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!)

[edit]
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 #696

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2025-09-08. Missed the previous one? See issue #695.

Discussions

Events

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

  • Blogs: Past, Present and Future: a Wikimedian-in-Residence at the Biodiversity Heritage Library: TiagoLubiana reflects on their tenure at the BHL (Q172266), integrating the biodiversity collections into the Wikimedia projects. Read on Diff Blog
  • Papers: Revealing hidden figures within natural history collections by empowering students with data sleuthing skills - Mabry et al.,(2025) Read here
  • Videos:
    • WiLES Wikidata Lexicographical Event Semantics modeling for natural languages (LD4 2025) YouTube
    • Wikidata presentations and lightning talks (LD4 2025) YouTube
    • On Wikiskills 1st Wikidata Training (Africa Wiki Women) YouTube
    • (French) Lors de la 1ère formation Wikidata de Wikiskills YouTube
    • Plugging into the WikiVerse: A Plug for a Wikidata Plug-in for ArchivesSpace YouTube
  • Presentations:

Tool of the week

  • Dacit is a listening-training app for cochlear implant users, built as part of a Master's Thesis for LMU Munich, it is powered by Wikidata-lexicographical data. Practice with 3 different excercises; identify (German-language) speakers, words and minimal pairs in your browser or as an android app
  • LexToWiktonaryis a userscript that adds a Wiktionary links button on Wikidata Lexeme pages. It checks the lemmas of a lexeme, finds matching entries across different Wiktionary language editions, and shows them in a popup for quick access, with an option to expand to all Wiktionaries.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

  • The submission deadline for WikidataCon proposals has passed. Proposals that were submitted in time can still be edited until Sep 9. Proposals are hidden by default, but a page for sharing submissions is available and can facilitate coordination.
  • Help Panel has been deployed on Wikidata Beta.🎉 This is a feature designed to guide contributors with quick links to relevant help pages. It currently appears in read mode across most pages and can be configured by admins. You can enable it in your Beta preferences under "Newcomer features". To help shape its future on Wikidata, we're inviting you to test it and share feedback on this talk page.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development

  • We're investigate options for improving information saved while publishing (phab:T403149)
  • Mobile Editing Experience: we added multi-language support (T402630)
  • Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are continuing to look into reducing the number of changes that show up on Wikipedia and co's Recent changes and Watchlist from edits to aliases (phab:T401288), more info

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

The Signpost: 9 September 2025

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UK Online Safety Act remains undefeated.
Plus Wiki rules, Wiki Spin, and physicists get street cred!
The price of Liberty is eternal vigilance.
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Tech News: 2025-37

[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.

Weekly highlight

  • The Editing team is working on a new check: Paste check. This check informs newcomers who paste text into Wikipedia that the content might not be accepted. This check is an effort to increase the likelihood that the new content people are adding to Wikipedia is aligned with the Movement's commitment to offering information under a free content license. This check will soon be tested at a few wikis. If your community is interested in this test, please tell us in this task, or contact the team.

Updates for editors

  • Advanced item Later this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting" beta feature will be able to use a linting tool to see errors or other potential problems in wikitext in real time. See the help page for more information. [1]
  • Advanced item When browsing a wiki (like en.wikipedia.org), the software responds in one of two ways: a desktop page, or a redirect to a mobile version on an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). Over the next three weeks, MediaWiki will start displaying the mobile version to mobile devices directly on the standard domain, without this redirect. This change does not affect existing m-dot URLs, or the "Desktop view" opt-out. Learn more. [2]
  • When an edit changes the categories of a page, the changes to the category membership counts are now happening asynchronously. This improves the speed of saving edits, especially when moving many pages to or from the same category, and reduces the risk of site outages, but it means that the counts can show outdated information for a few minutes. [3]
  • Edits on Wikidata to qualifiers (properties and values) and references (properties and values) in a Wikidata item statement will now not add entries to the RecentChanges or Watchlist pages on all other Wikis. This is a temporary change to improve performance while other solutions are created. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [4][5]
  • Japanese-language wikis have had a major upgrade to the way that search works. The new search should generally give more accurate and more relevant search results. [6]
  • Recurrent item View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • 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 01:10, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #697

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2025-09-15. Missed the previous one? See issue #696.

Discussions

Events

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

  • Paulina is a Wikidata-based tool for the GLAM community that facilitates searching for authors and works, helps identify their copyright status in different countries, and provides access to works when available.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

  • Help us test the new Help Panel feature, now enabled on Wikidata Beta
  • The Wikimedia Foundation launched a new team, the Wikidata Platform Team, to lead development and maintenance of query services, aiming for stable, scalable data access in collaboration with WMDE and the community.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

Development

  • Scalability/sustainability: We have rolled out changes to minimize the number of entries stored in the recent changes tables of Wikipedia and co that are edits coming from Wikidata. This also reduces the number of changes from Wikidata you will see showing up in Recent changes and watchlist on Wikipedia and co further.
  • MCP for Wikidata: We are getting it ready for first testing.
  • Dumps: We are continuing to investigate how to provide smaller/subset dumps.
  • Mobile statement editing: We are continuing the work on making statements editable, especially qualifiers and multiple references.
  • Anubis (Q134301689) anti-bot software was deployed on Wikibase Cloud and XTools to prevent site outages caused by bot traffic. (T399851, T400229)

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: 2025-38

[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

  • References lists that are made using the <references/> tag will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width. [7]
  • Starting in the week of October 6, on small wikis and medium wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use Event Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made for large wikis unless requested in Phabricator. This change is being made to make it easier for more people to use Event Registration, especially on wikis that are less likely to have policies related to the Event Organizer right. Learn more.
  • Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including:
    • for the intitle: keyword: metacharacters for start-of-line (^) and end-of-line ($) anchors [8]
    • for both intitle: and insource: keywords: shorthand character classes for digits (\d), whitespace (\s), and word characters (\w); and escape codes for line feed (\r), newline (\n), tab (\t), and unicode (e.g. \uHHHH). [9]
  • When you search for text that looks like an IP, the system will now show search results. It used to take you to the contributions for that IP instead of showing search results. [10]
  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 24. This is planned at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests which happen twice a year. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog.
  • Recurrent item View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that affected users who used the page-tabs to switch from wikitext editing of a section into the visualeditor. [11]

Updates for technical contributors

  • The MediaWiki Interfaces team is redesigning the Wikimedia REST API Sandbox with Codex. If you have feedback on improvements for the API documentation or what makes developer experiences smooth (or frustrating), you’re invited to join an upcoming discovery interview, or leave feedback onwiki. Learn more.
  • Edits to Wikidata aliases (an alternative name for an item or a property) will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [12]
  • The new Unicode 17.0 version has been released. The datasets on Commons for the Module:Unicode data have been updated. Wikipedias that do not use the Commons datasets should either update their own data or switch to the Commons datasets.
  • Users of the Wikimedia Enterprise Structured Contents endpoints can now access Parsed Tables. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of the Structured Contents initiative. Structured Contents output is freely available through the On-demand API, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services.
  • A dataset of English Wikipedia biographical information from Wikimedia Enterprise has been published on Kaggle, for evaluation and research. This provides structured data from more than 1.5 million biographies, including birth and death dates, education, affiliations, careers, awards, and more (from a June 2024 snapshot).
  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:02, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #698

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2025-09-22. Missed the previous one? See issue #697.

Events

  • Upcoming events:
    • Exploring Seediq: A Journey through Translation and Linked Data Documentation 25 October .This event will showcase the Seediq communities’ translation of the OCLC white paper on Wikibase, followed by an overview of the full paper. It will conclude with an open discussion on the lessons learned during the translation project and broader reflections on linked data.
    • Govdirectory US office hour, 25 September
    • FREE virtual 1hr Wiki webinar focusing on plant biodiversity. Open to anyone wanting to improve their digital outreach skills by enriching Wikidata. Tuesday 14th of October at 3pm NZST. Register to get link.
    • Wikidata’s 13th Birthday is just around the corner! Are you planning to host a celebration but haven’t added it to the calendar yet? Join the party! Thirty-nine (39) events are already scheduled, and yours can be too: Birthday Calendar. It’s also the perfect time to contribute a birthday present or message to this list. Gifts can be anything that celebrates Wikidata and its amazing community like a script you’ve written, a tool improvement, a visual, a poem... 🎉

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

Tool of the week

  • Duplicity This tool can pick a random article on a wiki without associated Wikidata item, and offer some possible matches on Wikidata, so you can add it to an existing item, or create a new one.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

Newest properties and property proposals to review

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know? 

(Q33947) - famoumost widely spoken of all Sámi languages
  • Showcase Lexemes: Waage (L37547) – German noun (‘ˈvaːɡə’) meaning "scale (device for measuring mass)", "Libra constellation", or "equilibrium"

Development

  • Mobile statement editing: We are working more on the editing state of statements, especially qualifiers and progress indicators during saving (phab:T402620)
  • Dumps: We fixed an issue with some of the dumps (phab:T403882) and are improving the monitoring
  • GraphQL: We are working on making it easier to get labels of linked entities in an API response, starting with Items (phab:T404692)
  • Sustainability: We have now rolled out improvements to the tracking of Wikidata changes on the other Wikimedia projects on all projects in order to decrease the size of the database table that tracks these changes (phab:T401288)
  • Bug fixes: Tacsipacsi submitted fixes for two issues in error messages on Special:SetSiteLink. Thank you! (phab:T404499, phab:T404500)

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: 2025-39

[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.

Weekly highlight

  • On September 24th at 15:00 UTC, all Wikimedia sites users will experience a brief read-only period due to a scheduled datacenter server switchover. The Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team will redirect all traffic from one primary server to its backup. You can listen to the switchover using the "Listen to Wikipedia" tool, where you will hear edits stop for a few minutes during the read-only phase, then resume. This twice-yearly datacenter server switchover ensures reliability by testing the backup datacenter, so that our sites can stay online even if the primary datacenter fails. You can read more about the process on the Diff blog.

Updates for editors

  • Editors of 60 more Wiktionaries will soon be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them into their pages. A function takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, like adding numbers, converting miles to meters, calculating elapsed time, or declining a word into a case. They will join the other 65 Wiktionary language editions, which already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, plans are in place to expand to more Wiktionaries and the Incubator.
  • A new parser function has been added: {{#contentmodel}}. Template editors and admins can use it to get the localized or canonical name of the content model of a specific page. The function makes it easier to create and edit system messages, such as MediaWiki:editinginterface, even when you switch types of pages, like wiki, JavaScript, CSS or JSON page. [13]
  • Adding or editing a DISPLAYTITLE for an article using VisualEditor will no longer be broken. Editors who use VisualEditor mode to modify the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} would no longer have the literal text "DISPLAYTITLE" or its localized variant added to their articles. A list of pages that may have been affected and might need cleanup is documented in this ticket.
  • Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
  • Recurrent item View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Recurrent item Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

  • Wikifunctions users can now import many essential facts involving geo-coordinates, quantities and time values from Wikidata. This is made possible by the creation of Wikifunctions types for these values, which makes them available for use by functions in Wikifunctions. Learn more about how this works in this video and Wikifunctions' August 1 newsletter (for quantities) and August 22 newsletter (for geo-coordinates).

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:51, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #699

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2025-09-29. Missed the previous one? See issue #698.

Discussions

  • Open request for adminship: Empat Tilda: RfP scheduled to end after 3 October 2025 18:30 (UTC)

Events

  • Upcoming events:
    • New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series! Mark your calendars for our first session of our WikiProject Personal Pronouns event series, which will provide a high-level overview of WikiProject Personal Pronouns' goals, past work, and implementation plans. The session will also serve as a practical orientation to the implementation work for this project, ending with a demonstration of the workflow to be used in subsequent sessions. No previous Wikidata experience is needed to participate. This session will be recorded. Slides and recordings will be found on the project page after the session. Join us Tuesday, September 30th at 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST (Time zone converter). Please see our project page for more information and Zoom links.
    • Wikidata are hosting a webinar on the Embedding Project: AI/ML Project Manager Philippe Saadé (WMDE) will introduce the project, including early experiences, wins and pitfalls, and open up the floor to your questions.
    • 🎁 Countdown to 13!🎁 Wikidata's 13th Birthday is fast approaching and this week marks the start of the first Birthday Events! For a full rundown of all Birthday Events, please see the Birthday Calendar.

Starting the month of celebrations this week include: Wali Wikimedians Community, Latin America in Wikidata 2025, Hausa Wikipedians User Group and the language communities of Zambia, Twi and Kinyarwanda and regional celebrations from the Northern Nigerian, Dagbani and Ghanaians Wikimedian communities!

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

  • Mobile statement editing: We continue to make good progress, which you can check out on beta Wikidata. Specifically it is now possible to
    • save changes to edits made to string Properties on statements (without losing qualifier / reference information) (phab:T401405)
    • change the rank of statements (phab:T402436)
  • Query Service UI: jhsoby submitted patches for two issues related to the example dialog. Thank you! (phab:T405747, phab:T405720)
  • Lexicographical data: 1F616EMO submitted a patch to fix a localization issue on the Lexeme page. Thank you! (phab:T322526)
  • Dumps: We fixed issues with the n-triples and truthy dumps generation and set up a dashboard for monitoring (phab:T403882)
  • GraphQL: We are continuing to make labels of linked entities accessible in the GraphQL endpoint (phab:T404692)
  • Wikidata in Wikipedia and co: We are continuing to work on improvements to how we technically track the use of Wikidata in the other Wikimedia projects in order to reduce the amount of changes from Wikidata in the watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and co.
  • Wikidata Query Service GUI: We deployed two fixes by User:Jon Harald Søby, thank you! (phab:T405720, phab:T405747)

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: 2025-40

[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.

Weekly highlight

  • A major software upgrade has been made to Phabricator. The update introduces performance improvements, a refreshed search interface, enhancements to Maniphest task search, updates to user profile pages and project workboards, new Herald automation features, as well as general text input, mobile experience improvements and more. [14]

Updates for editors

  • The Community Tech team will release the new Community Wishlist extension on October 1, that will improve the way wishes will be submitted. The new extension will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances. The old system will be retired. There will be a brief period of downtime while the extension is deployed and wishes are migrated to the new system. You can read more about this in the latest update or you can consult the current documentation on MediaWiki.
  • As announced on Diff blog, the production trial of the hCaptcha service for bot detection has begun. The trial is currently using hCaptcha to protect account creation on Chinese, Persian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish Wikipedias, where it will replace our existing CAPTCHA (FancyCaptcha). The goal with the trial is to better block bots while also improving usability and accessibility for users who encounter CAPTCHA challenges.
  • The CampaignEvents extension has been deployed to Wikimedia Commons. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. On Commons, anyone who is a registered user can use it as an event participant. To use it as an organizer, someone needs to have the event organizer right.
  • Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to German Wikipedia. You can test the feature on testwiki or on betawiki as well. Please share your thoughts on using templates in sub-references or volunteer to become a pilot wiki.
  • On wikis using the Mentorship system, communities can now opt experienced editors out of Mentorship through Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship. Within this setting, communities may define thresholds, based on edit count and account age, to decide when an editor is considered experienced enough to no longer receive Mentorship. [15]
  • The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Tone check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Tone language model for the following languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian and Latvian. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on October 3, which will be the start date of the test.
  • The rollout of multiblocks had the side effect that non-active block logs may have been shown on Special:Contributions and on blocked users' user and user_talk pages. This issue will be fully resolved in a few days. As part of the fix, messages prefixed with sp-contributions-blocked-notice will be removed and replaced with those prefixed with blocked-notice-logextract in a few weeks. Please help translate the new messages and update any local overrides if needed.
  • There was a bug with links added using visual editor if they included characters such as [ ] | after the fragment identifier (#). They were not encoded properly creating an incorrect link. This has been fixed. [16]
  • One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (q:ms:) [17]
  • Recurrent item View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks. [18]

Updates for technical contributors

  • Later this week, editors using Lua modules will be able to use the mw.title.newBatch function to look up the existence of up to 25 pages at once, in a way that only increases the expensive function count once.
  • A new Unsupported Tools Working Group has been formed as part of ongoing efforts to collectively determine technical work priorities, similar to the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). The working group will help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. For the first cycle, the group will be prioritizing an unsupported Wikimedia Commons tool.
  • 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 20:48, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 2 October 2025

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Fifty hot topics from fourteen noticeboards.
Policy, politics, icons, captchas, and LLMs.
And other recent publications.
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