon in Johannesburg, South Africa
• November 4–6: MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 in Vienna, Austria

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:16, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-41

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

Weekly highlight

• Communities can now request installation of Automoderator on their wiki. Automoderator is an automated anti-vandalism tool that reverts bad edits based on scores from the new "Revert Risk" machine learning model. You can read details about the necessary steps for installation and configuration. [606]

Updates for editors

• Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now customize their articles suggestion list from 41 filtering options when using the tool. This topic-based article suggestion feature makes it easy for translators to self-discover relevant articles based on their area of interest and translate them. You can try it with your mobile device. [607]
• View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• It is now possible for <syntaxhighlight> code blocks to offer readers a "Copy" button if the copy=1 attribute is set on the tag. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [608]
• Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML. [609]
• Later this month, temporary accounts will be rolled out on several pilot wikis. The final list of the wikis will be published in the second half of the month. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 11 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available.
• Rate limiting has been enabled for the code review tools Gerrit and GitLab to address ongoing issues caused by malicious traffic and scraping. Clients that open too many concurrent connections will be restricted for a few minutes. This rate limiting is managed through nftables firewall rules. For more details, see Wikitech's pages on Firewall, GitLab limits and Gerrit operations.
• Five new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Komering (w:kge:) [610]
  • a Wikipedia in Mooré (m:mos:) [611]
  • a Wiktionary in Madurese (wikt:mad:) [612]
  • a Wikiquote in Gorontalo (q:gor:) [613]
  • a Wikinews in Shan (n:shn:) [614]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:39, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-42

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

Updates for editors

• The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is starting to be removed. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. A first set of wikis are being contacted. These wikis are invited to stop using Flow, and to move all Flow boards to sub-pages, as archives. At these wikis, a script will move all Flow pages that aren't a sub-page to a sub-page automatically, starting on 22 October 2024. On 28 October 2024, all Flow boards at these wikis will be set in read-only mode. [615][616]
• WMF's Search Platform team is working on making it easier for readers to perform text searches in their language. A change last week on over 30 languages makes it easier to find words with accents and other diacritics. This applies to both full-text search and to types of advanced search such as the hastemplate and incategory keywords. More technical details (including a few other minor search upgrades) are available. [617]
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, EditCheck was installed at Russian Wikipedia, and fixes were made for some missing user interface styles.

Updates for technical contributors

• Editors who use the Toolforge tool Earwig's Copyright Violation Detector will now be required to log in with their Wikimedia account before running checks using the "search engine" option. This change is needed to help prevent external bots from misusing the system. Thanks to Chlod for these improvements. [618]
• Phabricator users can create tickets and add comments on existing tickets via Email again. Sending email to Phabricator has been fixed. [619]
• Some HTML elements in the interface are now wrapped with a <bdi> element, to make our HTML output more aligned with Web standards. More changes like this will be coming in future weeks. This change might break some tools that rely on the previous HTML structure of the interface. Note that relying on the HTML structure of the interface is not recommended and might break at any time. [620]

In depth

• The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes: updates on Wikimedia's authentication system, research to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki platform, updates on Parser Unification and MathML rollout, and more.
• The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition include: research about improving topic suggestions related to countries, improvements to PHPUnit tests, and more.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:18, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 19 October 2024

• News and notes: One election's end, another election's beginning

• Recent research: "As many as 5%" of new English Wikipedia articles "contain significant AI-generated content", says paper

• In the media: Off to the races! Wikipedia wins!

• Contest: A WikiCup for the Global South

• Traffic report: A scream breaks the still of the night

• Book review: The Editors

• Humour: The Newspaper Editors

• Crossword: Spilled Coffee Mug

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:15, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-43

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

Weekly highlight

• The Mobile Apps team has released an update to the iOS app's navigation, and it is now available in the latest App store version. The team added a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view, and brings the "Donate" button into a more accessible place for users who are reading an article. This is the first phase of a larger planned navigation refresh to help the iOS app transition from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports reading and editing. The Wikimedia Foundation has added more editing features and support for on-wiki communication based on volunteer requests in recent years.

iOS Wikipedia App's profile menu and contents

Updates for editors

• Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with some early ideas on potential features that recommend articles for further reading, automatically summarize articles, and improve search functionality. For more details and to stay updated, check out the Web team's Content Discovery Experiments page and subscribe to their newsletter.
• Later this month, logged-out editors of these 12 wikis will start to have temporary accounts created. The list may slightly change - some wikis may be removed but none will be added. Temporary account is a new type of user account. It enhances the logged-out editors' privacy and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 12 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available. Read more about the deployment plan across all wikis.
• View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the South Ndebele, Pannonian Rusyn, Obolo, Iban and Tai Nüa Wikipedia languages were created last week. [621][622][623][624][625]
• It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the new Wikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this in the latest Wikifunctions newsletter.

Updates for technical contributors

• Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new {{#timef:…}} parser function. For example, {{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "20 November 2024". Previously, {{#time:…}} could be used to format dates, but this required knowledge of the order of the time and date components and their intervening punctuation. #timef (or #timefl for local time) provides access to the standard date formats that MediaWiki uses in its user interface. This may help to simplify some templates on multi-lingual wikis like Commons and Meta. [626][627]
• Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using {{USERLANGUAGE}} instead of using {{int:lang}}. [628]
• The Product and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC) now has its pilot members with representation across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They will work to address the Movement Strategy's Technology Council initiative of having a co-defined and more resilient technological platform. [629]

In depth

• The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: an upcoming Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module, new Community Configuration options, and details on new projects.
• The Wikimedia Foundation is now an official partner of the CVE program, which is an international effort to catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This partnership will allow the Security Team to instantly publish common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) records that are affecting MediaWiki core, extensions, and skins, along with any other code the Foundation is a steward of.
• The Community Wishlist is now testing machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content.

Meetings and events

• 24 October - Wiki Education Speaker Series Webinar - Open Source Tech: Building the Wiki Education Dashboard, featuring Wikimedia interns and a Web developer in the panel.
• 20–22 December 2024 - Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024 in Odisha, India. A hackathon for community members, including developers, designers and content editors, to build technical solutions that improve contributors' experiences.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:49, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Growth News, October 2024

Current work

Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module

We will add a new module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We have released a simple version on beta wikis and we will soon start an A/B test on our pilot wikis. This module will only display on the Newcomer Homepage if communities decide to utilize it, so learn how to configure the Community Updates module, or share your thoughts on the project's talk page.

One design concept aimed to increase constructive activation

Constructive activation experimentation

After showcasing early design ideas at Wikimania, we conducted user testing of design prototypes. We now aim to engage communities in further discussions and plan to run a targeted experiment, presenting a structured task within the reading view to logged-in new account holders with zero edits.

Community Configuration

This Community Configuration extension was developed to help communities customize wiki features to meet their unique needs. The Growth team is now helping other Wikimedia Foundation teams make their products configurable:

• The Moderation Tools team now provides Community Configuration for Automoderator. (T365046)
• Certain Babel extension settings will be configurable soon. (T328171)

Future work

As part of the Growth team annual plan, we will continue to investigate ways to increase constructive activation on mobile, while also working with Data Products to move forward A/B testing functionality via the Metrics Platform.

Community events

• Growth team members presented Community Configuration: Shaping On-Wiki Functionality Together at Wikimania (slides). The session recording is available to watch on YouTube. This session provided an update on the Community Configuration project and introduced details about the upcoming features that communities will soon be able to configure. Representatives from the Moderator Tools, Editing, Web, and Campaigns teams shared their plans for utilizing Community Configuration in the future. Following these presentations, the WMF Growth team's Benoît Evellin and Martin Urbanec answered audience questions.
• Habib Mhenni gave a presentation of how mentorship works at WikiIndaba 2024. The recording is available.

Stay informed

Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work. If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Trizek_(WMF), 15:43, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-44

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

Updates for editors

• Later in November, the Charts extension will be deployed to the test wikis in order to help identify and fix any issue. A security review is underway to then enable deployment to pilot wikis for broader testing. You can read the October project update and see the latest documentation and examples on Beta Wikipedia.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pediapress.com, an external service that creates books from Wikipedia, can now use Wikimedia Maps to include existing pre-rendered infobox map images in their printed books on Wikipedia. [630]

Updates for technical contributors

• Wikis can use the Guided Tour extension to help newcomers understand how to edit. The Guided Tours extension now works with dark mode. Guided Tour maintainers can check their tours to see that nothing looks odd. They can also set emitTransitionOnStep to true to fix an old bug. They can use the new flag allowAutomaticBack to avoid back-buttons they don't want. [631]
• Administrators in the Wikimedia projects who use the Nuke Extension will notice that mass deletions done with this tool have the "Nuke" tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. [632]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:53, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-45

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

Updates for editors

• Stewards can now make global account blocks cause global autoblocks. This will assist stewards in preventing abuse from users who have been globally blocked. This includes preventing globally blocked temporary accounts from exiting their session or switching browsers to make subsequent edits for 24 hours. Previously, temporary accounts could exit their current session or switch browsers to continue editing. This is an anti-abuse tool improvement for the Temporary Accounts project. You can read more about the progress on key features for temporary accounts. [633]
• Wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled can now use the Collaboration List feature. This list provides a new, easy way for contributors to learn about WikiProjects on their wikis. Thanks to the Campaign team for this work that is part of the 2024/25 annual plan. If you are interested in bringing the CampaignEvents extension to your wiki, you can follow these steps or you can reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for help.
• The text color for red links will be slightly changed later this week to improve their contrast in light mode. [634]
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, on multilingual wikis, users can now hide translations from the WhatLinksHere special page.

Updates for technical contributors

• XML data dumps have been temporarily paused whilst a bug is investigated. [635]

In depth

• Temporary Accounts have been deployed to six wikis; thanks to the Trust and Safety Product team for this work, you can read about the deployment plans. Beginning next week, Temporary Accounts will also be enabled on seven other projects. If you are active on these wikis and need help migrating your tools, please reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for assistance.
• The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New languages supported in translatewiki or in MediaWiki; New keyboard input methods for some languages; details about recent and upcoming meetings, and more.

Meetings and events

• MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 is happening in Vienna, Austria and online from 4 to 6 November 2024. The conference will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:47, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 6 November 2024

• From the editors: Editing Wikipedia should not be a crime

• News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation shares ANI lawsuit updates; first admin elections appoint eleven sysops; first admin recalls opened; temporary accounts coming soon?

• In the media: An old scrimmage, politics and purported libel

• Special report: Wikipedia editors face litigation, censorship

• Gallery: Why you should take more photos and upload them

• In focus: Questions and answers about the court case

• Traffic report: Twisted tricks or tempting treats?

• Technology report: Wikimedia tech, the Asian News International case, and the ultra-rare BLACKLOCK

• Humour: Man quietly slinks away from talk page argument after realizing his argument dumb, wrong

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:05, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-46

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

Updates for editors

• On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, users will notice that the FuzzyBot will now automatically create translated versions of categories used on translated pages. [636]
• View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the submitted task to use the SecurePoll extension for English Wikipedia's special administrator election was resolved on time. [637]

Updates for technical contributors

• In 1.44.0-wmf-2, the logic of Wikibase function getAllStatements changed to behave like getBestStatements. Invoking the function now returns a copy of values which are immutable. [638]
• Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. The API will be rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The impacted endpoints include getting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content. These changes will be available on testwiki later this week, with other projects to follow. This change should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints should verify behavior on testwiki, and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket.

In depth

• Admins and users of the Wikimedia projects where Automoderator is enabled can now monitor and evaluate important metrics related to Automoderator's actions. This Superset dashboard calculates and aggregates metrics about Automoderator's behaviour on the projects in which it is deployed. Thanks to the Moderator Tools team for this Dashboard; you can visit the documentation page for more information about this work. [639]

Meetings and events

• 21 November 2024 (8:00 UTC & 16:00 UTC) - Community call with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year. The theme of this call is how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:04, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 65

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 65, September – October 2024

• Hindu Tamil Thisai joins The Wikipedia Library
• Frankfurt Book Fair 2024 report
• Tech tip: Mass downloads

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --12:49, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 18 November 2024

• News and notes: Open letter to WMF about court case breaks one thousand signatures, big arb case declined, U4C begins accepting cases

• In the media: Summons issued for Wikipedia editors by Indian court, "Gaza genocide" RfC close in news, old admin Gwern now big AI guy, and a "spectrum of reluctance" over Australian place names

• Recent research: SPINACH: AI help for asking Wikidata "challenging real-world questions"

• News from the WMF: Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Endowment audit reports: FY 2023–2024

• Traffic report: Well, let us share with you our knowledge, about the electoral college

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:43, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

ArbCom 2024 Elections voter message

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The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

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Tech News: 2024-47

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

Updates for editors

• Users of Wikimedia sites will now be warned when they create a redirect to a page that doesn't exist. This will reduce the number of broken redirects to red links in our projects. [640]
• View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pywikibot, which automates work on MediaWiki sites, was upgraded to 9.5.0 on Toolforge. [641]

Updates for technical contributors

• On wikis that use the FlaggedRevs extension, pages created or moved by users with the appropriate permissions are marked as flagged automatically. This feature has not been working recently, and changes fixing it should be deployed this week. Thanks to Daniel and Wargo for working on this. [642][643]

In depth

• There is a new Diff post about Temporary Accounts, available in more than 15 languages. Read it to learn about what Temporary Accounts are, their impact on different groups of users, and the plan to introduce the change on all wikis.

Meetings and events

• Technical volunteers can now register for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey. Application for travel and accommodation scholarships is open from November 12 to December 10 2024. The registration for the event will close in mid-April 2025. The Wikimedia Hackathon is an annual gathering that unites the global technical community to collaborate on existing projects and explore new ideas.
• Join the Wikimedia Commons community calls this week to help prioritize support for Commons which will be planned for 2025–2026. The theme will be how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons. This is an opportunity for volunteers who work on different things to come together and talk about what matters for the future of the project. The calls will take place November 21, 2024, 8:00 UTC and 16:00 UTC.
• A Language community meeting will take place November 29, 16:00 UTC to discuss updates and technical problem-solving.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:58, 19 November 2024 (UTC)