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Latest comment: 26 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-06-24. Please help Translate.
Upcoming: Lexicodays, online event dedicated to Lexemes on Wikidata, will take place on June 28-30. It takes place across time zone and both in English and Indonesian. Check the program and find the access links on the event page.
Wikidata in Prometheus - Prometheus is a non-commercial image archive for art and cultural studies. It hosts images from a variety of image and media databases and now works can be connected with Wikidata.
New Mix'n'match feature: For lists of (full or auto) matches where both the MnM entry and the Wikidata Item have coordinates, it now shows the distance between them in the description. (source)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikidata development team at Wikimedia Deutschland is planning a brief survey to understand the various ways people contribute to the project and identify user contribution patterns. A request has been made for a CentralNotice banner to deploy the survey to a broad audience. Your feedback, comments, and questions on this request are welcome: m:CentralNotice/Request/Wikidata Community Survey 2024
The second iteration of the Wikidata:Open Online Course will begin from July 1 until August 11. Whether you're a beginner taking your first steps, an individual in need of a refresher on Wikidata concepts, or a seasoned trainer looking to level up your skills - this course is right for you.
Multilingualism - organizes work around achieving 100% Wikidata multilingualism for every language with MediaWiki internationalization support. It is initiated, developed & supported by Wikimedia Language Diversity community volunteers.
Latest comment: 26 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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
Editors will notice that there have been some changes to the background color of text in the diff view, and the color of the byte-change numbers, last week. These changes are intended to make text more readable in both light mode and dark mode, and are part of a larger effort to increase accessibility. You can share your comments or questions on the project talkpage. [1]
The text colors that are used for visited-links, hovered-links, and active-links, were also slightly changed last week to improve their accessibility in both light mode and dark mode. [2]
Problems
You can copy permanent links to talk page comments by clicking on a comment's timestamp. This feature did not always work when the topic title was very long and the link was used as a wikitext link. This has been fixed. Thanks to Lofhi for submitting the bug. [3]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 June. It will be on all wikis from 27 June (calendar). [4][5]
Starting 26 June, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link at English Wikipedia, making this feature available for you to use at all wikis. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they were linked to, even if this comment has since been moved elsewhere. You can read more about this feature on Diff or on Mediawiki.org. [6]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-07-01. Please help Translate.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
DifoolBot 4 Task(s) - Split single references containing multiple reference URLs into multiple references.
Bot Bozze Task(s) - Add sitelinks to itwiki draft articles after they've been moved to the main namespace.
New request for comments: Spelling convention for labels and descriptions in English - RfC started 2024-06-25. This RfC requests feedback and input for finding consistency in spelling convention as English has multiple regional variations.
Past: The Lexicodays 2024 was an online event designed to offer a discussion space for the Wikidata community about Lexicographical Data. An archive of some of the slides and session recordings are here c:Category:Lexicodays 2024. More will be added as they become available.
Upcoming:
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 10th July 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Botany-focused Wikidata online workshop online as part of the #IBC2024. Date: Tuesday 9th July at 9pm NZST (GMT+12) / 11 am central Europe. Register here!
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
Querying for audio on Wikidata - This blog post discusses using SPARQL queries on Wikidata to find audio recordings, focusing on musical compositions and their associated genres.
Diff Blog: Imagining a Wikidata future for librarians together - the sixth and final blog post from the LD42023 conference. Silvia Gutiérrez (WMF) and Giovanna Fontenelle (WMF) document the results of the collaborative session on building a bridge between the Library-Wikidata community and WMF.
Library Knowledge as Linked Data: A Wikidata Approach: Contributing to a shared data commons. David Erlandson describes the experiences of using Wikidata for the pilot Program for Cooperative Cataloging to "accelerate the movement towards ubiquitous identifier creation and identity management at the network level".
User:Zvpunry/CreateNewItem - This is a User script to easily add a new Item while editing a Statement and noticing that the desired Item is missing.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The second iteration of the Wikidata:Open Online Course has begun. Class will continue until August 11. Whether you're a beginner taking your first steps, an individual in need of a refresher on Wikidata concepts, or a seasoned trainer looking to level up your skills - this course is right for you.
Newest WikiProjects: Inuktitut - This is the space to organize work to assure that the sum of all knowledge and the supporting infrastructure for necessary services are available in Inuktitut (ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ, Inuktitut).
Latest comment: 19 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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
Over the next three weeks, dark mode will become available for all users, both logged-in and logged-out, starting with the mobile web version. This fulfils one of the top-requested community wishes, and improves low-contrast reading and usage in low-light settings. As part of these changes, dark mode will also work on User-pages and Portals. There is more information in the latest Web team update. [7]
Logged-in users can now set global preferences for the text-size and dark-mode, thanks to a combined effort across Foundation teams. This allows Wikimedians using multiple wikis to set up a consistent reading experience easily, for example by switching between light and dark mode only once for all wikis. [8]
If you use a very old web browser some features might not work on the Wikimedia wikis. This affects Internet Explorer 11 and versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari older than 2016. This change makes it possible to use new CSS features and to send less code to all readers. [9][10]
Wikipedia Admins can customize local wiki configuration options easily using Community Configuration. Community Configuration was created to allow communities to customize how some features work, because each language wiki has unique needs. At the moment, admins can configure Growth features on their home wikis, in order to better recruit and retain new editors. More options will be provided in the coming months. [11]
Editors interested in language issues that are related to Unicode standards, can now discuss those topics at a new conversation space in MediaWiki.org. The Wikimedia Foundation is now a member of the Unicode Consortium, and the coordination group can collaboratively review the issues discussed and, where appropriate, bring them to the attention of the Unicode Consortium.
Latest comment: 12 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-07-08. Please help Translate.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 10th July 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Registration for Wikimania 2024 is open! In-person participants: please register until 26 July, 11:59 p.m., UTC. Virtual participants can register anytime. If you received a scholarship from the Wikimedia Foundation, you will receive an email with a registration code and instructions.
Tool of the week
User:Teester/EntityShape.js - a userscript that adds an input box to a Wikidata page wherein you can enter an EntitySchema (such as E10). When you click "Check", checks whether each statement and property conforms to the schema. It then displays a summary at the top of the Item for each property indicating whether they conform or not. It also adds a badge to each statement and each property on the page indicating whether they conform or not.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata teams' development goals for the third quarter of 2024 have been updated: Wikidata:Development plan
indexer (entity responsible for compiling an index of a book, database, website or other forms of media publications in the form of a methodical arrangement of records designed to enable users to locate information quickly. Example: Hazel K. Bell (Q70226489))
WorldCyclingStats ID (identifier on the website WorldCyclingStats (www.worldcyclingstats.com))
Latest comment: 12 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The CampaignEvents extension is now available on Meta-wiki, Igbo Wikipedia, and Swahili Wikipedia, and can be requested on your wiki. This extension helps in managing and making events more visible, giving Event organizers the ability to use tools like the Event registration tool. To learn more about the deployment status and how to request this extension for your wiki, visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-wiki.
Editors using the iOS Wikipedia app who have more than 50 edits can now use the Add an Image feature. This feature presents opportunities for small but useful contributions to Wikipedia.
A problem with the color of the talkpage tabs always showing as blue, even for non-existent pages which should have been red, affecting the Vector 2022 skin, has been fixed.
Future changes
The Trust and Safety Product team wants to introduce temporary accounts with as little disruption to tools and workflows as possible. Volunteer developers, including gadget and user-script maintainers, are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. The team has created documentation explaining how to do the update. Learn more.
Australia report: Partner Project between Wikimedia Australia, the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers (ANZSI) and the School of Information and Communication Studies at Charles Sturt University (CSU SICS)
Latest comment: 5 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-07-15. Please help Translate.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: SpinachBot - Task/s: AI agent-enabled question answering through the creation and execution of complex SPARQL queries on Wikidata. Users tag the bog with wikidata-related questions, and it tries to come up with an answer by iteratively creating SPARQL queries.
An Intelligent System: What I learned through taking an introductory Wikidata course - The author, Anne-Christine Hoff, dispels misconceptions about Wikidata. She highlights that it is a relational communication system, not solely bot-driven, and allows users worldwide to add localized data in multiple languages, creating a self-structuring repository of information
Merge and diff - blog post by Magnus about adding new properties (taxon data speficially, NCBI, GBIF, and iINaturalist) to the AC2WD tool. If you have the user script installed on Wikidata (see tool below), AC2WD will automatically show up on relevant taxon items.
Online workshop Upskilling in Wikidata for maximum impact IBC 2024 - Recording of the virtual Wikidata workshop given on the 9th of July 2024. An onboarding and introductory event in anticipation of a full in-person workshop to be held at the International Botanical Congress 2024 in Madrid on the 21st of July 2024
User:Magnus Manske/ac2wd.js - This script adds an "AC2WD" link in the tools sidebar. When you click on it, it uses the AC2WD tool to check the item for certain Authority Control IDs (eg VIAF). It then checks these AC datasets for statements (and more AC IDs). It will then add any new information it found as new statements, or add more references to existing statements where possible. A green checkmark will be appended to the link if data was added (reload the page to see), otherwise a "—" if no new data was available.
myfixguide.com (photos about how to disassemble hardware)
indexer (entity responsible for compiling an index of a book, database, website or other forms of media publications in the form of a methodical arrangement of records designed to enable users to locate information quickly)
Newest WikiProjects: Human Cells - dedicated to improve our coverage of information about these fundamental entities that compose organisms. The project focuses mainly on two kinds of cell classes: species-agnostic classes, such as neutrophil (Q188417), and human-specific classes, such as human neutrophil (Q101405102).
Latest comment: 5 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Wikimedia developers can now officially continue to use both Gerrit and GitLab, due to a June 24 decision by the Wikimedia Foundation to support software development on both platforms. Gerrit and GitLab are both code repositories used by developers to write, review, and deploy the software code that supports the MediaWiki software that the wiki projects are built on, as well as the tools used by editors to create and improve content. This decision will safeguard the productivity of our developers and prevent problems in code review from affecting our users. More details are available in the Migration status page.
The Wikimedia Foundation seeks applicants for the Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). This group will bring technical contributors and Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform. Council members will evaluate and consult on the movement's product and technical activities, so that we develop multi-generational projects. We are looking for a range of technical contributors across the globe, from a variety of Wikimedia projects. Please apply here by August 10.
Editors with rollback user-rights who use the Wikipedia App for Android can use the new Edit Patrol features. These features include a new feed of Recent Changes, related links such as Undo and Rollback, and the ability to create and save a personal library of user talk messages to use while patrolling. If your wiki wants to make these features available to users who do not have rollback rights but have reached a certain edit threshold, you can contact the team. You can read more about this project on Diff blog.
Next week, functionaries, volunteers maintaining tools, and software development teams are invited to test the temporary accounts feature on testwiki. Temporary accounts is a feature that will help improve privacy on the wikis. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page. [14]
Editors who upload files cross-wiki, or teach other people how to do so, may wish to join a Wikimedia Commons discussion. The Commons community is discussing limiting who can upload files through the cross-wiki upload/Upload dialog feature to users auto-confirmed on Wikimedia Commons. This is due to the large amount of copyright violations uploaded this way. There is a short summary at Commons:Cross-wiki upload and discussion at Commons:Village Pump.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 June. It will be on all wikis from 27 June (calendar). [4][5]
Wikimedia developers can now officially continue to use both Gerrit and GitLab, due to a June 24 decision by the Wikimedia Foundation to support software development on both platforms. Gerrit and GitLab are both code repositories used by developers to write, review, and deploy the software code that supports the MediaWiki software that the wiki projects are built on, as well as the tools used by editors to create and improve content. This decision will safeguard the productivity of our developers and prevent problems in code review from affecting our users. More details are available in the Migration status page.