This is an archive of past discussions with User:SS49. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Rob Fernandez (Wikimedia District of Columbia) on Listeria, a tool that uses SPARQL queries to define a list, and provides a bot that will update a wiki page containing that list if the results of that SPARQL query change, all based on Wikidata, 08 September. Agenda
Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 8 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #19 Facebook, YouTube, September 10
Added Wikidata support to Japanese Wikivoyage. phab:T261451
Investigating the nature of our training outliers to improve the way ORES automatically scores the quality of an Item.
Working on error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an item. phab:T260869
Completed various investigations to make an informed decision on the output format of WikibaseManifest files (automated configuration detection for toolbuilders) phab:T261285
Completed various bug fixes and wrap-up tasks to conclude the major engineering work on the Federated Properties project
More work on Item Quality Scoring and Federated Properties
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
Normally pages can be moved to a title that has no existing page yet or to a page that has only one revision, which is a redirect to the page to be moved. A new user right allows editors to move pages over one-revision pages that redirect to anywhere. [1]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 September. It will be on all wikis from 10 September (calendar).
All MediaWiki API modules will now use watchlist instead of watch. This was inconsistent before. [2]
Future changes
The Wikipedia Android app team might work on patrolling tools in the future. You can let them know what tools would be useful for you or for less experienced patrollers. See the page on mediawiki.org.
OTRS will be updated to a new version. This will probably take around two days. OTRS agents will not have access to the system during these days. Emails that come in during the update will be delivered when the update is done. The plan is to start around 08:00 UTC on 14 September. This could change. [3]
The Wikipedia Android app will send push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will need Google Play Services to work. It will also be possible to get the app without Google Play Services but push notifications will not work. Google Play Services is also used to make the app work for Android 4.4 users. [4][5]
Wikimedia code review could move to GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. You can take part in the consultation.
Dropdown menus in the Vector skin use a .menu class. This will not work in the future. Scripts can use nav ul instead. .vectorTabs and .vectorMenu will also not work. Some scripts need to be updated. You can read more in Phabricator.
Hi @SS49, thank you for completing the move of Bloch's theorem. Unfortunately, the new page is at Bloch's Theorem rather than the lowercase Bloch's theorem. I believe we were all in agreement about moving it there, is there any way you could move it once more to fix the capitalization error? The disambiguation page is unnecessary, there are only two articles and both include hatnotes pointing to the other, so Bloch's Theorem should just take the place of the disambiguation page at Bloch's theorem. This was first noticed by the original proposer, @Forbes72, who seems to be the only other involved editor (though we did have an IP user chime in with support). Thanks again!
The history of Asian art includes a vast range of influences from various cultures and religions. Pictured is Buddhist Temple in the Mountains, 11th century, China, ink on silk, by Li Cheng.
"Our admiration for Wikidata and for the people who work with it knows no bounds. Having a single source of well modelled, massively interlinked, well managed data that anyone can query at the press of a button is a real thing of wonder." - says the UK Parliament data team
The Wikidata development team is seeking to evaluate and improve the process of collecting and reacting to bug reports and feature requests. You can give feedback about your experience using this anonymous form until September 30th or add feedback publically to Wikidata talk:Contact the development team/Process review 2020.
WikiMap, a tool by User:DB111 that maps geocoded images from Commons and Wikipedia articles, now supports Wikidata items as well (Q99232292)
Wikidata QID's are approaching 9 digits. Now is the time to fix any code or schemas that assume that Q numbers are smaller than 9 characters.
Fixing an error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an Item instead of just one. (phabricator:T260869)
Development of version one of Federated Properties has concluded! Expect an announcement with timing of the release of this feature soon. Wikibase users who want an early look at the feature are invited to reach out to participate in the pre-release testing round.
Development of the WikibaseManifest extension has continued into its second sprint; we focused on determining a product specification for the Manifest output.
Finishing a draft documentation for a REST API to get it ready for a feedback round before implementation.
Finished improvements to the automated scoring of the quality of Items with ORES. Still need to retrain ORES and deploy the changes before the scores are actually different though.
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
The Wikipedia apps briefly showed pages without CSS last week. This meant they looked wrong. It was quickly fixed but cached pages without CSS were shown for a few hours. [6][7]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 September. It will be on all wikis from 17 September (calendar).
Hello, I'm SkyGuy94. I was wondering if You could help with something. I want to import the traditional Mongolian script template to Fanon Wiki, where I am an active user. The current method I'm using on Fanon Wiki results in the mongol script I use to be aligned this "ᠵᠢᠱᠢᠶᠡ ᠲᠧᠺᠰᠲ". As you can see, while the text is in the right direction, the bottom end of the text is aligned to the bottom of the line and ascending upwards instead of the top end being aligned to the top of the line and descending downwards. That just doesn't look authentic. Is there any way to properly import the template and all its components to Fanon wiki. I'd try to do it myself, but my programing skills are far below mediocre and I'm worried I'd mess it up if I tried. --SkyGuy94 (talk) 19:04, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
Hello and welcome to the September GOCE newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since June 2020.
Current and upcoming events
September Drive: Our current backlog-elimination drive is open until 23:59 on 30 September (UTC) and is open to all copy editors. Sign up today!
Election reminder: our end-of-year Election of Coordinators opens for nominations on 1 December. Coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought of helping out at the Guild, or know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them here.
Drive and Blitz reports
June Blitz: An uncorrected typo (even copy editors make copy editing mistakes!) led to an eight-day "leap blitz" from 14 to 21 June, focusing on requests and articles tagged in May. 19 participating editors claimed 54 copy edits. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.
July Drive: Over 750,000 words of articles were copy edited for this event, keeping pace with the previous three self-isolated drives. Of the 38 people who signed up, 30 copyedited at least one article. Final results and awards are listed here.
August Blitz: From 16 to 22 August, we copy edited articles tagged in June and July 2020 and requests. 12 participating editors completed 37 copy edits on the blitz. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.
Other news
June election: Jonesey95 was chosen to continue as lead coordinator, assisted by Baffle gab1978, Tdslk, Twofingered Typist, and first-time coordinator Puddleglum2.0. Reidgreg took a break after serving for a couple years. Thanks to everyone who participated!
Progress report: As of 01:33, 18 September 2020 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors had processed 532 requests since 1 January and there were 38 requests awaiting completion on the Requests page. The backlog of articles tagged for copy-editing stood at 433 (see monthly progress graph above).
Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 21 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: A starting point for newer institutions to think through what is involved in coordinating a Wikidata project, including shared infrastructure, training, and documentation, 22 September. Agenda
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #21 WikiDojo: Facebook, YouTube, September 25
Wikidata Query Service (in French) - (Parts 1, 2 & 3)
Tool of the week
copy-qid is a user script by Abbe98 that allows you to copy the Qid with one click.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikidata development team is seeking to evaluate and improve the process of collecting and reacting to bug reports and feature requests. You can give feedback about your experience using this anonymous form until September 30th or add feedback publically to Wikidata talk:Contact the development team/Process review 2020.
WDQS/WCQS Status update (September 2): "We are planning to spend more time doing some analytics on our data. (1) What are the most expensive queries, what are they trying to achieve and is that reasonable? (2) Do we have performant subgraphs that we could expose independently?"
The language codes lij-mc, ja-Hira, ja-Kana, ja-Hrkt, ja-Hani, ojp, ojp-Hira and ojp-Hani" have been added for use in monolingual text property values (phab:T254968, phab:T195816)
The language codes de-1901, eo-hsistemo and eo-xsistemo, ja-hira, ja-kana and ja-hrkt have been added for Lexemes (phab:T262330,phab:T257422, phab:T250559)
P1438 has been converted from string to external ID datatype (phab:T262198)
Worked on fixing an input issue with invisible characters (phab:T261071)
Investigating what work would be needed to get the new termbox that's available on mobile to also work on desktop
Fixing several issues with Special:Undelete (phab:T261747)
Fixing an error message being shown twice (phab:T260869)
Starting the coding work on the Query Builder
Continuing to write a draft for a REST API specification
Finishing the remaining work needed to get the improved quality scoring for Items deployed to ORES
Continuing work on WikibaseManifest: Determined the essential metadata that will be included in the WikibaseManifest file, added some new features (mostly MediaWiki metadata) to the Manifest that were requested by the OpenRefine team (phab:T262805 and phab:T262804) and set up a test system that will soon be ready for tool builders to use for testing the integration of their tools with WikibaseManifest
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 a new tag for reverted edits. For example you can see it in the recent changes feed or in the article history. It is added to edits when they have been undone, rollbacked or manually reverted to an older version of the page. [8][9]
Changes later this week
The number of times you can do something in a period of time on wiki is limited. This could be the number of edits per minute or the number of users you email in a day. Some users are not affected by all limits because of their user rights. They could soon see the limit even if it does not affect them. [10]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 September. It will be on all wikis from 24 September (calendar).
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions [IFLA] have published a series of six videos "discussions with professionals in order to discuss projects, issues, progress of Wikidata, Wikibase and bibliographic data in the field of libraries." Currently available as a playlist on YouTube under CC-By (Wikimedia Commons upload soon), with subtitles in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French (Arabic and Chinese coming soon). The production was made by the IFLA Wikidata Working Group and funded by a WikiCite grant.
The Wikidata development team is seeking to evaluate and improve the process of collecting and reacting to bug reports and feature requests. You can give feedback about your experience using this anonymous formuntil September 30th or add feedback publically to Wikidata talk:Contact the development team/Process review 2020.
Como is a new Android app, that uses Wikidata lexemes and senses to create a word-guessing game. It let's players create new senses and tests them on other players to finally save them in Wikidata. The app is developed as part of a BA thesis, to determine if this concept is useful to create more lexicographical data, and testers would be very welcome.
A long-standing bug has been fixed (T217144) where Items and Lexemes created via OAuth would not be added to the user’s watchlist even if the user had the Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist setting enabled. (The Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist setting was probably likewise ineffective, but this was not tested specifically.) Affected tools include QuickStatements, Mix'n'Match, and Wikidata Lexeme Forms; users of these and other tools may see more pages being added to their watchlists now. (This only applies to new edits and page creations; previously created or edited pages will not be automatically added to the watchlist retroactively.)
Working on the basic building blocks of the Query Builder towards making it possible to create the first very simple query with it
Talking to people about comparing Wikidata's data against other databases and flagging mismatches
Fixing an issue with Item creations via the API by blocked users leading to skipped entity IDs (phab:T232620)
Fixed an input issue with invisible characters (phab:T261071)
Finishing the draft of the REST API spec to get it ready for feedback
WikibaseManifest: created a separate key for local entities and decided what we do about non-local entity sources based on tool-builder feedback (phab:T263527) and specifying the API in OpenApi format (phab:T262919)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Editors are automatically added to some user groups. For example editors are added to autoconfirmed users when they have edited enough times and long enough. Abuse filters can hinder users from automatically getting user rights for a period of time. They can also remove rights user have. Wikis can now ask to change how long this period of time is for their wiki in Phabricator. It is currently five days. [12]
Problems
Last year some abuse filters stopped working because of a new change. If they tried to use variables that were unavailable for that action they would fail. This has now been fixed. [13]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 September. It will be on all wikis from 1 October (calendar).
Future changes
You can't see the language links to other language versions from the talk page or history page. They are also not shown when you edit an article. This could change. It is not decided if for example the history page should link to another history page or to the article. You can take part in the discussion in Phabricator.
The link colours could change. This is to make the difference between links and other text more clear. You can read more in Phabricator.
In your preferences you can choose to get different notifications on the web or by email. You will see Apps as one of the alternatives later this week. This is because the Android and iOS Wikipedia apps will use push notifications for those who want them. You can see the preferences on the test wiki. The goal is to have push notifications on Android in October and on iOS in early 2021. [14]
You can soon put pages on your watchlist for a limited time. This could be useful if you want to watch something for a shorter time but don't want it on your watchlist forever. It now works on mediawiki.org and will come to more wikis later. You can read more and see when it will come to other wikis.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Professor Toby Hudson on Entity Explosion, a browser extension which allows you to get information about entities on the web page you’re visiting, 06 October. Agenda
Video: How to create and edit items on Wikidata (in Spanish) - YouTube
Video: Introduction to Wikidata and wikiprojects of interest to librarians (in Spanish) - YouTube
Tool of the week
IllWill.js is a userscript that searches Wikidata for foreign-language sitelinks, to populate Template:ill and replace plain red links on other Wikimedia projects.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
omeka-s-wikidata is a new module for the open source GLAM collection management software Omeka, that allows cataloguers to use Wikidata as a vocabulary for persons, places, subjects, etc.
Maps of arts and humanities research grants funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council in UK between 2013-2019. Sorted by year, Sorted by budget (Source)
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 a new tool where you can see which home wiki users have in discussions on Meta. This can help show which communities are not part of the discussion on wikis where we make decisions that affect many other wikis.
You can now thank users for file uploads or for changing the language of a page. [15]
Problems
There were many errors with the new MediaWiki version last week. The new version was rolled back. Updates that should have happened last week are late. [16]
Everyone was logged out. This was because a user reported being logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [17]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 October. It will be on all wikis from 8 October (calendar).
Letters immediately after a link are shown as part of the link. For example the entire word in [[Child]]ren is linked. On Arabic wikis this works at both the start and end of a word. Previously on Arabic wikis numbers and other non-letter Unicode characters were shown as part of the link at the start of a word but not at the end. Now only Latin and Arabic letters will extend links on Arabic wikis. [18]
Future changes
You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on 27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [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.
Problems
Because of the problems with the MediaWiki version two weeks ago last week's updates are also late. [20][21][22]
Changes later this week
Live previews didn't show the templates used in the preview if you just edited a section. This has now been fixed. You can also test CSS and JavaScript pages even if you have the live preview enabled. Previously this didn't work well. [23][24]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 October. It will be on all wikis from 15 October (calendar).
Future changes
A new stable version of Pywikibot is coming soon. [25]
The new Wikibase/Consultants and Support Providers' directory on Meta lists people/companies that provide professional help with Wikibase -- be it technical support (installation and setup), custom development, or data modeling services.
The 2020 Coolest Tool Award is still accepting nominations until October 14th. Please use this form to recommend tools. You can nominate as many tools as you want by filling out the form multiple times.
Working on enabling JSON dumps for Lexemes (phab:T220883)
Finishing preventing blocked users from making us skip QIDs (phab:T232620)
Continuing work on the Wikibase Manifest extension that allows toolbuilders to easily access configurations of a specific Wikibase instance so it is easier for them to make their tools work with not just Wikidata but also other Wikibase instances
Started analyzing what we consider a mismatch for our work around checking Wikidata's data against other databases
Continued work on the Query Builder to get it to create the first very simple query. It can do that now but not yet visualize the result.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Other: Proposal to spin-off non-Earth coordinates from property P625 (coordinates location), currently only 7000 of 8 million values: see Property proposal/planetary coordinates
Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, October 20 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: hands-on work with Wikidata on creating items for authors of COVID 19 papers and brainstorming for future hands-on work, 20 October. Agenda
Blocked users trying to create new Items no longer make us skip QIDs (phab:T232620)
So far we don't have JSON dumps for Lexemes. We're working on regularly generating them as well now (phab:T264883)
Continuing work on getting the Query Builder to generate the first query. Almost there.
Started the feedback round for the REST API. Please provide your input if you are currently using the action API or plan to develop against Wikidata's API in the future.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 October. It will be on all wikis from 22 October (calendar).
Future changes
You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on 27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [26]
In the AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function will be updated soon so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [27]
Some gadgets and user-scripts use the HTML div with the ID #jump-to-nav. This div will be removed soon. Maintainers should replace these uses with either #siteSub or #mw-content-text. A list of affected scripts is at the top of phab:T265373.
Past: Providing sustainable data services through Wikibase and Wikidata, SEMIC Conference 2020 - (replay)
Past: Introduction to Wikidata by Frimelle, Software Freedom Kosova 2020 - (replay)
Past: What's new in Wikidata? by Lea Lacroix, Lydia Pintscher and Mattia Capozzi, ItWikiCon 2020 - (replay)
Ongoing: plenty of Wikidata birthday events, online and onsite! Here's an overview of the upcoming events, you can find the links and details in the main calendar.
WikiCite virtual conference on October 26-28, live-streamed on Youtube and Twitter, with sessions across many timezones and languages – English, French, German, Indonesian, and Portuguese.
24-hours online meetup, on October 28-29: an open discussion with plenty of community members facilitating exchange around the topic "what makes you enthusiastic about Wikidata"
Gene Wiki: how to synchronize and curate primary sources with and in Wikidata, online, on October 29th
Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata (in French) - (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5)
Tool of the week
WikibaseJS-cli allows to edit Wikidata from command line, including creating items from samples ("templates") and do complex transformations of statements
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Server switch: all wikis will be in read-only on Tuesday, October 27th at 14:00 UTC for up to an hour (more information). All services hosted by WMF (e.g. tools hosted on wmcloud.org) are also impacted. Non-essential code deployments will not happen this week.
Got the Query Builder to create the first simple queries. You can follow along the development from now on on the test system.
Preparing regular JSON dumps for Lexemes (phab:T264883)
Analyzed a number of queries to the query service together with the WMF search team to better understand what the queries are doing and what further optimizations we can make to the query service and which queries need different systems to answer them.
Working on creating and tracking implicit usages of Wikidata descriptions so description changes show up in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co (phab:T265897)
Looking into what would be considered a mismatch when comparing WIkidata's data against another database. This is groundwork for potentially automating this in the future to find potential issues in the data to flag to editors.
Working on deploying the new Item quality scoring model for ORES to production so we have improved quality scores
Finished investigating how to handle a restricted list of external Wikibase services. (phab:T265118)
Removed noratelimit on bots for wikidata.org (phab:T258354)
Published Easier Access for Programmers to Wikidata research report
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
You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on October 27 around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [28]
Last week, links to "diffs" from mobile watchlists and recentchanges were linking to page-revisions instead of diffs. This has now been fixed. [29]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Since the introduction of the interface administrators user group in 2018, administrators couldn’t view the deleted history of CSS/JS pages. Now they can. [30]
There was a problem with the Change Tags. The software would apply the "Reverted" tag to any page actions such as page-protection changes if they came directly after a reverted edit. This has now been fixed for new edits. [31]
The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias in November. Another announcement will be made once the date is finalized. [32]
Welcome to the fifteenth newsletter from the Growth team!
The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.
Variants C and D deployed
Variant D in Portuguese Wikipedia
Variants C and D are two new arrangements of the newcomer homepage.
We hope they will increase the number of users using suggested edits.
They both make suggested edits the clear place where newcomers should get started on the page.
They have some differences in their workflows, because we want to test which design is better.
We deployed these variants on October 19; half of newcomers get each variant.
After about 5 weeks, we will analyze the data from the tests.
The goal is to determine which variant is helping more newcomers to make more suggested edits.
We will identify the better variant and then use it with all newcomers.
Structured tasks: add a link
Concept A for add a link.
As we discussed in previous newsletters, the team is working on our first "structured task": the "add a link" task.
After community discussion on design ideas, we ran user tests on the mobile designs.
We decided on the design concept we want to use moving forward: Concept A.
We're now engineering the backend for this feature.
Next, we will be running user tests for desktop designs.
We recently deployed the Growth features to Polish, Portuguese, Swedish and Turkish Wikipedias. 18 wikis now have Growth features. Learn more about getting the features.
Sysops will once again be able to view the deleted history of JS/CSS pages; this was restricted to interface administrators when that group was introduced.
Twinkle's block module now includes the ability to note the specific case when applying a discretionary sanctions block and/or template.
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 no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser uses very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It could lead to downgrade attacks. Since October 29, 2020, users who use old TLS versions will not be able to connect to Wikimedia projects. A list of browser recommendations is available. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [33]
There is a new automatic tracking category available: Pages with non-numeric formatnum arguments. It collects pages which use the {{formatnum}} parser function with invalid (non-numeric) input, e.g.{{formatnum:TECHNEWS}}. Note that {{formatnum:123,456}} is also invalid input: as described in the documentation, the argument should be unformatted so that it can be reliably and correctly localised. The tracking category will help identify problematic usage and double-formatting. The new tracking category's name can be translated at translatewiki. [34]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 4. It will be on all wikis from November 5 (calendar).
Administrators and stewards will be able to use a special page (Special:CreateLocalAccount) to force local account creation for a global account. This is useful when account creation is blocked for that user (by a block or a filter). [35]
The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias on November 4. This change excludes the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias, plus a few smaller Wikipedias with special circumstances. You can read the help page and the troubleshooting guide for more information. [36]
Future changes
A discussion has been restarted about using a Unicode minus sign (− U+2212) in the output of {{formatnum}} when it is given a negative argument. [37]
In the future IP addresses of unregistered users will not be shown for everyone. They will get an alias instead. There will be a new user right or an opt-in function for more vandal fighters to see the IPs of unregistered users. There would be some criteria for who gets the user right or opt-in. There will also be other new tools to help handle vandalism. This is early in the process and the developers are still collecting information from the communities before they suggest solutions.
Past: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, October 27 (notes)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Arthur Smith and Daniel Mietchen discussing author items in Wikidata and the Author Disambiguator Tool, 3 November. Agenda
Wikidata Spanish Tutorials Website – a brand new user-friendly (with Dublin Core Metadata!) digital collection of Wikidata slides, tutorials, and manuals in Spanish (Biblioteca Daniel Cosío Villegas, Mexico)
An example of Chinese folklore is The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, a Chinese folk tale. Pictured is a depiction in the tale of the reunion of the couple of The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd on the bridge of magpies. The artwork displayed is in the Long Corridor of the Summer Palace in Beijing.
Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #24 - YouTube, Facebook, November 14, 19.00 UTC
Tool of the week
Template:Cite Q on Wikipedia makes it easier to use Wikidata items as Wikipedia references.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 12 November 2020 (Add to calendar). Come and share-out anything new or exciting that’s been happening with your Wikibase instance; what have you been doing recently, what is working well, what has been challenging for you - we would like to hear them all!
Continuing work with the WMF search team to automatically categorize WDQS queries to see how they can better be served
Query Builder work is continuing. Next step is making it possible to create a query with an arbitrary Property instead of the currently hard-coded post code.
Feedback round for the REST API is finishing this week and then we will review all the feedback and make changes to the spec accordingly.
Preparing to release 1.35 version of Wikibase docker image (phab:T264538)
Fixed Math extension to not require JS parser which caused issues creating new Statements for mathematical formulae (phab:T266673)
Made sure there is a meaningful edit summary when deleting a Lexeme (phab:T263435)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
You can see reference previews. This shows a preview of the footnote when you hover over it. This has been a beta feature. It will move out of beta and be enabled by default. There will be an option not to use it. The developers are looking for small or medium-sized wikis to be the first ones. You can let them know if your wiki is interested. [38]
From November 16 the categories will not be sorted in order for a short time. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the internationalisation library. They will use a script to fix the existing categories. This can take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [39][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
Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 16 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for most languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [41][42]
Changes later this week
If you merged two pages in a namespace where pages can't redirect this used to break the merge history. This will now be fixed. [43]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 November. It will be on all wikis from 19 November (calendar).
Future changes
The Community Wishlist Survey is now open for proposals. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals from 16 to 30 November. You can vote on proposals from 8 December to 21 December.
Blogpost: Introducing Mapping the Scottish Reformation: Clerics, Manuscripts, and Open Data. "Most of the individuals we have found are obviously relatively obscure and have no item entry in Wikidata...As such, we have created around one thousand new items over the last two months, all of which serve as a framework to record the key parameters of a cleric’s career".
Tool of the week
ALEC (A List of Everything Cool) is a tool to explore biodiversity content in Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Join the upcoming #1Lib1Ref Wikipedia campaign from January 15th to February 5th 2021 and improve Wikidata items by adding references to statements.
Added "Random lexeme" link under dedicated section for lexicographical data in the Wikidata sidebar (phab:T205525). Thanks to Matěj Suchánek!
Working on language/spelling variant selector bug on Special:NewItem and Special:NewLexeme that makes it difficult to continue creating Items or Lexemes (phab:T266638)
Work on the Query Builder continues. We're focusing on making it possible to query for all Items with a specific Property but any value next.
Went over all the feedback we have received for the REST API specification draft. Overall the feedback is positive and really useful. So we will move ahead after thinking more about the remaining points that were raised.
Working on making changes to descriptions show up in the RecentChanges feed and watchlists on Wikipedia and co as well even if they are not explicitly used (phab:T191831)
Fixed a problem adding statements with Properties of datatype mathematical formula (phab:T266496)
Kicked off our new effort to implement a predictable release cycle and release infrastructure for Wikibase suite by creating a prototype build workflow (phab:T267553) and prototype test workflow (phab:T267554)
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
Timestamps in Special:Log are now links. They go to Special:Log for only that entry. This is how timestamps work on for example the history page. [44]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
The Wikimedia Cloud VPS hosts technical projects for the Wikimedia movement. Developers need to claim projects they use. This is because old and unused projects are removed once a year. Unclaimed projects can be shut down from 1 December. Unclaimed projects can be deleted from 1 January. [45]
ANN: A platform to annotate text with Wikidata IDs (report) "Report of the work done by the Ann team at the eLife Sprint 2020. It describes the effort pursued towards a system for universal annotation of biomedical articles using the collaborative knowledge graph of Wikidata".
How the content of Wikidata can be represented in RDF - YouTube
Tool of the week
EntityShape.js is a script that allows you to check an Item against an EntitySchema. On the Item page, it will display various information about the Item, like the properties that should be present on the Item.
Query Builder: We're making it possible to switch between querying for specific values (e.g. all Items with a specific post code) or any value (all Items with a post code statement regardless of which one it is)
Correcting the behaviour of what automatically happens on Wikidata when a page is moved on Wikipedia and co to an excluded namespace with the "suppress redirect" option (phab:T261275)
Making language fallback indicators not show up for language variant fallbacks in a few more places (phab:T267502)
Adding html language attributes for statements linking to Forms and Senses (phab:T267023)
Working on language and lexical category fields turning red on unfocus even though no changes are made after a change in ooui (phab:T266936)
Finished building the 1.35 versions of the Wikibase base and bundle docker images and published to dockerhub (phab:T264538)
Hello! Voting in the 2020 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 7 December 2020. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: We will have several speakers joining us to discuss their projects in lightning talks, 1 December. Agenda
Upcoming: WMF search platform team office hour, Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020. 16:00-17:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PST / 11:00-12:00 EST / 17:00-18:00 CET. Etherpad, Google Meet. You can come and chat about the Wikidata & Commons Query Service.
Round 2 of the consultation on using Wikidata for curriculum digitization begun on November 24th, and will end on December 7th. You can participate by sharing your ideas in this response form (Google forms)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 December. It will be on all wikis from 3 December (calendar).
Future changes
The iOS Wikipedia app will show readers more of the article history. They can see new updates and easier see how the article has changed over time. This is an experiment. It will first be shown only to some iOS app users as a test. [46][47]
The Wiki Replicas can be used for SQL queries. You can use Quarry, PAWS or other ways to do this. To make the Wiki Replicas stable there will be two changes. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work. You can also only query a database if you connect to it directly. This will happen in February 2021. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech. [48]
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