User talk:Auntof6/Newsletters/Archives/2024 1

Tech News: 2024-02

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

• mediawiki2latex is a tool that converts wiki content into the formats of LaTeX, PDF, ODT, and EPUB. The code now runs many times faster due to recent improvements. There is also an optional Docker container you can install on your local machine.
• The way that Random pages are selected has been updated. This will slowly reduce the problem of some pages having a lower chance of appearing. [1]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar). [2][3]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:20, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 January 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• From the editor: NINETEEN MORE YEARS! NINETEEN MORE YEARS!

• Special report: Public Domain Day 2024

• Technology report: Wikipedia: A Multigenerational Pursuit

• News and notes: In other news ... see ya in court!

• In focus: The long road of a featured article candidate

• In the media: What is plagiarism? Oklahoma Disneyland? Reaching a human being at Wikipedia?

• WikiProject report: WikiProjects Israel and Palestine

• Obituary: Anthony Bradbury

• Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2023

• Crossword: everybody gangsta till the style sheets start cascading

• Comix: Conflict resolution

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 12:52, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #611

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

Discussions

• New request for comments: Community request for the development team to access inverse properties on client wikis. (Summary: We currently cannot access inverse property values on Wikipedia. This can be a data management issue on Wikipedia as we must always ask ourself if we must introduce an inverse property for cases where we need them. So I think it’s useful to gather the usecases community would want and draft a request for an API to the devteam to do that.)

Events

• Upcoming: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 17th January 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
• Past
  • Provenance Loves Wiki (PLW24), Jan 12th - 14th, research and data on the origin of artworks and cultural heritage and how Wikibase and Wikidata can support this.
  • WikiLovesWomen #SheSaid campaign wrapped up the 2023 campaign by visiting Kinshasha and Kisangani, where local Wikimedians improved quotes from women on FR Wikipedia and Wikidata.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • Building Connected Libraries in Nigeria: --> Reflections from the Wikibase Journey on collaboration and resouce sharing between Nigerian Libraries.
  • Wikidata and ChatGPT integration failure --> read about Finn Årup Nielsen's attempts to integrate LLM's with Wikidata.
  • QLever: a new way to query OpenStreetMap --> Discussion of the new opportunities offered by QLever to query OpenStreetMap and to run federated queries with Wikidata
  • Wikidata for authority control: 3 years of work --> The three-year Wikidata for authority control project, a collaboration between Wikimedia Sverige and Swedish museums, concluded in December 2023. It equipped museum staff with tools and skills to integrate their authority databases with Wikidata, resulting in added identifiers, SPARQL query proficiency, and enhanced knowledge sharing within the GLAM sector.
  • Go-ahead for Wikidata Project of GLAM institutions from Baden-Württemberg --> The GLAM-BW project, under "GLAM goes OpenData," connects major collections in Baden-Württemberg, focusing on the württembergische Kunstkammer. With over 3,000 objects, the project integrates information on collectors, histories, and objects into a knowledge graph for semantic searches, contributing to the broader realm of linked open data, akin to Wikidata.
  • Swiss GLAM Programme --> Wikimedia CH imported the Museum of Natural History of Neuchâtel's urchin fossil casts to Wikimedia Commons, connecting structured data on Wikidata. The project involved data cleaning, adding missing elements, and file imports via OpenRefine, highlighting seamless integration between Wikidata and Commons.
• Papers
  • Reflections on the PCC Wikidata Pilot at UCLA Library: --> Undertaking the PCC Learning Objectives. Discusses the 14-month Pilot programme for cooperative cataloguing of UCLA Library and Museum Collections. By E. Zhang, P. Biswas & I. Dagher.
  • Few-Shot Event Classification in Images using Knowledge Graphs for Prompting --> How can Wikidata and Wikipedia help Vision-Language Models improve their classification of images. Tahmasebzadeh et al., 2024.
• Videos
  • SMWCon 2023: Semantics, Wikis, and AI --> Day 1, Keynote by Prof. Markus Krötzsch who explores origins and principles of semantic wikis and key challenges that lie ahead in managing knowledge.
  • GLAM on Tour 2023 im Museum Barberini (German) --> find out what Museums have got to do with Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. More Info Here.
• Interactive notebooks: GLAM : Geolocated and Labelled Articles Map - explore Featured and Good Wikipedia articles through a map, powered by Wikidata.

Tool of the week

• Brian M Sperlongano released US boundary QA checker, a quality assurance tool for finding issues with boundary data in the United States by using Wikidata, OpenStreetMap, and US Census Bureau data.
• The Surrounding Ocean (available at vrandezo.github.io/TheSurroundingOcean) - is a tool that allows you to browse lexicographical data. You can use the tool to explore words and their meanings, translations, and synonyms. The tool is currently under development, and the developer, Danny, would appreciate feedback to fix any issues with the tool. More info: Wikidata:The Surrounding Ocean.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• OS-Wikidata Map Framework List of tools and maps which combines OSM and Wikidata.
• Call for Projects and Mentors for Google Summer of Code 2024 and Outreachy Round 28 is OPEN!
• Got an idea for a project to reclaim the public nature of the internet? With Wikidata? NLNet has a new fund you could apply to.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes: none
• Newest External identifiers: Walk Score ID, HistoriaGames game ID, ‎Deutsche Bahn station number, Legends Tour player ID, Moscow Cultural Heritage ID, USOPC Hall of Fame ID, Cathopedia article ID, ‎TouchArcade game ID, ‎DoblajeVideojuegos game ID, ‎Adventure-Treff game ID, Biota of New Zealand ID, Consortium of Bryophyte Herbaria taxon ID, Consortium of Lichen Herbaria taxon ID, Native Plants Hawaii ID, SERNEC taxon ID, TORCH taxon ID, Penstemon Database ID, Digicarmel ID, ‎Retskrivningsordbogen ID, MAMCS artwork ID, Sofascore player ID, ‎Mod.io game ID, Sina Chinese Basketball player ID, turismo.marche.it place ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • describes (Data objects that are described by this entity (e.g. an encyclopedia or topic-related book; intended for input of several data objects.))
  • memory type (specifies the type of working memory of this data object)
  • filial church (church which acts as the less important temple of a parish)
  • TOPO id (unique code to identify topographical features of France (department, city, thoroughfare...))
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Bluesky handle, Merkur author ID, Bavarian school ID, Rugby Database ID, Playstation Store Concept ID, ArchDaily Architecture Office ID, Il Nuovo De Mauro ID, Bluesky DID

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Historical events by a city sorted by importance (source)
  • Bubble chart showing countries with the highest number of children out of school in 2013 (source)
  • Timeline of writing systems and alphabets (source)
• Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Decolonise Wiki --> intends to focus on decolonising text, depictions and media within all relevant Wikipedia articles.
• WikiProject Highlights: Ontology Cleaning Task Force: A group of people have started a task force to discuss problems with the Wikidata ontology and how to clean them up. Anyone interested in participating is welcome. The task force maintains Wikidata:WikiProject Ontology/Cleaning Task Force as a record of its activities. You can add yourself to the participants list there and find out how to join group meetings or otherwise participate in the group. (Got something noteworthy happening in your WikiProject? Share it in the upcoming issue!)
• Newest database reports: Lexicographical data/Reports/Empty lexemes - Lexemes with no statements, no forms and no senses. (Do you see Lexemes from your language in the list that you can fix?)
• Showcase Items: January 15, 2018 (Q45919591) - Monday in January 2018
• Showcase Lexemes: در جنگ حلوا بخش نمی‌کنند (L1081423) - Persian with a meaning similar to "all's fair in love and war"

Development

• IP masking: We are working on adjusting Wikibase to handle the upcoming introduction of IP masking, which will give editors who are not logged in a temporary account name instead of using their IP to attribute edits to (phab:T351968)
• Lexicographical data: We are changing how empty Senses and Forms are represented in the dumps (phab:T305660)
• mul language code: We are doing user testing for the current implementation to see if it is understandable for people.
• Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on migrating it to the Codex design system.
• REST API:
  • We improved the handling of lower-case statement IDs (phab:T354262)
  • We are working on getting a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344039)

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

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Participate in this week's Lexeme challenge: Pigs
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Abdulai (WMDE) -MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:13, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-03

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

Recent changes

• Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. [4]
• Gadgets and personal user scripts may now use JavaScript syntax introduced in ES6 (also known as "ES2015") and ES7 ("ES2016"). MediaWiki validates the source code to protect other site functionality from syntax errors, and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. Previously, Gadgets could use the requiresES6 option. This option is no longer needed and will be removed in the future. [5]
• Bot passwords and owner-only OAuth consumers can now be restricted to allow editing only specific pages. [6]
• You can now thank edits made by bots. [7]
• An update on the status of the Community Wishlist Survey for 2024 has been published. Please read and give your feedback.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar). [8][9]
• Starting on January 17, it will not be possible to login to Wikimedia wikis from some specific old versions of the Chrome browser (versions 51–66, released between 2016 and 2018). Additionally, users of iOS 12, or Safari on Mac OS 10.14, may need to login to each wiki separately. [10]
• The jquery.cookie module was deprecated and replaced with the mediawiki.cookie module last year. A script has now been run to replace any remaining uses, and this week the temporary alias will be removed. [11]

Future changes

• Wikimedia Deutschland is working to make reusing references easier. They are looking for people who are interested in participating in individual video calls for user research in January and February.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:13, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-04

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

• A bug in UploadWizard prevented linking to the userpage of the uploader when uploading. It has now been fixed. [12]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 January. It will be on all wikis from 25 January (calendar). [13][14]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:04, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #613

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

Discussions

• Closed request for adminship: ROBERTSHST requested adminship to be able to link protected Wikipedia pages to Wikidata. The request has been denied and closed.
• New request for comments: Frettiebot block? - Bovlb has requested community input about the edit behaviour of this bot, with more discussion found on the Frettiebot Discussion page.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Books: Banned books, Wikipedia and Wikidata - Volume 54, Number 2, 2023 of the focus on International Library and Information Work. Professor Núria Ferran of Women and Wikipedia.
• Papers
  • Assisted Knowledge Graph Authoring: Human-Supervised Knowledge Graph Construction from Natural Language - a Web app allowing domain experts to create natural language Wikidata-based knowledge graphs. By Gohsen & Stein (2024).
  • Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignment - Lu, K., Yu, B., Zhou, C. & Zhou, J., (2024),. This paper explores using Knowledge Graph data silos to enrich interactions and dialogues with AI NPC's in roleplay videogames.
  • Narrowing the Knowledge Evaluation Gap: Open-Domain Question Answering with Multi-Granularity Answers - evaluating predicted answers against a set of multi-granularity answers based on Wikidata. By Yona et al, (2024).
• Videos
  • Introduction to Wikidata Query Tool - Learn A Wiki Skill (LAWS). If you are a Wikidata beginner, enjoy this video provided by Open Foundation West Africa.
  • Wikibase Cloud For Cultural Heritage Data Online and the SNARC Hub for Name Authority Records relating to Wales and the Welsh Language, with Jason J. Evans.
  • How to use Wikidata in research: good practices for using and sharing open data (Portugese). A training session by Rute Correia of Wikimedia Portugal.
• WikidataCon 2023 - (English Audio)
  • Wikifunctions: fulfilling one of Wikidata's missing promises? - with Denny Vrandečić
  • Structured data and collaborative curation: WikiProjects and Wikidata - with Daniel Mietchen.
  • Spreading our Data further with Wikibase REST API by L. Pintscher.
• Presentations:
  • Wikibase for a Research Project - A slidedeck provided by Ruth v.d. Bussche presented at Provenance Loves Wiki '24
  • Provenance Loves Wiki 2024 slides on Linking Boetticher and 19th Century Paintings through Wikidata and Wikisource
• Notebooks: GLAM2: Geolocated and Labeled Articles Map - much like the previously shared GLAM1 visually representing distribution of Good & Featured Articles but in a different visualisation.

Tool of the week

• Wikidata's insights for featured and good Wikipedia articles, a new Observable's notebook which helps exploring good articles or featured articles in any Wikipedia using Wikidata properties such as P31, P21, P106, P17, P27, etc.
• SpeedPatrolling - This tool helps Wikidata editors to patrol recent changes.
• metaphacts and Ontotext launch a new end-user interface on top of the Wikidata Knowledge Graph: try it here!

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• A job opening for a Data Scientist / Knowledge Engineer to use Wikidata as a foundational layer for an NSF-funded Prototype Open Knowledge Network.
• The Wikidata Development team needs your feedback! We are currently evaluating a new feature for the Wikidata Query Service. Fancy sharing your thoughts? We would greatly appreciate it if you could complete this survey on Lamapoll. It should take you around 10–15 minutes. Your input means a lot to us. Thank you!

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • underlying structure(s) (mathematical structure(s) obtained by deleting some data of the subject)
  • working memory type (specifies the type of working memory of this data object)
  • production manager (manager that is responsible for the administration of a feature film or television production)
  • simulates (item simulated, imitated, or made to appear real by this item)
  • Philippine middle name (maternal surname generally placed in the middle of this person's name)
  • combines media (media files that composes this media file)
  • clerked for (this person has held a clerkship with the judge)
• Newest External identifiers: RCS number, Sayed Ganj Balochi Glossary ID, Vazhaju word ID, Stage username, Qué series ver series ID, Baseball-Reference.com manager ID, ‎Playstation Store concept ID, Pallaalcentro player ID, Rowing Canada ID, Rugby Database ID, Encyclopedia of Cacti species ID, Nebula channel ID, fiba.basketball player ID, Académie de Stanislas member ID, National Natural Parks System ID, Bandcamp track ID, NientePopCorn movie ID, NientePopCorn series ID, NientePopCorn person ID, Bavarian school ID, BookBrainz edition ID, British Pathé asset ID, CRIS Unique Site Number, Great American Business Leaders of the 20th Century ID, Merkur author page, ‎Globoplay ID, BindingDB ID, FFTT player ID, Czech geological location ID, etymologiebank.nl ID, Bluesky handle, ‎Parliament of Victoria ID, ArchDaily architecture office ID, HistoryMakers Maker Directory ID, OKRB 011-2022 code, Plant Illustrations taxon ID, Plant Illustrations species ID, Bantumen Powerlist 100, International Hockey Federation competition ID, IndExs Exsiccata editor ID, COSL profile ID, ‎The Models Resource entity ID, HbVar ID, TracesOfWar award ID, Latindex 2022 ID, Flashback lexicon ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • Number of delegates ()
  • afd-verbot.de person id ()
  • date of application (date of a application/request that lead to a membership in an organisation, an employment or issuance of an identifier)
  • authorized image (Proposing to distinguish images with reliable source from GLAM partners or cultural institutions)
  • Dejure.org-Schlagwort (de) (searchword in Dejure.org)
• New External identifier property proposals to review:: VD 17 ID, Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana ID, MobiTUKI English-Swahili Dictionary entry, Singerman Identifier, X place ID, PteridoPortal taxon ID, Plants of Hawaiʻi ID, Kalliope.org author ID, The StoryGraph Author ID, EDIT16 title & place IDs, Myths on Maps Identifier, Anglo-Norman Dictionary entry, Archives départementales du Vaucluse Fonds ID, ru.hayazg.info ID, Sundance Institute Archive ID, Mindat taxon ID, notify.moe ID, nimi.li id, Nintendo eShop (UK) ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • The 100 smallest mountains in France (source)
  • French Prime ministers ordered by age when they start in office (source)
• Newest WikiProjects:
  • Wikidata:WikiProject IBC 2024 - The International Botanical Congress (IBC) takes place once every six years. The organisers of this WikiProject see this conference as an ideal opportunity to engage with the wider botanical community, educate them about the potential of Wikidata and to train them in its use. We will also use this opportunity to improve the data held in Wikidata about the participants, presenters and their contributions to botany.
  • WikiProject Health Data Space - This project is about organising data related to health data spaces, in particular the efforts to create a European Health Data Space. Initially it will focus on Sweden.
• Newest database reports: Differences in birth and death dates - This is list of reports when birth date or death date in Wikidata differs from other sources:
• Showcase Items: Hubble Space Telescope (Q2513) - NASA and ESA space telescope (launched 1990)
• Showcase Lexemes: šťastný (L204262) (Czech) - having luck, fortune, happy. This is our first Czech showcase lexeme and it just so happens to be the largest Lexeme on Wikidata!

Development

• [Breaking Change] We are changing how empty Sense and Form lists are represented in dumps
• Fixed the order of item/property suggestions on several occasions, primarily sex or gender (P21) (phab:T355697)
• mul lanuage code: We are wrapping up the usability testing.
• IP Masking: We continued the work on adapting Wikibase for the upcoming change to not show IP addresses for non-logged in users anymore.
• Wikibase REST API:
  • We added the ability to add a sitelink to an Item or edit an existing one (phab:T342987)
  • We are fixing a bug where badges were missing in the API reponse for sitelinks (phab:T355293)

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

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Participate in this week's Lexeme challenge: Diplomacy
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · -MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:16, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-05

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

Recent changes

• Starting Monday January 29, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they are looking for, even if this comment was moved elsewhere. This will affect all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. You can read more about this change on Diff or on Mediawiki.org. [15]
• There are some improvements to the CAPTCHA to make it harder for spam bots and scripts to bypass it. If you have feedback on this change, please comment on the task. Staff are monitoring metrics related to the CAPTCHA, as well as secondary metrics such as account creations and edit counts.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 January. It will be on all wikis from 1 February (calendar). [16][17]
• On February 1, a link will be added to the "Tools" menu to download a QR code that links to the page you are viewing. There will also be a new Special:QrCode page to create QR codes for any Wikimedia URL. This addresses the #19 most-voted wish from the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [18]
• Gadgets which only work in some skins have sometimes used the targets option to limit where you can use them. This will stop working this week. You should use the skins option instead. [19]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:31, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 January 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• News and notes: Wikipedian Osama Khalid celebrated his 30th birthday in jail

• Opinion: Until it happens to you

• Disinformation report: How paid editors squeeze you dry

• In the media: Katherine Maher new NPR CEO, go check Wikipedia, race in the race

• In focus: The long road of a featured article candidate, part 2

• Recent research: Croatian takeover was enabled by "lack of bureaucratic openness and rules constraining [admins]"

• Comix: We've all got to start somewhere

• Traffic report: DJ, gonna burn this goddamn house right down

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 15:17, 31 January 2024 (UTC)