User talk:Alfa80/Archive 7

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. [1]

Changes later this week

• Recurrent item 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. [2]
• 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.

• Events
  • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: New co-facilitator introductions and tools for editathons, 14 July. Agenda
  • Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #12, 18 July Facebook, YouTube
  • Past: Celtic Knot Wikimedia language conference, online, July 9-10. Videos, documentation and slides of sessions are accessible from the program page.

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Using OpenRefine with Wikidata for the first time, by Addshore
  • Using Wikidata in Mathematica and Wolfram, by Toni Schindler
  • Fostering the presence of museums on Wikipedia and Wikidata, by Debora Lopomo
  • Extending the Met’s reach with Wikidata, by Jennie Choi
  • Wikidata-related videos from the Celtic Knot Conference:
    • Wikidata and how you can use it to support minority languages (Mohammed Sadat)
    • Wikidata-powered infoboxes (Pau Cabot)
    • Hands-on Wikidata and lexicographical data (Nicolas Vigneron and Léa Lacroix)
    • FAIR linguistic data thanks to norm data – Wikidata as part of the research project VerbaAlpina (Christina Mutter)
    • Sámi placenames on Wikidata (Jon Harald Søby)
  • Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - Wikidata editing #11 Facebook, YouTube
  • Video: Introducing the Wikidata powered Dictionary of Welsh Biography timeline (Jason Evans), YouTube
  • Video: Diving into Wikidata workshop (Will Kent), YouTube
  • Video: Linked data for libraries with Wikibase, Infrastructure track (Jens Ohlig), YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • DragNDrop.js makes it possible to show a Wikipedia article and drag items to Wikidata.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • GQIS can now render results from a Wikidata SPARQL query with a new plugin.
  • New feature in V for Wikipedia that uses Wikidata identifiers to direct users to their favorite streaming app.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: Dowker-Thistlethwaite name
    • External identifiers: AlloCiné theater ID, Maniadb artist ID, Group Properties wiki ID, Oberwolfach mathematician ID, Archive Of Our Own tag, GameBanana video game ID, Spanish Olympic Committee athlete ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Image link, numeric ID, peak bagging classification, vanDerWaalsConstantA, vanDerWaalsConstantB, road name formatter, road number formatter, Medical Service, Ofsted inspection rating, OpenStreetMap numeric user ID, traffic sign template image, Vietnamese middle name
    • External identifiers: Wiki Loves Earth Ukraine identifier, OHM Relation ID, Filmstarts title ID, UK Research and Innovation person ID, SmallGroup ID, Personendatenbank Germania Sacra ID, SAH Archipedia building ID, SAH Archipedia architect ID, Our Campaigns candidate ID, VPE railway line ID, Churches in Limburg, The Draft Review ID, ANZSCO 2013 ID, ANZSOC ID, ASCRG ID, Encyclopédie berbère, 雑誌コード, OpenStreetMap user name, National Registry of Exonerations Case ID, Svenska Akademiens Ordbok ID, QLD Biota ID, Australian Weed ID
  • Query examples:
    • Illustrated Basque word of the day for children
    • Oldest UK MPs at the time of election (Source)
    • Map of archives in Wikidata (Source)

• Development
  • Continued building out documentation for Federated Properties (phabricator:T255651) and making interface improvements to the first stage of the feature (incl. phabricator:T246886, changes to special pages that interact with both Items/Properties, and phabricator:T255581, changes to Special:ListDataTypes when federation is enabled)
  • More work on the consistent design system
  • More work on decoupling the different Wikibase extensions from each other to make development easier
  • Finalizing research and interviews to better understand what could be improved in the way developers access Wikidata's data (APIs, SPARQL)
  • Testing the first prototype of the Simple Query Builder with some editors to get final input before coding starts
  • Sorting of language links on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects was broken (presumably by a change in MediaWiki core). A fix is being worked on. (phabricator:T257625)

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

• 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!

• Discussions
  • New request for comments: General semi protection for all property pages

• Events
  • Upcoming: The First Wikidata Workshop: Second Call for Papers. Papers due: August 10, 2020 | Workshop date: October 29, 2020
  • Upcoming: next Wikidata office hour, July 21st at 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST) in the Wikidata Telegram group. Query Service special with guests from WMF Search Team.
  • Upcoming: Wikidata Lab XXIV: Posicionamento digital relativo with Ederporto - July 23 17:00 UTC (14:00 BRT). In this technical training, we'll study the possibilities and functionalities of relative digital positioning in images and do practical activities on this topic using historical photographs of the city of São Paulo. The event will be held in Portuguese. Join us!
  • Upcoming video: July 21 - Wikipedia Weekly Network - Entity Schemas and Shape Expressions (ShEx) Facebook YouTube
  • Upcoming video: July 25 - Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #13 Facebook YouTube
  • Upcoming: Kidok-Workshop, online workshop about church building data. In German, non-native users welcome. Currently looking for a date in the upcoming week and people to help!
  • Upcoming video: Beyond Wikipedia - Knowledge that even a computer can understand. July 22, 2020 at 17:00 UTC. In this talk, Zbyszko Papierski will present Wikidata Query Service as one way that developers can interact with Wikidata.

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities botany pilot using Wikidata QIDs
  • Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #11 Facebook, YouTube
  • Video: Wikispore Day, including an interview of Denny Vrandečić about Abstract Wikipedia at 34'00
  • Video: Merging elements on Wikidata (in Italian) - YouTube
  • Video: Wikibase Ecosystem - taking Wikidata further (by Lydia Pintscher), YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • User:Frettie/consistency_check_add.js check consistency and add missing relations of a Wikidata object like father/son...

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Breaking change: removing special pageterms behavior on repo wikis, use entityterms instead (relevant for people using pageterms submodule of the query API module on Wikibase repository wikis)

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: version control system, interactive elements, course, peak bagging classification, public transport stop, descriptive solubility, applies if regular expression matches, energy consumption per transaction, content partnership category, Van Der Waals Constant a, Van Der Waals Constant b
    • External identifiers: Spanish Olympic Committee athlete ID, EHESS ID of a French commune, OpenHistoricalMap relation ID, IAPH code, Knot Atlas identifier, Knotinfo identifier, Swiss Tunnel ID, Wien Kulturgut: Kunstwerke im öffentlichen Raum ID, Österreichisches Musiklexikon Online ID, Swedish Riksdag document ID, Artprice artist ID, AnyDecentMusic album ID, SAH Archipedia architect ID, Personendatenbank Germania Sacra ID, Cistercian Biography Online ID, Digital Library of the Caribbean ID, Homebrew formula name, Our Campaigns candidate ID, UK Research and Innovation person ID, Unique Street Reference Number, Benerail station ID, Churches in Limburg, Vmusic.bg artist ID, US Quaternary Fault ID, ASCRG 2016 ID, ANZSOC 2011 ID, ANZSCO 2013 ID, Political Graveyard politician ID, SAH Archipedia building ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: BTI Status Index, BTI Governance Index, lyricsmule, number of majors offered, nationality (cultural identity), image of view, web interface software
    • External identifiers: Native Plants Database ID, Český hudební slovník osob a institucí ID, OpenCritic critic ID, DATAtourisme ID, ASCCEG 2019 ID, AHECC 2017 ID, ANZSIC 2006 ID, Unsplash User ID, South Africa EMIS code, Denkmaldatenbank Thurgau ID, HLTV Player ID, HLTV Team ID, SÚKL code, Nomenclature de tous les noms de rosiers, Science Fiction Awards Database author id, Fototeka person ID, Henrik Ibsen skrifter ID
  • Query examples:
    • Painters in Wikidata with the surname Ruiz (Source)
    • Cities with female mayor (Source)
    • MPs in the current UK parliament with identified mythical ancestors (Source)
    • Indian subcontinent rail lines (Source)
    • List of countries by age of the head of government (Source)
    • Cities of the United States between 100,000 and 600,000 inhabitants with the counties and states they are located in (Source)
  • Newest database reports: list of 1000, 2000 (without statements) and 10000 (filtered) random items

• Development
  • More work on the consistent design system
  • More work on decoupling the different Wikibase extensions from each other to make development easier:
    • load WikibaseClient through the JSON file (phab:T257435),
    • decoupling Client from Lib/Repo in the JavaScript code (phab:T256054),
    • reduce the uses of Repo classes (phab:T255885, phab:T255882)
    • Move all the special pages (phab:T257444), API modules (phab:T257443) and hooks (phab:T257445) from the PHP entry point to the JSON file
    • Merge the registration of WikibaseLib into the Repo and Client extensions (phab:T257432) and merge WikibaseView into Repo (phab:T258043)
  • Prepare the first development phase for the Simple Query Builder
  • Reference game: run a scraper, work on a dashboard that will gives an overview of the potential references that have already been judged in the game
  • Fix a bug related to maximum limit of search results (phab:T256885)
  • Resolve some configuration issues regarding Entity Sources (phab:T254315)
  • Federated Properties:
    • Changes to special pages that interact with both items/properties when federation is enabled (phab:T246886)
    • Changes to Special:ListDatatypes when federation is enabled (phab:T255581)
  • Add new monolingual language codes: mic (Miꞌkmaq), gil (Kiribati)

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

• 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!

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. [3]
• Some users keep getting the notifications for the same event. Some of these are old events. [4]
• 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. [5]

Changes later this week

• Recurrent item 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. [6]

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

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 Starter kit is now available for wiki communities. This page lists technical resources, tools, and recommendations. These are essential to operate a wiki project. This is mostly useful for smaller wikis where the community has limited experience with this. [7]
• 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.
• Advanced item On multiple wikis, a UTCLiveClock gadget is available. For wikis that import the gadget directly from mediawiki.org, end users can now choose a different timezone to show instead of UTC.

Problems

• Advanced item The deployment train for MediaWiki has been blocked this week. [8] [9]
• Translation Notification Bot was sending the same message multiple times to every translator. This has been fixed. [10]
• Some users were receiving the same notification multiple times. This has been fixed. [11]

Changes later this week

• Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from July 29. It will be on all wikis from JUly 30 (calendar).

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

• Events
  • The Wikidata track of the LD4 conference on Linked Data in Libraries takes place on Thursday 30 and Friday 31 July. Free, upon registration.
  • Seeking feedback on a possible WikiCite @Wikidata's 8th Birthday online conference; and what content/format/timing preferences you have. Please respond to this short survey. [Privacy policy: https://w.wiki/XfN]
  • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Liam Wyatt on WikiCite and its future plans, ways to get involved, and discussions that are happening in the community, 28 July. Agenda
  • Past: Wikidata and Wikibase office hour with a focus on the Query Service, July 21st. Notes of the discussions
  • Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #14, August 1 Facebook YouTube
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #23, August 2

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Croiser des données avec OpenRefine by Ash_Crow (in French, how to match data from inside and outside Wikidata with Open Refine)
  • "OBA: An Ontology-Based Framework for Creating REST APIs for Knowledge Graphs"
  • Library’s linked-data project gets new grant. "Known as Linked Data for Production, the project is part of a long-term collaboration among Cornell University Library, Stanford Libraries and the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa. Through linked data, information about books and other items in library records will be enhanced by related information from external online sources". By Jose Beduya
  • Wikidata Training Workshop 1, by Canadian Arts Presenting Association
    • Part 1 - Introduction to Wikidata - YouTube (En, Fr)
    • Part 2 - Usage of Wikidata - YouTube (En, Fr)
    • Part 3 - Components of a Wikidata item - YouTube (En, Fr)
  • Video: Wikidata Lab XXIV on relative digital positioning (in Portuguese). YouTube
  • Video: Women Writers in Review: Integrating special collections into Wikidata. YouTube
  • Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - Entity Schemas and Shape Expressions (ShEx) Facebook YouTube
  • Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #13 Facebook YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • We would love suggestions for tools to include in this section of the weekly summary. Please add your suggestions directly under Status updates/Next#Backlog after checking that the tool isn't already listed.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikimedia Commons Query Service (WCQS) launches in Beta. This SPARQL endpoint for Structured Data on Commons can federate with Wikidata's Query Service. (Announcement & discussion)
  • A new OpenRefine reconciliation service for Wikidata is available. Add it in OpenRefine with https://wikidata.reconci.link/en/api or by replacing en by any other Wikimedia language code.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: pertainym, BTI Governance Index, BTI Status Index, Ofsted inspection rating, distribution map of taxon
    • External identifiers: Wiki-Rennes ID, Queensland Biota ID, Australian Weed ID, Encyclopedie berbere ID, Japanese magazine code, Lobbywatch.ch ID of a member of parliament, IVS ID, Svenska Akademiens Ordbok ID, National Registry of Exonerations Case ID, Described and Captioned Media Program producer ID, Český hudební slovník osob a institucí ID, PM20 geo code, PM20 subject code, DATAtourisme ID, OpenCritic critic ID, ASCCEG 2019 ID, SmallGroup ID, ANZSIC 2006 ID, AHECC 2017 ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: booking URL, member of lexicon, screen (display) resolution, in pixels, Size comparison diagram, Butcher tableau, related laws and regulations, Water area
    • External identifiers: Archive Site Trinity College Cambridge ID, WISAARD ID, Jisho word id, UK Research and Innovation organisation ID, Opta football player ID, Opta football team ID, Opta football competition ID, Power plant operating licence (Turkey), Árvore de Interesse Público ID, MinDat taxon ID, Dizionario Biografico dei Protestanti in Italia ID, Twitter topics numeric ID, People Australia ID
  • Query examples:
    • People who have returned to being their country’s head of government after the longest gap (Source)
    • Number of MPs elected to the Swedish parliament for each election back to 1970 (Source)

• Development
  • Changed the size of image previews to 1024 in the gallery view of the query service to avoid some images not loading sometimes (phabricator:T258241)
  • Added an actual space between the entity title and the name of the fallback language (if any), so that the fallback language isn't selected anymore when double-clicking the entity title for copying (phabricator:T256857)
  • Fixed the directionality of text pieces in placeholders that mix LTR and RTL (phabricator:T253812)
  • Continued work on first pieces of design system to make coding new features easier in the future
  • Continued untangling the code of Wikibase Client and Wikibase Repo to make it easier to develop on them
  • Finished first piece of research on how to make it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers - more work to be done
  • Preparing to start coding on the Query Builder to make it easier to create queries without having to know SPARQL
  • Finished running the scraper that gets potential new references for unreferenced statements and preparing it for publishing

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

• 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!

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Wiki13

• Events
  • Upcoming: Search Platform Office Hours—August 5th, 2020. This event will be an occasion to talk about the Query Service.
  • Upcoming: Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #15, August 8 Facebook, YouTube
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #24, August 9

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Wikidata track at the 2020 LD4 Conference on Linked Data in Libraries:
    • (30 July) Wikidata Tutorial: Intro to the Basics (by User:Gamaliel)
    • (30 July) Advanced Wikidata Tools and Concepts: More Than Just P's and Q's (by User:Mahir256)
    • (30 July) Developing a Wikidata Project (by User:Will (Wiki Ed))
    • (31 July) VanderBot: Using a Python script to create and update researcher items in Wikidata (by User:Baskaufs)
    • (31 July) No bricks without clay: outcomes from the Stanford Wikidata Working Group (by User:Arcadialib)
    • (31 July) LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Wikidata Working Hour: Adding References to Wikidata (by User:Chicagohil)
  • Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #14 Facebook YouTube
  • Video: Lexemes in Wikidata - structured lexicographical data for everyone (by Lydia Pintscher), YouTube
  • Video: Wikidata presentation (in Turkish), YouTube
  • Why You Should Do NLP Beyond English - Nice article giving some context about why it matters to have Lexemes in Wikidata in many different languages

• Tool of the week
  • SQID allows you to analyse, browse and query Wikidata. SQID is inspired by Magnus Manske's Reasonator, but focuses on prominently featuring information about Wikidata classes and properties.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: height of center of mass, road number formatter, Vietnamese middle name, heraldic attitude, traffic sign template image
    • External identifiers: Tree of Public Interest ID, Denkmaldatenbank Thurgau ID, DSSTOX compound identifier, South Africa EMIS code, Archive Site Trinity College Cambridge ID, WISAARD resource ID, Gateway to Research organisation ID, SÚKL code, Science Fiction Awards Database author ID, Power plant operating licence (Turkey)
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: certified as, number of stages, convergence rate, step count, Alternative form, view, version type for works, advertisement copy
    • External identifiers: LibraryThing series identifier, Swiss Industrial Heritage ID, TOPCMB ID, Library of Congress Medium of Performance Thesaurus ID, Sports-Reference.com college basketball school ID, SAT-matrikulo, Signal number, BHF author ID, BHF magazine ID, SPLC Group ID, SPLC Individual ID, Open Civic Data Division Identifiers, RKD thesaurus ID, TCLF ID, Presence compositrices ID of composer, Presence compositrices ID of work
  • Query examples:
    • Properties and the number of constraint definition statements on them - there are quite a few with 0 constraint definitions
    • a graph of MPs and parties in the Swedish Parliament and with whom they worked together with to create motions 2018 SPOILER:>95% is just with people in the same party
    • Wealthiest queer people on Wikidata (Source)
    • Bubble chart showing the winners of the FA Cup (Source)
    • Map of parks in Oslo missing images on Wikidata (Source)
  • Commons queries:
    • Orienteerers: tinyurl.com/y25qa8ef (source, at 53:45)
    • Animal hugs: tinyurl.com/yykvj26y (source)

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

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

• 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!

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

• All queries to the Wikidata Query Service failed between 17:50 and 17:59 UTC on Thursday 23 July. Some queries failed during a longer period. [12]
• Interlanguage links were ordered incorrectly for the past few weeks. This problem was also mentioned in Tech News two weeks ago. The problem is now fixed. [13]
• There is a problem with the global preferences for the "Use Legacy Vector" option. Developers are working on fixing it. [14]
• A bug in the Wikibase extension had disabled the "move" and "create" types of protection in the main (Gallery) namespace on Wikimedia Commons. New protections could not be added, and existing protections were not enforced, allowing some page moves and page creations that should not have been possible. This has now been fixed. [15]

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. [16]
• 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. [17]
• Advanced item In the MonoBook skin, the searchGoButton identifier is now searchButton. This may affect CSS and JS gadgets. Migration instructions can be found in T255953. This was previously mentioned in issue 27.
• Advanced item Bot operators can use Pywikibot to regularly archive discussions. The behavior when the bot uses counter to prevent large archives was changed. [18]
• Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 5. It will be on all wikis from August 6 (calendar).

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

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Hazard-SJ, Gnoeee, Wagino 20100516
  • Closed request for adminship: Wiki13 (successful)

• Events
  • Past: Wikibase Live Session - August 2020. This session had a few people present on some of their work with modeling GLAM data in Wikibase or Wikidata. (replay)
  • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Daniel Mietchen and Lane Rasberry about Scholia, a project to present bibliographic information and scholarly profiles of authors and institutions, 11 August. [Agenda]
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #25, August 16

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - QuickStatements and Distributed Wikidata games Facebook, YouTube
  • Video: Collaboration, contribution and use of Wikidata and Wikipedia by academic libraries (in Greek). YouTube
  • Librarians work to broaden Vanderbilt’s research reputation with Wikidata tools. "To speed up the creation of metadata about faculty and their publications, Steven Baskauf, data science and data curation specialist for libraries, developed "VanderBot," a set of scripts that can read and write to Wikidata, greatly improving the efficiency by which Vanderbilt’s faculty are discoverable through Wikidata".

• Tool of the week
  • OSM ↔ Wikidata matcher links Wikidata entries to places in OpenStreetMap.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • wikidata2df, a Python package for easily turning a Wikidata SPARQL query into a pandas dataframe
  • With Wikidata Concept Tree Generator, you can enter any concept and instantly see a visualization of its extended relations. (Source)

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: size comparison diagram, view
    • External identifiers: Legacy.com newspaper ID, ChemSynthesis ID, Dizionario Biografico dei Protestanti in Italia ID, Maitron des fusillés ID, Fototeka person ID, LibraryThing series ID, TOPCMB ID, Swiss Industrial Heritage ID, Library of Congress Medium of Performance Thesaurus ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: image of entrance, extinction date, notation writer, raga, tala, SMARTS, Editio princeps, recording location
    • External identifiers: Sochy a města ID osoby, Sochy a města ID sochy, podvignaroda, Have I Been Pwned breach ID, European Investment Bank project ID, WordNet 3.1 Synset Id, cadastral municipality ID, NPR station ID, NYARC Discovery ID, Nasjonalt skoleregister-ID, ERIC Thesaurus ID, American Folklore Society Ethnographic Thesaurus ID, Trismegistos Texts ID
  • Query examples:
    • Ancestors of the current King of Spain color coded by sex or gender
    • Political alignments of the parties of world leaders (Source)
    • Female Mathematicians whose birth/death anniversary is today (Source)
  • Commons queries:
    • Map of images found in the medieval Atlas De Wit (source)
    • Things depicted with cats (source)

• Development
  • finalized designs for the query builder to start coding at the beginning of September
  • wrapping up the initial work on the design system so that we can start using the first pieces of it in the query builder development
  • working on properly linking redirects in recent changes, watchlist and co (phabricator:T255387)
  • addressed remaining security review comments about the Wikidata Bridge so that we can deploy it finally on the first Wikipedia
  • fixed a bug where string values had the wrong length limit (phabricator:T259440)
  • finishing the work of untangling Wikibase Client and Wikibase Repository extensions to make development easier

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

• 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!

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

• 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. [19]

Problems

• The mobile skin displays a message at the bottom of the page about who edited last. This message showed raw wikitext. This has now been fixed. Some messages in Structured Discussions and content translation may still appear as raw wikitext. Developers are working on it. [20]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [21] [22]

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

• Discussions
  • Closed requests for adminship: Hazard-SJ, Gnoeee, Wagino 20100516 (all successful)
  • New request for comments: How (un)important is preserving the historic character of an item?

• Events
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #26, August 23

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Video: Editing Wikidata with information from Son jarocho (in Spanish). YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • Entity Explosion: a new multilingual Chrome browser extension. "Taking the power of Wikidata with me wherever I go across the web!". Uses API calls to the Wikidata Query Service to match the URL you are browsing on to a Wikidata item, and then displays data and links to other sites about the same entity. (Video)

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata Bridge v1 will be deployed on Catalan Wikipedia on August 18th
  • New description and screenshots for the Simple Query Builder project, feedback welcome
  • Help:Dataset sizing

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: alternative form
    • External identifiers: Henrik Ibsen writings ID, RKD thesaurus ID, TCLF ID, Sculptures and cities database ID for sculptures, Manioc book ID, Presence compositrices ID of composer, Offizielle Deutsche Charts song ID, ToS;DR service numerical identifier, Have I Been Pwned breach ID, Unsplash User ID, EIB project ID, ANZSRC 2020 FoR ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: latest start date, earliest end date, Number of votes after transferring, map URL, type of archaeological site, record number, front and back matter
    • External identifiers: Sports-Reference.com college football school ID, Panteono de edukado.net, LSG local body code, MobyGames attribute ID, Dictionary of Occupational Titles ID, Frauen in Bewegung 1848–1938, Anais do Museu Paulista article ID, Dictionary of Occupational Titles Code (fourth edition, revised), Proballers player ID, Linked Open Data Cloud identifier, Chrome Webstore extension ID, CTHS publication ID, LBS Physical ID, GBIF occurence ID
  • Query examples:
    • Largest collections of Picasso content (Source). The National Gallery of Art holds the most with 303 objects
    • Bubble chart of snooker world champions (Source)
    • Map of streets in Tillydrone named after WW2 military leaders (Source)

• Development
  • Fixed a bug where a length limit for strings seems to have reverted itself back from 1500 to its default 400 (phabricator:T259440)
  • Fixed a bug that Wikibase is not always adding &redirect=no in situations when MediaWiki usually does (phabricator:T255387)
  • Wrapping up the initial work on the design system so it is ready for use in the first new feature (Query Builder)
  • Fixed the serialization of statements on Forms and Senses not containing the datatype (phabricator:T249206)
  • Wrapping up work on the first version of Federated Properties so that other Wikibase installations can use Wikidata's Properties instead of having to maintain their own
  • Worked on ensuring the data from the linked data interface at Special:EntityData is always up to date after an edit has been made (phabricator:T128486)
  • Enabling clients to use Lua to request labels, descriptions and aliases in some (often minority) languages even when they are not content languages (phabricator:T259340, phabricator:T260118)

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

• 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!

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 revert an edit using the undo link your edit is marked with an undo tag. This will now only happen if you don't change anything in the edit window before publishing the undo. This is to keep users from marking edits as undos when they actually do something else. [23]
• The new OOUI version will not work with Internet Explorer 8. This means the wikis will look strange and not work well in Internet Explorer 8. This was reported in Tech/News/2020/17. This is because keeping the wikis working with very old browsers creates other problems. [24]

Changes later this week

• Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 August. It will be on all wikis from 20 August (calendar).

Future changes

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis next week. This is a reminder. You can help by translating the announcement message. [25] [26]

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

• Events
  • Upcoming: Wikidata distributed birthday in October. You can organize an (online) event with your local group or favorite WikiProject! See also: calendar in progress, information for organizers, 24-hours online meetup
  • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: We will talk about gadgets and user scripts. 25 August. Agenda
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #27, August 30
  • Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #17 Facebook, YouTube

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Commonsense Knowledge in Wikidata (via ArXiv)
  • Wikidata-focused presentations at the Workshop "Data Science in Climate and Climate Impact Research" taking place on 20-21 August 2020 in Zurich and online.
    • Sarasua, Cristina, & Mietchen, Daniel. (2020, August). Multilingual Structured Climate Research Data in Wikidata - The Community Perspective. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3994272
    • Mietchen, Daniel, & Sarasua, Cristina. (2020, August). Multilingual Structured Climate Research Data in Wikidata - The Data Perspective. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3994266 (also on YouTube)
  • Video: How to add missing descriptions to Wikidata using QuickStatments tool (in Arabic) - YouTube
  • Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #16 Facebook, YouTube
  • Video: Introduction to Wikidata (in Malayalam) - YouTube
  • Video: Wikidata editing basics (in Chinese) - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • Sophox allows for SPARQL querying of Wikidata and OpenStreetMap in a single query

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Two new grant programs from WikiCite, in support of open citations and linked bibliographic data.

Full documentation, eligibility requirements, selection criteria, program design principles, and contacts at the links. Apply by 1 October.

1. Project & events [2ドル-10k]
2. e-Scholarships [per-diem calculated on your city; 1-5 people (single, or as a 'remote group') for 2-4 days, for COVID-era "stay at home" projects. Paid in advance living allowance, no expense report required.]

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: SMARTS notation, tala, raga, recording location, law or regulation identifying number, earliest end date, latest start date, extinction date
    • External identifiers: Filmstarts title ID, Trismegistos text ID, SPLC Individual ID, ERIC Thesaurus ID, American Folklore Society Ethnographic Thesaurus ID, BHF magazine ID, Macedonian cadastral municipality ID, Monumentbrowser ID, Frauen in Bewegung 1848–1938 ID, Nasjonalt skoleregister ID, BHF author ID, Proballers ID, Opera Online work ID, Opera Online composer ID, Opera Online opera house ID, CTHS publication ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Namesakes, Engineer's Line Reference, bibliography, external auditor, ITF-identificatiecode voor speler 2020, rotated image, mirrored image, combined from, overlaid from, number of deaths in senior care homes, number of cases intensive care, negotiated by, is solution to, Commons category for the exterior of the item, Number of taxpayers, medium
    • External identifiers: Abbreviations related to ancient authors and works and to academic works regarding classical antiquity, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe ID, Emporis company ID, Sports-Reference.com college basketball box score ID, FBref.com squad ID, Operator licence number, Jewish Virtual Library person ID, Spanish Artists from the Fourth to the Twentieth Century ID, JSTOR publisher ID, Istrapedia ID, monumenta.ch ID, Microsoft MVP profile ID, Art Bonus ID, The Living New Deal ID, TracesOfWar person ID, Hrvatski biografski leksikon ID, UG Digital Collections, jewishencyclopedia.com ID, Fancyclopedia 3 ID, Hrvatska tehnička enciklopedija ID, Grandterrier.net ID
  • Query examples:
    • British MPs with sons- or daughters-in-law who were also MPs (source)
    • MPs with the largest number of children or childen-in-law who became MPs (source)
    • Descendants of Robert Emett (born 1729), with counts of sitelinks and external IDs for them and their spouses (source)
    • Programming languages written by women (Source)
    • Bar chart showing the number of research output (articles, etc) annotated with a SARSCoV2 proteins as 'main subject' (Source)
    • Female soccer players who have a (known) social media account (Source)
    • Largest cities in France by population (Source)
  • Commons queries:
    • Works in Helsinki, and their copyright status (source)
  • Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Gazetteer

• Development
  • Deployed the first version of the Wikidata Bridge to Catalan Wikipedia
  • Creating Grafana Dashboards for the new Wikidata Bridge so we have some data to help us determine which datatypes to support next for example (phabricator:T260532)
  • Finished working on ensuring Labels of Items in some unusual, often minority, languages are still available on Wikipedia and other clients (phabricator: T259340)
  • Fixed error messages for API modules that will not work with the first version of Federated Properties (phabricator:T258558)
  • Working on improving how ORES judges the quality of an Item to make it more accurate
  • Started coding on Automated Configuration Discovery to make it easier for tool builders to make their tools work for other Wikibase instances as well

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

• 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!

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

• Recurrent item 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.

• Events
  • Past: Editing contest - Members of the 3rd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana. By Global Open Initiative - YouTube (1), (2)
  • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 1 at 18:00 CEST
  • Upcoming: WMF search platform team office hour, September 2nd at 17:00 CEST (15:00 GMT). Etherpad, Google Meet. You can come and chat about the Wikidata & Commons Query Service.
  • Upcoming: Wikidata birthday events organizers call, September 2nd at 19:00 CEST.
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #28, September 6
  • Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #18 Facebook, YouTube, September 5 at 19.00 UTC
  • Upcoming: Onam label-a-thon (September 1st and 2nd): Online label-a-thon to improve Wikidata items related to Kerala and Malayalam on this Onam holidays.

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Video: How to use the Wikidata Query Service, by Dr Chris Langley
  • Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #17 Facebook, YouTube
  • Video: Creating a Wikidata item (in Spanish) - YouTube
  • WikiCite and bibliographic data on Wikidata, how to contribute and how to view it with Scholia (in Spanish) - YouTube
  • Wikipedia's not so little sister is finding its own way - article by Lydia Pintscher in the Wikipedia Signpost

• Tool of the week
  • Wikidata for Firefox is a browser extension that displays Wikidata items while browsing the web, adds missing IDs and extracts information from websites to Wikidata.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Entity Explosion, the browser add-on for Chrome is now also available for Firefox. When the user visits a web page, it displays data from Wikidata, about the subject of that page.
  • WMF will be performing data center maintenance operations by switching all traffic to the secondary data centre on Tuesday, September 1st 2020. You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for up to an hour from 14:00 UTC
  • The Wikidata community now has a channel on the newly-established Wikimedia Chat service.
  • reconciler, a Python wrapper for Open Refine's API to reconcile pandas data frames with Wikidata items.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: Butcher tableau, front and back matter, external auditor
    • External identifiers: edukado.net Panteono ID, Chrome Webstore extension ID, PARADISEC Catalog, NPR station ID, JSTOR publisher ID, Emporis company ID, Art Bonus ID, British Museum object ID, monumenta.ch ID, The Living New Deal ID, Jewish Virtual Library person ID, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe ID, Spanish Artists from the Fourth to the Twentieth Century ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: parent superproperty, publisher of, performed at, Barcelona Public art identifier, opening hours (v.3), Fanbase name, aerial view, ground clearance, axle track, placeholder text element ID, displacement, Deutsche Bahn station abbreviation, entry in abbreviations table, Liturgical rank
    • External identifiers: NHK Archives Portal person ID, EPA Ecoregion Level 1 Code, EPA Ecoregion Level 2 Code, EPA Ecoregion Level 3 Code, EPA Ecoregion US Level 3 Code, EPA Ecoregion US Level 4 Code, Encyclopaedia of Architects, Vienna 1770–1945, Firefox add-on ID, London Stock Exchange company, Fatcat ID, NDL law ID, e-Gov law ID, OFAC sanction ID, British and Irish Furniture Makers Online ID, Library of Congress Children's Subject Headings ID, Occupational Outlook Handbook ID, Regesta Ecclesiastica Salisburgensia ID, Wisconsin Historical Society NRHP ID, YUAG ID, Grove Music Online ID, Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe person ID, McClintock and Strong Biblical Cyclopedia ID, Dostoyevsky and His Entourage ID
  • Query examples:
    • Map of cities and towns in the San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland combined statistical area - OSM/Wikidata query
    • Map of structures that have won architectural awards - OSM/Wikidata query
    • Birth places of Buffalo Sabres players (Source)
    • Timeline of all of Bird’s tunes (Source)
    • Approximate proportion of people called "John" in any given UK Parliament since 1372 (Source)
    • People born in Czechia who died in Germany and vice versa, by decade of birth (Source)
    • Location of decommissioned aircraft - OSM/Wikidata query (Source)
    • Railway network in Czechia (Source)
    • People born in Czechia who died in Germany and vice versa, by decade (of birth) (Source)
    • List of locations of Woolf's books (Source)

• Development
  • Working on Automated Configuration Discovery to make it easier for tool builders to make their tools work for other Wikibase instances as well
  • Polishing remaining pieces of the first version of Federated Properties to make it possible to use Wikidata's Properties in other Wikibase instances
  • Continuing to work on improving the way ORES automatically scores the quality of an Item to make it more accurate

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

• 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!

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

• This is a reminder. All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC. Please check on the details on the announcement message. [27] [28]

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.

• Events
  • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Rob Fernandez (Wikimedia District of Columbia) on Listeria, a tool that uses SPARQL queries to define a list, and provides a bot that will update a wiki page containing that list if the results of that SPARQL query change, all based on Wikidata, 08 September. Agenda
  • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 8 at 18:00 CEST
  • Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #19 Facebook, YouTube, September 10
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #29, September 13

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Semantic Wikibase has been released by Professional.Wiki (Demo video)
  • Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #18, workflows for SPARQL queries and QuickStatements Facebook, YouTube
  • OpenRefine 3.4 was released
  • How can I get data on all the dams in the world? Use Wikidata. By Addshore
  • Wikidata Training Workshop 2, by Canadian Arts Presenting Association - YouTube
    • Contributing to Wikidata - (Parts 1, 2, 3 & 4)
    • Contributing to Wikidata (in French) - (Parts 1, 2, 3 & 4)
  • Video: How to use QuickStatements - a tool to bulk upload data onto Wikidata. By Dr Sara Thomas

• Tool of the week
  • wmdeanalytics.wmflabs.org/WD_percentUsageDashboard is a dashboard that measures Wikidata's usage and coverage on Wikimedia Foundation projects.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Entity Explosion, the browser add-on for Chrome is now also available for Firefox. When the user visits a web page, it displays data from Wikidata, about the subject of that page.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: none
    • External identifiers: LSG local body code, NYARC Discovery ID, Encyclopaedia of Architects, Vienna 1770–1945 ID, Hrvatska tehnička enciklopedija ID, ICP artist ID, TracesOfWar person ID, Firefox add-on ID, NHK Archives Portal person ID, Hrvatski biografski leksikon ID, InciWeb ID, YUAG ID, Wikipedia Library partner ID, FIPRESCI person ID, Anais do Museu Paulista article ID, Legacies of British Slave-ownership place ID, Wisconsin Historical Society NRHP ID, Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: applies to form or aspect, blocked on the territory of, Liturgical category, Flickr image URL, turning radius, number of reboots, financials URL, SI base units, rank insignia2
    • External identifiers: Syro-Malabar Church Parish ID, Database of Umgebinde houses in Bohemian Switzerland ID, Re-Member ID, DIL ID, Naver Vibe Artist ID, American Battlefield Trust battlefield ID, American Battlefield Trust person ID, L'Officiel des spectacles ID, VA facility ID, Hikr Waypoint ID, tvmaze ID, Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia ID, Danish educational institution number, Past Fellow of the Royal Society ID, photoLondon ID, uta-net.com song ID, Historic Montana ID, KHRI ID, Seattle Art Museum ID, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art artwork ID
  • Query examples:
    • Map of companies developing/manufacturing a COVID-19 vaccine candidate that is at least in a phase 1 clinical trial
    • A table of the 100 highest fees charged for using various kinds of facilities, normalized to United States dollars - OSM/Wikidata query
    • Youngest age of UK MPs leaving office since 1900 (Source)
    • Longest time UK MPs lived after leaving office since 1900 (Source)
    • British cabinet members with past military service (Source)
    • Earliest written record of 10 largest Czech cities (Source)
    • Churches dedicated to Czech patron St. Wenceslas (blue) and Moravian patrons St. Cyril and Methodeus (orange) (Source)
    • German municipality names ending with -in, -ing, -heim (Source)

• Development
  • Added Wikidata support to Japanese Wikivoyage. phab:T261451
  • Investigating the nature of our training outliers to improve the way ORES automatically scores the quality of an Item.
  • Working on error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an item. phab:T260869
  • Completed various investigations to make an informed decision on the output format of WikibaseManifest files (automated configuration detection for toolbuilders) phab:T261285
  • Completed various bug fixes and wrap-up tasks to conclude the major engineering work on the Federated Properties project
  • More work on Item Quality Scoring and Federated Properties

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

• 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!

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

• Normally pages can be moved to a title that has no existing page yet or to a page that has only one revision, which is a redirect to the page to be moved. A new user right allows editors to move pages over one-revision pages that redirect to anywhere. [29]
• Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 September. It will be on all wikis from 10 September (calendar).
• Advanced item All MediaWiki API modules will now use watchlist instead of watch. This was inconsistent before. [30]

Future changes

• The Wikipedia Android app team might work on patrolling tools in the future. You can let them know what tools would be useful for you or for less experienced patrollers. See the page on mediawiki.org.
• OTRS will be updated to a new version. This will probably take around two days. OTRS agents will not have access to the system during these days. Emails that come in during the update will be delivered when the update is done. The plan is to start around 08:00 UTC on 14 September. This could change. [31]
• The Wikipedia Android app will send push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will need Google Play Services to work. It will also be possible to get the app without Google Play Services but push notifications will not work. Google Play Services is also used to make the app work for Android 4.4 users. [32] [33]
• Advanced item Wikimedia code review could move to GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. You can take part in the consultation.
• Advanced item Dropdown menus in the Vector skin use a .menu class. This will not work in the future. Scripts can use nav ul instead. .vectorTabs and .vectorMenu will also not work. Some scripts need to be updated. You can read more in Phabricator.

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

• Discussions
  • New request for comments: Alternate disclosure policy

• Events
  • Past: The Workshop On Open Citations And Open Scholarly Metadata 2020 took place in Bologna and online on September 9 and included a talk State of WikiCite in 2020, available on Zenodo via doi:10.5281/zenodo.4019954.
  • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 15 at 18:00 CEST
  • Upcoming: Wikidata birthday organizers call, September 16th at 13:00 UTC/GMT
  • Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #20: Facebook, YouTube, September 19
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #30, September 20

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Video: Youtuber Tom Scott tries to answer the question What Is The Best Thing?, using Wikidata to curate a collection of "things", and an online poll for people to vote on those things.
  • "Our admiration for Wikidata and for the people who work with it knows no bounds. Having a single source of well modelled, massively interlinked, well managed data that anyone can query at the press of a button is a real thing of wonder." - says the UK Parliament data team
  • Houcemeddine Turki, et al. (2020). Using logical constraints to validate information in collaborative knowledge graphs: a study of COVID-19 on Wikidata (Zenodo Preprint).
  • Video: Wikidata basics short videos by Wikimedian in Residence at University of Edinburgh (YouTube)
    • A brief intro to Wikidata and how to set up an account
    • How to add a new item to Wikidata
    • How to add an image to Wikidata
  • Video: Creating a Mix'n'Match set for Queensland Biota on Wikidata - YouTube
  • Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #19: Cradle and colours in queries. Facebook, YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • Mbabel is a tool that simplifies article creation by providing pre-made sentences based on Wikidata statements.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The consultation phase for the Wikimedia movement Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) is in progress until 6 October 2020. The UCoC drafting committee wants to learn which parts of the draft would present challenges for you or your work. What is missing from this draft? What do you like, and what could be improved?
  • All the lists of languages used on Wikidata: feel free to improve this draft documentation page.
  • The Wikidata development team is seeking to evaluate and improve the process of collecting and reacting to bug reports and feature requests. You can give feedback about your experience using this anonymous form until September 30^th or add feedback publically to Wikidata talk:Contact the development team/Process review 2020.
  • WikiMap, a tool by User:DB111 that maps geocoded images from Commons and Wikipedia articles, now supports Wikidata items as well (Q99232292)
  • Wikidata QID's are approaching 9 digits. Now is the time to fix any code or schemas that assume that Q numbers are smaller than 9 characters.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: aerial view, ride height, category for the exterior of the item, axle track
    • External identifiers: Anais do Museu Paulista article ID, Legacies of British Slave-ownership place ID, Wisconsin Historical Society NRHP ID, Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe ID, Jewish Encyclopedia ID, Grove Music Online ID, Hikr waypoint ID, DIL ID, Seattle Art Museum ID, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art artwork ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: expansion of, Oakeshott typology, Slack URL, TDD number, Hill size, K point, number of negative votes, number of support votes
    • External identifiers: Historic Montana ID, KHRI ID, KinoWiki ID, BD Gest' series ID, Portugal. Dicionário Histórico ID, Discord username, China Treaty Database ID, Discord channel, Bollywood Hungama movie, NMC Heritage ID, identifiant d'un artiste département des arts graphiques du musée du Louvre, SPoT skater ID, Canadian Women Artists History Initiative ID, Lambiek Special pages, Lambiek comic magazines, Rheinland-Pfälzische Personendatenbank ID, Delft municipal monument ID
  • Query examples:
    • Shortest path of descent from Charlemagne to George Washington, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Elizabeth II
    • List of most recent common ancestors (ordered by number of total degrees separated) between George Washington and George W. Bush (9th cousin 8 times removed), George Washington and Barack Obama (12th cousin 9 times removed), George Washington and Elizabeth II (2th consin 7 times removed), George W. Bush and Barack Obama (11th cousin), George W. Bush and Elizabeth II (14th cousin once removed), Barack Obama and Elizabeth II (19th cousin 3 times removed)
    • Artists that have recorded songs in several languages, by number of different languages used (Source)
    • Average age of companies listed on major indices (Source)
    • Basque Country sister cities with world municipalities (Source)
    • Map of companies developing/manufacturing a COVID-19 vaccine candidate that is at least in a phase 1 clinical trial (Source)
    • Map of mountains in Austria showing their heights; from red for the lowest through green to black for the highest (Source)
    • Top World Heritage sites by number of paintings depicting them (Source)
    • Map of sports pitches for team sports that require between 10 and 20 players on the field - Wikidata/OSM query

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

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

• 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!

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 Wikipedia apps briefly showed pages without CSS last week. This meant they looked wrong. It was quickly fixed but cached pages without CSS were shown for a few hours. [34] [35]

Changes later this week

• Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 September. It will be on all wikis from 17 September (calendar).

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

• Events
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata Introduction Workshop (German) (September 29)
  • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 21 at 18:00 CEST
  • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: A starting point for newer institutions to think through what is involved in coordinating a Wikidata project, including shared infrastructure, training, and documentation, 22 September. Agenda
  • Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #21 WikiDojo: Facebook, YouTube, September 25

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • "Representing COVID-19 information in collaborative knowledge graphs: a study of Wikidata"
  • ProWD: Detecting Knowledge Imbalances on Wikidata on blog.wikimedia.de
  • Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #20 WLM: Facebook, YouTube
  • Video: Wikidata Training Workshop 3, by Canadian Arts Presenting Association (YouTube)
    • Wikidata Query Service - (Parts 1, 2 & 3)
    • Wikidata Query Service (in French) - (Parts 1, 2 & 3)

• Tool of the week
  • copy-qid is a user script by Abbe98 that allows you to copy the Qid with one click.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The Wikidata development team is seeking to evaluate and improve the process of collecting and reacting to bug reports and feature requests. You can give feedback about your experience using this anonymous form until September 30^th or add feedback publically to Wikidata talk:Contact the development team/Process review 2020.
  • WDQS/WCQS Status update (September 2): "We are planning to spend more time doing some analytics on our data. (1) What are the most expensive queries, what are they trying to achieve and is that reasonable? (2) Do we have performant subgraphs that we could expose independently?"

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: category for the exterior of the item, axle track, Stairway To Hell ID, Oakeshott typology, construction point, turning radius, hill size, bibliography
    • External identifiers: Seattle Art Museum ID, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art artwork ID, TV Maze series ID, Barcelona Public art ID, University of Ghana Digital Collections (UGSpace) ID, Istrapedia ID, OnlyFans person ID, Linked Open Data Cloud identifier, The Cutting Room Floor ID, Fatcat ID, China Treaty Database ID, e-GOV law ID, Portugal. Dicionário Histórico ID, past Fellow of the Royal Society ID, Regesta Ecclesiastica Salisburgensia ID, Slack organization ID, Kansas Historic Resources Inventory ID, Historic Montana ID, ITF player ID 2020, BD Gest' series ID, American Battlefield Trust battlefield ID, P8624
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: defining mutations, nombre d'essais marqués, Netflix maturity rating, held event, number of paying subscribers, has census
    • External identifiers: Rheinland-Pfälzische Personendatenbank ID, Delft municipal monument ID, identificativo Ministero dell'interno, Dallas Museum of Art ID, Cincinnati Art Museum ID, Energy Identification Code, Wikimedia Chat channel, Symptom Ontology ID, MnDOT Historic Bridges ID, monumentsauxmorts.fr ID, monumentsdememoire.fr ID, Lower Sorbian place name ID, Région Île-de-France ID, Museen Dresden article ID, Turkey's Culture Portal ID, NPS place ID, SSYK 2012
  • Query examples:
    • Map of anything that memorializes or is named after a Whig Party member - OSM/Wikidata query
    • Map of every railway station presently connected directly or indirectly to St Pancras on Wikidata
    • Age of the winners of the Tour de France (Source)
    • Location and date of death of Danish rulers (Source)
    • Map of the places & causes of death of Roman Emperors (Source)
    • Images of members of the 16th Odisha Assembly (2019-24) (Source)
    • Star signs of Japanese Prime Ministers (Source)
    • Video game series with the longest time gap between a game and its direct sequel (Source)

• Development
  • WQS now supports mwapi service request for Wikibooks (phab:T261125)
  • The language codes lij-mc, ja-Hira, ja-Kana, ja-Hrkt, ja-Hani, ojp, ojp-Hira and ojp-Hani" have been added for use in monolingual text property values (phab:T254968, phab:T195816)
  • The language codes de-1901, eo-hsistemo and eo-xsistemo, ja-hira, ja-kana and ja-hrkt have been added for Lexemes (phab:T262330,phab:T257422, phab:T250559)
  • P1438 has been converted from string to external ID datatype (phab:T262198)
  • Worked on fixing an input issue with invisible characters (phab:T261071)
  • Investigating what work would be needed to get the new termbox that's available on mobile to also work on desktop
  • Fixing several issues with Special:Undelete (phab:T261747)
  • Fixing an error message being shown twice (phab:T260869)
  • Starting the coding work on the Query Builder
  • Continuing to write a draft for a REST API specification
  • Finishing the remaining work needed to get the improved quality scoring for Items deployed to ORES
  • Continuing work on WikibaseManifest: Determined the essential metadata that will be included in the WikibaseManifest file, added some new features (mostly MediaWiki metadata) to the Manifest that were requested by the OpenRefine team (phab:T262805 and phab:T262804) and set up a test system that will soon be ready for tool builders to use for testing the integration of their tools with WikibaseManifest

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

• 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!

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 tag for reverted edits. For example you can see it in the recent changes feed or in the article history. It is added to edits when they have been undone, rollbacked or manually reverted to an older version of the page. [36] [37]

Changes later this week

• The number of times you can do something in a period of time on wiki is limited. This could be the number of edits per minute or the number of users you email in a day. Some users are not affected by all limits because of their user rights. They could soon see the limit even if it does not affect them. [38]
• Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 September. It will be on all wikis from 24 September (calendar).

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

• Events
  • Linking the 20th century paper history to the sum of all knowledge (Best practice presentation at DCMI Virtual 2020)
  • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 29 at 18:00 CEST
  • Upcoming: WikiNeocomensia: Wikidata + OpenRefine, workshop in Neuchâtel (Switzerland) and in French, October 3
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #32, October 4

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions [IFLA] have published a series of six videos "discussions with professionals in order to discuss projects, issues, progress of Wikidata, Wikibase and bibliographic data in the field of libraries." Currently available as a playlist on YouTube under CC-By (Wikimedia Commons upload soon), with subtitles in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French (Arabic and Chinese coming soon). The production was made by the IFLA Wikidata Working Group and funded by a WikiCite grant.
  • Sidestepping the limitations of collection catalogues with machine learning and Wikidata
  • Navigating the maze of Wikidata query logs by Angela Bonifati, Wim Martens, Thomas Timm
  • Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #21 - WikiDojo on the Global Climate Strike: Facebook, YouTube
  • Video: Wikidata tutorial for lecturers (in Czech) - YouTube
  • Video: Creating and enriching linked data with Wikidata - YouTube
  • Video: Mix'n'Match Tutorial - YouTube
  • Video: Introduction to Wikidata for librarians (in Portuguese) - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • omeka-s-wikidata is an Omeka-S module for auto-suggesting Wikidata URIs and labels.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The Wikidata development team is seeking to evaluate and improve the process of collecting and reacting to bug reports and feature requests. You can give feedback about your experience using this anonymous form until September 30^th or add feedback publically to Wikidata talk:Contact the development team/Process review 2020.
  • Nominate your favorite tools for the Coolest Tool Award 2020 before October 14th.
  • Wikidata Walkabout is a new site that lets you browse and drill down through different "classes" of data on Wikidata: wikidatawalkabout.org
  • Como is a new Android app, that uses Wikidata lexemes and senses to create a word-guessing game. It let's players create new senses and tests them on other players to finally save them in Wikidata. The app is developed as part of a BA thesis, to determine if this concept is useful to create more lexicographical data, and testers would be very welcome.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: construction point, turning radius, hill size, bibliography, opening time, closing time, engine displacement, expansion of, Netflix maturity rating, TDD number
    • External identifiers: American Battlefield Trust battlefield ID, American Battlefield Trust ID (person), Occupational Outlook Handbook ID, Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia ID, Canadian Women Artists History Initiative ID, Book Marks ID, Re-Member ID, SPoT skater ID, NDL law ID, McClintock and Strong Biblical Cyclopedia ID, L'Officiel des spectacles ID, British and Irish Furniture Makers Online ID, Cincinnati Art Museum ID, Dallas Museum of Art ID, FBref.com squad ID, Dostoyevsky and His Entourage ID, Lambiek comic magazines ID, Energy Identification Code, Library of Congress Children's Subject Headings ID, Ministry of the Interior of Italy ID, National Park Service place ID, MnDOT Historic Bridges ID, Open Civic Data Division ID, Museen Dresden article ID, SSYK 2012 The Swedish Standard Classification of Occupations, LoC HABS/HAER/HALS place ID, Symptom Ontology ID, photoLondon ID, Syro-Malabar Catholic Church ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Regional Council of Tuscany ID, level of professionalness, defined in terms of, form of property constraint, Attraction to, group identity, analog television standard, ritual object, number of rooms
    • External identifiers: USA Water Polo Hall of Fame ID, Encyclopaedia Beliana ID, Indonesian prison database ID, LinkedIn group ID, Naver movie ID, CINE21 film ID, Movist film ID, KOBIS-ID, Max Movie film ID, The Boardr profile ID, Slovník českých nakladatelství 1848-1949 person ID, Google Play developer slug, Passion Patrimoine ID, FVLB work ID, BBC Sound Effects Asset ID, ITHL author ID, Quebec Dams Directory ID, Doktori.hu ID
  • Query examples:
    • Table of the 100 most recent additions of interactive OpenStreetMap maps to English Wikipedia articles - OSM/Wikidata query
    • Map of the birthplace of persons with an ELEM id on Wikidata (Source)

• Development
  • A long-standing bug has been fixed (T217144) where Items and Lexemes created via OAuth would not be added to the user’s watchlist even if the user had the Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist setting enabled. (The Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist setting was probably likewise ineffective, but this was not tested specifically.) Affected tools include QuickStatements, Mix'n'Match, and Wikidata Lexeme Forms; users of these and other tools may see more pages being added to their watchlists now. (This only applies to new edits and page creations; previously created or edited pages will not be automatically added to the watchlist retroactively.)
  • Working on the basic building blocks of the Query Builder towards making it possible to create the first very simple query with it
  • Talking to people about comparing Wikidata's data against other databases and flagging mismatches
  • Fixing an issue with Item creations via the API by blocked users leading to skipped entity IDs (phab:T232620)
  • Fixed an input issue with invisible characters (phab:T261071)
  • Finishing the draft of the REST API spec to get it ready for feedback
  • WikibaseManifest: created a separate key for local entities and decided what we do about non-local entity sources based on tool-builder feedback (phab:T263527) and specifying the API in OpenApi format (phab:T262919)

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

• 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!

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

• Admins can now see links to diffs of deleted revisions on Special:AbuseLog. This uses the interface of Special:Undelete. [39]
• Editors are automatically added to some user groups. For example editors are added to autoconfirmed users when they have edited enough times and long enough. Abuse filters can hinder users from automatically getting user rights for a period of time. They can also remove rights user have. Wikis can now ask to change how long this period of time is for their wiki in Phabricator. It is currently five days. [40]

Problems

• Last year some abuse filters stopped working because of a new change. If they tried to use variables that were unavailable for that action they would fail. This has now been fixed. [41]

Changes later this week

• Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 September. It will be on all wikis from 1 October (calendar).

Future changes

• You can't see the language links to other language versions from the talk page or history page. They are also not shown when you edit an article. This could change. It is not decided if for example the history page should link to another history page or to the article. You can take part in the discussion in Phabricator.
• The link colours could change. This is to make the difference between links and other text more clear. You can read more in Phabricator.
• In your preferences you can choose to get different notifications on the web or by email. You will see Apps as one of the alternatives later this week. This is because the Android and iOS Wikipedia apps will use push notifications for those who want them. You can see the preferences on the test wiki. The goal is to have push notifications on Android in October and on iOS in early 2021. [42]
• You can soon put pages on your watchlist for a limited time. This could be useful if you want to watch something for a shorter time but don't want it on your watchlist forever. It now works on mediawiki.org and will come to more wikis later. You can read more and see when it will come to other wikis.
• You can see what Wikimedians think are the best new technical tools this year. You can also nominate them.

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

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Fuzheado

• Events
  • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Professor Toby Hudson on Entity Explosion, a browser extension which allows you to get information about entities on the web page you’re visiting, 06 October. Agenda
  • Upcoming: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, October 27th at 17:00 CEST (15:00 GMT)
  • Upcoming: plenty of events for the Wikidata birthday, check the calendar and feel free to organise one!

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • What does/doesn’t follow Benford’s law: An analysis of hundreds of sets of numbers from Wikidata.
  • Video: How to create and edit items on Wikidata (in Spanish) - YouTube
  • Video: Introduction to Wikidata and wikiprojects of interest to librarians (in Spanish) - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • IllWill.js is a userscript that searches Wikidata for foreign-language sitelinks, to populate Template:ill and replace plain red links on other Wikimedia projects.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • omeka-s-wikidata is a new module for the open source GLAM collection management software Omeka, that allows cataloguers to use Wikidata as a vocabulary for persons, places, subjects, etc.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: TDD number, twin town sign, character designer, Deutsche Bahn station code
    • External identifiers: Museen Dresden article ID, SSYK 2012 The Swedish Standard Classification of Occupations, LoC HABS/HAER/HALS place ID, Symptom Ontology ID, photoLondon ID, Syro-Malabar Catholic Church ID, Native Plants Database ID, Lower Sorbian place name ID, Les roses cultivées à l'Haÿ en 1902 ID, Maniadb album ID, USA Water Polo Hall of Fame ID, Présence Compositrices work ID, Regional Council of Tuscany ID, Indonesian prison database ID, Encyclopaedia Beliana ID, Twitter topics ID, Naver movie ID, Bollywood Hungama movie ID, BoardGameGeek family ID, London Stock Exchange company ID, Région Île-de-France ID, Slovník českých nakladatelství 1848-1949 person ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: Infobox based on, CompositionToday composers showcase ID, parallel street, World Factbook country code, port calls, described at Wikipedia page, erected by, PIM award ID, Stadtwiki Dresden article
    • External identifiers: Quebec Dams Directory ID, Doktori.hu ID, CompositionToday composer ID, Slovník českých nakladatelství 1848-1949 publishing house ID, ACER code, Dictionnaire biographique du fouriérisme ID, NSW State Archives and Records Authority ID, SwissLipids identifier, Scottish Brick History Brick & Tileworks ID, Minecraft UUID, Minecraft username, Science Museum Group ID, Kicker.de player ID (actual scheme), RNACentral ID, NPS people ID, Directory of Belgian Photographers-ID, Dresden Street ID, Spotify playlist ID
  • Query examples:
    • Birthplace of people named Michael or any other variant of the name (Source)
    • Map of outdoor warning sirens, color-coded by manufacturer. A layer selector lets you toggle individual manufacturers on and off. Clicking a siren shows its make and model if available. - OSM/Wikidata query
    • Soviet cartoons in descending order of popularity in the world (Source)
    • List of ISO countries showing each country's synonyms, labels, etc. (Source)
    • Norwegian politicians who have been members of at least 3 parties (Source)
    • Streets in Leiden named after people/things (Source)
    • Maps of arts and humanities research grants funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council in UK between 2013-2019. Sorted by year, Sorted by budget (Source)
  • Newest database reports:
    • EntitySchema directory - feedback welcome on the report talk page.

• Development
  • First pieces of the Query Builder are coming together and we are working towards making it generate the first dumb query
  • Talking to people about their thoughts on checking Wikidata's data against other databases. If you're interested reach out to Mohammed.
  • Got some first internal feedback for the REST API specification draft. We'll publish it for feedback in the next days.
  • Fixing an issue with certain language codes no longer being available (phab:T264294)
  • Working on making sure blocked bots don't waste Item IDs when trying to create new Items (phab:T232620)

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

• 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!