User talk:Kharkiv07/Notifications/2015

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April 2015

The Signpost: 29 April 2015

• Wikimania: Choice of small village for Wikimania 2016 ruffles feathers
  Esino Lario is set to host Wikimania 2016, but volunteers and others have raised a host of concerns that raise serious questions about the town's suitability for hosting such a large conference.

• News and notes: Wiki Loves Monuments evaluation sees diminishing returns and increasing cost
  The evaluations reveal that in the last three years, WLM has possibly fallen victim to its own success and seen diminishing returns.

• In the media: Scottish MEP blocked for edit warring; ranking articles by importance
  David Coburn, a Member of the European Parliament for the Scotland region for the UK Independence Party, was blocked from editing Wikipedia on April 6.

• Featured content: Another day, another dollar
  Ten featured articles, nine featured lists, and twenty-eight featured pictures were promoted this week.

• Traffic report: Bruce, Nessie, and genocide
  Though the continued predominance of movies, TV, and sports noted in last week's report largely continues, three additional topics joined the Top 10 this week.

• Recent research: Military history, cricket, and Australia targeted in Wikipedia articles' popularity vs. quality; how copyright damages economy
  Reader demand for some topics (e.g. LGBT topics or pages about countries) is poorly satisfied, whereas there is over-abundance of quality on topics of comparatively little interest, such as military history.

• Technology report: VisualEditor and MediaWiki updates
  

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:11, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

May 2015

Tech News: 2015-19

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

• You can now chat with other users in Phabricator.
• There was a rare problem with VisualEditor. The text of another wiki could be added to your edit. The issue is now fixed.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 5. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 6 (calendar).
• It is now easier to add a link in VisualEditor. You can see an image and a description about the page.

Meetings

• You can join a meeting with the Language team. The meeting will be on May 5 at 14:30 (UTC).
• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 6 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join an event in France on May 22−25. You need to sign up before May 8.

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

15:22, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 06 May 2015

• News and notes: "Inspire" grant-making campaign concludes, grantees announced
  The Wikimedia Foundation this week announced the winning grantees in March's "Inspire" grant-making campaign.

• Featured content: The amorous android and the horsebreeder; WikiCup round two concludes
  Seven articles, three lists, and ten pictures were promoted to "featured" status this week. The second round of the WikiCup has ended.

• In the media: Guggenheim image donation; Wiki campaign gets advertising award
  artnet and The Next Web report (May 6) that the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is releasing a hundred images of works in its collection under Creative Commons licences in conjunction with a May 19 editathon.

• Special report: FDC candidates respond to key issues
  Elections have begun for five community members of the Funds Dissemination Committee, the Foundation's volunteer body for judging and recommending millions of dollars worth of annual grants to affiliates in the movement. The election lasts just eight days, from Sunday 3 May until 23:59 UTC on Sunday 10 May, so at the time of publication, voters will need to act promptly.

• Traffic report: The grim ship reality
  Like colliding ocean liners, rousing entertainment and harsh reality merged ungainly in this week's top 10 list. The much heralded pay-per-view pummeling of Manny Pacquiao by Floyd Mayweather, Jr. dominated the list's top slots, giving this list one of its highest total view counts in months.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:15, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-20

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

• You can now make charts and maps on your wiki with the new "graph" tool. If you have an old browser, you will see images instead. It uses a tool called Vega; you can learn how to use it and write help pages for your wiki. You can use the Vega edit tool to make charts and copy the code to your wiki. Charts and maps use complex code and you should put them into templates. In the future, you will be able to create charts with VisualEditor.
• You can apply for technical jobs to develop tools for the community.
• The logos of all wikis are now in a new place. It will make pages load faster. You can still ask to change the logo. You can also use local CSS for brief changes.

Problems

• There was a problem that caused slow editing.
• Pages were sometimes removed from your watchlist in VisualEditor. This problem is now fixed.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 6. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 12. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 13 (calendar).
• You can now use data from Wikidata on more pages. The page doesn't need to be linked to the Wikidata item. It works on a few wikis and more wikis will be added soon.
• You should get fewer errors when you add files to Commons.
• When you use an external link to link to a wiki page, VisualEditor now converts it to a wiki link.
• When you add a link in VisualEditor, you see pages that match what you type. It is now easier to see where they match.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 13 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:00, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 May 2015

• Foundation elections: Board candidates share their views with the Signpost
  Three community-elected seats on the Board of Trustees—the ultimate governing authority of the Wikimedia Foundation—will be decided by Wikimedians in the election to be held 17–31 May.

• News and notes: Swedish Wikimedia chapter organizes simultaneous Wikidata contests
  This week has been a busy one for the Wikidata project, with nearly simultaneous Wikidata contests, both organized by Wikimedia Sweden, now underway.

• Traffic report: Round Two
  Casual viewers may think I've posted the same list twice. But no, readers just happen to be really interested in May 2's Big Fight. In fact, last week was just the weigh-in and the trash talk. This week, the numbers actually increased.

• In the media: Grant Shapps story continues
  Grant Shapps, who was the co-chairman of the UK's Conservative Party until this week, has been accused of maliciously editing the Wikipedia biographies of his party's rivals.

• Op-ed: What made Wikipedia lose its reputation?
  There is a public misconception of Wikipedia: that any anonymous editor can edit Wikipedia at any time, and cannot be tracked or identified.

• Featured content: Four first-time featured article writers lead the way
  Eight articles, one list, and five pictures were promoted to featured status on the English Wikipedia in a slow week.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:54, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-21

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

• You can watch a video about the new graph tool.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 13. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 20 (calendar).
• References are now always in the right order. Also, the reference list now only shows references used on the page.
• You can no longer create an account with a colon ':' in it. If you already have one, it still works.
• The toolbar in VisualEditor now looks different. It is easier to see the icons.
• You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday.
• UploadWizard now shows better matches when you add a category to your file.
• A test about VisualEditor will start on the English Wikipedia on Thursday.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 21 at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a technical meeting in France this week.

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

15:38, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 20 May 2015

• From the editor: Your voice is needed: strategic voting in the WMF election
  The Wikimedia Foundation's bi-annual Board of Trustees election is open for voting. Of the ten seats on the board, three are elected representatives of the global Wikimedia community—you.

• In focus: The awful truth about Wikimedia's article counts
  The article counts of many Wikimedia wikis suddenly changed on 29 March 2015: as the Signpost reported at the time, sixty-five wikis fell below milestones tracked at the Wikimedia News Meta page, and three increased to new milestones.

• Traffic report: Inner Core
  The list is topped this week by Danish scientist Inge Lehmann, thanks to a Google Doodle celebrating her 127th birthday. Lehmann discovered in 1936 that the Earth has a solid inner core. It is sometimes surprising to realize how recently such basic scientific knowledge of the Earth, which we now take for granted, was discovered.

• News and notes: A dark side of comedy: the Wikipedia volunteers cleaning up behind John Oliver's fowl jokes
  Wikipedia editors logging in on May 19 found themselves walking into an unexpected amount of anti-vandal work to keep the site in line with its extensive biographies of living persons policy. A plethora of Wikipedia articles related to the United States House Committee on Appropriations, and the fifty-one representatives serving on it, have been hit by a raft of anonymous editors making often vulgar edits referencing "chicken fucker," or more creative combinations: "sexual conduct", "sexual congress", "fornicator", "intimate relations", or "trysts with chickens."

• Featured content: Puppets, fungi, and waterfalls
  Three articles, seven lists, and seven pictures were featured on the English Wikipedia.

• In the media: Jimmy Wales accepts Dan David Prize
  Jimmy Wales and five others accepted the 2015 Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University on May 17. The prize comes with US$1 million, ten percent of which goes to doctoral and postdoctoral scholarships.

• WikiProject report: Cell-ebrating Molecular Biology
  This week, we had the pleasure of interviewing WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology, which has come a long way since our last interview in 2008. Like most projects, it has a long member list, but only a small subset of that group regularly contributes. With 28 featured articles and 58 top-importance start class ones, the project has clearly had some success, but has a ways to go. We talked to three regular project contributors.

• Arbitration report: Editor conduct the subject of multiple cases
  The Arbitration Committee has an unusually large case load at present. Although perhaps not on a par with the high-profile, multi-party cases seen towards the end of last year and the beginning of this year, with five open cases the arbitrators are likely to be kept busy for the next several weeks.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:05, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-22

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

Problems

• VisualEditor was broken for 30 minutes on Tuesday. The problem was due to a tool it uses.
• Some Labs tools had issues last week.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 20. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 26. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 27 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 28 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can add your ideas of new tools to help active users like you.

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

16:30, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

June 2015

Tech News: 2015-23

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

Problems

• Many wikis were slow for a few hours on Wednesday due to a code error. Sometimes the pages did not load at all and showed an error.
• Some tools in Labs were broken on Wednesday and Thursday.
• Edit tags added by the software were broken on all wikis from May 23 to May 28.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 3 (calendar).
• You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 3 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:46, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 03 June 2015

• News and notes: Three new community-elected trustees announced, incumbents out
  The Wikimedia Foundation's volunteer election committee has announced the election results for the three vacant seats on the Board of Trustees. Dariusz Jemielnak, James Heilman, and Denny Vrandečić are set to take up their two-year terms on the Board. They will replace the three incumbents, all of whom stood this time unsuccessfully: Phoebe Ayers, Samuel Klein, and María Sefidari.

• Blog: How Wikipedia covered Caitlyn Jenner’s transition
  Caitlyn Jenner—the American hero of the 1976 Olympics, a film actor, and prominent member of Keeping Up with the Kardashians—may now be the most famous openly transgender person in the world.

• Discussion report: The deprecation of Persondata; RfA – A broken process; Complaints from users on Swedish Wikipedia
  Since the dawn of Wikipedia, or at least since 22 December 2005, the template named Persondata has existed.

• Featured content: It's not over till the fat man sings
  Two featured articles and ten featured pictures were promoted this week.

• Technology report: Things are getting SPDYier
  Over the past few weeks, developers have been working on improving Wikimedia's performance when users connect to it using SPDY.

• Special report: Towards "Health Information for All": Medical content on Wikipedia received 6.5 billion page views in 2013
  Wikipedia appears to be the single most used website for health information globally, exceeding traffic observed at the NIH, WebMD, WHO et al..

• In the media: Anonymous Australian editing targets football player, shooting victim
  More UK government vandalism; legend has it; minding the gender gap

• Traffic report: A rather ordinary week
  The traffic report is nothing unusual this week, with a Google Doodle for astronaut Sally Ride topping the list, the accidental death of famous mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. at #2, and the normal fare of recent popular American movies and television.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:31, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-24

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

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 9. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 11 (calendar).
• If you use the Monobook skin, the buttons and other controls now look more the same in VisualEditor and other tools.
• When you edit links and other items in VisualEditor, you now need to apply your change before closing the tool.
• The title of dialogs is now easier to see when it is near long buttons.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 9 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a meeting with the Language team. The meeting will be on June 10 at 14:30 (UTC).

Future changes

• If you have a bot, you may need to fix it. The default continuation mode of the API for action=query will change at the end of June.

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

18:18, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 June 2015

• News and notes: Chapter financial trends analyzed, news in brief
  This week saw the publication of the Chapter-wide Financial Trends Report 2013, a now-completed research project that examines the finances and outlays of the 36 movement-affiliated chapters.

• Traffic report: Two households, both alike in dignity
  "Happy families are all alike," Leo Tolstoy said, "but unhappy families are unhappy after their own fashion."

• In the media: Arbitration case attracts media coverage; Wikipedia in Israel
  UK media covers Wikipedia Arbitration case; Lila Tretikov visits Israel.

• Featured content: Just the bear facts, ma'am
  Four featured articles, two featured lists, one featured topic, and twenty-eight featured pictures were promoted this week.

• Technology report: Wikimedia sites are going HTTPS only
  Today it was announced that Wikimedia sites are going to become HTTPS only, finishing up 10 year effort of rolling out HTTPS.

• Blog: Making Wikipedia’s medical articles accessible in Chinese
  The Medical Translation Project, an ambitious attempt to improve and translate Wikipedia’s medical content from English into other languages, began in 2012.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:09, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-25

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

• Users have created more than 5000 articles with the new translation tool.
• Editing a page is now faster. This is because some statistics about edit filters were removed.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 17 June. It will be on all Wikipedias from 18 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 16 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. It will be on June 19 at 16:00 (UTC).

Future changes

• Developers are working on a new tool to get and send newsletters. If you read or write a newsletter, share your ideas about it.
• If you use Pywikibot, soon you won't be able to use compat anymore.

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

15:04, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 4

Newsletter • May/June 2015

Hello friends! We have been hard at work these past two months. For this report:

The directory is live!

For the first time, we are happy to bring you an exhaustive, comprehensive WikiProject Directory. This directory endeavors to list every single WikiProject on the English Wikipedia, including those that don't participate in article assessment. In constructing the broadest possible definition, we have come up with a list of approximately 2,600 WikiProjects. The directory tracks activity statistics on the WikiProject's pages, and, for where it's available, statistics on the number of articles tracked by the WikiProject and the number of editors active on those articles. Complementing the directory are description pages for each project, listing usernames of people active on the WikiProject pages and the articles in the WikiProject's scope. This will help Wikipedians interested in a subject find each other, whether to seek feedback on an article or to revive an old project. (There is an opt-out option.) We have also come up with listings of related WikiProjects, listing the ten most relevant WikiProjects based on what articles they have in common. We would like to promote WikiProjects as interconnected systems, rather than isolated silos.

A tremendous amount of work went into preparing this directory. WikiProjects do not consistently categorize their pages, meaning we had to develop our own index to match WikiProjects with the articles in their scope. We also had to make some adjustments to how WikiProjects were categorized; indeed, I personally have racked up a few hundred edits re-categorizing WikiProjects. There remains more work to be done to make the WikiProject directory truly useful. In the meantime, take a look and feel free to leave feedback at the WikiProject X talk page.

Stuff in the works!

What have we been working on?

• A new design template—This has been in the works for a while, of course. But our goal is to design something that is useful and cleanly presented on all browsers and at all screen resolutions while working within the confines of what MediaWiki has to offer. Additionally, we are working on designs for the sub-components featured on the main project page.
• A new WikiProject talk page banner in Lua—Work has begun on implementing the WikiProject banner in Lua. The goal is to create a banner template that can be usable by any WikiProject in lieu of having its own template. Work has slowed down for now to focus on higher priority items, but we are interested in your thoughts on how we could go about creating a more useful project banner. We have a draft module on Test Wikipedia, with a demonstration.
• New discussion reports—We have over 4.8 million articles on the English Wikipedia, and almost as many talk pages as well. But what happens when someone posts on a talk page? What if no one is watching that talk page? We are currently testing out a system for an automatically-updating new discussions list, like RFC for WikiProjects. We currently have five test pages up for the WikiProjects on cannabis, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and Ghana.
• SuggestBot for WikiProjects—We have asked the maintainer of SuggestBot to make some minor adjustments to SuggestBot that will allow it to post regular reports to those WikiProjects that ask for them. Stay tuned!
• Semi-automated article assessment—Using the new revision scoring service and another system currently under development, WikiProjects will be getting a new tool to facilitate the article assessment process by providing article quality/importance predictions for articles yet to be assessed. Aside from helping WikiProjects get through their backlogs, the goal is to help WikiProjects with collecting metrics and triaging their work. Semi-automation of this process will help achieve consistent results and keep the process running smoothly, as automation does on other parts of Wikipedia.

Want us to work on any other tools? Interested in volunteering? Leave a note on our talk page.

The WikiProject watchers report is back!

The database report which lists WikiProjects according to the number of watchers (i.e., people that have the project on their watchlist), is back! The report stopped being updated a year ago, following the deactivation of the Toolserver, but a replacement report has been generated.

Until next time, Harej (talk) 22:20, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 June 2015

• In the media: Wikipedia wins Asturias Prize; printing out Wikipedia; HTTPS switch
  The Princess of Asturias Foundation announced that Wikipedia would be the recipient of the 2015 Princess of Asturias award in the category of International Cooperation.

• Arbitration report: An election has consequences
  The Arbitration Committee delivered its final decision in a case that reached the attention of the UK national press.

• In focus: Three weeks to save freedom of panorama in Europe
  This would end a long-standing tradition in many countries that the skyline and the public scene should belong to everybody.

• Op-ed: Making a difference in Wikipedia, one GA at a time
  We need to be ever-diligent in ensuring that articles remain of high quality.

• Technology report: HTTPS-only rollout completed; proposal to enable VisualEditor for new accounts
  The rollout of HTTPS only has now been completed across all Wikimedia wikis.

• Interview: A veteran’s Wikipedia edits help him understand the brutality behind Yugoslavia’s wars
  We interviewed an Australian veteran who deployed to the region as a peacekeeper and now writes articles on the region's history to help him understand what he encountered there.

• News and notes: Labs outage kills tools, self; news in brief
  A more than usually severe outage Wikimedia Labs occurred after a massive database corruption implosion on June 17.

• Featured content: Great Dane hits 150
  Six featured articles, seven featured lists, and seven featured pictures were promoted this week.

• Discussion report: A quick way of becoming an admin
  Author's note: This might be a violation of WP:BEANS; read at your own risk.

• WikiProject report: Western Australia speaks – we are back
  It wouldn't be the WikiProject report if we didn't feature an Australian topic once in a while, so this week we're looking at the left side.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:48, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #163

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • German language Wikipedia closed its RfC on usage of Wikidata data. As a result Wikidata data can be used on the project as long as it happens through a template and it has a non-Wikimedia reference.
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Office hour on IRC. We talked about cool things that happened around Wikidata over the past 3 months got an update on upcoming developments and Freebase and more. You can read the log.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • en:South Pole Telescope is a nice example of an infobox completely filled from Wikidata.
  • Q20150617 was created on 2015-06-17
  • More data from Freebase have been added the Primary Sources Tool. There is also a page to help the mapping of Freebase properties.
  • Nice new manual for MixnMatch
  • The new nature.com/ontologies links to external ontologies and datasets; among them Wikidata.
  • National Gallery of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum now have entries for all their paintings on Wikidata thanks to wiki project Sum of all Paintings
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: takeoff and landing capability, Discogs label ID, Discogs master ID, Discogs artist ID, Encyclopaedia Metallum band id, investor, second surname in Spanish name, CulturaItalia ID, BerlPap identifier, Mapillary id, National Library of Ireland authority
  • Newest WikiProjects: Cross Items Interwikis
• Development
  • Made a small API breaking change to wbeditentity and wbgetclaims modules. Details can be seen in the commit message of https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/217885/
  • Worked more on unit support
  • Fixed an issue where you'd sometimes select the wrong value when entering a statement unintentionally (phabricator:T98471)
  • Switched the whole code base to make use of DataModel 3.0
  • The concept of “claims” no longer exists in Wikibase, as all places in the software work with statements. We are making this more and more explicit in the code.
  • The autoloading mechanism of the extension changed, see phabricator:T100813
  • More work on getting the Wikibase Quality extensions ready for deployment. They'll improve constraint checking and provide checks against 3rd party databases.
  • Special:UnconnectedPages had to be reworked (thanks Amir!) because of huge performance issues. Because of this it loses some functionality (being able to specify where the list starts and limiting the list to pages that have local interwiki links). We're working on bringing functionality back without the performance penalty.
  • Bene* created a SPARQL abstraction layer for PHP called Asparagus: https://github.com/Benestar/asparagus
  • Enabled arbitrary access on arwiki, cawiki, eswiki, huwiki, kowiki, rowiki, ukwiki, viwiki, and usage tracking on dewiki, ruwiki, cswiki and all s3 wikis. (ruwiki and cswiki get arbitrary access on June 23)
  • Finishing work on improved handling “invalid” values and statements with deleted properties.
  • Small breaking DOM change: Wikibase no longer adds its own h1 tag but uses MediaWiki's default .firstHeading element. (phabricator:T93534)
• 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
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:35, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-26

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

• Some wikis can now be used only with HTTPS. This includes the English, Russian and Chinese Wikipedias, among others. Soon all wikis will use only HTTPS for all users.
• You can't use HTTPS wikis with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP. You need to use another browser.

Problems

• On June 15, search was broken on all wikis for several hours.
• On June 16, images were broken for several hours on wikis that use InstantCommons.
• Many Labs tools were broken for several days. Almost all of them are back now. They may be missing some data for the last 10 days.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 23. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 24. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 25 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 23 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:24, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 June 2015

• From the editor: The Signpost tagging initiative
  Over more than a decade of weekly publication, The Signpost has accumulated an incredibly lengthy and detailed record about the issues, controversies, successes, and failures of the English Wikipedia community and the movement at large.

• Op-ed: Content Translation beta is coming to the English Wikipedia
  The Wikimedia Foundation's Language Engineering team plans to introduce Content Translation—a tool that makes it easier to translate Wikipedia articles into different languages—as a beta feature on the English Wikipedia.

• Special report: Small impact of the large Google Translation Project on Telugu Wikipedia
  During 2009–2011 Google ran the Google Translation Project (GTP), a program utilising paid translators to translate most popular English Wikipedia articles to various Indian language Wikipedias.

• Featured content: One eye when begun, two when it's done
  Four articles and nine pictures were promoted to featured status this week.

• Recent research: How Wikipedia built governance capability; readability of plastic surgery articles
  One paper looks at the topic of Wikipedia governance in the context of online social production.

• Technology report: 2015 MediaWiki architecture focus and Multimedia roadmap announced
  This past week saw the kick-off of the 2015 MediaWiki architecture focus of improving our content platform.

• News and notes: Board of Trustees propose bylaw amendments
  The Board of Trustees is the "ultimate corporate authority" of the Wikimedia Foundation and the level at which the strategic decisions regarding the Wikimedia movement are made ...

• In the media: Turkish Wikipedia censorship; "Can Wikipedia survive?"; PR editing
  The Hürriyet Daily News reports that the Turkish Wikipedia has posted banners on the top of the encyclopedia to warn users that a number of articles are being blocked by the Turkish government.

• Blog: 7,473 volumes at 700 pages each: meet Print Wikipedia
  After six years of work, a residency in the Canadian Rockies, endless debugging, and more than a little help from my friends, I have made Print Wikipedia.

• Arbitration report: Politics by other means: The American politics 2 arbitration
  Clausewitz' pithy summary of warfare as "politics by other means" seems to be the motto of some Wikipedia editors.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:13, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #164

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Ateliers Wikidata
  • Upcoming: Wikimania. There will be several talks and workshops related to Wikidata. Say hi at the "Ask Us Anything" session for Wikidata if you're there.
  • Reductionism
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Which geographic areas do different Wikipedias cover? How does it compare to Wikidata? Markus has a beautiful answer
  • Wikiproject Molecular Biology and AskPlatypus are shortlisted for the OpenData Award \o/ This is the award Wikidata won last year.
  • Paper on vandalism on Wikidata. Lydia is in touch with them to figure out how to best use the insights for us.
  • Reasonator got some updates: it is now using external ID formatter URLs, has monolingual string support and better social network links
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: number of children, MovieMeter movie identifier, MovieMeter director ID, Foursquare venue ID, BoxRec ID, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile catalogue number, sortkey, properties for this type, patron, Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, Google Scholar ID, Dutch Senate person ID, Trismegistos ID, Wikisource index page
  • Newest External tools: Wikidata Compare
  • Showcase items: none. Yours next week?
• Development
  • Jonas joined the team and Adam is back \o/
  • Deployed arbitrary access to ruwiki and cswiki
  • Machine readable versions (in various formats) of Wikibase entities will be advertised in their page heads as alternate link. (phabricator:T96298)
  • Fixed property label on item pages not scrolling anymore (phabricator:T94588)
  • More work on getting the Wikibase Quality extensions ready for release. The part doing constraint violation checks should go to test.wikidata.org next week. The part doing checks against 3rd party databases will still take a bit longer but is also shaping up nicely.
  • Made it possible to create items even when another user is mass-creating items (phabricator:T103796)
  • Bene* worked more on making Wikidata work nicely on mobile
  • Fixed weird issue with cursor jumping around in sitelink input field (phabricator:T103489)
  • Fixed an issue where it was not possible to edit a statement after you removed its only reference (phabricator:T103603)
  • Lydia will be traveling for much of July. Expect her to be a bit less responsive during that time.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 18:15, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-27

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

• Long lines in code blocks now look better.
• You can now see graphs in VisualEditor.
• When you read a page on the mobile site, you can now see a link to go to its talk page.
• The code coloring tool has changed. You can now use many more languages. It now also works on mobile.
• You can look at a new site to learn how to reuse data from Wikimedia sites.

Problems

• JavaScript was broken on some wikis due to a code error. VisualEditor and other tools that use JavaScript were broken.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 30. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 1. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 2 (calendar).
• You can now use a tool in VisualEditor to add and edit code in color.
• When you edit a sentence in the Translate tool, it can show you older translations. They help you save time if they look alike. The older translations should now work better. If you see problems, you should report them.
• If you are an admin or have other special rights, you now need a strong password.
• Bot and JavaScript coders: The old continuation mode of the API for action=query doesn't work any more.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 30 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future

• When you create a new account, it will also create one on Meta-Wiki and mediawiki.org.

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

15:56, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Juy 2015

The Signpost: 01 July 2015

• News and notes: Training the Trainers; VP of Engineering leaves WMF
  This week The Center for Internet and Society published a promotional blog post highlighting the heritage of the center's creation of the Train the Trainer program.

• In the media: EU freedom of panorama; Nehru outrage; BBC apology
  A week now remains until the vote, expected on 9 July, when the European Parliament will express either its approval, disapproval, or lack of opinion on the question of freedom of panorama in the European Union.

• WikiProject report: Able to make a stand
  Here to share their wisdom are Dodger67, Penny Richards, LilyKitty, and Mirokado of WikiProject Disability

• Featured content: Viva V.E.R.D.I.
  Four featured list and twelve featured pictures were promoted this week.

• Traffic report: We're Baaaaack
  For the week of June 21 to 27, 2015, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages.

• Technology report: Technical updates and improvements
  Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community.

• Blog: These Texans are on a quest to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of their state’s revolution
  Like many editors of the world's largest encyclopedia, Karanacs was browsing the site's articles and found that they were of relatively poor quality—and that the traditional narrative she'd learned was not necessarily accurate.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:01, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #165

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion about Atheism and the religion property.
  • Discussion about the Verifiability of data as a policy.
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Upcoming: Wikimania. There will be several talks and workshops related to Wikidata. Say hi at the "Ask Us Anything" session for Wikidata if you're there.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • A new database report lists people categorized as dead in Wikipedia, but lacking Property:P570 (date of death). It's updated several times during the day. There are about 20 to 30 new entries each day. There is currently some backlog from the Arabic, Marathi, and Thai Wikipedias. Items updated first in Wikidata wont appear in the report. They are listed directly in Wikidata's recent deaths report.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: RSL editions, Open Hub ID, number of children, MovieMeter movie identifier, MovieMeter director ID
• Development
  • Adam wrote a blog post on the improvement of the data after one year and GeneaWiki
  • After the next deployment, Special:ItemDisambiguation will match aliases and be case insensitive.
  • Improved details of matches in the entity suggester (wbsearchentities api module)
  • Deployed the WikibaseQuality and WikibaseQualityConstraints extensions to test.wikidata.org
  • Fixed the layout of long qualifier names
  • JSON dumps are now automatically copied to labs
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:16, 4 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-28

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

• On the mobile site, you now see more information when you search for a page. It now shows the description from Wikidata.

Problems

• The code of long pages is not colored any more. You may see this problem on the pages of long gadgets.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 7. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 8. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 9 (calendar).
• The "Page information" tool shows how many users watch the page. You can now see how many are active.
• You can now translate articles into English with the new translation tool.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 7 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:13, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 08 July 2015

• Editorial: So you want to get your message out. Where do you turn?
  It seems like a good time to discuss the various communications channels available to community members.

• News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation annual plan released, news in brief
  Lila Tretikov this week posted an email to the wikimedia-l mailing list announcing the final publication of the Wikimedia Foundation's 2015 annual plan.

• In the media: Wikimania warning; Wikipedia "mystery" easily solved
  The mayor of Esino Lario warns that Wikimedia 2016 is "at risk of disappearing".

• Traffic report: The Empire lobs back
  It's July 4 weekend and on this list that means only one thing: Wimbledon. Sure, the American Independence Day gets noticed too, but it can't hold a candle to that staggeringly British sporting event.

• Featured content: Pyrénées, Playmates, parliament and a prison...
  12 featured articles, 2 featured lists, and 15 featured pictures were promoted this week.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:51, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #166

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Slides on Primary Sources Tool and Wikidata introduction (in Spanish) for the Donostia-San Sebastián Wikidata Editathon
  • Presentation about Wikidata at the Axel Springer Hack Day 2015
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikiresearch looked into the coverage of the moon by geotags in Wikidata
  • Wikiresearch published a visualization of the relationship between nationality and occupation based on Wikidata's data
  • Which zoo has polar bears? Wikidata attempts to answer the question here. Work in progress.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: MCN code, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Anime News Network anime ID, Anime News Network manga ID, Anime News Network company ID, Anime News Network person ID, FSK film rating, PolSys ID, Righteous Among The Nations ID, USDA NDB number, lesarchivesduspectacle ID, INEGI locality identifier
• Development
  • The Wikidata Quality extension (constraint reports per item) was deployed. You can now use d:Special:ConstraintReport to see the result for different items. This is for example the constraint report for the item cat (Q142).
  • 8 million additional statements from Freebase were made available through the Primary sources tool
  • Moving towards having a single edit button to edit references along with the value they belong to.
  • Bene continued working on phasing out the deprecated Entity superclass and making more entity types possible.
  • More work on phasing out a deprecated serializer implementation we still use in certain places.
  • Further work on the new RDF export.
  • PHPCS is now used on each change in Wikibase to ensure the code fulfils certain code quality standards.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 11:03, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-29

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

• You can now see a list of pages with errors in code coloring.

Problems

• There was a problem with editing on Thursday. Some tools like bots and VisualEditor were broken on all wikis for 10 minutes.
• There was a problem with images on Thursday. They were broken on all wikis for 15 minutes.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 15. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 16 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join a technical meeting at Wikimania in Mexico City this week.

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

15:06, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 July 2015

• Op-ed: On paid editing and advocacy: when the Bright Line fails to shine, and what we can do about it
  "How long will this take?" This is one of the first questions new clients ask. They come to us because the Wikipedia entry about the company at which they work is wrong, incomplete, or even just outdated. The answer varies ...

• Traffic report: Belles of the ball
  However coy they may be about it in public, Americans love to win. And when they do, they make no secret of it.

• WikiProject report: What happens when a country is no longer a country?
  We return this week with an interview with a historical project that's still fairly active, WikiProject Former countries.

• In the media: Shapps requests WMUK data; professor's plagiarism demotion
  In The Register, Andrew Orlowski reports that three weeks ago, Grant Shapps filed a request with Wikimedia UK (WMUK) under the Data Protection Act 1998 "for all data relating to him".

• Blog: Wikimedia Foundation releases third transparency report
  The Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce the release of our latest transparency report.

• News and notes: The Wikimedia Conference and Wikimania
  Wikimania 2015 is underway in Mexico City, and one of its sessions—a scheduled follow-up to the annual Wikimedia Conference that was held in Berlin in May—is good reason to provide a retrospective of that Conference.

• Featured content: When angels and daemons interrupt the vicious and intemperate
  One featured article, seven featured lists, and 14 featured pictures were promoted this week.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:43, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #167

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Nikki
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Right now: Wikimania
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Magnus made some new tools:
    • list of scientists on Wikidata born after 1950 with no image, grouped by employer. Check your university!
    • list of scientists on Wikidata born after 1950 with no ORCID iD, grouped by employer. Ditto!
    • an InfoBitt replacement
    • a tool you can use to match up Wikipedia articles without an item to either an existing item or a create a new one if none exists
    • plus Mix'N'Match got new datasets you can help match up with Wikidata
  • P2000 was created.
  • Some presentations at Wikimania related to Wikidata have detailed slides online:
    • WikiProject Sum of All Paintings
    • Templates are dead! Long live templates!, technical presentation on the function and future of template syntax
    • Future of structured documents: VisualEditor, Citations and Wikidata, oh my!
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: CPDL ID, UNESCO language status, UCI code, Facebook Places ID, parliament.uk bio link, medical specialty, AllMusic composition ID, TeX string, Plazi ID, LPSN URL, species kept, Encyclopaedia Metallum artist ID, Delarge ID
  • New task forces: Linguistics
• Development
  • Attending Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City right now, meeting awesome people that already use or want to know everything about Wikidata.
  • After the next deployment, redirects will be automatically created when merging items.
  • Special:UnconnectedPages can now be queried via the query API, thanks to Ladsgroup.
  • Migrating away from an older serializer to the DataModel Serialization component.
  • Worked on a new time parser that can parse formats like M/D/Y, Y M D and so on.
  • Fixed a bug where a value could not be edited when save failed.
  • Made the snak type, badge and rank selectors position themselves after resizing the browser window and introduced a possibility to collapse the sitelinks sections.
  • Worked on a change in editing to be able to edit a statement and it’s references in one step.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 15:48, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-30

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

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 21. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 22. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 23 (calendar).
• You now see more warnings in the image viewer. They tell you to be careful when using the image, for example if it shows a person.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 21 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Soon you won't be able to use MathJax to display math.

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

03:06, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 July 2015

• From the editor: Change the world
  We want to take a moment to ask you to consider contributing to the Signpost.

• News and notes: Wikimanía 2016; Lightbreather ArbCom case
  Wikimania features remarks from some leading players from the Wikimedia Foundation as well as the free knowledge movement.

• Wikimanía report: Wikimanía 2015 report, part 1, the plenaries
  WMF's Executive Director, Lila Tretikov, gave the opening plenary address.

• In the media: Novelists annotate Wikipedia; Wales promotes TPO; Working for free
  Three novelists "have found a way to control the Wikipedia narrative" by using the annotation website Genius to annotate their own Wikipedia articles.

• Traffic report: The Nerds, They Are A-Changin'
  Summary:When I was a kid, being a nerd meant wanting to go to Pluto.

• WikiProject report: Some more politics
  WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom

• Featured content: The sleep of reason produces monsters
  Three featured articles, two featured lists, and 29 featured pictures were promoted this week.

• Gallery: "One small step..."
  46 years ago this week, humanity set foot on the Moon.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  Community technical news.

• Read this Signpost in full
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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:17, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #168

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Successful request for adminship: Nikki
  • Open request for oversightership: Sjoerddebruin
  • Closed request for comments: Administrative divisions and populated places, Given names and surnames
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata, coming soon to a menu near you!
  • Past: Wikimania
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Upload of 4.2M new statements from Freebase in the Primary Sources tool.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: NALT id, Instagram username, Twitter username, Revised Romanisation, CPDL ID, UNESCO language status, UCI code, Facebook Places ID
• Development
  • Continued migrating away from an older serializer to the DataModel Serialization component.
  • Released Wikibase DataModel Serialization 1.7.0
  • Depreacting the parameter ungroupedlist in the api modules GetClaims and GetEntities
  • Tweaking the sitelink input
  • Changing the display of item selector results
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:50, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-31

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

• You can now use redirects to link to JavaScript pages.
• You cannot use the compact user bar any more.
• You can change your options to see bigger images.
• You can watch short videos about how to use VisualEditor.
• You can now edit pages linked in "what links here" more easily.

Problems

• There was a problem with some Lua modules on July 22 and 23. Some pages using them did not list them in "what links here". You can fix those pages with a null edit: edit and save the page without making any change.
• There was a problem with the abuse filter page on big wikis on July 23. It was due to a code error.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 29. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 30 (calendar).
• JavaScript authors: You cannot use wgNoticeUserData to get edit counts anymore.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 28 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:05, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 July 2015

• News and notes: BARC de-adminship proposal; Wikimania recordings debate
  An RFC proposes to create a "Bureaucrats' Admin Review Committee" (BARC) composed of bureaucrats empowered to remove adminship rights.

• Op-ed: My life as an autistic Wikipedian
  Two years ago, I discovered that I was on the autism spectrum.

• Recent research: Wikipedia and collective intelligence; how Wikipedia is tweeted
  An article argues that Wikipedia displays some key characteristics of a collective intelligence process.

• In the media: Is Wikipedia a battleground in the culture wars?
  "Editors representing rival political tribes [are] frequently attempting to impose their respective narratives as the official version of one or another cultural controversy."

• Featured content: Even mammoths get the Blues
  Five featured articles, five featured lists, and sixteen featured pictures were promoted this week.

• Traffic report: Namaste again, Reddit
  For the first time since this list began, India-related topics have claimed both the top two slots.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:59, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

August 2015

Wikidata weekly summary #169

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open requests for Oversight: Sjoerddebruin
  • Enable Flow on Wikidata?
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Early version of a reconcile API for Wikidata by Magnus
  • PagePile: a new tool by Magnus
  • Mix-n-Match got a number of new catalogs and now shows a thin red line in front of a catalog that does not yet have a property on Wikidata
  • 1.700 biographical items without gender, but with image. Go go go!
  • Interested in art movements? Check out this
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: MoMA artwork id, Facebook ID, cuisine, Cooper-Hewitt Person ID, Exif make, Exif model, IPNI publication ID, ZooBank publication ID, ZooBank author ID, Catalogus Professorum Halensis, NALT id
  • Showcase items: László Krasznahorkai (Q512062)
• Development
  • Minor fixes to property edit mode
  • Some fixes for the cucumber test errors
  • Released Wikibase DataModel 4.0
  • Released Wikibase DataModel Services 1.0
  • Continued work to migrate away from old serializers in Wikibase Lib to those in WikibaseDataModelSerialization.
  • Working on scripts for importing entities from another Wikibase instance (e.g. Wikidata), so that development instances can have some sample data.
  • Fixed the counting of references
  • Changed style of the Entitytermsview inputs
  • Entity Selector displays alias in brackets behind label
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 19:29, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-32

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 ContentTranslation extension has been updated:
  • You can now type in list paragraphs on wikis with right-to-left scripts.
  • Some user interface updates changed how details in the ContentTranslation extension look.
• The error page you see when the sites are not working is now simpler and easier to read. It also shows the Wikimedia logo.
• MediaWiki now supports redirects for CSS pages.
• Bots can't guess captchas unlimited times anymore.

Problems

• There was a problem with thumbnails on wikis with local images on July 24 and 25. It was due to a code error.
• We can't search by file type on Wikimedia wikis now.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 5. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 6 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 4 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:51, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 05 August 2015

• Editorial: Wikipedia better equipped to deal with systemic bias than traditional publishers
  That particular artists would be omitted through oversight or happenstance is reasonable, but that one of the world's leading publishers of art books is completely unaware of their major omissions is startling.

• Op-ed: Je ne suis pas Google
  The public interest in remembering the facts about trials and convictions is, in my view, at least as strong as any "right to be forgotten."

• News and notes: VisualEditor, endowment, science, and news in brief
  VisualEditor is now on slow roll-out on the English Wikipedia.

• WikiProject report: Meet the boilerplate makers
  The Report checks in with WikiProject Templates.

• In the media: Probe into Nehru edits launched; dangers of the right to be forgotten
  The Indian government has launched an investigation into the source of Wikipedia edits regarding Jawaharlal Nehru that caused outrage in that country.

• Traffic report: Mrityorma amritam gamaya...
  Death is no stranger to this list, but it has never cast such a pall as this week, when for the first time half the slots in the top 10 were devoted to it, including the top 3.

• Featured content: Maya, Michigan, Medici, Médée, and Moul n'ga
  Three featured articles, seven featured lists, and twenty-two featured pictures were promoted this week.

• Blog: Get help editing Wikipedia with the new “Co-op” mentorship program
  What if there was a gathering place on Wikipedia for newer editors to find a mentor?

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:17, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #4—2015

Read this in another language • Local subscription list • Subscribe to the multilingual edition

Did you know?

You can add quotations marks before and after a title or phrase with a single click.

Select the relevant text. Find the correct quotations marks in the special character inserter tool (marked as Ω in the toolbar).

Click the button. VisualEditor will add the quotation marks on either side of the text you selected.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team have been working on mobile phone support. They have fixed many bugs and improved language support. They post weekly status reports on mediawiki.org. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving language support and functionality on mobile devices.

Wikimania

The team attended Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City. There they participated in the Hackathon and met with individuals and groups of users. They also made several presentations about VisualEditor and the future of editing.

Following Wikimania, we announced winners for the VisualEditor 2015 Translathon. Our thanks and congratulations to users Halan-tul, Renessaince, जनक राज भट्ट (Janak Bhatta), Vahe Gharakhanyan, Warrakkk, and Eduardogobi.

For interface messages (translated at translatewiki.net), we saw the initiative affecting 42 languages. The average progress in translations across all languages was 56.5% before the translathon, and 78.2% after (+21.7%). In particular, Sakha improved from 12.2% to 94.2%; Brazilian Portuguese went from 50.6% to 100%; Taraškievica went from 44.9% to 85.3%; Doteli went from 1.3% to 41.2%. Also, while 1.7% of the messages were outdated across all languages before the translathon, the percentage dropped to 0.8% afterwards (-0.9%).

For documentation messages (on mediawiki.org), we saw the initiative affecting 24 languages. The average progress in translations across all languages was 26.6% before translathon, and 46.9% after (+20.3%).  There were particularly notable achievements for three languages. Armenian improved from 1% to 99%; Swedish, from 21% to 99%, and Brazilian Portuguese, from 34% to 83%. Outdated translations across all languages were reduced from 8.4% before translathon to 4.8% afterwards (-3.6%).

We published some graphs showing the effect of the event on the Translathon page. Thank you to the translators for participating and the translatewiki.net staff for facilitating this initiative.

Recent improvements

Auto-fill features for citations can be enabled on each Wikipedia. The tool uses the citoid service to convert a URL or DOI into a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. You can see an animated GIF of the quick, simple process at mediawiki.org. So far, about a dozen Wikipedias have enabled the auto-citation tool. To enable it for your wiki, follow the instructions at mediawiki.org.

Your wiki can customize the first section of the special character inserter in VisualEditor. Please follow the instructions at mediawiki.org to put the characters you want at the top. 

In other changes, if you need to fill in a CAPTCHA and get it wrong, then you can click to get a new one to complete. VisualEditor can now display and edit Vega-based graphs. If you use the Monobook skin, VisualEditor's appearance is now more consistent with other software.  

Future changes

The team will be changing the appearance of selected links inside VisualEditor. The purpose is to make it easy to see whether your cursor is inside or outside the link. When you select a link, the link label (the words shown on the page) will be enclosed in a faint box. If you place your cursor inside the box, then your changes to the link label will be part of the link. If you place your cursor outside the box, then it will not. This will make it easy to know when new characters will be added to the link and when they will not.

On the English Wikipedia, 10% of newly created accounts are now offered both the visual and the wikitext editors. A recent controlled trial showed no significant difference in survival or productivity for new users in the short term. New users with access to VisualEditor were very slightly less likely to produce results that needed reverting. You can learn more about this by watching a video of the July 2015 Wikimedia Research Showcase. The proportion of new accounts with access to both editing environments will be gradually increased over time. Eventually all new users have the choice between the two editing environments.

Let's work together

• Share your ideas and ask questions at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback.
• Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help.
• If your wiki would like VisualEditor enabled on another namespace, you can file a request in Phabricator. Please include a link to a community discussion about the requested change.
• Please file requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the styling menu in Phabricator.
• The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
• The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, usually on Tuesdays at 12:00 (noon) PDT (19:00 UTC). Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q1 blocker, though. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the main VisualEditor project with the bug.

If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact Elitre directly, so that she can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:01, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #170

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Successful request for oversight rights: Sjoerddebruin
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikimedia UK is organizing a Wikidata training session. You can sign up here.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Talk pages on Wikidata can now be converted to use Flow. You can request migrating your talk page at d:Wikidata:Flow.
  • Mix-n-Match got a bunch of new catalogs for you to match up with Wikidata. Currently matching is happening at about 500 items per day. Pretty sweet :)
  • @happybirthdayauthors is a new Twitter account posting reading suggestions based on Wikidata data.
  • Arbitrary access is rolling out to a large number of wikis over the next two weeks.
  • Duplicity can help you match up unlinked Wikipedia articles to a Wikidata item.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Erdős number, worldfootball.net ID, AllMovie artist ID, Teuchos ID, isomeric SMILES, Catalogus Professorum Academiae Groninganae id, Hansard ID
• Development
  • Made some small changes to the style of the edit warning and sitelinks so they are easier to notice and understand
  • Added error messages for Special:GoToLinkedPage and Special:ItemByTitle so you get a useful message in case no result is found
  • The Entity Selector now displays alias in brackets behind label
  • The number of entities loaded via the {{#property:…}} parser function and via Lua will be reported in the “Parser profiling data” (which can be found below a page preview or within the Html of a page)
  • Prepared for next rounds of arbitrary access rollout
  • Investigated growing lag of dispatching of changes to Wikipedia and co. We'll need to investigate further and change things so the lag between an edit on Wikidata and it being send to the Wikipedias and other projects is not too high.
  • Added the property ID to Special:ListProperties
  • Moved two extensions (Wikidata.org and WikimediaBadges) from Github to Gerrit. More will follow.
  • We'd like to drop a database table. Discussion is ongoing.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 18:20, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-33

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 can now hide the signature button when you edit a content page.
• The "Your preferences have been saved" message has changed. You can now see more easily what was saved when you change preferences several times.
• You can now play Ogg video files in some browsers that don't support this format. This solution uses JavaScript and works on desktop browsers only for now. It will work on mobile later.
• You can now use the same tools to edit style in VisualEditor on mobile as in desktop browsers.
• It is now easier to see if there is a JavaScript error in a user or site script.
• JavaScript authors:
  • You can no longer use the Sajax library. You can see a list of pages to fix.
  • You can no longer use document.write on Wikimedia wikis. You can see a list of pages to fix.
• The content translation tool now works better. It is easier to use math, and useless tags are no longer added.

Problems

• More edits have been rejected due to loss of session data lately. This is now fixed.
• Importing a Lua module sometimes didn't work. This is now fixed.
• Text was sometimes lost in the content translation tool. One part of the problem is now fixed.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 12. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 13 (calendar).
• UploadWizard is getting a new look. The look of buttons and checkboxes has already changed. This week, UploadWizard gets a new date picker. The other text fields will change soon.
• You can now test VisualEditor on mobile devices of all sizes.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 11 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Some things in the watchlist will get a new look.

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

14:58, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 12 August 2015

• News and notes: Superprotect, one year later; a contentious RfA
  Superprotect was a novel page protection level implemented on August 10 last year, without warning.

• In the media: Paid editing; traffic drop; Nicki Minaj
  The Atlantic discusses "The Covert World of People Trying to Edit Wikipedia—for Pay".

• Forum: Community voices on paid editing
  The community speaks out on paid editing.

• Wikimanía report: Wikimanía 2015, part 2, a community event
  Our ongoing Wikimanía coverage.

• Traffic report: Fighting from top to bottom
  The charts are led this week by UFC women's champion Ronda Rousey, who won her last match at UFC 190 (#9) in 34 seconds.

• Featured content: Fused lizards, giant mice, and Scottish demons
  Watch out for icebergs.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  Wikimedia technical news.

• Blog: The Hunt for Tirpitz
  During World War II, the German battleship Tirpitz was a major threat to Allied convoys travelling across the North Atlantic and Arctic Sea.

• Read this Signpost in full
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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:49, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #171

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Reinforcement of data analysis before any modification of the DB
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • cooperation between free content projects
  • A case is made to concentrate our quality efforts on the differences between Wikidata and other sources
  • Ongoing: Several team members are attending the Chaos Communication Camp.
  • Upcoming: SmartDataConference
  • A Comparative Survey of DBpedia, Freebase, OpenCyc, Wikidata, and YAGO
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata needs your vote! It only takes a minute.
  • WikiProject Sum of all Paintings reached the milestone of 100.000 paintings. Congrats!
  • Arbitrary access is now available on another ~250 Wikipedias].
  • See d:Wikidata talk:Arbitrary access#Use cases: testing modules and templates for two general use cases for arbitrary access on Wikipedia's regression testing of Wikidata-related modules and templates and testing infoboxes with Wikidata content.
  • List of articles on English Wikipedia without a Wikidata item (also works for other projects)
  • You have a bunch of names etc. and want to find Wikidata items with those labels/aliases? Try relabel!
  • SourcererBot is adding lots of references to existing statements on several thousand items.
  • Mix-n-Match has new catalogs including the National Library of Australia.
  • Deaths at Wikipedia are a series of reports comparing items at Wikidata with death-by-year-categories of Wikipedia. For the years since 2000, only about 15% of items at Wikidata lack d:Property:P570 (date of death).
  • 93% of items about people have a gender set now.
  • Want to make both Wikidata and Inventaire better? You can help by finding those books' authors.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Find A Grave cemetery ID, German cattle breed ID, Erdős number, worldfootball.net ID, AllMovie artist ID
  • Newest tools: Suggestor
• Development
  • Rolled out arbitrary access to about 250 Wikipedias including German, French and Japanese. More to come in a few days.
  • Worked more on quantities. Looks like we'll have it on a demo system for you to try a first version within the next two weeks.
  • Bene* is joining us for a month as an intern. Welcome!
  • References are now hidden while loading the page, speeding up page load time
  • First commit to the ArticlePlaceholder extension
  • Expensive parser functions now count each entity only once
  • Released a new version of the DataModelServices component and started using it
  • Started working on phasing out the wb_entity_per_page table. It will be kept around and updated for some time to allow tool owners to migrate.
  • The Wikibase code base now fullfills all of MediaWiki’s PHPCS coding standards
  • Added property IDs to Special:ListProperties
  • Did a lot of bug triage on Phabricator
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:03, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-34

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

• Many Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Before they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article.
• Some auto-saving problems and other issues in the Content Translation tool are now fixed. Please report to the Content Translation feedback page if you still have problems.

Problems

• Older gadgets that are not using ResourceLoader are not loading anymore. They need to be updated.
• On August 12 the machine translation servers and the Content Translation tool didn't work. This was fixed on the same day.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 20 (calendar).
• You can soon watch when something is added to or removed from a category.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 18 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:17, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 19 August 2015

• Op-ed: WP:THREATENING2MEN: The English Wikipedia's misogynist infopolitics and the hegemony of the asshole consensus
  Nothing makes Wikipedians more angry than a discussion of gender and feminism on Wikipedia.

• In the media: Politically controversial science; "Wikipedia hates women"
  A new article in PLOS ONE about Wikipedia's science coverage has attracted media attention.

• Featured content: Dead parrots, live frogs, a symbolic kiss and what do we get? Enrique Iglesias!
  This week's featured content.

• Travelogue: Seeing is believing
  Tony the Tiger tours New York City.

• Traffic report: Straight Outta Connecticut
  It's a long way from the leafy bowers of Greenwich, Connecticut to the concrete barrens of Compton, California.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  Community technical news.

• Blog: How Wikipedia responds to breaking news
  Wikipedia is capable of covering news like any news agency.

• Read this Signpost in full
• Single-page
• Unsubscribe
• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:01, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #172

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: SmartData conference
  • Paper: Reifying RDF: What Works Well With Wikidata?
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata made it into the top 10 of the Land der Ideen competition \o/ This means we're part of the final public voting starting on 9th of September. Thanks everyone who voted and spread the word.
  • Flow is being tested on selected talk pages.
  • New tool: Get new Wikidata items (now or before a given timestamp) as HTML or PagePile
  • New tool: Find Wikidata items without an image around a location, then find free images on Flickr taken nearby.
  • EventZoom.net extended with OpenStreetMap support, increasing the options for visualizing historical events from Wikidata.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Find A Grave cemetery ID, German cattle breed ID, Erdős number, worldfootball.net ID, AllMovie artist ID
• Development
  • Soon the edit summary for edits through the API will also contain the automatic edit summary that you are used to for edits done through the website. The summary given by the API user will be appended to the automatic summary. (phabricator:T97247)
  • Addressed performance issues in usage tracking updates and had to delay the latest round of rollouts because of it
  • Fixed a bug where suggestions would show up twice in item and property selectors (phabricator:T109697)
  • Improved performance of the mw.wikibase.sitelink Lua method
  • More work done on Unit Selector widget
  • Started working on the ArticlePlaceholder extension
  • Made final changes so we can redirect mobile users to the mobile version by default
  • Evaluated the remaining steps to get the extension deployed that lets you do checks against 3rd party databases. Not much left it seems and we'll tackle that in one of the next sprints. Getting the new features deployed for the constraints checks will still take a bit longer.
  • More work on making the edit summaries in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co more meaningful
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 12:35, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-35

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

• Disambiguation pages are now excluded from the random page function.

Problems

• There was a problem with CAPTCHAs in VisualEditor. This has now been fixed.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 26. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 27 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 25 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

13:02, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 August 2015

• In focus: An increase in active Wikipedia editors
  Does the data mean good news for the encyclopedia?

• In the media: Russia temporarily blocks Wikipedia
  The Russian Wikipedia is blocked, more blocks may be on the on the horizon.

• Op-ed: Wikimania—can volunteers organize conferences?
  Should paid event staff supplement the work of volunteers?

• News and notes: Re-imagining grants
  The Wikimedia Foundation's grant structure.

• Featured content: Out to stud, please call later
  This week's featured content.

• Arbitration report: Reinforcing Arbitration
  The recently closed Arbitration Enforcement case.

• Recent research: OpenSym 2015 report
  A look at the research presented at the OpenSym 2015 conference.

• Read this Signpost in full
• Single-page
• Unsubscribe
• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:59, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #173

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • New request for comments: Merging relationship properties
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Removing use of Mediawiki’s API ‘rawmode’ in Wikibase
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • New page: Wikidata:OpenStreetMap to facilitate cooperation with our colleagues at OpenStreetMap
  • Inventaire now shows links to ProjectGutenberg ebooks based on Wikidata data (example)
  • First version of units is ready for testing
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: ResearchGate ID, GitHub username, African Plant Database, LinkedIn personal profile, Project Gutenberg ebook ID, Category for pictures taken with camera, work period end, work period start, NASA biographical ID, Dictionary of Ulster Biography ID, United States Armed Forces service number, Colour Index International constitution ID, Avibase ID
  • Newest WikiProjects: Reasoning
  • Newest gadgets: List of missing pairs queries, DuplicateReferences
  • Newest External tools: Commons:Database reports/Cameras
• Development
  • Lucie posted a sneak-peek of her work on the article placeholder extension
  • Optimized Wikidata for viewing on mobile devices. You will be redirected to m.wikidata.org automatically when using a mobile device soon the same way it already happens on Wikipedia. (Editing will only be possible via the special pages!)
  • Started working on a page to track how much Wikidata's data is used on each Wikimedia project
  • API breaking change coming soon
  • API custom summary will no longer override the autocomment (phabricator:T97247)
  • Paging and sorting has been added to Special:ListProperties and it now also shows the IDs of the properties
  • Worked more on making the edit summaries on the client more meaningful and readable
  • Introduced a limit of 250 different entities that can be used on a page in the client via arbitrary access. The limit does not apply to convenience functions in lua, such as mw.wikibase.label which use a TermLookup instead of loading a full entity to get labels. (phabricator:T93885)
  • Properties are now linked in the diff view (phabricator:T105411)
  • Ricordisamoa made several improvements to special pages (eg phabricator:T68744, phabricator:T48248, phabricator:T86647)
  • Fixed a bug that made aliases too prominent in entity selectors (phabricator:T110021)
  • Fixed a bug that made entries show up twice in the entity selector (phabricator:T109697)
  • Started working on a special page to list all pages on a wiki with a certain badge
  • Fixed remaining blockers for first rollout of unit support
  • Bene worked on a new feature for DuckDuckGo to show instant results from Wikidata on their site
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:43, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-36

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

• VisualEditor will now automatically create a link when you type in or paste an ISBN, PMID, or RFC.
• The link editor in VisualEditor is now a bit wider. It's now the same width as the automatic citation tool.
• VisualEditor gadget authors can no longer use the backwards-compatibility module ext.visualEditor.viewPageTarget.init. Use ext.visualEditor.desktopArticleTarget.init instead.
• Gadget writers can now use mediawiki.ForeignApi to communicate between different Wikimedia wikis.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 3 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 1 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikidata API will be updated with breaking changes. This will probably happen on September 9.

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

21:37, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

September 2015

The Signpost: 02 September 2015

• Special report: Massive paid editing network unearthed on the English Wikipedia
  Nearly 400 accounts blocked in largest paid-editing bust ever.

• News and notes: Flow placed on ice
  The WMF collaboration team announced this week that Flow will no longer be under active development.

• Discussion report: WMF's sudden reversal on Wiki Loves Monuments
  A conflict regarding fundraising banners on the Italian Wikipedia is resolved.

• Featured content: Brawny
  This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 16 August to 24 August.

• In the media: Orangemoody sockpuppet case sparks widespread coverage
  Also vital statistics regarding Ja Rule.

• Traffic report: You didn't miss much
  The late-summer smash success of Straight Outta Compton remains the chief talking point of the English-speaking world, interrupted only by the welcome return of a Google Doodle.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  Community technical news.

• Read this Signpost in full
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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:07, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #174

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikimedia Grafana graphs of Wikidata profiling information
  • Past: Wikimedia Science Conference (blog posts: Liberating Science Daily With, and To, Wikidata, Wikidata, Wikipedia, and #wikisci)
  • Past: Wikidata workshop in Rennes
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • New date for the next Arbitrary access rollout has been set: 16th of September.
  • Support for units on Wikidata is coming on Wednesday (9th of September).
  • A new version of Kian has been released
  • The Wikidata Game has got a new mode: Books without author.
  • A new IEG proposal needs your review and support. You can also submit your own until the 29th of September.
  • >8K Fellows of the Royal Society have been added to mix’n’match
  • You can have a look at the spiffy new mobile view
  • Want to work with the data in Wikidata? There is a new release of the Wikidata Toolkit for you.
  • Your help is needed with the most important constraint violations.
  • A new noticeboard has been created to help with classification issues: d:Wikidata:Classification noticeboard
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Artsy artist, National Gallery of Victoria artist identifier, CITES Species+ ID
• Development
  • Worked on search on the mobile site
  • Started working on automatically linking identifiers without a gadget and the new datatype for identifiers
  • We have a new Special page to query badges (finally!) After the next update it will be at Special:PagesWithBadges on Wikipedia and others
  • Fixed some of the remaining known issues with unit support to make it ready for rollout on Wednesday
  • Continued with making it possible to show meaningful edit summaries in the watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and others
  • Made change dispatching faster (This is what makes Wikipedia and others aware of changes happening on Wikidata)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:39, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-37

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

• You can now mention up to 50 users in a post and they will get a notification. Previously you could notify up to 20 users.
• A new version of the Wikidata Toolkit has been released. It now has Wikibase API support.
• You can now use Wikidata to find all good or featured articles in a Wikipedia version.

Problems

• There was a problem with Tool Labs due to kernel issues. This has been fixed.
• The Content Translation tool published some pages with the same reference repeated several times. This has been fixed.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 9. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 10 (calendar).
• The maximum character length when you search for something on the Wikimedia wikis is now 300 characters.
• The notifications list has been split into two lists. As a first step, notifications about messages on your user talk page will be placed in the second list. Feedback is requested at the Echo talk page.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 8 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the Wikitech ambassadors mailing list. The list is for Wikimedians interested in spreading information about Wikimedia technology news. See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia mailing lists will be moved to a new server and the software will be upgraded. This will happen on September 9 at 14:00 (UTC). The mailing lists will not be working during the move. It can take up to four hours.
• Wikidata will soon be able to store measurements, such as a mountain's height or the distance between two places.

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

17:29, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 09 September 2015

• Gallery: Being Welsh
  The National Library is now releasing some of the nation's most treasured collections to Wikimedia Commons for everyone to use and enjoy.

• Featured content: Killed by flying debris
  Tony1 interviews a prolific featured content participant, Ian Rose.

• Op-ed: DYK, or proudly displaying incorrect information on the Main Page with alarming regularity
  Fram tells us why DYK is a problem.

• News and notes: The Swedish Wikipedia's controversial two-millionth article
  First bot-created article generated from Wikidata; the Orange Bar of Doom has finally met its doom; active editor numbers still on the rise; arbitrator to resign; ne templates added in wake of Orangemoody case

• Traffic report: Mass media production traffic
  This week's theme in popular articles revolved entirely around mass media productions.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  section begin "tech-newsletter-content"

• In the media: Calling all scientists!; More Wikipedia editors in the Netherlands than all of Africa combined
  A recap of Wikipedia in the media this week

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:00, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-38

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

• You can now use the Wikidata query service.
• Belarusian-Taraškievica Wikipedia was moved from be-x-old.wikipedia.org to be-tarask.wikipedia.org. This caused some issues, but most of them were resolved.
• Language preferences might not be changed immediately when you adjust them. Language selection might work slower. Please report any problems.

Problems

• There was a problem when editing International Standard Book Numbers in Visual Editor. This has now been fixed.
• The Wikimedia mailing lists should have been upgraded on September 9. It didn't work as planned and will now happen later.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 16. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 17 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 15 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• ContentTranslation will show more data on the Special:ContentTranslationStats page. For example, it will show translation trends and information about deleted translations.
• The first version of the translation suggestions feature will be deployed soon.

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

16:18, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #175

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Wikidata edit-a-thon at Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2015 in Estonia
  • Upcoming: Office hour on IRC, 23 September
  • Upcoming: Mobilizing Open Cultural Data, Helsinki, 2 October
  • Upcoming: Wikidata tutorial at SWAT4LS, December
  • Un-deleting 500,000 Wikidata items
  • Wikimania 2015 report by Multichill
  • DSS Wikidata Editathon
  • A simple way to write Wikidata bots
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Please vote for Wikidata to win the people's choice award of Land der Ideen (voting instructions)
  • We passed 70M statements.
  • Stalagmites and stalactites visualizes items without statements, items with statements, and deleted/redirected items by batches of 100,000 QIDs
  • Mix n Match is now available for mobile, has an improved automatic matching algorithm, got speed improvements and new catalogs were added like the National Gallery of Victoria, World Heritage Sites and CulturaItalia
  • The annual Wikipedia editing competition organized by the International Society for Computational Biology will include a Wikidata component this year for the first time.
  • Matched birth and death days seeks to investigate all pairs of humans (in various subsets) that appear to have the same birth dates and death dates. De-duplication underway!
  • You can now use the new special page Special:PagesWithBadges to see which articles on that project have a badge like "featured article".
  • New tool by Magnus to suggest links to Wikidata items while you type
  • Meta, MediaWiki, Wikispecies and Wikibooks will get (more) access to Wikidata soon
  • Wikidata now has an official SPARQL endpoint so you can query the data
    • announcement
    • examples
    • How US Presidents Died According to Wikidata
  • Wikidata now supports units
    • announcement
    • properties with units already created
    • Properties with units waiting for creation
    • example
  • Prototype database to store all Wikipedia references
  • Duplicity can show you how many (and which) articles on a Wikipedia are not connected to an item on Wikidata (example for frwp)
  • Magnus wrote a user script to let you edit Listeria-powered lists on Wikipedia directly
  • Musicpedia has been released in beta and is using data from Wikidata
  • New tool by Magnus to create a Commons creator page from a Wikidata item
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: length, elevation above sea level, orbital inclination, area, duration, height, width, wingspan, M x sin i, speed, watershed area, density, electrical conductivity, heat capacity, HMDB ID, depositor, luminosity, aspect ratio, HSDB ID, LIPID MAPS ID, KNApSAcK ID, NIAID ChemDB ID, Fusion enthalpy, mass
• Development
  • Release of the query service and unit support (see above)
  • Made quantities not show URIs when editing a value but instead show the label
  • Worked on new datatype for identifiers to be able to split them from the other statements in the user interface, link them without the need for the authority control gadget and be able to link them in JSON/RDF
  • Worked more on making the edit summaries in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co more meaningful
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:21, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 16 September 2015

• Editorial: No access is no answer to closed access
  On Wikipedia's commitment to open access and its obligations to readers and editors.

• News and notes: Byrd and notifications leave, but page views stay; was a terror suspect editing Wikipedia?
  WMF CFO to depart, notifications come and go, and questions about the possible editing by a recently arrested terrorism suspect.

• In the media: Is there life on Mars?
  Probably not. Also, Whitehall still editing Wikipedia.

• Featured content: Why did the emu cross the road?
  This week's featured content.

• Traffic report: Another week
  No particular trends to spot in this week's top article traffic.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  Community technical news.

• Read this Signpost in full
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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:43, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-39

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 now an experimental Wikimedia maps service. You can give feedback here.
• Last week a few issues with UploadWizard were fixed. Before this was done, UploadWizard would stop you from uploading your files if something went wrong.
• More Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Previously they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article.
• The VisualEditor welcome dialogue has been changed. The intention is to make it more helpful for new users.

Problems

• Wikimedia Labs' HTTPS certificate expired for most of Tuesday 15 September. To reach Wikimedia Labs and Tool Labs securely you had to ignore your browser's security error message. There was no risk to data security during this time.
• Last week the notification system was split into two parts. This was temporarily undone because of a bug and performance concerns. It will return to two parts this week.
• UploadWizard couldn't upload files larger than 5 MB when using chunked uploads. This has now been fixed.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 22. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 23. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 24 (calendar).
• The page move tool has been switched over to the new standard look for forms.
• You can now choose whether to extend a link or not when editing one in VisualEditor. This means it is easier to choose how much of what you type before and after the link is part of it.
• Wikibooks can now use data from Wikidata.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. It will be on September 23 at 17:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can register to the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2016 in San Francisco 4–6 January 2016. Gadget, template, bot, and tool developers are welcome as well. Call for participation and travel sponsorship requests are open until 2 October.

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

18:29, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #176

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: WikiCon in Dresden
  • Upcoming: office hour on IRC
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The grant proposal "StrepHit: Wikidata Statements Validation via References" is looking for endorsements
  • Wikidata and it's dumps are now described according to the DCAT-AP standard. You can add your language by translating the general and the Wikidata specific messages.
  • A follow-up to the Wikidata for research proposal has begun to be drafted by the University of Haifa and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
  • Community page for the new SPARQL query service, including a subpage for interesting or illustrative queries, and a board for suggestions and discussions.
  • Wikibooks now has access to the data on Wikidata
  • English Wikipedia and a few more got arbitrary access
  • Mix'n'match got new catalogs including Open Library authors and AcademiaNet's excellent female authors
  • The LinkedWiki extension now supports Wikidata (demo)
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: FISA ID, Power of 10 athlete ID, Library of Congress JukeBox ID, CrunchBase organisation ID, CrunchBase person ID, CDD Public ID, Nikkaji, ZINC ID, Leadscope ID, M.49 code, BLDAM object ID, AcademiaNet, fabrication method, user manual link, pressure, temperature, speed of sound, internetmedicin.se ID, range, CDB Chemical ID, Mémoire des hommes, Fellow of the Royal Society, magnetic moment, thermal conductivity
• Development
  • Started writing default Lua modules for the Article Placeholder
  • Excluded the Topic namespace from Special:UnconnectedPages
  • Fixed a bug where an item link on normal wiki pages was sometimes prepended by a label (in a random language)
  • Worked on the remaining blockers for redirecting users on mobile devices to the mobile version of the site
  • Fixed an issue where people had login issues when trying to connect an article to an item on the client
  • Worked on removing some more places that don't have language fallback yet
  • Worked more on making meaningful edit summaries show up in the client watchlist and recent changes
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 15:59, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 23 September 2015

• In the media: PETA makes "monkey selfie" a three-way copyright battle; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  PETA launches a copyright lawsuit over the infamous photograph.

• Op-ed: Can we please stop bashing Wikipedia?
  No, really, just stop.

• Featured content: Inside Duke Humfrey's Library
  This week's featured content.

• WikiProject report: Dancing to the beat of a... wikiproject?
  This time of year features the Latin Grammy Awards, so here for an interview are WikiProject Latin music.

• Traffic report: ¡Viva la Revolución! Kinda.
  This week, drug lord and wannabe Bolivar Pablo Escobar was joined by a whole host of somewhat more primetime-friendly political insurgents.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  Community technical news.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:24, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-40

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

• In UploadWizard, the dialog to see an image preview has been removed. You already see the images in the thumbnails when you upload them.
• UploadWizard dialogs look a bit different now. They have been updated to the new OOUI look.
• You can now edit music scores in VisualEditor. You can add new sheet music scores and get live updates when you edit one.
• When you send an e-mail to another editor using Special:EmailUser, that user will now get a notification on the wiki as well.
• You can now see 500 images when you upload images from Flickr with UploadWizard. Before this change the limit was 50.
• The Wikimedia mailing lists have been upgraded.
• MediaWiki developers spent a day looking at proposed code changes in Gerrit. The goal was to clean up the backlog and give feedback to volunteer developers.

Problems

• Some visitors had problems reaching the Wikimedia sites for an hour on September 24.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 30. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 1 (calendar).
• There will be a new beta feature that allows editors to use Flow on their user talkpage if they want to. Each wiki can decide if they want to enable it.
• The Content Translation tool can give translation suggestions. This feature will now be available in more languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Japanese, Italian, and Catalan.

Meetings

• You can join the strategy process of the Reading department of Wikimedia Engineering.
• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation developers want the community to decide who can use OAuth in the future. You can discuss it on Meta.

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

15:15, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #177

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: IRC office hour (log with summary of past 3 months, OSM integration and more)
  • Upcoming: code.talks
  • Upcoming: Wikiconference USA
  • Wikidata-Items schnell auf der Kommandozeile nachschlagen? Mediawiki APIs hacken
  • A sea-change in science citation? The Wikipedia Science conference.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Great collaboration between a group of Flemish museums and art collections and Wikidata
  • Wikidata timeline is another tool that gives you nice timelines based in Wikidata's data (examples: American Sitcoms, Wars, Meryl Streep)
  • Cool new tool by Magnus for dynamic list generation
  • nlwiki has made great progress in getting down the number of articles not connected to Wikidata
  • The Museum of Modern Art website now includes Wikidata IDs (example)
  • 50.79% of all #Wikidata items have none, one or two statements now. Next month it is likely to be less than half. Good progress!
  • Some more examples to get you started with Wikidata's query service: 1, 2, 3
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Membership, YerelNet village ID, prize money, radius, vapor pressure, kinematic viscosity, combustion enthalpy, vaporization enthalpy, NDF-RT ID, Half-Life, sublimation temperature, wing area, power output, Kunstindex Danmark artwork, decomposition point, RXNO Ontology, size of team at finish, size of team at start, boiling point, melting point, Banque de noms de lieux du Québec id, BC Geographical Names ID, substitute/deputy/replacement of office/officeholder, term length of office, image legend, co-driver, qualifies for, short author name, Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur ID
• Development
  • You can now find the Wikibase ontology at http://wikiba.se/ontology
  • Special:UnconnectedPages will have a namespace filter
  • Worked on a small birthday present (One month left!) and party organizing (more info coming in the next days)
  • Language fallbacks will be shown also when adding a new statement, in qualifiers and references as well as for badges
  • Fixed a long-standing login issue when adding a new language link from Wikipedia and co (phabricator:T50389)
  • Worked on RfC for multi-content revisions. This is groundwork for Commons support. (phabricator:T107595)
  • More work on making meaningful edit summaries show up in the watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and co
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 17:21, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

October 2015

The Signpost: 30 September 2015

• News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation fundraising report, Montreal to host 2017 Wikimania
  A year of fundraising and a controversial decision.

• In the media: Irish legislative editing; coffee quarrel; more sports vandalism
  More Wikipedia editing in the news.

• Op-ed: Wikipedia needs more administrators
  Low numbers of active admins and high standards for adminship make a troubling combination.

• Recent research: Wiktionary special; newbies, conflict and tolerance; Is Wikipedia's search function inferior?
  A look at newly published Wikipedia research.

• Tech news: Tech news in brief
  Community technical news

• Read this Signpost in full
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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:35, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #178

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: code.talks (slides on migrating Freebase to Wikidata)
  • Past: Wikidata:Mobilizing Open Cultural Data (videos, slides)
  • Upcoming: Wikidata's 3rd birthday. We will have a party and you should come! (announcement, program and other details, IMPORTANT: sign up so we know how many people to expect)
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • There are now almost 5000 articles in Czech Wikipedia which include an infobox without parameters, only with data from Wikidata.
  • Input request about editing Wikidata from clients like Wikipedia
  • Freebase to Wikidata: results of Tpt's internship have been published
  • Articles without a Wikidata item can now be filtered by category tree. (example for chemists on enwiki)
  • Wikidata:Units attempts to list available units and properties they can be used with
  • Constraint reports can now check if units are within a user defined list: e.g. report for mass (P2067)
  • WikiProject Economics needs more participants to organize all the new properties.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Georgian national system of romanization, Hepburn romanization, membership, YerelNet village ID, prize money, radius, vapor pressure, kinematic viscosity, combustion enthalpy, vaporization enthalpy, NDF-RT ID, half-life, sublimation temperature, wing area, power output, Kunstindex Danmark artwork, decomposition point, RXNO Ontology, size of team at finish, size of team at start, boiling point, melting point
• Development
  • Changed the default RDF flavor to include all statements (phabricator:T101837)
  • Started to work on creating new articles from scratch from the article placeholder
  • Continued work on the Lua libraries of the default Article Placeholder layout
  • Started the research on client editing with an input page
  • More work on making the mobile view fit for being enabled per default for mobile users
  • Changed our JavaScript coding style to be more in line with MediaWiki core’s
  • In edit mode, the label is now displayed for units instead of a URL
  • Added a new “YearMonthDay” date parser that supports many edge cases where all other date parsers fail
  • More work on passing full edit summaries to the client wikis.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:52, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-41

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 link editor in the visual editor now shows results below the search box. This improves the usability on desktop and mobile.
• The description at Special:ChangeEmail now clearly explains that the page can also be used to remove your email.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 6. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 8 (calendar).
• UploadWizard will remind users to add a category.
• UploadWizard's category selectors will be easier to use.
• A new Cite error will be shown if a named reference is defined more than once in the same article.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikidata requests your input on how to improve the editing of Wikidata's data in other locations, such as Wikipedias.

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

18:33, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor update

This note is only delivered to English Wikipedia subscribers of the visual editor's newsletter.

The location of the visual editor's preference has been changed from the "Beta" tab to the "Editing" section of your preferences on this wiki. The setting now says Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta. This aligns en.wiki with almost all the other WMF wikis; it doesn’t mean the visual editor is complete, or that it is no longer “in beta phase” though.

This action has not changed anything else for editors: it still honours editors’ previous choices about having it on or off; logged-out users continue to only have access to wikitext; the “Edit” tab is still after the “Edit source” one. You can learn more at the visual editor’s talk page.

We don’t expect this to cause any glitches, but in case your account no longer has the settings that you want, please accept our apologies and correct it in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences. Thank you for your attention, Elitre (WMF) -16:32, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 07 October 2015

• Op-ed: Walled gardens of corruption
  Kazakhstan and Wikipedia: A marriage made in hell.

• Traffic report: Reality is for losers
  English speakers, like most of humanity, are primarily a northern-hemispheric people, and as autumn draws close and the days grow shorter, as a group we tend to huddle around our flickering screens and remember what matters: TV, movies, sports and, of course, crazy doomsday prophecies.

• Featured content: This Week's Featured Content
  Some of Wikipedia's newest featured content.

• Gallery: Winners of Wiki Loves Monuments 2015 in Pakistan
  These winners of the Wiki Loves Monuments Pakistan 2015 contest were shared with the Social Media mailing list recently.

• Arbitration report: Warning: Contains GMOs
  A new case was opened for ArbCom as the Genetically modified organisms case was accepted and opened on 28 September.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  A reproduced version of the Wikimedia tech newsletter.

• In the media: Jailed Saudi blogger wins award; PR editing and Wiki-embarassment; Pakistan's third-richest person?
  A summary of Wikimedia's mentions in the media.

• Read this Signpost in full
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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:21, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-42

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 database size lists have been updated. These control special page update frequency and which wikis use global abuse filters.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 13. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 14. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 15 (calendar).
• You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons using the visual editor. When the image is uploaded it will be added to the article you're editing.
• Pages that show citation error messages will automatically be placed in a hidden category.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:29, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #179

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: WikiCon USA (slides)
  • Ongoing: World Health Summit (slides)
  • Upcoming: ODI Summit with a session on the gene-related efforts on Wikidata
  • Don't forget to sign up if you are coming to Wikidata's third birthday party.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Discussion has started on English WikiProject Football about using Wikidata for player squad templates (example) and player club history (example). Needs more input on best practices and commitment to update data.
  • A command line client to the SPARQL query service has been released
  • Query example: popularity of the given name Adolf
  • MoMa artists have been added to Mix'n'match
  • Books without authors on Wikidata are now down to 12.5K from 25K since drive began. You can help get it down even further.
  • Number of articles that are not connected to a Wikidata item on Catalan Wikipedia has been brought down significantly. How about yours?
  • This Month in GLAM has Wikidata coverage
  • Interested in British politics? WikiProject British Politicians has some stats to show where you can help out
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: median lethal dose, first aid measures, official symbol, units used for this property, external subproperty, external superproperty, volume for quantity, semi-major axis, cash, explosive velocity, torque, Max TDP, maximum thrust, metallicity, market capitalization, discharge, spectral line, decay width, gyromagnetic ratio, flux, household wealth, real gross domestic product growth rate, net worth, cruise speed, radial velocity, proper motion, parallax, longitude of ascending node, angular distance, position angle, relative to, SourceForge project, average shot length, Spotify track ID, Discogs release ID, Spotify album ID, minimum explosive concentration, upper flammable limit, lower flammable limit, dipole moment, electric charge, autoignition temperature, (average) gradient, production volume, students count, Soccerbase manager id, PSS-Archi architect id, Soccerbase player id, endangeredlanguages.com ID, NILF author id, C-SPAN identifier of a person, BiblioNet publisher identifier, BiblioNet author identifier, BiblioNet publication identifier, Wiki Loves Monuments ID, DLI, history of topic, ISO 9:1995, Finnish Ministers database ID, Finnish MP ID, Kansallisbiografia ID, ACM Classification Code (2012), solvent, solubility, drug used for treatment, medical condition treated
• Development
  • You'll now get redirected to the mobile view automatically on mobile devices (example)
  • Made it possible to use more entities on a page via Lua without running into Lua's memory limit
  • Added the Article Placeholder extension’s results to the search result page (this is one of a few remaining blockers before we can put it on a testsystem for you to try out and give feedback)
  • Added option to create a new article from Article Placeholder
  • More work on the new datatype for properties
  • More work on making meaningful edit summaries on the client. Found a few remaining bugs during testing.
  • More work on a birthday present :D
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 18:01, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 October 2015

• Op-ed: WikiConference USA 2015: built on good faith
  We believe that human interaction can only make Wikipedia stronger.

• WikiConference report: US gathering sees speeches from Andrew Lih, AfroCrowd, and the Archivist of the United States
  Three days at the US National Archives.

• Editorial: Why the news media needs a Wikipedian in residence
  The news coverage we usually see about Wikipedia is neither in-depth, nor specialized, nor systematic.

• News and notes: 2015–2016 Q1 fundraising update sparks mailing list debate
  Everyone's talking about money.

• Traffic report: Screens, Sport, Reddit, and Death
  For the second consecutive week, the most viewed article had less than one million views, the only two weeks that has happened in all of 2015.

• Featured content: A fistful of dollars
  This week's featured content.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  Community technical news.

• Blog: Third Wikimedia Spain conference takes place in Madrid
  On September 25, 26 and 27, Wikimedia Spain celebrated its third Wikimedia Conference at the Colegio Mayor Universitario Isabel de España in Madrid.

• Read this Signpost in full
• Single-page
• Unsubscribe
• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:38, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #180

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • How many female scientists are there on Wikipedia? This time with SPARQL! (French)
  • Wikidata Enpoint SPARQL and the paintings of Goya Wikidata's SPARQL endpoint and the paintings of Goya (French)
  • Upcoming: 3rd Birthday \o/ (Please don't forget to register if you're coming to the party.)
  • More wrapups of Wikiconference USA including slides: ,
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Magnus overhauled the Wikidata Game! Sweeeeeet! Now includes one where you can match an author and a publication. And it has stats.
  • Mix'n'match got skyscrapers to match up for you.
  • Sitelinks and P569 compares various Wikipedias by the proportion of items with date of birth (Property:P569)
  • Catalan Wikipedia match up all of their articles to items on Wikidata. Congrats!
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: periapsis, apoapsis, Florentine musea catalogue ID, reason for deprecation
• Development
  • Worked on adding auto-completion for item and property prefixes to the SPARQL query editor (so you can search by label when entering a query)
  • Wrote maintenance script for changing some properties from datatype string to upcoming datatype identifier
  • More work on birthday present
  • More work on the article placeholder to get it ready for a first demo
  • Prepared patch for also publishing JSON dumps with bzip2 compression
  • Further improved edit summaries we show on Wikipedia etc
  • Prepared for giving Wikispecies, Meta and Mediawiki access to the sitelinks on Wikidata on 20. of October
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:20, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-43

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

• Tech News is trying to make reading the newsletter easier. The icon means the item is in the newsletter every week, but with new dates. The icon means the item is mainly relevant for readers with technical knowledge. You can leave feedback on this change.
• Timestamps in the protection log will now be in the user's timezone. Previously they would show Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Problems

• A problem with MediaWiki made some pages show no content on October 14. This has now been fixed.
• Some templates were misplaced in the Flow description bar. This could make it impossible to click on links. This will be fixed this week.
• The deployment of the new MediaWiki version was stopped on October 14. No new code was deployed for the rest of week. This meant planned changes did not happen.

Changes this week

• Changes that were planned to happen last week will happen this week.
• Wikispecies, Meta and MediaWiki.org will be able to use Wikidata for sitelinks.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:02, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 21 October 2015

• Editorial: Women and Wikipedia: the world is watching
  Time to clean up our mess.

• News and notes: Wikimedia lawsuit against NSA dismissed; Affiliates mailing list launched
  District court judge decrees that the WMF lacks standing.

• In the media: "Wikipedia's hostility to women"
  "The lunatics are running the asylum."

• Special report: One year of GamerGate, or how I learned to stop worrying and love bare rule-level consensus
  Examining the conflict and its participants.

• Featured content: A more balanced week
  Featured content

• Op-ed: Wikipedia is significantly amplifying the impact of Open Access publications
  When given a choice between journals of similar impact factors, editors are significantly more likely to select the “open access” option.

• Arbitration report: Four ArbCom cases ongoing
  Open cases before the Arbitration Committee.

• Traffic report: Hiding under the covers of the Internet
  We live in a harsh, uncertain world.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  Community technical news.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:02, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #181

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • New request for comments: Derived properties, Are colors instance-of or subclass-of color
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Poof it works - using wikidata to build Wikipedia articles about genes
  • Wikidata, SPARQL and huskies (French)
  • Wikidata, SPARQL and elected dynasties (French)
  • The birth and death of German playwrights
  • Distributed stats
  • Past: Wikidata training at Wikimedia UK
  • Upcoming: Wikidata's 3rd birthday \o/ (on 29th)
  • Upcoming: SemWeb.Pro in Paris
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • There's a new Wikidata taxonomy browser
  • Meta, MediaWiki and Wikispecies now have access to sitelinks on Wikidata. Welcome to Wikidata, sisters!
  • Harvest templates. New tool to copy data from templates to Wikidata.
  • Number of articles that are not connected to a Wikidata item on Italian Wikipedia has been brought down significantly. How about yours?
  • The Wikidata Game now has a primary sources game and one to match Wikispecies pages to Wikidata items
  • The National Gallery of Arts was added to Mix'n'match
  • Some more query examples: Dracula movies and their actors, movies with links to videos
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Debrett's People of Today ID, maximum operating altitude, DfE URN, NGA artist id, life expectancy, Refseq Genome ID, argument of periapsis, periapsis
• Development
  • ctrl-space now enables autocomplete for labels on http://query.wikidata.org . Should make it easier for you to find the right items and properties.
  • Worked on birthday present :)
  • From Monday on a bzip2 compressed version of the Wikidata json dumps will be published, along with the gzip compressed version.
  • Made it possible to get from the search results page to the article placeholder. This was one of the last holdups for a first demo version.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 18:25, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 5

Newsletter • October 2015

Hello there! Happy to be writing this newsletter once more. This month:

We did it!

In July, we launched five pilot WikiProjects: WikiProjects Cannabis, Evolutionary Biology, Ghana, Hampshire, and Women's Health. We also use the new design, named "WPX UI," on WikiProject Women in Technology, Women in Red, WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health. We are currently looking for projects for the next round of testing. If you are interested, please sign up on the Pilots page.

Shortly after our launch we presented at Wikimania 2015. Our slides are on Wikimedia Commons.

Then after all that work, we went through the process of figuring out whether we accomplished our goal. We reached out to participants on the redesigned WikiProjects, and we asked them to complete a survey. (If you filled out your survey—thank you!) While there are still some issues with the WikiProject tools and the new design, there appears to be general satisfaction (at least among those who responded). The results of the survey and more are documented in our grant report filed with the Wikimedia Foundation.

The work continues!

There is more work that needs to be done, so we have applied for a renewal of our grant. Comments on the proposal are welcome. We would like to improve what we have already started on the English Wikipedia and to also expand to Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. Why those? Because they are multilingual projects and because there needs to be better coordination across Wikimedia projects. More details are available in the renewal proposal.

How can the Wikimedia Foundation support WikiProjects?

The Wikimedia Developer Summit will be held in San Francisco in January 2016. The recently established Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation is interested in investigating what technical support they can provide for WikiProjects, i.e., support beyond just templates and bots. I have plenty of opinions myself, but I want to hear what you think. The session is being planned on Phabricator, the Wikimedia bug tracker. If you are not familiar with Phabricator, you can log in with your Wikipedia username and password through the "Login or Register: MediaWiki" button on the login page. Your feedback can help make editing Wikipedia a better experience.

Until next time,

Harej (talk) 09:03, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-44

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

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
• The first time you use the visual editor, pop-ups will explain why and when you should use the citation and link tools.
• You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons from inside the wikitext editor by clicking "Upload" in the "Insert file" dialog. You will also be able to drag and drop them into an article when using the visual editor.
• When you edit a code block in visual editor, you will have the syntax highlighted.
• Index and Page namespaces on Wikisource will be defined as content namespaces in $wgContentNamespaces.

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

18:04, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #5—2015

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Did you know?

You can use the visual editor on smartphones and tablets.

Click the pencil icon to open the editor for a page. Inside that, use the gear menu in the upper right corner to "Switch to visual editing".

The editing button will remember which editing environment you used last time, and give you the same one next time. The desktop site will be switching to a system similar to this one in the coming months.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs, added new features, and made some small design changes. They post weekly status reports on mediawiki.org. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for languages like Japanese and Arabic, making it easier to edit on mobile devices, and providing rich-media tools for formulæ, charts, galleries and uploading.

Recent improvements

Educational features: The first time you use the visual editor, it now draws your attention to the Link and ⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽ tools. When you click on the tools, it explains why you should use them. (T108620) Alongside this, the welcome message for new users has been simplified to make editing more welcoming. (T112354) More in-software educational features are planned.

Links:  It is now easier to understand when you are adding text to a link and when you are typing plain text next to it. (T74108, T91285) The editor now fully supports ISBN, PMID or RFC numbers. (T109498, T110347, T63558)  These "magic links" use a custom link editing tool.

Uploads:  Registered editors can now upload images and other media to Commons while editing. Click the new tab in the "Insert Images and media" tool. You will be guided through the process without having to leave your edit. At the end, the image will be inserted. This tool is limited to one file at a time, owned by the user, and licensed under Commons's standard license. For more complex situations, the tool links to more advanced upload tools. You can also drag the image into the editor. This will be available in the wikitext editor later.

Mobile:  Previously, the visual editor was available on the mobile Wikipedia site only on tablets. Now, editors can use the visual editor on any size of device. (T85630)  Edit conflicts were previously broken on the mobile website. Edit conflicts can now be resolved in both wikitext and visual editors. (T111894) Sometimes templates and similar items could not be deleted on the mobile website. Selecting them caused the on-screen keyboard to hide with some browsers. Now there is a new "Delete" button, so that these things can be removed if the keyboard hides. (T62110) You can also edit table cells in mobile now.

Rich editing tools:  You can now add and edit sheet music in the visual editor. (T112925)  There are separate tabs for advanced options, such as MIDI and Ogg audio files. (T114227 and T113354)  When editing formulæ and other blocks, errors are shown as you edit. It is also possible to edit some types of graphs; adding new ones, and support for new types, will be coming.

On the English Wikipedia, the visual editor is now automatically available to anyone who creates an account. The preference switch was moved to the normal location, under Special:Preferences.

Future changes

You will soon be able to switch from the wikitext to the visual editor after you start editing. (T49779) Previously, you could only switch from the visual editor to the wikitext editor. Bi-directional switching will make possible a single edit tab. (T102398) This project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab, similar to the system already used on the mobile website. The "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time.

Let's work together

• Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. This feedback page uses Flow for discussions.
• Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help, and report it on Phabricator (Korean - Japanese) or on Wikipedia (Korean - Japanese).
• Local admins can set up the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki. If you need help, then please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.
• The weekly task triage meetings are open to volunteers. Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration, though. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the main VisualEditor project with the bug.

If you can't read this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) 23:25, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 October 2015

• From the editor: The Signpost's reorganization plan—we need your help
  A call for volunteers.

• News and notes: English Wikipedia reaches five million articles
  The community reacts to another milestone.

• In the media: The world's Wikipedia gaps; Google and Wikipedia accused of tying Ben Carson to NAMBLA
  The week's news coverage about the encyclopedia.

• Op-ed: It’s time to stop the bullying
  Gangs of bullies and trolls rove the internet and make life difficult for the rest of us.

• Arbitration report: A second attempt at Arbitration enforcement
  A divisive case before the Committee opens.

• Traffic report: Canada, the most popular nation on Earth
  What's this all aboot, eh?

• Recent research: Student attitudes towards Wikipedia; Jesus, Napoleon and Obama top "Wikipedia social network"; featured article editing patterns in 12 languages
  New research about Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects.

• Featured content: Birds, turtles, and other things
  This week's featured content.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  Community technical news.

• Community letter: Five million articles
  The community celebrates.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:12, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

November 2015

Wikidata weekly summary #182

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • How to add dates with undefined calendar (Julian or Gregorian)? is discussed on Project chat.
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata turned 3! The party doubled as the award ceremony for the Land der Ideen price.

    

    I love Wikidata because

    • Page with state of the project editorial, message from the development team and greetings
    • Images from the party
    • Denny and Erik look back at the beginning of the project - the other recordings are still being cut but you can already see the uncut stream here
    • Presents:
      • Three presents for Wikidata's third birthday from Amir including artificial intelligence to find vandalism!
      • Improved query.wikidata.org by the dev team
      • Preview of the Article Placeholder by Lucie (bachelor student of the dev team)
      • Special:Nearby by the dev team
      • Donation of CC World University & School (WUaS) to CC Wikidata to celebrate its 3rd birthday! by Scott_WUaS
      • Your name in Wikidata Morse code from TMg
  • Help organize the Wikidata related sessions at Wikimania 2016
  • Past: Open Access Week
  • Past: DINI Jahrestagung (slides)
  • Past: Tehran SFD (video)
  • Upcoming: ODI Summit
  • Upcoming: SWAT4LS
  • Modeling the social network of movie actors of the 1920s and 1930s with Wikidata
  • Looking for…science fiction movies on the Linked Data Cloud
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Italian Wikipedia matched up nearly all of their articles to items on Wikidata. Congrats!
  • Bene updated the Tours. Please help translate them here.
  • The Distributed Game now has a Kian module suggesting statements to add
  • Andrew made maps of missing images on Wikidata: South Africa, India, Australia, world
  • Nikki imported dates of birth and death for more than 40,000 persons from Japanese Wikipedia.
  • Example query: French people with an article on English Wikipedia but not French Wikipedia
  • Example query: paintings without dimension (add some?)
  • Example query: people or things born or created on the same day of the year as Wikidata
  • We passed 15M items.
  • Happy 10th anniversary to Semantic MediaWiki! We wouldn't be where we are today without you.
  • All 8,860 fellows of the Royal Society have been matched to Wikidata items
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Wikidata property sample, Emporis building complex ID, Orsay Museum artist ID, Politifact Personality Identifier, Fashion Model Directory ID, mix'n'match catalogue ID, ISOCAT id, draft, beam, ionization energy, ITU-T network identifier, mobile country code, frequency of event
  • Newest External tools: Top missing P31 by number of sitelinks list the items with most sitelinks lacking instance of or subclass of
• Development
  • Worked on birthday presents (Special:Nearby, article placeholder demo system and improvements to query.wikidata.org)
  • Wes, Stas, Dan and James from the WMF came over to talk through current work around Wikidata and plans for the future
  • Further poked at editing references at the same time as rest of the statement
  • Investigated where we can push next to improve performance
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 15:55, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-45

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

Recent changes

• You can now see how many editors are using a gadget on a wiki on Special:GadgetUsage.
• If you are using the mobile version of Wikipedia, you can now see Wikidata descriptions under article titles in search results.
• Editing conflicts are now detected when you edit on a mobile device. Before, this did not work properly on mobile.

Problems

• On October 26 the Wikimedia sites went down for ten minutes.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 4. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 5 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join. You can also read the latest VisualEditor newsletter.

Future changes

• A help link will be added to Special:Search. Administrators might have to update the MediaWiki:Search-summary message to avoid two help links.
• Empty list items could be allowed in the future. If so, this could affect some templates.

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

16:43, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 04 November 2015

• Op-ed: You are invited to participate in the Community Wishlist Survey
  The WMF wants your ideas for technical improvements.

• News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation finances; Superprotect is gone
  WMF funding and the death and life of a controversial feature.

• In the media: Ahmadiyya Jabrayilov: propaganda myth or history?
  The difficulties of verifying encyclopedia content.

• Traffic report: Death, the Dead, and Spectres are abroad
  The week in article traffic.

• Featured content: Christianity, music, and cricket
  This week's featured content.

• Gallery: Princess of Asturias Awards 2015 ceremony
  Wikipedia received the 2015 Princess of Asturias Award for global cooperation on October 23.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  Community technical news.

• Read this Signpost in full
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• Unsubscribe
• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:29, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #183

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Lakokat
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata/Wikibase Json Dump Reader
  • Wikidata project to tackle language barriers in scientific reserach
  • Semantic Cities
  • Q167545: Wikidata celebrated its third birthday
  • Slides from talk at UCSD on "Open biomedical knowledge using crowdsourcing and citizenscience"
  • Past: semwebpro (slides)
  • Past: ODI Summit
  • Past: MozFest (etherpad)
  • Upcoming: WikiConference Seoul

Highlights of 3 years of Wikidata by Madgalena Wiegner

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • List of Wikipedia articles without an image where Wikidata has one
  • Want to use data from Wikidata to enrich data in your own application? S wrote a good start.
  • Commons misconceptions and how to avoid them by School of Data
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: charted in, Danish parish code, venous drainage, lymphatic drainage, CRIStin ID, arterial supply, periapsis date, price, uses, Groeningemuseum work PID, iTunes album ID, Austrian Parliament ID, ambitus, Member of the Hellenic Parliament ID, Magdeburger Biographisches Lexikon, UEFA player code, World Health Organisation International Nonproprietary Name, Heidelberg Academy for Sciences and Humanities member ID, Hederich article
  • Ever noticed ranks?
• Development
  • Worked on the tests for the ArticlePlaceholder
  • Finished the create article button for the ArticlePlaceholder page
  • From Monday on a bzip2 compressed version of the beta Wikidata TTL dumps will be published along the gzip one
  • Getting close to make it possible to add the main value of a statement and its reference at the same time
  • Worked on adding a new section to item and property pages for identifiers
  • Did backend work for making identifiers useful in our machine-readable outputs (by actually linking them instead of just giving the identifier string) - more work needed
  • Fixed a bug where dates would have English months on non-English wikis (phabricator:T116503)
  • Fixed a bug when editing labels on mobile (phabricator:T117184)
  • Worked more on making search work on mobile
  • Worked on a fix for a visual glitch in the table of content on mobile (the box is bigger than its content)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:25, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-46

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

Recent changes

• Superprotect has been removed.
• You can now switch between the wikitext editor and the visual editor without saving. You will not lose the changes you have made.
• JSON dumps of the production search indexes are now available. They can be imported to Elasticsearch.

Problems

• Some translations for the Thanks and Echo extensions were missing. Translators have been asked to help and this should be solved soon.

Changes this week

• Thumbnails of 16-bit TIFF files will be displayed properly. Before, this didn't work.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• A new tool to navigate through diff pages is being developed. You can test it out and give feedback.
• The options on Special:Watchlist will look slightly different.

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

17:19, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 11 November 2015

• Op-ed: As one thousand of us requested, Superprotect has been removed
  Assessing the end of a controversial feature.

• Arbitration report: Elections, redirections, and a resignation from the Committee
  It's that time of the year again.

• Discussion report: Compromise of two administrator accounts prompts security review
  Fallout from a recent security breach.

• Featured content: Texas, film, and cycling
  Featured content

• In the media: Sanger on Wikipedia; Silver on Vox; lawyers on monkeys
  Are the inmates running the asylum? Are journalists copying Wikipedia? Are monkeys filing lawsuits?

• Traffic report: Doodles of popularity
  More doodles, more traffic.

• Gallery: Paris
  Reflecting on the tragedy in France.

• Read this Signpost in full
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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:08, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #184

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Successful request for adminship: Lakokat
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Upcoming: Wikimedia Conferentie Nederland
  • Upcoming: Ateliers Wikidata
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Callisto - a tool that shows places depicted in artworks
  • Qwery.me - an experiment for a simplified query service with SPARQL
  • Whitepaper exploring Wikidata for cultural institutions
  • Example query: real numbers with their approximate value
  • Pre-print: Centralizing content and distributing labor: a community model for curating the very long tail of microbial genomes
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: constraint, minimal lethal dose, PPP GDP per capita, NSDAP membership number (1925–1945), employment by economic sector, money supply, net profit, current account balance, genetic association, consumption rate
  • Newest WikiProjects: Education
  • Newest Database reports: Items without claims by site
  • Find Wikidata-only infoboxes in the Czech Wikipedia
• Development
  • Added language fallback to Special:ConstraintReport
  • Fixed a bug that prevented undoing edits via the api (phabricator:T101694)
  • Worked more on moving identifiers into their own section and linking them in the machine-readable export formats
  • Worked on making search suggestions work on mobile
  • Experimented with using icons instead of text for some of the actions in an item
  • Made a lot of progress on a good default layout for the ArticlePlaceholder
  • Nearly finished simultaneous editing of value and reference
  • Improved browser tests and fixed issues with them
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:04, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-47

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

Changes this week

• You can use TemplateData to indicate how you want a template to be displayed in wikitext. Tools like VisualEditor that edit templates will soon use this information.
• Echo notification icons in MonoBook will look more like other icons in the theme.
• The Community Tech team is doing a community wishlist survey to understand what they should be working on. They are now accepting proposals in all languages. You can create your proposal in the small box above the blue button and click it when you're done.
• Wikis can make the welcome notification link to a specific page.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 18. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 19 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 17 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Internet Explorer 8 will no longer have JavaScript support. You will still be able to browse and edit Wikipedia, but will not be able to use some features. This can be solved by upgrading to a newer version or switching to a different browser. The change will happen in January 2016.

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

19:39, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 18 November 2015

• Special report: ArbCom election—candidates’ opinions analysed
  Our annual election coverage.

• In the media: Icelandic milestone; apolitical editing
  Icelandic Wikipedia hits 400K articles; how do Wikipedia editors stay neutral?

• Discussion report: BASC disbanded; other developments in the discussion world
  Discussions around the encyclopedia.

• Arbitration report: Ban Appeals Subcommittee goes up in smoke; 21 candidates running
  Updates on the Committee. You know, besides the election.

• Featured content: Fantasia on a Theme by Jimbo Wales
  The week in Featured Content.

• Traffic report: Darkness and light
  Paris and Diwali.

• Read this Signpost in full
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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:28, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #185

Wikidata weekly summary #114

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • New request for comments: Improve bot policy for data import and data modification
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Upcoming: Ubuntu Party, Paris
  • Upcoming: Wikidata editathon, National Library of Wales
  • More mixin’, more matches
  • Impact of Wikimania Mexico 2015 on Wikidata
  • Myanmar coordinates on Wikidata by Lockal & Widar
  • Tasty translations for the Taste of Stockholm food festival
  • Bachelor thesis about generating quiz questions from Wikidata
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Mix'n'match: new catalogs were added
  • Whitepaper for GLAM institutions wanting to work with Wikdiata
  • MediaWiki, Meta, Wikispecies and Wikinews will get access to the data on Wikidata on Dec. 2nd. (So far they only have access to sitelinks.)
  • What kind of information does Wikidata have? Jura made an overview for the types of statements we have.
  • You can now use SPARQL instead of WDQ for all Listeria bot-generated lists, on all wikis. See en:Template:Wikidata list
  • Alpha release of Wikipedia Gender Inequality Index (using data from Wikidata)
  • Query examples: all xkcd comics, English demonyms for countries
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Cycling Archives ID (team), Cycling Archives ID (race), antagonist muscle, ProCyclingStats ID (team), ProCyclingStats ID (race), GNS Unique Feature Identifier, mean anomaly, quantity buried, Swedish Olympic Committee athlete ID, article ID, general classification, aftershocks, elector, debut participant, call sign, constraint status, comment, min quantity, max quantity, max date, min date, relation, class, namespace, property, item, group by, exception to constraint, property constraint, minimal lethal dose
• Development
  • Rolled out simultaneous editing of main part of the statement and reference
  • Did a clean-up of the statements section (removing some lines etc) and added icons for the actions on statements
  • Worked more on moving identifiers into their own section in item pages and having them linked properly in the exports
  • Work on improving ranking of search results on Wikidata
  • Decreased size of html of item pages
  • Adapted our code to some minor changes in the watchlist code in core
  • More work on making the search on mobile work
  • Made preparations for constraint definitions through statements on properties
  • Fixing size of table of content on mobile
  • Prevented merging of items which link to each other
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 19:29, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-48

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

Recent changes

• A new Pageview API has been announced. Feedback is requested to help decide which data to add to it next.

Changes this week

• There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Language Engineering team. The topic is: Content Translation updates and Questions & Answers. The meeting will be on 25 November at 13:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 24 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "RfC: Raise MediaWiki's PHP version requirement and update coding standards". The meeting will be on 25 November at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• From 1 December, the MediaWiki API will no longer support the dbg, txt, and yaml output formats.

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

20:26, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 November 2015

• Op-ed: Wikidata: the new Rosetta Stone
  Wikidata is set to become the main open data repository worldwide.

• News and notes: Fundraising update; FDC recommendations
  Updates on the Wikimedia Foundation.

• In the media: Erasmus Prize awarded to Wikipedia; trouble on the Russian Wikipedia
  The worldwide community wins a prestigious award while the Russian community struggles with government interference.

• Recent research: Do Wikipedia citations mirror scholarly impact?; co-star networks in silent films
  Scholarly research about Wikipedia and related projects.

• Featured content: Caves and stuff
  Featured content

• Traffic report: J'en ai ras le bol
  The week's most read articles.

• Arbitration report: Third Palestine-Israel case closes; Voting begins
  Another long-running case has been closed, while the voting process for this year's Arbitration Committee Elections has begun.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  Community technical news.

• Blog: Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland urge Reiss Engelhorn Museum to reconsider suit over public domain works of art
  The suit concerns copyright claims related to 17 images of the museum’s public domain works of art.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:27, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #186

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Koavf
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Wikipedia and Wikidata editathon (EditatónAlicia) in Mexico
  • Past: Wikimedia Conferentie Nederland
  • Past: Wikidata Editathon at the National Library of Wales
  • Past: Ubuntu Conference, Paris
  • Is Wikidata the new Rosetta Stone?
  • WordLift 3.0: A brief semantic story – part 1
  • Workshop i Wikidata
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Your help is needed with the most important constraint violations.
  • New daily report on Mix'n'match
  • Daily updated list of people who's birthday is today
  • French Wikisource is using images from Wikidata for their author page headers and more now (example)
  • New catalogs have been added to Mix'n'match
  • A new author language game has been added to the Wikidata distributed game.
  • Mix’n’match now creates a new, pre-filled Wikidata item when no matching one can be found (by humans!), where possible
  • Workflow sketch for the OA Signalling project
  • example of a Listeria list created from a SPARQL query
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Australian Stratigraphic Units Database ID, Roman agnomen, Roman cognomen, production code, NMHH film rating, time to altitude, online service, intended public, Roman nomen gentilicium, Roman praenomen, Classification of Instructional Programs code, UNESCO endangered language ID, has list, statistical unit, applies to taxon, number of graves, Speedskatingbase.eu ID, Stuttgart Database of Scientific Illustrators ID, period, YSO ID, Elonet movie ID, AGORHA event identifier, AGORHA work ID, playing range image, AGORHA person/institution ID, indigenous to, CESAR person ID, BoardGameGeek ID, Musopen composer ID, SFDb-identifier of group, SFDb-identifier of soundtrack, SFDb-identifier of company, SFDb movie ID, Norwegian organization number, Dictionary of Art Historians
• Development
  • Worked on (and for now finished) a new, prettier layout for the ArticlePlaceholder-generated pages
  • Made improvements to page size by removing a lot of unneeded comments in the HTML
  • Worked more on putting identifiers into their own section and linking them properly without a gadget
  • Looked into making it possible to edit more languages without the labellister gadget
  • Worked on improving the ranking of search results on Special:Search
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:02, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-49

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

The symbol for advanced news items has been changed. This is because the symbols were too similar. If a news item is for more technical readers it now looks like this: . You can give feedback on this change.

Problems

• On September 29 users' skin preferences were removed by mistake on small and medium-sized wikis. This changed preferences back to Vector. Restoring all data would cause even more problems. Affected users who want to have their preference changed back globally can ask for it as a comment on Phabricator task T119206 until December 21 2015.
• Some scheduled tasks were not working properly from September to recently. This meant some pages in the special pages namespace were not updated. It has now been fixed.

Changes this week

• Wikinews, Wikispecies, MediaWiki.org and Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata.
• There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is using the <figure> tag for media. The meeting will be on 2 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Category watchlists are now available on test wikis and MediaWiki.org. The plan is to enable it on most wikis in January.
• Cross-wiki notifications are being developed. When this is done you will not have to go to the wiki where something happened to be notified.

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

16:16, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

December 2015

The Signpost: 02 December 2015

• Op-ed: Whither Wikidata?
  Issues of quality and verifiability threaten the project.

• News and notes: Online harassment consultation; High voter turnout at ArbCom elections
  How the community can have its say on two important matters.

• In the media: Is Wikidata as transparent as it seems?; Wikimedia Fund-raising drive launches
  Concerns about Wikidata and WMF fundraising.

• Traffic report: Jonesing for episodes
  The new Netflix series heads the list.

• Featured content: This Week's Featured Content
  Newly promoted featured content.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  Community technical news.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:21, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-50

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

Recent changes

• Revision scoring will help to automatically identify bad-faith and good-faith edits. The point is to make it easier to block vandals and welcome newcomers. It currently supports Wikidata and 14 Wikipedias.

Problems

• Meta was not given access to information from Wikidata last week. This will happen later.

Changes this week

• You will be able to use wikilinks in Flow topic titles.
• IP users will have a toolbar with links to the user talk page and user contributions. Some Wikipedias already have this feature.
• You will be able to edit the graph size in the visual editor. You can either specify the size in the graph dialog or drag it to be the size you want it to be.
• It will be easier to write math in the visual editor if you don't know LaTeX. You can use symbol buttons instead.
• You will be able to use syntax highlighting when you write math with LaTeX in the visual editor.
• UploadWizard will look a bit different.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 10 December. (calendar).
• New MediaWiki versions will now be on Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedia on Wednesdays. Other Wikipedias get the new MediaWiki version on Thursdays.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are "Graph/Graphoid/Kartographer – data storage architecture" and "Parametric JSON builder". The meeting will be on 9 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• A new beta feature will show users links to related articles at the bottom of an article. It will not be enabled by default.

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

17:53, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #187

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Semantic Web Application and Tools 4 Life Science
    • notes
    • example queries
    • a few images
  • Ongoing: Wikidata for Beginners session at DISH 2015, Rotterdam, 8 December 2015
  • Upcoming: Wikidata pour la science
  • Upcoming: Workshop on "Wikidata as a platform for biocuration" at Biocuration 2016
  • Slides for talk "Building the sum of all human citations"
  • Op-ed in Signpost (Lydia is working on a piece to address some of the points)
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Closing in towards 1 million links between Commons categories and Wikidata article-type items -- 8,000 more by next week?
  • Help labeling edits to improve the vandalism detection on Wikidata
  • Open Science Prize is looking for cool ideas for Open Data and health. How about something awesome with Wikidata?
  • The Individual Engagement Grant for StrepHit has been accepted
  • Are you between 13 and 17? Join us for Google Code-in and do some Wikidata tasks with Wikimedia
  • We want your feedback on how to improve the process of showcasing Wikidata's best content
  • I dreamed of a perfect database - Wikidata? ;-)
  • Histropedia timeline of National Library of Wales
  • Wikinews, Wikispecies and MediaWiki now have access to the data on Wikidata. Do awesome things with it, sisters! Meta will follow on 15th.
  • Map of narrative locations in Denmark
  • Experimental REST API for Wikidata
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: deprecated in version, issued by, MediaWiki hooks used, superpartner of, has superpartner, natural abundance, Genius artist ID, ODIS ID, FAO risk status, conversion to SI base unit, Soccerway player ID, Sandbox-Property
  • Newest Database reports: WikiProject Movies/new films
  • Showcase items: Bertus Aafjes
• Development
  • Polished the patch that adds icons to the item pages (for actions like edit, remove etc) and makes them cleaner. This will go live later today.
  • Worked more on a separate section for identifiers
  • Started working on the sorting of statements on the ArticlePlaceholder pages
  • Made it possible to use unknown language, no linguistic content and more as languages for the monolingual text datatype
  • Experimented more with improvements to the ranking on Special:Search
  • Worked on showing more languages in the in other languages box than the ones defined in your babel boxes
  • Small improvements to recent changes/watchlist integration on Wikipedia and co
  • Worked on making it possible to create a redirect over a deleted item
  • Worked on PHP7 support
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 15:49, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 09 December 2015

• News and notes: ArbCom election results announced
  The three scrutineers announced the results, a little more than three days after the close of voting.

• Op-ed: Wikidata: Knowledge from different points of view
  A response from Wikidata.

• In the media: Political editing in the context of the US presidential primaries
  Another election, another series of edit wars.

• Gallery: Wiki Loves Monuments 2015 winners
  The top 25 images.

• Traffic report: So do you laugh, or does it cry?
  Another death tops the report this week.

• Featured content: Sports, ships, arts... and some other things
  This week's featured content.

• Technology report: Tech news in brief
  Community technical news.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:38, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #188

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata: knowledge from different points of view (Signpost op-ed on knowledge diversity and our thinking on data quality)
  • The Wikimedia Foundation Scholarships Program is now accepting applications for Wikimania 2016 (deadline: 09 January 2016 23:59 UTC)
  • Wikidata: A platform for data integration and dissemination for the life sciences and beyond received the prize for best paper at SWAT4LS. Congrats!
  • Past: 50 hours of Wikidata and Wikipedia editing at Museo Soumaya
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Over 16.000 people have contributed to Wikidata over the last month.
  • Wikidata Analyst, a tool to help comprehensively analyze the quality of Wikidata (announcement)
  • Overview of the current state of Sum of all Paintings and how you can help by Multichill
  • query.wikidata.org now more prominently shows example queries in case you missed them before, lets you filter and gives you a preview for them. Additionally you can click a little magnifying glass next to an item ID in a query result and explore it further.
  • WikiJourney now has a first release on the Play Store
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: JMDb film identifier, British Council artist ID, MLSSoccer.com ID, YouTube channel ID, image of function, MGI gene symbol, NCBI Locus tag, teaching method, OKPO ID, Ballotpedia ID, organisation directed from the office, office held by head of the organisation, Elonet actor ID, diameter, French diocesan architects ID, statement describes, CTHS person ID, Chemins de mémoire ID, Academic Tree ID, French Sculpture Census ID, deprecated in version, issued by
  • Query example: Which "Lincoln" was "Lincoln" named for?, places by elevation span, people who died in 1945 (for upcoming 2016 public domain day)
  • Newest Database reports: List of films without article in Wikipedia of the same language
• Development
  • Working on sorting of statement groups for the ArticlePlaceholder extension
  • Further work on a separate section for identifiers
  • Worked on properly linking identifiers in the exports
  • Removed a number of lines and boxes in the statement section to make it less busy
  • Made it possible to create a redirect over a deleted item without having to undelete it first
  • Further work on improving ranking on Special:Search
  • Making it possible to show and edit more languages for labels/descriptions/aliases than the ones defined in your babel boxes
  • Getting ready for the holidays :)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 14:30, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-51

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

Changes this week

• Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 17 December. (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 15 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is talking about the agenda for the Wikimedia Developer Summit. The meeting will be on 16 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• A new gadget manager will come next year. The new gadget system is called Gadgets 2.0.

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

17:42, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 16 December 2015

• In focus: Drone photography: New possibilities and new challenges
  Creating content in the sky.

• In the media: Wales in China; #Edit2015
  Jimmy Wales finds his words edited on the Internet.

• Arbitration report: GMO case decided
  Keeping up with the committee.

• Featured content: An unusually slow week
  Featured content

• WikiProject report: Women in Red—using teamwork and partnerships to elevate online and offline collaborations
  Tackling content gaps through collaboration.

• Traffic report: A feast of Spam
  More data, more problems.

• Gallery: WikiConference USA 2015: images, slide decks, and videos
  A look back at October.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:57, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-52

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

Tech News

• Because of the holidays, the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2016.
• The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2015? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!

Recent changes

• CompletionSuggester is a new suggestions algorithm for Search. It is available as a Beta feature since 17 December. (more information)
• The Multimedia team is running an A/B test for the cross-wiki upload tool. They are testing four different interfaces. The test is running from 16-23 December. (more information)

Changes this week

• There is no deployment of MediaWiki scheduled until 12 January 2016 (calendar).

Meetings

• Should administrators and other users with advanced tools need stronger passwords? You can discuss about it in a Request for Comments.
• No meeting with the VisualEditor team on 22 and 29 December, and 5 January.

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

18:29, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #189

Wikidata weekly summary #186

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Successful request for adminship: Eurodyne
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • World Health Summit yearbook for 2015
  • You can apply for a scholarship to attend Wikimania 2016 (deadline: January 9th)
  • Talk submissions for Wikimania 2016 are open. We'd love to see many Wikidata-related submissions. If you need help with your submission contact Lydia.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Google has launched the Knowledge Graph Search API, replacing the deprecated Freebase API
  • Meta now has access to the data on Wikidata as well
  • Want to get an overview of the classes and properties on Wikidata? The Miga class and property browser was updated.
  • WikiBrowser - semantically browse Wikipedia with the help of Wikidata
  • WikiFamou.us lets you compare topics by popularity across languages with the help of Wikidata
  • Chronas is a history project linking Wikipedia and Wikidata with a chronological and cartographical view
  • Visiting some place for the holidays? Check out the items nearby.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Fashion Model Directory magazine ID, Fashion Model Directory designer ID, Artsy gene, WikiPathways ID, NII Article ID, set in period, short-term exposure limit, maximum peak exposure limit, ceiling exposure limit, time-weighted average exposure limit, Total assets, total expenditure, Six Degrees of Francis Bacon ID
  • Query example: works created by females who died in 1945
• Development
  • <3 Thanks for being awesome. Enjoy the holidays :)
  • We will take the "in other projects"-sidebar out of beta features in January (phabricator:T103102)
  • Making ranking information like label and statement counts available to the CirrusSearch index in order to improve ranking in search results (phabricator:T110648)
  • Continued work on the identifier data type for identifiers like VIAF and ISBN so we can easily put them into a separate section in the items and properly link them in the exports (phabricator:T95682, phabricator:T121274)
  • Continued work on making external identifiers clickable links without the help of the authority control gadget (phabricator:T95684)
  • Fixed a mistake in the set reference API documentation (gerrit:259171)
  • More work on cleaning up the statement section (phabricator:T121390)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 21:59, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #6—2015

Read this in another language • Subscription list

Did you know?

A new, simpler system for editing will offer a single Edit button. Once the page has opened, you can switch back and forth between visual and wikitext editing.

If you prefer having separate edit buttons, then you can set that option in your preferences, either in a pop-up dialog the next time you open the visual editor, or by going to Special:Preferences and choosing the setting that you want:

The current plan is for the default setting to have the Edit button open the editing environment you used most recently.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs and expanded the mathematics formula tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for languages such as Japanese and Arabic, and providing rich-media tools for formulæ, charts, galleries and uploading.

Recent improvements

You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing.

The LaTeX mathematics formula editor has been significantly expanded. (T118616) You can see the formula as you change the LaTeX code. You can click buttons to insert the correct LaTeX code for many symbols.

Future changes

The single edit tab project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab, like the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398) Initially, the "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as a cookie for logged-out users and as an account preference for logged-in editors. Logged-in editors will be able to set a default editor in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences in the drop-down menu about "Editing mode:".

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the following Wikipedias in early 2016: Amharic, Buginese, Min Dong, Cree, Manx, Hakka, Armenian, Georgian, Pontic, Serbo-Croatian, Tigrinya, Mingrelian, Zhuang, and Min Nan. (T116523) Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. The developers would like to know how well it works. Please tell them what kind of computer, web browser, and keyboard you are using.

In 2016, the feedback pages for the visual editor on many Wikipedias will be redirected to mediawiki.org. (T92661)

Testing opportunities

• Please try the new system for the single edit tab on test2.wikipedia.org. You can edit while logged out to see how it works for logged-out editors, or you can create a separate account to be able to set your account's preferences. Please share your thoughts about the single edit tab system at the feedback topic on mediawiki.org or sign up for formal user research (type "single edit tab" in the question about other areas you're interested in). The new system has not been finalized, and your feedback can affect the outcome. The team particularly wants your thoughts about the options in Special:Preferences. The current choices in Special:Preferences are:
  • Remember my last editor,
  • Always give me the visual editor if possible, 
  • Always give me the source editor, and 
  • Show me both editor tabs.  (This is the current state for people using the visual editor. None of these options will be visible if you have disabled the visual editor in your preferences at that wiki.)
• Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help, and report it on Phabricator (Korean - Japanese) or on Wikipedia (Korean - Japanese).

If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

Whatamidoing (WMF), 00:54, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #190

Wikidata weekly summary #186

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Ongoing: 32C3
  • Upcoming: Wikimedia Developer Summit
  • Upcoming: StrepHit IEG project kick-off seminar
  • Upcoming: Office hour on IRC
  • Upcoming: FOSDEM (Lucie will give a talk about the ArticlePlaceholder extension)
  • Registration and scholarship applications for the Wikimedia Hackathon in Israel are open
  • Don't forget your talk submissions for Wikimania 2016. Lydia can help if needed.
  • Getting CAS registry numbers out of WikiData
  • The quality of SMILES strings in Wikidata
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Paper: Wikidata: A platform for data integration and dissemination for the life sciences and beyond
  • The Wikidata for Research proposal has now been published in a journal
  • New tool to turn string claims to monolingual claims
  • Johl built a card game about German politicians using Wikidata
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: number of awards, Prosopographia Attica, Structurae person ID, stage classification, sports disciplines competed in, personal best, substrate of
• Development
  • Some small bugfixes and tweaks.
  • Enjoying the holidays and editing on Wikidata. Hope you are too :)
• Monthly Tasks
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Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 14:07, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 December 2015

• News and notes: WMF Board dismisses community-elected trustee
  In a monumental move, the Board ousted one of its own

• Arbitration report: Second Arbitration Enforcement case concludes as another case is suspended
  The latest news from ArbCom

• Featured content: The post-Christmas edition
  A report covering material promoted from 13 to 26 December

• Traffic report: The Force we expected
  In a development that should surprise no one, Star Wars takes the first place prize

• Year in review: The top ten Wikipedia stories of 2015
  We review the top ten stories that defined the Wikimedia movement in 2015

• In the media: Wikipedia plagued by a "Basket of Deception"
  The latest news coverage from around the movement

• Gallery: It's that time of year again
  Christmas time is here.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:34, 30 December 2015 (UTC)