This user is busy in real life and may not respond swiftly to queries.
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Bring a picnic blanket and some potluck, as well as some sunscreen! We'll also provide a little something for everyone, but we encourage you to bring your own favorite dishes to share, especially for those food cultural topics you would like to improve on Wikipedia.
Latest comment: 29 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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. [1]
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. [2][3]
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.
Latest comment: 22 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-08-26. Please help Translate.
Discussions
Open request for adminship:
Gwanki - RfP scheduled to end after 26 August 2024 05:54 (UTC)
Putnik 2 - RfP scheduled to end after 27 August 2024 23:17 (UTC)
Audio Transcription (P9533) from Author: Yug. P9533 is described as transcription of the word/text being spoken in this file. Does this exclude other communications modalities?
Wikidata's 12th Birthday is fast approaching. Do you need financial support to organize a birthday event? Here is some useful information about how to get funding: Wikidata:Twelfth Birthday/Run an event/Funding. The deadline to apply is September 1st.
WikiLibCon25 The Wikimedia+Libraries International Convention 2025 takes place in Mexico City, Mexico between 15 - 17 January 2025 - Call for Scholarships (ends 31 August0 and Proposals (ends 15 September) are open. WikiLibCon25 brings together Wikimedians, Wikibrarians, information professionals, library workers and mission-aligned partners from around the globe to create a vivid community and promote cooperative projects in the Library & Wikimedia sphere.
Slides: Giving metabolites (and lipids) a chemical and biological context with open science. This talk discusses the role of open science in providing chemical and biological context for metabolites and lipids, highlighting open-source cheminformatics, open standards, and open data to facilitate linking knowledge across databases and publications, as well as describing chemical interactions in biological pathway databases. By Egon Willighagen.
Wikidata distributed/#game=94 - Help adding missing information related to artists on BNU's catalog (Select the option that fits best).
Other Noteworthy Stuff
New AI Project Manager to join Wikimedia Deutschland: We’re pleased to announce that a new AI project manager will be joining our team next week. Lydia and Jonathan (Director of Engineering) have been prototyping in this area and recently presented their work at the AI_dev summit (YouTube link). Our goal is to bring knowledge graphs and generative AI closer together, making AI more equitable, truthful, participatory, and open. More updates to come soon!
Latest comment: 22 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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. [4]
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:
Latest comment: 21 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Dear Wikimedian,
We are excited to share our July newsletter, highlighting the impactful initiatives undertaken by CIS-A2K over the past month. This edition provides a detailed overview of our events and activities, offering insights into our collaborative efforts and community engagements and a brief regarding upcoming initiatives for next month.
Latest comment: 19 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The fourth round of the 2024 WikiCup ended on 29 August. Each of the 8 contestants who advanced to Round 4 scored at least 472 points, and the following contestants scored more than 700 points:
Congratulations to our eight finalists and all who participated. Contestants put in extraordinary amounts of effort during this round, and their scores can be seen here. So far this year, competitors have gotten 36 featured articles, 55 featured lists, 15 good articles, 93 in the news credits, and at least 333 did you know credits. They have conducted 357 featured content reviews, as well as 553 good article reviews and peer reviews, and have added 30 articles to featured topics and good topics.
Any content promoted after 29 August but before the start of Round 5 can be claimed during Round 5, which starts on 1 September at 00:00 (UTC). Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. If two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether for a good article, featured content, or anything else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Remember to claim your points within 14 days of earning them, and importantly, before the deadline on 31 October.
Latest comment: 17 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Nominations for the upcoming project coordinator election have opened. A team of up to ten coordinators will be elected for the next coordination year. The project coordinators are the designated points of contact for issues concerning the project, and are responsible for maintaining our internal structure and processes. They do not, however, have any authority over article content or editor conduct, or any other special powers. More information on being a coordinator is available here. If you are interested in running, please sign up here by 23:59 UTC on 14 September! Voting will commence on 15 September. If you have any questions, you can contact any member of the current coord team. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:40, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
Latest comment: 22 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-09-02.
Discussions
Project chat: Wikidata:Project chat#Mass-import policy - A new mass-import policy has been proposed, focusing on improving the quality of existing items rather than importing new ones, with a suggested limit of 100 new items before requiring community approval.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session 3 September, 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, 3 September, 2024 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter). Christa Strickler will be our first Project Series lead with her joint project with the Wikidata Religion & Theology Community of Practice to contribute biographical data to Wikidata from the IRFA database using the Mix’n’Match tool. We are excited to learn more about this project, provide a forum for discussion and shared learning, and lend a hand while building new skills. Event page: Wikidata:WikiProject LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group/Affinity Group Calls/First Project Series
(id) Registration is open for the Wikimedia Indonesia Research Grant 2024 program. Open until 30 September 2024. This program opens funding opportunities for research on topics related to Wikidata, Wikipedia, or other Wiki projects, and Linked Open Data.
Blogs: (de) Wikibase4Research - Easily manage, share and visualize knowledge data, tailored for academic purposes, WB4R simplifies the installation and use of MedaWiki software. By Kolja Bailly.
Display Wikidata Info on sister projects by User:Yair rand. This user-script will add the articles corresponding Wikidata item Label, Q-ID, Description and Short Desc. neatly under the article title. If no Wikidata item is linked, option to CreateNewItem page on Wikidata is provided.
Showcase Items: Wikimedia disambiguation page (Q4167410): type of wiki page usually in main namespace (article namespace, ns=0) containing links to articles with similar names, and very little details only, use with P31 "instance of" (2024-09-02)
The WMF Search Platform team is putting the finishing touches on the new Query Service servers that contain the two parts of the split graph.
We are analyzing which percentage of current queries are better served by other systems like the REST API or search.
Wikimedia projects integration:
We have worked on moving the Wikidata Item link out of the toolbox section of the sidebar of an article. It has been rolled out to the first wikis: ukwiki, hewiki, fawiki (phab:T66315)
We are working on decreasing the amount of irrelevant changes from Wikidata in the watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and co by correcting the tracking behaviour of the Lua function mw.wikibase.entity:getSitelink() (phab:T295356)
Wikibase REST API: We continued improving errors and error messages.
Following an RfC, there is a new criterion for speedy deletion: C4, which applies to unused maintenance categories, such as empty dated maintenance categories for dates in the past.
The arbitration case Historical Elections is currently open. Proposed decision is expected by 3 September 2024 for this case.
Miscellaneous
Editors can now enter into good article review circles, an alternative for informal quid pro quo arrangements, to have a GAN reviewed in return for reviewing a different editor's nomination.
Latest comment: 15 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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. [5]
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. [6]
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:
