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Wikidata weekly summary #432

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Rob Fernandez (Wikimedia District of Columbia) on Listeria, a tool that uses SPARQL queries to define a list, and provides a bot that will update a wiki page containing that list if the results of that SPARQL query change, all based on Wikidata, 08 September. Agenda
    • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 8 at 18:00 CEST
    • Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #19 Facebook, YouTube, September 10
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #29, September 13
  • Development
    • Added Wikidata support to Japanese Wikivoyage. phab:T261451
    • Investigating the nature of our training outliers to improve the way ORES automatically scores the quality of an Item.
    • Working on error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an item. phab:T260869
    • Completed various investigations to make an informed decision on the output format of WikibaseManifest files (automated configuration detection for toolbuilders) phab:T261285
    • Completed various bug fixes and wrap-up tasks to conclude the major engineering work on the Federated Properties project
    • More work on Item Quality Scoring and Federated Properties

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.

Tech News: 2020-37

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

Changes later this week

  • Normally pages can be moved to a title that has no existing page yet or to a page that has only one revision, which is a redirect to the page to be moved. A new user right allows editors to move pages over one-revision pages that redirect to anywhere. [1]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 September. It will be on all wikis from 10 September (calendar).
  • Advanced item All MediaWiki API modules will now use watchlist instead of watch. This was inconsistent before. [2]

Future changes

  • The Wikipedia Android app team might work on patrolling tools in the future. You can let them know what tools would be useful for you or for less experienced patrollers. See the page on mediawiki.org.
  • OTRS will be updated to a new version. This will probably take around two days. OTRS agents will not have access to the system during these days. Emails that come in during the update will be delivered when the update is done. The plan is to start around 08:00 UTC on 14 September. This could change. [3]
  • The Wikipedia Android app will send push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will need Google Play Services to work. It will also be possible to get the app without Google Play Services but push notifications will not work. Google Play Services is also used to make the app work for Android 4.4 users. [4][5]
  • Advanced item Wikimedia code review could move to GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. You can take part in the consultation.
  • Advanced item Dropdown menus in the Vector skin use a .menu class. This will not work in the future. Scripts can use nav ul instead. .vectorTabs and .vectorMenu will also not work. Some scripts need to be updated. You can read more in Phabricator.

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

15:59, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #433

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Mbabel is a tool that simplifies article creation by providing pre-made sentences based on Wikidata statements.
  • Development
    • Fixing an error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an Item instead of just one. (phabricator:T260869)
    • Development of version one of Federated Properties has concluded! Expect an announcement with timing of the release of this feature soon. Wikibase users who want an early look at the feature are invited to reach out to participate in the pre-release testing round.
    • Development of the WikibaseManifest extension has continued into its second sprint; we focused on determining a product specification for the Manifest output.
    • Finishing a draft documentation for a REST API to get it ready for a feedback round before implementation.
    • Finished improvements to the automated scoring of the quality of Items with ORES. Still need to retrain ORES and deploy the changes before the scores are actually different though.

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.

Tech News: 2020-38

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

Problems

  • The Wikipedia apps briefly showed pages without CSS last week. This meant they looked wrong. It was quickly fixed but cached pages without CSS were shown for a few hours. [6][7]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 September. It will be on all wikis from 17 September (calendar).

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

16:18, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Guild of Copy Editors September 2020 Newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors September 2020 Newsletter

Hello and welcome to the September GOCE newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since June 2020.

                 Current and upcoming events

September Drive: Our current backlog-elimination drive is open until 23:59 on 30 September (UTC) and is open to all copy editors. Sign up today!

Election reminder: our end-of-year Election of Coordinators opens for nominations on 1 December. Coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought of helping out at the Guild, or know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them here.

Drive and Blitz reports

June Blitz: An uncorrected typo (even copy editors make copy editing mistakes!) led to an eight-day "leap blitz" from 14 to 21 June, focusing on requests and articles tagged in May. 19 participating editors claimed 54 copy edits. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.

July Drive: Over 750,000 words of articles were copy edited for this event, keeping pace with the previous three self-isolated drives. Of the 38 people who signed up, 30 copyedited at least one article. Final results and awards are listed here.

August Blitz: From 16 to 22 August, we copy edited articles tagged in June and July 2020 and requests. 12 participating editors completed 37 copy edits on the blitz. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.

Other news

June election: Jonesey95 was chosen to continue as lead coordinator, assisted by Baffle gab1978, Tdslk, Twofingered Typist, and first-time coordinator Puddleglum2.0. Reidgreg took a break after serving for a couple years. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Progress report: As of 01:33, 18 September 2020 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors had processed 532 requests since 1 January and there were 38 requests awaiting completion on the Requests page. The backlog of articles tagged for copy-editing stood at 433 (see monthly progress graph above).

Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Jonesey95, Baffle gab1978, Puddleglum2.0, Tdslk and Twofingered Typist.

To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:02, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #434

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata Introduction Workshop (German) (September 29)
    • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 21 at 18:00 CEST
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: A starting point for newer institutions to think through what is involved in coordinating a Wikidata project, including shared infrastructure, training, and documentation, 22 September. Agenda
    • Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #21 WikiDojo: Facebook, YouTube, September 25
  • Tool of the week
    • copy-qid is a user script by Abbe98 that allows you to copy the Qid with one click.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • WQS now supports mwapi service request for Wikibooks (phab:T261125)
    • The language codes lij-mc, ja-Hira, ja-Kana, ja-Hrkt, ja-Hani, ojp, ojp-Hira and ojp-Hani" have been added for use in monolingual text property values (phab:T254968, phab:T195816)
    • The language codes de-1901, eo-hsistemo and eo-xsistemo, ja-hira, ja-kana and ja-hrkt have been added for Lexemes (phab:T262330,phab:T257422, phab:T250559)
    • P1438 has been converted from string to external ID datatype (phab:T262198)
    • Worked on fixing an input issue with invisible characters (phab:T261071)
    • Investigating what work would be needed to get the new termbox that's available on mobile to also work on desktop
    • Fixing several issues with Special:Undelete (phab:T261747)
    • Fixing an error message being shown twice (phab:T260869)
    • Starting the coding work on the Query Builder
    • Continuing to write a draft for a REST API specification
    • Finishing the remaining work needed to get the improved quality scoring for Items deployed to ORES
    • Continuing work on WikibaseManifest: Determined the essential metadata that will be included in the WikibaseManifest file, added some new features (mostly MediaWiki metadata) to the Manifest that were requested by the OpenRefine team (phab:T262805 and phab:T262804) and set up a test system that will soon be ready for tool builders to use for testing the integration of their tools with WikibaseManifest


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.

Tech News: 2020-39

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

Recent changes

  • There is a new tag for reverted edits. For example you can see it in the recent changes feed or in the article history. It is added to edits when they have been undone, rollbacked or manually reverted to an older version of the page. [8][9]

Changes later this week

  • The number of times you can do something in a period of time on wiki is limited. This could be the number of edits per minute or the number of users you email in a day. Some users are not affected by all limits because of their user rights. They could soon see the limit even if it does not affect them. [10]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 September. It will be on all wikis from 24 September (calendar).

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

21:26, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

"Ocean Planet" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Ocean Planet. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 September 21#Ocean Planet until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. Mdewman6 (talk) 23:45, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 September 2020

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:47, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 September 2020

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:53, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #435

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • The Wikidata development team is seeking to evaluate and improve the process of collecting and reacting to bug reports and feature requests. You can give feedback about your experience using this anonymous form until September 30th or add feedback publically to Wikidata talk:Contact the development team/Process review 2020.
    • Nominate your favorite tools for the Coolest Tool Award 2020 before October 14th.
    • Wikidata Walkabout is a new site that lets you browse and drill down through different "classes" of data on Wikidata: wikidatawalkabout.org
    • Como is a new Android app, that uses Wikidata lexemes and senses to create a word-guessing game. It let's players create new senses and tests them on other players to finally save them in Wikidata. The app is developed as part of a BA thesis, to determine if this concept is useful to create more lexicographical data, and testers would be very welcome.
  • Development
    • A long-standing bug has been fixed (T217144) where Items and Lexemes created via OAuth would not be added to the user’s watchlist even if the user had the Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist setting enabled. (The Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist setting was probably likewise ineffective, but this was not tested specifically.) Affected tools include QuickStatements, Mix'n'Match, and Wikidata Lexeme Forms; users of these and other tools may see more pages being added to their watchlists now. (This only applies to new edits and page creations; previously created or edited pages will not be automatically added to the watchlist retroactively.)
    • Working on the basic building blocks of the Query Builder towards making it possible to create the first very simple query with it
    • Talking to people about comparing Wikidata's data against other databases and flagging mismatches
    • Fixing an issue with Item creations via the API by blocked users leading to skipped entity IDs (phab:T232620)
    • Fixed an input issue with invisible characters (phab:T261071)
    • Finishing the draft of the REST API spec to get it ready for feedback
    • WikibaseManifest: created a separate key for local entities and decided what we do about non-local entity sources based on tool-builder feedback (phab:T263527) and specifying the API in OpenApi format (phab:T262919)


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.

Tech News: 2020-40

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

Recent changes

  • Admins can now see links to diffs of deleted revisions on Special:AbuseLog. This uses the interface of Special:Undelete. [11]
  • Editors are automatically added to some user groups. For example editors are added to autoconfirmed users when they have edited enough times and long enough. Abuse filters can hinder users from automatically getting user rights for a period of time. They can also remove rights user have. Wikis can now ask to change how long this period of time is for their wiki in Phabricator. It is currently five days. [12]

Problems

  • Last year some abuse filters stopped working because of a new change. If they tried to use variables that were unavailable for that action they would fail. This has now been fixed. [13]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 September. It will be on all wikis from 1 October (calendar).

Future changes

  • You can't see the language links to other language versions from the talk page or history page. They are also not shown when you edit an article. This could change. It is not decided if for example the history page should link to another history page or to the article. You can take part in the discussion in Phabricator.
  • The link colours could change. This is to make the difference between links and other text more clear. You can read more in Phabricator.
  • In your preferences you can choose to get different notifications on the web or by email. You will see Apps as one of the alternatives later this week. This is because the Android and iOS Wikipedia apps will use push notifications for those who want them. You can see the preferences on the test wiki. The goal is to have push notifications on Android in October and on iOS in early 2021. [14]
  • You can soon put pages on your watchlist for a limited time. This could be useful if you want to watch something for a shorter time but don't want it on your watchlist forever. It now works on mediawiki.org and will come to more wikis later. You can read more and see when it will come to other wikis.
  • You can see what Wikimedians think are the best new technical tools this year. You can also nominate them.

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

21:23, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of KOI-7296.01

Notice

The article KOI-7296.01 has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

This planet candidate has been determined to be a false positive, and isn't otherwise notable.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. SevenSpheresCelestia (talk) 22:54, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of KOI-7599.01

Notice

The article KOI-7599.01 has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

This planet candidate has been determined to be a false positive, and isn't otherwise notable.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. SevenSpheresCelestia (talk) 22:57, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Merger discussion for KOI-2124.01

An article that you have been involved in editing—KOI-2124.01—has been proposed for merging with another article. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. SevenSpheresCelestia (talk) 23:18, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Merger discussion for KOI-7617.01

An article that you have been involved in editing—KOI-7617.01—has been proposed for merging with another article. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. SevenSpheresCelestia (talk) 23:18, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #436

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
  • Events
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Professor Toby Hudson on Entity Explosion, a browser extension which allows you to get information about entities on the web page you’re visiting, 06 October. Agenda
    • Upcoming: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, October 27th at 17:00 CEST (15:00 GMT)
    • Upcoming: plenty of events for the Wikidata birthday, check the calendar and feel free to organise one!
  • Tool of the week
    • IllWill.js is a userscript that searches Wikidata for foreign-language sitelinks, to populate Template:ill and replace plain red links on other Wikimedia projects.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • omeka-s-wikidata is a new module for the open source GLAM collection management software Omeka, that allows cataloguers to use Wikidata as a vocabulary for persons, places, subjects, etc.
  • Development
    • First pieces of the Query Builder are coming together and we are working towards making it generate the first dumb query
    • Talking to people about their thoughts on checking Wikidata's data against other databases. If you're interested reach out to Mohammed.
    • Got some first internal feedback for the REST API specification draft. We'll publish it for feedback in the next days.
    • Fixing an issue with certain language codes no longer being available (phab:T264294)
    • Working on making sure blocked bots don't waste Item IDs when trying to create new Items (phab:T232620)

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.

Tech News: 2020-41

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

Recent changes

  • There is a new tool where you can see which home wiki users have in discussions on Meta. This can help show which communities are not part of the discussion on wikis where we make decisions that affect many other wikis.
  • You can now thank users for file uploads or for changing the language of a page. [15]

Problems

  • There were many errors with the new MediaWiki version last week. The new version was rolled back. Updates that should have happened last week are late. [16]
  • Everyone was logged out. This was because a user reported being logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [17]
  • Advanced item Many pages have JavaScript errors. You can read more and now see a list of user scripts with errors.

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 October. It will be on all wikis from 8 October (calendar).
  • Letters immediately after a link are shown as part of the link. For example the entire word in [[Child]]ren is linked. On Arabic wikis this works at both the start and end of a word. Previously on Arabic wikis numbers and other non-letter Unicode characters were shown as part of the link at the start of a word but not at the end. Now only Latin and Arabic letters will extend links on Arabic wikis. [18]

Future changes

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

16:24, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

Merger discussion for EPIC 203771098

An article that you have been involved in editing—EPIC 203771098—has been proposed for merging with another article. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. SevenSpheresCelestia (talk) 21:08, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

WikiProject Video games Newsletter Q3 2020

The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter
Volume 12, No. 3 — 3rd Quarter, 2020
Previous issue | Index | Next issue

Project At a Glance
As of Q3 2020, the project has:

Content

Project Navigation
To opt-out or sign up to receive future editions of this newsletter, click here to update the distribution list.
(Delivered ~~~~~)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:10, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-42

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

Problems

  • Because of the problems with the MediaWiki version two weeks ago last week's updates are also late. [20][21][22]

Changes later this week

  • Live previews didn't show the templates used in the preview if you just edited a section. This has now been fixed. You can also test CSS and JavaScript pages even if you have the live preview enabled. Previously this didn't work well. [23][24]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 October. It will be on all wikis from 15 October (calendar).

Future changes

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

15:23, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #437

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: MsynABot
    • Closed request for adminship: Fuzheado (successful)
  • Tool of the week
    • OD2WD automatically converts CSV files from Open Data portals into QuickStatements for Wikidata republishing. Demo video
  • Development
    • The RFC to semi-protect all property pages has been implemented, all properties now require the “autoconfirmed” right to edit (T254280)
    • Working on enabling JSON dumps for Lexemes (phab:T220883)
    • Finishing preventing blocked users from making us skip QIDs (phab:T232620)
    • Continuing work on the Wikibase Manifest extension that allows toolbuilders to easily access configurations of a specific Wikibase instance so it is easier for them to make their tools work with not just Wikidata but also other Wikibase instances
    • Started analyzing what we consider a mismatch for our work around checking Wikidata's data against other databases
    • Continued work on the Query Builder to get it to create the first very simple query. It can do that now but not yet visualize the result.

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 #438

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Prepbio tool uses Wikidata to create the beginnings of a Wikipedia stub biography article. (2020-10-19)
  • Development
    • Blocked users trying to create new Items no longer make us skip QIDs (phab:T232620)
    • So far we don't have JSON dumps for Lexemes. We're working on regularly generating them as well now (phab:T264883)
    • Continuing work on getting the Query Builder to generate the first query. Almost there.
    • Started the feedback round for the REST API. Please provide your input if you are currently using the action API or plan to develop against Wikidata's API in the future.

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.

Tech News: 2020-43

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

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 October. It will be on all wikis from 22 October (calendar).

Future changes

  • You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on 27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [26]
  • Advanced item In the AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function will be updated soon so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [27]
  • Some gadgets and user-scripts use the HTML div with the ID #jump-to-nav. This div will be removed soon. Maintainers should replace these uses with either #siteSub or #mw-content-text. A list of affected scripts is at the top of phab:T265373.

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

16:30, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #439

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Past: Providing sustainable data services through Wikibase and Wikidata, SEMIC Conference 2020 - (replay)
    • Past: Introduction to Wikidata by Frimelle, Software Freedom Kosova 2020 - (replay)
    • Past: What's new in Wikidata? by Lea Lacroix, Lydia Pintscher and Mattia Capozzi, ItWikiCon 2020 - (replay)
    • Ongoing: plenty of Wikidata birthday events, online and onsite! Here's an overview of the upcoming events, you can find the links and details in the main calendar.
      • WikiCite virtual conference on October 26-28, live-streamed on Youtube and Twitter, with sessions across many timezones and languages – English, French, German, Indonesian, and Portuguese.
      • Wikidata Education Week, online, on October 26-30
      • 24-hours online meetup, on October 28-29: an open discussion with plenty of community members facilitating exchange around the topic "what makes you enthusiastic about Wikidata"
      • Gene Wiki: how to synchronize and curate primary sources with and in Wikidata, online, on October 29th
      • Birthday celebration in Rennes, France, on October 29th
      • Birthday Celebration in Accra, Ghana, and online, on October 29th
    • Upcoming: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, October 27th at 17:00 CET (16:00 GMT)
    • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, October 27 at 18:00 CET
  • Tool of the week
    • WikibaseJS-cli allows to edit Wikidata from command line, including creating items from samples ("templates") and do complex transformations of statements
  • Development
    • Got the Query Builder to create the first simple queries. You can follow along the development from now on on the test system.
    • Preparing regular JSON dumps for Lexemes (phab:T264883)
    • Analyzed a number of queries to the query service together with the WMF search team to better understand what the queries are doing and what further optimizations we can make to the query service and which queries need different systems to answer them.
    • Working on creating and tracking implicit usages of Wikidata descriptions so description changes show up in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co (phab:T265897)
    • Created Extension:WikibaseManifest documentation on MediaWiki.
    • Looking into what would be considered a mismatch when comparing WIkidata's data against another database. This is groundwork for potentially automating this in the future to find potential issues in the data to flag to editors.
    • Working on deploying the new Item quality scoring model for ORES to production so we have improved quality scores
    • Finished investigating how to handle a restricted list of external Wikibase services. (phab:T265118)
    • Removed noratelimit on bots for wikidata.org (phab:T258354)
    • Published Easier Access for Programmers to Wikidata research report

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.

Tech News: 2020-44

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

Problems

  • You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on October 27 around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [28]
  • Last week, links to "diffs" from mobile watchlists and recentchanges were linking to page-revisions instead of diffs. This has now been fixed. [29]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

  • Since the introduction of the interface administrators user group in 2018, administrators couldn’t view the deleted history of CSS/JS pages. Now they can. [30]
  • There was a problem with the Change Tags. The software would apply the "Reverted" tag to any page actions such as page-protection changes if they came directly after a reverted edit. This has now been fixed for new edits. [31]
  • The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias in November. Another announcement will be made once the date is finalized. [32]

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

17:37, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Maths, science, and technology request for comment

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Growth team updates #15

Welcome to the fifteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Variants C and D deployed

Variant D in Portuguese Wikipedia

Variants C and D are two new arrangements of the newcomer homepage. We hope they will increase the number of users using suggested edits. They both make suggested edits the clear place where newcomers should get started on the page. They have some differences in their workflows, because we want to test which design is better. We deployed these variants on October 19; half of newcomers get each variant. After about 5 weeks, we will analyze the data from the tests. The goal is to determine which variant is helping more newcomers to make more suggested edits. We will identify the better variant and then use it with all newcomers.

Concept A for add a link.

As we discussed in previous newsletters, the team is working on our first "structured task": the "add a link" task. After community discussion on design ideas, we ran user tests on the mobile designs. We decided on the design concept we want to use moving forward: Concept A. We're now engineering the backend for this feature. Next, we will be running user tests for desktop designs.

Learn more about the findings.

Community news

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:09, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 November 2020

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:50, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-45

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

Recent changes

  • You can no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser uses very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It could lead to downgrade attacks. Since October 29, 2020, users who use old TLS versions will not be able to connect to Wikimedia projects. A list of browser recommendations is available. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [33]
  • Advanced item There is a new automatic tracking category available: Pages with non-numeric formatnum arguments. It collects pages which use the {{formatnum}} parser function with invalid (non-numeric) input, e.g. {{formatnum:TECHNEWS}}. Note that {{formatnum:123,456}} is also invalid input: as described in the documentation, the argument should be unformatted so that it can be reliably and correctly localised. The tracking category will help identify problematic usage and double-formatting. The new tracking category's name can be translated at translatewiki. [34]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 4. It will be on all wikis from November 5 (calendar).
  • Administrators and stewards will be able to use a special page (Special:CreateLocalAccount) to force local account creation for a global account. This is useful when account creation is blocked for that user (by a block or a filter). [35]
  • The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias on November 4. This change excludes the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias, plus a few smaller Wikipedias with special circumstances. You can read the help page and the troubleshooting guide for more information. [36]

Future changes

  • A discussion has been restarted about using a Unicode minus sign (− U+2212) in the output of {{formatnum}} when it is given a negative argument. [37]
  • In the future IP addresses of unregistered users will not be shown for everyone. They will get an alias instead. There will be a new user right or an opt-in function for more vandal fighters to see the IPs of unregistered users. There would be some criteria for who gets the user right or opt-in. There will also be other new tools to help handle vandalism. This is early in the process and the developers are still collecting information from the communities before they suggest solutions.

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

16:08, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #440

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Hasley (RfP scheduled to end after 2 November 2020 17:23 UTC)
  • Events
    • Past: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, October 27 (notes)
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Arthur Smith and Daniel Mietchen discussing author items in Wikidata and the Author Disambiguator Tool, 3 November. Agenda
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #37, November 8
    • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, November 3 at 18:00 CET
This is 32 hours of video covering 85 individual presentations in 7 languages.
1266 "unique viewers" have watched some portion on YouTubeSince the conference began last Monday.
  • Tool of the week
    • reCH is a Wikidata anti-vandalism tool that is used to review edits and patrol new changes.
  • Development
    • Fixing the issue of `content was: ""` (empty string) when deleting Lexemes (phab:T263435)
    • Final steps for deployment of JSON dumps for Lexeme (phab:T264883)
    • Working on fixing an issue with adding statements with datatype mathematical formula (phab:T266673)
    • The Query Builder can now generate its first very simple query and show the result. You can follow along as we develop it at the demo system.

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.

WikiCup 2020 November newsletter

The 2020 WikiCup has come to an end, with the final round going down to the wire. Our new Champion is England Lee Vilenski (submissions), the runner-up last year, who was closely followed by England Gog the Mild (submissions). In the final round, Lee achieved 4 FAs and 30 GAs, mostly on cue sport topics, while Gog achieved 3 FAs and 15 GAs, mostly on important battles and wars, which earned him a high number of bonus points. Botswana The Rambling Man (submissions) was in third place with 4 FAs and 8 GAs on football topics, with New York (state) Epicgenius (submissions) close behind with 19 GAs and 16 DYK's, his interest being the buildings of New York.

The other finalists were Gondor Hog Farm (submissions), Indonesia HaEr48 (submissions), Somerset Harrias (submissions) and Free Hong Kong Bloom6132 (submissions). The final round was very productive, and besides 15 FAs, contestants achieved 75 FAC reviews, 88 GAs and 108 GAN reviews. Altogether, Wikipedia has benefited greatly from the activities of WikiCup competitors all through the contest. Well done everyone!

All those who reached the final will receive awards and the following special awards will be made, based on high performance in particular areas of content creation. So that the finalists do not have an undue advantage, these prizes are awarded to the competitor who scored the highest in any particular field in a single round, or in the event of a tie, to the overall leader in this field.

Next year's competition will begin on 1 January. You are invited to sign up to participate; the WikiCup is open to all Wikipedians, both novices and experienced editors, and we hope to see you all in the 2021 competition. Until then, it only remains to once again congratulate our worthy winners, and thank all participants for their involvement! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13, Sturmvogel 66, Vanamonde and Cwmhiraeth MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:37, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #441

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Template:Cite Q on Wikipedia makes it easier to use Wikidata items as Wikipedia references.
  • Development
    • Continuing work with the WMF search team to automatically categorize WDQS queries to see how they can better be served
    • Query Builder work is continuing. Next step is making it possible to create a query with an arbitrary Property instead of the currently hard-coded post code.
    • Feedback round for the REST API is finishing this week and then we will review all the feedback and make changes to the spec accordingly.
    • Preparing to release 1.35 version of Wikibase docker image (phab:T264538)
    • Fixed Math extension to not require JS parser which caused issues creating new Statements for mathematical formulae (phab:T266673)
    • Made sure there is a meaningful edit summary when deleting a Lexeme (phab:T263435)

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.

Tech News: 2020-46

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

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

  • You can see reference previews. This shows a preview of the footnote when you hover over it. This has been a beta feature. It will move out of beta and be enabled by default. There will be an option not to use it. The developers are looking for small or medium-sized wikis to be the first ones. You can let them know if your wiki is interested. [38]
  • From November 16 the categories will not be sorted in order for a short time. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the internationalisation library. They will use a script to fix the existing categories. This can take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [39][40]

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

15:49, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-47

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

Recent changes

  • Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 16 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for most languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [41][42]

Changes later this week

  • If you merged two pages in a namespace where pages can't redirect this used to break the merge history. This will now be fixed. [43]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 November. It will be on all wikis from 19 November (calendar).

Future changes

  • The Community Wishlist Survey is now open for proposals. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals from 16 to 30 November. You can vote on proposals from 8 December to 21 December.

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

15:36, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #442

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • ALEC (A List of Everything Cool) is a tool to explore biodiversity content in Wikidata.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Join the upcoming #1Lib1Ref Wikipedia campaign from January 15th to February 5th 2021 and improve Wikidata items by adding references to statements.
  • Development
    • Added "Random lexeme" link under dedicated section for lexicographical data in the Wikidata sidebar (phab:T205525). Thanks to Matěj Suchánek!
    • Working on language/spelling variant selector bug on Special:NewItem and Special:NewLexeme that makes it difficult to continue creating Items or Lexemes (phab:T266638)
    • Work on the Query Builder continues. We're focusing on making it possible to query for all Items with a specific Property but any value next.
    • Went over all the feedback we have received for the REST API specification draft. Overall the feedback is positive and really useful. So we will move ahead after thinking more about the remaining points that were raised.
    • Working on making changes to descriptions show up in the RecentChanges feed and watchlists on Wikipedia and co as well even if they are not explicitly used (phab:T191831)
    • Fixed a problem adding statements with Properties of datatype mathematical formula (phab:T266496)
    • Kicked off our new effort to implement a predictable release cycle and release infrastructure for Wikibase suite by creating a prototype build workflow (phab:T267553) and prototype test workflow (phab:T267554)

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.

Tech News: 2020-48

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

Recent changes

  • Timestamps in Special:Log are now links. They go to Special:Log for only that entry. This is how timestamps work on for example the history page. [44]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

  • Advanced item The Wikimedia Cloud VPS hosts technical projects for the Wikimedia movement. Developers need to claim projects they use. This is because old and unused projects are removed once a year. Unclaimed projects can be shut down from 1 December. Unclaimed projects can be deleted from 1 January. [45]

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

17:17, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

ikidata weekly summary #443

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • EntityShape.js is a script that allows you to check an Item against an EntitySchema. On the Item page, it will display various information about the Item, like the properties that should be present on the Item.
  • Development
    • Query Builder: We're making it possible to switch between querying for specific values (e.g. all Items with a specific post code) or any value (all Items with a post code statement regardless of which one it is)
    • Correcting the behaviour of what automatically happens on Wikidata when a page is moved on Wikipedia and co to an excluded namespace with the "suppress redirect" option (phab:T261275)
    • Making language fallback indicators not show up for language variant fallbacks in a few more places (phab:T267502)
    • Adding html language attributes for statements linking to Forms and Senses (phab:T267023)
    • Working on language and lexical category fields turning red on unfocus even though no changes are made after a change in ooui (phab:T266936)
    • Finished building the 1.35 versions of the Wikibase base and bundle docker images and published to dockerhub (phab:T264538)

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.

ArbCom 2020 Elections voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2020 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 7 December 2020. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2020 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:44, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 November 2020

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:45, 29 November 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #444

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: We will have several speakers joining us to discuss their projects in lightning talks, 1 December. Agenda
    • Upcoming: WMF search platform team office hour, Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020. 16:00-17:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PST / 11:00-12:00 EST / 17:00-18:00 CET. Etherpad, Google Meet. You can come and chat about the Wikidata & Commons Query Service.
    • Online edition of the Wikimedia Coolest Tool Award ceremony, on Friday, December 11th at 17:00 UTC.
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #41, December 6
  • Tool of the week
    • osm2kg is a tool to facilitate matching Wikidata entries to OSM nodes.
  • Development
    • Development on the Query Builder is continuing. You can follow along at https://query-builder-test.toolforge.org
    • Fixed an issue where language fallback indicators were still shown when falling back from a variant of the language (phab:T267502)
    • Fixed an issue on Lexeme pages where language and lexical category fields turn red on unfocus even though no changes were made (phab:T266936)
    • Working on improving what happens to sitelinks when an article is moved to a unsupported namespace (phab:T261275))
    • Investigating a significant increase in skipped Item IDs (phab:T268625)
    • Addressing the feedback for the draft of the REST API spec

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.

Tech News: 2020-49

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

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 December. It will be on all wikis from 3 December (calendar).

Future changes

  • The iOS Wikipedia app will show readers more of the article history. They can see new updates and easier see how the article has changed over time. This is an experiment. It will first be shown only to some iOS app users as a test. [46][47]
  • Advanced item The Wiki Replicas can be used for SQL queries. You can use Quarry, PAWS or other ways to do this. To make the Wiki Replicas stable there will be two changes. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work. You can also only query a database if you connect to it directly. This will happen in February 2021. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech. [48]

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

17:43, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

Growth team updates #16

Welcome to the sixteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Growth features show impact

Newcomer task experiments results

The team recently published our analysis of the impact of newcomer tasks. We are happy to announce that we found that the Growth features, and particularly newcomer tasks, lead to increased editing from newcomers.

In November 2019, the Growth team added the "newcomer tasks" feature to the newcomer homepage. After six months, we collected data from Arabic, Vietnamese, Czech, and Korean Wikipedias. We analyzed the overall impact of the Growth features, including newcomer tasks.

This analysis finds that the Growth features lead to increases in:

  • the probability that newcomers make their first article edit (+11.6%)
  • the probability that they are retained as editors
  • the number of edits they make during their first couple of weeks on the wiki (+22%)

We also find that the quality of their edits, as measured by revert rate, is comparable to that of a control group.

  • The number of suggested edits completed by each wiki each week, going from December 2019 to November 2020, with a line for the total.
    The number of suggested edits completed by each wiki each week, going from December 2019 to November 2020, with a line for the total.
  • The number of distinct users completing suggested edits by each wiki each week, going from December 2019 to November 2020.
    The number of distinct users completing suggested edits by each wiki each week, going from December 2019 to November 2020.

Because of these results, we think all Wikipedias should consider implementing these features. Learn more about how to get them.

You can find more details about this experiment on the report page. Please post any feedback or questions on the talk page

General metrics

As of November 2020, across all wikis where the features have been deployed:

  • more than 5,000 newcomers have made more than 40,000 edits using Newcomer tasks.
  • more than 14,000 questions have been sent to volunteer mentors by more than 11,000 users.
  • more than 2,000 questions have been asked on help desks by more than 1,500 users.

Learn more about Growth results here, and please post any feedback or questions on the talk page.

Variants C and D

Variants C and D are two new arrangements of the newcomer homepage. We deployed them in October. After six weeks of these variants being deployed, we can see that they have led to increased interactions with newcomer tasks. Next, we will determine which variant is best and use that for all newcomers.

News for mentors

A separate list for workshops hosts

During workshops organized by education programs through the communities, workshops hosts like to mentor people they train on wiki. Several wikis requested to have a way to claim their mentees without having other newcomers being randomly being assigned to them. To address this need, a separate list can be created on wiki, for mentors that wish to claim mentees, but prefer not to have random mentees being assigned to them. Learn more about this feature.

Claiming multiple mentees at once

Mentors can use Special:ClaimMentee to claim a newcomer as their mentee. The feature now allows mentors to claim multiple newcomers at once.

Community news

The help panel allows people to post a message to the local help desk while editing. Previously, the tool always posted messages to the bottom of help desks. Wikis are now able to configure it to display new messages at the top of the help desk page. T261714


Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

14:22, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-50

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

Recent changes

  • You can now put pages on your watchlist for a limited period of time. Some wikis already had this function. [49][50]

Changes later this week

  • Information from Wikidata that is used on a wiki page can be shown in recent changes and watchlists on a Wikimedia wiki. To see this you need to turn on showing Wikidata edits in your watchlist in the preferences. Changes to the Wikidata description in the language of a Wikimedia wiki will then be shown in recent changes and watchlists. This will not show edits to languages that are not relevant to your wiki. [51][52]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all wikis from 10 December (calendar).

Future changes

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

16:14, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #445

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • We now have a central repository for wikibase-cli templates, with the aim to document best practices, offer general purpose request/create/edit templates, but also offer more niche templates as examples of what's possible: contributions and template requests welcome!
  • Development
    • Simple Query Builder development continues. We worked on combining different query conditions as well as internationalisation.
    • Making the precision translatable in geocoordinate and date inputs (phab:T269102)
    • Changes to descriptions in a specific language now show up on watchlist and recent changes on the Wikipedia and co for that language (phab:T191831)
    • Finished working on the problem of incorrectly-escaped label being included in a link to Special:NewItem if there are no search results (phab:T263258)
    • Investigating why we're currently skipping a significant number of Item IDs (phab:T268625)
    • Wikibase Release Strategy/Infrastructure: We have decided where to host future Docker and tarball releases of Wikibase. You can read about the details and the reasoning in the following ADRs: Docker Image Repository, Tarball Repository


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.

December 2020 Guild of Copy Editors Newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors December 2020 Newsletter

Hello and welcome to the December GOCE newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since September 2020.

                 Current and upcoming events

Election time: our end-of-year Election of Coordinators opened for nominations on 1 December and will close on 15 December at 23:59 (UTC). Voting opens at 00:01 the following day and will continue until 31 December at 23:59, just before Auld Lang Syne. Coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought of helping out at the Guild, or know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them here.

December Blitz: This will run from 13 to 19 December, and will target all Requests. Sign up now.

Drive and Blitz reports

September Drive: 67 fewer articles had copy-edit templates by this month's close. Of the 27 editors who signed up, 15 copy-edited at least one article, and 124 articles were claimed for the drive.

October Blitz: this ran from 18 to 24 October, and focused on articles tagged for copy-edit in July and August 2020, and all Requests. Of the 13 who signed up, 11 editors copy-edited at least one article. 21 articles were claimed for the blitz.

November Drive: Of the 18 editors who signed up, 15 copy-edited at least one article, and together claimed 134 articles. At the close of the drive, 67 fewer articles were in the backlog and we had dealt with 39 requests.

Other news

Progress report: As of 09:05, 3 December 2020 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors had processed 663 requests (18 from 2019) since 1 January and there were 52 requests awaiting completion on the Requests page. The backlog of articles tagged for copy-editing stood at 494 (see monthly progress graph above).

Annual Report for 2020: this roundup of the year's activity at the Guild is planned for publication in late January or early February.

Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Seasonal tidings and cheers from your GOCE coordinators: Jonesey95, Baffle gab1978, Puddleglum2.0, Tdslk and Twofingered Typist.

To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:46, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #446

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • datao.net is a visual tool for querying and exposing Wikidata easily.
  • Development
    • We spend the week doing some exploratory work for the next year. Among other things we looked into how to measure the number of constraint violations on an average Item and what we can learn from it.

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.

Tech News: 2020-51

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

Recent changes

  • There is a Wikipedia app for KaiOS phones. It was released in India in September. It can now be downloaded in other countries too. [53]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all wikis from 17 December (calendar).

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

21:33, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #447

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Wikidata Live is a real-time visual dashboard for Wikidata edits; paper, interface (visualizes recent changes to Wikidata in quasi real time).
  • Development
    • Continuing to work on the query builder. It can now have more than one query conditions. One of the next steps is making it possible to query for Item values. You can follow along on the demo system.
    • Finished working on the problem of values of Statements that link to Forms and Senses not having language attributes associated with them in the HTML code (phab:T267023)
    • Fixed language selectors covering other input fields when using keyboard navigation for Special:NewItem and Special:NewLexeme (phab:T266638)
    • Fixed language fallback indicators sometimes still shown for variant fallbacks (phab:T267502)
    • Working on whitespace stripped while typing when editing lexemes (phab:T250550)

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.

Tech News: 2020-52

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

Tech News

  • Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2021.

Recent changes

  • The {{citation needed}} template shows when a statement in a Wikipedia article needs a source. If you click on it when you edit with the visual editor there is a popup that explains this. Now it can also show the reason and when it was added. [54]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.

Future changes

  • You can propose and discuss what technical improvements should be done for geographic information. This could be coordinates, maps or other related things.
  • Some wikis use LanguageConverter to switch between writing systems or variants of a language. This can only be done for the entire page. There will be a <langconvert> tag that can convert a piece of text on a page. [55]
  • Oversighters and stewards can hide entries in Special:AbuseLog. They can soon hide multiple entries at once using checkboxes. This works like hiding normal edits. It will happen in early January. [56]

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

20:52, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 December 2020

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:25, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #448

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Ongoing: rC3 (remote Chaos Communication Congress). Several Wikidata-related talks and meetups happening on December 27th, 28th and 29th: introduction to Wikidata, Wikidata for datajournalists, Wikidata meetups in German and English, and a Query Service workshop. (see Wikipaka schedule for more details)
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Project Grants open call for proposals in 2021. Changes in the review process for Project Grants in 2021; the open call for community organizing proposals will be from January 11 to February 10 and the open call for software and research proposals will be from February 15 to March 16.
  • 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.

Welcome to the 2021 WikiCup!

Happy New Year and Happy New WikiCup! The competition begins today and all article creators, expanders, improvers and reviewers are welcome to take part. If you have already signed up, your submissions page can be found here. If you have not yet signed up, you can add your name here and the judges will set up your submissions page. Any questions on the rules or on anything else should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the WikiCup talk page. Signups will close at the end of January, and the first round will end on 26 February; the 64 highest scorers at that time will move on to round 2. We thank Vanamonde93 and Godot13, who have retired as judges, and we thank them for their past dedication. The judges for the WikiCup this year are Sturmvogel 66 (talk · contribs · email) and Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs · email). Good luck! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:10, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter, Q4 2020

The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter
Volume 12, No. 4 — 4th Quarter, 2020
Previous issue | Index | Next issue

Project At a Glance
As of Q4 2020, the project has:

Content

Project Navigation
To opt-out or sign up to receive future editions of this newsletter, click here to update the distribution list.
(Delivered 08:33, 4 January 2021 (UTC))

--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:33, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #449

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • Due to the winter holidays, no deployment has happened for Wikidata in the last two weeks.

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.

Tech News: 2021-02

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

Recent changes

  • You can choose to be reminded when you have not added an edit summary. This can be done in your preferences. This could conflict with the CAPTCHA. This has now been fixed. [57]
  • You can link to specific log entries. You can get these links for example by clicking the timestamps in the log. Until now, such links to private log entries showed no entry even if you had permission to view private log entries. The links now show the entry. [58]
  • Admins can use the abuse filter tool to automatically prevent bad edits. Three changes happened last week:
    • The filter editing interface now shows syntax errors while you type. This is similar to JavaScript pages. It also shows a warning for regular expressions that match the empty string. New warnings will be added later. [59]
    • Oversighters can now hide multiple filter log entries at once using checkboxes on Special:AbuseLog. This is how the usual revision deletion works. [60]
    • When a filter matches too many actions after it has been changed it is "throttled". The most powerful actions are disabled. This is to avoid many editors getting blocked when an administrator made a mistake. The administrator will now get a notification about this "throttle".
  • Advanced item There is a new tool to build new skins. You can also see existing skins. You can give feedback. [61]
  • Advanced item Bots using the API no longer watch pages automatically based on account preferences. Setting the watchlist to watch will still work. This is to reduce the size of the watchlist data in the database. [62]
  • Advanced item Scribunto's file metadata now includes length. [63]
  • Advanced item CSS and JavaScript code pages now have link anchors to line numbers. You can use wikilinks like w:en:MediaWiki:Common.js#L-50. [64]
  • Recurrent item There was a new version of MediaWiki last week. You can read a detailed log of all 763 changes. Most of them are very small and will not affect you.

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 January. It will be on all wikis from 14 January (calendar).

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

15:41, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #450

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • QueryGraph is a web tool for creating queries in SPARQL from graphs.
  • Development
    • Continued working on the Query Builder. We focused on making it possible to query for Item values and being able to limit the number of Items in the result. We also looked into how to query for quantity values.
    • Changed P920’s data type from string to external identifier (phab:T269205)
    • Finished working on the problem of Items that have the page prop wikibase:statements set to 0 but actually do have statements (phab:T145712)
    • Continued work on the “Publishing” step of the Wikibase release pipeline by building and testing three components of the software suite: Wikibase (phab: T267893), Query Service frontend (phab:T268025), and Query Service backend (phab:T268022)

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 #451

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Development
    • Continued working on the Query Builder. We continued to set up tracking for the number of queries that result in an error, timeout, etc. (phab:T269224). We als made it possible to query for Item values (phab:T268814). You can always try the current state on the test system.
    • Finished fixing an issue with whitespace being stripped while typing when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
    • Worked on no error being shown when trying to save Lemma with invalid language code (phab:T265783)
    • Working on using Special:MyLanguage feature for more links in the Wikidata Query Service interface to redirect people to documentation in their language (phab:T267656)
    • Continued interviewing people to better understand how to best compare Wikidata's data against other databases in order to find mismatches that need the editors' attention

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.

Tech News: 2021-03

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

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all wikis from 21 January (calendar).

Future changes

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

16:09, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Editing news 2021 #1

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this newsletter

Reply tool

Graph of Reply tool and full-page wikitext edit completion rates
Completion rates for comments made with the Reply tool and full-page wikitext editing. Details and limitations are in this report.

The Reply tool is available at most other Wikipedias.

  • The Reply tool has been deployed as an opt-out preference to all editors at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.
  • It is also available as a Beta Feature at almost all Wikipedias except for the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias. If it is not available at your wiki, you can request it by following these simple instructions.

Research notes:

  • As of January 2021, more than 3,500 editors have used the Reply tool to post about 70,000 comments.
  • There is preliminary data from the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedia on the Reply tool. Junior Contributors who use the Reply tool are more likely to publish the comments that they start writing than those who use full-page wikitext editing.[66]
  • The Editing and Parsing teams have significantly reduced the number of edits that affect other parts of the page. About 0.3% of edits did this during the last month.[67] Some of the remaining changes are automatic corrections for Special:LintErrors.
  • A large A/B test will start soon.[68] This is part of the process to offer the Reply tool to everyone. During this test, half of all editors at 24 Wikipedias (not including the English Wikipedia) will have the Reply tool automatically enabled, and half will not. Editors at those Wikipeedias can still turn it on or off for their own accounts in Special:Preferences.

New discussion tool

Screenshot of version 1.0 of the New Discussion Tool prototype.

The new tool for starting new discussions (new sections) will join the Discussion tools in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures at the end of January. You can try the tool for yourself.[69] You can leave feedback in this thread or on the talk page.

Next: Notifications

During Talk pages consultation 2019, editors said that it should be easier to know about new activity in conversations they are interested in. The Notifications project is just beginning. What would help you become aware of new comments? What's working with the current system? Which pages at your wiki should the team look at? Please post your advice at mw:Talk:Talk pages project/Notifications.

–Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:02, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #452

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Past: Wikidata+Wikibase office hour happened on January 21st. See notes here (English).
    • Past: 2021 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Beginner Teaching Workshop (in Chinese). Replay on YouTube 1, 2, 3, 4
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Wikibase, the Integrated Authority File (GND) pilot at the German National Library, and the WikiLibrary Manifesto, 26 January. Agenda
    • Upcoming: SPARQL queries and OpenRefine live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, Januray 26 at 18:00 CET
    • Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #29 - YouTube, Facebook, 30 January
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata meetup in Swedish #47, 31 January
    • Upcoming: The Open Festival of Persistent Identifiers starts from 27 January 2021. See schedule here.
  • Tool of the week
    • TAViewer is a web-based anatomy atlas viewer that cross-references Terminologia Anatomica terms with data from Wikipedia and Wikidata.
  • Development
    • Continued working on the Query Builder: made it possible to limit the number of results in the result set, made it possible to include results from subclasses when querying for Item values, worked on negating queries and started on sharing of queries via URL. As always you can try the current state on the test system.
    • Making links in the Query Service redirect to the proper translations of their pages on-wiki by using Special:MyLanguage redirects (phab:T267656)
    • Working on fixing an issue with displaying large numbers for quantity values (phab:T268456)
    • Fixed a case where no error message was shown when trying to save a Lemma with an invalid language code (phab:T265783)
    • Talked to a few more people about checking Wikidata's data against other databases to find potential errors
    • Continuing the Release Strategy project for Wikibase, with the following progress:
      • Created a “release pipeline” for Wikibase extension (phab:T267627)
      • Created MediaWiki docker images based off release branches (phab:T270133)
      • Defined format and contents of Wikibase suite components not maintained by Wikimedia Germany (phab:T271194)

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.

Tech News: 2021-04

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

Problems

Changes later this week

  • Bracket matching will be added to the CodeMirror syntax highlighter on the first wikis. The first wikis are German and Catalan Wikipedia and maybe other Wikimedia wikis. This will happen on 27 January. [72]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (calendar).

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

18:30, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 January 2021

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:10, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #453

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Labelcleaner is a script by Andrew Gray used to clean up Wikidata labels/aliases/descriptions for a given language on a set of items.
  • Development
    • Continuing development on the first version of the Query Builder. It's starting to be able to do the first really meaningful queries now. Latest addition was the ability to negate conditions. Up next is the ability to connect conditions with OR instead of only AND as well as querying for quantities and ranges. You can follow along on the test system.
    • Exploring possible solutions for how to compare Wikidata's data against other databases to find and highlight mismatches automatically.
    • Added lexicographical data codes for a few languages: rkt, ctg (phab:T271589), and az-cyrl (phab:T265906)
    • Finished working on the issue of TypeError on a diff of a Wikidata talk page phab:T271402
    • Updated Wikidata unit conversion configuration (phab:T267644)
    • Fixed two last places where links in the the Query Service UI were not using Special:MyLanguage yet to redirect to the documentation page in the user's language (phab:T267656)
    • Pushing JSON dumps for Lexemes over the finish line (phab:T264883)
    • Working on showing an error when trying to save lemmas with invalid language codes (phab:T265783)
    • Wikibase Release Strategy
      • Investigated the release of Wikibase suite components not maintained by Wikimedia (phab:T271193)
      • Continued process of adding additional components to the Wikibase release, including OAuth (phab:T272580)


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.

Tech News: 2021-05

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

Problems

Changes later this week

  • You can soon use Wikidata to link to pages on the multilingual Wikisource. [74]
  • Often editors use a "non-breaking space" to make a gap between two items when reading but still show them together. This can be used to avoid a line break. You will now be able to add new ones via the special character tool in the 2010, 2017, and visual editors. The character will be shown in the visual editor as a space with a grey background. [75][76]
  • Advanced item Wikis use abuse filters to stop bad edits being made. Filter maintainers can now use syntax like 1.2.3.4 - 1.2.3.55 as well as the 1.2.3.4/27 syntax for IP ranges. [77]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).

Future changes

  • Minerva is the skin Wikimedia wikis use for mobile traffic. When a page is protected and you can't edit it you can normally read the source wikicode. This doesn't work on Minerva on mobile devices. This is being fixed. Some text might overlap. This is because your community needs to update MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext to work on mobile. You can read more. [78][79]
  • Advanced item Cloud VPS and Toolforge will change the IP address they use to contact the wikis. The new IP address will be 185.15.56.1. This will happen on February 8. You can read more.

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

22:38, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-06

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

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  • You can see edits to chosen pages on Special:Watchlist. You can add pages to your watchlist on every wiki you like. The GlobalWatchlist extension will come to Meta on 11 February. There you can see entries on watched pages on different wikis on the same page. The new watchlist will be found on Special:GlobalWatchlist on Meta. You can choose which wikis to watch and other preferences on Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings on Meta. You can watch up to five wikis. [81]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (calendar).

Future changes

  • When admins protect pages the form will use the OOUI look. Special:Import will also get the new look. This will make them easier to use on mobile phones. [82][83]
  • Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [84]
  • Advanced item Last week Tech News reported that the IP address Cloud VPS and Toolforge use to contact the wikis will change on 8 February. This is delayed. It will happen later instead. [85]

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

17:40, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #454

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Item documentation has two new features. First, it now includes two predefined SPARQL queries. The first one give the number of statements about the item by property and the second the list of statement about the properties. Second, for items of class award, it includes predefined SPARQL queries from TP award. See Q1624297 for an example.
    • Ranker lets you edit the ranks of several statements at once.
  • Development
    • Made it possible to connect query conditions with OR (instead of only AND) in the Query Builder (phab:T272694)
    • Making it possible to query only for statements with or without a reference in the Query Builder (phab:T272699)
    • Continuing to work on adding a rate limit for creating Item IDs to prevent people from allocating a large number of unassigned Item IDs that are then lost (phab:T272032)
    • Working on the problem of Lexeme merging failing if the source Lexeme has links to its own Senses (phab:T273830)
    • Working on showing an error when trying to save a Lemma with invalid language code on a Lexeme (phab:T265783)
    • Fixing an issue in the Property selector fallback where it is not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
    • Making it possible to add Interwiki links to/from Multilingual Wikisource (phab:T138332)

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 #455

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Development
    • Work on the Simple Query Builder continues. We finished connecting query conditions via OR (phab:T272694). Next we will work on adding the UI for sharing the visual query via a link (phab:T272887)
    • Improved the deployment process for the Query Service UI to make it easier to deploy
    • Fixed language code "dag" for Dagbani not working for Lemmas for Lexemes (phab:T272242)
    • Fixing the bug where the Property selector is not falling back from language variant to major language for Property labels (phab:T272712)
    • Adding a rate limit for creating Item IDs to avoid skipping so many due to misbehaving bots (phab:T272032)
    • Fixed the case where no error was shown when trying to save a lemma with an invalid language code (phab:T265783)
    • Fixed a but where merging two Lexemes fails if the source Lexeme has links to its own Senses (phab:T273830)
    • Increasing the rate of edits that trigger a check by the constraint checker to 50%. This will increase the number of constraints violations that you can query in the Query Service. (phab:T204031)
    • Making it possible to add interwiki links to/from Multilingual Wikisource (phab:T138332)

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.


Tech News: 2021-07

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

Problems

  • There were problems with recent versions of MediaWiki. Because the updates caused problems the developers rolled back to an earlier version. Some updates and new functions will come later than planned. [87][88]
  • Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [89]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (calendar).

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

17:54, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #456

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Fixed wrongly encoded HTML in some messages in the Wikidata Bridge (phab:T272350)
    • Working on showing all languages in the language suggester for monolingual text Properties (phab:T124758)
    • Fixed an issue with spaces in external identifier URLs being replaced by "+" (phab:T271126)
    • Added a rate limit for creating Item IDs, which should help with decreasing the number of skipped Q-IDs (phab:T272032)
    • Fixed an issue where whitespace was stripped while typing when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
    • Fixing the case where you cannot easily edit negative quantities after saving (phab:T274129)
    • Working on making it possible to query for quantity values in the Query Builder (phab:T268942)

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.


Tech News: 2021-08

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

Recent changes

  • The visual editor will now use MediaSearch to find images. You can search for images on Commons in the visual editor when you are looking for illustrations. This is to help editors find better images. [91]
  • Advanced item The syntax highlighter now works with more languages: Futhark, Graphviz/DOT, CDDL and AMDGPU. [92]

Problems

  • Editing a timeline might have removed all text from it. This was because of a bug and has been fixed. You might need to edit the timeline again for it to show properly. [93]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 February. It will be on all wikis from 25 February (calendar).

Future changes

  • Advanced item There is a user group for developers and users interested in working on Wikimedia wikis with the Rust programming language. You can join or tell others who want to make your wiki better in the future.

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

00:16, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 February 2021

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:28, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #457

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Press, articles, blog posts, videos
    • Blogpost: Wikidata and Correspondence Archives (Enriching basic metadata with a knowledge graph)
    • Blogpost: The promise of Wikidata - How journalists can use the crowdsourced open knowledge base as a data source (at DataJournalism.com)
    • Video: Accra Archive Wikidata and Wikipedia Workshop (GLAMS Campaign Ghana) - YouTube
    • Video: COVID-19 coverage on Wikidata - YouTube
    • Video: Identify and describe items of bibliographic interest (articles, monographs, authors) on Wikidata (in Italian) - YouTube
    • Video: Visualizing the global research ecosystem via Wikidata and Scholia - YouTube
    • Video: Demo: How to upload new bibliography and create dashboards on Wikidata - YouTube
    • Video: Reconciliation Open Refine Wikidata (in Swedish) - YouTube
    • Video: Reconciling researchers to Wikidata via Google Sheets - YouTube
    • Video: LIVE Wikidata editing #33 - YouTube, Facebook
    • Video: How to create new Wikidata item (in Dutch) - YouTube
    • Video: Merging Wikidata items (in Dutch) - YouTube
  • Tool of the week
    • EditSum, a new user script which allows to attach custom summary text to any label/statement/sitelink/etc. modification.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • Working on first version of small tool that lets you get the average ORES quality score for a list of Items and find the lowest-quality Items in the batch so it's easier to improve them.
    • Taking a closer look at what larger improvements we want to make to Lexemes later this year.
    • Thinking through different ways how we can technically get mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases so we can later expose them.
    • Thinking through what the first version of the REST API should contain and what should come later.
    • Fixed an issue with whitespaces when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
    • Made sure all languages show up in the language selector for monolingual text Properties at least with their language code because them not showing up was very confusing (phab:T124758)
    • Fixed an issue with generating correct links for external IDs with + (phab:T271126)
    • Fixing an issue with Property selector not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
    • Continuing to build out the Query Builder and focusing on input for quantity and date queries (phab:T268942 and phab:T272697)
    • Due to the planned delay of the release of MediaWiki 1.36, the Wikibase team has been working on preparing a Wikibase update that includes new functionality (such as the “Federated Properties” feature) based on v1.35. To that end, we started backporting certain features and fixes into the Wikibase 1.35 release. Follow our progress here.

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.

Tech News: 2021-09

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

Recent changes

  • Wikis using the Growth team tools can now show the name of a newcomer's mentor anywhere through a magic word. This can be used for welcome messages or userboxes.
  • A new version of the VideoCutTool is now available. It enables cropping, trimming, audio disabling, and rotating video content. It is being created as part of the developer outreach programs.

Problems

  • There was a problem with the job queue. This meant some functions did not save changes and mass messages were delayed. This did not affect wiki edits. [94]
  • Some editors may not be logged in to their accounts automatically in the latest versions of Firefox and Safari. [95]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 March. It will be on all wikis from 4 March (calendar).

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

19:06, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

WikiCup 2021 March newsletter

Round 1 of the competition has finished; it was a high-scoring round with 21 contestants scoring more than 100 points. Everyone with a positive score moves on to Round 2, with 55 contestants qualifying. You will need to finish among the top thirty-two contestants in Round 2 if you are to qualify for Round 3. Our top scorers in Round 1 were:

  • New York (state) Epicgenius led the field with a featured article, nine good articles and an assortment of other submissions, specialising on buildings and locations in New York, for a total of 945 points.
  • Republic of Venice Bloom6132 was close behind with 896 points, largely gained from 71 "In the news" items, mostly recent deaths.
  • Scotland ImaginesTigers, who has been editing Wikipedia for less than a year, was in third place with 711 points, much helped by bringing League of Legends to featured article status, exemplifying how bonus points can boost a contestant's score.
  • Rwanda Amakuru came next with 708 points, Kigali being another featured article that scored maximum bonus points.
  • Ktin, new to the WikiCup, was in fifth place with 523 points, garnered from 15 DYKs and 34 "In the news" items.
  • Botswana The Rambling Man scored 511 points, many from featured article candidate reviews and from football related DYKs.
  • Gog the Mild, last year's runner-up, came next with 498 points, from a featured article and numerous featured article candidate reviews.
  • Hog Farm, at 452, scored for a featured article, four good articles and a number of reviews.
  • United States Le Panini, another newcomer to the WikiCup, scored 438 for a featured article and three good articles.
  • England Lee Vilenski, last year's champion, scored 332 points, from a featured article and various other sport-related topics.

These contestants, like all the others, now have to start again from scratch. In Round 1, contestants achieved eight featured articles, three featured lists and one featured picture, as well as around two hundred DYKs and twenty-seven ITNs. They completed 97 good article reviews, nearly double the 52 good articles they claimed. Contestants also claimed for 135 featured article and featured list candidate reviews. There is no longer a requirement to mention your WikiCup participation when undertaking these reviews.

Remember that any content promoted after the end of Round 1 but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is a good article candidate, a featured process, or something else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews.

If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Sturmvogel 66 (talk) and Cwmhiraeth (talk). MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:25, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #17

Welcome to the seventeenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Structured tasks

Add a link: the team is continuing to engineer on our first "structured task", which will break down the workflow of adding wikilinks to articles, and assist newcomers with an algorithm to identify words and phrases that could be made into links.

Add an image: even as we build our first structured task, we have been thinking about the next one. "Add an image" is a structured task in which newcomers would be recommended images from Wikimedia Commons to add to unillustrated articles. This is an ambitious idea with many details to consider. We have already learned a lot from community members, and we encourage everyone to look at the project page and join the discussion.

Moving forward: more wikis to get the features

Last November, our team published the analysis of the impact of newcomer tasks. We announced that we found that the Growth features, and particularly newcomer tasks, lead to increased editing from newcomers. Because of these results, we believe all Wikipedias should implement these features.

We have started to contact more wikis to deploy the features, including Wikipedias of all sizes. Bengali Wikipedia recently began using Growth features, and Danish, Thai, Indonesian, and Romanian Wikipedias will be coming soon. Please contact us if you have questions regarding deployment.

We are looking for translators who can help by translating the interface. Translating is done on Translatewiki.net (it requires a different account that your Wikimedia one). Communities that already have the Growth features being deployed are invited to check on the translations. Access translations here.

Variant testing

As mentioned in our previous newsletter, we ran a test of two variants of the newcomer homepage, meant to find a version that increases users completing suggested edits. We have completed the experiment, and learned that one of the variants leads to more edits on desktop while the other leads to more edits on mobile. Therefore, we will deploy the strongest variants for each platform to all newcomers.

News for mentors

Mentor dashboard: we have interviewed mentors from several communities as we plan a mentor dashboard feature, which would help mentors track the progress of their mentees. We encourage all mentors to share their thoughts on tools that would help them.

Magic word for mentors: it is now possible to use a magic word, {{#mentor}}, to display the name of a given newcomer's mentor. This can be used on welcome messages, userboxes, etc.

Help panel questions going to mentors: in most wikis, newcomers using the help panel ask questions to the help desk. On Czech Wikipedia, we have experimented with sending these questions to mentors instead. This simplifies the newcomer experience, and only led to a increase in mentorship questions of about 30%. We tried this in Arabic, Bengali, French and Vietnamese Wikipedias, and we are making it the default experience.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:02, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #458

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Fixed an issue where the Property selector is not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
    • Working on support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via wbeditentity (phab:T199896)
    • Continuing to work on the Query Builder and making it possible to query for quantities and dates with it.
    • Putting finishing touches on a small tool that lets you get the average ORES quality score for a list of Items as well as the individual scores for each of the Items


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.

Tech News: 2021-10

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

Recent changes

  • Section translation now works on Bengali Wikipedia. It helps mobile editors translate sections of articles. It will come to more wikis later. The first focus is active wikis with a smaller number of articles. You can test it and leave feedback.
  • Flagged revisions now give admins the review right. [97]
  • When someone links to a Wikipedia article on Twitter this will now show a preview of the article. [98]

Problems

  • Many graphs have JavaScript errors. Graph editors can check their graphs in their browser's developer console after editing. [99]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 March. It will be on all wikis from 11 March (calendar).
  • The New Discussion tool will soon be a new discussion tools beta feature for on most Wikipedias. The goal is to make it easier to start new discussions. [100]

Future changes

  • There will be a number of changes to make it easier to work with templates. Some will come to the first wikis in March. Other changes will come to the first wikis in June. This is both for those who use templates and those who create or maintain them. You can read more.
  • Reference Previews will become a default feature on some wikis on 17 March. They will share a setting with Page Previews. If you prefer the Reference Tooltips or Navigation-Popups gadget you can keep using them. If so Reference Previews won't be shown. [101][102]
  • New JavaScript-based functions will not work in Internet Explorer 11. This is because Internet Explorer is an old browser that doesn't work with how JavaScript is written today. Everything that works in Internet Explorer 11 today will continue working in Internet Explorer for now. You can read more.

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

17:50, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #459

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Minorax (RfP scheduled to end after 19 March 2021 11:23 UTC)
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Plant Humanities Lab is a website you can use to explore the cultural histories of plants and their influence on human societies.
    • DX Lab Art Index is an interactive database of over 18,000 nineteenth century Australian Artworks by over 2000 artists with links to Wikidata & compiled by volunteers over 10 years.
    • The new WDQS Streaming Updater is live as of March 15, 2021 on a pre-production test server for feedback. Available at https://query-preview.wikidata.org/. Release details here.
    • Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year - Call for Nominations! The research must be on, about, using data from, and/or of importance to Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons or other Wikimedia projects. Deadline to submit your nomination is no later than 2021-03-22.


  • Development
    • Continued working on the Query Builder and focused on querying for quantity values (phab:T268942), handling special cases around sub classes for taxons and locations (phab:T274634) adding tooltips (phab:T275542) and sharing a visual query (phab:T272887)
    • Making changes to how Cognate handles redirects on Wiktionary to make more pages accessible through interwiki links (phab:T165061)
    • Creating a dashboard to break down the number of editors by namespace (phab:T275999)
    • Finishing support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via wbeditentity API module (phab:T199896)

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.


Tech News: 2021-11

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

Recent changes

Problems

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 March. It will be on all wikis from 18 March (calendar).

Future changes

  • You can add a newline or carriage return character to a custom signature if you use a template. There is a proposal to not allow them in the future. This is because they can cause formatting problems. [104][105]
  • You will be able to read but not edit 12 wikis for a short period of time on 23 March at 06:00 (UTC). This could take 30 minutes but will probably be much faster.
  • Advanced item You can use Quarry for SQL queries to the Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 23 March. There will be a new field to specify the database to connect to. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech. PAWS and other ways to do SQL queries to the Wiki Replicas will be affected later. [106]

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

23:20, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Feedback request: Maths, science, and technology request for comment

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Tech News: 2021-12

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • You will be able to read but not edit twelve wikis for a short period of time on 23 March at 06:00 (UTC). This can also affect password changes, logging in to new wikis, global renames and changing or confirming emails. This could take 30 minutes but will probably be much faster.

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 March. It will be on all wikis from 25 March (calendar).
  • Syntax highlighting colours will change to be easier to read. This will soon come to the first wikis. [107]

Future changes

  • Flagged revisions will no longer have multiple tags like "tone" or "depth". It will also only have one tier. This was changed because very few wikis used these features and they make the tool difficult to maintain. [108][109]
  • Advanced item Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015 this was moved from wg* to mw.config. wg* will soon no longer work. [110]

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

16:51, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
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