This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Latest comment: 6 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Welcome to the 600th Weekly Summary!
Lydia initiated the weekly newsletter at the start of the Wikidata project, before it even went live, to keep the community in the loop about the developments, the new projects and tools. Léa carried on the newsletter in 2016 and then it was my turn in 2020. The newsletter has been going strong for eleven years, with its content powered by the community, and delivered every week without fail. Thank you to everyone who helped fill in the different sections of the Weekly Summary thus far ❤️ --Mohammed
Today it is time to celebrate Wikidata’s 11th birthday. Let’s take a look back at the past year and what’s coming.
Wikidata’s world - map of Wikidata Items with a geocoordinate
There are now over 12.200 amazing people who are actively editing on Wikidata - 3000 of them even making more than 100 edits a month ♥️ Thank you! Without you Wikidata wouldn’t be what it is today. Thank you for helping give more people more access to more knowledge every single day. This year also marks the year we can welcome a new sister to the Wikimedia projects: Wikifunctions is live, letting us all geek out on functions in anticipation of Abstract Wikipedia. Another big milestone was Wikibase Cloud coming out of private beta. Now you can more easily run your own Wikibase and collect and maintain data that doesn’t fit into Wikidata. 2023 was also the year when the efforts of Wikidata editors were recognized across the Wikimedia movement with the awarding of the Wikimedian of the Year award to Taufik Rosman and the Wikimedia Laureate award to Siobhan Leachman. Over the coming year I want us to find ways how we can bring more people, who are already editing a bit here and there, closer to the community and help them find their place in our community. If you are one of them and have not found your place yet, check out a WikiProject related to your interests. Wikidata has something for everyone 😉
Wikidata now has over 106 Million Items and nearly 1.2 Million Lexemes. We are closing in on 2 Billion edits, making about 20 Million edits per month. All this content is used to create useful, quirky, educational or just fun applications that wouldn’t be possible without Wikidata and all the work you put into it. Check out Notable People for example. Over the coming year we want to make that even easier by building better APIs, lessening the strain on the Query Service, doing more outreach to developers as well as making our data more usable by ironing out ontology issues. In addition there will be increased focus on improving how the other Wikimedia projects integrate Wikidata. With the opening up of Wikibase Cloud we will hopefully also see many new Wikibases pop up that cover more specialized data or be used as playgrounds to prepare data for Wikidata. I am looking forward to a growing Wikibase Ecosystem and excited about more Linked Open Data becoming available to the world, with Wikidata being an entryway to it all.
And last but not least: if you want to learn a bit more about the history and backstory of Wikidata, then you might like Wikidata: The Making Of by Denny, Markus and me.
List of presents gathered by the community for Wikidata's eleventh birthday
Luthor is a multi-lingual tool for adding usage examples to lexemes on Wikidata, from sentences found on Wikisource in the same language. (by Asaf Bartov)
সংকলক একটি সরঞ্জাম যেটা দিয়ে উইকিসংকলনের লেখাগুলির উইকিউপাত্ত আইটেম অনুসারে সে লেখাগুলিকে উন্নত ভাবে অনুসন্ধান করা যায়। - Sangkalak is a tool with which Wikisource works can be searched more readily, using the Wikidata items for those works. (present from Mahir256) (by মাহির২৫৬-এর উপহার)
Creating new Lexemes? For a lot more languages you now no longer need to provide a spelling variant when creating a new Lexeme, making it even easier to contribute data about words in your language. (present from the development team)
The Mismatch Finder, the tool to help review mismatches between Wikidata and other data sources now also has support for mismatches on qualifiers. This allows it to be useful also for issues that are in the data in qualifiers. (present from the development team)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call October 31, 2023: We will hear from Darnelle Melvin, Cory Lampert, and Andre Hulet, University of Nevada-Las Vegas Libraries, on WireframeVG: A Search and Discovery Application for Wikidata Projects. Agenda
How cultural institutions use Wikidata (How cultural heritage institutions sharing their collection data, including implementing Wikidata projects, batch uploading datasets to Wikidata, and how to share successes to a broader audience) - Jackie Rubashkin, Metadata Technician, Barack Obama Presidential Library; Michelle van Lanschot, Project Coordinator at Wikimedia-Netherlands; William Blueher, Associate Museum Librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Will Kent, Wiki Education
(in Chinese) Wikidata基礎編輯教學 (Wikidata basic editor) - Conference for Open Source Coders, Users & Promoters (COSCUP) 2023
Notable People is a map project by Topi Tjukanov that showing birthplaces of the most "notable people" around the world. It uses the combined data of Wikipedia and Wikidata from the paper's "a cross-verified database of notable people, 3500 BC-2018 AD" by Morgane Laouenan, Palaash Bhargava, Jean-Benoît Eyméoud, Olivier Gergaud, Guillaume Plique & Etienne Wasmer. The data shows only one person for each unique geographic location with the highest notability rank.
Wikimedia Research Fund Update update. "You can apply for research funds (USD 2K-50K) until December 15, 2023. While all research proposals related to Wikimedia projects are welcome, we particularly encourage research studies on medium to small size languages and communities, as well as in low resourced languages and projects."
The Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects team is investigating the different ways Wikidata is used in the sister projects. We would like to speak with you about your experiences integrating or connecting Wikidata, if you'd like to tell us, please sign up for an interview on our project page or on our Registration Form.
Wikidata:WikiProject Academic Publisher - a project to display open access shares (among others based on publishers) at the Austrian Datahub for Open Access Negotiations and Monitoring
Development
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing the work on making it possible to remove a description in a given language from an Item, modify the label of an Item and add aliases to an Item (phab:T342986, phab:T342980, phab:T335842)
Lexicographical data: We switched the Property that is used to pre-select the spelling variant on the Special:NewLexeme page from P218 (ISO 639-1 code) to P305 (IETF language tag) to make use of the latter’s larger coverage. (phab:T348923)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing to work on addressing the feedback from the testing of the new datatype in the test system.
Latest comment: 6 months 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.
Recent changes
The Structured Content team, as part of its project of improving UploadWizard on Commons, made some UX improvements to the upload step of choosing own vs not own work (T347590), as well as to the licensing step for own work (T347756).
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (calendar).
Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 2 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for many languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [1][2]
Starting November 1, the impact module (Special:Impact) will be upgraded by the Growth team. The new impact module shows newcomers more data regarding their impact on the wiki. It was tested by a few wikis during the last few months. [3]
Latest comment: 6 months 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.
Recent changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, the default font-size of a number of navigational elements (tagline, tools menu, navigational links, and more) has been increased slightly to match the font size used in page content. [4]
Problems
Last week, there was a problem displaying some recent edits on a few wikis, for 1-6 hours. The edits were saved but not immediately shown. This was due to a database problem. [5]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).
The Growth team will reassign newcomers from former mentors to the currently active mentors. They have also changed the notification language to be more user-friendly. [6][7]
Latest comment: 6 months 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.
Last week, users who previously visited Meta-Wiki or Wikimedia Commons and then became logged out on those wikis could not log in again. The problem is now resolved. [12]
Last week, some pop-up dialogs and menus were shown with the wrong font size. The problem is now resolved. [13]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).
Future changes
Reference Previews are coming to many wikis as a default feature. They are popups for references, similar to the PagePreviews feature. You can opt out of seeing them. If you are using the gadgets Reference Tooltips or Navigation Popups, you won’t see Reference Previews. Deployment is planned for November 22, 2023.
Canary (also known as heartbeat) events will be produced into Wikimedia event streams from December 11. Streams users are advised to filter out these events, by discarding all events where meta.domain == "canary". Updates to Pywikibot or wikimedia-streams will discard these events by default. [14]
Latest comment: 6 months 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.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [15][16]
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Quechua Wikipedia, Romansh Wikipedia, Romani Wikipedia, Rundi Wikipedia, Aromanian Wikipedia, Tarandíne Wikipedia, Rusyn Wikipedia, Kinyarwanda Wikipedia, Sanskrit Wikipedia, Sakha Wikipedia, Santali Wikipedia, Sardinian Wikipedia, Sicilian Wikipedia, Scots Wikipedia, Sindhi Wikipedia, Northern Sami Wikipedia, Sango Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, Sinhala Wikipedia, Slovak Wikipedia, Slovenian Wikipedia, Samoan Wikipedia, Somali Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Serbian Wikipedia, Sranan Tongo Wikipedia, Swati Wikipedia, Southern Sotho Wikipedia, Saterland Frisian Wikipedia, Sundanese Wikipedia, Silesian Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Tulu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tetum Wikipedia, Tajik Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkmen Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia, Tswana Wikipedia, Tongan Wikipedia, Tok Pisin Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Tsonga Wikipedia, Tatar Wikipedia, Twi Wikipedia, Tahitian Wikipedia, Tuvinian Wikipedia, Udmurt Wikipedia, Uyghur Wikipedia, Uzbek Wikipedia, Venda Wikipedia, Venetian Wikipedia, Veps Wikipedia, West Flemish Wikipedia, Volapük Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [17][18][19]
The Vector 2022 skin will have some minor visual changes to drop-down menus, column widths, and more. These changes were added to four Wikipedias last week. If no issues are found, these changes will proceed to all wikis this week. These changes will make it possible to add new menus for readability and dark mode. Learn more. [20]
Latest comment: 6 months 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.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [21][22]
MediaWiki's JavaScript system will now allow async/await syntax in gadgets and user scripts. Gadget authors should remember that users' browsers may not support it, so it should be used appropriately. [23]
The deployment of "Add a link" announced last week was postponed. It will resume this week.
Latest comment: 5 months 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.
Recent changes
The spacing between paragraphs on Vector 2022 has been changed from 7px to 14px to match the size of the text. This will make it easier to distinguish paragraphs from sentences. [24]
The "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is working again. You no longer need to switch to source editing to edit {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords. [25]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [26][27]
Registration & Scholarship applications are now open for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 that will take place from 3–5 May in Tallinn, Estonia. Scholarship applications are open until 5 January 2024.
Latest comment: 5 months 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.
Recent changes
On Wikimedia Commons, there are some minor user-interface improvements for the "choosing own vs not own work" step in the UploadWizard. This is part of the Structured Content team's project of improving UploadWizard on Commons. [29][30]
Problems
There was a problem showing the Newcomer homepage feature with the "impact module" and their page-view graphs, for a few days in early December. This has now been fixed. [31][32]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 December. It will be on all wikis from 14 December (calendar). [33][34]
Future changes
The 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 5 January 2024, and has an associated privacy statement.
Latest comment: 5 months 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.
Tech News
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2024 because of the holidays.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 December. It will be on all wikis from 21 December (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [35][36]
Starting December 18, it won't be possible to activate Structured Discussions on a user's own talk page using the Beta feature. The Beta feature option remains available for users who want to deactivate Structured Discussions. This is part of Structured Discussions' deprecation work. [37]
There will be full support for redirects in the Module namespace. The "Move Page" feature will leave an appropriate redirect behind, and such redirects will be appropriately recognized by the software (e.g. hidden from Special:UnconnectedPages). There will also be support for manual redirects. [38]
Future changes
The MediaWiki JavaScript documentation is moving to a new format. During the move, you can read the old docs using version 1.41. Feedback about the new site is welcome on the project talk page.
The Wishathon is a new initiative that encourages collaboration across the Wikimedia community to develop solutions for wishes collected through the Community Wishlist Survey. The first community Wishathon will take place from 15–17 March. If you are interested in a project proposal as a user, developer, designer, or product lead, you can register for the event and read more.
Other discussions: How to handle concepts of trans people on Wikidata? Should {privacy at wikidata.org} be redirected to {privacy at wikimedia.org} or should it be monitored by Wikidata volunteers? Join the discussion!
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour December 18th, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to.The ninth and final Wikidata Working Hour in the series will be using SPARQL and Scholia to query and visualize the data we’ve added to Wikidata during our series. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page
Blogs: #LD42023. Part I: The Future of Wikidata + Libraries (A Workshop) - This blog series explores how libraries engage with Wikidata and Linked Data in the face of AI challenges. Led by Silvia Gutiérrez and Giovanna Fontenelle from the Wikimedia Foundation, the series summarizes insights from a collaborative session at the 2023 LD4 Conference, using Design Thinking strategies to connect the Library-Wikidata community with WMF, focusing on Wikidata, Wikibase, and Structured Data on Commons (SDC) in libraries. By Silvia Gutiérrez & Giovanna Fontenelle
Papers
Wikipedia gender gap: a scoping review - This review analyzes Wikipedia's gender gap from 2007 to 2022, revealing a slight majority of female authors, addressing key themes, and exploring strategies to mitigate the gap, providing valuable insights into the research landscape in this domain. By Núria Ferran-Ferrer, Juan-José Boté-Vericad and Julia Minguillón.
Ten years of Wikidata: A bibliometric study - This research delves into scholarly publications about Wikidata from its inception in 2012 to late 2022, revealing 945 relevant papers, primarily from conferences. The analysis highlights a concentration of experts and contributors from the Global North, as well as governmental institutions as predominant funders. The study calls for enhanced networking and outreach to promote diversity and inclusion within the Wikidata research community. Emphasizing computer science perspectives, the research focuses on methods for developing and utilizing open knowledge graphs, notably Wikidata, with a narrower but significant interest in application-oriented studies in digital humanities, biology, and healthcare. (Turki, et al)
Videos
Duplicating Everywhere All at Once | Cebuano Wikipedia - Five years ago, Lsjbot's Wikipedia articles caused duplicate Wikidata items, notably impacting geographic places on Cebuano Wikipedia. This video by User:Canley at Wikimania 2023 delves into the history, visualizes the issue, and suggests cleanup strategies for Wikidata and Wikipedia, emphasizing Aotearoa New Zealand and parts of Australia, with implications for the global challenge of bot-created duplicates.
Useful Authorities for Data-Driven Collection Research with Alicia Fagerving - Alicia Fagerving, Wikimedia Sverige, introduces the project "Useful Authorities for Data-Driven Collection Research" and Wikidata. The project, spanning 2021-2023, links vocabularies from the databases of Nationalmuseum and Statens historiska museer to Wikidata, exploring it as a platform for semantic interoperability among cultural heritage institutions and providing tools and visualizations for similar projects.
2023: OSM-Wikidata Map Framework. Combining OpenStreetMap and Wikidata allows to leverage the strengths of the two projects to create richer maps. This talk explores how OSM-Wikidata Map Framework simplifies this process. By Daniele Santini
It's not bad! Measuring Gérard Depardieu's mark on French cinema (in French) - The analysis centers on Gérard Depardieu's impact on French cinema amid legal issues and sexual assault allegations. Despite difficulties in addressing these accusations, the author leverages Wikidata to measure Depardieu's influence by querying films from directors born after 1930 to assess his involvement.
How to Become a Billionaire: A Billionaire's Occupations Network Analysis - This network analysis investigates billionaires’ primary sources of income with a network graph—based on their occupations—connecting billionaires from all over the world and uncovering some of the biggest industries in the world.
Drama Corpora Project (DraCor) is a digital database of plays, primarily from Europe. It collects and organizes texts of plays in a way that allows researchers and others to extract and analyze information from those texts. This could include details about the characters, the dialogue, the stage directions, and more. The data is being pulled from Wikidata.
We finished adding the endpoints for adding aliases in a given language for a Property (phab:T343721) and removing a Property's label in a given language (phab:T342983)
We started working on the endpoint for removing a Property's description in a given language (phab:T342985)
We are fixing an issue with incorrect handling of lowercase statement IDs in edit requests (phab:T352644)
Special:PrefixIndex now shows label/lemma for Properties and Lexemes (phab:T343115)
Language codes: We changed where Wikidata is getting its languages from for Lexemes and Monolingual text statements and thereby resolved many tasks requesting another language being added to them (phab:T341409)
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (calendar).
Canary (also known as heartbeat) events will be produced into Wikimedia event streams from December 11. Streams users are advised to filter out these events, by discarding all events where 
The 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 5 January 2024, and has an associated privacy statement.
