User talk:Rdicerb (WMF)/Archive 1

Thank you!

Thanks for the love! Also, which Rachel are you? Were you at Wikimania? Deryck C.^Meta 14:23, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I was at Wikimania! I often sat at the Community Advocacy/ Community Engagement Table, though I was often also out and about/walking and talking! - Rdicerb (WMF) (talk) 04:53, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #154

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open RfA: Aldnonymous
  • RfC: Review of "change datatype to monolingual" actions for some properties, Adopt Help:Classification as an official help page
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Redirects on Wikidata
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Tool by Magnus to find wrong nationalities on Wikidata
  • Where am I? (figuring out your location based on geocoordinates in Wikidata)
  • Map of French national parks
  • Histropedia published 5 query generator spreadsheets
  • Wikimedia's monthly GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) newsletter now includes a Wikidata report. The draft for the first edition, covering April, may be edited and your contributions will be welcome.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Baseball-Reference.com minor league player ID, Baseball-Reference.com major league player ID, road number, BAnQ ID, DSH object ID, Open Food Facts food category slug, Open Food Facts food additive slug, genealogics.org personID, Kaiserhof ID, addressee, National Portrait Gallery (London) person identifier, RSL book's identifier, name in kana
• Development
  • Made label, description and aliases special pages easier to use
  • Bene* created a new Special:ListProperties special page to list properties by data type
  • Expanded our set of automated browser tests
  • Made language fallbacks work in more situations and more consistently. In particular, the entity selector now uses language fallback. This should benefit especially people who want to use Wikidata in a variant such as en-gb.
  • Continued work on the planned DataModel 3.0 release
  • Continued discussing and documenting future calendar model support
  • Continued work on our RDF generator
  • Continued work on usage tracking for labels on multilingual sites
  • Addshore worked on various issues regarding redirects
  • Addshore worked on a special page to turn an item into a redirect
  • Work on showing entity labels in edit summaries on history pages
  • Implemented change dispatching based on the new usage tracking mechanism
  • Fixed issue with page deletions on some Wikipedias not being reported to Wikidata
  • More work on straightening out date formatting and parsing
  • Fixed handling of scientific notation for quantity values
  • Term box: fixed bug causing stale info to be show, and another bug causing babel languages to be ignored sometimes.
  • Implemented access to other arbitrary items via the #property parser function
  • Bene* implemented check to make sure two properties can not have the same alias only differing in capitalization
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 09:52, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-17

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

• There was sometimes a problem when saving a page in VisualEditor. It is now fixed on all wikis. [1]
• VisualEditor sometimes showed empty warnings for wikis using Flagged Revisions. This is now fixed on all wikis. [2]
• You can get the new version of the Wikipedia app for iOS. With it you can share facts with your friends. [3]
• If you write JavaScript, you should stop using importScript and importStylesheet. [4]

Problems

• There was a problem with Labs on Monday. [5]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 21. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 22 (calendar).
• Developers are renaming 1.5 million accounts. After that all accounts will be unique and will work on all wikis. [6] [7] [8]
• If your wiki has the auto-fill tool for citations, you can now use it when you edit a reference. [9]
• You can now give examples for template options in TemplateData. [10]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 22 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will soon be able to add and remove tags on edits. [11] [12]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:30, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #155

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • RfC: Opting out of Global sysops 2
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata emerges as central element of GLAM-WIKI 2015
  • ongoing: Coding DaVinci
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The question that started Wikidata has finally been answered! Thank you Markus! ;-)
  • Wikimedia Sverige adapted two brochures about Wikidata, one for GLAMs and one for researchers.
  • Bene* has been working on making Wikidata work nicely on mobile. You can check the current status on a demo system.
  • Amir could use your help with automatic transliteration of human names
  • Commons-WD: a tool to edit Wikidata based on a Commons category
  • Various improvements to the Primary Sources Tool including:
    • Edits made with it will now say so in the edit summary
    • It now uses the URL blacklist to not suggest low-quality references
    • Caching issues were fixed
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Kiev street code, blood type, Perry Index, input set, SSR Name ID, SSR WrittenForm ID, INPN Code, Nasjonalbiblioteket photographer ID, distribution map, anti-virus alias, HathiTrust id, common name, Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online identifier, Swedish district code, investigated by, US Federal Election Commission identifier, PSS-archi ID, Gaoloumi ID, draft pick number, GrassBase ID, electorate, owner of, Roud Folk Song Index, IPI Code, ISWC
  • There are a number of user boxes you can add to your user page to indicate interests and which wiki projects you belong to.
• Development
  • On Tuesday, we are deploying usage tracking (no arbitrary access yet) to Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource, and subscription tracking on Wikidata. There should be no noticeable changes for users. These are necessary steps towards enabling arbitrary access in clients.
  • Worked on making language fallback work in the suggester (when adding a new statement or searching for an item)
  • More work on RDF output and the query service
  • Added Special:RedirectEntity for redirecting items
  • Investigated and working to fix JS bug on items with “invalid” values (phabricator:92975)
  • Did work towards having entity ids in revision histories and in diffs linked with their label (like on watchlists or in the recentchanges)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:59, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-18

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

• All accounts are now unique and work on all wikis. [13] [14]
• You can read a report from experts who tested the security of MediaWiki. [15]
• There was a problem between VisualEditor and an antivirus software. It is now fixed. [16]
• You can help test VisualEditor to see if it works in your language. [17]

Problems

• Some Labs tools had problems due to a software bug. [18]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 22. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 29 (calendar).
• It is now clearer that you can delete several rows and columns when you edit tables in VisualEditor. [19]
• You now see more information when you search for a template in VisualEditor. [20]
• You can now cancel when you add citations on desktop, or edit links on mobile, in VisualEditor. [21]
• You can now see the list of other formats for videos only after they're ready. [22]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 29 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:10, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Support request with team editing experiment project

Dear tech ambassadors, instead of spamming the Village Pump of each Wikipedia about my tiny project proposal for researching team editing (see here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Research_team_editing), I have decided to leave to your own discretion if the matter is relevant enough to inform a wider audience already. I would appreciate if you could appraise if the Wikipedia community you are more familiar with could have interest in testing group editing "on their own grounds" and with their own guidance. In a nutshell: it consists in editing pages as a group instead of as an individual. This social experiment might involve redefining some aspects of the workflow we are all used to, with the hope of creating a more friendly and collaborative environment since editing under a group umbrella creates less social exposure than traditional "individual editing". I send you this message also as a proof that the Inspire Campaign is already gearing up. As said I would appreciate of *you* just a comment on the talk page/endorsement of my project noting your general perception about the idea. Nothing else. Your contribution helps to shape the future! (which I hope it will be very bright, with colors, and Wikipedia everywhere) Regards from User:Micru on meta.

Wikidata weekly summary #156

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata was presented at a Swedish Linked Data Network Meet-up in Gothenburg.
  • The most important Wikipedia pages
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • P107 (main type) is finally orphaned and deleted, 20 months after deprecation. This was the first property used 1000000 times.
  • The royal baby was quickly updated on Wikidata. (her family tree)
  • New tool by Magnus: Find pictures on geography.co.uk, upload them to Commons and add them to Wikidata
  • All Van Gogh Museum paintings are now on Commons and Wikidata. Go go SumOfAllPaintings peeps!
  • List of topics with links in at least X Wikipedias
  • All French Senators matched using MixNMatch \o/
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: represented by, Netflix Identifier, maximum number of players, minimum number of players, CERL ID, Name Assigning Authority Number, Hall of Valor ID, ballots cast, eligible voters, catholic-hierarchy diocese ID, Wikidata example geographic coordinates, Wikidata example monolingual text, Wikidata example property, Wikidata example quantity, Wikidata example time, Wikidata example URL, Wikidata example item value, Wikidata example string, Wikidata example media file, Wikidata property example
• Development
  • We rolled out usage tracking on the first two wikis (French Wikisource and Dutch Wikipedia). Users should not notice anything. More wikis will follow in the next weeks. This is the remaining step for enabling arbitrary access on wikis other than Commons.
  • The students team is working hard to get a first release of the improved constraint reports and checks against 3rd party databases out.
  • Ricordisamoa fixed the issue with long descriptions being cut off.
  • We fixed the focus flow in the property selector.
  • We improved the messages on Special:EntityData to make it more understandable.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 14:13, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-19

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

• You can now chat with other users in Phabricator. [23]
• There was a rare problem with VisualEditor. The text of another wiki could be added to your edit. The issue is now fixed. [24] [25]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 5. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 6 (calendar).
• It is now easier to add a link in VisualEditor. You can see an image and a description about the page. [26]

Meetings

• You can join a meeting with the Language team. The meeting will be on May 5 at 14:30 (UTC). [27]
• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 6 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join an event in France on May 22−25. You need to sign up before May 8. [28]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:04, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #157

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Mbch331
  • New request for comments: Notability policy overhaul
  • Closed requests for comments: Conflict of Interest (no consensus), Speedy vs Regular deletion (stale)
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • A study has been published about how Wikidata can help significantly improve the quality of medical content on Wikipedia. This is why we do Wikidata! \o/
  • MusicBrainz is migrating to Wikidata for Wikipedia links
  • Past: Open Data for Academics - some media available on Wikimedia Commons.
  • Upcoming: OuiShare Labs Camp in Paris
  • Upcoming: MediaWiki hackathon in Lyon
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The Wikidata Visualization Challenge has started. You can enter your submission until June 1 (23:59 CEST).
  • Denny has published a proposed breakdown of tasks for Wiktionary support incl mockups. Please read and comment.
  • The Wikidata Menu Challenge has started and goes on to May 27. Add labels, images and pronunciation audio to a list of around 290 items to help show off the power of Wikidata at a food festival.
  • Dynamic lists on Wikipedia based on Wikidata data
  • The Frick Collection and the Brooklyn Museum both have their paintings on Wikidata now.
  • The most distant known galaxy EGS-zs8-1 (Q19860435) has been discovered and added to Wikidata.
  • Reasonator has been restyled, to work better on mobile devices. It also has an enhanced display on first names (exsample: Paul)
  • Woah! Volcanos! (Help match the Smithonian's volcano identifiers with Wikidata) ;-)
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Smithsonian volcano identifier, cathedral, hair color, Declarator.org ID, Web Gallery of Art identifier, list of characters, measured by, income classification (Philippines), Vox-ATypI classification, after a work by, spacecraft
• Development
  • Access to data from arbitrary items is coming to the first wikis on Monday \o/ It'll be Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource.
  • Sneak peek at the current state of development for showing constraint violations on statements
  • Hovercards also show the target's label and ID now. (Try them by turning them on in the beta features section of your preferences.)
  • Continued working on RDF export
  • More work on making it possible to add a reference right away when adding a statement (and allowing the full statement incl references to be edited at the same time)
  • Did more work to make usage tracking possible on multilingual wikis (namely Commons)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 17:46, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-20

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

• You can now make charts and maps on your wiki with the new "graph" tool. If you have an old browser, you will see images instead. It uses a tool called Vega; you can learn how to use it and write help pages for your wiki. You can use the Vega edit tool to make charts and copy the code to your wiki. Charts and maps use complex code and you should put them into templates. In the future, you will be able to create charts with VisualEditor. [29] [30] [31]
• You can apply for technical jobs to develop tools for the community. [32]
• The logos of all wikis are now in a new place. It will make pages load faster. You can still ask to change the logo. You can also use local CSS for brief changes. [33] [34]

Problems

• There was a problem that caused slow editing. [35]
• Pages were sometimes removed from your watchlist in VisualEditor. This problem is now fixed. [36]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 6. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 12. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 13 (calendar).
• You can now use data from Wikidata on more pages. The page doesn't need to be linked to the Wikidata item. It works on a few wikis and more wikis will be added soon. [37] [38]
• You should get fewer errors when you add files to Commons. [39]
• When you use an external link to link to a wiki page, VisualEditor now converts it to a wiki link. [40]
• When you add a link in VisualEditor, you see pages that match what you type. It is now easier to see where they match. [41]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 13 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:35, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #158

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Successful request for adminship: Mbch331
  • Closed request for comments: Opting out of Global sysops 2
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Using Wikidata to Improve the Medical Content on Wikipedia
  • Past: Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) spoke about authority control in Wikidata (and sister projects) at the World Digital Library's Arab Peninsula Regional Group Symposium, organised in conjunction with the Qatar National Library, in Doha on 13 May. His slides, with an Arabic translation, will be online soon.
  • Past: Wikidata editing workshop at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin
  • Past: Wikidata workshop for archivists of Catalan City of Justice
  • Upcoming: MediaWiki hackathon in Lyon
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Elections for the board of the Wikimedia Foundation are ongoing. Wikidata should be well represented among the voters. Go and vote!
  • Wikidata won another award by Land der Ideen! \o/ Thank you everyone who is making Wikidata awesome!
  • Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource now have the arbitrary access feature. Persian Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikipedia are following today. Italian Wikipedia and all remaining Wikisource projects are following on June 1st.
  • New manual for adding inventory numbers to paintings on Wikidata
  • English Wikipedia is running a bot to add authority control templates to many articles that are filled completely from Wikidata. Italian Wikipedia is doing so as well.
  • Wikidata won an Open Data award last year. Nominations for this year are open now. Who should win this year?
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources entry, vice-county
• Development
  • Prepared for deployment of arbitrary access on more wikis
  • Graph extension will be enabled on Wikidata later today
  • Improvements to calendar handling
  • More work on RDF export for query service
  • Continued work on usage tracking and arbitrary access for multilingual wikis
  • Addshore investigated and started fixing abuse filter issues
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 14:05, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-21

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

• You can watch a video about the new graph tool.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 13. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 20 (calendar).
• References are now always in the right order. Also, the reference list now only shows references used on the page. [42]
• You can no longer create an account with a colon ':' in it. If you already have one, it still works. [43]
• The toolbar in VisualEditor now looks different. It is easier to see the icons. [44]
• You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday. [45] [46]
• UploadWizard now shows better matches when you add a category to your file. [47]
• A test about VisualEditor will start on the English Wikipedia on Thursday. [48]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 21 at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a technical meeting in France this week.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:21, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-22

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• VisualEditor was broken for 30 minutes on Tuesday. The problem was due to a tool it uses. [49]
• Some Labs tools had issues last week. [50] [51]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 20. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 26. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 27 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 28 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can add your ideas of new tools to help active users like you. [52]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:15, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #159

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press

Wikimedia Hackathon 2015

• • State of the Map US (OpenStreetMap's conference) in New York on 6-8 June
  • Wikimedia Hackathon 2015 in Lyon from 23-25 May. Some of the activities and outcomes:
    • Wikidata descriptions can be soon be edited in the Wikipedia iOS app.
    • A early preview of the official SPARQL endpoint for Wikidata has been created to query Wikidata. Remember that it is not stable and still beta. A short introduction to SPARQL can be found in Lucie's slides.
    • If you are not familiar with SPARQL yet, a tool has been created by Tpt and Bene* to generate SPARQL queries from natural language questions.
    • To do SPARQL queries from the command line, a command line tool was crafted by Marius.
    • The special page to query for badges is within reach.
    • A feedback session on the architecture of Wikibase was held.
    • We got a cool presentation by Maxime about inventaire.io.
    • We figured out the next steps to make Wikidata more mobile friendly.
    • Pilot on the Hungarian Wikipedia to show diagrams based on Wikidata in their articles on Spanish villages
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • New command line tool for mapping SKOS to Wikidata (video)
  • The Wikidata Visualization Challenge is ending soon. Please submit your entries. The Wikidata Menu Challenge is also ending soon.
  • The number of videos about Wikidata is growing and there is now a category on Wikimedia Commons for these.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: lowest note, highest note, source website, Fauna Europaea ID, Danish urban area code, OpenPlaques plaque identifier, signatory, BNC identifier, different from
  • Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Elections
• Development
  • Got early preview of the primary SPARQL endpoint for Wikidata live
  • The Graph extension is now live on Wikidata
  • Arbitrary access is rolled out on fawiki, hewiki and enwikivoyage now
  • Busy with the hackathon (see above)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 21:21, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #160

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • upcoming: State of the Map US
  • Visualizing history with automated event maps
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Final hours to make your vote count in the WMF board election
  • Now we have Q20000000 and P1900
  • Wikidata stats have been updated
  • Over 100 timeline of famous painters by Histropedia
  • WD-FIST can now take a manual item list and limit its search to JPEGs
  • Traveling this summer? Find items needing pictures around you with WikiShootMe
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: altered regulation leads to, posttranslational modification association with, gene substitution association with, gene inversion association with, gene insertion association with, gene duplication association with, deletion association with, increased expression in, decreased expression in, side effect, Commonwealth War Graves Commission person identifier, Australian Dictionary of Biography identifier, office held by head of state, FundRef registry name, Volcanic explosivity index, Spotify artist ID, BALaT person/organisation id, EAGLE id, Librivox author ID
• Development
  • Recovering from hackathon
  • Prepared rollout of usage tracking and arbitrary access to more wikis
  • Testing of the query service
  • Fixed styling issues with entity selector
  • Worked more on Capiunto to make it easier to create good infoboxes
  • Worked on making broken values editable to fix them (this for example happens when a property is deleted but some values are left over)
  • Made entity id an optional parameter in mw.wikibase.label and mw.wikibase.description lua methods. (default to use connected item)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:18, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-23

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• Many wikis were slow for a few hours on Wednesday due to a code error. Sometimes the pages did not load at all and showed an error. [53]
• Some tools in Labs were broken on Wednesday and Thursday. [54]
• Edit tags added by the software were broken on all wikis from May 23 to May 28. [55] [56]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 3 (calendar).
• You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday. [57]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 3 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:35, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #161

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • RfC on usage of Wikidata on German-language Wikipedia
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Pigsonthewing and aude were at State of the Map US to talk about Wikidata/OpenStreetMap cooperation and more
  • Past: Lucie and Marius gave an intro to Wikidata at Gulaschprogrammiernacht in Karlsruhe (slides)
  • Upcoming: Office hour on IRC on 19th
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The English-language Wikipedia has decided to deprecate Persondata in favour of Wikidata.
  • New tool by Magnus to make it easier to add references
  • The results are in for the Wikimedia Foundation's board election. One name should sound familiar to you ;-)
  • Addshore created new maps of the geocoordinates on Wikidata. More coming.
  • Sylvain made an overview of the overlap in topics that the biggest Wikipedias have.
  • Wikidata has passed German Wikipedia in number of items with images (743850 dewp articles vs. 804885 items) - now only second to English-language Wikipedia.
  • Catalan Wikipedia is moving Taxon IDs to Wikidata.
  • Zolo did a comparison of English/French/German/Chinese and Cebuano Wikipedias in terms of main types of articles. Biographies were compared by period, nationality and occupation.
  • Connectivity statistics were updated.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: DMS V, Clinvar Accession Number, Vaccine Ontology ID, VIOLIN ID, vaccine for, participating team, first line, URI pattern for RDF resource, Commonwealth War Graves Commission burial ground identifier, Ministry of Education of Chile school ID
  • Newest gadgets: Mark as patrolled by User:Petr Matas
• Development
  • Italian Wikipedia and all remaining Wikisource projects now have arbitrary access. The rollout will continue. The schedule for the next projects is at d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access.
  • The Content Translation tool now automatically connects translated articles to Wikidata. (Thanks Content Translation developers!) Previously translated but unconnected articles have been connected by a bot. (Thanks Amir!)
  • Code review of the extensions written by a team of students to improve the constraint reports and make it possible to automatically check our data against other databases. A first version will go live soon pending further codereview and fixes.
  • Two new methods have been added to the lua library provided by Wikibase: wikibase.resolvePropertyId and wikibase.entity:getBestStatements.
  • Further work on making unserializable values editable in the UI (This can happen for example if a property is deleted.)
  • Made the Wikidata JSON dumps available on Labs in the standard dumps location there (/public/dumps).
  • Worked on automatically creating a redirect when merging items via the API.
  • Rewrote the script that generates a map image based on geocoordinates in Wikidata. (Result see above.)
  • Released Wikibase DataModel 3.0
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 15:14, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-24

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 this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 9. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 11 (calendar). [58] [59]
• If you use the Monobook skin, the buttons and other controls now look more the same in VisualEditor and other tools. [60]
• When you edit links and other items in VisualEditor, you now need to apply your change before closing the tool. [61]
• The title of dialogs is now easier to see when it is near long buttons. [62]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 9 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a meeting with the Language team. The meeting will be on June 10 at 14:30 (UTC). [63]

Future changes

• If you have a bot, you may need to fix it. The default continuation mode of the API for action=query will change at the end of June. [64]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:21, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #162

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Should we have a Wikidata User Group?
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Thanks to everyone who participated in the Wikidata:Menu Challenge which made Wikidata shine at A Taste of Stockholm. The live results are still up at https://wikimedia-sverige.github.io/tastydata .
  • Upcoming: Donostia-San Sebastián Wikidata Editathon
  • Upcoming: Ateliers Wikidata in Paris
  • News about Wikidata FIST
  • Review of the big interwiki link migration
  • Timeline of Christopher Lee films
  • Wikidata map - 19 months on
  • A challenge was raised to calculate the degrees of separation to Kevin Bacon. Already one routine has been produced, the next step is to use live data so that we can work on reducing the number of intermediary steps.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • ViziData has been improved significantly
  • Wikidata Visualization Challenge winners announced: first prize to ViziData.
  • New paper: Peer-production system or collaborative ontology development effort: what is Wikidata?
  • Jura1 posted some data around property usage on items about people
  • Tpt is interning at Google now to free up more content from Freebase for us. He's adding more data to the Primary Sources Tool.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: street key, relief location map, location map, McCune-Reischauer romanization, conifers.org ID, Dyntaxa ID, Project Gutenberg ID, UN/LOCODE, Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire ID, DBCS ID, Animator.ru ID, MobyGames ID, stated as, PGCH ID
• Development
  • Deployed arbitrary access on all Wikivoyage and Wikiquote projects and announced the next ones. See d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access for more.
  • More fine tuning on entity usage tracking (relevant for arbitrary access)
  • Fixed bug that sometimes allowed multiple properties to have the same label in a given language (phabricator:T102148)
  • More work on automatically creating redirects when merging items
  • More code review of the Wikidata Quality extensions (improved constraint reports and checks against 3rd party databases). Starting to look good for a first deployment.
  • The sitelinks heading hierarchy changed and includes a “Site links” heading now that is only shown on mobile. This is a DOM change needed to make Wikidata work better on mobile.
  • Started working on having PHPCS coverage for the major Wikibase.git code base to find small code issues more easily
  • Prepared Wikibase.git for the DataModel 3.0 switch
  • Released Wikibase DataModel Serialization 1.4
  • Released Wikibase Internal Serialization 1.4
  • New releases of several DataValue components, including DataValues Number 0.5, DataValues JavaScript 0.7 and ValueView 0.14.5
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 12:08, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-25

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

• Users have created more than 5000 articles with the new translation tool. [65]
• Editing a page is now faster. This is because some statistics about edit filters were removed. [66]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 17 June. It will be on all Wikipedias from 18 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 16 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. It will be on June 19 at 16:00 (UTC). [67]

Future changes

• Developers are working on a new tool to get and send newsletters. If you read or write a newsletter, share your ideas about it. [68]
• If you use Pywikibot, soon you won't be able to use compat anymore. [69] [70] [71]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:04, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #163

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • German language Wikipedia closed its RfC on usage of Wikidata data. As a result Wikidata data can be used on the project as long as it happens through a template and it has a non-Wikimedia reference.
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Office hour on IRC. We talked about cool things that happened around Wikidata over the past 3 months got an update on upcoming developments and Freebase and more. You can read the log.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • en:South Pole Telescope is a nice example of an infobox completely filled from Wikidata.
  • Q20150617 was created on 2015-06-17
  • More data from Freebase have been added the Primary Sources Tool. There is also a page to help the mapping of Freebase properties.
  • Nice new manual for MixnMatch
  • The new nature.com/ontologies links to external ontologies and datasets; among them Wikidata.
  • National Gallery of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum now have entries for all their paintings on Wikidata thanks to wiki project Sum of all Paintings
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: takeoff and landing capability, Discogs label ID, Discogs master ID, Discogs artist ID, Encyclopaedia Metallum band id, investor, second surname in Spanish name, CulturaItalia ID, BerlPap identifier, Mapillary id, National Library of Ireland authority
  • Newest WikiProjects: Cross Items Interwikis
• Development
  • Made a small API breaking change to wbeditentity and wbgetclaims modules. Details can be seen in the commit message of https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/217885/
  • Worked more on unit support
  • Fixed an issue where you'd sometimes select the wrong value when entering a statement unintentionally (phabricator:T98471)
  • Switched the whole code base to make use of DataModel 3.0
  • The concept of “claims” no longer exists in Wikibase, as all places in the software work with statements. We are making this more and more explicit in the code.
  • The autoloading mechanism of the extension changed, see phabricator:T100813
  • More work on getting the Wikibase Quality extensions ready for deployment. They'll improve constraint checking and provide checks against 3rd party databases.
  • Special:UnconnectedPages had to be reworked (thanks Amir!) because of huge performance issues. Because of this it loses some functionality (being able to specify where the list starts and limiting the list to pages that have local interwiki links). We're working on bringing functionality back without the performance penalty.
  • Bene* created a SPARQL abstraction layer for PHP called Asparagus: https://github.com/Benestar/asparagus
  • Enabled arbitrary access on arwiki, cawiki, eswiki, huwiki, kowiki, rowiki, ukwiki, viwiki, and usage tracking on dewiki, ruwiki, cswiki and all s3 wikis. (ruwiki and cswiki get arbitrary access on June 23)
  • Finishing work on improved handling “invalid” values and statements with deleted properties.
  • Small breaking DOM change: Wikibase no longer adds its own h1 tag but uses MediaWiki's default .firstHeading element. (phabricator:T93534)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:34, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-26

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

• Some wikis can now be used only with HTTPS. This includes the English, Russian and Chinese Wikipedias, among others. Soon all wikis will use only HTTPS for all users. [72] [73]
• You can't use HTTPS wikis with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP. You need to use another browser. [74]

Problems

• On June 15, search was broken on all wikis for several hours. [75] [76] [77]
• On June 16, images were broken for several hours on wikis that use InstantCommons. [78] [79] [80]
• Many Labs tools were broken for several days. Almost all of them are back now. They may be missing some data for the last 10 days. [81] [82] [83]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 23. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 24. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 25 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 23 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:23, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #164

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Ateliers Wikidata
  • Upcoming: Wikimania. There will be several talks and workshops related to Wikidata. Say hi at the "Ask Us Anything" session for Wikidata if you're there.
  • Reductionism
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Which geographic areas do different Wikipedias cover? How does it compare to Wikidata? Markus has a beautiful answer
  • Wikiproject Molecular Biology and AskPlatypus are shortlisted for the OpenData Award \o/ This is the award Wikidata won last year.
  • Paper on vandalism on Wikidata. Lydia is in touch with them to figure out how to best use the insights for us.
  • Reasonator got some updates: it is now using external ID formatter URLs, has monolingual string support and better social network links
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: number of children, MovieMeter movie identifier, MovieMeter director ID, Foursquare venue ID, BoxRec ID, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile catalogue number, sortkey, properties for this type, patron, Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, Google Scholar ID, Dutch Senate person ID, Trismegistos ID, Wikisource index page
  • Newest External tools: Wikidata Compare
  • Showcase items: none. Yours next week?
• Development
  • Jonas joined the team and Adam is back \o/
  • Deployed arbitrary access to ruwiki and cswiki
  • Machine readable versions (in various formats) of Wikibase entities will be advertised in their page heads as alternate link. (phabricator:T96298)
  • Fixed property label on item pages not scrolling anymore (phabricator:T94588)
  • More work on getting the Wikibase Quality extensions ready for release. The part doing constraint violation checks should go to test.wikidata.org next week. The part doing checks against 3rd party databases will still take a bit longer but is also shaping up nicely.
  • Made it possible to create items even when another user is mass-creating items (phabricator:T103796)
  • Bene* worked more on making Wikidata work nicely on mobile
  • Fixed weird issue with cursor jumping around in sitelink input field (phabricator:T103489)
  • Fixed an issue where it was not possible to edit a statement after you removed its only reference (phabricator:T103603)
  • Lydia will be traveling for much of July. Expect her to be a bit less responsive during that time.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 18:15, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-27

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

• Long lines in code blocks now look better. [84]
• You can now see graphs in VisualEditor. [85]
• When you read a page on the mobile site, you can now see a link to go to its talk page. [86]
• The code coloring tool has changed. You can now use many more languages. It now also works on mobile. [87] [88] [89]
• You can look at a new site to learn how to reuse data from Wikimedia sites. [90]

Problems

• JavaScript was broken on some wikis due to a code error. VisualEditor and other tools that use JavaScript were broken. [91]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 30. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 1. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 2 (calendar).
• You can now use a tool in VisualEditor to add and edit code in color. [92]
• When you edit a sentence in the Translate tool, it can show you older translations. They help you save time if they look alike. The older translations should now work better. If you see problems, you should report them. [93]
• If you are an admin or have other special rights, you now need a strong password. [94]
• Bot and JavaScript coders: The old continuation mode of the API for action=query doesn't work any more. [95]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 30 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future

• When you create a new account, it will also create one on Meta-Wiki and mediawiki.org. [96]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:56, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #165

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion about Atheism and the religion property.
  • Discussion about the Verifiability of data as a policy.
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Upcoming: Wikimania. There will be several talks and workshops related to Wikidata. Say hi at the "Ask Us Anything" session for Wikidata if you're there.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • A new database report lists people categorized as dead in Wikipedia, but lacking Property:P570 (date of death). It's updated several times during the day. There are about 20 to 30 new entries each day. There is currently some backlog from the Arabic, Marathi, and Thai Wikipedias. Items updated first in Wikidata wont appear in the report. They are listed directly in Wikidata's recent deaths report.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: RSL editions, Open Hub ID, number of children, MovieMeter movie identifier, MovieMeter director ID
• Development
  • Adam wrote a blog post on the improvement of the data after one year and GeneaWiki
  • After the next deployment, Special:ItemDisambiguation will match aliases and be case insensitive.
  • Improved details of matches in the entity suggester (wbsearchentities api module)
  • Deployed the WikibaseQuality and WikibaseQualityConstraints extensions to test.wikidata.org
  • Fixed the layout of long qualifier names
  • JSON dumps are now automatically copied to labs
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:16, 4 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-28

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 the mobile site, you now see more information when you search for a page. It now shows the description from Wikidata. [97]

Problems

• The code of long pages is not colored any more. You may see this problem on the pages of long gadgets. [98]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 7. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 8. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 9 (calendar).
• The "Page information" tool shows how many users watch the page. You can now see how many are active. [99] [100]
• You can now translate articles into English with the new translation tool. [101]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 7 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:13, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #166

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Slides on Primary Sources Tool and Wikidata introduction (in Spanish) for the Donostia-San Sebastián Wikidata Editathon
  • Presentation about Wikidata at the Axel Springer Hack Day 2015
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikiresearch looked into the coverage of the moon by geotags in Wikidata
  • Wikiresearch published a visualization of the relationship between nationality and occupation based on Wikidata's data
  • Which zoo has polar bears? Wikidata attempts to answer the question here. Work in progress.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: MCN code, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Anime News Network anime ID, Anime News Network manga ID, Anime News Network company ID, Anime News Network person ID, FSK film rating, PolSys ID, Righteous Among The Nations ID, USDA NDB number, lesarchivesduspectacle ID, INEGI locality identifier
• Development
  • The Wikidata Quality extension (constraint reports per item) was deployed. You can now use d:Special:ConstraintReport to see the result for different items. This is for example the constraint report for the item cat (Q142).
  • 8 million additional statements from Freebase were made available through the Primary sources tool
  • Moving towards having a single edit button to edit references along with the value they belong to.
  • Bene continued working on phasing out the deprecated Entity superclass and making more entity types possible.
  • More work on phasing out a deprecated serializer implementation we still use in certain places.
  • Further work on the new RDF export.
  • PHPCS is now used on each change in Wikibase to ensure the code fulfils certain code quality standards.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 11:03, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-29

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

• You can now see a list of pages with errors in code coloring. [102]

Problems

• There was a problem with editing on Thursday. Some tools like bots and VisualEditor were broken on all wikis for 10 minutes. [103]
• There was a problem with images on Thursday. They were broken on all wikis for 15 minutes. [104]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 15. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 16 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join a technical meeting at Wikimania in Mexico City this week. [105]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:06, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #167

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Nikki
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Right now: Wikimania
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Magnus made some new tools:
    • list of scientists on Wikidata born after 1950 with no image, grouped by employer. Check your university!
    • list of scientists on Wikidata born after 1950 with no ORCID iD, grouped by employer. Ditto!
    • an InfoBitt replacement
    • a tool you can use to match up Wikipedia articles without an item to either an existing item or a create a new one if none exists
    • plus Mix'N'Match got new datasets you can help match up with Wikidata
  • P2000 was created.
  • Some presentations at Wikimania related to Wikidata have detailed slides online:
    • WikiProject Sum of All Paintings
    • Templates are dead! Long live templates!, technical presentation on the function and future of template syntax
    • Future of structured documents: VisualEditor, Citations and Wikidata, oh my!
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: CPDL ID, UNESCO language status, UCI code, Facebook Places ID, parliament.uk bio link, medical specialty, AllMusic composition ID, TeX string, Plazi ID, LPSN URL, species kept, Encyclopaedia Metallum artist ID, Delarge ID
  • New task forces: Linguistics
• Development
  • Attending Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City right now, meeting awesome people that already use or want to know everything about Wikidata.
  • After the next deployment, redirects will be automatically created when merging items.
  • Special:UnconnectedPages can now be queried via the query API, thanks to Ladsgroup.
  • Migrating away from an older serializer to the DataModel Serialization component.
  • Worked on a new time parser that can parse formats like M/D/Y, Y M D and so on.
  • Fixed a bug where a value could not be edited when save failed.
  • Made the snak type, badge and rank selectors position themselves after resizing the browser window and introduced a possibility to collapse the sitelinks sections.
  • Worked on a change in editing to be able to edit a statement and it’s references in one step.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 15:48, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-30

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 this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 21. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 22. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 23 (calendar).
• You now see more warnings in the image viewer. They tell you to be careful when using the image, for example if it shows a person. [106]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 21 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Soon you won't be able to use MathJax to display math. [107]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

03:05, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #168

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Successful request for adminship: Nikki
  • Open request for oversightership: Sjoerddebruin
  • Closed request for comments: Administrative divisions and populated places, Given names and surnames
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata, coming soon to a menu near you!
  • Past: Wikimania
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Upload of 4.2M new statements from Freebase in the Primary Sources tool.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: NALT id, Instagram username, Twitter username, Revised Romanisation, CPDL ID, UNESCO language status, UCI code, Facebook Places ID
• Development
  • Continued migrating away from an older serializer to the DataModel Serialization component.
  • Released Wikibase DataModel Serialization 1.7.0
  • Depreacting the parameter ungroupedlist in the api modules GetClaims and GetEntities
  • Tweaking the sitelink input
  • Changing the display of item selector results
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:49, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-31

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

• You can now use redirects to link to JavaScript pages. [108]
• You cannot use the compact user bar any more. [109]
• You can change your options to see bigger images. [110]
• You can watch short videos about how to use VisualEditor. [111]
• You can now edit pages linked in "what links here" more easily. [112]

Problems

• There was a problem with some Lua modules on July 22 and 23. Some pages using them did not list them in "what links here". You can fix those pages with a null edit: edit and save the page without making any change.
• There was a problem with the abuse filter page on big wikis on July 23. It was due to a code error. [113]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 29. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 30 (calendar).
• JavaScript authors: You cannot use wgNoticeUserData to get edit counts anymore. [114]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 28 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:05, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #169

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open requests for Oversight: Sjoerddebruin
  • Enable Flow on Wikidata?
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Early version of a reconcile API for Wikidata by Magnus
  • PagePile: a new tool by Magnus
  • Mix-n-Match got a number of new catalogs and now shows a thin red line in front of a catalog that does not yet have a property on Wikidata
  • 1.700 biographical items without gender, but with image. Go go go!
  • Interested in art movements? Check out this
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: MoMA artwork id, Facebook ID, cuisine, Cooper-Hewitt Person ID, Exif make, Exif model, IPNI publication ID, ZooBank publication ID, ZooBank author ID, Catalogus Professorum Halensis, NALT id
  • Showcase items: László Krasznahorkai (Q512062)
• Development
  • Minor fixes to property edit mode
  • Some fixes for the cucumber test errors
  • Released Wikibase DataModel 4.0
  • Released Wikibase DataModel Services 1.0
  • Continued work to migrate away from old serializers in Wikibase Lib to those in WikibaseDataModelSerialization.
  • Working on scripts for importing entities from another Wikibase instance (e.g. Wikidata), so that development instances can have some sample data.
  • Fixed the counting of references
  • Changed style of the Entitytermsview inputs
  • Entity Selector displays alias in brackets behind label
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 19:29, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-32

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 ContentTranslation extension has been updated:
  • You can now type in list paragraphs on wikis with right-to-left scripts. [115]
  • Some user interface updates changed how details in the ContentTranslation extension look. [116] [117] [118] [119]
• The error page you see when the sites are not working is now simpler and easier to read. It also shows the Wikimedia logo. [120]
• MediaWiki now supports redirects for CSS pages. [121]
• Bots can't guess captchas unlimited times anymore. [122]

Problems

• There was a problem with thumbnails on wikis with local images on July 24 and 25. It was due to a code error. [123]
• We can't search by file type on Wikimedia wikis now. [124]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 5. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 6 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 4 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:51, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #170

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Successful request for oversight rights: Sjoerddebruin
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikimedia UK is organizing a Wikidata training session. You can sign up here.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Talk pages on Wikidata can now be converted to use Flow. You can request migrating your talk page at d:Wikidata:Flow.
  • Mix-n-Match got a bunch of new catalogs for you to match up with Wikidata. Currently matching is happening at about 500 items per day. Pretty sweet :)
  • @happybirthdayauthors is a new Twitter account posting reading suggestions based on Wikidata data.
  • Arbitrary access is rolling out to a large number of wikis over the next two weeks.
  • Duplicity can help you match up unlinked Wikipedia articles to a Wikidata item.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Erdős number, worldfootball.net ID, AllMovie artist ID, Teuchos ID, isomeric SMILES, Catalogus Professorum Academiae Groninganae id, Hansard ID
• Development
  • Made some small changes to the style of the edit warning and sitelinks so they are easier to notice and understand
  • Added error messages for Special:GoToLinkedPage and Special:ItemByTitle so you get a useful message in case no result is found
  • The Entity Selector now displays alias in brackets behind label
  • The number of entities loaded via the {{#property:…}} parser function and via Lua will be reported in the “Parser profiling data” (which can be found below a page preview or within the Html of a page)
  • Prepared for next rounds of arbitrary access rollout
  • Investigated growing lag of dispatching of changes to Wikipedia and co. We'll need to investigate further and change things so the lag between an edit on Wikidata and it being send to the Wikipedias and other projects is not too high.
  • Added the property ID to Special:ListProperties
  • Moved two extensions (Wikidata.org and WikimediaBadges) from Github to Gerrit. More will follow.
  • We'd like to drop a database table. Discussion is ongoing.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 18:20, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-33

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

• MediaWiki can now hide the signature button when you edit a content page. [125]
• The "Your preferences have been saved" message has changed. You can now see more easily what was saved when you change preferences several times. [126]
• You can now play Ogg video files in some browsers that don't support this format. This solution uses JavaScript and works on desktop browsers only for now. It will work on mobile later. [127]
• You can now use the same tools to edit style in VisualEditor on mobile as in desktop browsers. [128]
• It is now easier to see if there is a JavaScript error in a user or site script. [129]
• JavaScript authors:
  • You can no longer use the Sajax library. You can see a list of pages to fix. [130] [131]
  • You can no longer use document.write on Wikimedia wikis. You can see a list of pages to fix. [132] [133]
• The content translation tool now works better. It is easier to use math, and useless tags are no longer added. [134]

Problems

• More edits have been rejected due to loss of session data lately. This is now fixed. [135]
• Importing a Lua module sometimes didn't work. This is now fixed. [136]
• Text was sometimes lost in the content translation tool. One part of the problem is now fixed. [137]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 12. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 13 (calendar).
• UploadWizard is getting a new look. The look of buttons and checkboxes has already changed. This week, UploadWizard gets a new date picker. The other text fields will change soon. [138]
• You can now test VisualEditor on mobile devices of all sizes. [139]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 11 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Some things in the watchlist will get a new look. [140]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

14:57, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #171

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Reinforcement of data analysis before any modification of the DB
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • cooperation between free content projects
  • A case is made to concentrate our quality efforts on the differences between Wikidata and other sources
  • Ongoing: Several team members are attending the Chaos Communication Camp.
  • Upcoming: SmartDataConference
  • A Comparative Survey of DBpedia, Freebase, OpenCyc, Wikidata, and YAGO
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata needs your vote! It only takes a minute.
  • WikiProject Sum of all Paintings reached the milestone of 100.000 paintings. Congrats!
  • Arbitrary access is now available on another ~250 Wikipedias].
  • See d:Wikidata talk:Arbitrary access#Use cases: testing modules and templates for two general use cases for arbitrary access on Wikipedia's regression testing of Wikidata-related modules and templates and testing infoboxes with Wikidata content.
  • List of articles on English Wikipedia without a Wikidata item (also works for other projects)
  • You have a bunch of names etc. and want to find Wikidata items with those labels/aliases? Try relabel!
  • SourcererBot is adding lots of references to existing statements on several thousand items.
  • Mix-n-Match has new catalogs including the National Library of Australia.
  • Deaths at Wikipedia are a series of reports comparing items at Wikidata with death-by-year-categories of Wikipedia. For the years since 2000, only about 15% of items at Wikidata lack d:Property:P570 (date of death).
  • 93% of items about people have a gender set now.
  • Want to make both Wikidata and Inventaire better? You can help by finding those books' authors.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Find A Grave cemetery ID, German cattle breed ID, Erdős number, worldfootball.net ID, AllMovie artist ID
  • Newest tools: Suggestor
• Development
  • Rolled out arbitrary access to about 250 Wikipedias including German, French and Japanese. More to come in a few days.
  • Worked more on quantities. Looks like we'll have it on a demo system for you to try a first version within the next two weeks.
  • Bene* is joining us for a month as an intern. Welcome!
  • References are now hidden while loading the page, speeding up page load time
  • First commit to the ArticlePlaceholder extension
  • Expensive parser functions now count each entity only once
  • Released a new version of the DataModelServices component and started using it
  • Started working on phasing out the wb_entity_per_page table. It will be kept around and updated for some time to allow tool owners to migrate.
  • The Wikibase code base now fullfills all of MediaWiki’s PHPCS coding standards
  • Added property IDs to Special:ListProperties
  • Did a lot of bug triage on Phabricator
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:03, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-34

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

• Many Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Before they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article. [141] [142] [143]
• Some auto-saving problems and other issues in the Content Translation tool are now fixed. Please report to the Content Translation feedback page if you still have problems. [144]

Problems

• Older gadgets that are not using ResourceLoader are not loading anymore. They need to be updated. [145] [146]
• On August 12 the machine translation servers and the Content Translation tool didn't work. This was fixed on the same day. [147]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 20 (calendar).
• You can soon watch when something is added to or removed from a category. [148]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 18 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:17, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #172

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: SmartData conference
  • Paper: Reifying RDF: What Works Well With Wikidata?
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata made it into the top 10 of the Land der Ideen competition \o/ This means we're part of the final public voting starting on 9th of September. Thanks everyone who voted and spread the word.
  • Flow is being tested on selected talk pages.
  • New tool: Get new Wikidata items (now or before a given timestamp) as HTML or PagePile
  • New tool: Find Wikidata items without an image around a location, then find free images on Flickr taken nearby.
  • EventZoom.net extended with OpenStreetMap support, increasing the options for visualizing historical events from Wikidata.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Find A Grave cemetery ID, German cattle breed ID, Erdős number, worldfootball.net ID, AllMovie artist ID
• Development
  • Soon the edit summary for edits through the API will also contain the automatic edit summary that you are used to for edits done through the website. The summary given by the API user will be appended to the automatic summary. (phabricator:T97247)
  • Addressed performance issues in usage tracking updates and had to delay the latest round of rollouts because of it
  • Fixed a bug where suggestions would show up twice in item and property selectors (phabricator:T109697)
  • Improved performance of the mw.wikibase.sitelink Lua method
  • More work done on Unit Selector widget
  • Started working on the ArticlePlaceholder extension
  • Made final changes so we can redirect mobile users to the mobile version by default
  • Evaluated the remaining steps to get the extension deployed that lets you do checks against 3rd party databases. Not much left it seems and we'll tackle that in one of the next sprints. Getting the new features deployed for the constraints checks will still take a bit longer.
  • More work on making the edit summaries in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co more meaningful
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 12:35, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-35

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

• Disambiguation pages are now excluded from the random page function. [149]

Problems

• There was a problem with CAPTCHAs in VisualEditor. This has now been fixed. [150]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 26. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 27 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 25 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:02, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #173

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • New request for comments: Merging relationship properties
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Removing use of Mediawiki’s API ‘rawmode’ in Wikibase
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • New page: Wikidata:OpenStreetMap to facilitate cooperation with our colleagues at OpenStreetMap
  • Inventaire now shows links to ProjectGutenberg ebooks based on Wikidata data (example)
  • First version of units is ready for testing
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: ResearchGate ID, GitHub username, African Plant Database, LinkedIn personal profile, Project Gutenberg ebook ID, Category for pictures taken with camera, work period end, work period start, NASA biographical ID, Dictionary of Ulster Biography ID, United States Armed Forces service number, Colour Index International constitution ID, Avibase ID
  • Newest WikiProjects: Reasoning
  • Newest gadgets: List of missing pairs queries, DuplicateReferences
  • Newest External tools: Commons:Database reports/Cameras
• Development
  • Lucie posted a sneak-peek of her work on the article placeholder extension
  • Optimized Wikidata for viewing on mobile devices. You will be redirected to m.wikidata.org automatically when using a mobile device soon the same way it already happens on Wikipedia. (Editing will only be possible via the special pages!)
  • Started working on a page to track how much Wikidata's data is used on each Wikimedia project
  • API breaking change coming soon
  • API custom summary will no longer override the autocomment (phabricator:T97247)
  • Paging and sorting has been added to Special:ListProperties and it now also shows the IDs of the properties
  • Worked more on making the edit summaries on the client more meaningful and readable
  • Introduced a limit of 250 different entities that can be used on a page in the client via arbitrary access. The limit does not apply to convenience functions in lua, such as mw.wikibase.label which use a TermLookup instead of loading a full entity to get labels. (phabricator:T93885)
  • Properties are now linked in the diff view (phabricator:T105411)
  • Ricordisamoa made several improvements to special pages (eg phabricator:T68744, phabricator:T48248, phabricator:T86647)
  • Fixed a bug that made aliases too prominent in entity selectors (phabricator:T110021)
  • Fixed a bug that made entries show up twice in the entity selector (phabricator:T109697)
  • Started working on a special page to list all pages on a wiki with a certain badge
  • Fixed remaining blockers for first rollout of unit support
  • Bene worked on a new feature for DuckDuckGo to show instant results from Wikidata on their site
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:43, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-36

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

• VisualEditor will now automatically create a link when you type in or paste an ISBN, PMID, or RFC. [151][152]
• The link editor in VisualEditor is now a bit wider. It's now the same width as the automatic citation tool. [153]
• VisualEditor gadget authors can no longer use the backwards-compatibility module ext.visualEditor.viewPageTarget.init. Use ext.visualEditor.desktopArticleTarget.init instead. [154]
• Gadget writers can now use mediawiki.ForeignApi to communicate between different Wikimedia wikis. [155]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 3 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 1 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikidata API will be updated with breaking changes. This will probably happen on September 9. [156]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

21:36, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #174

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikimedia Grafana graphs of Wikidata profiling information
  • Past: Wikimedia Science Conference (blog posts: Liberating Science Daily With, and To, Wikidata, Wikidata, Wikipedia, and #wikisci)
  • Past: Wikidata workshop in Rennes
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • New date for the next Arbitrary access rollout has been set: 16th of September.
  • Support for units on Wikidata is coming on Wednesday (9th of September).
  • A new version of Kian has been released
  • The Wikidata Game has got a new mode: Books without author.
  • A new IEG proposal needs your review and support. You can also submit your own until the 29th of September.
  • >8K Fellows of the Royal Society have been added to mix’n’match
  • You can have a look at the spiffy new mobile view
  • Want to work with the data in Wikidata? There is a new release of the Wikidata Toolkit for you.
  • Your help is needed with the most important constraint violations.
  • A new noticeboard has been created to help with classification issues: d:Wikidata:Classification noticeboard
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Artsy artist, National Gallery of Victoria artist identifier, CITES Species+ ID
• Development
  • Worked on search on the mobile site
  • Started working on automatically linking identifiers without a gadget and the new datatype for identifiers
  • We have a new Special page to query badges (finally!) After the next update it will be at Special:PagesWithBadges on Wikipedia and others
  • Fixed some of the remaining known issues with unit support to make it ready for rollout on Wednesday
  • Continued with making it possible to show meaningful edit summaries in the watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and others
  • Made change dispatching faster (This is what makes Wikipedia and others aware of changes happening on Wikidata)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:39, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-37

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

• You can now mention up to 50 users in a post and they will get a notification. Previously you could notify up to 20 users. [157]
• A new version of the Wikidata Toolkit has been released. It now has Wikibase API support. [158]
• You can now use Wikidata to find all good or featured articles in a Wikipedia version. [159]

Problems

• There was a problem with Tool Labs due to kernel issues. This has been fixed. [160]
• The Content Translation tool published some pages with the same reference repeated several times. This has been fixed. [161][162]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 9. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 10 (calendar).
• The maximum character length when you search for something on the Wikimedia wikis is now 300 characters. [163]
• The notifications list has been split into two lists. As a first step, notifications about messages on your user talk page will be placed in the second list. Feedback is requested at the Echo talk page. [164][165]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 8 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the Wikitech ambassadors mailing list. The list is for Wikimedians interested in spreading information about Wikimedia technology news. See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia mailing lists will be moved to a new server and the software will be upgraded. This will happen on September 9 at 14:00 (UTC). The mailing lists will not be working during the move. It can take up to four hours. [166]
• Wikidata will soon be able to store measurements, such as a mountain's height or the distance between two places. [167][168]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:29, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-38

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

• You can now use the Wikidata query service. [169]
• Belarusian-Taraškievica Wikipedia was moved from be-x-old.wikipedia.org to be-tarask.wikipedia.org. This caused some issues, but most of them were resolved. [170]
• Language preferences might not be changed immediately when you adjust them. Language selection might work slower. Please report any problems. [171][172]

Problems

• There was a problem when editing International Standard Book Numbers in Visual Editor. This has now been fixed. [173]
• The Wikimedia mailing lists should have been upgraded on September 9. It didn't work as planned and will now happen later. [174]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 16. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 17 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 15 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• ContentTranslation will show more data on the Special:ContentTranslationStats page. For example, it will show translation trends and information about deleted translations. [175]
• The first version of the translation suggestions feature will be deployed soon. [176]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:17, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #175

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Wikidata edit-a-thon at Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2015 in Estonia
  • Upcoming: Office hour on IRC, 23 September
  • Upcoming: Mobilizing Open Cultural Data, Helsinki, 2 October
  • Upcoming: Wikidata tutorial at SWAT4LS, December
  • Un-deleting 500,000 Wikidata items
  • Wikimania 2015 report by Multichill
  • DSS Wikidata Editathon
  • A simple way to write Wikidata bots
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Please vote for Wikidata to win the people's choice award of Land der Ideen (voting instructions)
  • We passed 70M statements.
  • Stalagmites and stalactites visualizes items without statements, items with statements, and deleted/redirected items by batches of 100,000 QIDs
  • Mix n Match is now available for mobile, has an improved automatic matching algorithm, got speed improvements and new catalogs were added like the National Gallery of Victoria, World Heritage Sites and CulturaItalia
  • The annual Wikipedia editing competition organized by the International Society for Computational Biology will include a Wikidata component this year for the first time.
  • Matched birth and death days seeks to investigate all pairs of humans (in various subsets) that appear to have the same birth dates and death dates. De-duplication underway!
  • You can now use the new special page Special:PagesWithBadges to see which articles on that project have a badge like "featured article".
  • New tool by Magnus to suggest links to Wikidata items while you type
  • Meta, MediaWiki, Wikispecies and Wikibooks will get (more) access to Wikidata soon
  • Wikidata now has an official SPARQL endpoint so you can query the data
    • announcement
    • examples
    • How US Presidents Died According to Wikidata
  • Wikidata now supports units
    • announcement
    • properties with units already created
    • Properties with units waiting for creation
    • example
  • Prototype database to store all Wikipedia references
  • Duplicity can show you how many (and which) articles on a Wikipedia are not connected to an item on Wikidata (example for frwp)
  • Magnus wrote a user script to let you edit Listeria-powered lists on Wikipedia directly
  • Musicpedia has been released in beta and is using data from Wikidata
  • New tool by Magnus to create a Commons creator page from a Wikidata item
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: length, elevation above sea level, orbital inclination, area, duration, height, width, wingspan, M x sin i, speed, watershed area, density, electrical conductivity, heat capacity, HMDB ID, depositor, luminosity, aspect ratio, HSDB ID, LIPID MAPS ID, KNApSAcK ID, NIAID ChemDB ID, Fusion enthalpy, mass
• Development
  • Release of the query service and unit support (see above)
  • Made quantities not show URIs when editing a value but instead show the label
  • Worked on new datatype for identifiers to be able to split them from the other statements in the user interface, link them without the need for the authority control gadget and be able to link them in JSON/RDF
  • Worked more on making the edit summaries in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co more meaningful
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:21, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-39

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

• There is now an experimental Wikimedia maps service. You can give feedback here. [177][178]
• Last week a few issues with UploadWizard were fixed. Before this was done, UploadWizard would stop you from uploading your files if something went wrong. [179][180][181][182]
• More Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Previously they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article. [183]
• The VisualEditor welcome dialogue has been changed. The intention is to make it more helpful for new users. [184]

Problems

• Wikimedia Labs' HTTPS certificate expired for most of Tuesday 15 September. To reach Wikimedia Labs and Tool Labs securely you had to ignore your browser's security error message. There was no risk to data security during this time. [185]
• Last week the notification system was split into two parts. This was temporarily undone because of a bug and performance concerns. It will return to two parts this week. [186][187]
• UploadWizard couldn't upload files larger than 5 MB when using chunked uploads. This has now been fixed. [188]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 22. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 23. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 24 (calendar).
• The page move tool has been switched over to the new standard look for forms. [189]
• You can now choose whether to extend a link or not when editing one in VisualEditor. This means it is easier to choose how much of what you type before and after the link is part of it. [190]
• Wikibooks can now use data from Wikidata. [191]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. It will be on September 23 at 17:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can register to the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2016 in San Francisco 4–6 January 2016. Gadget, template, bot, and tool developers are welcome as well. Call for participation and travel sponsorship requests are open until 2 October.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:29, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #176

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: WikiCon in Dresden
  • Upcoming: office hour on IRC
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The grant proposal "StrepHit: Wikidata Statements Validation via References" is looking for endorsements
  • Wikidata and it's dumps are now described according to the DCAT-AP standard. You can add your language by translating the general and the Wikidata specific messages.
  • A follow-up to the Wikidata for research proposal has begun to be drafted by the University of Haifa and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
  • Community page for the new SPARQL query service, including a subpage for interesting or illustrative queries, and a board for suggestions and discussions.
  • Wikibooks now has access to the data on Wikidata
  • English Wikipedia and a few more got arbitrary access
  • Mix'n'match got new catalogs including Open Library authors and AcademiaNet's excellent female authors
  • The LinkedWiki extension now supports Wikidata (demo)
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: FISA ID, Power of 10 athlete ID, Library of Congress JukeBox ID, CrunchBase organisation ID, CrunchBase person ID, CDD Public ID, Nikkaji, ZINC ID, Leadscope ID, M.49 code, BLDAM object ID, AcademiaNet, fabrication method, user manual link, pressure, temperature, speed of sound, internetmedicin.se ID, range, CDB Chemical ID, Mémoire des hommes, Fellow of the Royal Society, magnetic moment, thermal conductivity
• Development
  • Started writing default Lua modules for the Article Placeholder
  • Excluded the Topic namespace from Special:UnconnectedPages
  • Fixed a bug where an item link on normal wiki pages was sometimes prepended by a label (in a random language)
  • Worked on the remaining blockers for redirecting users on mobile devices to the mobile version of the site
  • Fixed an issue where people had login issues when trying to connect an article to an item on the client
  • Worked on removing some more places that don't have language fallback yet
  • Worked more on making meaningful edit summaries show up in the client watchlist and recent changes
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 15:59, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-40

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 UploadWizard, the dialog to see an image preview has been removed. You already see the images in the thumbnails when you upload them. [192]
• UploadWizard dialogs look a bit different now. They have been updated to the new OOUI look. [193]
• You can now edit music scores in VisualEditor. You can add new sheet music scores and get live updates when you edit one. [194]
• When you send an e-mail to another editor using Special:EmailUser, that user will now get a notification on the wiki as well. [195]
• You can now see 500 images when you upload images from Flickr with UploadWizard. Before this change the limit was 50. [196]
• The Wikimedia mailing lists have been upgraded. [197]
• MediaWiki developers spent a day looking at proposed code changes in Gerrit. The goal was to clean up the backlog and give feedback to volunteer developers. [198]

Problems

• Some visitors had problems reaching the Wikimedia sites for an hour on September 24. [199][200]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 30. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 1 (calendar).
• There will be a new beta feature that allows editors to use Flow on their user talkpage if they want to. Each wiki can decide if they want to enable it. [201]
• The Content Translation tool can give translation suggestions. This feature will now be available in more languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Japanese, Italian, and Catalan. [202]

Meetings

• You can join the strategy process of the Reading department of Wikimedia Engineering. [203]
• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation developers want the community to decide who can use OAuth in the future. You can discuss it on Meta.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:15, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #177

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: IRC office hour (log with summary of past 3 months, OSM integration and more)
  • Upcoming: code.talks
  • Upcoming: Wikiconference USA
  • Wikidata-Items schnell auf der Kommandozeile nachschlagen? Mediawiki APIs hacken
  • A sea-change in science citation? The Wikipedia Science conference.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Great collaboration between a group of Flemish museums and art collections and Wikidata
  • Wikidata timeline is another tool that gives you nice timelines based in Wikidata's data (examples: American Sitcoms, Wars, Meryl Streep)
  • Cool new tool by Magnus for dynamic list generation
  • nlwiki has made great progress in getting down the number of articles not connected to Wikidata
  • The Museum of Modern Art website now includes Wikidata IDs (example)
  • 50.79% of all #Wikidata items have none, one or two statements now. Next month it is likely to be less than half. Good progress!
  • Some more examples to get you started with Wikidata's query service: 1, 2, 3
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Membership, YerelNet village ID, prize money, radius, vapor pressure, kinematic viscosity, combustion enthalpy, vaporization enthalpy, NDF-RT ID, Half-Life, sublimation temperature, wing area, power output, Kunstindex Danmark artwork, decomposition point, RXNO Ontology, size of team at finish, size of team at start, boiling point, melting point, Banque de noms de lieux du Québec id, BC Geographical Names ID, substitute/deputy/replacement of office/officeholder, term length of office, image legend, co-driver, qualifies for, short author name, Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur ID
• Development
  • You can now find the Wikibase ontology at http://wikiba.se/ontology
  • Special:UnconnectedPages will have a namespace filter
  • Worked on a small birthday present (One month left!) and party organizing (more info coming in the next days)
  • Language fallbacks will be shown also when adding a new statement, in qualifiers and references as well as for badges
  • Fixed a long-standing login issue when adding a new language link from Wikipedia and co (phabricator:T50389)
  • Worked on RfC for multi-content revisions. This is groundwork for Commons support. (phabricator:T107595)
  • More work on making meaningful edit summaries show up in the watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and co
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 17:21, 29 September 2015 (UTC)