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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. [1][2]
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. [3]
The deployment of "Add a link" announced last week was postponed. It will resume this week.
Around 250 war-threatened architectural monuments documented (German) - Wikidata, Wikibase and Commons are helping preserve and plan the restoration of culturally-significant Monuments damaged or destroyed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
ZotWb < export records in a Zotero group library to a custom Wikibase, prepare datasets to send to OpenRefine, feed OpenRefine reconciliaton results back to the Wikibase. Wikidata is envolved in the entity reconciliation. Here's a short explanation and demo video Tool is written and provided by David Lindermann with support from WMF Rapid Grant.
Montana Plant Life URL (URL for a plant family, genus, or species on the Montana Plant Life website)
event role (item that describes a role in an event class)
role in event (event class for which the item describes a role)
selectional preference ((to be used only with the subclasses of Q_event_role) an item that plays this role in an event instance should descend from this item via a combination of P31 and P279)
event arguments and types (item that plays a role in an event instance; used with a qualifier "argument type")
BnF archives and manuscripts ID (identifier for a manuscript in the archives and manuscripts catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). Do not include the initial "cc")
clerked for (this person has held a clerkship with the judge)
battery life (the length of time a device can continue to work before it needs its battery to be recharged)
Showcase Lexemes: läsa - 'read' about this Swedish word with many pronounciations and grammatical features.
Feel free to suggest next week's Showcase Item and Lexeme!
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the endpoint for removing an Item's label in a specific language (phab:T335841) and the endpoint for modifying descriptions on a Property (phab:T342981)
We are working on the endpoint for adding aliases in a given language for a Property (phab:T343721) and removing a Property's label in a given language (phab:T342983)
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on moving the tool over to the new design system Codex
We adjusted the styling for the values of monolingual text statements to make the language easier to distinguish from the value (phab:T280774)
mul language code: We made some final adjustments to get it ready for testing.
Lexemes: We are adding a license note for anon users when editing a Lexeme’s lemma, a Form or Sense (phab:T343999)
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. [4]
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. [5]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [6][7]
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.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: LccnBot (Task: Adds P244 to bibliographic entities base on library authority records.)
New request for comments: Duplicate References Data Model and UI < During Data Modelling Days '23, 2 proposals emerged trying to answer the question of how to handle duplicate References on Wikidata Items.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call December 12, 2023: Several members of the Chinese Culture and Heritage Wikidata group will provide an overview of the group's Wikidata projects as well as the challenges they have encountered. Agenda
Data-SHS Bordeaux Week: Processing and Analyzing Quantitative Data in Human and Social Sciences 2023. Dec. 11 - 15, Bordeaux, FR.
OpenRefine - a open source tool for working with data < This session explores the advantages of using OR to wrangle, clean, transform and standardise data for Wikidata. Presented by Jinoy Tom Jacob at the IndiaFOSS3.0 Conference.
QLever SPARQl Engine < If you attended Data Modeling Days '23, you may have seen an extraordinary Session given by Hannah Bast and Johannes Kalmbach showcasing the power and advantages of the QLever engine. QLever can handle queries that cause the WDQS to timeout or allowing Federated queries and Geospatial!
(QLEver has already featured in Tool of the Week but we wanted to showcase it again after experiencing it at DMD '23)
counterexample (qualifier for deprecated P279 statements; example instance or subclass of the item class for which a "subclass of" statement does not hold)
WikiProject Heritage Collections: database of archival fonds and heritage collections (including contemporary scientific collections or documentation holdings) and to ensure the interlinking of respective catalogues, finding aids, or collection databases with Wikidata.
WikiProject Source Reliability: is an effort to identify and aggregate online sources of assessments of the reliability and credibility of sources.
Wikibase REST API: We continued work on the routes for adding aliases in a given language for a Property (phab:T343721) and removing a Property's label in a given language (phab:T342983)
Monolingual text values can now use many more languages than before. We’re still working on doing the same for Lexemes. (phab:T341409)
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. [9][10]
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. [11][12]
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). [13][14]
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 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. [15][16]
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. [17]
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. [18]
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)
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Welcome to 2023’s Final Weekly Summary!
A big thank you to everyone who contributed to the newsletter this year!👏🙏 As we step into 2024, we'd love to hear what changes you would like to see in the newsletter. Share your wishlist here: What changes would you like to see in the newsletter in 2024?"
Discussions
Open request for adminship: EPIC (RfP scheduled to end after 26 December 2023 20:34 UTC)
New requests for permissions/Bot: Balyozbot. Tasks:
Import sitelinks, labels, descriptions from ku wikipedia pages which use the template w:ku:Template:Înterwîkî etîket û danasîn. (There are over 1800 articles that use this template waiting to be connected to Wikidata at the moment.)
Add sitelinks to kuwiktionary / kuwikipedia categories / create an item for the category if necessary. I have been doing this manually for quite some time using Quickstatements but since I need to get permission for the first task, I will be handling them using a bot as well.
Upcoming: Introducing WMF Wishathon for Wikimedia’s Community Wishlist! "focused on bringing together people who already contribute to technical aspects of the Wikimedia projects, who know how to find their way on the technical ecosystem, and who are able to work or collaborate on projects rather autonomously." March 15th to 17th, 2024.
African Librarians empowered to share knowledge and enhance information visibility through AfLIA Wikidata Online Course --> The "Promoting Open Knowledge Practices in African Libraries through Wikidata" project, executed by AfLIA with support from the Wikimedia Foundation, trained African librarians on using Wikidata to enhance the visibility of library collections and close the knowledge and gender gap on Africa. The course was facilitated by experienced African Wikimedian editors and included diverse strategies for learner engagement and support.
Papers: Increasing Coverage and Precision of Textual Information in Multilingual Knowledge Graphs by (Conia et al, 2023) --> This paper introduces a novel task of automatic Knowledge Graph Enhancement (KGE) to bridge the gap in the quantity and quality of textual information between English and non-English languages in Wikidata. It presents M-NTA, an unsupervised approach that combines Machine Translation, Web Search, and Large Language Models to generate high-quality textual information, and studies its impact on Entity Linking, Knowledge Graph Completion, and Question Answering tasks.
Videos
Wikidata, Wikisource and Wiktionary: Wikisource for DH (WiSe 2023) --> The lecture "Fundamentals and application-oriented methods of the Digital Humanities" by Kay-Michael Würzner is designed as a series of lectures in which teachers in the "Digital Humanities" course present their fields of work and key topics and present them for discussion.
Empowering Open-Source Generative AI by Integrating the Wikidata knowledge graph --> Generative AI has changed the information ecosystem, and open-source knowledge graphs like Wikidata can become invaluable assets, propelling a myriad of applications forward. Jonathan Fraine & Lydia Pintscher present the practical integration of Wikidata's open-source, open-access knowledge graph to empower Generative AI applications. Harnessing the real-time updated, structured data encapsulated within Wikidata, they explore automated content creation, data augmentation, and semantic analysis, underpinning the generative paradigms. Through a blend of theoretical insights and real-world applications, they elucidate how to leverage Wikidata to elevate generative AI applications, breaking down existing data silos, and fostering a collaborative ecosystem within our global community of developers and contributors.
Wiki Indaba 2023 - African content on Wikidata --> Discussion with Alice Kibombo, Georges Fodouop and Jesse Asiedu-Akrofi, about Wikidata for African Librarians during the Wiki Indaba conference, that took place between 3-5 November 2023 in Agadir, Morocco.
No Time to Wait - S07E10 - ACMI // Wikidata - Paul Duchesne + Simon Loffler --> Report on recent residency program to extensively link together collection data from ACMI with Wikidata. This work has allowed the organisation to import vast quantities of data and media to enrich their own internet collection experience, as well enable writing information back to source and federating with other linked institutions.
Map of K-Pop Idols --> An interactive map where each red dot represents a K-pop Idol (a singer or musician in South Korean Pop music) you are able to click on.
Disney as the Mega Corporation it is Today --> Disney has greatly evolved from the simple animation company that first debuted in 1923 with its signature Steamboat Willie animation. This analysis details some of the major acquisitions Disney has chosen to help expand its reach as a media and entertainment company.
State of statues in the US --> Map of how many statues there are, who is depicted in the statues, their genders, and where the statues are concentrated.
An Analysis on Nepo Babies: Net Worths and Fame --> This work uses Wikidata to analyze the influence and success of children of famous actors (nepo babies) in the entertainment industry, and compares the careers and net worth of these children with their parents to understand the impact of nepotism on their success.
Tool of the week
Cersei - is a tool designed for importing or scraping data from various third-party sources, using source-specific Python code. It can use a "headless browser" to scrape complicated websites that rely on eg JavaScript to navigate. It can therefore access data sources that can not be accessed via eg Mix'n'match. The data from sources can be updated regularly, either for everything, or just changed entries (if the source has a "recent changes" equivalent).
Wikidata:Zotero/Cita - is a Wikidata addon for Zotero that adds citations (i.e., what other items an item cites) metadata support to this open source reference management software, using cites work (P2860) information available from Wikidata, and enabling users to easily contribute missing data.
production manager (manager that is responsible for the administration of a feature film or television production; oversees production plans, controls resources, initiates production, ensures ongoing operations, monitors schedules and expenditures, and creates a detailed production schedule and budget)
Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Städel Museum Wikidata Clean-Up - This WikiProject from the Städel Museum aims to actively participate in the Wikimedia community by maintaining and updating the quality of its data. This includes their collection of public domain art, which has been digitized and made freely available for public use. The project focuses on ensuring that the most current and high-quality data, including high-resolution images and improved metadata, are available on platforms like Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.
Upcoming: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC, 17th January 2023 (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.
Papers: Improving maintenance of community-based knowledge graphs. This paper by Nicolas Ferranti addresses the critical issue of data quality in open knowledge graphs, with a specific focus on Wikidata. It aims to formalize Wikidata's unique approaches to assess and resolve data inconsistencies, proposing a semi-automatic refinement pipeline to empower the Wikidata user community in maintaining and enhancing the reliability of this extensive collaborative knowledge graph.
Videos: WikidataCon 2023 Day 1.5 - The past and future of Wikidata. In this video Lydia Pintscher takes a moment to review the major events of Wikidata over the past few years. Then turns to look forward and predict what Wikidata's prospects will be over the next year.
Tool of the week
WICA: Wikidata's insights for created articles is an updated version of an old tool. It now includes many new features to analyse your list of created articles using Wikidata properties.
Nonprofit Status (Indicating the legal and tax status of a non-profit organization (specific to served legal areas, aka. Countries). Addition to {{P|1454}}. {{P|1628}} to [https://schema.org/nonprofitStatus nonprofitStatus] from schema.org. Organizations can have multiple Nonprofit Status from different countries.)
creative director (person who makes high-level creative decisions, oversees the creation of creative assets such as adverts, products, events or logos and guides and directs the creative people who create the end result)
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. [1][2]
MediaWiki's JavaScript system will now allow 
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.