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)
Nous prédisons aux fans des sans pagEs, dès le mois de janvier 2025, une réduction continuelle des biais de genre, et une présence accrue des minorités ainsi que des embellies d'ambiance stellaire.
Les communautés francophones vont particulièrement fuser en mars. Vénus accompagnera les envolées nébuleuses avec la Quinzaine des autrices au printemps. La Convention LSP sera dopée par Mercure et se tiendra à Lyon sous les bons auspices de la cabale lyonnaise et de nouveaux horizons sur le wiktionnaire. Cet été, le soleil en signe de Terre dopera de calories la cartographie des sorcières sur wikidata sans oublier le traditionnel feu d'artifice du mois des fiertés en juin. Saturne en automne enflammera les citations SheSaid. Jupiter accompagnera en novembre d'une pluie de givre étincelant les sans images sur Commons. Quelque part nous porterons au firmament nos collaborations adelphes avec Noircir Wikipédia et le deuxième texte pour rayonner de mille feux !
La constellation de ces projets n'attend que vous pour demander la lune...
Pour connaitre nos prochains évènements regardez notre agenda. Vous avez une idée pour organiser un projet ou un éditathon ? Contactez-nous par mail : info@sans-pages.org.
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.
Join the Wikidata Training Event 2025 organised by Wikimedia Botswana UG for Wikidata enthusiasts of all levels. Starts 18 Jan 10:00am CAT (UTC+2), registration required.
Wikidata module for the Hidden Figures CURE - The newly published Wikidata module for the Hidden Figures CURE teaches undergraduates to use Wikidata for uncovering and highlighting the contributions of hidden figures in natural history, such as women, people of color, and Indigenous peoples.
Memory of the World: Ways forward - Efforts to improve the representation of UNESCO's Memory of the World (MOW) international register on Wikidata include new articles, enhanced data quality, and training on creating structured data. Key contributions involve updating Wikipedia and Wikidata entries, addressing data inconsistencies, and expanding the visibility of MOW inscriptions across languages.
Public domain visibility on Wikidata (in Catalan). The article discusses how Wikidata is being used to enhance the visibility of public domain works by integrating copyright information and making it easily accessible.
Presentations: Wikibase e Wikidata per lo studio dell'epigrafia greca (in Italian, i.e. Wikibase and Wikidata for the study of Greek epigraphy), presentation at SAEG (Advanced Seminar of Greek Epigraphy) IX in Rome, 10 January 2025, by Pietro Ortimini, Anna Clara Maniero Azzolini, Epìdosis - slides
Tool of the week
Dungeon Of Knowledge - is a roguelike game with Items generated from Wikidata that lets you crawl through the Dungeon of Knowledge in a classic ASCII interface. (toot) (blog)
VIAF (cf. Q54919 and P214) underwent a relevant change of interface on January 10; the way of visualizing clusters in JSON format has changed in comparison with present OCLC documentation and e.g. http://viaf.org/viaf/102333412/viaf.json doesn't work anymore; this broke most or all Wikidata gadgets using VIAF data; in the absence of official communications from OCLC, developers are trying to understand if the new VIAF interface is stable before changing their gadgets accordingly
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))
nomenclatural type of (taxon item of which this item is the taxonomic type (name-bearing type), e.g. the family for which this genus is the type, the genus for which this species is the type, the taxon for which this type specimen is the type, ect...)
World Heritage type (Propriety of World heritage site : the Type (Cultural, Natural, Mixed))
Entry height (Height of the entrance above ground level for boarding public transport vehicles.)
location code (the location code of the location item. Should be used with qualifier property {{Q|P459}} to specify which location code system being used.)
DIF historia player ID (Identifier for a sportsperson connected to Djurgårdens IF on difhistoria.se (official site))
Dernières actualités techniques de la communauté technique de Wikimedia. N’hésitez pas à informer les autres utilisateurs de ces changements. Certains changements ne vous concernent pas. D’autres traductions sont disponibles.
En lumière cette semaine
Le système de connexion utilisateur unique (SUL) va être mis à jour durant les prochains mois. Il permet aux utilisateurs et utilisatrices d’être connectés sur tous les sites en même temps après avoir renseigné leurs identifiants sur un site Wikimedia. La mise à jour est nécessaire car les navigateurs restreignent de plus en plus les témoins de connexion inter-domaines. Pour s’adapter à ces restrictions, les pages de connexion et de création de compte seront déplacées vers un domaine central, mais cela apparaitra toujours comme si vous étiez sur le wiki d’origine. Le code mis à jour sera activé cette semaine pour les utilisations sur les wikis de test. Ce changement devrait être déployé pour tous durant février et mars. Consultez la page du projet SUL3 pour plus d’informations et un calendrier.
Actualités pour la contribution
Sur les wikis ayant PageAssessments (évaluation des pages) installée, vous pouvez désormais filtrer les résultats de recherche aux pages dans un projet donné à l’aide du mot-clé inproject:. (Ces wikis : Wikipédia en arabe, Wikipédia en anglais, Wikivoyage en anglais, Wikipédia en français, Wikipédia en hongrois, Wikipédia en népalais, Wikipédia en turc, Wikipédia en chinois.) [1]
Un nouveau wiki a été créé : une Wikipédia en tigré (w:tig:) [2]
Voir les 35 tâches soumises par la communauté résolues la semaine dernière. Par exemple, il y avait un beugue de mise à jour du compteur de modifications de quelqu’un effectuant une annulation d’une autre modification : cela est maintenant corrigé. [3]
Actualités pour la contribution technique
Les utilisateurs et utilisatrices de l’API REST de Wikimedia (par exemple pour des robots ou des outils) peuvent être impactés par des mises à jour en cours. À partir de la semaine du 13 janvier, nous commencerons à rediriger certains points terminaux de contenu de page depuis RESTbase vers les nouveaux points terminaux de l’API REST de MediaWiki pour tous les projets wiki. Ce changement était disponible sur testwiki, et ne devrait pas affecter les fonctionnalités existantes, mais les utilisateurs actifs des points terminaux concernés peuvent signaler directement à l’équipe des interfaces de MediaWiki tout problème qui arriverait.
Les personnes maintenant des outils sur Toolforge peuvent désormais partager leurs retour sur Toolforge UI, un projet visant à fournir une plateforme web pour la création et la gestion d’outils Toolforge depuis une interface graphique, en plus des processus existant par ligne de commande. Ce projet vise à simplifier les tâches des mainteneurs et mainteneuses actifs, ainsi qu’à rendre l’inscription et les procédures de déploiement plus accessibles aux nouveaux et nouvelles créatrices d’outils. Le projet en est encore à ses balbutiements et l’équipe des services en infonuage recueille des retours de la communauté Toolforge pour aiderà concevoir la solution correspondant à leurs besoins. En savoir plus et donner son avis sur Toolforge UI.
Pour le développement d’outil et bibliothèque qui utilisent le système OAuth : le point terminal d’identité utilisé pour OAuth 1 et OAuth 2 retournait un objet JSON avec un entier dans le sous-champ, ce qui était incorrect (le champ doit toujours être une chaine de caractère); Cela a été corrigé ; le correctif sera déployé sur les wikis Wikimedia la semaine du 13 janvier.[4]
De nombreux wikis utilisent actuellement le CSS de Cite pour insérer des marqueurs de note de bas de page personnalisés dans la sortie de Parsoid. À partir du 20 janvier, ces règles seront désactivées, mais les développeurs vous demandent de ne pas nettoyer votre MediaWiki:Common.css avant le 20 février pour éviter des problèmes pendant la migration. Vos wikis rencontreront peut-être des petits changements dans les marqueurs de notes de bas page dans l’éditeur visuel ou en utilisant le mode de lecture expérimental Parsoid, mais s’il y a des changements, ils devraient garder le rendu cohérent avec la sortie de l’analyseur classique. [5]
Edit-A-Thon for Black History Month: 12 February 1300 - 1500 MST (UTC+7) is an onsite event at the University of Colorado Boulder, with a theme to add or expand items on Black and African-American comics creators.
Data Reuse Days 2025 is from February 18 to 27, 2025! This is an online event focusing on how people and organizations use Wikidata's data to build interesting applications and tools. Don't forget to register so we can know you are coming.
Past: Missed the Q1 Wikidata+Wikibase office hour? You can catch up by reading the session log here: 2025-01-15 (Q1 2025)
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs: Cleaning up legacy Wikipedia links in Open Library: The blog post discusses cleaning up outdated Wikipedia links to improve article accuracy and navigation, while highlighting the importance of integrating Wikidata for better data management.
Tracking Looted Art with Wikidata Queries - As part of Art History Loves Wiki 25, Laurel Zuckerman will show how Wikidata SPARQL queries can aid provenance researchers and historians find, identify and track looted art.
OpenStreetMap and Wikidata in Disaster Times: Ormat Murat Yilmaz will speak on how Wikidata and OSM play a role in coordinating relief efforts by providing a collaborative platform for providing data about affected areas. Part of WM CEE meeting 2024 Istanbul.
Serbian Novels on Wikidata: Presented by Filip Maljkovič on the progress and process of adding Serbian literature into Wikidata, using OCR methods to map pages and assign Properties.
(german)Wikidata for NGOs: Use and network open data sensibly: Johan Hoelderle discusses how nonprofits can benefit from the largest free knowledge base and show what potential open data offers for non-profit projects.
Data partnerships and Libraries combating misinformation: WMDE's Alan Ang delivers a speech on how GLAM institutions can help prevent the spread of dis- and misinformation whether hallucinatory AI or malicious, part of the Wikimedia+Libraries International Convention 2025.
Product Manager: Wikibase Suite: Wikimedia Deutschland is looking for a PM to lead Wikibase Suite, empowering institutions like GLAMs and research groups to build customizable linked knowledge bases and contribute to the world’s largest open data graph.
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))
nomenclatural type of (taxon item of which this item is the taxonomic type (name-bearing type), e.g. the family for which this genus is the type, the genus for which this species is the type, the taxon for which this type specimen is the type, ect...)
World Heritage type (Propriety of World heritage site : the Type (Cultural, Natural, Mixed))
location code (the location code of the location item. Should be used with qualifier property {{Q|P459}} to specify which location code system being used.)
DIF historia player ID (Identifier for a sportsperson connected to Djurgårdens IF on difhistoria.se (official site))
We’re making good progress on checking format constraints more efficiently and with fewer errors (T380751)
We’re working on making distinct-values constraint checks works with the split Query Service (T369079)
EntitySchemas: We’re working on making the heading on EntitySchema pages apply language fallback (T228423)
Search: We’ve started working on the new search UI component which will let you search for additional entity types from the main search bar and not just Items anymore (T338483)
Wikibase REST API: We're working on adding search to the API (T383209)
Dernières actualités techniques de la communauté technique de Wikimedia. N’hésitez pas à informer les autres utilisateurs de ces changements. Certains changements ne vous concernent pas. D’autres traductions sont disponibles.
Actualités pour la contribution
Administrators can mass-delete multiple pages created by a user or IP address using Extension:Nuke. It previously only allowed deletion of pages created in the last 30 days. It can now delete pages from the last 90 days, provided it is targeting a specific user or IP address.[6]
On wikis that use the Patrolled edits feature, when the rollback feature is used to revert an unpatrolled page revision, that revision will now be marked as "manually patrolled" instead of "autopatrolled", which is more accurate. Some editors that use filters on Recent Changes may need to update their filter settings.[7]
Voir les 31 tâches soumises par la communauté résolues la semaine dernière. For example, the Visual Editor's "Insert link" feature did not always suggest existing pages properly when an editor started typing, which has now been fixed.
Actualités pour la contribution technique
The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is being progressively removed from the wikis. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. The last group of wikis (Catalan Wikiquote, Wikimedia Finland, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikibooks, Wikimedia Sweden) will soon be contacted. If you have questions about this process, please ping Trizek (WMF) at your wiki.[8]
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: updates about services from the Data Platform Engineering teams, information about Codex from the Design System team, and more.
Call for Proposals: IslandoraCon 2025. "IslandoraCon brings together a community of librarians, archivists, cultural heritage collections managers, technologists, developers, project managers, and open source project enthusiasts in support of the Islandora framework for digital curation and asset management." Deadline for session proposals: February 14, 2024.
PhotoNearby.js - a user script that checks Wikimedia Commons for a nearby photo if no image (P18) statement and has coordinate location (P625). Displays above the Statements heading. Defaults to a 500 meter radius. Displays a link to WikiShootMe.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
As part of an effort to benchmark open source SPARQL engines on Wikidata, the page Wikidata:Scaling Wikidata/Benchmarking/Existing Benchmarks contains some initial results and analyses of benchmarking Blazegraph, MilleniumDB, QLever, and Virtuoso on several existing SPARQL query benchmarks for Wikidata. There are some surprising results there, particularly related to different answers produced by different engines. Suggestions on how to improve the effort or provide deeper explanations of the results are particularly welcome on the discussion page.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
nomenclatural type of (taxon item of which this item is the taxonomic type (name-bearing type), e.g. the family for which this genus is the type, the genus for which this species is the type, the taxon for which this type specimen is the type, ect...)
World Heritage type (Propriety of World heritage site : the Type (Cultural, Natural, Mixed))
location code (the location code of the location item. Should be used with qualifier property {{Q|P459}} to specify which location code system being used.)
DIF historia player ID (Identifier for a sportsperson connected to Djurgårdens IF on difhistoria.se (official site))
Newest WikiProjects: No Longer at the Margins - aims to highlight and document the contributions of women in science, ensuring their visibility and recognition in the historical and archival record by addressing biases and gaps in representation.
Storage growth: We are making some changes to the terms-related database table in order to scale better (phab:T351802)
Constraint violations: We’re working on making distinct-values constraint checks works with the split Query Service (phab:T369079)
EntitySchemas: We’re working on making the heading on EntitySchema pages apply language fallback (phab:T228423)
Search: We are working on the new search UI component which will let you search for additional entity types from the main search bar and not just Items anymore (phab:T338483)
Wikibase REST API: We're continuing the work on adding search to the API (phab:T383209)
Lua: We are investigating if we can increase the Entity Usage Limit on client pages (phab:T381098)
Dernières actualités techniques de la communauté technique de Wikimedia. N’hésitez pas à informer les autres utilisateurs de ces changements. Certains changements ne vous concernent pas. D’autres traductions sont disponibles.
En lumière cette semaine
Patrollers and admins - what information or context about edits or users could help you to make patroller or admin decisions more quickly or easily? The Wikimedia Foundation wants to hear from you to help guide its upcoming annual plan. Please consider sharing your thoughts on this and 13 other questions to shape the technical direction for next year.
Actualités pour la contribution
iOS Wikipedia App users worldwide can now access a personalized Year in Review feature, which provides insights based on their reading and editing history on Wikipedia. This project is part of a broader effort to help welcome new readers as they discover and interact with encyclopedic content.
Edit patrollers now have a new feature available that can highlight potentially problematic new pages. When a page is created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted, a tag ('Recreated') will now be added, which users can filter for in Spécial:Modifications récentes and Spécial:Nouvelles pages.[9]
Later this week, there will be a new warning for editors if they attempt to create a redirect that links to another redirect (a double redirect). The feature will recommend that they link directly to the second redirect's target page. Thanks to the user SomeRandomDeveloper for this improvement.[10]
Wikimedia wikis allow WebAuthn-based second factor checks (such as hardware tokens) during login, but the feature is fragile and has very few users. The MediaWiki Platform team is temporarily disabling adding new WebAuthn keys, to avoid interfering with the rollout of SUL3 (single user login version 3). Existing keys are unaffected.[11]
For developers that use the MediaWiki History dumps: The Data Platform Engineering team has added a couple of new fields to these dumps, to support the Temporary Accounts initiative. If you maintain software that reads those dumps, please review your code and the updated documentation, since the order of the fields in the row will change. There will also be one field rename: in the mediawiki_user_history dump, the anonymous field will be renamed to is_anonymous. The changes will take effect with the next release of the dumps in February.[12]