The Wikidata BEACON generator was updated by Magnus. It now uses all properties with “formatter URL”, so always up-to-date with target URLs. It is faster, too.
Happy new year!:) It'll be a great one for Wikidata!
Have you filed bugs in the past? Awesome! It'd be super helpful if you have a look at your old bugs and see if they are still relevant. You can find them at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/authored/ (make sure you're logged in on Phabricator)
The sitelink section has been reworked. This will go live on Wikidata on Tuesday. The sitelinks will then be slimmer and they will appear in a sidebar on the right side if there is enough space.
More performance improvements when parsing an item page, ~%15 faster for some pages:)
Usage tracking will likely be deployed on February 2 on Wikidata. This will not be user-visible. It just means that pages using data from arbitrary items get updated/purged when the data changes. Arbitrary access is being tested at Test Wikidata and testwiki:Test Wiki. An example is at testwiki:Kitten on arbitrary page.
Assigning items on Mix'n'match will now make that change on Wikidata for you automatically
Wikibooks will get access to language links via Wikidata on February 24th. Coordination is happening at d:Wikidata:Wikibooks.
Roughly 17000 of the candidate articles that Google identified as potentially being about the same topic but lacking a language link have been merged. About 17500 are remaining and waiting for you to go through them via https://tools.wmflabs.org/yichengtry/
Did more work on Capiunto to get it into a state where it can be deployed to Wikimedia sites.
Mourned Titan (phabricator:T88550) as its developers were bought up. Began evaluation for which graph database to use instead for a Wikidata query service (mw:Wikibase/Indexing)
Further work on header section redesign
Tweaks to the sitelink section
Worked on making monolingual text datatype accept more languages
Finished showing the language when a language fallback is used
Started looking into fixing the existing Guided Tours after Guided Tours extension API changes
Worked on implementing Lua convenience functions for rendering arbitrary Snaks. This is useful for displaying references or qualifiers. (phabricator:T76213)
The templates for adding badges (good article, featured article, etc) to articles on Wikipedia in the sidebar are getting removed from articles rapidly in favor of getting that information from Wikidata \o/ German Wikipedia even deleted those templates already. English Wikipedia seems to be getting close.
We are hiring! Passionate about Wikidata and know your way around Java Script and co? Apply!
We'll spend the next week working with Nik and Stas from WMF to move queries forward in Berlin
Worked on implementing a Lua interface for arbitrary Snak rendering. This can be used to render eg. qualifiers or references in Wikipedia infoboxes.
Did groundwork for Lua convenience functions that render data in the user’s interface language, rather than the content language (for multilingual wikis, like Commons or Wikidata only)
Did further work on making the Lua interface code nicer and share code with the parser functions
Removed input method selector in the sitelink input as it was hiding the actual input and not very useful there
Fixed some issues in diff views showing new data instead of old data
Created a few scripts to make it easier for 3rd parties to install Wikibase
Fixed icinga notification that tests if dispatch lag gets high
Investigated several issues regarding storage of time values and started fixing them
Fixed editing of qualifiers
Fixed most browser tests after introduction of new header design
Chaged a number of Lua modules (from deprecated function mw.wikibase.getEntity to mw.wikibase.getEntityObject)
Updated the json documentation
Always link to Wikidata on client pages that don’t have any langlinks. This affects users without JavaScript and logged out users, logged in users will still see the link item dialog. gerrit:168632
Fixes for the Wikibase qunit Jenkins job
Made Vagrant git-update also properly update Wikibase and dependencies
Fix for phabricator:T88254 (malformatted Wikidata entries appearing in Watchlist RSS feed in clients)
Final touches on new header design
Investigated how we can provide language fallback also in suggestions when search or adding new statements
More work on allowing additional languages in monolingual text datatype
Added missing backend piece for quantities with units. Now the remaining piece is the user interface.
Lots of improvements around MixNMatch. It has a new catalog overview page. ~340K IDs have been matched so far with it and it now has an FAQ for institutions wanting to get their identifiers linked in Wikidata
First screenshot of the primary sources tool that'll help with migrating data from Freebase and enriching it with references has been leaked;-): 1 and 2
WikiArabia takes place in Monastir, Tunisia, 3-5 April
The GLAM-WIKI 2015 conference in The Hague (10-12 April) features several presentations and tutorials about Wikidata for/with cultural institutions.
The Library world will use Wikidata to link its information to any and all Wikipedias. No longer English only, but every Wikipedia will be exposed in this way.
Went through all the feedback we got for improving watchlist integration on Wikipedia and co and posted our assesment
Put the infrastructure for creating Turtle-Beta dumps in place. All new Wikidata dumps will be in https://dumps.wikimedia.org/wikidatawiki/entities/ from Monday on (the old * directory will be kept around and receive new json dumps for backwards compatibility).
Reduced size of entities pages by removing no longer needed data (to make the UI faster).
Fixed bug that sometimes caused dates and other types of values to be cut short when quickly saving. (phabricator:T92831)
Fixed issues with setting focus after clicking edit.
We are going to change the way value suggestions are ranked when entering a new statement. This will help with "male" and "female" not showing up among the top suggestions. Previously we ranked by number of sitelinks. We will change this to the maximum of sitelinks and labels. So if an item has labels in many languages but no sitelinks like "male" and "female" it will still show up high in the suggestions. (phabricator:T94404)
Discussed how to move forward with identifiers. Outcome: They should get their own datatype. (phabricator:T95287)
Implemented arbitrary access for the {{#property:…}} parser function. This can be invoked on the wikis that have arbitrary access enabled by using {{#property:P123|from=Q42}}. So far this is only Wikidata itself.
Did further performance work on the client (Wikipedia and co) in preparation for arbitrary access
Improved the performance of wbgetentities significantly when loading a large number of entities
Wikimedia's monthly GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) newsletter now includes a Wikidata report. The draft for the first edition, covering April, may be edited and your contributions will be welcome.
Made label, description and aliases special pages easier to use
Bene* created a new Special:ListProperties special page to list properties by data type
Expanded our set of automated browser tests
Made language fallbacks work in more situations and more consistently. In particular, the entity selector now uses language fallback. This should benefit especially people who want to use Wikidata in a variant such as en-gb.
Continued work on the planned DataModel 3.0 release
Continued discussing and documenting future calendar model support
Continued work on our RDF generator
Continued work on usage tracking for labels on multilingual sites
Addshore worked on various issues regarding redirects
Addshore worked on a special page to turn an item into a redirect
Work on showing entity labels in edit summaries on history pages
Implemented change dispatching based on the new usage tracking mechanism
Fixed issue with page deletions on some Wikipedias not being reported to Wikidata
More work on straightening out date formatting and parsing
Fixed handling of scientific notation for quantity values
Term box: fixed bug causing stale info to be show, and another bug causing babel languages to be ignored sometimes.
Implemented access to other arbitrary items via the #property parser function
Bene* implemented check to make sure two properties can not have the same alias only differing in capitalization
There are a number of user boxes you can add to your user page to indicate interests and which wiki projects you belong to.
Development
On Tuesday, we are deploying usage tracking (no arbitrary access yet) to Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource, and subscription tracking on Wikidata. There should be no noticeable changes for users. These are necessary steps towards enabling arbitrary access in clients.
Worked on making language fallback work in the suggester (when adding a new statement or searching for an item)
More work on RDF output and the query service
Added Special:RedirectEntity for redirecting items
Investigated and working to fix JS bug on items with “invalid” values (phabricator:92975)
Did work towards having entity ids in revision histories and in diffs linked with their label (like on watchlists or in the recentchanges)
A study has been published about how Wikidata can help significantly improve the quality of medical content on Wikipedia. This is why we do Wikidata! \o/
The Wikidata Menu Challenge has started and goes on to May 27. Add labels, images and pronunciation audio to a list of around 290 items to help show off the power of Wikidata at a food festival.
Hovercards also show the target's label and ID now. (Try them by turning them on in the beta features section of your preferences.)
Continued working on RDF export
More work on making it possible to add a reference right away when adding a statement (and allowing the full statement incl references to be edited at the same time)
Did more work to make usage tracking possible on multilingual wikis (namely Commons)
Past: Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) spoke about authority control in Wikidata (and sister projects) at the World Digital Library's Arab Peninsula Regional Group Symposium, organised in conjunction with the Qatar National Library, in Doha on 13 May. His slides, with an Arabic translation, will be online soon.
Past: Wikidata editing workshop at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin
Past: Wikidata workshop for archivists of Catalan City of Justice
Upcoming: MediaWiki hackathon in Lyon
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Elections for the board of the Wikimedia Foundation are ongoing. Wikidata should be well represented among the voters. Go and vote!
Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource now have the arbitrary access feature. Persian Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikipedia are following today. Italian Wikipedia and all remaining Wikisource projects are following on June 1st.
English Wikipedia is running a bot to add authority control templates to many articles that are filled completely from Wikidata. Italian Wikipedia is doing so as well.
Wikidata descriptions can be soon be edited in the Wikipedia iOS app.
A early preview of the official SPARQL endpoint for Wikidata has been created to query Wikidata. Remember that it is not stable and still beta. A short introduction to SPARQL can be found in Lucie's slides.
If you are not familiar with SPARQL yet, a tool has been created by Tpt and Bene* to generate SPARQL queries from natural language questions.
To do SPARQL queries from the command line, a command line tool was crafted by Marius.
The special page to query for badges is within reach.
A feedback session on the architecture of Wikibase was held.
We got a cool presentation by Maxime about inventaire.io.
We figured out the next steps to make Wikidata more mobile friendly.
Wikidata has passed German Wikipedia in number of items with images (743850 dewp articles vs. 804885 items) - now only second to English-language Wikipedia.
Catalan Wikipedia is moving Taxon IDs to Wikidata.
Zolo did a comparison of English/French/German/Chinese and Cebuano Wikipedias in terms of main types of articles. Biographies were compared by period, nationality and occupation.
Italian Wikipedia and all remaining Wikisource projects now have arbitrary access. The rollout will continue. The schedule for the next projects is at d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access.
The Content Translation tool now automatically connects translated articles to Wikidata. (Thanks Content Translation developers!) Previously translated but unconnected articles have been connected by a bot. (Thanks Amir!)
Code review of the extensions written by a team of students to improve the constraint reports and make it possible to automatically check our data against other databases. A first version will go live soon pending further codereview and fixes.
A challenge was raised to calculate the degrees of separation to Kevin Bacon. Already one routine has been produced, the next step is to use live data so that we can work on reducing the number of intermediary steps.
Deployed arbitrary access on all Wikivoyage and Wikiquote projects and announced the next ones. See d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access for more.
More fine tuning on entity usage tracking (relevant for arbitrary access)
Fixed bug that sometimes allowed multiple properties to have the same label in a given language (phabricator:T102148)
More work on automatically creating redirects when merging items
More code review of the Wikidata Quality extensions (improved constraint reports and checks against 3rd party databases). Starting to look good for a first deployment.
The sitelinks heading hierarchy changed and includes a “Site links” heading now that is only shown on mobile. This is a DOM change needed to make Wikidata work better on mobile.
Started working on having PHPCS coverage for the major Wikibase.git code base to find small code issues more easily
Prepared Wikibase.git for the DataModel 3.0 switch
Released Wikibase DataModel Serialization 1.4
Released Wikibase Internal Serialization 1.4
New releases of several DataValue components, including DataValues Number 0.5, DataValues JavaScript 0.7 and ValueView 0.14.5
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
German language Wikipedia closed its RfC on usage of Wikidata data. As a result Wikidata data can be used on the project as long as it happens through a template and it has a non-Wikimedia reference.
Events/Blogs/Press
Past: Office hour on IRC. We talked about cool things that happened around Wikidata over the past 3 months got an update on upcoming developments and Freebase and more. You can read the log.
Fixed an issue where you'd sometimes select the wrong value when entering a statement unintentionally (phabricator:T98471)
Switched the whole code base to make use of DataModel 3.0
The concept of “claims” no longer exists in Wikibase, as all places in the software work with statements. We are making this more and more explicit in the code.
More work on getting the Wikibase Quality extensions ready for deployment. They'll improve constraint checking and provide checks against 3rd party databases.
Special:UnconnectedPages had to be reworked (thanks Amir!) because of huge performance issues. Because of this it loses some functionality (being able to specify where the list starts and limiting the list to pages that have local interwiki links). We're working on bringing functionality back without the performance penalty.
Enabled arbitrary access on arwiki, cawiki, eswiki, huwiki, kowiki, rowiki, ukwiki, viwiki, and usage tracking on dewiki, ruwiki, cswiki and all s3 wikis. (ruwiki and cswiki get arbitrary access on June 23)
Finishing work on improved handling “invalid” values and statements with deleted properties.
Small breaking DOM change: Wikibase no longer adds its own h1 tag but uses MediaWiki's default .firstHeading element. (phabricator:T93534)
Upcoming: Wikimania. There will be several talks and workshops related to Wikidata. Say hi at the "Ask Us Anything" session for Wikidata if you're there.
Machine readable versions (in various formats) of Wikibase entities will be advertised in their page heads as alternate link. (phabricator:T96298)
Fixed property label on item pages not scrolling anymore (phabricator:T94588)
More work on getting the Wikibase Quality extensions ready for release. The part doing constraint violation checks should go to test.wikidata.org next week. The part doing checks against 3rd party databases will still take a bit longer but is also shaping up nicely.
Made it possible to create items even when another user is mass-creating items (phabricator:T103796)
Bene* worked more on making Wikidata work nicely on mobile
Fixed weird issue with cursor jumping around in sitelink input field (phabricator:T103489)
Fixed an issue where it was not possible to edit a statement after you removed its only reference (phabricator:T103603)
Lydia will be traveling for much of July. Expect her to be a bit less responsive during that time.
Upcoming: Wikimania. There will be several talks and workshops related to Wikidata. Say hi at the "Ask Us Anything" session for Wikidata if you're there.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
A new database report lists people categorized as dead in Wikipedia, but lacking Property:P570 (date of death). It's updated several times during the day. There are about 20 to 30 new entries each day. There is currently some backlog from the Arabic, Marathi, and Thai Wikipedias. Items updated first in Wikidata wont appear in the report. They are listed directly in Wikidata's recent deaths report.
Attending Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City right now, meeting awesome people that already use or want to know everything about Wikidata.
After the next deployment, redirects will be automatically created when merging items.
Special:UnconnectedPages can now be queried via the query API, thanks to Ladsgroup.
Migrating away from an older serializer to the DataModel Serialization component.
Worked on a new time parser that can parse formats like M/D/Y, Y M D and so on.
Fixed a bug where a value could not be edited when save failed.
Made the snak type, badge and rank selectors position themselves after resizing the browser window and introduced a possibility to collapse the sitelinks sections.
Worked on a change in editing to be able to edit a statement and it’s references in one step.
Made some small changes to the style of the edit warning and sitelinks so they are easier to notice and understand
Added error messages for Special:GoToLinkedPage and Special:ItemByTitle so you get a useful message in case no result is found
The Entity Selector now displays alias in brackets behind label
The number of entities loaded via the {{#property:…}} parser function and via Lua will be reported in the “Parser profiling data” (which can be found below a page preview or within the Html of a page)
Prepared for next rounds of arbitrary access rollout
Investigated growing lag of dispatching of changes to Wikipedia and co. We'll need to investigate further and change things so the lag between an edit on Wikidata and it being send to the Wikipedias and other projects is not too high.
Added the property ID to Special:ListProperties
Moved two extensions (Wikidata.org and WikimediaBadges) from Github to Gerrit. More will follow.
You have a bunch of names etc. and want to find Wikidata items with those labels/aliases? Try relabel!
SourcererBot is adding lots of references to existing statements on several thousand items.
Mix-n-Match has new catalogs including the National Library of Australia.
Deaths at Wikipedia are a series of reports comparing items at Wikidata with death-by-year-categories of Wikipedia. For the years since 2000, only about 15% of items at Wikidata lack d:Property:P570 (date of death).
Soon the edit summary for edits through the API will also contain the automatic edit summary that you are used to for edits done through the website. The summary given by the API user will be appended to the automatic summary. (phabricator:T97247)
Addressed performance issues in usage tracking updates and had to delay the latest round of rollouts because of it
Fixed a bug where suggestions would show up twice in item and property selectors (phabricator:T109697)
Improved performance of the mw.wikibase.sitelink Lua method
Made final changes so we can redirect mobile users to the mobile version by default
Evaluated the remaining steps to get the extension deployed that lets you do checks against 3rd party databases. Not much left it seems and we'll tackle that in one of the next sprints. Getting the new features deployed for the constraints checks will still take a bit longer.
More work on making the edit summaries in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co more meaningful
Optimized Wikidata for viewing on mobile devices. You will be redirected to m.wikidata.org automatically when using a mobile device soon the same way it already happens on Wikipedia. (Editing will only be possible via the special pages!)
API custom summary will no longer override the autocomment (phabricator:T97247)
Paging and sorting has been added to Special:ListProperties and it now also shows the IDs of the properties
Worked more on making the edit summaries on the client more meaningful and readable
Introduced a limit of 250 different entities that can be used on a page in the client via arbitrary access. The limit does not apply to convenience functions in lua, such as mw.wikibase.label which use a TermLookup instead of loading a full entity to get labels. (phabricator:T93885)
Stalagmites and stalactites visualizes items without statements, items with statements, and deleted/redirected items by batches of 100,000 QIDs
Mix n Match is now available for mobile, has an improved automatic matching algorithm, got speed improvements and new catalogs were added like the National Gallery of Victoria, World Heritage Sites and CulturaItalia
Matched birth and death days seeks to investigate all pairs of humans (in various subsets) that appear to have the same birth dates and death dates. De-duplication underway!
You can now use the new special page Special:PagesWithBadges to see which articles on that project have a badge like "featured article".
Release of the query service and unit support (see above)
Made quantities not show URIs when editing a value but instead show the label
Worked on new datatype for identifiers to be able to split them from the other statements in the user interface, link them without the need for the authority control gadget and be able to link them in JSON/RDF
Worked more on making the edit summaries in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co more meaningful
A follow-up to the Wikidata for research proposal has begun to be drafted by the University of Haifa and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
Community page for the new SPARQL query service, including a subpage for interesting or illustrative queries, and a board for suggestions and discussions.
Discussion has started on English WikiProject Football about using Wikidata for player squad templates (example) and player club history (example). Needs more input on best practices and commitment to update data.
You'll now get redirected to the mobile view automatically on mobile devices (example)
Made it possible to use more entities on a page via Lua without running into Lua's memory limit
Added the Article Placeholder extension’s results to the search result page (this is one of a few remaining blockers before we can put it on a testsystem for you to try out and give feedback)
Added option to create a new article from Article Placeholder
More work on the new datatype for properties
More work on making meaningful edit summaries on the client. Found a few remaining bugs during testing.
Finished the create article button for the ArticlePlaceholder page
From Monday on a bzip2 compressed version of the beta Wikidata TTL dumps will be published along the gzip one
Getting close to make it possible to add the main value of a statement and its reference at the same time
Worked on adding a new section to item and property pages for identifiers
Did backend work for making identifiers useful in our machine-readable outputs (by actually linking them instead of just giving the identifier string) - more work needed
Fixed a bug where dates would have English months on non-English wikis (phabricator:T116503)
query.wikidata.org now more prominently shows example queries in case you missed them before, lets you filter and gives you a preview for them. Additionally you can click a little magnifying glass next to an item ID in a query result and explore it further.
We will take the "in other projects"-sidebar out of beta features in January (phabricator:T103102)
Making ranking information like label and statement counts available to the CirrusSearch index in order to improve ranking in search results (phabricator:T110648)
Continued work on the identifier data type for identifiers like VIAF and ISBN so we can easily put them into a separate section in the items and properly link them in the exports (phabricator:T95682, phabricator:T121274)
Continued work on making external identifiers clickable links without the help of the authority control gadget (phabricator:T95684)
Fixed a mistake in the set reference API documentation (gerrit:259171)
