User talk:James Allison/Archive 78
| This is an archive of past discussions with User:James Allison. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
| Archive 75 | Archive 76 | Archive 77 | Archive 78 | Archive 79 | Archive 80 | → | Archive 82 |
Tech News: 2025-45
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Administrators will now find that Special:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start).
- For users with "Automatically subscribe to topics" enabled in their preferences, starting a new topic or adding a reply to an existing topic will now subscribe them to replies to that topic. Previously, this would only happen if the DiscussionTools "Add topic" or "Reply" widgets were used. When DiscussionTools was originally launched existing accounts were not opted in to automatic topic subscriptions, so this change should primarily affect newer accounts and users who have deliberately changed their preferences since that time.
- Scribunto modules can now be used to generate SVG images. This can be used to build charts, graphics and other visualizations dynamically through Lua, reducing the need to compose them externally and upload them as files.
- Wikimedia sites now provide all anonymous users with the option to enable a dark mode color scheme, featuring light-colored text on a dark background. This enhancement aims to deliver a more enjoyable reading experience, especially in dimly lit environments.
- Users with large watchlists have long faced timeouts when editing Special:EditWatchlist. The page now loads entries in smaller sections instead of all at once due to a paging update, allowing everyone to edit their watchlists smoothly. As part of the database update, sorting by expiry has been removed because it was over 100× slower than sorting by title. A community wish has been created to explore alternative ways to restore sort-by-expiry. If this feature is important to you, please support the wish!
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the fixing of the persisting highlighting when using VisualEditor find and replace during a query.
Updates for technical contributors
- Since 2019 the Wikimedia URL Shortener at https://w.wiki is available for all Wikimedia wikis to create short links to articles, permalinks, diffs, etc. It is available in the sidebar as "Get shortened URL". There are 30 wikis that also install an older "ShortUrl" extension. The old extension will soon be removed. This means
/s/URLs will not be advertised under article titles via HTMLclass="title-shortlink". The/s/URLs will keep working. - On Thursday, October 30, the MediaWiki Interfaces and SRE Service Operations teams began rerouting Action API traffic through a common API gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
- MediaWiki Train deployments will pause for the final two weeks of 2025: 22 December and 29 December. Backport windows will also pause between Monday, 22 December 2025 and Thursday, 2 January 2026. A backport window is a scheduled time to add things like bug fixes and configuration changes. There are seven deployment trains remaining for 2025.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- In 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that AI systems and search engines increasingly use Wikipedia content without driving users to the site, contributing to an 8% drop in human pageviews compared to 2024. After detecting bots disguised as humans, Wikimedia updated its traffic data to reflect this shift. Read more about current user trends on Wikipedia in a Diff blog post.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
The Signpost: 10 November 2025
- News and notes: Temporary accounts go live and WMF board member self-suspends
ArbCom elections draw close, and Wikimania '27 in Santiago.
- Community view: Six Wikipedians' thoughts on Grokipedia, and the humanity of it all
It ain't a five course meal, according to one of our interviewees.
- Wikicup report: BeanieFan11, WikiCup victor of 2025, covers the results
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
- In the media: Jimbo's book, an argument about genocide, and a train of shame
Wikipedia's new rival, political controversy in Italy and other Wiki-reports.
- Recent research: Taking stock of the 2024–2025 research grants
$400,000 USD in total funding: what did we get?
- Opinion: With Grokipedia, top-down control of knowledge is new again
Does it shed any light on particular topics that are better suited to LLM-generation than others?
- Obituary: Struway
Rest in peace.
- Traffic report: The documentaried, the disowned, the deceased, Diwali and the Dodgers
You know your man is working hard, he's worth a deuce.
- Comix: Head of steam
'Sblood!
Wikidata weekly summary #705

week leading up to 2025-11-10. Missed the previous one? See issue #704.
Discussions
- Other: Draft policy for temporary account IP viewers. What requirements should be set for this user right?
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: Introducing the Unicode Inflection Library Technical Preview Release : The Unicode Inflection Library leverages comprehensive lexicons from Wikidata to support standardized, multilingual grammatical transformations for global software applications.
- Videos:
- Art+Feminism Celebrates Wikidata!
- Day 5_Using WikiData with Spyral Notebook and Project Presentation
- Wikidata and Wikipedia training for Art+Feminism 2025 in Uganda
- What are Wikidata WikiProjects, and why should you join one? Watch this great explainer from the #LevelingUpDays2024 to see how these communities work together! Then, find your project: Wikidata:WikiProjects
Tool of the week
- User:Difool/WikidataCleanup.js: gadget allowing to do, in one click, a wide series of cleanups in an item: normalize labels, descriptions, and aliases (double spaces, certain Unicode characters), remove weak references, remove weakly referenced dates when they have lower precision than a strongly referenced date and downgrade unnecessary preferred ranks; about the general issue of redundancies in Wikidata, you can check WikiProject Redundancy
- Ghanasupremecases is a webapp that dynamically pulls and displays over 2,000 Supreme Court of Ghana cases from Wikidata, allowing users to access case details linked directly to Wikidata items. The goal is to make African legal data more open, structured, and discoverable, and to demonstrate how Wikidata can serve as a foundation for national-level legal archive
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Temporary accounts rollout: Starting November 12, the community will see logged‑out edits handled through temporary accounts instead of IPs, prompting tool and bot checks.
- Help shape the future WikidatCon! If you attended WikidataCon 2025, please take 10 minutes to share your feedback in this anonymous GDPR-compliant survey (sslsurvey)
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- operating humidity (humidity at which a device operates)
- collector (person or group who physically collected a specimen or object in the field)
- Serbo-Croatian preferred project code (For an interwiki article, the property points to the Serbo-Croatian project (sh, bs, hr, sr) that either has a special connection to the topic or the highest quality article.)
- Newest External identifiers: CACI company ID, AEK Football player ID, Sultanlar Ligi player ID, BeWeb historical or artistic asset ID, SofaScore sports team ID, FootballFakts.ru football match ID, Kicker sports match ID, BDFutbol match ID, Foot Mercato / Fichajes / Fussball Transfers player ID, Disney+ browse ID, Filmarks ID, Memorial Book of Social Democracy-ID, NLAI ID, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain ID, The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts ID, Antique Chinese and Japanese Porcelain Dictionary and Glossary of Terms entry, Filmfriend movie ID, Hesse School ID, The Oxford Dictionary of Dance entry ID, Saxony School ID, NCL Taiwan Periodical Literature periodical identifier, NZ Charities Register Number, IFES Election Guide ID, Arte de la Argentina ID, Democratic Memory Bank ID, Kicker competition ID, Soccer365.net team ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- time of deposition (date or point in time when an archaeological object or assemblage was buried, hidden, lost, or otherwise deposited.)
- readiness (readiness)
- greenhouse gases emissions (amount of greenhouse effect emited by a given company or industry sector)
- neuter form of label (neuter form of name or title)
- current season ({{TranslateThis | an identifier for the team's current season <!-- | xx = descriptions in other languages --> }})
- flag carrier of (country of which the airline is the flag carrier)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: BFXC authority ID, BWB-nummer, Schulnummer Brandenburg, Encyclopedia of Shinto ID, Power Thesaurus ID, WDSF person ID, Blu-Ray.com film ID, Japanese Law Translation ID, USGS Publication ID, Afrikaregisteret ID, National cultural monument of Czechia ID, Admirable Façades styles ID, Brussels Inventory of Architectural Heritage buildings ID, Brussels Inventory of Architectural Heritage streets ID, Dicionário Biográfico de Cientistas, Engenheiros e Médicos em Portugal ID, TikTok User ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples: Map of all places related to persons with layers by property of the place (source)
- WikiProject Highlights: Passionate about highlighting women's achievements? WikiProject Women is dedicated to creating and improving data about women worldwide. Help close the gender gap in knowledge! #WikidataWikiProjects
- Showcase Items: Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape (Q1136251) - cultural landscape in South Africa
- Showcase Lexemes: fold (L4479) - English verb (foʊld) meaning "to bend over on itself", "to mix ingredients gently", or "to fail or give in"
Development The development team were involved in roadmap planning meetings so not much happened in the past week.
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: Paraguay
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-46
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors

- Starting November 12, users will see a change in the appearance of talk pages on some Wikipedias. Almost all wikis have received this design change; English Wikipedia will get these changes later. You can read more on Diff. Users can opt out of these changes in their user preferences in "Show discussion activity".
- MediaWiki can now display a page indicator automatically while a page is protected. This feature is disabled by default. It can be enabled by community request.
- Using the "Show preview" or "Show changes" buttons in the wikitext editor will now carry over certain URL parameters like 'useskin', 'uselang' and 'section'. This update also fixes an issue where, if the browser crashed while previewing an edit to a single section, saving this edit could overwrite the entire page with just that section’s content.
- Wikivoyage wikis can use colored map markers in the article text. The text of these markers will now be shown in contrasting black or white color, instead of always being white. Local workarounds for the problem can be removed.
- The Activity tab in the Wikipedia Android app is now available for all users. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
- The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment called "Image browsing" to test how to make it easier for readers to browse and discover images on Wikipedia articles. This experiment, a mobile-only A/B test, will go live on English Wikipedia in the week of November 17 and will run for four weeks, affecting 0.05% of users on English wiki. The test launched on November 3 on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese wikis, affecting up to 10% of users on those wikis.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example the inability to lock accounts on mobile sites has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Nominations are open on Wikitech for new Toolforge standards committee members. The committee oversees the Toolforge Right to fork policy and Abandoned tool policy among other duties. Nominations will remain open through 2025-11-28.
- The JWT issuer field in OAuth 2 access tokens for SUL wikis has been changed to
https://meta.wikimedia.org. Old access tokens will still work. - The JWT subject field in OAuth 2 access tokens will soon change from
<user id>tomw:<identity type>:<user id>, where<identity type>is typicallyCentralAuth:(for SUL wikis) orlocal:<wiki id>(for other wikis). This is to avoid conflicts between different user ID types, and to make OAuth 2 access tokens and thesessionJwtcookie more similar. Old access tokens will still work. - MediaWiki's block messages (blockedtext, blockedtext-partial, autoblockedtext, systemblockedtext, blockedtext-tempuser, autoblockedtext-tempuser) now support additional parameters indicating whether the user is blocked from editing their own user talk page
$9or emailing other users$10. - A
REL1_45branch for MediaWiki core and each of the extensions and skins in Wikimedia git has been created. This is the first step in the release process for MediaWiki 1.45.0, scheduled for late November 2025. If you are working on a critical bug fix or working on a new feature, you may need to take note of this change. - The process for generating CirrusSearch dumps has been updated due to slowing performance. If you encounter any issues migrating to the replacement dumps, please contact the Search Platform Team for support.
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.
Wikidata weekly summary #706

week leading up to 2025-11-17. Missed the previous one? See issue #705.
Discussions
- New requests for permissions/Bot:
- Che-W-bot - Task(s): Possible duplicate of the bot below.
- CheWikibot - Task(s): Import new articles created on Chechen Wikipedia (ce.wiki) to Wikidata.
- DDResearchBot - Task(s): This bot will facilitate adding structured, cited data from trusted integrity sources to Wikidata for Dewey Digital.
- Closed request for comments:
- Adapt blocking policy to IPv6 networks - While there is a general agreement for admins to block /64, no consensus to add to the blocking Policy was reached.
- Proposal to better document featured SPARQL queries - Consensus was reached and a vote is planned.
- Gender neutral Labels for occupations/positions in French - Majority support for using male and female forms in French labels and aliases, gender-neutral descriptions, and completing male/female label properties.
- Items for videos of online platforms that represent notable Items - No consensus could be reached.
- Should Labels of interlanguage links from other Wikipedia Projects? - There is general support to import labels, however there are concerns about the import as an Alias.
- Signed Statements - No consensus could be reached.
- Use of dates in descriptions of items regarding humans - Dates on Wikidata are community-specific; add only to disambiguate, don’t remove, and format per language conventions.
- Project chat: Proposal:Prohibiting LLM-generated content
- Other:
- Wikidata:Temporary account IP viewer - users who may view IP addresses associated with temporary accounts.
- Wikidata:Self-promotion - an essay on creating an Item about yourself, your organisation, or your work is a form of self-promotion and is strongly discouraged. Feel free to update this page.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- Wikidata Days: IWUG and WAFTAI - A 4 day edit-a-thon beginning November 26, 2025, for Cameroonian and Nigerian educational institutions.
- WikiLatih Wikidata - November 21, 08:50am (WIB), learning around Wikidata: how to reuse data and edit Items. Organised by the Faculty of Science and Technology Universitas Airlangga.
- Just missed it: First steps in Wikidata for the Wikimedia LGBT Community - two introductory workshops for English, French and Spanish Wikipedians with an interest in learning Wikidata.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: GLAM Netherlands report The joint Radboud–Maastricht project Open Topstukken concluded at the Dutch National Library, showcasing 30 digitized collection highlights enriched with Linked Open Data via Wikidata and supported by new tools, documentation, and visualizations to enhance digital accessibility and interoperability.
- Videos:
- (Spanish) Mujeres que Inspiran: Layla Michán - Wikidata e investigación (Women who inspire. Wikidata & research)
- Wikidata Workshop: Improving African Authors and Books Items
- (Spanish) Enriquecer, reutilizar y modelar datos y metadatos usando Wikidata. Tomás Saorín Pérez (Enrich, reuse, and model data and metadata using Wikidata.)
- Guide to the Wikidata Notability Policy
- Wikidata: Wikimedia's knowledge graph in a world of generative AI
- (Portuguese) O que saber antes de editar no Wikidata (What to know before editing on Wikidata)
- (Portuguese) Para além da Wikipédia: como os dados estruturados conectam saberes (Beyond Wikipedia: how structured data connect knowledge)
Tool of the week
- ArchiveExternaLinks is a UserScript by Poro26. The UserScript automates the archiving of all external links present in an item, whether they appear in statements, references or identifiers. For each external link, the script automatically adds an archive link [archive], similar to what is done on Wikipedia for web sources cited in references
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- data collection method (scientific data collection procedure used in/by the subject)
- time of deposition (point in time when an archaeological object or assemblage was buried, hidden, lost, or otherwise deposited)
- Commonwealth Sport country code (code for countries participating in Commonwealth Sport events)
- Newest External identifiers: Japanese Film Database ID, GCatholic former diocese ID, Myanmar Company Registration Number, Team Austria athlete ID, ECHL.com player ID, Genbu.net ID, ISTAMPIE ID, HarmonyOS NEXT APP ID, Federal Legal Information ID, UNESCO Virtual Museum inventory ID, South Korean Business Registration Number, Lämningsnummer, Mackolik football manager ID, Biserici.org church ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review: role in naming (the role the namesake played in relation to this item, i.e. why the item is named after the namesake)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Korea Heritage Service Heritage Portal ID, Lubimyczytać version/edition ID, UEA catalogue ID, CRA program account number, PL-AED, Yandex Object Answer ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject LGBTQ History - aims to improve and organize data related to the history, people, places, events, and organizations that have contributed to LGBTQ+ experiences across time and geography.
- WikiProject Highlights:
- 👩🔬Passionate about highlighting women's achievements? WikiProject Women is dedicated to creating and improving data about women worldwide. Help close the gender gap in knowledge! WikiProject Women
- 🗳️ Interested in democracy and political data? Join WikiProject Elections to model data about elections, candidates, and results from around the globe. Make electoral data open and accessible! WikiProject Elections
- 🏛️ How do you find info on government institutions? WikiProject Govdirectory has a structured data model for that! Help improve data about public agencies on Wikidata. WikiProject Govdirectory
- 🎵 Into music? From classical to K-pop, WikiProject Music needs your expertise to harmonize data on songs, artists, and releases. Join the band! WikiProject Music
- 🧬 Your skills can help model lifesaving data. WikiProject Medicine works on structured data for diseases, drugs, clinical trials, and anatomy. Join a project that matters. WikiProject Medicine
- 🔍 Interested in how knowledge itself is structured? WikiProject Ontology delves into the fundamental classes and properties of Wikidata. Shape the backbone of the knowledge graph! WikiProject Ontology
- Showcase Items: Aboriginal Australians (Q12060728) - First Nations people of Australia
- Showcase Lexemes: ਦਿਮਾਗ਼ (L1078947) - Punjabi noun (dɪ.mäːɣ) meaning "brain (organ)", "intellect/mind", or "understanding/consciousness"
Development
- Mobile statement editing:
- We are working on editing statements that link to other entities in their value (phab:T403974, phab:T409149)
- We enabled mobile statement editing as a beta feature on test.wikidata.org (phab:T407737)
- GraphQL prototype: We finished the work on making labels of linked entities available (phab:T404692)
- Dumps: We are continuing to work on making the dump process more robust
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!
Tech News: 2025-47
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The Reader Experience team is experimenting with reading lists on mobile web, allowing logged-in readers with no edits to save private lists of articles for later. The experiment is running on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias since the week of 10 November, and will begin on English Wikipedia the week of 17 November.
- Users who can’t receive their email verification code during login can now get help by submitting a form on a new special page. This update is part of the Account Security initiative. If your account has an email address, please make sure you still have access to it. When logging in from a new device or location without 2FA, you may be asked to enter a 6-digit code sent by email to finish logging in. Learn more.
- One new wiki has been created: a Wikisource in Minangkabau (
s:min:)
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- As part of the Parser Unification project, the Content Transform Team rolled out Parsoid as the default parser to many low-traffic Wikipedias and is preparing the next step to high traffic ones. This message is an invitation for you to opt-in to Parsoid, as described in the Extension:ParserMigration documentation, and identify any issues you might encounter with your own workflow using bots, gadgets, or user scripts. Please, let us know through the "Report Visual Bug" link in the Tools sidebar or create a phab ticket and tag the Content Transform Team in Phabricator.
- Unsupported Tools: Several issues with Video2Commons have been fixed, including filename-related upload failures, black-video imports, and retry handling. AV1 support has also been added. Ongoing work focuses on backend stability, ffmpeg errors, subtitle imports, metadata handling, and playlist uploads. To track specific tasks, check the Phabricator board.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Save the date for the next Wikimedia Hackathon happening in Milan, Italy from May 1–3, 2026. Registration will open in January 2026. Scholarship applications are currently open, and will close on November 28, 2025. If you have any questions, please email hackathon@wikimedia.org.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
ArbCom 2025 Elections voter message
Hello! Voting in the 2025 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 1 December 2025. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
If you wish to participate in the 2025 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:21, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #707

week leading up to 2025-11-24. Missed the previous one? See issue #706.
Discussions
- New requests for permissions/Bot:
- News2DataBot - Task(s): Check for new, unlinked articles on Polish Wikinews and create relevant Items.
- WikidataLiteraryWorksMetaDataUpload - Task(s): Upload metadata for literary works from research project.
- New request for comments: The Exhibition Models RfC was split into 2 Schema proposals: Exhibition Concept and Exhibition Manifestation.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- Upcoming LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session on 25 November 2025: Join the community-driven effort led by WikiProject Personal Pronouns to improve pronoun data modeling and ethics in Wikidata. This is part of a three-session series (Oct 14, Nov 25, Dec 9) focused on implementing new best practices. No prior Wikidata experience required. Join at 17:00 UTC. Event page.
- Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 - Hosted in Milan, Italy, scholarships are now open, apply on Pretix.
- Art+Feminism & Whose Knowledge? - A conversation on building a feminist data future, Dec 5, 2025, 13:00 UTC (Time zone converter).
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- Presentations: Wikidata as a challenge for rule systems (Declarative AI 2025 Conf.) - Slides / Recording
- Papers: Snapshot of bibliographic metadata from Wikidata for all Arabic periodicals published worldwide before 1930 - Project Jarāʾid, by T. Grallert, (2025).
- Videos:
- An introduction to Wikidata and its use for librarians and researchers; slides available on Commons
- WikidataCon 2025 Session Playlists (YouTube):
Day 1 (31.10) / Day 2 (01.11) / Day 3 (02.11) - Wikidata in library catalogues: Introduction to the Primo VE linked data feature - By Dr Thneed
- Wikidata Live Editing: Stolpersteine and the Holocaust victims they commemorate
- Towards Linked Data Fluency: Takeaways from a Wikidata Workflow Pilot Program
- Enhancing authority files through SPARQL federated queries - Thomas Kerboul and the Bibliothèque de Genève improved person data by comparing Wikidata and IdRef, with manual checks preventing ID mix-ups.
- (Spanish) Inspiring Women: Layla Michán - Wikidata and research - Dr. Aguirre (UNAM) discusses Wikidata as a collaborative research tool and shared experiences in the “Women Who Inspire” series.
Tool of the week
- Timetrail is a website that visualizes the movement of Wikidata items over time by mapping their associated events and locations.
- The redesigned WikiProvenance is now live, featuring a new front end and backend for exploring and comparing Wikidata provenance information. Try examples like Johann Sebastian Bach or Human vs. City and Paris vs. London. Explore it here: https://wikiprovenance.toolforge.org/
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- LDF endpoint retirement considered: The unstable and low-traffic LDF endpoint may be retired to reduce maintenance effort and unnecessary load on WDQS. If your workflow depends on it and you would hate to see it go, please let the Wikidata development team know at Wikidata talk:Data access.
- WDQS Legacy endpoint deprecation: The legacy endpoint (
query-legacy-full.wikidata.org) will be fully decommissioned on 7 January 2026. Please migrate tools and workflows to the supported endpoints:query.wikidata.org(Main) orquery-scholarly.wikidata.org(Scholarly). Assistance is available on the Data Access and Request a Query pages. - Insights from Data Governance Research Process 2025: Results of the research to better understand how the communities currently think about which data and communities are best served by Wikidata, Wikibase Cloud or Wikibase Suite respectively.
- Abstract Wikipedia naming contest: Help pick a name for the new Wikimedia wiki project which is provisionally known as Abstract Wikipedia. The second phase of voting is now open until December 1.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest External identifiers: CUIT, REGAFI id, Hong Kong company ID, California Entity Number, Mã số doanh nghiệp, InfoconDB series ID, InfoconDB conference ID, Biography.com ID, Hudobné centrum person ID, Hudobné centrum group ID, FAIR Epigraphic Vocabularies ID, NVLI ID, SerBenfiquista.com players ID, BG IISDA org ID, BG NACID person ID, The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland ID, Encyclopedia of African American History 1896 to the Present entry ID, National cultural monument of Czechia ID, Davis Cup player ID since 2025, Eiga.com drama ID, Last Address ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- parliamentary group leader (the identity of the leader of a parliamentary group)
- SignWriting transcription (representation in SignWriting)
- free height (vertical distance from the floor level to the lowest obstruction in the ceiling of an indoor or outdoor space)
- thumbtime (Time for video thumbnail in seconds)
- Credibly accused of (entity (person or organization) that has been credibly accused of a crime or serious misconduct, but is not (yet) convicted)
- New External identifier property proposals to review:: CHZZK streamer ID, FC Barcelona players ID, Qalamos person ID, KISTI conference ID, KaraokeTexty.cz artist ID, KaraokeTexty.cz song ID, DLSite dōjin circle ID, DLSite person ID, DLSite work ID, Showlabs ID, DEUMM Online ID, Kvinnehistorie.no persons ID, Foot Résultats player ID, Manga-DB person ID, Manga-DB publisher ID, Manga-DB magazine ID, Slekt og Data cemetery ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Newest WikiProjects:
- Bookbindings - share metadata and images from the currently offline Database of Bookbindings at the British Library
- Irish Traditional Music:Projects - aims to systematically create and enhance Wikidata items for people profiled in the 2024 edition of Fintan Vallely's The Companion to Irish Traditional Music.
- Basketball: Western Illinois Leathernecks Women's
- WikiProject Highlights: Lost Media/Subpages - aim to list all media lost to time in Wikidata
- Showcase Items: arXiv (Q118398) - online digital archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers
- Showcase Lexemes: Bogucin (L1405411) - Polish proper noun (bɔˈɡu.t͡ɕin) meaning "village in Greater Poland", "village in Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship", or "village in Lublin Voivodeship"
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!
Tech News: 2025-48
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Last week, the Wikimedia Search Team recreated the "DWIM" (Do What I Mean) gadget functionality server-side, for Russian and Hebrew Wikipedias. This feature adds cross-keyboard suggestions to the standard search-box suggestions. For example, searching for cxfcnmt on Russian Wikipedia will now add suggestions for счастье ("happiness") that the user probably intended. They plan to enable this feature for other Russian and Hebrew wikis this week.
- Later this week, users of the "⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽" beta feature will have syntax highlighting available in DiscussionTools. This requires that the "Enable editing tools in source mode" preference be set.
- Campaign events extension – the set of tools for coordinating events and other on-wiki collaborations has now been deployed to all Wikimedia wikis. A new feature known as Collaborative contribution to help organizers and participants see the impact of activities has also been added. Join the upcoming learning session to see the new feature in action and share your feedback.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug which stopped CodeReviewBot from working, has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
- Users of Wikimedia API can join a usability study to help validate the new design of Wikimedia REST API sandboxes. Interested participants should fill the recruitment survey.
- The MediaWiki Interfaces team is deprecating XSLT stylesheets within the Action API. Support for
format=xml&xlst={stylesheet}will be removed from Wikimedia projects by the end of November, 2025. In addition, it will soon be disabled by default in MediaWiki release versions: v1.43 (LTS), v1.44, and v1.45. Support for XSLT stylesheets will be fully removed from MediaWiki v1.46 (expected to release between April and May 2026). - The WDQS legacy endpoint (query-legacy-full.wikidata.org) will be decommissioned at the end of December 2025, and finally closed down on 7th January 2026. After this date, users should expect requests to query.wikidata.org that require the full graph to fail or return invalid results if they are not rewritten to use SPARQL federation. The team encourages users to ensure that tools and workflows use the supported WDQS endpoints (https://query.wikidata.org/ - Main graph or https://query-scholarly.wikidata.org/ - Scholarly graph). For support with migrating use cases, please review the Data Access and Request a Query pages for details and assistance on alternative access methods.
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.
The Signpost: 1 December 2025
- News and notes: Election cycles come and go, and Wikimedia Foundation achieves record revenue in 2024–2025!
Admin and ArbCom elections upcoming, BoT elects two new members, task force advises to close Wikinews and keep Wikispore, and other news from the Wikimedia world.
- In the media: Wales walk-off, antisemitism, supernatural powers, feminism turmoil, saints, and sex
Plus mammoth mummy sex-change operation completed!
- Recent research: At least 80 million inconsistent facts on Wikipedia – can AI help find them?
And other recent publications about contradictions and retractions.
- Disinformation report: Epstein email exchanges planned strategy, edits and reported progress
At work on Wikipedia whitewashing. How much should they be paid?
- Traffic report: It's a family affair
Even in these times there is something to be thankful for!
- Book review: The Seven Rules of Trust
Jimmy Wales and Dan Gardner write a book inspired by Wikipedia. What's in it?
- From the archives: "I have been asked by Jeffrey Epstein ..."
The twists and turns of Epstein’s portrayal on Wikipedia.
- Humour: An interview with Wikipe-tan
A conversation about being the mascot of Wikipedia.
- Opinion: AI finds errors in 90% of Wikipedia's best articles
Using ChatGPT to fact-check a month's worth of Today's featured articles.
- Serendipity: Highlights from the itWikiCon 2025
A recap of the latest convention of the Italian Wiki-community, held in Catania from 7–9 November.
- Comix: Madness
It could happen to anyone.
Wikidata weekly summary #708

week leading up to 2025-12-01. Missed the previous one? See issue #707.
Discussions
- A Project Chat discussion (here) on mul / fallback language for Labels, Descriptions and Aliases has continued on Help Talk: Default values for labels and aliases
Events
- Upcoming events:
- Mark your calendars
- Workshop: The Swiss archival landscape – Wikidata and interactive map
February 2 & April 20 (German) / June 2 (French), 2026. Workshops are on-site and online, registration mandatory (closes January 20). - Citizen Technology Community Gathering and Taiwan Translation Launch of Linked Open Data Documents December 7 Time: 13:30-16:50 UTC+8 at West District (Q707524) Xi Project
- OpenStreetMap X Wikidata Meetup #83 December 8 Time: 19:30-21:00 UTC+8 at Mozilla Community Space Taipei (Q61752245).
- Workshop: The Swiss archival landscape – Wikidata and interactive map
- Mark your calendars
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- Papers: Benchmarking SPARQL Engines on Wikidata Queries - Four open-source SPARQL engines were benchmarked on Wikidata, with QLever fastest, Blazegraph slower, and all showing SPARQL standard deviations. By Peter F. Patel-Schneider (2025).
- Videos:
- Records in Contexts (RiC) Wikibase Working Session - Regine Heberlein of the (SAA) Description Section Steering Committee hosts a workshop on Wikibase implementation of the Records in Context Conceptual Model (RiC-CM).
- Wikidata Live Editing: Stolpersteine and the Holocaust victims they commemorate - Follow along as WMDE's Lukas Werkmeister expands Items of Berlin Stoelpersteine.
- Wikidata in library catalogues: Introduction to the Primo VE linked data feature - by Dr Thneed
Tool of the week
- Prix Littéraires lists French-speaking literary prizes and their recipients, also computing statistics (see also WikiProject)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Nov 27: The Wikibase Community User Group met for a Wikibase Live Session and to discuss the Federated Values demonstration.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest External identifiers: Federal Taxpayer Registry ID, WDSF athlete ID, TikTok numeric user ID, USGS Publication ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- concurring opinion by (judicial opinion agreed to by less than half of the members of a court agreeing with the majority's final decision but providing different or additional reasons)
- audio version of text (The audio version of a text (e.g. book). Not the audio version of the Wikipedia article about the text (e.g. book).)
- Hong Kong fire alarm level (Hong Kong fire alarm levels classification system)
- overnight stays (number of tourists that stay overnight at a place)
- specimen determiner (person who assigned the identification to a specimen)
- collection date (the date-time or interval during which a specimen or object was collected in the field)
- position holder name string (name of person holding a position)
- Crowdfunding target (target goal of this Crowdfunding campaign)
- image sensor format (shape and size of a digital camera's image sensor)
- random page URL (link to random page on website)
- translates from (language(s) that this person, company or organization translates works texts from)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Twitter broadcast ID, Petal Maps Place ID, MJ character glyph name, Mastercaller player ID, dartn.de player ID, darts1.de player ID, pdpa.co.uk player ID, Antiquitatum Thesaurus ID, Theaterencyclopedie-identificatiecode, Buy Me a Coffee username, GoFundMe ID, Identifiant Maitron d'une biographie (nouvelle version), Michaelis Portuguese-English properties, U.S. Copyright Office Public Records System name slug, FCC ID Database company ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples: Objects bearing the handwriting of Moses Maimonides (Source)
- Newest WikiProjects: Uzbekistan, Natural History Specimen Data Model
- Newest database reports: Popular Items without Claims - these are the most-connected or linked Items that do not have any Statements.
- Showcase Items: The Walt Disney Company (Q7414) - American multinational mass media company
- Showcase Lexemes: Showcase Lexemes: девочка (L103836) - Russian noun (dʲɪˈvot͡ɕkə) meaning "female child", "affectionate address to a woman", or "female organism"
Development
- Mobile editing of statements:
- We have added editing support for more data types (entity IDs, geographical shapes and tabular data).
- It is now available as a beta feature on test.wikidata.org. You can enable it here.
- Wikidata integration in Wikipedia and co: We are rolling out improvements to the Databox Lua module to a number of Wikipedias to make it easier to have out-of-the-box Wikidata-powered infoboxes
- Ontology federation: We are making progress with making it possible to use Wikidata Item's as statement values in other Wikibase instances
- GraphQL: We are continuing the work on the prototype, focusing on getting data from a batch of Items
- Wikidata Query Service: The Wikidata Platform team is working on benchmarking of different replacement options for Blazegraph, the software powering the Wikidata Query Service
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: Togo
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-49
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The Wikipedia Year in Review 2025 will be available on December 2 for users of iOS and Android Wikipedia apps, featuring new personalized insights, updated reading highlights, and refreshed designs. Learn more on the review's project page.
- The Growth team is working on improving the text and presentation of the Verification Email sent to new users to make them more welcoming, useful and informative. Some new text have been drafted for A/B testing and you can help by translating them. See Phabricator.
- Add a link will now be deployed at Japanese, Urdu and Chinese Wikipedias on December 2. Add a link is based on a prediction model that suggests links to be added to articles. While this feature has already been available on most Wikipedias, the prediction model could not support certain languages. A new model has now been developed to handle these languages, and it will be gradually rolled out to other Wikipedias over time. If you would like to know more, please contact Trizek (WMF).
View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where search boxes on some Commons pages showed no results due to switch from SpecialSearch to MediaSearch, has now been fixed. - Two new wikis have been created:
- a Wikipedia in Toki Pona (
w:tok:) - a Wikiquote in Nigerian Pidgin (
q:pcm:)
- a Wikipedia in Toki Pona (
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The Wikimedia Foundation is in the early stages of exploring approaches to Article guidance. The initiative aims to identify interventions that could help new editors easily understand and apply existing Wikipedia practices and policies when creating an article. The project is in the exploration and early experimental design phase. All community members are encouraged to learn more about the project, and share their thoughts on the talk page.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikidata weekly summary #709

week leading up to 2025-12-08. Missed the previous one? See issue #708.
Discussions
- New requests for permissions/Bot:
- Well, Well, Bot! - Task/s: Database imports, maintenance.
- RijksBot - Task/s: Adding Rijksmuseum IDs (P13234) to Wikidata items based on a CSV mapping of QIDs to Rijksmuseum URIs.
- CostamiriBot - Task/s: Chess related tasks such as monthly updates to the elo rating of chess players.
- New draft: Wikidata:External identifiers/Obsolescence (opinions are welcome in its talk page)
Events
- Upcoming events:
- How to view #25N with Wikidata? - a community hour with Wikimedia Chile, 21:00 UTC+1 (Time zone converter)
- Fact-Checking with Wikidata Workshop - January 20, 2026, 16:30 ~ 18:00 UTC+1 (Time zone converter) - WMDE's Philippe Saadé will show hands-on methods using the Wikidata MCP to retrieve, filter and classify Wikidata statements with semantic search, reranker LLM and NLI models, registration required.
- (Portuguese) Meeting Point Editatona II - Warm your hands modeling festival on Wikidata: December 10, 2025, 15:00 - 19:00 UTC+1, Porto, Portugal.
- Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session 9 December, 2025: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, 9 December, 2025 at 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter). WikiProject Personal Pronouns members will lead three implementation sessions to improve the data modeling and ethics of personal pronoun representation in Wikidata based on newly-established best practices and Wikidata policy by remediating legacy statements with participants. No previous Wikidata experience is needed to participate. Sessions will be held on October 14, November 25, and December 9, 2025 at our regular time of 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET. Event page: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_LD4_Wikidata_Affinity_Group/Project_Series/PersonalPronouns
- Past Events: Digital Humanities Hub: Documenting epigraphic data, Wikidata ontology practice - December 2 & 3, 2025, both 14:00 ~ 15:30 UTC.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: Wikidata 13th Birthday Celebration in Lafia
- Papers:
- Wikontic: Constructing Wikidata-Aligned, Ontology-Aware Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models - Chepurova et al., (2025)
- Victims of Posterity. Identifying Gaps on 19th-Century French Art History with Wikidata - first paper in the Wikidata Across the Humanities: Datasets, Methodologies, Reuse collection by the Journal of Open Humanities Data. Authored by Claire Dupin de Beyssat.
- Videos: GB Claude Code AI Agent: Fully Autonomous Wikidata Query & Visualization (Zero Human Intervention)
- (Taiwanese Mandarin) Wikidata Taiwan translation project on "Creating Library Linked Data with Wikibase: Lessons Learned from Project Passage" (as published by the OCLC)
Tool of the week
- Wikiguessr Game Is a Wikidata game it guess the location from Image from anywhere around the world by User: Ranjithsiji
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Remembering Amos Bairoch, co-contributor to Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics Semantic Web of data and consulted often for TiagoLubiana's CellosaurusBot.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- GBFS feed URL (URL of a GBFS feed for the bicycle-sharing system)
- code of conduct URL (URL of a resource that contains the Code of Conduct of a project or organization)
- Newest External identifiers: BFXC authority ID, Out tag ID, GayCities ID, Fight.ru fighters ID, Personality Database group ID, Codes for the administrative divisions of the People's Republic of China, Macanese company ID, MovieID film ID, Teen Vogue tag ID, CRT Database model ID, PriceRunner product ID, BWB number, Brandenburg School ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- fragrance gender (category for which a fragrance is marketed)
- perfumer (person who created a perfume)
- Discharge regime (The '''[[:en:Discharge regime|discharge regime]]''' can be Glacial, Nival or Pluvial. It can be a combination of 2 : Nivo-pluvial, Pluvio-nival, Nivo-glacial, etc. Be specific (e.g. pluvial tropical, meridional, etc.). Or be complex)
- minimal pair of (lexeme that differ from this one in only one phonological element)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Cookpad Recipe ID, Sector.sk game ID, Card Player ID, Fragrantica perfume ID, Fragrantica perfume brand ID, My Abandonware theme ID, Identificador Banrep Cultural, izoh.uz word ID, VGChartz game ID, Metacritic video game genre ID, Place Names and Places of Nova Scotia ID, Taking Stock ID, Game Font Library ID, Fragrantica perfume notes ID, EAGER game ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- WikiProject Highlights: WikiProject Turkmenistan
- Showcase Items: Goosebumps - 2015 film directed by Rob Letterman
- Showcase Lexemes: course (L3958) - English noun (kɔːrs) meaning "direction of movement", "program of study", or "part of a meal"
Development
- Mobile statement editing:
- It's now possible to edit existing references (phab:T405236)
- We fixed a number of issues such as a problem when adding the first statements to an item (phab:T409069)
- We started work on showing constraint violation indicators (phab:T400676)
- We're working on showing errors in the edit form (phab:T408928)
- We're improving the edit summaries (phab:T411247)
- Wikidata integration in the Wikimedia projects: We continued working on improvements to the Databox Lua module and template
- GraphQL: We continued working on the first version of GraphQL support
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: Togo
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-50
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
- Anybody who wishes to secure their user account can now use two-factor authentication (2FA). This is available to all registered users of all Wikimedia projects. This is part of the Account Security initiative. Later, 2FA will be required for all users who can take security- or privacy-sensitive actions.
Updates for editors
- Following last week's deployments, the Add a link feature, which allows editors to add suggested links during editing, will be available to an additional 33 Wikipedias starting on 9 December. This expansion is possible thanks to the new prediction model that now supports all languages, including those that were previously not covered. While the feature has been available on most Wikipedias for some time, this rollout brings us closer to using the improved model everywhere. If you have any questions or would like more details please contact Trizek (WMF).
- Last week, the Search Platform team added transliterated as-you-type search suggestions to Georgian wikis. If there are only a few regular search suggestions, then queries in Latin or Cyrillic script are now rewritten into Georgian script to look for more matches. For example, searching for either bedniereba or бедниереба will now suggest the existing article about ბედნიერება ("happiness"). You can recommend other languages where transliterated suggestions would be useful on Phabricator for future development.
- Later this week, a controlled experiment will begin for editors on the 100 largest Wikipedias who are editing a section in the mobile web visual editor. 50% of these editors will notice a new "Edit full page" button that will enable them to expand their editing session to the whole page. This feature is intended to make it easier for people on mobile web to edit any article section, regardless of which section-edit icon they tapped to begin. The experiment will last ~4 weeks. You can find more details about the project.
- Later this week, the Reader Growth team will launch a mobile web experiment to expand all article sections by default (currently they are collapsed by default) and pin the section header the user is currently reading to the top of the page. The experiment will affect 10% of users on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
- The Wikipedia Year in Review 2025, a feature in the Wikipedia mobile apps (iOS and Android) that provides users with a personalised summary of their engagement with Wikipedia over the year, is now available on the iOS and Android apps. This edition includes expanded personalised insights, improved reading highlights, new donor messaging, and updated designs. Open the app to view your Year in Review and explore your reading journey from 2025.
- A recent software bug caused edits made with VisualEditor to make unintended changes to wikitext, including removing whitespace and replacing spaces with underscores in wikilinks inside citations. This was partially fixed last week, and further fixes are in progress. Editors who used VisualEditor between November 28 and December 2 should review their edits for unexpected modifications.
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the incorrect handling of URLs copied from the address bar of Microsoft Edge users, has been resolved.
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting this week, users of the "⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽" beta feature will have CodeMirror as the editor for Lua, JavaScript, CSS, JSON and Vue content models, instead of CodeEditor. With this, the linters will be upgraded. This is part of a larger effort to eventually replace CodeEditor and provide a consistent code editing experience.
- Developers are encouraged to take the 2025 Developer Satisfaction Survey, which remains open until 5 January 2026. If you build software for the Wikimedia ecosystem and would like to share your experiences or feedback, your participation is greatly appreciated.
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.