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The Bugle: Issue 227, March 2025

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Hawkeye7 looks at works on a female astronaut and a senior US Navy officer Op-ed: Adam Cuerden on his experiences with a recent featured picture Timeline: This month in military history

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 11:11, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #671

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2025-03-17. Missed the previous one? See issue #670

Discussions

• New request for comments: Time to deprecate P642 - of (P642) has spent 3 years marked asdeprecated. Is it time to finally mark it as an obsolete Wikidata property(Q18644427)?

Events

• Upcoming events:
  • Call for Wikimania 2025 Programme reviewers. Apply until Monday 17 March 12:00 UTC
  • Wikidata Affinity Group Update: The fourth session of Starting a Wikidata Project, originally set for March 18, will now be an asynchronous Slack discussion in the #wikidata channel of the LD4 Slack Space. Join us at 9am PT / 16:00 UTC to discuss Reporting Your Outcomes and Results. Join Slack here. Note: April programming will pause as we prepare the next series.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • Training for the staff of the Museum of Photography in Krakow on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata - "The training aimed to enable the MuFo staff to effectively navigate and develop skills in editing and managing the museum's digital resources within the Wikimedia projects."
  • (German) Wikipedia Unterwegs - this time in Neu-Ulm: This travelling community meetup for German Wikimedians discusses the growing ecosystem of Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons.
  • REST in Rust by Magnus: "A new Rust crate has been developed to simplify access to the Wikibase REST API, featuring industry-level coding standards, 248 unit tests, >97% code coverage, and high maintainability. Check out the GitHub repo and contribute via the issue tracker or pull requests!"
• Videos
  • Useful videos that explain how to set up/make use of Wikibases. Put together by Valerie
  • Wikidata and Wikibase - Curriculum Transformation in the Digital Humanities
  • (Chinese) Open Data Day Taiwan 2025: more details and program agenda on the Wikimedia Taiwan Meta Event page
  • Wikidata as an Open Data Resource: Ian Watt at Open Source SG
  • Bridging GLAM and Wiki: The Khalili Perspective: Dr. Martin Poulter, WiR at Khalili Foundation.

Tool of the week

• Research Expeditions on Wikidata with itineraries - Visualization tool for research expeditions itineraries and natural history collections.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• An update regarding the WDQS backend has been published, about the adoption of the new endpoints and the next steps that will take place.
• Call for Projects – Wiki Mentor Africa Hackathon 2025. Do you have a technical project that needs contributions? Or a testing initiative that could use more hands? Submit a project BY 21st March 2025.
• The Wikidata Vector Database prototype is almost ready! Developers interested in integrating semantic search into their applications and editors looking to explore Wikidata items using natural language search are invited to reach out for more details: philippe.saadewikimedia.de
• Join the Wikimedia Deutschland software development team: Product Manager Wikibase Suite (all genders)

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • OAI formatter (formatter to generate ID compatible with Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting services)
  • AI-generation prompt (exact prompt that was used to generate this AI-generated media or work)
  • data analysis method (methods used in the main item for inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information)
• Newest External identifiers: Wikishire article ID, HelloAsso organization ID, Dictionnaire de la déportation gardoise person ID, Graceful17 entity ID, ‎Game Input Database ID, DRTV ID, Calindex person ID, Historia Hispánica ID, ‎TERMDAT ID, Kulturdatenbank ID, DDLC entry ID, Chinese Basketball Association player ID, ‎Captain Coaster coaster ID, Memoria Chilena ID, Jamendo track ID, MikuWiki article ID, ‎ZOOM Platform product ID, Clio-online researcher ID, Clio-online organization ID, ‎SteamDB tech ID, ‎Big Fish Games game ID, Clio-online web resource ID, Iowa State University Library Vocabularies ID, Newsweek topic ID, booru tag
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • watercraft prefix (prefix applied to watercraft operated by different organisations)
  • accused (person or organization who has been accused of carrying out this harmful, illegal, or immoral act without having received a criminal conviction or where the accused have been acquitted in a court of law)
  • applies to volume (volume of the item (usually edition of a work) to which the claim applies)
  • oxygen endurance (The maximum time a submarine, spacecraft or enclosed vehicle can sustain life using its onboard oxygen supply.)
  • Coefficient of thermal expansion ()
  • fracture toughness ()
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Danskefilmstemmer.dk work ID, Danskefilmstemmer.dk character ID, Internet-Portal „Westfälische Geschichte“ person ID, Kosovo NGO registration number, Yale LUX ID, geraldika.ru symbol ID, Swimcloud swimmer ID, CACI company ID, VD 16 ID, World Higher Education Database ID, Qur'an Wiki article ID, JSIC code, Macrotransactions game ID, Landtag Tirol person ID, NexusMods mod ID, Thunderstore game ID, SideQuest app ID, IndExs Exsiccata ID, National Academy of Engineering member ID, DGO ID, The Rural Settlement of Roman Britain ID, Audiovisual Identity Database page, Encyclopaedia of Islam (Arabic edition) ID, Rodovid family ID, Cultural Heritage Azerbaijan ID, Zurich Kantonsrat and Regierungsrat member ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Location of fire stations in Spain (source)
  • Oldest known individual per taxon (pre-20th century) (source)
• Newest WikiProjects: AncientMaths
• WikiProject Highlights: New country page for Poland in WikiProject Nonprofit Organizations, and on cividata.org. Help expanding it!
• Newest database reports: German lexemes without forms divided by lexical category (source)
• Showcase Items: Perm (Q915) - city in Russia
• Showcase Lexemes: Knoten (L298686) - German noun that can mean "knot", "fundamental unit of which graphs (in graph theory) are formed", "point where an orbit crosses a plane of reference to which it is inclined", or "hair wrapped in a circular coil around itself (bun)."

Development

• Wikibase REST API: We continued the work on adding search to the API (phab:T383126)
• Search: We are continuing the work on making it easier to search for entities other than Items in the search box (phab:T338483)
• Query Service: We set up the constraint checks to use the split graph instead of the full graph (phab:T374021)
• Integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are looking into how changes from Wikidata are represented on the other Wikimedia projects and how that can be improved (phab:T386200)

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.
• 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 · Previous issue · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Abdulai (WMDE) talk · MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:55, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-12

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

Weekly highlight

• Twice a year, around the equinoxes, the Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team performs a datacenter server switchover, redirecting all traffic from one primary server to its backup. This provides reliability in case of a crisis, as we can always fall back on the other datacenter. Thanks to the Listen to Wikipedia tool, you can hear the switchover take place: Before it begins, you'll hear the steady stream of edits; Then, as the system enters a brief read-only phase, the sound stops for a couple of minutes, before resuming after the switchover. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog. If you want to keep an ear out for the next server switchover, listen to the wikis on March 19 at 14:00 UTC.

Updates for editors

• The improved Content Translation tool dashboard is now available in 10 Wikipedias and will be available for all Wikipedias soon. With the unified dashboard, desktop users can now: Translate new sections of an article; Discover and access topic-based article suggestion filters (initially available only for mobile device users); Discover and access the Community-defined lists filter, also known as "Collections", from wiki-projects and campaigns.
• On Wikimedia Commons, a new system to select the appropriate file categories has been introduced: if a category has one or more subcategories, users will be able to click on an arrow that will open the subcategories directly within the form, and choose the correct one. The parent category name will always be shown on top, and it will always be possible to come back to it. This should decrease the amount of work for volunteers in fixing/creating new categories. The change is also available on mobile. These changes are part of planned improvements to the UploadWizard.
• The Community Tech team is seeking wikis to join a pilot for the Multiblocks feature and a refreshed Special:Block page in late March. Multiblocks enables administrators to impose multiple different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. If you are an admin or steward and would like us to discuss joining the pilot with your community, please leave a message on the project talk page.
• Starting March 25, the Editing team will test a new feature for Edit Check at 12 Wikipedias: Multi-Check. Half of the newcomers on these wikis will see all Reference Checks during their edit session, while the other half will continue seeing only one. The goal of this test is to see if users are confused or discouraged when shown multiple Reference Checks (when relevant) within a single editing session. At these wikis, the tags used on edits that show References Check will be simplified, as multiple tags could be shown within a single edit. Changes to the tags are documented on Phabricator. [1]
• The Global reminder bot, which is a service for notifying users that their temporary user-rights are about to expire, now supports using the localized name of the user-rights group in the message heading. Translators can see the listing of existing translations and documentation to check if their language needs updating or creation.
• The GlobalPreferences gender setting, which is used for how the software should refer to you in interface messages, now works as expected by overriding the local defaults. [2]
• View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Wikipedia App for Android had a bug fixed for when a user is browsing and searching in multiple languages. [3]

Updates for technical contributors

• Later this week, the way that Codex styles are loaded will be changing. There is a small risk that this may result in unstyled interface message boxes on certain pages. User generated content (e.g. templates) is not impacted. Gadgets may be impacted. If you see any issues please report them. See the linked task for details, screenshots, and documentation on how to fix any affected gadgets.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:45, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 67

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 67, January – February 2025

• East View Press and The Africa Report join the library
• Spotlight: Wikimedia+Libraries International Convention and WikiCredCon
• Tech tip: Suggest page

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --18:48, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

March thanks

story · music · places

Thank you for improving article quality in March! -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:48, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

Today: an opera, 100 years old OTD, on Bach's birthday. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:12, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

Today, 300 years of Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 1! We sang works for (mostly) double choir by Pachelbel, Johann Christoph Bach, Kuhnau/Bach, Gounod and Rheinberger! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:48, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 March 2025

• From the editor: Hanami

• Opinion: Talking about governments editing Wikipedia

• News and notes: Deeper look at takedowns targeting Wikipedia

• In the media: The good, the bad, and the unusual

• Recent research: Explaining the disappointing history of Flagged Revisions; and what's the impact of ChatGPT on Wikipedia so far?

• Traffic report: All the world's a stage, we are merely players...

• Gallery: WikiPortraits rule!

• Essay: Unusual biographical images

• Obituary: Rest in peace

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:06, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-13

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

Weekly highlight

• The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking your feedback on the drafts of the objectives and key results that will shape the Foundation's Product and Technology priorities for the next fiscal year (starting in July). The objectives are broad high-level areas, and the key-results are measurable ways to track the success of their objectives. Please share your feedback on the talkpage, in any language, ideally before the end of April.

Updates for editors

• The CampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (see deployment plan for details) in April 2025, and the team has begun the process of engaging communities on the identified wikis. The extension provides tools to organize, manage, and promote collaborative activities (like events, edit-a-thons, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. The extension has three tools: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation Lists. It is currently on 13 Wikipedias, including English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia, as well as Wikidata. Questions or requests can be directed to the extension talk page or in Phabricator (with #campaigns-product-team tag).
• Starting the week of March 31st, wikis will be able to set which user groups can view private registrants in Event Registration, as part of the CampaignEvents extension. By default, event organizers and the local wiki admins will be able to see private registrants. This is a change from the current behavior, in which only event organizers can see private registrants. Wikis can change the default setup by requesting a configuration change in Phabricator (and adding the #campaigns-product-team tag). Participants of past events can cancel their registration at any time.
• Administrators at wikis that have a customized MediaWiki:Sidebar should check that it contains an entry for the Special pages listing. If it does not, they should add it using * specialpages-url|specialpages. Wikis with a default sidebar will see the link moved from the page toolbox into the sidebar menu in April. [4]
• The Minerva skin (mobile web) combines both Notice and Alert notifications within the bell icon (). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts. [5]
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• VisualEditor has introduced a new client-side hook for developers to use when integrating with the VisualEditor target lifecycle. This hook should replace the existing lifecycle-related hooks, and be more consistent between different platforms. In addition, the new hook will apply to uses of VisualEditor outside of just full article editing, allowing gadgets to interact with the editor in DiscussionTools as well. The Editing Team intends to deprecate and eventually remove the old lifecycle hooks, so any use cases that this new hook does not cover would be of interest to them and can be shared in the task.
• Developers who use the mw.Api JavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with the userAgent parameter: var api = new mw.Api( { userAgent: 'GadgetNameHere/1.0.1' } );. If you maintain a gadget or user script, please set a user agent, because it helps with library and server maintenance and with differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate traffic. [6][7]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:39, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #672 (correct version!)

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2025-03-24. Missed the previous one? See issue #671

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot:Request for admin flag for MsynBot - From 2021 through 2024, this bot has implemented the 2019 RfC “semi-protection to prevent vandalism on most used Items” by maintaining page protections based on the outcome, d:Wikidata:Protection policy#Highly used items. The admin flag got lost due to bot inactivity but the bot operation could be resumed immediately if the admin flag is given back.

Events

• Upcoming events:
  • AAFRennes2025, 26-28 Mars 2025
  • 5-6 April & 12 April: Scholia Hackathon
  • Wikidata and Sister Projects to take place May 29 - June 1. Please send us your session ideas, we still have lots of space for proposals. This is a great chance to highlight the benefits of Wikidata use in other WM projects. See Talk page for proposals.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • Enhance Your Wikibase With Extensions
  • Editing Lexemes with your little finger
  • Wikidata and the sum of all video games − 2024 edition by Jean-Fred
• Thread: Who wins in a Wikipedia race between GPT-4.5, o1, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and @OpenAI's new Computer-Using Agent?

Tool of the week

• Lexica - a mobile-friendly tool that simplifies micro contributions to lexicographical data on Wikidata, making various editing tasks accessible and intuitive for contributors of all experience levels.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Mobile Editing of Statements - You have been asking for the ability to edit statements from mobile devices for years, this project will make editing statements on Wikidata Items more accessible and user-friendly for mobile users. Sign up to participate in prototype testing and interviews with our UX team
• Join the Wikimedia Deutschland software development team: Product Manager Wikibase Suite (all genders)

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest properties:
  • General datatypes:
    • data analysis method (methods used in the main item for inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information)
  • External identifiers: booru tag, Steam Group numeric ID, Kompass company ID, ‎Macrotransactions game ID, Thunderstore game ID, ‎JSR package ID, ‎GitLab topic ID, Amazon Music track ID, Crunchyroll artist ID, SideQuest app ID
• New property proposals to review:
  • General datatypes:
    • levels (levels, maps, episodes, chapters or stages of this video game)
    • Scilit scholar ID (author identifier on {{Q|77125337}})
    • وزن صرفي عربي (A feature to adjust the pattern of Arabic words in lexemes)
    • باب صرفي للأفعال العربية الثلاثية المجردة (Morphology of the Arabic triliteral verbs)
    • land degradation (The amount of land that is degraded by an object. Mainly for infrastructure projects)
    • Research projects that contributed to this data set (This property allows to identify research projects that they have contributed to or created an item)
    • Platform height (platform height above the top of the rail (or above the road for buses))
    • extended by (addons for this item) (Class of software this software is extended by)
  • External identifiers: Congressional Medal of Honor Society recipient ID, Delfi.ee theme ID, identifiant Dezède d'un individu, SeqCode Registry ID, Openalfa street ID, The Oxford Dictionary of Music entry ID, A Dictionary of Education entry ID, TDKIV wikibase ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • 2024 Population Census in Uganda (source)
• WikiProject Highlights:
  • Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal/Liste des artistes de la collection
• Showcase Items: Cinderella (Q15046091) - 2015 film directed by Kenneth Branagh
• Showcase Lexemes: страсть (L166968) - Russian noun that can mean "love", "passion", "desire", or "suffering."

Development

• Wikibase REST API: We finished work on the simple Item search (phab:T383126) and started on the one for Properties (phab:T386377)
• Vector 2022 skin: We fixed a number of the remaining issues with dark mode (phab:T385039) and sitelink positioning (phab:T316797)
• Search: We continued the work on making it easier to search in other entity types (Properties, Lexemes, EntitySchemas) besides Items (phab:T321543)

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.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country:
• 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!

Anything to add? Please share! :)

· Previous issue · Danny Benjafield (WMDE) talk ·