User talk:James Allison

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Join the Months of African Cinema Global Contest!

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Greetings!

The AfroCine Project invites you to join us again this October and November, the two months which are dedicated to improving content about the cinema of Africa, the Caribbean, and the diaspora.

Join us in this exciting venture, by helping to create or expand contents in Wikimedia projects which are connected to this scope. Kindly list your username under the participants section to indicate your interest in participating in this contest.

We would be awarding prizes to different categories of winners:

  • Overall winner
    • 1st - $500
    • 2nd - $200
    • 3rd - $100
  • Diversity winner - $100
  • Gender-gap fillers - $100
  • Language Winners - up to $100*

We would be adding additional categories as the contest progresses, along with local prizes from affiliates in your countries. For further information about the contest, the prizes and how to participate, please visit the contest page here. For further inquiries, please leave comments on the contest talkpage or on the main project talkpage. Looking forward to your participation.--Jamie Tubers (talk) 19:22, 22nd September 2020 (UTC)

Ýou can opt-out of this annual reminder from The Afrocine Project by removing your username from this list

Welcome to the Months of African Cinema Global Contest!

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Greetings!

The AfroCine Project core team is happy to inform you that the Months of African Cinema Contest is happening again this year in October and November. We invite Wikipedians all over the world to join in improving content related to African cinema on Wikipedia!

Please list your username under the participants’ section of the contest page to indicate your interest in participating in this contest. The term "African" in the context of this contest, includes people of African descent from all over the world, which includes the diaspora and the Caribbean.

The following prizes would be recognized at the end of the contest:

  • Overall winner
    • 1st - $500
    • 2nd - $200
    • 3rd - $100
  • Diversity winner - $100
  • Gender-gap fillers - $100
  • Language Winners - up to $100*

Also look out for local prizes from affiliates in your countries or communities! For further information about the contest, the prizes and how to participate, please visit the contest page here. For further inquiries, please leave comments on the contest talkpage or on the main project talkpage. We look forward to your participation.--Jamie Tubers (talk) 23:20, 30th September 2021 (UTC)

Ýou can opt-out of this annual reminder from The Afrocine Project by removing your username from this list

Invitation to Local Wikimania Event in San Francisco this Friday

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Hi!

Wikimania is happening and hopefully you're enjoying the sessions. While it's fairly last minute, you're warmly invited to participate in the local Wikimania-themed meetup in the Wikimedia Foundation office this Friday (tomorrow!). You will have to register in advance, but we would love to see more people from the WikiSalon community participate! For more information and registration, please check out meta:Wikimania 2022/San Francisco Meetup.

The event will involve hacking, teaching, learning, and celebrating and we'll have snacks. We will have the opportunity to watch live sessions at Wikimania together in the afternoon. The rest of the day we'll have opportunity to participate in the hackathon, and we may have some on-demand workshops/learning sessions.

In case we run out of space, it's first-come-first-serve so let us know soon! Hope to see you there.

(Subscribe/Unsubscribe to this talk page notice here)

On behalf of the Bay Area Wiki Salon team and Bittakea, Effeietsanders

New Page Patrol newsletter October 2022

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Hello James Allison,

Much has happened since the last newsletter over two months ago. The open letter finished with 444 signatures. The letter was sent to several dozen people at the WMF, and we have heard that it is being discussed but there has been no official reply. A related article appears in the current issue of The Signpost. If you haven't seen it, you should, including the readers' comment section.

Awards: Barnstars were given for the past several years (thanks to MPGuy2824), and we are now all caught up. The 2021 cup went to John B123 for leading with 26,525 article reviews during 2021. To encourage moderate activity, a new "Iron" level barnstar is awarded annually for reviewing 360 articles ("one-a-day"), and 100 reviews earns the "Standard" NPP barnstar. About 90 reviewers received barnstars for each of the years 2018 to 2021 (including the new awards that were given retroactively). All awards issued for every year are listed on the Awards page. Check out the new Hall of Fame also.

Software news: Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have connected with WMF developers who can review and approve patches, so they have been able to fix some bugs, and make other improvements to the Page Curation software. You can see everything that has been fixed recently here. The reviewer report has also been improved.

NPP backlog May – October 15, 2022

Suggestions:

  • There is much enthusiasm over the low backlog, but remember that the "quality and depth of patrolling are more important than speed".
  • Reminder: an article should not be tagged for any kind of deletion for a minimum of 15 minutes after creation and it is often appropriate to wait an hour or more. (from the NPP tutorial)
  • Reviewers should focus their effort where it can do the most good, reviewing articles. Other clean-up tasks that don't require advanced permissions can be left to other editors that routinely improve articles in these ways (creating Talk Pages, specifying projects and ratings, adding categories, etc.) Let's rely on others when it makes the most sense. On the other hand, if you enjoy doing these tasks while reviewing and it keeps you engaged with NPP (or are guiding a newcomer), then by all means continue.
  • This user script puts a link to the feed in your top toolbar.

Backlog:

Saving the best for last: From a July low of 8,500, the backlog climbed back to 11,000 in August and then reversed in September dropping to below 6,000 and continued falling with the October backlog drive to under 1,000, a level not seen in over four years. Keep in mind that there are 2,000 new articles every week, so the number of reviews is far higher than the backlog reduction. To keep the backlog under a thousand, we have to keep reviewing at about half the recent rate!

Reminders
  • Newsletter feedback - please take this short poll about the newsletter.
  • If you're interested in instant messaging and chat rooms, please join us on the New Page Patrol Discord, where you can ask for help and live chat with other patrollers.
  • Please add the project discussion page to your watchlist.
  • If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be a reviewer, please ask any admin to remove you from the group. If you want the tools back again, just ask at PERM.
  • To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

New Pages Patrol newsletter January 2023

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Hello James Allison,

New Page Review queue December 2022
Backlog

The October drive reduced the backlog from 9,700 to an amazing 0! Congratulations to WaddlesJP13 who led with 2084 points. See this page for further details. The queue is steadily rising again and is approaching 2,000. It would be great if <2,000 were the “new normal”. Please continue to help out even if it's only for a few or even one patrol a day.

2022 Awards

Onel5969 won the 2022 cup for 28,302 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 80/day. There was one Gold Award (5000+ reviews), 11 Silver (2000+), 28 Iron (360+) and 39 more for the 100+ barnstar. Rosguill led again for the 4th year by clearing 49,294 redirects. For the full details see the Awards page and the Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone!

Minimum deletion time: The previous WP:NPP guideline was to wait 15 minutes before tagging for deletion (including draftification and WP:BLAR). Due to complaints, a consensus decided to raise the time to 1 hour. To illustrate this, very new pages in the feed are now highlighted in red. (As always, this is not applicable to attack pages, copyvios, vandalism, etc.)

New draftify script: In response to feedback from AFC, the The Move to Draft script now provides a choice of set messages that also link the creator to a new, friendly explanation page. The script also warns reviewers if the creator is probably still developing the article. The former script is no longer maintained. Please edit your edit your common.js or vector.js file from User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js to User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft.js

Redirects: Some of our redirect reviewers have reduced their activity and the backlog is up to 9,000+ (two months deep). If you are interested in this distinctly different task and need any help, see this guide, this checklist, and spend some time at WP:RFD.

Discussions with the WMF The PageTriage open letter signed by 444 users is bearing fruit. The Growth Team has assigned some software engineers to work on PageTriage, the software that powers the NewPagesFeed and the Page Curation toolbar. WMF has submitted dozens of patches in the last few weeks to modernize PageTriage's code, which will make it easier to write patches in the future. This work is helpful but is not very visible to the end user. For patches visible to the end user, volunteers such as Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have been writing patches for bug reports and feature requests. The Growth Team also had a video conference with the NPP coordinators to discuss revamping the landing pages that new users see.

Reminders
  • Newsletter feedback - please take this short poll about the newsletter.
  • There is live chat with patrollers on the New Page Patrol Discord.
  • Please add the project discussion page to your watchlist.
  • If you no longer wish to be a reviewer, please ask any admin to remove you from the group. If you want the tools back again, just ask at PERM.
  • To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

New Pages Patrol newsletter June 2023

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Hello James Allison,

New Page Review queue April to June 2023

Backlog

Redirect drive: In response to an unusually high redirect backlog, we held a redirect backlog drive in May. The drive completed with 23851 reviews done in total, bringing the redirect backlog to 0 (momentarily). Congratulations to Hey man im josh who led with a staggering 4316 points, followed by Meena and Greyzxq with 2868 and 2546 points respectively. See this page for more details. The redirect queue is steadily rising again and is steadily approaching 4,000. Please continue to help out, even if it's only for a few or even one review a day.

Redirect autopatrol: All administrators without autopatrol have now been added to the redirect autopatrol list. If you see any users who consistently create significant amounts of good quality redirects, consider requesting redirect autopatrol for them here.

WMF work on PageTriage: The WMF Moderator Tools team, consisting of Sam, Jason and Susana, and also some patches from Jon, has been hard at work updating PageTriage. They are focusing their efforts on modernising the extension's code rather than on bug fixes or new features, though some user-facing work will be prioritised. This will help make sure that this extension is not deprecated, and is easier to work on in the future. In the next month or so, we will have an opt-in beta test where new page patrollers can help test the rewrite of Special:NewPagesFeed, to help find bugs. We will post more details at WT:NPPR when we are ready for beta testers.

Articles for Creation (AFC): All new page reviewers are now automatically approved for Articles for Creation draft reviewing (you do not need to apply at WT:AFCP like was required previously). To install the AFC helper script, visit Special:Preferences, visit the Gadgets tab, tick "Yet Another AFC Helper Script", then click "Save". To find drafts to review, visit Special:NewPagesFeed, and at the top left, tick "Articles for Creation". To review a draft, visit a submitted draft, click on the "More" menu, then click "Review (AFCH)". You can also comment on and submit drafts that are unsubmitted using the script.

You can review the AFC workflow at WP:AFCR. It is up to you if you also want to mark your AFC accepts as NPP reviewed (this is allowed but optional, depends if you would like a second set of eyes on your accept). Don't forget that draftspace is optional, so moves of drafts to mainspace (even if they are not ready) should not be reverted, except possibly if there is conflict of interest.

Pro tip: Did you know that visual artists such as painters have their own SNG? The most common part of this "creative professionals" criteria that applies to artists is WP:ARTIST 4b (solo exhibition, not group exhibition, at a major museum) or 4d (being represented within the permanent collections of two museums).

Reminders

Wikidata weekly summary #608

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Welcome to 2023’s Final Weekly Summary!

A big thank you to everyone who contributed to the newsletter this year!👏🙏 As we step into 2024, we'd love to hear what changes you would like to see in the newsletter. Share your wishlist here: What changes would you like to see in the newsletter in 2024?"

  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: EPIC (RfP scheduled to end after 26 December 2023 20:34 UTC)
    • New requests for permissions/Bot: Balyozbot. Tasks:
  1. Import sitelinks, labels, descriptions from ku wikipedia pages which use the template w:ku:Template:Înterwîkî etîket û danasîn. (There are over 1800 articles that use this template waiting to be connected to Wikidata at the moment.)
  2. Add sitelinks to kuwiktionary / kuwikipedia categories / create an item for the category if necessary. I have been doing this manually for quite some time using Quickstatements but since I need to get permission for the first task, I will be handling them using a bot as well.
  • Press, articles, blog posts, videos
    • Blogs
    • Papers: Increasing Coverage and Precision of Textual Information in Multilingual Knowledge Graphs by (Conia et al, 2023) --> This paper introduces a novel task of automatic Knowledge Graph Enhancement (KGE) to bridge the gap in the quantity and quality of textual information between English and non-English languages in Wikidata. It presents M-NTA, an unsupervised approach that combines Machine Translation, Web Search, and Large Language Models to generate high-quality textual information, and studies its impact on Entity Linking, Knowledge Graph Completion, and Question Answering tasks.
    • Videos
      • Wikidata, Wikisource and Wiktionary: Wikisource for DH (WiSe 2023) --> The lecture "Fundamentals and application-oriented methods of the Digital Humanities" by Kay-Michael Würzner is designed as a series of lectures in which teachers in the "Digital Humanities" course present their fields of work and key topics and present them for discussion.
      • Empowering Open-Source Generative AI by Integrating the Wikidata knowledge graph --> Generative AI has changed the information ecosystem, and open-source knowledge graphs like Wikidata can become invaluable assets, propelling a myriad of applications forward. Jonathan Fraine & Lydia Pintscher present the practical integration of Wikidata's open-source, open-access knowledge graph to empower Generative AI applications. Harnessing the real-time updated, structured data encapsulated within Wikidata, they explore automated content creation, data augmentation, and semantic analysis, underpinning the generative paradigms. Through a blend of theoretical insights and real-world applications, they elucidate how to leverage Wikidata to elevate generative AI applications, breaking down existing data silos, and fostering a collaborative ecosystem within our global community of developers and contributors.
      • Wiki Indaba 2023 - African content on Wikidata --> Discussion with Alice Kibombo, Georges Fodouop and Jesse Asiedu-Akrofi, about Wikidata for African Librarians during the Wiki Indaba conference, that took place between 3-5 November 2023 in Agadir, Morocco.
      • No Time to Wait - S07E10 - ACMI // Wikidata - Paul Duchesne + Simon Loffler --> Report on recent residency program to extensively link together collection data from ACMI with Wikidata. This work has allowed the organisation to import vast quantities of data and media to enrich their own internet collection experience, as well enable writing information back to source and federating with other linked institutions.
      • Wiki(s)data #5: Wikidata Live editing (in Italian) --> The ontology of Wikidata: how to interact with it for a better quality, by Epìdosis
    • Notebooks
      • Map of K-Pop Idols --> An interactive map where each red dot represents a K-pop Idol (a singer or musician in South Korean Pop music) you are able to click on.
      • Disney as the Mega Corporation it is Today --> Disney has greatly evolved from the simple animation company that first debuted in 1923 with its signature Steamboat Willie animation. This analysis details some of the major acquisitions Disney has chosen to help expand its reach as a media and entertainment company.
      • The Gender-Equality Gap in STEM Awards --> A network graph and multiple data visualizations on UCLA's alumnni awards based on gender.
      • Exploring The Belichick Coaching Tree --> This analyses details the coaching tree of the prolific American Football coach Bill Belichick.
      • State of statues in the US --> Map of how many statues there are, who is depicted in the statues, their genders, and where the statues are concentrated.
      • An Analysis on Nepo Babies: Net Worths and Fame --> This work uses Wikidata to analyze the influence and success of children of famous actors (nepo babies) in the entertainment industry, and compares the careers and net worth of these children with their parents to understand the impact of nepotism on their success.
  • Tool of the week
    • Cersei - is a tool designed for importing or scraping data from various third-party sources, using source-specific Python code. It can use a "headless browser" to scrape complicated websites that rely on eg JavaScript to navigate. It can therefore access data sources that can not be accessed via eg Mix'n'match. The data from sources can be updated regularly, either for everything, or just changed entries (if the source has a "recent changes" equivalent).
    • Wikidata:Zotero/Cita - is a Wikidata addon for Zotero that adds citations (i.e., what other items an item cites) metadata support to this open source reference management software, using cites work (P2860) information available from Wikidata, and enabling users to easily contribute missing data.
  • Development
    • Due to the winter holidays, the development team is taking a break and no deployment is happening for Wikidata at the moment.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Wikidata weekly summary #609

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: WikiBayer (RfP scheduled to end after 8 January 2024 12:01 UTC)
    • Closed request for adminship: EPIC (closed as successful). Welcome onboard \o/
    • New requests for permissions/Bot: HVSH-Bot . Task: Import data about politicians from the Q119949776, now only partially online available.
  • Events
    • Upcoming: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC, 17th January 2023 (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.
    • Ongoing: Weekly Lexeme Challenge #123: Ologist
  • Press, articles, blog posts, videos
    • Papers: Improving maintenance of community-based knowledge graphs. This paper by Nicolas Ferranti addresses the critical issue of data quality in open knowledge graphs, with a specific focus on Wikidata. It aims to formalize Wikidata's unique approaches to assess and resolve data inconsistencies, proposing a semi-automatic refinement pipeline to empower the Wikidata user community in maintaining and enhancing the reliability of this extensive collaborative knowledge graph.
    • Videos: WikidataCon 2023 Day 1.5 - The past and future of Wikidata. In this video Lydia Pintscher takes a moment to review the major events of Wikidata over the past few years. Then turns to look forward and predict what Wikidata's prospects will be over the next year.
  • Development
    • The development team is just returning from the winter holidays so there is no development update at the moment.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Wikidata weekly summary #610

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

Discussions

  • Closed request for adminship: WikiBayer (closed as successful). Welcome onboard \o/
  • New requests for permissions/Bot: So9qBot 9. Task: Add DDO identifier to Danish lexemes.

Events

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week Map your list of created articles - a notebook display of geolocated articles on a map created by a user per chosen project and batch (featured/good article).

Other Noteworthy Stuff Wikimedia Indonesia and Wikimedia Deutschland ended their partnership within the project Software Collaboration for Wikidata prematurely. Read their joint statement here.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

Did you know?

Development

  • IP masking/temporary accounts: We are adjusting Wikibase to be prepared for the upcoming changes to no longer expose IP addresses for non-logged-in users (phab:T351968)
  • Dumps/lex. data: We’re adjusting how empty lists of Forms and Senses are represented in JSON dumps (phab:T305660)
  • Wikibase REST API:
    • We finished the work on making it possible to get all sitelinks of an Item (phab:T344041)
    • We are working on getting a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344039)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Wikidata weekly summary #612

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

Discussions

  • New request for comments: Domain name as data (Summary: How should Wikidata store the domain name associated with an item? There are many properties for URLs, but a domain name is a different value.)

Events

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

  • Wikimedia Commons based streaming services by Magnus: WikiFlix for movies and the companion tool WikiVibes for audio.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development

  • IP Masking: We are continuing to adapt Wikibase to the upcoming IP Masking feature. We worked on hiding warnings about IP addresses being saved when they don’t apply (phab:T353807, phab:T352006) and creating temporary accounts when editing (phab:T354730)
  • Wikibase REST API:
    • We continued working on the ability to get a sitelink for a given site (phab:T344039)
    • We started working on the ability to remove a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344685)
    • We worked on fixing a bug where the REST API PUT request does not handle statement on Items with lowercase statement IDs (phab:T352644)
  • mul language code: We did user testing to find any remaining issue before release

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Wikidata weekly summary #634

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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.

Events

  • 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.
    • Talk to the Search Platform / Query Service Team—July 3, 2024
    • 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

Tool of the week

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 properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development

  • EntitySchemas:
    • We worked around an issue where EntitySchema pages were no longer considered “content” and had become unsearchable (phab:T368010)
    • We prepared for the release of the new datatype on July 2nd.
  • mul language code: We are working on the last remaining blocker before rolling out the first stage to Wikidata (phab:T362917)
  • Wikibase REST API: We are continuing to rework API errors (phab:T366911, phab:T366239)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Wikidata weekly summary #672

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2025-03-17. Missed the previous one? See issue #670

Discussions

Events

  • Upcoming events:
    • Call for Wikimania 2025 Programme reviewers. Apply until Monday 17 March 12:00 UTC
    • Wikidata Affinity Group Update: The fourth session of Starting a Wikidata Project, originally set for March 18, will now be an asynchronous Slack discussion in the #wikidata channel of the LD4 Slack Space. Join us at 9am PT / 16:00 UTC to discuss Reporting Your Outcomes and Results. Join Slack here. Note: April programming will pause as we prepare the next series.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

Other Noteworthy Stuff

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development

  • Wikibase REST API: We continued the work on adding search to the API (phab:T383126)
  • Search: We are continuing the work on making it easier to search for entities other than Items in the search box (phab:T338483)
  • Query Service: We set up the constraint checks to use the split graph instead of the full graph (phab:T374021)
  • Integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are looking into how changes from Wikidata are represented on the other Wikimedia projects and how that can be improved (phab:T386200)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Wikidata weekly summary #672 (correct version!)

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2025-03-24. Missed the previous one? See issue #671

Discussions

Events

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

  • Lexica - a mobile-friendly tool that simplifies micro contributions to lexicographical data on Wikidata, making various editing tasks accessible and intuitive for contributors of all experience levels.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development

  • Wikibase REST API: We finished work on the simple Item search (phab:T383126) and started on the one for Properties (phab:T386377)
  • Vector 2022 skin: We fixed a number of the remaining issues with dark mode (phab:T385039) and sitelink positioning (phab:T316797)
  • Search: We continued the work on making it easier to search in other entity types (Properties, Lexemes, EntitySchemas) besides Items (phab:T321543)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Anything to add? Please share! :)

Wikidata weekly summary #703

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2025-10-27. Missed the previous one? See issue #702.

Discussions

Events

  • Upcoming events:
    • 🎉 Wikidata's 13th Birthday! Join us online, October 29 17:00 UTC (in your timezone) for presents, birthday messages, games...and a 📣surprise announcement (don't miss it!). 🎁 Add your own gifts to the list - anything that celebrates Wikidata and its amazing community... a script you’ve written, tool improvement, visual, poem...the sky's the limit. Get the call link here: 13th Birthday Presents & Messages call.
    • WikidataCon 2025, October 31 - November 2, make sure to register at the event page.
    • SPARQL workshop (in German): "From Zero to SPARQL. Eine Einführung in die Abfrage von Wissensgraphen (Schwerpunkt Wikidata)", 4 Nov 2025, 10-13, free and open to all, online via Zoom. more information and registration
    • The scholarship deadline for Wikimania 2026 is approaching fast: 31st of October. Apply today if you want to attend on a scholarship.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

  • Nemo is a new Wikidata query tool by User:Markus Krötzsch the tool can answer queries, extracts subsets, and perform analyses in ways that SPARQL alone can't. It also lets you combine Wikidata with other data sources.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know? 

(Q22530539) - lake in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Canada

Development

  • Wikidata in Wikipedia and co:
    • We worked on making Wikidata change summaries in recent changes and watchlist on the other Wikimedia projects more understandable by adding icons. This will be rolled out soon (phab:T397258)
    • We continued the improvements to the Databox module (phab:T400322, phab:T400318)
  • Mobile statement editing: We continued working on editing references (phab:T405236) and did clean-ups for the beta release (phab:T405743)
  • GraphQL: We continued work on including labels of linked entities in responses
  • Dumps: We are looking into why dump generation is slower than it should be recently

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Tech News: 2025-44

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

Updates for editors

  • The Wikipedia iOS app has launched an A/B/C test of improvements made to the tabbed browsing feature for select regions and languages. The test, named “More dynamic tabs”, explores new tab experiences and includes “Did you know” and “Because you read” article recommendations. You can read more on the project page.
  • Autoconfirmed users on small and medium wikis with the CampaignEvents extension can now use Event Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
  • Recurrent item View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue of flashing colors when holding or pressing the arrow keys under the dark mode settings in Vector 2022 has been fixed. [1]

Updates for technical contributors

  • The CampaignEvents extension will be deployed to all remaining wikis during the week of 17 November 2025. The extension currently includes three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. For this rollout, Invitation List will not be enabled on Wikifunctions and MediaWiki unless requested by those communities. Visit the deployment page to learn more.
  • The SwaggerUI-based REST sandbox experience is now live on all wiki projects. The sandbox can be accessed through the Special:RestSandbox page. Please report any issues to the MediaWiki Interfaces team board, or join the discussion on the project launch page. [2]
  • Transform endpoints with a trailing slash path in the MediaWiki REST API are now marked as deprecated. They will remain functional during this time, but removal is expected by the end of January 2026. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found and tested using the REST Sandbox. See the MediaWiki REST API Deprecation page for more detailed information about the API deprecation policies and procedures.
  • A dedicated changelog now exists for the MediaWiki REST API. The changelog provides an overview of these changes, making it easier for developers to keep track of improvements and iterations. Announcements will also continue to flow through the standard communication channels, including Tech News and email distribution lists, but can now be more easily referenced from a central location. If you have feedback about the style, structure, or content of this changelog, please join the discussion.
  • Administrators can delete the tracking category which was previously added by the JsonConfig extension, as it is no longer used. See the categories linked from Q130635582. It is OK if there are still pages listed in the category as that is just a caching issue, and they will be automatically cleared out the next time each page is edited. [3]
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:28, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #704

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2025-11-03. Missed the previous one? See issue #703.

Discussions

  • Closed request for adminship: Samoasambia
  • New requests for permissions/Bot: langCodesBot - Task(s): Python script to automate the cleanup of deprecated language codes (e.g., kr) from Wikidata items. Delete or move labels, descriptions, and aliases based on comparisons with fallback and related languages. The script uses the Pywikibot framework to process each item and logs cases it skips due to data inconsistencies or ambiguity to a CSV file for manual review.
  • New request for comments: Exhibition models by Hexatekin - This proposal focuses on standardizing models for art exhibitions. There is not a consistent data model used for art exhibitions that factors in parent-child relationships for traveling exhibitions, show series, or biennials, despite these being important and common types of events in international art history.

Events

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week The Wikidata Reference Validator by User:JosefAnthony helps check and replace broken or outdated references — keeping Wikidata’s knowledge verifiable and trustworthy. It checks whether external references are still accessible or offline, so we can ensure that every statement on Wikidata shows how we know what we know.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know? 

(Q167634) - political movement for reformation within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the 1980s, widely associated with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost policy reform
  • Showcase Lexemes:baseline (L46097) - English noun (ˈbeɪslaɪn) meaning "a starting point for comparison", "a benchmark in budgeting", or "a reference line in typography or surveying"

Development

  • Mobile editing of statements: We are continuing the work on qualifiers and reference editing
  • GraphQL: We are continuing the work on making labels of linked entities available in GraphQL (phab:T404692)
  • Dumps: We are continuing to look into improvements for the dump process

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Tech News: 2025-45

[edit]

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

Updates for editors

  • Administrators will now find that Special:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start). [4]
  • For users with "Automatically subscribe to topics" enabled in their preferences, starting a new topic or adding a reply to an existing topic will now subscribe them to replies to that topic. Previously, this would only happen if the DiscussionTools "Add topic" or "Reply" widgets were used. When DiscussionTools was originally launched existing accounts were not opted in to automatic topic subscriptions, so this change should primarily affect newer accounts and users who have deliberately changed their preferences since that time. [5]
  • Scribunto modules can now be used to generate SVG images. This can be used to build charts, graphics and other visualizations dynamically through Lua, reducing the need to compose them externally and upload them as files. [6]
  • Wikimedia sites now provide all anonymous users with the option to enable a dark mode color scheme, featuring light-colored text on a dark background. This enhancement aims to deliver a more enjoyable reading experience, especially in dimly lit environments. [7]
  • Users with large watchlists have long faced timeouts when editing Special:EditWatchlist. The page now loads entries in smaller sections instead of all at once due to a paging update, allowing everyone to edit their watchlists smoothly. As part of the database update, sorting by expiry has been removed because it was over 100× slower than sorting by title. A community wish has been created to explore alternative ways to restore sort-by-expiry. If this feature is important to you, please support the wish! [8]
  • Recurrent item View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the fixing of the persisting highlighting when using VisualEditor find and replace during a query. [9]

Updates for technical contributors

  • Since 2019 the Wikimedia URL Shortener at https://w.wiki is available for all Wikimedia wikis to create short links to articles, permalinks, diffs, etc. It is available in the sidebar as "Get shortened URL". There are 30 wikis that also install an older "ShortUrl" extension. The old extension will soon be removed. This means /s/ URLs will not be advertised under article titles via HTML class="title-shortlink". The /s/ URLs will keep working. [10]
  • On Thursday, October 30, the MediaWiki Interfaces and SRE Service Operations teams began rerouting Action API traffic through a common API gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
  • MediaWiki Train deployments will pause for the final two weeks of 2025: 22 December and 29 December. Backport windows will also pause between Monday, 22 December 2025 and Thursday, 2 January 2026. A backport window is a scheduled time to add things like bug fixes and configuration changes. There are seven deployment trains remaining for 2025. [11]
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

  • In 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that AI systems and search engines increasingly use Wikipedia content without driving users to the site, contributing to an 8% drop in human pageviews compared to 2024. After detecting bots disguised as humans, Wikimedia updated its traffic data to reflect this shift. Read more about current user trends on Wikipedia in a Diff blog post.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:30, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 10 November 2025

[edit]
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:53, 10 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #705

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2025-11-10. Missed the previous one? See issue #704.

Discussions

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

  • User:Difool/WikidataCleanup.js: gadget allowing to do, in one click, a wide series of cleanups in an item: normalize labels, descriptions, and aliases (double spaces, certain Unicode characters), remove weak references, remove weakly referenced dates when they have lower precision than a strongly referenced date and downgrade unnecessary preferred ranks; about the general issue of redundancies in Wikidata, you can check WikiProject Redundancy
  • Ghanasupremecases is a webapp that dynamically pulls and displays over 2,000 Supreme Court of Ghana cases from Wikidata, allowing users to access case details linked directly to Wikidata items. The goal is to make African legal data more open, structured, and discoverable, and to demonstrate how Wikidata can serve as a foundation for national-level legal archive

Other Noteworthy Stuff

  • Temporary accounts rollout: Starting November 12, the community will see logged‑out edits handled through temporary accounts instead of IPs, prompting tool and bot checks.
  • Help shape the future WikidatCon! If you attended WikidataCon 2025, please take 10 minutes to share your feedback in this anonymous GDPR-compliant survey (sslsurvey)

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development The development team were involved in roadmap planning meetings so not much happened in the past week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

Tech News: 2025-46

[edit]

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

Updates for editors

Screenshot of the visual improvements made on talk pages
Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.
  • Starting November 12, users will see a change in the appearance of talk pages on some Wikipedias. Almost all wikis have received this design change; English Wikipedia will get these changes later. You can read more on Diff. Users can opt out of these changes in their user preferences in "Show discussion activity". [12]
  • MediaWiki can now display a page indicator automatically while a page is protected. This feature is disabled by default. It can be enabled by community request. [13]
  • Using the "Show preview" or "Show changes" buttons in the wikitext editor will now carry over certain URL parameters like 'useskin', 'uselang' and 'section'. This update also fixes an issue where, if the browser crashed while previewing an edit to a single section, saving this edit could overwrite the entire page with just that section’s content. [14][15][16]
  • Wikivoyage wikis can use colored map markers in the article text. The text of these markers will now be shown in contrasting black or white color, instead of always being white. Local workarounds for the problem can be removed. [17]
  • The Activity tab in the Wikipedia Android app is now available for all users. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging. [18]
  • The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment called "Image browsing" to test how to make it easier for readers to browse and discover images on Wikipedia articles. This experiment, a mobile-only A/B test, will go live on English Wikipedia in the week of November 17 and will run for four weeks, affecting 0.05% of users on English wiki. The test launched on November 3 on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese wikis, affecting up to 10% of users on those wikis. [19]
  • Recurrent item View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example the inability to lock accounts on mobile sites has been fixed. [20]

Updates for technical contributors

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:36, 10 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #706

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2025-11-17. Missed the previous one? See issue #705.

Discussions

Events

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

  • ArchiveExternaLinks is a UserScript by Poro26. The UserScript automates the archiving of all external links present in an item, whether they appear in statements, references or identifiers. For each external link, the script automatically adds an archive link [archive], similar to what is done on Wikipedia for web sources cited in references

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

  • Query examples:
  • Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject LGBTQ History - aims to improve and organize data related to the history, people, places, events, and organizations that have contributed to LGBTQ+ experiences across time and geography.
  • WikiProject Highlights:
    • 👩🔬Passionate about highlighting women's achievements? WikiProject Women is dedicated to creating and improving data about women worldwide. Help close the gender gap in knowledge! WikiProject Women
    • 🗳️ Interested in democracy and political data? Join WikiProject Elections to model data about elections, candidates, and results from around the globe. Make electoral data open and accessible! WikiProject Elections
    • 🏛️ How do you find info on government institutions? WikiProject Govdirectory has a structured data model for that! Help improve data about public agencies on Wikidata. WikiProject Govdirectory
    • 🎵 Into music? From classical to K-pop, WikiProject Music needs your expertise to harmonize data on songs, artists, and releases. Join the band! WikiProject Music
    • 🧬 Your skills can help model lifesaving data. WikiProject Medicine works on structured data for diseases, drugs, clinical trials, and anatomy. Join a project that matters. WikiProject Medicine
    • 🔍 Interested in how knowledge itself is structured? WikiProject Ontology delves into the fundamental classes and properties of Wikidata. Shape the backbone of the knowledge graph! WikiProject Ontology
  • Showcase Items: Aboriginal Australians (Q12060728) - First Nations people of Australia
  • Showcase Lexemes: ਦਿਮਾਗ਼ (L1078947) - Punjabi noun (dɪ.mäːɣ) meaning "brain (organ)", "intellect/mind", or "understanding/consciousness"

Development

  • Mobile statement editing:
    • We are working on editing statements that link to other entities in their value (phab:T403974, phab:T409149)
    • We enabled mobile statement editing as a beta feature on test.wikidata.org (phab:T407737)
  • GraphQL prototype: We finished the work on making labels of linked entities available (phab:T404692)
  • Dumps: We are continuing to work on making the dump process more robust

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks


Tech News: 2025-47

[edit]

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

Updates for editors

  • The Reader Experience team is experimenting with reading lists on mobile web, allowing logged-in readers with no edits to save private lists of articles for later. The experiment is running on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias since the week of 10 November, and will begin on English Wikipedia the week of 17 November.
  • Users who can’t receive their email verification code during login can now get help by submitting a form on a new special page. This update is part of the Account Security initiative. If your account has an email address, please make sure you still have access to it. When logging in from a new device or location without 2FA, you may be asked to enter a 6-digit code sent by email to finish logging in. Learn more.
  • One new wiki has been created: a Wikisource in Minangkabau (s:min:) [27]
  • Recurrent item View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • As part of the Parser Unification project, the Content Transform Team rolled out Parsoid as the default parser to many low-traffic Wikipedias and is preparing the next step to high traffic ones. This message is an invitation for you to opt-in to Parsoid, as described in the Extension:ParserMigration documentation, and identify any issues you might encounter with your own workflow using bots, gadgets, or user scripts. Please, let us know through the "Report Visual Bug" link in the Tools sidebar or create a phab ticket and tag the Content Transform Team in Phabricator.
  • Unsupported Tools: Several issues with Video2Commons have been fixed, including filename-related upload failures, black-video imports, and retry handling. AV1 support has also been added. Ongoing work focuses on backend stability, ffmpeg errors, subtitle imports, metadata handling, and playlist uploads. To track specific tasks, check the Phabricator board.
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

  • Save the date for the next Wikimedia Hackathon happening in Milan, Italy from May 1–3, 2026. Registration will open in January 2026. Scholarship applications are currently open, and will close on November 28, 2025. If you have any questions, please email hackathon@wikimedia.org.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:24, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2025 Elections voter message

[edit]

Hello! Voting in the 2025 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 1 December 2025. 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.

If you wish to participate in the 2025 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:21, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]