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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 2024-07-01. Please help Translate.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
DifoolBot 4 Task(s) - Split single references containing multiple reference URLs into multiple references.
Bot Bozze Task(s) - Add sitelinks to itwiki draft articles after they've been moved to the main namespace.
New request for comments: Spelling convention for labels and descriptions in English - RfC started 2024-06-25. This RfC requests feedback and input for finding consistency in spelling convention as English has multiple regional variations.
Past: The Lexicodays 2024 was an online event designed to offer a discussion space for the Wikidata community about Lexicographical Data. An archive of some of the slides and session recordings are here c:Category:Lexicodays 2024. More will be added as they become available.
Upcoming:
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 10th July 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Botany-focused Wikidata online workshop online as part of the #IBC2024. Date: Tuesday 9th July at 9pm NZST (GMT+12) / 11 am central Europe. Register here!
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
Querying for audio on Wikidata - This blog post discusses using SPARQL queries on Wikidata to find audio recordings, focusing on musical compositions and their associated genres.
Diff Blog: Imagining a Wikidata future for librarians together - the sixth and final blog post from the LD42023 conference. Silvia Gutiérrez (WMF) and Giovanna Fontenelle (WMF) document the results of the collaborative session on building a bridge between the Library-Wikidata community and WMF.
Library Knowledge as Linked Data: A Wikidata Approach: Contributing to a shared data commons. David Erlandson describes the experiences of using Wikidata for the pilot Program for Cooperative Cataloging to "accelerate the movement towards ubiquitous identifier creation and identity management at the network level".
User:Zvpunry/CreateNewItem - This is a User script to easily add a new Item while editing a Statement and noticing that the desired Item is missing.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The second iteration of the Wikidata:Open Online Course has begun. Class will continue until August 11. Whether you're a beginner taking your first steps, an individual in need of a refresher on Wikidata concepts, or a seasoned trainer looking to level up your skills - this course is right for you.
Newest WikiProjects: Inuktitut - This is the space to organize work to assure that the sum of all knowledge and the supporting infrastructure for necessary services are available in Inuktitut (ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ, Inuktitut).
Wikidata Affinity Group Update: The fourth session of Starting a Wikidata Project, originally set for March 18, will now be an asynchronous Slack discussion in the #wikidata channel of the LD4 Slack Space. Join us at 9am PT / 16:00 UTC to discuss Reporting Your Outcomes and Results. Join Slack here. Note: April programming will pause as we prepare the next series.
(German) Wikipedia Unterwegs - this time in Neu-Ulm: This travelling community meetup for German Wikimedians discusses the growing ecosystem of Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons.
REST in Rust by Magnus: "A new Rust crate has been developed to simplify access to the Wikibase REST API, featuring industry-level coding standards, 248 unit tests, >97% code coverage, and high maintainability. Check out the GitHub repo and contribute via the issue tracker or pull requests!"
The Wikidata Vector Database prototype is almost ready! Developers interested in integrating semantic search into their applications and editors looking to explore Wikidata items using natural language search are invited to reach out for more details: philippe.saadewikimedia.de
OAI formatter (formatter to generate ID compatible with Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting services)
AI-generation prompt (exact prompt that was used to generate this AI-generated media or work)
data analysis method (methods used in the main item for inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information)
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
watercraft prefix (prefix applied to watercraft operated by different organisations)
accused (person or organization who has been accused of carrying out this harmful, illegal, or immoral act without having received a criminal conviction or where the accused have been acquitted in a court of law)
applies to volume (volume of the item (usually edition of a work) to which the claim applies)
oxygen endurance (The maximum time a submarine, spacecraft or enclosed vehicle can sustain life using its onboard oxygen supply.)
Showcase Lexemes: Knoten (L298686) - German noun that can mean "knot", "fundamental unit of which graphs (in graph theory) are formed", "point where an orbit crosses a plane of reference to which it is inclined", or "hair wrapped in a circular coil around itself (bun)."
Development
Wikibase REST API: We continued the work on adding search to the API (phab:T383126)
Search: We are continuing the work on making it easier to search for entities other than Items in the search box (phab:T338483)
Query Service: We set up the constraint checks to use the split graph instead of the full graph (phab:T374021)
Integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are looking into how changes from Wikidata are represented on the other Wikimedia projects and how that can be improved (phab:T386200)
Wikidata and Sister Projects to take place May 29 - June 1. Please send us your session ideas, we still have lots of space for proposals. This is a great chance to highlight the benefits of Wikidata use in other WM projects. See Talk page for proposals.
Lexica - a mobile-friendly tool that simplifies micro contributions to lexicographical data on Wikidata, making various editing tasks accessible and intuitive for contributors of all experience levels.
data analysis method (methods used in the main item for inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information)
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-08-18. Missed the previous one? See issue #692.
Events
Upcoming events: New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series! Mark your calendars for our third session of our event series, an Introduction to Wikidata/EMCO, which is meant to introduce EMCO participants and anyone interested to Wikidata and to develop frameworks and skills for entity management in the Wikidata environment. We will review searching in Wikidata and have a practical, hands-on exercise where everyone can create a new person item and add some statements. Join us Tuesday, August 19th at 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST Time zone converter. Please see our project page for more information and Zoom links.
Magnus Manske’s developed a Como Wikidata Game using Autodesc, this game suggests short descriptions for Wikidata items that don't have any. Review each suggestion, improve it if needed, and submit a concise, accurate description. Additioanlly the andriod application for the game is available for download at Google Play Store
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Are you a developer using Wikidata's data in your application with the action API or Query Service? The Wikidata development would love to talk to you to help improve how you can get to Wikidata's data. More details here (Great Question). User interview is 60-mins and you’ll receive compensation as a thank-you for your time.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
Código INE (Bolivia) (Official hierarchical identifier of the National Institute of Statistics of Bolivia for administrative entities such as departments, provinces and municipalities.)
quality for (quality that is described by this sense of adjective/grammatical modifier)
type of quality (qualifier of "item for this modifier" that specifies the type of quality)
Showcase Lexemes: spegnere (L1250690) - Italian verb (ˈspeɲ.ɲe.re) meaning "to extinguish (a fire)", "to turn off (a device)", or "to die (euphemistic)"
Development
Mobile editing of statements: We are continuing the work - so far on the read-only mobile version. We will start looking into editing soon. You can follow along with the development on beta Wikidata.
GraphQL: We are continuing some experiments with GraphQL to see if it is useful for specific types of access to Wikidata's data.
Dumps: We are starting to experiment with subset dumps to see if we can get meaningful smaller dumps for reusers.
Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects:
We are working on scalability issues around the number of changes from Wikidata that get sent to Wikipedia and co. As part of this we are continuing to look into how to decrease the number of changes in recent changes and watchlist on Wikipedia and co that don't actually affect an article there.
We are investigating how the upcoming larger rollout of Parsoid affects the tracking of Wikidata usage in articles.
We are looking into improving the Databox Lua module that is used especially in smaller Wikipedias to get Wikidata-powered infoboxes.
Federation: We are looking at the previous prototype for Federated Properties that allowed to use Wikidata's Properties on another Wikibase instance. We are checking what if anything of it can be revived for our current work to allow other Wikibase instances to use Wikidata's Items and Properties seamlessly.
Data governance: We are concluding research around the current undestanding of people about which data should go where in the Wikibase Ecosystem.
Constraint reports: We limited Special:ConstraintReport to logged-in users to avoid AI scrapers hitting the systems too hard ([[phab:T401789]))
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Later this week, people who are logged-in and have the "Discussion tools" Beta Feature enabled will gain the ability to "Thank" individual comments directly from talk pages, rather than needing to navigate to page history. Learn more about this feature. [1]
An A/B test comparing two versions of the desktop donate link launched on testwiki on 12 August and on English Wikipedia 14 August for 0.1% of logged out users on the desktop site. The experiment will run for three weeks, ending on 12 September. [2]
An A/A test to measure the baseline for reader retention was launched 12 August using Experimentation Lab. This measures the percentage of users who revisit a wiki after their initial visit over a 14-day period. No visual changes are expected. The experiment will run through 31 August. [3]
Closed request for permissions/Bot: Dolabbot - task(s): Import module subpages from other wikis (mainly English wiktionary) to Korean wiktionary and addition of corresponding Wikidata sitelinks.
The call for proposals deadline for WikidataCon 2025 is very close (end of the August). Submit your session proposals at this Call for Proposals page.
Wikidata's 13th birthday decentralized events will take place in October and November 2025. Feel free to browse the documentation pages to learn how to organize an event in your area and get in touch with other organizers. If you need funding support, make sure to apply for the micro-grants before the deadline of September 1st. Please help translate the documentation pages into your language.
WikiCite 2025: a 3-day (25 - 31 August 2025) conference, summit and hackathon for creating an ecosystem of bibliographical data. To attend online, please sign-up on the Participants page.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs: How Wikidata is coding for humanity - In this interview, Lydia Pintscher of Wikimedia Deutschland speaks with Stephen Harrison on how Wikidata connects human and machine-readable knowledge and why contributing to it is having a global impact.
A new tool SPARQL Recent Changes 2 has been released and enables mass-validation of entities in Wikidata based on their recent changes. This tool enables users to ensure that whole subgraphs are valid according to any given EntitySchema!
WikiCrowd A tool for crowdsourced micro-edits on Wikimedia projects, letting users make quick contributions—like labeling images or answering simple questions—to improve data on Commons and Wikidata.
Mobile editing of statements: After focusing on the initial read-only version, we are now starting the work on the actual editing mode. You can follow along with the development on beta Wikidata.
Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects:
We are continuing to work on scalability issues around the number of changes from Wikidata that get sent to Wikipedia and co. As part of this we are continuing to look into how to decrease the number of changes in recent changes and watchlist on Wikipedia and co that don't actually affect an article there.
GraphQL: We now have a prototype for GraphQL for Wikidata. We'd love to have your feedback about it, especially if you are a developer building applications with Wikidata's data. More details at GraphQL prototype
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Template authors can now use additional CSS properties, since the CSS sanitizer used by TemplateStyles was updated. For example: width: fit-content; ruby-align; relative units such as lh; and custom strings in list-style-type. These improvements are a Community Wishlist wish. [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]
On large wikis, the default time period to display edits from, within the Special:RecentChanges page, has been changed from 7 days to 1 day. This is part of a performance improvement project. This should have no user-facing impact due to the quantity of edits on these wikis. [19]
Wikimedia Commons videos were not shown in the Videos tab in Google Search. The problem was investigated and reported to Google who have now fixed the issue. [21][22]
Two fields of the recentchanges database table are being removed. rc_new and rc_type are being removed in favor of rc_source. Queries to these older fields will start to fail starting this week and developers should use rc_source instead. These older fields were deprecated over 10 years ago and should not be in use. This is part of work to improve the performance and stability of queries to the recentchanges table. [24]
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: support for new languages in MediaWiki and translatewiki; the start of the Language Onboarding and Development project to help support the growth of new and small wikis; updates on research projects; and more.
Meetings and events
The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, August 29th at 15:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: the Avro keyboard developers from Wikimedia Bangladesh, who were recently awarded a national award for their contributions to this keyboard; and other topics.
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