Data access for Wikiquote will be enabled on June 10th. Coordination and questions should go to d:Wikidata:Wikiquote.
[toollabs:wp-world/wikidata/superclasses.php?lang=en Superclasses maps] shows coordinates for a class of items on a map. Classes are coming from Wikidata.
The EditItem suggester was released. You give it a property and it will return a list of items likely missing that property.
Looking for a cool university project with impact? We have some of them around Wikidata - not just for computer science students. Get in touch with Lydia.
Had a lot to think about and recap from the Zürich Hackathon, e.g. things regarding search, suggestions as well as the user interface redesign
Started doing mockups of the new user interface (Nothing to show yet, sorry!)
Setup an autogenerating code documentation instance on labs at wbdoc.wmflabs.org. Hint: Submitting patches that make the inline code documentation even better is a good starting point to get involved in coding
Worked on new datatype monolingual text (basically a string with an associated language)
Reworked a hell lot of “change operations” code that’s responsible for each and every edit as well as validating user input and API requests, for example denying empty descriptions and finding and blocking unnecessary duplications
Checked all the new Beta features that the teams in San Francisco are developing and made sure they work with Wikidata
Our efforts to make Wikidata faster broke some gadgets so we helped fixing them. Sorry for the breakage!
Dug into odd display bugs with the MonoBook skin and attempted to fix them (bugzilla:64741)
More testing on simple queries
Tpt worked on making inter-project links in the sidebar a beta-feature
Editors may now include their ORCID identifiers (and others, such as VIAF) on their user pages, using the Authority control template. You can register for an ORCID at http://orcid.org
More cleanup for the coming switch to WikibaseDataModel 1.0.
Icinga Dispatch Lag monitoring scripts, including IRC notifier bot, have been tested and are ready for Ops implementation. This should give us quicker notifications in case the notifications to Wikipedia and co about changes on Wikidata are slow again.
GenderCounter uses Wikidata to provide an accurate service with distinguishing male and female names
ca.wikipedia found a nice way to use Wikidata. They're comparing their living people to Wikidata to see if any of them have a date of death there. They're then put into a category for review: ca:Categoria:Persones vives a revisar
Continued working on full redirect support for items. It touches a surprising big chunk of the code base.
Continued working on the QueryEngine code base and it’s data type support.
Fixed and updated the most recent implementation of the property and item selector widget, e.g. a MonoBook specific bug.
Pushed along reviews and deployment of the entity suggester code that will make suggestions for new properties to be added to items. Our hope is to have it through performance review for the next deployment.
Hey everyone, it's rare these small sections come along but there is a bit of interesting news to get across which one line under 'noteworthy stuff' won't be the best for. For the next 6 summaries, they will be translatable at Wikidata. This is an interesting idea which was first proposed on the delivery page and on Wikidata-l by Base. This is purely a trial and if you all want the summaries to remain translatable, please participate! You can view the first translated summary (hopefully) here! Also sorry for this one being late :)
As part of the Outreach Program for Women d:User:User:Thepwnco is continuing improving all help pages to help new users understand Wikidata better. At the same time w:User:Discoveranjali is helping with social media outreach and creating presentations workshops about Wikidata.
More work on redirects. They are taking shape. Done with much of the groundwork. We've seen the first one! :D
Continued work on user interface redesign mockups
Monolingual text datatype is also taking shape but needs more user interface love to make it intuitive.
Investigated making Wikidata.org its own client so you can for example get access to better Lua functions for access to an item's label on a discussion page. Outcome: Should be possible but needs some more work.
Two new GuidedTours (aka interactive tutorials) have been released—we now have one on editing items and one on editing statements! Both tours are available from the Wikidata:Tours portal and feedback can be left on the talk page at Wikidata_talk:Tours. The work was a combined effort of User:Bene* and Outreach Program for Women intern User:Thepwnco.
We passed another milestone \o/ 10 million items now have an "instance of" or "subclass of" statement making it easy to tell what the item is about.
Bene* worked with the dev team this week. He pushed forward support for storing badges (eg featured article) on Wikidata and implemented the first two guided tours.
CTRL+ click and middle click on a search result in the entity selector now opens the result in a new tab.
Further progress on redirects
Fixed a number of annoyances with the entity selector
Continued work on mockups for new user interface
Investigated what issues come up if we make wikidata.org its own client. Things look good so we will probably enable it soonish. This will mean you can link Wikidata pages in items and access the data in them on other pages on Wikidata.
You are receiving this notification because you signed up as a translator to हिन्दी on Wikidata.
The page Wikidata:News is available for translation. You can translate it here:
Wikidata's new Main page is almost ready to go live, but is still in need of a visually-appealing banner! Got an idea for an eye-catching design that represents what Wikidata's all about? Submit proposals before August 11 at d:Wikidata:Portal Redesign/Banner
Finished a large number of new features and got them ready for roll-out. More in this email.
Wikibase made a big step forward to finally switch to DataModel 1.0.
Improved support for entity IDs bigger than 2 billion (32 bit integer).
We had to adapt Wikibase to some major changes (more major than usual, partly caused by discussions at Wikimania) in MediaWiki core: The default Vector skin became it’s own component and the ResourceLoader got some small but important updates.
Continued work on refactoring code of the user interface to make it ready for new design
Wrote a script to get number of users having wikidata in their recent changes/watchlist from the database
It will be possible to show the badges like "Featured Article" stored on Wikidata in the sidebar of the clients (Wikipedia, Wikisource, ...) starting Tuesday. Wikipedia will follow on Thursday.
Starting Tuesday we will deploy a new beta feature on the clients. It will allow you to show links to other sister projects in the sidebar based on the links in Wikidata.
You are receiving this notification because you signed up as a translator to हिन्दी on Wikidata.
The page Wikidata:Translators' noticeboard/Header/text is available for translation. You can translate it here:
Badges support via Wikidata has been rolled out to Wikipedia and other sister projects. If the icons shown are not the ones your project would like please request a change here.
Performance improvements for "in other projects sidebar" beta feature and bug fixes in the feature on wikis with sidebar cache enabled (e.g. zhwiki, commons)
Worked on performance improvements to badges feature
Fixing bug with xml format in the API, and added tests for it so hopefully this does not break again!
Worked more on enabling statements on properties
Further work on new user interface design groundwork - mostly refactoring and enabling editing of multiple sitelinks and label/alias/description at once
First pokes at usage tracking
Drafted an RfC to improve recent changes so we can show Wikidata changes also when enhanced recent changes is enabled
You are receiving this notification because you signed up as a translator to हिन्दी on Wikidata.
The page Wikidata:Contribute is available for translation. You can translate it here:
With the deployment next Tuesday you will be able to edit all sitelinks at once as well as all fields of the "in other languages" box. This is an intermediate step towards the new user interface and will evolve further over the next weeks. You can see what is coming on Tuesday now already on test.wikidata.org.
WikiProject Names aims to improve name related data on Wikidata. Initial focus is on first names (given names). Half of items for first names still need cleaning up, but 15% of items for persons already have a given name defined.
Worked on supporting statements on properties in WikibaseDataModelSerialization (bugzilla:66425)
Fixed broken xml api output (bugzilla:70531), as well as some inconsistencies in the xml format and added tests that should help avoid future breakage in the xml format
Finished performance improvements for badges
Worked on entity usage tracking
Pietro from the EAGLE project came to visit us, one of the first 3rd party users of Wikibase. See http://www.eagle-network.eu
Added a hook point to allow 3rd party users (like the EAGLE project) of Wikibase to control what goes into the search index
Started work on a widget that lets you edit badges right in the item instead of going to the special page
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
[[:d:Wikidata:Requests for comment/User conduct policies|Closed RfC: User conduct policies] * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** Wikidata Toolkit 0.3.0 released - Wikidata Toolkit ** ProteinBoxBot is making Wikidata the canonical resource for referencing and translating identifiers for genes and proteins from different species * Did you know? ** Newest properties: depends on, motto, series ordinal, Federal Register Document Number, monogram, cause of, Cycling Quotient ID * Development ** Investigated and fixed issues with time values ** Investigated issues with coordinate value precision ** Fixed a number of issues related to HHVM ** Further work on usage tracking ** Created smoke tests for items and properties ** Created a widget to edit badges directly on the item without going through the special page ** Prepared for a week of work with the WMF multimedia team and volunteers next week to get more planning done for structured data support for 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
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:48, 4 October 2014 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #128 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Discussions ** Open RfA: Nikosguard * Events/Blogs/Press ** Upcoming IRC office hour about structured data on Commons * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** All human genes are now wikidata items, for example: Here is one (of approximately 40,000) called "spinocerebellar ataxia 37" - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q18081265. Blog post about this to appear here: http://blog.wikimedia.de/tag/wikidata/ ** Want to be kept up-to-date on structured data on Commons? There is now a new newsletter you can subscribe to. ** Interested in some statistics about the data on Wikidata? Check Wikidata Stats every now and then. (Thanks Magnus for moving it to the new dump format.) * Did you know? ** Newest properties: UBERON ID, Yandex.Music ID, has quality, Exceptionnal heritage of Wallonia ID, Orphanet ID, demonym (monoligual text), maximum Strahler number * Development ** Spent the week with the WMF multimedia team and volunteers to get more clarity about structured data on Commons. We'll be asking for feedback on a lot of stuff over the next weeks. The main info hub is taking shape at Commons:Structured data. ** More fixes for the switch to HHVM ** Looked into possible performance improvements. Some of them will be taken into the next sprint. ** Battled a handful of nasty issues on the live-site ** Wikibase DataModel 1.1 was released * 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
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 22:32, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #129 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Discussions ** Do you want to see constraint violation reports and referencing improved? Please provide input. * Events/Blogs/Press ** IRC office hour about structured data on Commons (log) ** hackathon around scholarly articles on Wikidata (etherpad with notes) ** Blog post about the meeting to discuss structured data on Commons in Berlin * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** Clusters of humans and species on Wikidata ** New parameter in the template Property documentation: subject item; see [this example edit] for how to use it ** New tool: Linked Items. Returns sorted, de-duped list of Q values from a Wikipedia page, or chunk of wiki-text. Thank you, Magnus! ** Wikidata annotation tool is looking for feedback ** Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase by Denny and Markus has been published. It gives a very nice non-technical overview of Wikidata. ** Magnus re-wrote Wiki ShootMe to now use Wikidata. * Did you know? ** Always wanted to know which topics have amazing articles on Wikimedia projects across many languages? Here you go! ** Newest properties: At the Circulating Library ID, MacTutor id (biographies), allmovie identifier, number of survivors, given name version for other gender, name in native language, tempo marking, manifestation of, zbMATH author ID, Executive Order number * Development ** Improvements to sitelink editing usability ** Released Wikibase DataModel 2.0 ** Profiling and performance improvements in Wikibase and Wikibase DataModel ** Implementing LabelLookup, which is needed to improve performance of EntityId formatting. This will lead to improved item page loading times. ** Added new featured list and recommended article badges. ** Remove most usage of class aliases to be compatible with HHVM (dependencies of bugzilla:71295) * 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
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 20:26, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #114 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Other Noteworthy Stuff ** The Wikidata Game now has a 'Commons Categories' game * Did you know? ** Newest properties: At the Circulating Library ID, MacTutor id (biographies), allmovie identifier, number of survivors, given name version for other gender, name in native language, tempo marking, manifestation of, zbMATH author ID, Executive Order number * Development ** Made significant performance improvements (to be rolled out next week) ** Worked on usability improvements to the editing of sitelinks ** When you link to an image on Wikimedia Commons in a statement it will now show up in “global usage” there. ** Made the phpunit tests for Wikibase much faster ** Wikibase phpunit tests on travis pass with hhvm now ** Fixed label/description uniqueness constraint checks ** Work on entity usage tracking ** Year formatter now shows the year instead of the unformatted ISO string in case of a precision mismatch ** Diff and old revision pages don’t run the JavaScript UI any more, should be much faster now ** Introduced a Changers concept to the JavaScript frontend, wrapping the API and entityStore functionality ** Identified issue causing content in the old serialization format to be included in XML dumps * 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
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 20:28, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #131 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Events/Blogs/Press ** Wikidata turned 2 on Wednesday! Have a look at the notes from the community and development team and add your note. Also don't forget to check out all the cool presents (a painting, speed improvements, a huge load of unconnected articles that you can help connect via the Wikidata Game, WikidataLDF, a recent changes visualisation)! ** Wikidata II * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** Wikidata is nominated for 2 Open Data Awards! \o/ Magnus and Lydia will attend the award ceremony next week. Keep your fingers crossed for us. ** Wikidata as the central hub for open life science data ** What is Wikipedia about? Great data viz based on Wikidata ** Super Lachaise, a mobile app based on Wikidata for a cemetery in Paris ** Random items without statements ** Tutorial: How to make a “descendants of” timeline using Wikidata ** Updated statistics on the topics with most highly-rated articles on Wikipedia * Did you know? ** Newest properties: deepest point, Desa code of Indonesia, Slovene Cultural Heritage Register ID, Catalan object of cultural interest ID, Municipality code of Brazil, Pleiades identifier, MalaCards ID, natural product of taxon, official blog, University of Barcelona authority ID, Beilstein Registry Number, Gmelin Number * Development ** Worked around memory corruption in zend PHP ** HHVM beta feature is enabled again for Wikidata ** Fixes for various breaking changes in mediawiki core ** Work on language fall backs for new serialization code ** Work on fixing XML dumps ** Work on making Special:Version correct again for Wikidata extensions ** Implemented LabelLookup to improve performance further ** Worked more on remaining tasks for simple queries ** Poked remaining tasks for statements on properties ** Further improvements to the usability and workflow of sitelink editing ** Wrote browser tests for authority control gadget * 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
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 14:24, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #132 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Discussions ** Zero error rate - help improve the quality of Wikidata's data Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Lydia, Magnus and Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the ODI award gala * Events/Blogs/Press ** Wikidata won the Open Data Award by the Open Data Institute in the category Publisher \o/ (blog post by ODI, blog post by WMDE) ** Tutorial: Create instant location based timelines using Wikidata queries * Did you know? ** Less than 23% of Wikidata items have no statement. Down from ~53% a year ago. ** Newest properties: consecrator, Slovene Cultural Heritage designation, penalty, charge, judge, defender, prosecutor, defendant, number of casualties, deepest point, Desa code of Indonesia, Slovene Cultural Heritage Register ID, Catalan object of cultural interest ID * Development ** Continued work on LabelLookup and related code to further improve performance ** Made it possible to show references in statements on property pages. (Remaining bugs before roll-out are issues with adding/editing/removing statements on property pages.) ** Further improvements to sitelink editing (The edit toolbar now floats so it doesn't scroll out of the page on a long list of sitelinks. An empty row for adding a new sitelink is shown by default when editing to make this faster and take less scrolling.) ** Further adapting of simple query code so we can get it to review at the Foundation again. ** Lots of bug fixes all over the place * 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
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:05, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #133 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Events/Blogs/Press ** Upcoming office hours for Commons (Nov 20th) and Wikidata (Dec 3rd). More details on the office hour page. ** GLAM/Wikidata hackathon in Amsterdam * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** Help make sure these items have labels in your language * Did you know? ** Newest properties: NATO code for grade * Development ** Work on reviving the tree of life built from Wikidata data ** Added a "featured portal" badge (Q17580674) ** Improved the performance of getting labels and sitelinks in Lua (and decreased the memory usage) ** Did groundwork on applying page deletions to the repo ** Refactor initialization of EntityView so that we can use batched label lookup for improved performance. ** Added IRC to available protocolls for the URL datatype ** Improved calendar model display * 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
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 00:00, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #134 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Events/Blogs/Press ** Had a great hackathon for GLAM and Wikidata in Amsterdam last weekend ** IRC office hour about structured data on Commons (logs) ** Building a periodic table using Wikidata ** Lydia will be speaking at internetdagarna in Stockholm on Monday * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** Wikimedia Commons will get Phase 2 on December 2nd ** The Sum of all Paintings - new app to nicely display data related to artwork ** Institutions on Commons without an item on Wikidata ** Wikidata descriptions being used to help clarify search results in the Wikipedia mobile app ** WikidataTodo now shows you tasks to be done on Wikidata related to a specific country as well ** VisualEditor coming as a beta feature ** Statements on properties are getting closer to the finish line. You could help figure out which properties to use for describing and classifying properties. * Did you know? ** Newest properties: MarineTraffic Port ID, MarineTraffic Ship ID, drives on the, detail map, plaintiff, date of official opening, squad number, BBC Things identifer, SIREN number, CLARA-ID, History of Parliament ID, IRC channel, Commons Institution page * Development ** When a page is deleted on a client (Wikipedia, etc) its sitelink is now removed automatically from its Wikidata item ** Reworked the automatic precision detection for coordinates ** The long planned split of the code base into two independent Wikibase Repo and Client extensions is getting closer pretty fast these weeks ** Made good progress on making the sitelinks section much more compact and moving it into the right-hand sidebar ** While still reworking lots of details that slightly changed in DataModel 2.0 we already started working on a possible DataModel 3.0 ** More performance optimizations in the form of more advanced label lookup implementations ** Implemented file-based cache of SiteStore to improve performance ** Bug fixes ** Updated the property suggester with new data! :) * 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
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 21:47, 23 November 2014 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #135 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Events/Blogs/Press ** Past: Internetdagaarna in Stockholm ** Past: Hacks/Hackers in Berlin ** Picture this! ** Wikidata identifiers and the ODNB - where next? ** Wikidata and identifiers - part 2, the matching process ** IRC office hour on Wednesday * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** Commons will get access to the data on Wikidata on Tuesday ** Statements on properties and language fallbacks are coming ** VisualEditor is now available as a beta feature to make editing of project and help pages easier * Did you know? ** Newest properties: China Vitae ID, Formatter URL, subject item, equivalent property, SIL code, Thai cultural heritage ID, has melody, MarineTraffic Port ID, drives on the, detail map, plaintiff, date of official opening, squad number, BBC Things identifer * Development ** Moved the sitelink section into a sidebar (if the page is too narrow it will float below the statement section like it is now) ** Wrapping up work on injecting LabelLookups into EntityView (should boost performance) ** Implemented new notification bar to replace the notification bubble we had before ** Fixed more issues with geocoordinates ** Wrapping up work on client side usage tracking (important for arbitrary access) ** Making language fallback work for referenced entities (via LabelLookup) ** Transformations for pass XML dumps got merged, should fix phabricator:T74348 ** Enabled Statements on Properties on http://test.wikidata.org for testing ** JSON dumps will no longer contain redirects from the week after next week on ** Improved performance of client’s other projects sidebar ** Worked on bug triage (looking at the testme bugs) ** Replaced the custom Wikidata Jenkins continuous integration slaves with regular ones ** Fixed error in DataModel that was noticed by DataModelSerializer tests ** Input on mw:Wikibase/Indexing * 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
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:14, 1 December 2014 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #136 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Events/Blogs/Press ** IRC office hour (log) ** Wikidata for research - a grant proposal anyone can edit * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** Wikimedia Commons now has access to the data on Wikidata ** Statements on properties are now live ** Sneak peek at a prototype for checking Wikidata's data against 3rd party databases ** The Game has a new mode: alma mater ** Work is ongoing for a bot job to tag thousands of objects in OpenStreetMap with the equivalent Wikidata ID ** Resolver finds Wikidata items for a given identifier (VIAF, GND, IMDB, ...) ** English-Wikipedia now has a template, RedQ, which puts a Wikidata link next to red links for subjects which have no Wikipedia article in any language, This should prevent duplicate Wikidata items from being created when an article is written, and assist Wikipedia editors to find relevant facts and sources. Please copy it to other-language Wikipedias. * Did you know? ** Newest properties: working title, undercarriage ** Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Wikidata for research aims to integrate Wikidata more closely with research, and to this end, a grant proposal is being drafted. * Development ** Started work on units ** More work on evaluating options for querying ** Implemented Property DataType (for relationships between properties) ** Improvements to get by with fewer memcache request on clients ** Work on file-based cache of the SiteStore ** Work on improved label lookup performance ** Wrapping up work on usage tracking * 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
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:48, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #137 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Events/Blogs/Press ** Running Wikidata queries on scientific publications ** Finding ORCID identifiers used in Wikidata & Wikipedia ** past: Wikidata workshop in NYC * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** Ancient philosopher communities visualized based on Wikidata data * Did you know? ** Newest properties: departure transaction, acquisition transaction, port, curator, pendant of ** Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Music * Development ** More work on making it possible to query Wikidata data (mw:Wikibase/Indexing) ** Further improvements to performance on the clients (Wikipedia etc) ** Fixed and improved JSON dump creation process ** Finishing touches on new sitelinks section ** Worked more on supporting quantities with units - first basic version is making good progress ** Unprotected Q183 (Germany) again (had to be protected to ensure site availability) ** Improved performance for page views on Wikidata (no longer accessing actual entity data blob, when page is available from parser cache) ** Moved issues from github to phabricator and closed/checked bugs marked for testing * 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
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:01, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #138 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Discussions ** Open RfAs: Petr Matas ** Closed RfAs: Jared Preston (Successful) * Events/Blogs/Press ** Welcome Freebase! *** Freebase announcement *** Wikidata announcement *** Wikiproject *** Primary sources tool *** Heise *** Venturebeat *** Gigaom ** Wikidata for Research – presenting the team and a first sketch of the workplan * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** New features! Language fallbacks, property data type and performance improvements ** New tree of life based on Wikidata data * Did you know? ** Newest properties: subproperty of, mandatory qualifier, NIST/CODATA ID, EgliseInfo ID ** New task forces: Freebase, Sled dog racing ** Showcase items: Lion * Development ** Happy holidays from the dev team, everyone :) ** ~=[,,_,,]:3 ** Enabled other projects sidebar feature as default on Italian Wikipedia ** Deployed new code to Wikidata, including performance improvements, language fallback, and property data type ** Fixed some small issues that popped up after deployment ** Ongoing work on performance improvements (batched label lookup) ** Ongoing work on the JavaScript widgets needed for the planned redesign ** Ongoing work on the WikibaseJavaScriptApi extension that was split from the Wikibase code base ** Finished tree of life ** Some more work on support for units ** Closed/checked even more ‘testme’ bugs on Phabricator ** Wikidata Query has gotten a number of stability fixes. To increase availability and performance we now have multiple instances of it with a load balancer in front of it. ** The data for the entity suggester has been updated. Suggestions when adding new statements should be even better now. * 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
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 17:49, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
== Translation notification: Help:Merge ==
Hello Wikiuser13, You are receiving this notification because you signed up as a translator to हिन्दी on Wikidata. The page Help:Merge is available for translation. You can translate it here: * translate to हिन्दी
>> On December 3rd, the RfC about creating redirects was closed, thus we need you to update this important help page which is supposed to learn newbies how items in Wikidata are merged. <<
Your help is greatly appreciated. Translators like you help Wikidata to function as a truly multilingual community. Thank you! Wikidata translation coordinators, 11:24, 30 December 2014 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #139 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Discussions ** Provide your input on article placeholders based on Wikidata ** new RfC: CoI editing ** Anonymous artists at wiki project visual arts * Events/Blogs/Press ** We need to start talking about scaling Wikidata over the next months and years: Scaling Wikidata: success means making the pie bigger ** The next big step for Wikidata—forming a hub for researchers ** wikidata4research4all ** There was a well-attended Wikidata meetup at 31C3 * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** Wikidata Query now runs on multiple, load-balanced, self-restarting servers. Thanks to Yuvi for the help. ** Vandals suck. Don't know how to help us fight them? Here are two pages to get you started: Wikidata:Vandalism and Wikidata:Abuse filter. ** The Wikidata BEACON generator was updated by Magnus. It now uses all properties with “formatter URL”, so always up-to-date with target URLs. It is faster, too. ** Number of visual artworks on Wikidata by institution * Did you know? ** Newest properties: Terminologia Histologica (TH), Terminologia Embryologica (TE), ICD-9-CM, operations and procedures key (OPS), ICD-10-PCS, central government debt as a percent of GDP, AniDB identifier, main property, awarded for work, Pokémon browser number, inscription, quote, subtitle, BBC Your Paintings artwork identifier, has vertex figure, index case of, number suspected, number probable, number confirmed, general formula, this taxon is source of, Route number, LAC identifier, CONA, ATCvet, TGN, Chess Club ID, Chess Games ID, Cycling Database ID, ProCyclingStats ID, DOI Prefix, Alexa rank, has index case, related property, number of faces, MPAA film rating, unveiled by, station number, wing configuration, TERYT municipality code, referee, YouTube video identifier, BBF identifier, Korean Movie Database ID, Dictionary of Welsh Biography ID ** Showcase items: Iggy Azalea, Helsinki * Development ** Happy new year! :) It'll be a great one for Wikidata! ** Have you filed bugs in the past? Awesome! It'd be super helpful if you have a look at your old bugs and see if they are still relevant. You can find them at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/authored/ (make sure you're logged in on Phabricator) * 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
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 23:01, 3 January 2015 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #140 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Events/Blogs/Press ** Upcoming: Office hour on IRC on Friday. You should come :) ** Past: London Wikidata Meetup 2 *** We had a meetup with nine people: *** set up Wikidata:WikiProject UK and Ireland (sound recording of meeting available) ** Upcoming: Open Data Day, 21st February 2015 *** For generic wiki, see International Open Data Day *** Open Data Camp UK, Saturday/Sunday 21st/22nd February 2015 * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** We just crossed 14000 active users (over the last month). Thank you all! * Did you know? ** Newest properties: Gray's Anatomy 1918 subject, Total valid votes, inverse of, NLP identifier ** Newest WikiProjects: Food, UK and Ireland, Suisse ** Newest gadgets: ExportClaims, Mark as patrolled from list of changes * Development ** The sitelink section has been reworked. This will go live on Wikidata on Tuesday. The sitelinks will then be slimmer and they will appear in a sidebar on the right side if there is enough space. ** More performance improvements when parsing an item page, ~%15 faster for some pages :) ** Titan was selected as the graph DB to implement a Wikidata query service running in production ** Fixed adding links to ru.wikinews.org which was broken by its change to HTTPS-only ** Worked on redesigning the header area (label, description, alias, in-other-languages box) ** Polished d:Wikidata:Data access and d:Wikidata:Database download. Could still use some more work though if you have time. ** Enabled PHP_CodeSniffer with Mediawiki rules and some additional ones to make us aware of more code issues ** We no longer log some common 404 errors in the exception log * 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
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 18:25, 11 January 2015 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #141 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Discussions ** RfC: Speedy vs Regular deletion ** Closed RfAs: George.Edward.C (successful) ** Open RfAs: Petr Matas, Edoderoo * Events/Blogs/Press ** The Wikidata for research proposal was submitted to the European Union on January 14. Congrats to Daniel for spearheading that huge effort. ** Blog post about how Wikidata can change the way citizen scientists contribute ** IRC office hour happened (log) ** Blog posts about gender inequality index based on Wikidata data by Max and Magnus ** MediaWiki Developer Summit * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** The development plan has been updated and expanded ** Official Wikipedia app now uses Wikidata descriptions \o/ More to come! ** Usage tracking will likely be deployed on February 2 on Wikidata. This will not be user-visible. It just means that pages using data from arbitrary items get updated/purged when the data changes. Arbitrary access is being tested at Test Wikidata and testwiki:Test Wiki. An example is at testwiki:Kitten on arbitrary page. ** Assigning items on Mix'n'match will now make that change on Wikidata for you automatically * Did you know? ** Newest properties: IGESPAR identifier, SIPA identifier, SkyscraperPage building id * Development ** Deployed new sitelinks interface design to Wikidata. It's not done yet but we're getting there. Tweaks are in progress. ** Worked on redesign of header area ** Fixed some bugs that popped up after deployment ** Enabled usage tracking and arbitrary access on test.wikipedia.org and test.wikidata, and preparations for enabling it on Wikidata ** Collecting Query examples for the new query functionality * 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!
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:00, 17 January 2015 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #142 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Discussions ** Closed RfAs: Petr Matas (unsuccessful), Edoderoo (successful) ** Open RfAs: Eurodyne * Events/Blogs/Press ** Upcoming: MediaWiki Developer Summit ** Upcoming: FOSDEM ** Upcoming: Wikidata for research meetup in February in Paris and Berlin ** Past: Meetup in Cambridge ** Brainstorming for Wikimania talks related to Wikidata is happening at phabricator:T87334 and you can apply for a scholarship ** Wikidata - a year in numbers * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** Want to help out mapping schema.org and Wikidata properties? There is now a ticket for coordination. ** The new Content Translation tool uses Wikidata data to suggest the correct article to link to when translating a Wikipedia article to another language ** Using GNOME Shell? There is a Wikidata search provider for you. * Did you know? ** Newest properties: award shared with, native label, pollenizer, pollination ** You can influence the languages shown in the "in other languages box" by adding a bable box to your user page like here. * Development ** More work on header section redesign ** Released Wikibase DataModel 2.5 ** Broke and fixed JSON dumps - sorry! ** Implemented entity change subscription service * 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!
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:09, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #143 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Discussions ** Closed RfAs: Eurodyne (unsuccessful) ** Open RfAs: BlackBeast * Events/Blogs/Press ** Past: MediaWiki Developer Summit ** Past: FOSDEM ** Upcoming: ArtBytes hackathon * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** ATOM feeds for changes in Wikidata Query results. Define your own to keep an eye on changes in specific topics ** Overview of the number of visual artworks items on Wikidata by creator (>5 items) ** The Wikidata Free Image Search Tool can now also search Commons (not just follow language links) * Did you know? ** Newest properties: British Museum person-institution, Sächsische Biografie, equivalent class, LfDS object ID, DAAO identifier ** Newest WikiProjects: Authority control * Development ** Fixed diffs not showing old ranks, qualifiers and references on the left side (phabricator:T87096) ** Worked on several date and time related issues, like incorrect padding of the year to 11 instead of 16 digits (phabricator:T87764) ** Further work on header section redesign (phabricator:T75654) ** Started redesign of statements section (phabricator:T87316) ** Introduced a hint showing the language when a language fallback is used on an item or property (phabricator:T85105) ** Working on splitting a Wikibase View component out of the Wikibase Repo code base ** Currently testing how PHPCS and PHPMD can help raising Wikibase’ code quality ** Released Wikibase DataModelSerialization 1.3 with language fallback support * 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!
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:20, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #144 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Discussions ** Open RfAs: BlackBeast * Events/Blogs/Press ** Upcoming: Eurpeana Tech ** Andrew Su gave a talk about crowd sourcing and citizen science for biology including Wikidata (slides) ** Going to Wikimania? Apply for a scholarship. ** Internet Archive, Wikidata and Open Education * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** Wikibooks will get access to language links via Wikidata on February 24th. Coordination is happening at d:Wikidata:Wikibooks. ** Roughly 17000 of the candidate articles that Google identified as potentially being about the same topic but lacking a language link have been merged. About 17500 are remaining and waiting for you to go through them via https://tools.wmflabs.org/yichengtry/ ** Mix'n'Match got a face lift ** Magnus says every day new images are added to over 1000 items \o/ ** RStats client for Wikidata ** Reasonator now also supports biography texts in French * Did you know? ** Showcase items: Lucy (first name) * Development ** Did more work on Capiunto to get it into a state where it can be deployed to Wikimedia sites. ** Mourned Titan (phabricator:T88550) as its developers were bought up. Began evaluation for which graph database to use instead for a Wikidata query service (mw:Wikibase/Indexing) ** Further work on header section redesign ** Tweaks to the sitelink section ** Worked on making monolingual text datatype accept more languages ** Finished showing the language when a language fallback is used ** Started looking into fixing the existing Guided Tours after Guided Tours extension API changes ** Worked on implementing Lua convenience functions for rendering arbitrary Snaks. This is useful for displaying references or qualifiers. (phabricator:T76213) * 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!
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 17:54, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #145 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Events/Blogs/Press ** Past: Europeana Tech ** Wir lieben Freie Software ** Mapping resources using open knowledge: starting with books! ** New recommendations outline ways to strengthen Europeana’s future relationship with Wikimedia * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** Spiffy new project building on top of Wikidata: inventaire.io. Check out this example entry! ** You will now see when a language fallback for a label is used on an item or property. The language name will be shown next to it. ** Automatic descriptions for Wikidata items by Magnus ** The templates for adding badges (good article, featured article, etc) to articles on Wikipedia in the sidebar are getting removed from articles rapidly in favor of getting that information from Wikidata \o/ German Wikipedia even deleted those templates already. English Wikipedia seems to be getting close. * Did you know? ** Newest properties: Journalisted ID, Biography at the Bundestag of Germany, Metacritic ID ** Newest WikiProjects: Identical Twins * Development ** <3 ** We are hiring! Passionate about Wikidata and know your way around Java Script and co? Apply! ** We'll spend the next week working with Nik and Stas from WMF to move queries forward in Berlin ** Worked on implementing a Lua interface for arbitrary Snak rendering. This can be used to render eg. qualifiers or references in Wikipedia infoboxes. ** Did groundwork for Lua convenience functions that render data in the user’s interface language, rather than the content language (for multilingual wikis, like Commons or Wikidata only) ** Did further work on making the Lua interface code nicer and share code with the parser functions ** Removed input method selector in the sitelink input as it was hiding the actual input and not very useful there ** Fixed some issues in diff views showing new data instead of old data ** Created a few scripts to make it easier for 3rd parties to install Wikibase ** Fixed icinga notification that tests if dispatch lag gets high ** Investigated several issues regarding storage of time values and started fixing them ** Fixed editing of qualifiers ** Fixed most browser tests after introduction of new header design * 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!
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 10:25, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
== Wikidata weekly summary #146 ==
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
* Events/Blogs/Press ** Asking ever bigger questions with Wikidata ** Wikidata4Research meetup in Berlin * Other Noteworthy Stuff ** As announced Wikibooks is getting access to Wikidata for their sitelinks on 24th. Coordination at d:Wikidata:Wikibooks ** ViziData ** Update on data quality project ** Update on structured data for Commons ** Using mw.wikibase.getEntity in a Lua module? Please read this. ** Number of visual artworks items by property (type, genre, creator...) on Wikidata * Did you know? ** Newest properties: operty:P1721|pinyin transliteration ]], posthumous name, temple name, courtesy name, SANDRE ID, brand
Chaged a number of Lua modules (from deprecated function mw.wikibase.getEntity to mw.wikibase.getEntityObject)
Updated the json documentation
Always link to Wikidata on client pages that don’t have any langlinks. This affects users without JavaScript and logged out users, logged in users will still see the link item dialog. gerrit:168632
Fixes for the Wikibase qunit Jenkins job
Made Vagrant git-update also properly update Wikibase and dependencies
Fix for phabricator:T88254 (malformatted Wikidata entries appearing in Watchlist RSS feed in clients)
Final touches on new header design
Investigated how we can provide language fallback also in suggestions when search or adding new statements
More work on allowing additional languages in monolingual text datatype
Added missing backend piece for quantities with units. Now the remaining piece is the user interface.
Lots of improvements around MixNMatch. It has a new catalog overview page. ~340K IDs have been matched so far with it and it now has an FAQ for institutions wanting to get their identifiers linked in Wikidata
First screenshot of the primary sources tool that'll help with migrating data from Freebase and enriching it with references has been leaked ;-): 1 and 2
WikiArabia takes place in Monastir, Tunisia, 3-5 April
The GLAM-WIKI 2015 conference in The Hague (10-12 April) features several presentations and tutorials about Wikidata for/with cultural institutions.
The Library world will use Wikidata to link its information to any and all Wikipedias. No longer English only, but every Wikipedia will be exposed in this way.
Went through all the feedback we got for improving watchlist integration on Wikipedia and co and posted our assesment
Put the infrastructure for creating Turtle-Beta dumps in place. All new Wikidata dumps will be in https://dumps.wikimedia.org/wikidatawiki/entities/ from Monday on (the old * directory will be kept around and receive new json dumps for backwards compatibility).
Reduced size of entities pages by removing no longer needed data (to make the UI faster).
Fixed bug that sometimes caused dates and other types of values to be cut short when quickly saving. (phabricator:T92831)
Fixed issues with setting focus after clicking edit.
We are going to change the way value suggestions are ranked when entering a new statement. This will help with "male" and "female" not showing up among the top suggestions. Previously we ranked by number of sitelinks. We will change this to the maximum of sitelinks and labels. So if an item has labels in many languages but no sitelinks like "male" and "female" it will still show up high in the suggestions. (phabricator:T94404)
Discussed how to move forward with identifiers. Outcome: They should get their own datatype. (phabricator:T95287)
Implemented arbitrary access for the {{#property:…}} parser function. This can be invoked on the wikis that have arbitrary access enabled by using {{#property:P123|from=Q42}}. So far this is only Wikidata itself.
Did further performance work on the client (Wikipedia and co) in preparation for arbitrary access
Improved the performance of wbgetentities significantly when loading a large number of entities
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.
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
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)
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.
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/
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.
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)
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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
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!)
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)
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
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".
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
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.
Discussion has started on English WikiProject Football about using Wikidata for player squad templates (example) and player club history (example). Needs more input on best practices and commitment to update data.
You'll now get redirected to the mobile view automatically on mobile devices (example)
Made it possible to use more entities on a page via Lua without running into Lua's memory limit
Added the Article Placeholder extension’s results to the search result page (this is one of a few remaining blockers before we can put it on a testsystem for you to try out and give feedback)
Added option to create a new article from Article Placeholder
More work on the new datatype for properties
More work on making meaningful edit summaries on the client. Found a few remaining bugs during testing.
Finished the create article button for the ArticlePlaceholder page
From Monday on a bzip2 compressed version of the beta Wikidata TTL dumps will be published along the gzip one
Getting close to make it possible to add the main value of a statement and its reference at the same time
Worked on adding a new section to item and property pages for identifiers
Did backend work for making identifiers useful in our machine-readable outputs (by actually linking them instead of just giving the identifier string) - more work needed
Fixed a bug where dates would have English months on non-English wikis (phabricator:T116503)
query.wikidata.org now more prominently shows example queries in case you missed them before, lets you filter and gives you a preview for them. Additionally you can click a little magnifying glass next to an item ID in a query result and explore it further.
<3 Thanks for being awesome. Enjoy the holidays :)
We will take the "in other projects"-sidebar out of beta features in January (phabricator:T103102)
Making ranking information like label and statement counts available to the CirrusSearch index in order to improve ranking in search results (phabricator:T110648)
Continued work on the identifier data type for identifiers like VIAF and ISBN so we can easily put them into a separate section in the items and properly link them in the exports (phabricator:T95682, phabricator:T121274)
Continued work on making external identifiers clickable links without the help of the authority control gadget (phabricator:T95684)
Fixed a mistake in the set reference API documentation (gerrit:259171)