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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.
Recent changes
The mobile site history pages now use the same HTML as the desktop history pages. If you hear of any problems relating to mobile history usage please point them to the phabricator task.
On most wikis, admins can now block users from making specific actions. These actions are: uploading files, creating new pages, moving (renaming) pages, and sending thanks. The goal of this feature is to allow admins to apply blocks that are adequate to the blocked users' activity. Learn more about "action blocks". [1][2]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 February. It will be on all wikis from 8 February (calendar). [3][4]
Talk pages permalinks that included diacritics and non-Latin script were malfunctioning. This issue is fixed. [5]
Future changes
24 Wikipedias with Reference Tooltips as a default gadget are encouraged to remove that default flag. This would make Reference Previews the new default for reference popups, leading to a more consistent experience across wikis. For 46 Wikipedias with less than 4 interface admins, the change is already scheduled for mid-February, unless there are concerns. The older Reference Tooltips gadget will still remain usable and will override this feature, if it is available on your wiki and you have enabled it in your settings. [6][7]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Translations are available.
Discussions
New request for permissions/Bot:
CJMBot - let users upload a CSV file in a certain format. The data inside is validated and processed, creating new items or updating existing items by adding statements and references.
Love Data Week - My Kind of Data by Ali Smith. Shared relevant links to learn about data equity and inclusion, disciplinary communities, and creating a kinder world through data.
Wikidata for Teaching Biology: Coloration in Felines (Spanish) - a paper that showcases Wikidata as a learning tool for students through the use of properties and statements applied to biological entities can enhance students computational and informational skills, by Marín1 D. & Michán L.
Advancing Drinking Water Justice at the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Conference discusses how Wikidata and Wikibase Cloud can help address differences in data quality (at the 55:00 minute mark)
Au bord de l'eau Mapping Wikidata's items next to a body of water using P206 property.
Tool of the week
MediaWiki:Gadget-dataDrainer.js - this userscript allows you to delete the data of an item. You can choose what you want to delete: labels and/or descriptions and/or aliases and or sitelinks.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
There is a new update relative to the experiment with splitting the Wikidata Query Service graph. A project page for the experiment has also been published.
WMDE is currently conducting a research on Knowledge Equity in Linked Open Data. The goal is to try to better understand how the use of Wikidata, Wikibase Suite, and Wikibase Cloud both support knowledge equity and create barriers to knowledge equity when people are contributing historically and structurally marginalized knowledge and perspectives. If you are interested in participating in this project, please fill out this survey!
Library and Information Science - this new Wikiproject aims to identify and fill gaps in LIS-related content. If you are interested in the areas of librarianship, information studies, metadata and indexing; then please consider joining!
Political murders in the Weimar Republic - Collect historic political murders in the Weimar Republic e.g. through historic newspaper articles or scientific articles.
The graph split testing for the Wikidata Query Service has started. Please find more details in the "Other Noteworthy Stuff" section above.
IP Masking: We are continuing the work on adapting Wikibase for the upcoming IP Masking feature, so that IP addresses for non-logged-in users are no longer published.
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the route for getting and removing a sitelink from an Item (phab:T344039, phab:T344685) and we continue work on the one for adding/ replacing and modifying a sitelink on an Item (phab:T342987, phab:T342988)
We now handle of case sensitive statement IDs in GET, PUT, PATCH and DELETE requests as HTTP redirect (phab:T354261)
We documented the differences in sitelink data structure between Wikibase REST API and Action API responses (phab:T355659)
We fixed the bug where sitelink data did not include badges (phab:T355293)
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 WDQS Graph Split experiment is working and loaded onto 3 test servers. The team in charge is testing the split's impact and requires feedback from WDQS users through the UI or programmatically in different channels. [8][9][10] Users' feedback will validate the impact of various use cases and workflows around the Wikidata Query service. [11][12]
Problems
There was a bug that affected the appearance of visited links when using mobile device to access wiki sites. It made the links appear black; this issue is fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (calendar). [13][14]
As work continues on the grid engine deprecation,[15] tools on the grid engine will be stopped starting on February 14th, 2024. If you have tools actively migrating you can ask for an extension so they are not stopped. [16]
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 have the "Email me when a page or a file on my watchlist is changed" option enabled, edits by bot accounts no longer trigger notification emails. Previously, only minor edits would not trigger the notification emails. [17]
There are changes to how user and site scripts load for Vector 2022 on specific wikis. The changes impacted the following Wikis: all projects with Vector legacy as the default skin, Wikivoyage, and Wikibooks. Other wikis will be affected over the course of the next three months. Gadgets are not impacted. If you have been affected or want to minimize the impact on your project, see this ticket. Please coordinate and take action proactively.
Newly auto-created accounts (the accounts you get when you visit a new wiki) now have the same local notification preferences as users who freshly register on that wiki. It is effected in four notification types listed in the task's description.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (calendar). [19][20]
Selected tools on the grid engine have been stopped as we prepare to shut down the grid on March 14th, 2024. The tool's code and data have not been deleted. If you are a maintainer and you want your tool re-enabled reach out to the team. Only tools that have asked for extension are still running on the grid.
The CSS filter property can now be used in HTML style attributes in wikitext. [21]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Translations are available.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: WT2O_2 - (RfP deadline: February 22, 2024 17:46 UTC)
Other: Project chat: PI Bot is an interesting conversation about the function of PI Bot in creating Stub articles and evolves into discussing ways of matching articles, categories and templates in sibling projects with their Wikidata items. Contribute to the discussion or even better, use one of the many tools posted and get linking!
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call February 20, 2024: In honor of Valentine's Day month, we are bringing back the popular program from last February: What's Your Wikidata Passion? What is your central Wikidata interest right now? It can be a work or personal project, even if you’re just beginning to think about it, or just what you like to edit when you have time. This is a great way to share your ideas, solicit community input and ask questions about resources or tools. This will be an open mic session, completely informal. Please add yourselves to the list on our agenda here if you would like to talk for 5 minutes or so. You can share your screen if you like, but there’s no need for slides. Or just show up and talk on the spur of the moment. This will be a community session where we welcome all to participate! Agenda
Dancing Digital Project with Rebecca Salzer is a Wikibase instance sharing LOD between itself, video archives and Commons.
WikiPod AI - try listening to last week's Status Updates with AI-generated speaking, an experiment by Tiago Lubiana.
Notebooks: TTTTRPG - Timeline Tree of Tabletop Role-Playing Games queried using SPARQL from Wikidata.
Tool of the week
User:Yair rand/DiffLists.js - this userscript changes the appearance of Recent Changes, Watchlist, Contributions, History pages, and Related Changes. It also adds filter options.
Wikidata Topic Curator (a rewrite of ItemSubjector into a webapp) help wikimedians add relevant topics to items. Based on a given topic QID it fetches articles matching the label, aliases or a custom user-provided term of that QID that is currently missing the main subject property.
Author Disambiguator - is a tool for editing the authors of works recorded in Wikidata, e.g. for finding Wikidata Items for the authors (P50 instead of 'author name string').
Castradenumber (number for a registred subject in a Castrade)
latest end date ((qualifier) latest date on which the statement could have ceased to be true (i.e., latest date beyond which the statement could no longer be true))
anthesis start (time of the year when a plant normally starts flowering)
leaf morphology (characterization of aspects of the shape of a plant’s leaves)
Newest WikiProjects: Looted heritage - aims to use Wikidata to document looted cultural heritage. Its primary focus is on the colonial era, but it also encompasses other relevant historical periods. It's scope includes artworks, sacred items, human remains, and other forms of tangible and intangible artifacts that may be considered a part of a people's heritage.
WikiProject Highlights: Staedel Museum Wikidata Clean-up The Staedul Museum comprises 24,000+ works of art spanning more than 700 years. They have generously opened up digital surrogates of their collection to the Wikimedia community. This project improves the metadata quality and create Wikidata items for works of art.
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 mobile visual editor is now the default editor for users who never edited before, at a small group of wikis. Research shows that users using this editor are slightly more successful publishing the edits they started, and slightly less successful publishing non-reverted edits. Users who defined the wikitext editor as their default on desktop will get the wikitext editor on mobile for their first edit on mobile as well. [22]
The mw.config value wgGlobalGroups now only contains groups that are active in the wiki. Scripts no longer have to check whether the group is active on the wiki via an API request. A code example of the above is: if (/globalgroupname/.test(mw.config.get("wgGlobalGroups"))). [23]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 29 February (calendar). [24][25]
Future changes
The right to change edit tags (changetags) will be removed from users in Wikimedia sites, keeping it by default for admins and bots only. Your community can ask to retain the old configuration on your wiki before this change happens. Please indicate in this ticket to keep it for your community before the end of March 2024.
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 Special:Book page (as well as the associated "Create a book" functionality) provided by the old Collection extension has been removed from all Wikisource wikis, as it was broken. This does not affect the ability to download normal books, which is provided by the Wikisource extension. [26]
Maintenance on etherpad is completed. If you encounter any issues, please indicate in this ticket.
Gadgets allow interface admins to create custom features with CSS and JavaScript. The Gadget and Gadget_definition namespaces and gadgets-definition-edit user right were reserved for an experiment in 2015, but were never used. These were visible on Special:Search and Special:ListGroupRights. The unused namespaces and user rights are now removed. No pages are moved, and no changes need to be made. [27]
A usability improvement to the "Add a citation" in Wikipedia workflow has been made, the insert button was moved to the popup header. [28]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (calendar). [29][30]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [31]
The HTML markup of headings and section edit links will be changed later this year to improve accessibility. See Heading HTML changes for details. The new markup will be the same as in the new Parsoid wikitext parser. You can test your gadget or stylesheet with the new markup if you add ?useparsoid=1 to your URL (more info) or turn on Parsoid read views in your user options (more info).
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: Mike Peel (scheduled to end after 9 March 2024 13:08 (UTC))
Closed request for adminship: Madamebiblio requested for admintool to fight against vandalism, and the request was closed as successful.
New requests for permissions/Bot:
Mfchris84-Bot - Task: Will run scripts on toolforge to automate and schedule edits on bibliographic items. Starting with Swiss online magazine Syntopia Alpina (Q112206291), then continuing by adding swisscovery edition ID (P9907) to version/edition items.
BorkedBot_12 - Task: Update number of viewers/listeners (P5436) with the qualifier YouTube channel ID (P2397) for YouTuber content creators and influencers.
LocodeBot - Task: Match UN/LOCODE (Q499348) to Wikidata entries by ISO 3166-2 region code, name and distance (if defined), important for UN organisations.
Join the Queensbridge Tech Lab edit-a-thon - create and enrich local diverse heroes in Queens, NYC as part of the NYC Open Data Week. March 16, 10:00 - 16:00 EST (UTC -5).
Empowering BHL Staff with Wiki Education’s Wikidata Certificate Course - The Biodiversity Heritage Library blog celebrates committee members completing a Wikidata Certification course led by Will Kent, as part of the Wiki Education. Participants levelled up SPARQL queries, visualisations, federation, modelling and bulk loading and editing.
WiQuizz - from Nuxt and SPARQL WiQuizz allows you to create or play quiz games where content is generated from Wikidata. It could be a fun way to get people interacting with Wikidata!
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Claim Analysis Toolkit, collection of Observable notebooks to visualize simple Wikidata claims
date popularized (point in time the subject became well known to the public, if different from its inception)
Bild der Person bei der Tätigkeit (picture of a person in action, especially for a sportsperson, visual artist, musican, actor. P18 is normally used for portraits)
Newest WikiProjects: Te Papa Research Expeditions - create and enrich metadata and trial research expeditions schema for Te Papa, Dominion and Colonial Museums.
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 12 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (calendar). [32][33]
After consulting with various communities, the line height of the text on the Minerva skin will be increased to its previous value of 1.65. Different options for typography can also be set using the options in the menu, as needed. [34]
The active link color in Minerva will be changed to provide more consistency with our other platforms and best practices. [35]
Structured data on Commons will no longer ask whether you want to leave the page without saving. This will prevent the “information you’ve entered may not be saved” popups from appearing when no information have been entered. It will also make file pages on Commons load faster in certain cases. However, the popups will be hidden even if information has indeed been entered. If you accidentally close the page before saving the structured data you entered, that data will be lost. [36]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [37][38]
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 2024-03-11. Translations are available.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: Zafer - (RfP scheduled to end after 12 March 2024 20:03 (UTC))
Closed request for adminship: Mike Peel 2 - Adminship re-granted, welcome back Mike!
New requests for permissions/Bot:
Mfchris84-Bot 1 - Task: Add swisscovery edition ID (P9907) to instance of (P31) version, edition or translation (Q3331189) based on checking ISBN-13 (P212) or ISBN-10 (P957).
NinoBot - Task: Semi-automatically create version, edition or translation (Q3331189) entries for Spanish Wikisource Index pages from Commons files.
Emijrpbot 10 - Task: Create a written work (Q47461344) and version, edition or translation (Q3331189) item for works and editions in the National Library of Spain datos.bne.es project.
Queer Data Days - Wikidata Gender Diversity Project Event, a pair of virtual events welcoming a range of speakers investigating queer approaches to data and technology. Sign up for March 15 or March 16, 15:00 (CET).
Wikidata Leveling Up Days, an online event and a collection of resources to welcome new people to Wikidata. The online event takes place on April 5-7 and 12-14 with presentations, workshops and discussions. The program is open to contributions. Learn more about the project at the website WiGeDi.
Wikibase Intro (Dutch) - Bart Magnus writes an article about the benefits of Wikibase for the Flemish Association for Library, Archives & Documentation (VVBAD).
Multilingual entity linking and global insights - Ontotext are developing AI products that can read text and establish of the same concept in different languages (MEL) and between knowledge graphs and plaintext.
Bosnia and Herzegovina - This project aims to be a central hub for the curation of all items (biographical, cultural, geographical, organizational, etc.) related to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Te Papa Research Expeditions - aims to create or enrich Wikidata with data on research expeditions undertaken by Te Papa/ Dominion Museum/Colonial Museum and institutional staff
WikiProject Highlights: Looted heritage - this WikiProject is calling for Item suggestions to work on. The scope includes all forms of looted heritage; artworks, sacred items, human remains, and other forms of tangible and intangible artifacts that may be considered a part of a people's heritage.
Newest database reports: unmarked supercentenarians - contains instance of (P31) human (Q5) with period of life greater than 110 years and not marked with subject has role (P2868) supercentenarian (Q1200828) or subject has role (P2868) alleged supercentenarian (Q106991708).
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 February. It will be on all wikis from 8 February (calendar). [3][4]
As work continues on the grid engine deprecation,[15] tools on the grid engine will be stopped starting on February 14th, 2024. If you have tools actively migrating you can ask for an extension so they are not stopped. [16]