This user is aware of the designation of the following topics as contentious topics:
articles about living or recently deceased people, and edits relating to the subject (living or recently deceased) of such biographical articles
the region of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal), broadly construed, including but not limited to history, politics, ethnicity, and social groups
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)
Latest comment: 30 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
The Community Tech team will be focusing on wishes related to Watchlists and Recent Changes pages, over the next few months. They are looking for feedback. Please read the latest update, and if you have ideas, please submit a wish on the topic.
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Commons community has decided to block cross-wiki uploads to Wikimedia Commons, for all users without autoconfirmed rights on that wiki, starting on August 16. This is because of widespread problems related to files that are uploaded by newcomers. Users who are affected by this will get an error message with a link to the less restrictive UploadWizard on Commons. Please help translating the message or give feedback on the message text. Please also update your local help pages to explain this restriction. [1]
On wikis with temporary accounts enabled and Meta-Wiki, administrators may now set up a footer for the Special:Contributions pages of temporary accounts, similar to those which can be shown on IP and user-account pages. They may do it by creating the page named MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-temp. [2]
Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Fall 2025 will be held 28–30 October 2025 in Hanover, Germany. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.
Latest comment: 27 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 27th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 2025! Boy, does it feel good to kick off the year with an issue. Yep, it's been a year since we cleared out the 2022-2024 backlog with issues 23 and 24! Good times. Though in this case "a year" just means... 6 months? 😯 The salience of whatever joke I was planning to make here has vanished speedily. Aaron Liu (talk) 21:00, 31 July 2025 (UTC)Reply
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
WikiTextExpander by Polygnotus, is this edition's featured script. At the click of a configurable hotkey, this script will find and replace or link a configurable list of phrases within the selected text in all source editors (even in the comment/reply field!). Besides allowing the quick insertion of templated messages, this script greatly mitigates the WP:WTF? problem by providing both the legibility of familiar words and the convenience of shortcuts. And to those asking, the capitalization of "Wikitext" as "WikiText" was a necessary sacrifice for far-more-memorable acronymy.
CanonNi: AlertAssistant has been fixed and rewritten using OOUI instead of Twinkle's Morebits. Such modern, very tool. (Do note that the maintainer has since become inactive.)
NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AjaxLoader has been updated to use modern JS APIs that replace the browser's URL bar with the link you clicked on to load in place. The "back" (and "forward") buttons also work now. Cool, innit?
andrybak: Unsigned helper no longer shows an error when the message to sign was added in the earliest 50 revisions of a page's history. This is especially relevant to pages with short histories.
BilledMammal/Move+ needs updating to order list of pages handle lists of pages to move correctly regardless of the discussion's page, so that we may avoid repeating fiasco history.
In breaking m:Tech/News, Gadgets can now include .vue files. This makes it easier to develop modern user interfaces using Vue.js, in particular using Codex, the official design system of Wikimedia. Codex icons are now also available. The documentation has examples.
Appo/Globstory integrates OpenHistoryMap, updating the map whenever hovering/clicking on a ___location or year, the latter of which changes the map to be (hopefully) accurate to the year selected. It's pretty interesting.
linkinfo Somewhat similar to WP:NavPops, Awesome Aasim/linkinfo(pictured) provides a collection of links to replace the right-click context menu, presented beautifully.
PreviousDiscussions provides a link to search for your username on subpages of another user's userpage and talkpage conveniently.
Twineeea/noRedLinks brings you to the "read" instead of the "create" tab when you visit a red link. Contemplate life's mysteries as you stare into the blank! Deeply.
No, this is not going to be the enduring tradition of S++ for the future. This was meant to be a joke for the special occasion on the first day of the fourth month but was delayed by four months because I'm lazy.
Wikimania begins this week (August 6-9). Check out the Wikidata sessions and meetups in the event schedule and mark them in your calander.
New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series: Join the second session in our Intro to Wikidata/EMCO series. It will be focused on gadgets and user scripts that enhance Wikidata editing. We'll demo useful tools and invite you to share your favorites too! 🗓️ Tuesday, August 5 🕘 9am PT / 12pm ET / 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST ℹ️ More info & Zoom link: Project page
Wikimedia Commons Depicts statements over time - Looking at the user of Wikidata Items to show that Wikimedia commons images depict, since the structured data on commons feature was originally turned on. Roads currently come out on top! By Adshore
Videos: Ongoing Wikidata sessions at the LD4 2025 events. (playlist)
Tool of the week
Who Painted this - is a tool developed by Francesco Negri. The tool is a game that let's you guess who created a painting, using data from Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
If you are using Wikidata's APIs please be aware that the existing user agent policy will be enforced more strictly going forward. Please make sure your application sets a proper user agent. More details are in this announcement.
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.
Updates for editors
Editors can now enable the User Info card. This feature adds an icon next to usernames on history pages and similar user-contribution log pages. When you tap or click on the icon, it displays data related to that user account such as the number of edits, reverted edits, blocks, and more. It's part of a broader project to make it easier for moderators to evaluate account trustworthiness. The feature can be enabled in your global preferences, and later this week it will be available in local preferences. [3]
Everybody is invited to share comments on Collaborative Contributions, a project recently launched by the Connection team. The project aims to create a new way to display the impact of collaborative editing activities (such as edit-a-thons, backlog drives, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. Post your comments on the project talk page. [4]
Administrators can now define the default block duration for temporary accounts. To do that, they need to create a page named MediaWiki:Ipb-default-expiry-temporary-account and use a value defined in MediaWiki:Ipboptions. This allows administrators to easily block temporary accounts for 90 days, which is functionally equivalent to an indefinite block. The advantage of this solution is that it does not clutter Special:BlockList. More documentation is available. [5]
Gadgets can now include .vue files. This makes it easier to develop modern user interfaces using Vue.js, in particular using Codex, the official design system of Wikimedia. Codex icons can be loaded through the gadget definition. The documentation has examples. For user scripts that use Vue.js, an API module now exists to load Codex icons. [6][7]
Module developers can now use a Lua interface to simplify the preparation of Lua modules for translation on Meta-Wiki. This improvement makes it easier for translators to find and edit module strings without dealing with raw Lua code. It helps prevent mistakes that could break the module during translation. Module developers and translators are invited to watch the demo video, read more about translatable modules to understand how it works, refer to Meta-Wiki's Module:User Wikimedia project for example usage, and share their feedback on how well it addresses the challenges in their workflow. The interface still has some performance issues, so it should not be used in widely used modules yet. [8]
Developers of external tools that connect to Wikimedia pages must set a user-agent that complies with the user-agent policy. This policy will start to be more strongly enforced in August because of external crawlers that are overusing Wikimedia's resources. Tools that are hosted on Wikimedia's Toolforge or Cloud VPS will not be affected by this for now, but should still set a user-agent. More technical details are available, and related questions are welcome in that task.
Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to some smaller Wikipedias over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyages and Wiktionaries to Parsoid Read Views. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [9]
Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
wikimedia.de
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
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