This is an archive of past discussions with User:DaxServer. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-02-10. Missed the previous one? See issue #665
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
TiagoLubianaBot 5 - Task(s): Add image or reference illustration based on categories for botanical illustrations on Wikimedia Commons. Only add when only 1 or 2 files in category.
Closed request for permissions/Bot: MangadexBot - Task(s): add metadata from mangadex to manga with Mangadex manga ID - closed as relevant Property has been deprecated and marked for deletion.
Whose (Wiki)Data is it anyway? - Ethics & Consent when cataloguing people, places and things. An on-site Library workshop of the Toronto Metropolitan University, February 12, 1200 - 1600 EST (UTC-5).
Comics Edit-A-Thon for Black History month, hosted by the Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship of the University of Colorado (onsite only & registration required). February 12, 1300 - 1500 MST (UTC-7).
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
Making SPARQL more accessible: Daniel Motz's bachelor's thesis on visual query graphs, check out their project in Tool of the Week
Preserving Community History with Wikibase - Tan Li Qi of MyCommunity, a Singaporean nonprofit dedicated to preserving the stories of everyday people by documenting community narratives, social memories, and local heritage.
Query by Graph - build a SPARQL query using drag'n'drop visual elements. This is an interesting tool that provides another way to approach building SPARQL queries, especially for those that find the Query builder or raw SPARQL unintuitive or complex.
CivData - "Cividata makes the diverse world of non-profit organizations visible. As a volunteer project, Cividata provides a comprehensive overview of non-profit organizations worldwide, based on data from Wikipedia's sister project Wikidata."
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Creation of the interim Global Resource Distribution Committee - Call for candidates ends February 25, midnight (AOE). The interim GDRC is being established to oversee and adjust resource distribution for the Community Fund, aligning with the movement's evolving needs. Currently open to applications from candidates with experience in grantmaking, budgeting and knowledge of Wikimedia's grant types. Further information on the role and how to apply can be found on the GDRC Meta page
Curationist seeks Digital Archivist - Curationist, a free online resource for cultural heritage seeks a part-time archiver who can navigate Wikidata, SPARQL and create metadata and support writers.
romantic orientation (pattern of romantic attraction of this person or fictional character — use ONLY IF they have stated it themselves, unambiguously, or it has been widely agreed upon by historians after their death)
location code (the location code of the location (please use more specific property if available))
directs readers to (document or class of documents to which this item or class directs readers)
nomenclatural type of (taxon item of which this item is the taxonomic type (name-bearing type), e.g. the family for which this genus is the type, the genus for which this species is the type, the taxon for which this type specimen is the type, ect...)
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 Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has published a draft of their recommendations for the Wikimedia Foundation's Product and Technology department. They have recommended focusing on mobile experiences, particularly contributions. They request community feedback at the talk page by 21 February.
Updates for editors
The "Special pages" portlet link will be moved from the "Toolbox" into the "Navigation" section of the main menu's sidebar by default. This change is because the Toolbox is intended for tools relating to the current page, not tools relating to the site, so the link will be more logically and consistently located. To modify this behavior and update CSS styling, administrators can follow the instructions at T385346. [1]
As part of this year's work around improving the ways readers discover content on the wikis, the Web team will be running an experiment with a small number of readers that displays some suggestions for related or interesting articles within the search bar. Please check out the project page for more information.
View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the global blocks log will now be shown directly on the Special:CentralAuth page, similarly to global locks, to simplify the workflows for stewards. [3]
Updates for technical contributors
Wikidata now supports a special language as a "default for all languages" for labels and aliases. This is to avoid excessive duplication of the same information across many languages. If your Wikidata queries use labels, you may need to update them as some existing labels are getting removed. [4]
The function getDescription was invoked on every Wiki page read and accounts for ~2.5% of a page's total load time. The calculated value will now be cached, reducing load on Wikimedia servers. [5]
As part of the RESTBase deprecation effort, the /page/related endpoint has been blocked as of February 6, 2025, and will be removed soon. This timeline was chosen to align with the deprecation schedules for older Android and iOS versions. The stable alternative is the "morelike" action API in MediaWiki, and a migration example is available. The MediaWiki Interfaces team can be contacted for any questions. [6]
In depth
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: Updates about the "Contribute" menu; details on some of the newest language editions of Wikipedia; details on new languages supported by the MediaWiki interface; updates on the Community-defined lists feature; and more.
The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on the progress towards bringing better visibility into global charts usage and support for categorizing pages in the Data namespace on Commons.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-02-17. Missed the previous one? See issue #666
Discussions
Open request for CheckUser: Lymantria (RfP scheduled to end at 19 February 2025 04:22 UTC)
New request for comments: Anna's Archive - The RFC is about whether Wikidata should import and store metadata from Anna's Archive, considering legal, copyright, and technical challenges.
New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series! We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series session on Tuesday, 18 February, 2025 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET Time Zone Converter. Eric Willey will be facilitating a series of four sessions focused on starting a Wikidata project from the foundation up at your institution. The second session will focus on choosing your project. Event page
Wikidata and Wikibase: Curriculum Transformation in the Digital Humanities. Talk on Wednesday, 5 March. By Information Services, University of Edinburgh. (register)
Fedipol (Fediverse Activity Tracker) is a Wikidata-based tool used for tracking activity and analyzing accounts related to German political parties, institutions, and instances on the Fediverse.
Peh-oe-ji (writing system for {{Q|36778|Taiwan Taigi}} or other {{Q|36495}} language varieties in Fujian and South East Asia.)
Taiwanese Taigi Romanization System (romanization system for {{Q|36778|Taiwan Taigi}} or other {{Q|36495}} language varieties in Fujian and South East Asia.)
leader of organization (This property identifies the top executive leader of an organization, regardless of the specific title used by the organization.)
Search: We are continuing the work on the improved search that lets you limit your search more easily to other entity types besides Items like Lexemes and Properties (phab:T321543)
RDF: We are working on aligning the RDF export to the Query Service prefixes (phab:T384344)
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
Communities using growth tools can now showcase one event on the Special:Homepage for newcomers. This feature will help newcomers to be informed about editing activities they can participate in. Administrators can create a new event to showcase at Special:CommunityConfiguration. To learn more about this feature, please read the Diff post, have a look at the documentation, or contact the Growth team.
Updates for editors
Highlighted talk pages improvements
Starting next week, talk pages at these wikis – Spanish Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia – will get a new design. This change was extensively tested as a Beta feature and is the last step of talk pages improvements. [7]
You can now navigate to view a redirect page directly from its action pages, such as the history page. Previously, you were forced to first go to the redirect target. This change should help editors who work with redirects a lot. Thanks to user stjn for this improvement. [8]
When a Cite reference is reused many times, wikis currently show either numbers like "1.23" or localized alphabetic markers like "a b c" in the reference list. Previously, if there were so many reuses that the alphabetic markers were all used, an error message was displayed. As part of the work to modernize Cite customization, these errors will no longer be shown and instead the backlinks will fall back to showing numeric markers like "1.23" once the alphabetic markers are all used.
The log entries for each change to an editor's user-groups are now clearer by specifying exactly what has changed, instead of the plain before and after listings. Translators can help to update the localized versions. Thanks to user Msz2001 for these improvements.
A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to mass delete pages, to enable users to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. [9]
Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. Thanks to user MolecularPilot for this and the previous improvements. [10]
View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the configuration for the AV1 video file format, which enables these files to play again. [11]
Updates for technical contributors
Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to most Wiktionaries over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyage to Parsoid Read Views last year. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [12][13]
Developers of tools that run on-wiki should note that mw.Uri is deprecated. Tools requiring mw.Uri must explicitly declare mediawiki.Uri as a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser native URL API soon. [14]
New request for comments: Certify the Wikidata trainers? - Initially discussed in Project Chat, this RfC looks to establish a clear community-endorsed policy on how Wikidata Trainers can be appropriately certified and their skills demonstrated and recognized.
The WikidataDiffAnalyzer is a Ruby gem designed to parse and analyze differences between Wikidata revisions, providing detailed statistics on changes to claims, labels, descriptions, aliases, site links, and more, while also supporting analysis of merges, redirects, and other edit types.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
Date filed (Filing date for a document, e.g. a patent or court case. Alternative names include <code>date submitted</code>, <code>submission date</code>, <code>filing date</code>, etc. These are all distinct from dates of issuance, granting, acceptance, publication, etc. that are public-facing and have to do with the last stage in a publication process. Searches for [https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?search=date+filed&title=Special:Search&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns120=1 similar] terms yielded [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=filing&ns120=1&fulltext=Search+for+a+property&fulltext=Search no results], so apologies if this is redundant.)
Showcase Lexemes: år (L743600) - Nynorsk noun that can mean "a vein", "road", "talent", "an ore", "insect wing part" or "small stripe with a different colour from its surroundings."
Development
Hosting the Data Reuse Days
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing the work on a search endpoint for the API (phab:T383126)
Search: We are continuing to work on the search field that lets you search other entity types as well and not just Items (phab:T321543
Mobile editing: We are designing prototypes for first testing sessions
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 can now customize how the Babel feature creates categories using Special:CommunityConfiguration/Babel. They can rename language categories, choose whether they should be auto-created, and adjust other settings. [15]
The wikimedia.org portal has been updated – and is receiving some ongoing improvements – to modernize and improve the accessibility of our portal pages. It now has better support for mobile layouts, updated wording and links, and better language support. Additionally, all of the Wikimedia project portals, such as wikibooks.org, now support dark mode when a reader is using that system setting. [16][17][18]
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that prevented clicking on search results in the web-interface for some Firefox for Android phone configurations. [20]
Meetings and events
The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, February 28th at 14:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: highlights and technical updates on keyboard and tools for the Sámi languages, Translatewiki.net contributions from the Bahasa Lampung community in Indonesia, and technical Q&A. If you'd like to join, simply sign up on the wiki page.
From patrolling new edits to uploading photos or joining a campaign, you can count on the Wikimedia platform to be up and running — in your language, anywhere in the world. That is, except for a couple of minutes during the equinoctes.
All the information you need to start working on your Wikimania 2025 program submissions is now available on the Wiki. Deadline: March 31 st, Anywhere on Earth.
New Wikidata Event! The upcoming "Wikidata and Sister Projects" event (May 29–June 1) is looking for speakers to share how Wikidata connects with other Wikimedia projects - if you are interested, request more info or submit your session idea here.
New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series! We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series session on Tuesday, March 4, 2025 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET Time Zone Converter Eric Willey will be facilitating a series of four sessions focused on starting a Wikidata project from the foundation up at your institution. The third session will focus on making the most of your time and work. Event page.
Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025 - annual global contest aimed at documenting and sharing the diverse customs and traditions observed during the month of Ramadan. Date: 25 February 2025 – 16 April 2025. Register here!
Showcase Lexemes: baguette (L7347) - French noun that can mean "elongated type of bread loaf", "elongated type of bread loaf", "conductor's baton", "chopsticks", "drum sticks" or "magic wand".
Development
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing the work on the simple Item search (phab:T383126)
Dumps: We fixed an issue that prevented the dumps from being generated (phab:T386401)
Search: We are continuing to work on the search UI that will let you search not just Items but also other entity types (phab:T321543)
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
All logged-in editors using the mobile view can now edit a full page. The "Edit full page" link is accessible from the "More" menu in the toolbar. This was previously only available to editors using the Advanced mobile contributions setting. [21]
Interface administrators can now help to remove the deprecated Cite CSS code matching "mw-ref" from their local MediaWiki:Common.css. The list of wikis in need of cleanup, and the code to remove, can be found with this global search and in this example, and you can learn more about how to help on the CSS migration project page. The Cite footnote markers ("[1]") are now rendered by Parsoid, and the deprecated CSS is no longer needed. The CSS for backlinks ("mw:referencedBy") should remain in place for now. This cleanup is expected to cause no visible changes for readers. Please help to remove this code before March 20, after which the development team will do it for you.
When editors embed a file (e.g. [[File:MediaWiki.png]]) on a page that is protected with cascading protection, the software will no longer restrict edits to the file description page, only to new file uploads.[22] In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g. {{:File:MediaWiki.png}}) will now restrict edits to the page.[23]
When editors revert a file to an earlier version it will now require the same permissions as ordinarily uploading a new version of the file. The software now checks for 'reupload' or 'reupload-own' rights,[24] and respects cascading protection.[25]
When administrators are listing pages for deletion with the Nuke tool, they can now also list associated talk pages and redirects for deletion, alongside pages created by the target, rather than needing to manually delete these pages afterwards. [26]
The previously noted update to Single User Login, which will accommodate browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies by moving login and account creation to a central domain, will now roll out to all users during March and April. The team plans to enable it for all new account creation on Group0 wikis this week. See the SUL3 project page for more details and an updated timeline.
Since last week there has been a bug that shows some interface icons as black squares until the page has fully loaded. It will be fixed this week. [27]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed with loading images in very old versions of the Firefox browser on mobile. [29]
WMDE Blog - Highlights of Data Reuse Days: The post showcases 3 excellent apps: WikiFlix (public domain full-length films), KDE Itinerary (travel assistant app) and Scribe Keyboard (easier writing in secondary languages). These are just some of the applications built using Wikidata; check out more at the Data Reuse Days pages.
zelph: A new tool for detecting logical contradictions and making inferences in Wikidata, using a rule-based system to improve data quality and derive new facts. Check it out on GitHub or explore results on the project website.
New Tool for Women’s Day: Scheherazade identifies women without articles in your Wikipedia but present in many others, helping editors prioritize creating missing biographies.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikimedia Research Fund had launched. You're encourage to submit proposals around Wikidata. The deadline to submit your proposal is April 16, 2025.
The 4th iteration of the Wikidata:Open Online Course will begin from March 17 until April 30. 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.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
kigo of (the season the sense denotes in haiku in Japanese)
Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised score (score that the subject have received on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised psychological assessment tool as administered by a suitably qualified and experienced clinician under scientifically controlled and licensed conditions, standardized conditions)
Showcase Lexemes: felle (L476372) - Bokmål verb that can mean "to make something fall", "to kill", "to force a resignation", "to prove guilt", "to let lose", "to announce" or "to join."
Development
Search: The search team at the WMF has added a new search keyword for Lexemes. You can use the keyword "inlanguage:en" or "inlanguage:Q1860" to limit your search to Lexemes with Lexeme language English and so on. Here is an example search for "bank" within English Lexemes: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?search=L%3Abank+inlanguage%3Aen (phab:T271776)
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
Editors who use password managers at multiple wikis may notice changes in the future. The way that our wikis provide information to password managers about reusing passwords across domains has recently been updated, so some password managers might now offer you login credentials that you saved for a different Wikimedia site. Some password managers already did this, and are now doing it for more Wikimedia domains. This is part of the SUL3 project which aims to improve how our unified login works, and to keep it compatible with ongoing changes to the web-browsers we use. [30][31]
The Wikipedia Apps Team is inviting interested users to help improve Wikipedia’s offline and limited internet use. After discussions in Afrika Baraza and the last ESEAP call, key challenges like search, editing, and offline access are being explored, with upcoming focus groups to dive deeper into these topics. All languages are welcome, and interpretation will be available. Want to share your thoughts? Join the discussion or email [email protected]!
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 19. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the launch of the Community Updates module, the most recent changes in Community Configuration, and the upcoming test of in-article suggestions for first-time editors.
An old API that was previously used in the Android Wikipedia app is being removed at the end of March. There are no current software uses, but users of the app with a version that is older than 6 months by the time of removal (2025-03-31), will no longer have access to the Suggested Edits feature, until they update their app. You can read more details about this change.
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.
(German) Wikipedia Unterwegs - this time in Neu-Ulm: This travelling community meetup for German Wikimedians discusses the growing ecosystem of Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons.
REST in Rust by Magnus: "A new Rust crate has been developed to simplify access to the Wikibase REST API, featuring industry-level coding standards, 248 unit tests, >97% code coverage, and high maintainability. Check out the GitHub repo and contribute via the issue tracker or pull requests!"
The Wikidata Vector Database prototype is almost ready! Developers interested in integrating semantic search into their applications and editors looking to explore Wikidata items using natural language search are invited to reach out for more details: philippe.saadewikimedia.de
OAI formatter (formatter to generate ID compatible with Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting services)
AI-generation prompt (exact prompt that was used to generate this AI-generated media or work)
data analysis method (methods used in the main item for inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information)
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
watercraft prefix (prefix applied to watercraft operated by different organisations)
accused (person or organization who has been accused of carrying out this harmful, illegal, or immoral act without having received a criminal conviction or where the accused have been acquitted in a court of law)
applies to volume (volume of the item (usually edition of a work) to which the claim applies)
oxygen endurance (The maximum time a submarine, spacecraft or enclosed vehicle can sustain life using its onboard oxygen supply.)
Showcase Lexemes: Knoten (L298686) - German noun that can mean "knot", "fundamental unit of which graphs (in graph theory) are formed", "point where an orbit crosses a plane of reference to which it is inclined", or "hair wrapped in a circular coil around itself (bun)."
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)
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
Twice a year, around the equinoxes, the Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team performs a datacenter server switchover, redirecting all traffic from one primary server to its backup. This provides reliability in case of a crisis, as we can always fall back on the other datacenter. Thanks to the Listen to Wikipedia tool, you can hear the switchover take place: Before it begins, you'll hear the steady stream of edits; Then, as the system enters a brief read-only phase, the sound stops for a couple of minutes, before resuming after the switchover. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog. If you want to keep an ear out for the next server switchover, listen to the wikis on March 19 at 14:00 UTC.
On Wikimedia Commons, a new system to select the appropriate file categories has been introduced: if a category has one or more subcategories, users will be able to click on an arrow that will open the subcategories directly within the form, and choose the correct one. The parent category name will always be shown on top, and it will always be possible to come back to it. This should decrease the amount of work for volunteers in fixing/creating new categories. The change is also available on mobile. These changes are part of planned improvements to the UploadWizard.
The Community Tech team is seeking wikis to join a pilot for the Multiblocks feature and a refreshed Special:Block page in late March. Multiblocks enables administrators to impose multiple different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. If you are an admin or steward and would like us to discuss joining the pilot with your community, please leave a message on the project talk page.
Starting March 25, the Editing team will test a new feature for Edit Check at 12 Wikipedias: Multi-Check. Half of the newcomers on these wikis will see all Reference Checks during their edit session, while the other half will continue seeing only one. The goal of this test is to see if users are confused or discouraged when shown multiple Reference Checks (when relevant) within a single editing session. At these wikis, the tags used on edits that show References Check will be simplified, as multiple tags could be shown within a single edit. Changes to the tags are documented on Phabricator. [32]
The Global reminder bot, which is a service for notifying users that their temporary user-rights are about to expire, now supports using the localized name of the user-rights group in the message heading. Translators can see the listing of existing translations and documentation to check if their language needs updating or creation.
The GlobalPreferences gender setting, which is used for how the software should refer to you in interface messages, now works as expected by overriding the local defaults. [33]
View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Wikipedia App for Android had a bug fixed for when a user is browsing and searching in multiple languages. [34]
Updates for technical contributors
Later this week, the way that Codex styles are loaded will be changing. There is a small risk that this may result in unstyled interface message boxes on certain pages. User generated content (e.g. templates) is not impacted. Gadgets may be impacted. If you see any issues please report them. See the linked task for details, screenshots, and documentation on how to fix any affected gadgets.
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 Wikimedia Foundation is seeking your feedback on the drafts of the objectives and key results that will shape the Foundation's Product and Technology priorities for the next fiscal year (starting in July). The objectives are broad high-level areas, and the key-results are measurable ways to track the success of their objectives. Please share your feedback on the talkpage, in any language, ideally before the end of April.
Updates for editors
The CampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (see deployment plan for details) in April 2025, and the team has begun the process of engaging communities on the identified wikis. The extension provides tools to organize, manage, and promote collaborative activities (like events, edit-a-thons, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. The extension has three tools: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation Lists. It is currently on 13 Wikipedias, including English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia, as well as Wikidata. Questions or requests can be directed to the extension talk page or in Phabricator (with #campaigns-product-team tag).
Starting the week of March 31st, wikis will be able to set which user groups can view private registrants in Event Registration, as part of the CampaignEvents extension. By default, event organizers and the local wiki admins will be able to see private registrants. This is a change from the current behavior, in which only event organizers can see private registrants. Wikis can change the default setup by requesting a configuration change in Phabricator (and adding the #campaigns-product-team tag). Participants of past events can cancel their registration at any time.
Administrators at wikis that have a customized MediaWiki:Sidebar should check that it contains an entry for the Special pages listing. If it does not, they should add it using * specialpages-url|specialpages. Wikis with a default sidebar will see the link moved from the page toolbox into the sidebar menu in April. [35]
The Minerva skin (mobile web) combines both Notice and Alert notifications within the bell icon (). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts. [36]
VisualEditor has introduced a new client-side hook for developers to use when integrating with the VisualEditor target lifecycle. This hook should replace the existing lifecycle-related hooks, and be more consistent between different platforms. In addition, the new hook will apply to uses of VisualEditor outside of just full article editing, allowing gadgets to interact with the editor in DiscussionTools as well. The Editing Team intends to deprecate and eventually remove the old lifecycle hooks, so any use cases that this new hook does not cover would be of interest to them and can be shared in the task.
Developers who use the mw.Api JavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with the userAgent parameter: var api = new mw.Api( { userAgent: 'GadgetNameHere/1.0.1' } );. If you maintain a gadget or user script, please set a user agent, because it helps with library and server maintenance and with differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate traffic. [37][38]
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 Editing team is working on a new Edit check: Peacock check. This check's goal is to identify non-neutral terms while a user is editing a wikipage, so that they can be informed that their edit should perhaps be changed before they publish it. This project is at the early stages, and the team is looking for communities' input: in this Phabricator task, they are gathering on-wiki policies, templates used to tag non-neutral articles, and the terms (jargon and keywords) used in edit summaries for the languages they are currently researching. You can participate by editing the table on Phabricator, commenting on the task, or directly messaging Trizek (WMF).
Single User Login has now been updated on all wikis to move login and account creation to a central domain. This makes user login compatible with browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies, which have prevented users of some browsers from staying logged in.
Starting on March 31st, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin a limited release of generated OpenAPI specs and a SwaggerUI-based sandbox experience for MediaWiki REST APIs. They invite developers from a limited group of non-English Wikipedia communities (Arabic, German, French, Hebrew, Interlingua, Dutch, Chinese) to review the documentation and experiment with the sandbox in their preferred language. In addition to these specific Wikipedia projects, the sandbox and OpenAPI spec will be available on the on the test wiki REST Sandbox special page for developers with English as their preferred language. During the preview period, the MediaWiki Interfaces Team also invites developers to share feedback about your experience. The preview will last for approximately 2 weeks, after which the sandbox and OpenAPI specs will be made available across all wiki projects.
Sometimes a small, one line code change can have great significance: in this case, it means that for the first time in years we're able to run all of the stack serving maps.wikimedia.org - a host dedicated to serving our wikis and their multi-lingual maps needs - from a single core datacenter, something we test every time we perform a datacenter switchover. This is important because it means that in case one of our datacenters is affected by a catastrophe, we'll still be able to serve the site. This change is the result of extensive work by two developers on porting the last component of the maps stack over to kubernetes, where we can allocate resources more efficiently than before, thus we're able to withstand more traffic in a single datacenter. This work involved a lot of complicated steps because this software, and the software libraries it uses, required many long overdue upgrades. This type of work makes the Wikimedia infrastructure more sustainable.
Meetings and events
MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop Spring 2025 is happening in Sandusky, USA, and online, from 14–16 May 2025. The workshop will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users. Registration and presentation signup is now available at the workshop's website.
MCL's Linked Data Usergroup's Wikidata Edit-A-Thon - The Midwest Collaborative for Library Services is hosting an editathon between April 7 - 11, 2025. This is an onsite event and only available to USA states: Indiana and Michigan.
Open translations in mathematics (Oxford Seminar) - This presentation from Tim Osgood discusses the utility of mathematics for translations, a community-driven approach, and how Wikidata is contributing.
(Spanish) Socialisation: Literary Data in Bogota 2015 - 2020 - The Colombian Publishing Observatory of the Caro y Cuervo Institute presents "Metadata Model for Independent Publishing in Bogotá", containing over 31,500 data points, all catalogued in Wikidata.
(Italian) Tools for Visualising Wikidata - Carlo Bianchini presents some useful tools for visualising data and queries from Wikidata, with a focus on Digital Humanities.
Wikidata Ontology Course Peter Patel-Schneider and Ege Doğan will run a seven-week Wikidata Ontology Course starting late April / early May. It aims to expand the Wikidata community’s knowledge of the Wikidata ontology through lectures, exercises, and group projects. Participants should have prior Wikidata experience and are expected to attend lectures, complete exercises (about one hour per week), and contribute to a group project. More details |available here.
SWIS-WEM Facility Code (Unique identifier for facilities registered with the Australian Energy Market Operator for facilities operating in the South West Interconnected System Wholesale Electricity Market (SWIS-WEM Facility Code))
number of downloads (2) (number of downloads of times this application or creative work have been downloaded)
species protection status (Links species, habitat or biotope type with the regulation international or national that protects this species)
Showcase Lexemes:humpback (L322138) - English noun that can mean " kyphosis (condition of the spine)", "a person with an abnormal curvature of the spine", "humpback whale, a particular marine mammal variety", "pink salmon", "lake skygazer, a type of ray-finned fish", " type of arch bridge where the span is larger than the ramps on either side", or " humpback dolphin, a particular variety of marine mammal."
Development
Search: We continued the work on making it easier to search entity types other than Items (Lexemes, Properties, EntitySchemas) in the search box (phab:T321543)
Vector 2022 theme: We are fixing remaining issues with dark mode (phab:T385039)
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing to build out the simple Item search endpoint (phab:T386228) and are looking into the one for Properties (phab:T386377)
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 2025-04-07. Please help Translate.
Papers: Enabling disaggregation of Asian American subgroups: a dataset of Wikidata names for disparity estimation - Paper by Lin, Q. et al (2025).
Videos
Curationist: What is it and how does it work? - Curationist utilises Wikidata to help discover, curate and share public-domian art and cultural heritage content. YouTube
(Swedish) Connecting Wikidata, OpenStreetMap and the National Archives with Magnus Sälgö YouTube
(French) Focus on Wikidata, Wikifying Science, a presentation from Delphine Montagne and Pierre-Yves Beaudouin. Canal-U TV: C@fé Renatis
Other
(Portuguese) Wikidata at School: expanding access to knowledge and tackling gender gaps! Instagram: Projeto Mais
Tool of the week
Wikidata:Tools/Wikidata for Web - also known as Wikidata for Firefox is a browser extension for Mozilla Firefox that displays data from Wikidata on various websites, enhancing the information you are already looking at, and also allows extraction of data from these websites.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata Ontology Course Peter Patel-Schneider and Ege Doğan will run a seven-week Wikidata Ontology Course starting late April / early May. It aims to expand the Wikidata community’s knowledge of the Wikidata ontology through lectures, exercises, and group projects. Participants should have prior Wikidata experience and are expected to attend lectures, complete exercises (about one hour per week), and contribute to a group project. More details available here.
Job Vacancy - Are you interested in helping shape the technical future of Wikimedia's knowledge graph? We are looking for a Staff Engineer (Wikidata)
We made some progress on the ScopedTypeaheadSearch feature by improving the UI, and making it translatable (phab:T390269)
We continued working on dark mode support (phab:T389633)
Wikibase REST API: We are almost done adding the last few features on the simple item and property search endpoint. We'll be happy to get feedback on these from 15.04 when they're completed
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The Design System Team is preparing to release the next major version of Codex (v2.0.0) on April 29. Editors and developers who use CSS from Codex should see the 2.0 overview documentation, which includes guidance related to a few of the breaking changes such as font-size, line-height, and size-icon.
The results of the Developer Satisfaction Survey (2025) are now available. Thank you to all participants. These results help the Foundation decide what to work on next and to review what they recently worked on.
The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon will take place in Istanbul, Turkey, between 2–4 May. Registration for attending the in-person event will close on 13 April. Before registering, please note the potential need for a visa or e-visa to enter the country.
Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'globaluserinfo')
TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'globaluserinfo')
at Object.success (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:DaxServer/Mark-locked.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript:136:51)
at fire (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/load.php?lang=en&modules=ext.discussionTools.init%7Cjquery%2Coojs-ui-core%7Cjquery.ui&skin=vector&version=4u1hh:357:76)
at Object.fireWith [as resolveWith] (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/load.php?lang=en&modules=ext.discussionTools.init%7Cjquery%2Coojs-ui-core%7Cjquery.ui&skin=vector&version=4u1hh:358:264)
at done (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/load.php?lang=en&modules=ext.discussionTools.init%7Cjquery%2Coojs-ui-core%7Cjquery.ui&skin=vector&version=4u1hh:440:734)
at XMLHttpRequest.<anonymous> (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/load.php?lang=en&modules=ext.discussionTools.init%7Cjquery%2Coojs-ui-core%7Cjquery.ui&skin=vector&version=4u1hh:444:315)
For the moment, I've taken this out of my common.js; it was useful, but I can live without it. I mostly thought you would want to know about the errors. RoySmith(talk)14:26, 14 April 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #675
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-04-14. Missed the previous one? See issue #674
Events
Upcoming events: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 16th April 2025 (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.
Other: Wikidata references made easier. "Several tricks to make it easier and faster, using various scripts and gadgets" to add references to Wikidata statements. By Spinster
Tool of the week
Wikidata Topic Curator is a React-based web application. It’s a new and improved version of ItemSubjector created to help Wikimedians connect items on Wikidata to the right topics. By entering a topic QID, it finds related articles using the topic’s label, aliases, or custom terms.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Join the Wikidata development team at Wikimedia Deutschland
Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject USC Libraries A WikiProject for work done at University of Southern California Libraries to connect library data with Wikidata.
Showcase Lexemes: Straße (L44061) - German noun that can mean "road", "straight", "street", "strait", "group of people inhabiting buildings along a perticular street" or "production line".
Development
We merged and prepared changes to rename wikibase:EntitySchema to wikibase:WikibaseEntitySchema in RDF (phab:T371196) – this has been announced as a breaking change and will be deployed to Wikidata on 24 April
We made some more improvements to dark mode support (phab:T389633)
We’re working on tests for the ScopedTypeaheadSearch feature (phab:T385790)
Wikibase REST API: We're going to wrap up pagination on the simple Item and property search endpoint and are working to improve our test architecture for search (phab:T386691). We're going to pick up prefix search for Items and phrase matching next!
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
Later this week, the default thumbnail size will be increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn't previously possible due to technical limitations. [40]
File thumbnails are now stored in discrete sizes. If a page specifies a thumbnail size that's not among the standard sizes (20, 40, 60, 120, 250, 330, 500, 960), then MediaWiki will pick the closest larger thumbnail size but will tell the browser to downscale it to the requested size. In these cases, nothing will change visually but users might load slightly larger images. If it doesn't matter which thumbnail size is used in a page, please pick one of the standard sizes to avoid the extra in-browser down-scaling step. [41][42]
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Foundation are working on a system called Edge Uniques which will enable A/B testing, help protect against Distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is so that they can more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for.
To improve security for users, a small percentage of logins will now require that the account owner input a one-time password emailed to their account. It is recommended that you check that the email address on your account is set correctly, and that it has been confirmed, and that you have an email set for this purpose. [43]
"Are you interested in taking a short survey to improve tools used for reviewing or reverting edits on your Wiki?" This question will be asked at 7 wikis starting next week, on Recent Changes and Watchlist pages. The Moderator Tools team wants to know more about activities that involve looking at new edits made to your Wikimedia project, and determining whether they adhere to your project's policies.
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: an invitation for tool maintainers to attend the Toolforge UI Community Feedback Session on April 15th; recent community metrics; and recent technical blog posts.
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
Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template. [44]
A new type of lint error has been created: Empty headings (documentation). The Linter extension's purpose is to identify wikitext patterns that must or can be fixed in pages and provide some guidance about what the problems are with those patterns and how to fix them. [45]
Following its publication on HuggingFace, the "Structured Contents" dataset, developed by Wikimedia Enterprise, is now also available on Kaggle. This Beta initiative is focused on making Wikimedia data more machine-readable for high-volume reusers. They are releasing this beta version in a location that open dataset communities already use, in order to seek feedback, to help improve the product for a future wider release. You can read more about the overall Structured Contents project, and about the first release that's freely usable.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings and events
The Editing and Machine Learning Teams invite interested volunteers to a video meeting to discuss Peacock check, which is the latest Edit check that will detect "peacock" or "overly-promotional" or "non-neutral" language whilst an editor is typing. Editors who work with newcomers, or help to fix this kind of writing, or are interested in how we use artificial intelligence in our projects are encouraged to attend. The meeting will be on April 28, 2025 at 18:00–19:00 UTC and hosted on Zoom.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-04-22. Missed the previous one? See issue #675. <translate>Translations are available</translate>
<translate>Past: Missed the Q2 Wikidata+Wikibase office hour? You can catch up by reading the session log here: [[<tvar name="2">d:Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:Events/Telegram office hour 2025-04-16</tvar>|2025-04-16 (Q2 2025)]]</translate>
<translate> Press, articles, blog posts, videos </translate>
<translate>Mastodon bot</translate> <translate> that "highlights natural compounds found in plants, fungi, bacteria or animals — and includes Wikidata references and visual structure depictions."</translate>
<translate>Tool of the week</translate>
<translate>[[<tvar name="3">d:Special:MyLanguage/User:Spinster/Wikidata_references_made_easier</tvar>|User:Spinster/Wikidata references made easier]]: The script helps in adding references to statements, in order to provide context for our data, make the data more reliable, transparent and trustworthy for anyone who uses it </translate>.
<translate>Other Noteworthy Stuff</translate>
<translate>Registration is open for a Wikidata ontology course led by Peter Patel-Schneider and Ege Doğan.</translate> <translate>To register, email pfpschneidergmail.com with your Wikidata username and a brief note on your interest. The course starts 1 May, with weekly lectures on Thursdays from 1–3pm EDT (skipping 29 May and 12 June).</translate> <translate>Space may be limited; priority goes to those already interested. Participants should know Wikidata, attend sessions, complete weekly exercises (~1 hour), and join a group project</translate>. <translate>Details: Course page</translate>
Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles.
<translate>Wikidata job openings at the The Wikimedia Foundation</translate>
organization code (the organization code of the organization item. Should either be used with qualifier property {{Q|P459}} to specify which system being used, or be used as the qualifier of {{P|31}}.)
organization unit code (the organization unit code of the organization unit/part/(sub)division item. Should either be used with qualifier property {{Q|P459}} to specify which system being used, or be used as the qualifier of {{P|31}}.)
Picture composition (Description of a picture composition (design rules) analogous to the Commons category “[[:commons:Category:Picture composition]]”)
<translate>WikiProject Highlights</translate>: <translate>[[<tvar name="51">d:Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:WikiProject Taiwan/Travel</tvar>|Taiwan Travel]]</translate> - <translate>aims to create travel related items about Taiwan</translate>
<translate>[[<tvar name="6">d:Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:Showcase items</tvar>|Showcase Items]] </translate>: Pete's Dragon (Q18786473) - 2016, film by David Lowery
<translate>[[<tvar name="7">d:Wikidata:Showcase lexemes</tvar>|Showcase Lexemes]]: Bill (L3855) - English noun (/bɪl/) that can mean "invoice", "proposed law", "bird's beak", or "a given name"</translate>:
<translate>Development</translate>
<translate>Wikidata changes in watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and co: We are continuing the work on making the edit summaries more understandable </translate>(phab:T386200)
<translate>Wikibase REST API: We are continuing to build out the simple search functionality</translate> (phab:T389011)
<translate>Dark mode: We are fixing a few remaining issues with dark mode support in the Vector 2022 theme</translate> (phab:T389633)
<translate> Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed [[<tvar name="8">d:Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:Status_updates/Next#Newest_properties_and_property_proposals_to_review</tvar>|above]] </translate>.
<translate>Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme [[<tvar name="9">d:Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:Status_updates/Next#Did_you_know?</tvar>|above]]</translate>.
<translate> Summarize your [[<tvar name="11">d:Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:Status_updates/Next#Did_you_know?</tvar>|WikiProject's ongoing activities]] in one or two sentences</translate>.
<translate>Help [[<tvar name="11">d:Special:LanguageStats</tvar>|translate]] or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!</translate>
<translate> [[<tvar name="12">d:Special:MyLanguage/User:Pasleim/projectmerge</tvar>|Help merge identical items]] across Wikimedia projects </translate>.
<translate>Help [[<tvar name="13">d:Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:Status updates/Next</tvar>|write the next summary!]]</translate>
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-04-28. Missed the previous one? See issue #676. Translations are available
quarry.wmcloud.org is a public querying interface for Wiki Replicas, a set of live replica SQL databases of public Wikimedia Wikis. Quarry is designed to make running queries against Wiki Replicas easy. Quarry can also be used to query public databases stored in ToolsDB.
terminal speaker (the last person able to speak the language fluently)
nomenclatural type of (taxon item of which this item is the taxonomic type (name-bearing type), e.g. the family for which this genus is the type, the genus for which this species is the type, the taxon for which this type specimen is the type, ect...)
interior designer (person responsible for the interior design of a notable building or structure)
kigo of (season which denotes the sense in haiku in Japanese)
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
defined for (the subject takes the object as parameter (or parameter tuple))
The Long Distance Walkers Association (External Identifier (URL slug) for a hiking route on The Long Distance Walkers Association website (United Kingdom only))
Showcase Lexemes: Córdoba (L642328) - Spanish noun (kór-do-ba) that can mean "a city in Spain", "a city in Argentina", or "a Mexican city"
Development
Bug: We fixed an issue where newly created Properties became inaccessible after adding a statement with a Property linking to an Item or Lexeme. The fix will go live on Wednesday. (phab:T374230)
Search: We continued implementing the new search that will make it easier to search for Properties and Lexemes in the UI (phab:T321543)
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
Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, will have access to the CampaignEvents extension this week. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. They won't have to manually grant themselves the right before they can manage events as requested by a community.
The release of the next major version of Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, is scheduled for 29 April 2025. Technical editors will have access to the release by the week of 5 May 2025. This update will include a number of breaking changes and minor visual changes. Instructions on handling the breaking and visual changes are documented on this page. Pre-release testing is reported in T386298, with post-release issues tracked in T392379 and T392390.
Users of Wiki Replicas will notice that the database views of ipblocks, ipblocks_ipindex, and ipblocks_compat are now deprecated. Users can query the block and block_target new views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025.
The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which brings the global technical community together to connect, brainstorm, and hack existing projects, will take place from May 2 to 4th, 2025, at Istanbul, Turkey.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-05-05. Missed the previous one? See issue #677. Translations are available
Discussions
Closed request for permissions/Bot: Mr Robot - No consensus reached.
OpenStreetMap: OpenStreetMap, is a project that creates and distributes free geographic data for the world. It was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways .
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Ever played Redactle? Lucas put together a Wikidata version of it. Can you guess the Item? Still needs a bit of work but you can try it out now.
Showcase Lexemes: Tribe (L28956) - English noun (trīb) that can mean "a social division in traditional society", "a political subdivision", or "a genre of Techno Music":
Development
Wikidata Query Service: The search platform team finished the remaining work for the graph split and it is going live this week.
Wikipedia and co: We continued working on improving how Wikidata edits are shown on the watchlist on Wikipedia and co. We are focusing on showing labels instead of IDs for the entities (Items, Properties, ...) linked in the edit summaries (phab:T388685)
UI: We continued doing small fixes for dark mode support in the UI (phab:T385039)
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing the work on the search endpoint (phab:T383126)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Admins can now choose which namespaces are permitted for Event Registration via Community Configuration (documentation). The default setup is for event registration to be permitted in the Event namespace, but other namespaces (such as the project namespace or WikiProject namespace) can now be added. With this change, communities like WikiProjects can now more easily use Event Registration for their collaborative activities.
Editors can now transclude the Collaboration List on a wiki page (documentation). The Collaboration List is an automated list of events and WikiProjects on the wikis, accessed via Special:AllEvents (example). Now, the Collaboration List can be added to all sorts of wiki pages, such as: a wiki mainpage, a WikiProject page, an affiliate page, an event page, or even a user page.
Developers who use the moment library in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like the Intl library or the new mediawiki.DateFormatter library. The moment library has been deprecated and will begin to log messages in the developer console. You can see a global search for current uses, and ask related questions in this Phabricator task.
Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikidata term store tables (wbt_*) need to update their code to connect to a separate database cluster. These tables are being split into a separate database cluster. Tools that query those tables via the wiki replicas must be adapted to connect to the new cluster instead. Documentation and related links are available. [46]
The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on preparing to expand the deployment to additional wikis as soon as this week (starting May 6) and scaling up over the following weeks, plus exploring filtering and transforming source data.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-05-12. Missed the previous one? See issue #678. Translations are available
Past: Wikimedia Hackathon happened on May 4. Check out the closing showcase that included some Wikidata-related projects: Etherpad (Hackaton 2025)
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
GLAM and Wikidata: The "GLAMorous Wikidata" Campaign: In March 2025, Wikimedia Serbia launched a local thematic campaign called GLAMurous Wikidata, focused on improving data about cultural and heritage institutions on Wikidata.
Wikidata and Research: The programme for the “Wikidata and Research” conference is now available online. Scheduled for 5–6 June 2025 at the University of Florence, this event is convened by a volunteer Scientific Committee in collaboration with Wikimedia Italia and the University of Florence.
Wdactle game -- is a Wikidata version of Redactle! It's a game where you are shown a Wikidata Item with all labels and words redacted and have to figure out what it is. Guessing a word reveals all the places where it is used. Built by Luca Werkmeister during the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
⚠️ Wikidata Query Service graph split: As you know Wikidata Query Service was no longer able to handle the complete set of data Wikidata has. To address this the graph in Wikidata Query Service has now been split into a main graph (that continues to be at query.wikidata.org) and a scholarly graph (that is at query-scholarly.wikidata.org). For more details please see Wikidata:SPARQL query service/WDQS graph split.
Join the Wikidata:Impact stories global campiagn. We're celebrating the amazing Wikidata community - editors, developers, librarians, and creators - and inviting you to share how Wikidata is used. Your story can inspire others and grow the community. Submit yours or nominate a cool project by June 6.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
related video (less fitting video, used only because a better alternative is not available. If an appropriate video of the item is available, use P10 instead. Value should not be a generic placeholder.)
cosplay of (character(s) that are cosplayed in this image or video)
Showcase Lexemes: Projektion (L494436) - German noun (pro-yek-tsi̯oːn) that can mean "projection", "image display", or "defence mechanism in Psychoanalysis"
Development
mul language code: We are fixing an issue where Items can't be found by their mul language label or alias (phab:T392058)
Wikibase REST API: We are working on phrase matching for the simple search (phab:T389011)
Dark mode: We fixed a color contrast bug with the entity selector when making new statements (phab:T393641)
Ontology: We’re working on an updated, more complete version of the wikibase.owl ontology file (phab:T371752)
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 "Get shortened URL" link on the sidebar now includes a QR code. Wikimedia site users can now use it by scanning or downloading it to quickly share and access shared content from Wikimedia sites, conveniently.
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Foundation is working on a system called Edge Uniques, which will enable A/B testing, help protect against distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is to help more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for. Tech News has previously written about this. The deployment will be gradual. Some might see the Edge Uniques cookie the week of 19 May. You can discuss this on the talk page.
Starting May 19, 2025, Event organisers in wikis with the CampaignEvents extension enabled can use Event Registration in the project namespace (e.g., Wikipedia namespace, Wikidata namespace). With this change, communities don't need admins to use the feature. However, wikis that don't want this change can remove and add the permitted namespaces at Special:CommunityConfiguration/CampaignEvents.
The Wikipedia project now has a Wikipedia in Nupe (w:nup:). This is a language primarily spoken in the North Central region of Nigeria. Speakers of this language are invited to contribute to new Wikipedia.
Developers can now access pre-parsed Dutch Wikipedia, amongst others (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) through the Structured Contents snapshots (beta). The content includes parsed Wikipedia abstracts, descriptions, main images, infoboxes, article sections, and references.
The /page/data-parsoid REST API endpoint is no longer in use and will be deprecated. It is scheduled to be turned off on June 7, 2025.
The IPv6 support is a newly introduced Cloud virtual network that significantly boosts Wikimedia platforms' scalability, security, and readiness for the future. If you are a technical contributor eager to learn more, check out this blog post for an in-depth look at the journey to IPv6.
