Wikidata:Status updates/2014 12 20

This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2014-12-20.

Discussions

• Open RfAs: Petr Matas
• Closed RfAs: Jared Preston (Successful)

Events/Press/Blogs

• Welcome Freebase!
  • Freebase announcement
  • Wikidata announcement
  • Wikiproject
  • Primary sources tool
  • Heise
  • Venturebeat
  • Gigaom
• Wikidata for Research – presenting the team and a first sketch of the workplan

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• New features! Language fallbacks, property data type and performance improvements
• New tree of life based on Wikidata data

Did you know?

• Newest properties: subproperty of, mandatory qualifier, NIST/CODATA ID, EgliseInfo ID
• Newest WikiProjects: Freebase, Sled dog racing
• Showcase items: lion (Q140)

Development

• Happy holidays from the dev team, everyone :)
• ~=[,,_,,]:3
• Enabled other projects sidebar feature as default on Italian Wikipedia
• Deployed new code to Wikidata, including performance improvements, language fallback, and property data type
• Fixed some small issues that popped up after deployment
• Ongoing work on performance improvements (batched label lookup)
• Ongoing work on the JavaScript widgets needed for the planned redesign
• Ongoing work on the WikibaseJavaScriptApi extension that was split from the Wikibase code base
• Finished tree of life
• Some more work on support for units
• Closed/checked even more ‘testme’ bugs on Phabricator
• Wikidata Query has gotten a number of stability fixes. To increase availability and performance we now have multiple instances of it with a load balancer in front of it.
• The data for the entity suggester has been updated. Suggestions when adding new statements should be even better now.

You can see all open bugs related to Wikidata here

Monthly Tasks

• Hack on one of these.
• Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
• Help develop the next summary here!
• Contribute to a Showcase item

Anything to add? Please share! :)