Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2024-12-16. Missed the previous one? See issue #657
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: PWSBot - Task(s): Is a selfmade chatbot to answer factual questions as part of a final research project for educational purposes.
Closed request for permissions/Bot: CarbonBot - Withdrawn by submitter
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session (Attn: Please fill out Pre-Participation Survey!) 17 December 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, 17 December 2024 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6 pm CET (Time zone converter) Wikimedian Mahir Morshed is leading a series of four sessions focused on lexicographical data in Wikidata. We are looking forward to learning more about these Wikibase entities! If you anticipate attending the workshop sessions, please fill out a brief survey linked from our Series Etherpad to help us prepare relevant materials for you. Sessions will be held on November 5, November 19, December 3, and December 17, 2024 at our regular time of 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET. Event page
Baptiste de Coulon, "Les données liées, Wikidata et les archives : une opportunité de contribution aux communs numériques". In: La Gazette des archives, n°271, 2024-2, p.37-56 (free access online after 3 years).
Tabular Online Validator - checks if SPARQL query results conform to a provided schema by validating data and highlighting potential errors, such as missing properties, invalid values, or too many values, with the option to refine the schema if issues arise. (A major update to the current ShEx validator that is expected to get integrated into the existing validator soon)
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
Wikibase REST API: We prototyped search support for the REST API and would like your feedback on it.
Property Suggestions: We updated the underlying data so you should have more up-to-date suggestions again when making new statements.
EntitySchemas: We continued the work on making it possible to search for EntitySchemas by their label and aliases when linking to them in a statement.
Query Service: We are investigating if we can do something about the issue where not all edgeLabels are shown on a graph visualisation (phab:T381857) and if there are any alternatives to the library used for the graph builder in the Query Service (phab:T381764)
Under the hood: We are optimizing the server setup for the term store to accommodate its growth (phab:T351802)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
Interested in improving event management on your home wiki? The CampaignEvents extension offers organizers features like event registration management, event/wikiproject promotion, finding potential participants, and more - all directly on-wiki. If you are an organizer or think your community would benefit from this extension, start a discussion to enable it on your wiki today. To learn more about how to enable this extension on your wiki, visit the deployment status page.
Updates for editors
Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in Italy and Mexico on the Italian, Spanish, and English Wikipedias, can see a personalized Year in Review with insights based on their reading and editing history.
Users of the Android Wikipedia App in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia can see the new Rabbit Holes feature. This feature shows a suggested search term in the Search bar based on the current article being viewed, and a suggested reading list generated from the user’s last two visited articles.
The global reminder bot is now active and running on nearly 800 wikis. This service reminds most users holding temporary rights when they are about to expire, so that they can renew should they want to. See the technical details page for more information.
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 13 January 2025 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the Android Wikipedia App which had caused translatable SVG images to show the wrong language when they were tapped.
Updates for technical contributors
There is no new MediaWiki version next week. The next deployments will start on 14 January. [1]
Ongoing: Wikidata Cleanup 2024 - Romaine continues his initiative, "Wikidata Cleanup," to coordinate community efforts in addressing the problem of items missing basic properties during the last ten days of 2024, when many users have extra time due to holidays. The aim is to improve data quality by focusing on ensuring all items have essential properties like "instance of" (P31) or "subclass of" (P279), adding relevant country and location data, and maintaining consistency within item series.
Upcoming events: Data Reuse Days - online event focusing on projects using Wikidata's data, 18-27 February 2025. You can submit a proposal for the program on the talk page until January 12th.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
Exploring YouTube Channels Via Wikidata, by Tara Calishain. "This time I'm playing with a way to browse YouTube channels while using Wikidata as context. And you can try it too, because it doesn't need any API keys!"
Flying Dehyphenator is an Ordia game. Given the start part of a word, use the spacebar to move the word and hit the next part of the word. Only hyphenations described with the Unicode hyphenation character work.
Want a wrap of your Wikidata activities in 2024? Wiki Year In Review has it for you! (use www.wikidata.org for the project URL)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikibase/Suite-Contributing-Guide: Wikibase Suite's contributing guide has been published. This guide aims to help anyone who wants to contribute and make sure they are equipped with all the relevant information to do so.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
nonprofit tax status (country specific tax status of organisations like non-profits)
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 26th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 August 2024. At press time, over 94% of the world has legally fallen prey to the merry celebrations of "Christmas", and so shall you soon. It's been a quiet 4 months, and we hope to see you with way more new scripts next year. Happy holidays! Aaron Liu (talk) 05:06, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Very useful for changelist patrollers, DiffUndo, by Nardog, is this edition's featured script. Taking inspiration from WP:AutoWikiBrowser's double-click-to-undo feature, it adds an undo button to every line of every diff from "show changes", optimizing partial reverts with your favorite magic spell and nearly fulfilling m:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Partial revert undo.
Doğu/Adiutor, a recent WP:Twinkle/WP:RedWarn-like userscript that follows modern WMF UI design, is now an extension. However, its sole maintainer has left the project, which still awaits WMF mw:code stewardship (among some audits) to be installed on your favorite WMF wikis.
DannyS712, our former chief editor, has ascended to MediaWiki and the greener purpley pastures of PHP with commits creating Special:NamespaceInfo and the __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ magic word to exclude a template from Special:UnusedTemplates! I wonder if Wikipedia has a templaters' newsletter...
BilledMammal/Move+ needs updating to order list of pages handle lists of pages to move correctly regardless of the discussion's page, so that we may avoid repeating fiasco history.
Andrybak/Unsigned helper forks Anomie/unsignedhelper to add support for binary search, automatic edit summaries after generating the {{unsigned}} template, support for {{undated}}, and support for generating while syntax highlighting is on.
Polygnotus/Move+ updates BilledMammal's classic Move+ to add automattic watchlisting of all pages—except the target page(s)—changed while processing a move.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2024-12-30. Missed the previous one? See issue #659
Welcome to 2023’s Final Weekly Summary!
A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to the newsletter this year! 🎉 Each of your contributions, whether big or small, has made a difference and has helped us create a vibrant and informative resource for the Wikidata community. 🙏 Let's continue building and sharing knowledge together in the coming year! 🙌✨
Discussions
Open request for oversight: Ameisenigel (RfP scheduled to end at 6 January 2025 21:52 UTC)
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Papers
Library Data in Wikimedia Projects: Case Study from the Czech Republic by Jansová, L., Maixnerová, L., & Š´tastná, P. (2024). "The paper outlines the collaboration between the National Library of the Czech Republic and Wikimedia since 2006, focusing on linking authority records with Wikipedia articles and training librarians and users. By 2023, the National Library provided most of its databases under a CC0 license, launched a "Wikimedians in Residence" program, and collaborated on projects involving linked data and using authority records in Wikidata. This partnership has enhanced their cooperation for mutual benefit, identifying key factors for their successful long-term collaboration."
How have you modelled my gender? Reconstructing the history of gender representation in Wikidata by Melis, B., Fioravanti, M., Paolini, C., & Metilli, D. (2024). "The paper traces the evolution of gender representation in Wikidata, showing how the community has moved from a binary interpretation of gender to a more inclusive model for trans and non-binary identities. The Wikidata Gender Diversity project (WiGeDi) timeline highlights the significant changes influenced by external historical events and the community's increased understanding of gender complexity."
Videos: Arabic Wikidata Days 2024 - Data Science Course - First Practical Session: Wikibase-CLI Tool (part 1, part 2) by Saeed Habishan. "The Wikibase-CLI enables command-based interaction with Wikidata using shell scripts and JavaScript. The tool runs on NodeJS and enables automatic reading and editing of Wikidata."
Tool of the week
WikiORA - is a tool designed for gene over-representation analysis. It integrates data from Wikidata, Wikipedia, Gene Ontology, and PanglaoDB to help researchers identify significantly enriched gene sets in their data.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
nonprofit tax status (country specific tax status of organisations like non-profits)
Newest WikiProjects: Uganda - aims to be a central hub for the curation of any and all items (biographical, cultural, geographical, organisational, etc...) relating to Uganda (Q1036)
WikiProject Highlights:
Narration/Folktales - creation of Items for motifs described in Thompson's motif index completed
Austria - concerns itself with improving data from nonprofit organizations in Austria
Showcase Lexemes: ਲੇਟਣ (L750580) - in Punjabi (pa) and "لیٹݨ" in Punjabi Shahmukhi (pnb) transliterate to "Leṭaṇ," which means "to lie down" or "to rest" in English.
Development
Most of the development team staff are still taking a break, so no development happened.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-01-06. Missed the previous one? See issue #660
Discussions
New request for comments: Constraints for Germanies - Following from a property discussion on P17 (German non-states), this RfC aims to find consensus on how to apply constraints that exclude items of historical periods in German history.
Please submit your proposals for the Data Reuse Days online event until January 12th. See current proposals on the talk page and here's some ideas to inspire you: presentations/demos of tools using Wikidata's data (10mins Lightning Talk presentations), discussions and presentations connecting Wikidata editors with reusers and/or explanations and demos on how to use a specific part of the technical infrastructure to reuse Wikidata's data (APIs, dumps, etc.).
Talk to the Search Platform / Query Service Team --January 8, 2025. The Search Platform Team holds monthly meetings to discuss anything related to Wikimedia search, Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), Wikimedia Commons Query Service (WCQS), etc.! Time: 16:00-17:00 UTC / 08:00 PDT / 11:00 EDT / 17:00 CET
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC, 15th January 2025 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Blogs: (fr) female authors with male pseudonyms, blog post by Le Deuxième Texte including SPARQL queries to find female authors with male pseudonyms.
Websites :Global Dementia and Risk Factors, website by 'Students at the Maastricht Science Programme', includes data visualizations of the prevalence and current treatments of dementia across the world. It utilises data extracted as SPARQL Endpoints from Wikidata.
Papers
Ontology-grounded Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction by LLM under Wikidata schema - This paper proposes an ontology-driven approach to KG construction using LLMs where competency questions guide ontology creation and relation extraction, leveraging Wikidata for semantic consistency. A scalable pipeline minimizes human effort while producing high-quality, interpretable KGs interoperable with Wikidata for knowledge base expansion. By Xiaohan Feng, Xixin Wu & Helen Meng (2024).
Knowledge Incorporated Image Question Answering Using Wikidata Repository - Proposes a Visual Question Answering (VQA) model that integrates external knowledge from Wikidata to address complex open-domain questions by combining image, question, and knowledge modalities. Evaluated on the VQAv2 dataset, the model outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches, demonstrating improved reasoning and accuracy (Koshti et al., 2024).
Videos: (arabic) Part 6: SPARQL Demo Session: connecting external services - Sparql SERVICE clause gives access to additional data such as labels via wikibase:label, interaction with MediaWiki APIs using wikibase:mwapi, and integration of data from subgraphs (such as the main graph and the scholarly articles graph). Integration of data from external SPARQL endpoints such as DBpedia.
Tool of the week
Wikidata Entity Linker - is a Microsoft Edge browser extension that creates web links for matching inner HTML text based on a regex format of Q\d+ which is the format of a Wikidata Entity ID. (email)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Vacancy: Research Software Engineer / Wikibase-Expert - The Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) located in Hannover has a research position open for someone interested in the deployment, administration and maintenance of open source knowledge management software such as Mediawiki, Wikibase and OpenRefine as part of the NFDI4Culture partnership within the OSL.
January 1, 2025, marked Public Domain Day, with hundreds of 1929 films entering the public domain. Sandra has shared helpful notes to assist in making these films discoverable via WikiFlix, by adding video files to Wikicommons and Wikidata. Join the effort!
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
nonprofit tax status (country specific tax status of organisations like non-profits)
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the Android Wikipedia App which had caused translatable SVG images to show the wrong language when they were tapped.
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
Miscellaneous
Improve a script
Requested scripts
Updated scripts
Newly maintained scripts
New scripts
