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Tech News: 2020-26

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

Problems

• There are some new tools to make it easier for newcomers to start editing. They are available on some wikis. These wikis had a problem with the visual editor for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug in the new tools. It was soon fixed. [1]
• Some user scripts and gadgets stopped working because of a change to CSS selectors. .vectorTabs should be replaced with .vector-menu-tabs to fix this. [2]

Changes later this week

• The developers are working on a new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This will be released on 24 June. You can give feedback. [3]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 June. It will be on all wikis from 25 June (calendar).

Future changes

• A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use TemplateStyles instead. 91 wikis still need to fix this. You can read more and see if your wiki is affected. [4]

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

18:48, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 June 2020

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

• Community view: Community open letter on renaming

• Gallery: After the killing of George Floyd

• In the media: Part collaboration and part combat

• Discussion report: Community reacts to WMF rebranding proposals

• Featured content: Sports are returning, with a rainbow

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

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

• News from the WMF: We stand for racial justice

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

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

• Humour: Cherchez une femme

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

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

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

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Black Lives Matter

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

Wikidata weekly summary #422

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

• Discussions
  • Closed request for comments: Disallow merging into newer entity

• Events
  • Past: Wikidata Wochenende 2020 (in German)
    • Introduction to Wikidata (video)
    • Introduction to SPARQL (video)
  • Past: Cultural heritage webinar, Science Museum group. (presentations and videos)
  • Past: Wikidata Query Service exercise (in Chinese) (video)
  • Past: Wikidata in Toronto webinar with Alex Jung (video)
  • Past: Writing Wikidata queries workshop, part of the Small Wikis Toolkit series (video recording)
  • Upcoming: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, Query Service special, July 21st at 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST)
  • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Merrilee Proffitt, Chris Cyr, and Rob Fernandez on a project to surface library holdings to indicate possible notability for persons, June 30th. Agenda
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #19, July 5
  • Upcoming: Wikidata Parliament of Ghana contest, July 1st

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Lexemes in Wikidata: 2020 status, by Finn Årup Nielsen
  • Upcoming video: Live Wikidata editing #10 - with guest: YouTube, Facebook

• Tool of the week
  • The Sourcerer edit game suggests some sources that could fit to a claim and helps people adding references easily.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikibase Live sessions is coming back with the first call about Data Modeling in the context of Libraries happening on Thursday, July 2nd at 1600 UTC.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: funder, intended subject of deprecated statement, Democracy Index, principal investigator, file page offset, strike tone, applies to name of value, entry receptor, estimated value, media franchise, Dewey Decimal Classification (works and editions), Library of Congress Classification (works and editions), Universal Decimal Classification (works and editions), Regensburg Classification (works and editions), study type, number of branches, references work, tradition or theory, Dowker-Thistlethwaite notation, qualifier for this property, gloss quote, use with property value, use with qualifier, prompt when missing, offset from vertical
    • External identifiers: Noovie person ID, NTB ID, sobory.ru ID, Philadelphia Museum of Art person ID, WorldFootball.net stadium ID, National Football Teams.com match ID, EU-Football.info stadium ID, Canadian Football League player ID, cadastral municipality number in Austria, Monasteries in the Netherlands until 1800 ID, Indonesian intangible cultural heritage, Australian Classification ID, Dansk litteraturs historie ID, DLive game ID, MuseScore artist ID, Uffizi artwork ID, MNBAQ artist ID, Cimetières de France ID, Dansk Biografisk Leksikon ID, SIUSA archival fonds ID, Odeon ID, WikiTrek ID, Nomor Pokok Wajib Pajak, Spotify songwriter ID, NVE Elvenett elvID, Proleksis enciklopedija ID, Singapore Infopedia ID, vglist video game ID, Veldkruus ID, BitterDB compound ID, Helsinki persistent building ID Ratu, SIUSA archive producer family ID, SIUSA archive producer organization ID, Museum of Family History ID, Deku Deals ID, Thesaurus Sozialwissenschaften ID, GCatholic person ID, Legacy.com person ID, Econlib ID, UNBIS Thesaurus ID, Web of Science ID, Encyclopedia Tatarica (tt) Online ID, Criminological Thesaurus ID, Crossref journal ID, Duden ID, Encyclopedia Tatarica (ru) Online ID, Directory of Afrocubanas ID, Emmys person ID, finalesrugby.fr ID, Goodreads work ID, locality number in Austria, IDU person ID, Gramophone composer ID, Foreign war churchyards in Norway ID, Riksdagen person guid, GCatholic diocese ID, PMSA ID, BBK (library and bibliographic classification), Rate Your Music release ID, QUDT quantity kind ID, Unique Property Reference Number
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: FIBA Hall of Fame, Vmusic.bg artist ID, black-and-white photograph, Gujin Tushu Jicheng link, version control system, provisions, sleeping capacity, floor area, twin town sign, floor material, intended background color, is exception to constraint, prohibits, permits, Kunya, jour équivalent dans le calendrier correspondant, context of death, inverse agonist of, seatwidth, external error, set in environment, property constraint for Commons, Dowker-Thistlethwaite name, Localised title, DOI formatter, Open Data portal, subscribed by, Knot Atlas identifier, theorised by, Knotilus identifier, KnotInfo identifier, sorting weight, character designer, image set, taxon synonym string
    • External identifiers: SPOnG game ID, Bundesinventar der historischen Verkehrswege der Schweiz (IVS), Legacy.com newspaper ID, Opera Online opera house ID, Opera Online performer ID, Opera Online conductor ID, KKBox track ID, Offizielle Deutsche Charts album ID, Qobuz album ID 2, AZLyrics.com song ID, BBFC ID, FIPRESCI person ID, KBpedia ID, BWFpara.tournamentsoftware.com player ID, Maitron des fusillés ID, TheFreeDictionary medical term ID, Spanish Olympic Committee athlete ID, Naturvårdsverket Amenity ID, Supreme Court of Sweden case number, Econlib person ID, NUKAT (non-VIAF) ID, Reposcope ID, People's Representative Council of Indonesia ID, PPN ID, Oxford Bibliographies ID, Grove Art Online ID, Maniadb artist ID, Maniadb album ID, Swiss Timber Bridges, PO ID, Wikipedia Library partner ID, InciWeb, HLTV ID, Les roses cultivées à l'Haÿ en 1902 ID, Swedish Riksdag document, Church of Jesus Christ missionary ID, Church of Jesus Christ pioneer ID, Nauvoo community project ID, Dignity Memorial person ID, Oberwolfach mathematician ID, Unique Street Reference Number, TlF ID, identifiant lobbywatch.ch d'un parlementaire, identifiant Manioc livre, Bibliothèque Digital des Caraïbes, identifiant Manioc périodique, AlloCiné theater ID
  • Query examples:
    • Timeline of U.S. Presidents
    • List of MPs currently in the Sveriges riksdag (Source)
    • Map showing people buried in Père Lachaise by place of birth (Source)
    • Existing named trees in the world (Source)
    • Artworks depicting things related to a fairy tale (Source)
  • Newest database reports: no statements/enwiki

• Development
  • It is now possible to search for EntitySchema pages using a shortcut “E:”, similar to “P:” for Properties and “L:” for Lexemes. For example: E:E10 or E:kakapo. T245529
  • Continued working on the first version of Federation, which will allow other Wikibase installations to use Wikidata's Properties - getting closer to a first testable version
  • More work on consistency of user interface components
  • Finalizing the click-dummy for the first version of the Query Builder so we can start testing it with some editors soon and get feedback.
  • Continuing to investigate how to improve our APIs and other ways to improve access to the data in Wikidata for programmers
  • Discussed the future of the Wikidata Query Service and ideas for next steps we can take to make it scale better. Guillaume will join the next office hour to talk about it.
  • More work on clearer separation of Wikibase repository and Wikibase client code in order to improve maintainability

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

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

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:01, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-27

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

Problems

• Everyone was logged out. This was because a few users saw the wikis as if they were logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [5]
• Some readers didn't see new edits to pages. If the page had been recently changed they saw an older version of the page instead. This only affected readers who were logged out. It lasted for ten days. It has been fixed. [6]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

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

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

16:30, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #3

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

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

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

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:05, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #423

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

• Events
  • Past: Wikidata Parliament of Ghana contest launch (replay)
  • Upcoming: Biohackathon 2020 Barcelona 2020 November 9th - 13th The accepted wikidata related proposal: Knowledge graphs and wikidata subsetting
  • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #20, July 12
  • Upcoming: Celtic Knot conference, July 9-10, including several sessions about Wikidata, a Wikidata helpdesk

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Why Ariadne uses Getty AAT over Wikidata
  • Video: LIVE Wikidata editing #10 - YouTube

• Tool of the week
  • Ptable displays the periodic table automatically extracted from information provided by Wikidata; it also provides a check that all the elements are there with some basic properties. Additional pages provide charts of the nuclides under different criteria such as half-life. Each element or nuclide is linked to its Wikidata item for more information or to edit if necessary.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Abstract Wikipedia was approved.
  • OpenRefine 3.4 beta 2 was released.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: Open Data portal, theorised by, DOI formatter, set in environment, academic appointment
    • External identifiers: House Divided ID, thefreedictionary medical term ID, People's Representative Council of Indonesia ID, Grove Art Online ID, Supreme Court of Sweden case number, KBpedia ID, Swedish Environmental Protection Agency OBJECTID, Oxford Bibliographies ID, Swiss Timber Bridges ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes: taxon synonym string, PM20 subject code, PM20 geo code, number of downloads, Interactive element, course, Zoning symbol, vanDerWaalsConstant, has pattern
    • External identifiers: AlloCiné theater ID, Cistercian Biography Online ID, Pitchfork artist ID, Archive Of Our Own tag, Austrian encyclopedia of music online, Swiss Tunnel ID, ANZSRC 2020 FoR ID, CPJF ID, TripAdvisor ID 2, Wien Kulturgut: Kunstwerke im öffentlichen Raum ID, public transport stop, Homebrew formula name, Offizielle Deutsche Charts song ID, British Museum object ID, ToS;DR service numerical identifier, code EHESS d'une commune, IAPH code, ProtonDB video game ID
  • Query examples:
    • France has a new Prime Minister: see the list of all ministers in French history (very long scroll). If you want to know more, see this notebook
    • Open data portals in Wikidata (using the newly created property Open Data portal (P8402))
    • Objects that are named after people on Wikidata (Source)

• Development
  • More work on the consistent design system (Phabricator board)
  • More work on decoupling the different Wikibase extensions from each other
    • Proposal to stop registering WikibaseLib as a separate extension
  • Polishing the first step of Federation (using Wikidata's Properties in another Wikibase installation) (incl. preventing users from selecting a federated property with a non-supported data type (phab:T252012) and preventing users from accessing Special:NewProperty when federation is enabled (phab:T255576) and viewing a list of all properties when federation is enabled (phab:T246339))
  • Continuing research and interviews around the topic of making it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers
  • Doing first testing of mockups and prototypes of the first version of the Query Builder - coding can start soon
  • Convert a few properties from string to external identifier: Linguasphere code (P1396), KOATUU identifier (P1077) and ISIN (P946)

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

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

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:19, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-28

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

Problems

• The Score extension has been disabled for now. This is because of a security issue. It will work again as soon as the security issue has been fixed. [7]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

• Abstract Wikipedia is a new Wikimedia project. It will collect language-independent information that can be easily read in different languages. It builds on Wikidata. The name is preliminary. You can read more. [8]
• The iOS Wikipedia app developers are thinking about new experimental tools. If you use an iPhone you can help them by answering the survey.
• Some rules for user signatures will soon be enforced. Lint errors and invalid HTML will no longer be allowed in user signatures. Nested substitution will not be allowed. A link to your user page, user talk page or user contributions will be required. You can check if your signature works with the new rules. This is because the signatures can cause problems for tools or other text on the page.

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

20:18, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #424

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

• Events
  • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: 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!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:27, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-29

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

Recent changes

• Users can thank others for their edits. Checkusers can now see user data related to that action. This can help identify sock puppets who harass others using thanks. [9]

Problems

• Everyone was logged out a couple of weeks ago to fix a security problem. The problem was not entirely fixed. Because of this everyone was logged out once again last week. [10][11]

Changes later this week

• Wikis that are not for one specific language can translate pages. Sometimes parts of translations are outdated or missing. Outdated translations are marked with a pink background. Missing translations will also be marked in the future. This markup can sometimes break things. It can soon be disabled by using <translate nowrap></translate> on the source page. [12]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 July. It will be on all wikis from 16 July (calendar).

Future changes

• Wikimedia code review plans to use GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. [13][14][15][16]

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

16:29, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #425

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

• 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!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) (WMDE) 14:58, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-30

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

Recent changes

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

Problems

• There is a problem with the interlanguage links. The interlanguage links are the links that help you find a specific page in a different language. The sorting is broken. The developers are working on a solution. [17]
• Some users keep getting the notifications for the same event. Some of these are old events. [18]
• 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. [19]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

• There is a Printable version link. This will disappear. That is because web browsers today can create a printable version or show how it will look in print anyway. [20]

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

19:13, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-31

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

Recent changes

• The 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. [21]
• 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.
• 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

• The deployment train for MediaWiki has been blocked this week. [22][23]
• Translation Notification Bot was sending the same message multiple times to every translator. This has been fixed. [24]
• Some users were receiving the same notification multiple times. This has been fixed. [25]

Changes later this week

• 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.

13:51, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #426

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

• 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!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:03, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Short description

The short description "founder and first Umayyad Caliph (r.661-680)" only makes sense to people who already know who Hazrat Muawiyah was. If you want to say he is the founder of something, you need to say of what. Do you think it would make more sense to say "first Umayyad Caliph (r.661-680) and founder of the Umayyad Caliphate"?-- Toddy1 (talk) 12:28, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

Toddy1 Good pickup. I have changed the short description to what you suggested. Thank you. Chewings72 (talk) 13:01, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 2 August 2020

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

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

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

• In the media: Dog days gone bad

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

• Featured content: Remembering Art, Valor, and Freedom

• Traffic report: Now for something completely different

• Gallery: Photos of threatened species from iNaturalist

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

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

• Essay: Not compatible with a collaborative project

• Obituaries: Hasteur and Brian McNeil

• In focus: WikiLoop DoubleCheck, reviewing edits made easy

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:24, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #427

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

• 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!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:37, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-32

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

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. [26]
• 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. [27]
• There is a problem with the global preferences for the "Use Legacy Vector" option. Developers are working on fixing it. [28]
• 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. [29]

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. [30]
• 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. [31]
• 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.
• Bot operators can use Pywikibot to regularly archive discussions. The behavior when the bot uses counter to prevent large archives was changed. [32]
• 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.

15:43, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Instagram as reliable source for coptic orthodox pedophilia scandal

Hello! I noticed that you removed some edits regarding a leaked report because they had instagram as a reference. The instagram account was first to post the report and the report has been mentioned in many news stories including one by the LA times. I simply included the instagram account as the reference because it includes the report in its entirety. The report is not available in as much detail in other places.

What is your advice getting the information up the proper references. Please comment on my talk page. thank you :)

--Titus Obelisk (talk) 14:15, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Titus Obelisk If the story was in the LA Times then quote the LA Times as your source, not Instagram.Chewings72 (talk) 00:49, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #428

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

• 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!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:06, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-33

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

Recent changes

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

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. [34]

Changes later this week

• 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. [35][36]

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

16:06, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Short descriptions

Hi. I've notice you change a few short descriptions on articles on my watchlist, and i'm not entirely sure it's necessary or useful. My understanding of the short description (from WP:SHORTDES) that that it "should be brief" and "should not attempt to precisely define the subject" and "should focus on distinguishing the subject from ones with similar titles". To that end, i would argue that adding the birth and death years of Roman emperors is unnecessary ~ i'm not even sure that their regnal years are necessary as they are clearly defined by "Third [or some other number] Roman emperor". If i'm misunderstanding or misinterpreting, please feel free to correct me and explain mine error; happy days, Lindsay^Hello 20:20, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

LindsayH Thank you for your message. I have been correcting a number of short description entries for biographies for some time now. As a principle, I agree with and support the definitions that you quoted in your message. My basic approach is to just provide enough information to help identify the biography based on the country that the person has primarily lived in or carried out their occupation; the primary occupation(s) of the individual during their lifetime ; and some information regarding when they lived. Given that it doesn't take up much space, my preference is to put the date of birth and date of death to help identify when the person was active or flourished . If that is not available or is uncertain, I then refer to the relevant century or part of that century (e.g. early 2nd century AD). For individuals who have ruled an empire or a kingdom or a principality or the like, I have added a second bracket with the period of reign since I believe that is relevant to getting a very brief understanding of when the individual was most influential. However I'm not wedded to that if you think that that is unnecessary information. One key element in my approach is to try and make sure that the short descriptions are not too long e.g. under 100 characters. Happy to discuss further with you regarding my approach to Roman emperors. I don't wish to be pedantic about it -- I just want to try and improve the overall quality of the short descriptions as they are important both in Wikipedia and for Wikidata. Regards Chewings72 (talk) 05:07, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. To be fair, i'm not wedded to any particular use of the things ~ i scarcely notice them, and don't go seeking them out; my interest is merely that we have a basic consistency with them, and stay in line with what the community wants. My understanding is that the point of the short description is merely to enable the reader to know that they have arrived at the correct article among two or more which may be the same or similar titles. Thus, distinguishing, thus, between London, London, London, London, London, London, and so on, is the key; for that, an appropriate short description might be "A city in England", rather than "An English city, the seat of the Queen, capital of the greatest empire ever seen, population 8 million" ~ obviously, i'm exaggerating for (i hope) humorous effect, but i'm sure you understand. For the emperors (or any other rulers) we surely only need enough to be sure we're on the right page ~ so for Caligula, for example, "Third emperor of Rome" would be sufficient without the dates or, certainly, with only one set of dates (after all, WP:SHORTDESC does suggest 40 characters).

Enough, i'm sure you think i've gone overboard here but, i promise you, i'm not beating this to death, i am done. I really have just written here as a follow up so you'd know i did see your reply and thought it over, and to explain my thinking. Thanks; happy days, Lindsay^Hello 09:52, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #429

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

• 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!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:03, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-34

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

Recent changes

• 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. [37]
• 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. [38]

Changes later this week

• 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. [39][40]

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

20:41, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #430

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

• 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 [$2-10k]
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!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:09, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-35

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

Changes later this week

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

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

17:59, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 August 2020

• News and notes: The high road and the low road

• In the media: Storytelling large and small

• Featured content: Going for the goal

• Special report: Wikipedia's not so little sister is finding its own way

• Op-Ed: The longest-running hoax

• Traffic report: Heart, soul, umbrellas, and politics

• News from the WMF: Fourteen things we’ve learned by moving Polish Wikimedia conference online

• Recent research: Detecting spam, and pages to protect; non-anonymous editors signal their intelligence with high-quality articles

• Arbitration report: A slow couple of months

• From the archives: Wikipedia for promotional purposes?

• Obituaries: Marcus Sherman, Jerome West, and Pauline van Till

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:32, 30 August 2020 (UTC)