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
There is a new user preference for "Always enable safe mode". This setting will make pages load without including any on-wiki JavaScript or on-wiki stylesheet pages. It can be useful for debugging broken JavaScript gadgets.
Gadget definitions now have a new "contentModels" option. The option takes a list of page content models, like wikitext or css. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages with the given content models.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (calendar).
Future changes
The Vector 2022 skin will no longer use the custom styles and scripts of Vector legacy (2010). The change will be made later this year or in early 2024. See how to adjust the CSS and JS pages on your wiki.
January 12 - 14, 2024, Berlin, Germany (and online) - CFP: Provenance Loves Wiki - A workshop on art history, art science and provenance research in Wikidata/Wikipedia & Wikibase
Ongoing
Weekly Lexemes Challenge #110, Ohm's law (Challenge started on 2023-09-25 12:01:32)
This Week
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call October 3, 2023: Lars Willighagen will discuss on citation.js.org, Wikidata, and plans for more linked data. Agenda
Wikidata for Better Health (in French) - Houcemeddine Turki, Faculty of Sciences SFAX < closing session of "Adapting Wikidata to support clinical practice using Data Science, Semantic Web and Machine Learning"
Swiss Archives is an interactive overview map of the Swiss archives present in Wikidata have corresponding Wikipedia articles and in which language (FR, DE, IT), allowing interested Wikimedians to know where they can contribute or expand. - Michael Gasser (X post)
WikiProject GLAM-BW - a project to connect major collections held by museums in Baden-Württemberg by uploading information on collectors, former collection locations, collecting histories, and objects
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We are finalizing the work on getting the labels, descriptions and aliases of a Property.
We are finishing work on modifying the descriptions of an Item.
You can now add sitelinks to Wikifunctions (phab:T342857)
We improved the “required” marker on Special:NewLexeme, hopefully making its meaning clearer (phab:T322683)
If you are not logged-in, you’ll also get the yellow warning when editing Lexeme’s Lemmas, Forms, and Senses (phab:T343979)
We added the tlh-latn and tlh-piqd codes for monolingual text, so that now you can add the titles to Shakepear’s works in the original Klingon (phab:T286239)
Mismatch Finder:
Failed uploads now no longer offer to download review results (phab:T335864)
We are working on the ability to report mismatches on qualifiers (phab:T313467)
The Mismatch Finder will show a clarifying message when Java Script is disabled (phab:T343344)
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
The Vector 2022 skin will now remember the pinned/unpinned status for the Table of Contents for all logged-out users.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September (calendar).
Gadget definitions will have a new "namespaces" option. The option takes a list of namespace IDs. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages in the given namespaces.
Future changes
New variables will be added to AbuseFilter: global_account_groups and global_account_editcount. They are available only when an account is being created. You can use them to prevent blocking automatic creation of accounts when users with many edits elsewhere visit your wiki for the first time.
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 27 October at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
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
The Vector 2022 skin will now remember the pinned/unpinned status for the Table of Contents for all logged-out users.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September (calendar).
Gadget definitions will have a new "namespaces" option. The option takes a list of namespace IDs. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages in the given namespaces.
Future changes
New variables will be added to AbuseFilter: global_account_groups and global_account_editcount. They are available only when an account is being created. You can use them to prevent blocking automatic creation of accounts when users with many edits elsewhere visit your wiki for the first time.
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 27 October at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
WikidataCon 2023, the conference dedicated to the Wikidata community, is taking place on October 28-29, online all around the world and onsite in Taipei. You can now register for the conference.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour September 29. This event is part of a series where you can gain hands-on experience with Wikidata by working on a diverse library and information science (LIS) dataset. In this fourth session, we'll introduce the Wikimedia PAWS environment for data gathering and processing in your Wikidata projects. We'll focus on web scraping for article data using Python and the Beautiful Soup package for parsing. You'll learn about data models for making your data accessible to both machines and humans. This session will be recorded and shared on the event page. Event page.
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #110, Ohm's law (Challenge started on 2023-09-25 12:01:32)
User:Luca.favorido/linkypop.js is a script that can be used to search an identifier on an external site. It provides a button to search for an identifier as soon as you type it in the property input field. For example, if you type “ORCID”, an icon with a lens will appear, and when you click it, a new tab will open with the ORCID site looking for the name of the researcher. You can then copy the URL and paste it to Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Want to play a game? Wikidata:Games has some Wikidata-related ones for you.
Citation.js Toolforge is a service to export citations from Wikidata items in various formats (BibTeX, RIS) and various citations formats (Vancouver, APA, etc)
type of musical notation (system of musical notation used on a given music source or composition)
chronological designation (stated scholarly journal year to which reference is made by: source cited in support of a particular statement may not be the same as the publication date or volume)
We worked on making it possible to upload mismatches on qualifiers (phab:T313467)
We are continuing to migrate tools from ORES to Lift Wing (phab:T343731)
We've added Wikifunktions as a new wiki for sitelinks (phab:T342857)
Wikibase REST API: We are working on making it possible to get labels, descriptions and aliases from a Property as well as modify the description of an Item
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
MediaWiki now has a stable interface policy for frontend code that more clearly defines how we deprecate MediaWiki code and wiki-based code (e.g. gadgets and user scripts). Thank you to everyone who contributed to the content and discussions.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (calendar).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour September 15, 2023. We will learn how to use Zotero, the reference management software, and its browser plugin to automatically extract metadata for articles and convert them to a Wikidata format that can be batch uploaded using QuickStatements.More information on the event page
chronological designation (as a typical instance, the stated scholarly journal year to which reference is made by: the reference source being cited to support the statement being made)
We are planning the migration of some of our existing components from the Wikit to the Codex design system in Query Builder, Mismatch Finder and the Special:NewLexeme page.
Warnings about not being logged-in will now have a returnto= parameter attached to their links, so that you can don’t use your flow from logging in (phab:T330550)
We fixed an issue with the LanguageSwitcher in Query Builder where it would open out of the viewport on some tablet screen widths (phab:T344231)
Wikibase REST API: We finished the work on making it possible to remove a statement from a Property (phab:T342976) and getting the labels of a Property (phab:T342977)
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
ORES, the revision evaluation service, is now using a new open-source infrastructure on all wikis except for English Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two will follow this week. If you notice any unusual results from the Recent Changes filters that are related to ORES (for example, "Contribution quality predictions" and "User intent predictions"), please report them.
When you are logged in on one Wikimedia wiki and visit a different Wikimedia wiki, the system tries to log you in there automatically. This has been unreliable for a long time. You can now visit the login page to make the system try extra hard. If you feel that made logging in better or worse than it used to be, your feedback is appreciated.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
As part of the changes for the Better diff handling of paragraph splits wishlist proposal, the inline switch widget in diff pages is being rolled out this week to all wikis. The inline switch will allow viewers to toggle between a unified inline or two-column diff wikitext format.
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 20 September. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
The Enterprise API is launching a new feature called "breaking news". Currently in BETA, this attempts to identify likely "newsworthy" topics as they are currently being written about in any Wikipedia. Your help is requested to improve the accuracy of its detection model, especially on smaller language editions, by recommending templates or identifiable editing patterns. See more information at the documentation page on MediaWiki or the FAQ on Meta.
Peppercat is a website listing government ministers, and other key political leaders, from all over the world, taking data from Wikidata. More information
state of transmission (state of transmission of a work (as a concept, not as a physical item; for that, use P5816))
describes actor of (predicate sense whose actor (an agent or a cause—basically the instigator of an action) is denoted by this sense)
describes undergoer of (predicate sense whose undergoer (a patient, a theme, or a recipient—basically a non-instigator of an action) is denoted by this sense)
Machine learning: We are migrating some tools that currently use ORES to the new Lift Wing (phab:T343731)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work around the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements
Query Builder: We fixed some issues in the Query Builder language selector (phab:T344231)
We’re making the warning for anonymous editors more useful by letting them return to the page they came from after logging in (phab:T330550); we’re also working on showing those warnings in the first place in WikibaseLexeme (phab:T343979)
Wikibase REST API: We are working on the ability to remove a statement from a Property (phab:T342976) and get the labels of a Property (phab:T342977)
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
EditInSequence, a feature that allows users to edit pages faster on Wikisource has been moved to a Beta Feature based on community feedback. To enable it, you can navigate to the beta features tab in Preferences.
There is a new option for Administrators when they are changing the usergroups for a user, to add the user’s user page to their watchlist. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API.
The LoginNotify extension was not sending notifications since January. It has now been fixed, so going forward, you may see notifications for failed login attempts, and successful login attempts from a new device.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Eastern Mari Wikipedia, Maori Wikipedia, Minangkabau Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Mongolian Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Western Mari Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Maltese Wikipedia, Mirandese Wikipedia, Erzya Wikipedia, Mazanderani Wikipedia, Nāhuatl Wikipedia, Neapolitan Wikipedia, Low German Wikipedia, Low Saxon Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Newari Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Novial Wikipedia, N'Ko Wikipedia, Nouormand Wikipedia, Northern Sotho Wikipedia, Navajo Wikipedia, Nyanja Wikipedia, Occitan Wikipedia, Livvi-Karelian Wikipedia, Oromo Wikipedia, Oriya Wikipedia, Ossetic Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Pangasinan Wikipedia, Pampanga Wikipedia, Papiamento Wikipedia, Picard Wikipedia, Pennsylvania German Wikipedia, Palatine German Wikipedia, Norfuk / Pitkern Wikipedia, Piedmontese Wikipedia, Western Punjabi Wikipedia, Pontic Wikipedia, Pashto Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally.
Gadget definitions now have a new "contentModels" option. The option takes a list of page content models, like 
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (calendar).
