User talk:Rich Farmbrough/Archive/2026 February

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"Macropharmacology" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Macropharmacology has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2026 February 1 § Macropharmacology until a consensus is reached. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 16:31, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

What's your take on AI and Wikipedia's future?

It's been awhile.

I'm interested in your analysis or opinion of AI.

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   10:21, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

AI relies on ground truth, so does Wikipedia. Both have issues in this regard, but AI's ground truth often is Wikipedia, it can't work without it. Ultimately AI will be better at determining epistemological values than a group of WP editors, but that time is not now. Doubtless AI will be used more and more in producing Wikipedia and similar content (and tools), as will other IT tools.

Wikipedia provides a number of valuable things, you can refer to the Wikipedia page on Foo and it will be the same for everybody (in a sense). WP loads faster than an AI can provide similar levels of content. You can rabbit hole faster.

There are interesting overlaps though.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough 16:50, 19 January 2026 (UTC).

Very insightful, thank you.

What would you expect the ETA, for AI determining epistemological values better than WP editors, might be? A year? 2 years? 4 years? How long do you think we have?

Concerning similar content, such as output on an AI's prompt page, how long do you think it will take for that to become nearly as good as Wikipedia (i.e., without much hallucinating), and what effect will this have on WP reader and new editor traffic?

Good point about centralized reference locations. Instant generation doesn't have stability like published material does, even if that material is subject to editing in real time (which is what permalinks are for). That wouldn't be the case if AI produced error-free citations, but for the time being, this feature of AIs is a faulty claim. Now that AIs have entered the encyclopedia space (Grok, etc.), how long will it likely be before those are preferred for training data over Wikipedia?

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic (producer of Claude AI), has been raising the alarm for months that AI will soon be able to do all white collar work soon, including his job. That sounds like the entire computer ecosystem could be transformed. Wikimedia has at least one data center, so it is positioned to do something. What will Wikimedia (and/or Wikipedia) need to do to stay in the game?

I look forward to your replies. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   19:00, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

I think we could do it now with the right questions and sufficient human resource to bootstrap it. Grokepedia is working on it.

It's not clear what the products will be. We need to understand the use of our extra-somatic information stores, a lot of pleasure is obtained by finding things out, rather than having them presented shrink wrapped. Similarly we want to hear the history of music, not just the composed for us melodies that exactly fit our mood.

But for utility perhaps there will be a new paradigm with easier navigation than existing formats. And of course rudimentary computer-brain interfaces are not a million miles away.

It's unlikely that we will carry on for long without a universal basic income or equivalent, at least in the more developed world.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough 16:53, 23 January 2026 (UTC).

Makes sense. Perhaps Wikipedia faces 2-pronged competition: AI-built sites (Grokepedia, etc.) and instant AI media of nearly any type: articles/tutorials/readings/books/courses/documentaries in text/audio/video.

Now that they are applying AI as programming and AI development tools, the projected timeline is shrinking. What took years now takes weeks. It doesn't appear we will have to wait very long for these things to arrive, except that governments aren't designed to respond that quickly. Out of curiosity, are you programming using AI these days? Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   13:12, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #717

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-02-02. Missed the previous one? See issue #716.

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot: Sapper-bot 2 - Task: Monthly updates of the Dead Sea level and the "lowest point" property for Israel, Jordan, and Asia.
• Closed request for permissions/Bot: LiteraryWorksMetaDataUploadBot - Task: Upload metadata for literary works from research project. (Approved)
• Other: Proposal to configure the Newcomer Dashboard for Wikidata

Events

• Upcoming events:
  • Call for Sessions: Wikimania 2026 is Coming to Paris! The submission form will remain open until March 1. Results will be published in May.
  • Who's hiding behind museum collections? - A Wikidata Edit-a-thon by WiNoDa Knowledge Lab (February 24th, 1:00pm-4:30pm CET). This online Edit-a-thon will focus on the many collectors that contributed to the Arachnida and Miryapoda collection of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. Join us to uncover the unspoken human networks that shaped the history of science! Register here: http://winoda.de/en/event/wikidata-edit-a-thon/

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs: Strengthening the Latin American public domain with Wikidata
• Thesis: Hebeis, Maximilian (2026): Entity Matching for Person Records in Authority Files, Bamberg: Otto-Friedrich-Universität (Master thesis in computer science: "a case study into applying learningbased entity matching to person records from two large authority databases, namely the German national Integrated Authority File (GND) and the crowd-sourced open knowledge base Wikidata")
• Papers: Special Collection of the Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD): Wikidata across the humanities: datasets, methodologies, reuse, https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/collections/wikidata_across_the_humanities (new papers have been published during the last week; see a list at d:Q136325279#P527)
• Videos:
  • Africa Wiki Women 1st Newbies Community Meetup - held an orientation for new members on editing Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Commons, to help bridge knowledge gaps of African women on Wiki platforms.
  • Mapping Africa: Visualizing Knowledge and Communities - explores how African communities use maps and geospatial data to enhance Wikidata, improve Wikimedia articles, and make local knowledge more visible globally.

Tool of the week

• Wdlist : Create and manage a personal list of Wikidata items.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Wikimedia Deutschland Job vacancy - Architect of Storage Solutions - (freelance contract / 4-6 weeks)
• You can now nominate your favorite Wikidata research award for 2025. Call for Nominations now open until February 15, 2026.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest External identifiers: U.S. Copyright Office Public Records System name ID, Lenta.ru person ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • value type of this mathematical property (type of the value of this mathematical property when applied to this object or this type of objects)
  • Gifu Prefectural Shrine Association ranking (One of the three rankings given by the Gifu Prefectural Shrine Association)
  • instances must not have (instances of this class or of its subclasses must not have given property or statement)
  • African Scientists Directory ID (identifier for a scientist in the African Scientists Directory)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Center for Jewish History person ID, LINCS ID, Artdoc.Media film ID, Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Architects 1800-1950 practice ID, Walloon-French dictionary ID, Russian Register of Film Distribution Certificates ID, Hentaigana for Academic Information Exchange ID, Identifiant inventaire Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek ID, Woordenboek van Nieuwe Woorden ID, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal ID, Woordcombinaties ID, Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands ID, Database of the Southern Dutch Dialects concept ID, GiveSendGo ID, CrowdRepublic project ID, European Dictionary Portal ID, Gravestone Project Cemetery ID, Uzbek-Russian dictionary ID, Ruwiki ID, Swedish National Archives ID, GDUNO ID, JMRC person id, Catalunya Romànica ID, Mercantile Navy List ID, Igromania author ID, Danmarks Kirker, Medvik ID, Obálky knih ID, National Theatre in Prague artist ID, National Theatre in Prague performance ID, Alpine Linux Wiki article, Microsoft Store developer ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples: Item with a Wikipedia page in lang. X but not Y (source) - modify the wd: QID and the schema:isPartOf for your own purposes.
• Newest WikiProjects:
  • WikiProject Chess - Rubinstein-Memorial list
  • WikiProject Units of Measurement
  • Wikiproject Medicine - List of Italian Doctors
  • WikiProject Evanion Collection
• WikiProject Highlights: WikiProject every Politician / Canada - all Commons lists were updated.
• Newest database reports: Variety of reports for deletion candidates

Development

• Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects:
  • We are making progress with identifying additional ways in which we can reduce the number of irrelevant changes from Wikidata showing up in recent changes and watchlist on Wikipedia and co.
  • We are discussing with pilot Wikipedias about turning on showing Wikidata changes by default in watchlist and recent changes (moving it from opt-in to opt-out)
• GraphQL: We are putting the last touches on a GraphQL endpoint for Wikidata. We are planning to get it live later this month for feedback.
• LDF endpoint: We are planning to decommission the endpoint in preparation for the migration away from Blazegraph on the 18th of February (phab:T415696)
• Mobile statement editing:
  • We are almost done with adding support for editing statements with quantity and monolingual text datatype and finished support for mathematical expression statements. We started support for editing coordinate statements.
  • We are continuing the work on showing constraint violations.
• Wikibase Ecosystem: We are in the process of setting up a demo system for ontology federation (i.e. using Wikidata Items as values in statements on another Wikibase instance)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country:
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

· Previous issue · Full report · Unsubscribe . JosefAnthony talk ·MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:42, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-06

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

Updates for editors

• The "Page information" feature, which gives validating information about a page (example), now automatically includes a table of contents. If there is a local MediaWiki:Pageinfo-header page created by individual users, it can now be removed.
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, VisualEditor previously added bold or italic formatting inside link descriptions, making the wikicode complex. This has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• There was no XML dump on 20 January. Additionally, from now on, dumps will be generated once per month only.
• The MediaWiki Interfaces team removed support for all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API. All API users currently calling those endpoints are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Weekly highlight

• Users are reminded that the Wikimedia Foundation has shared some guiding questions for the July 2026–June 2027 Annual Plan on Meta and Diff. These focus on global trends, faster and healthier experimentation, better support for newcomers, strengthening editors and advanced users, improving collaboration across projects, and growing and retaining readership. Feedback and ideas are welcome on the talk page.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:41, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development - January 2026 Newsletter

This is our fifty first newsletter. This issue has news related to SDG 15.

User group news

• The annual report for 2025 was published.
• Next user group meeting is 22 February.
• The drafting of the 2026 annual plan is under way, please help.

Other news

• Winning images of the special category “Human Rights and Environment” from Wiki Loves Earth 2025🤝 (SDG 15)

This message was sent with Global message delivery by Ainali (talk) 14:22, 4 February 2026 (UTC) • Contribute • Manage subscription

Wikidata weekly summary #718

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-02-09. Missed the previous one? See issue #717.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs: Numishare Blog: Improving searchability using Natural language Processing + Wikidata - How NLP-based search improvements for numismatic collections for the American Numismatic Society. Python NLP tools and Wikidata add a semantic layer that links equivalent terms (e.g. “serpent” and “snake”) to improve discovery across coin databases such as OCRE and MANTIS. Author: Ethan Gruber.
• Videos:
  • Art+Feminism Conversations / Intro to Wikidata + Archives: Led by User:Epìdosis and User:Alan Ang (WMDE), this recording covers tools that support collaborative Wikidata editing, and includes with brief updates on mobile editing, Wikibase software, and work at the intersection of AI and Wikidata. Find more info and tools covered on Meta:Art+Feminism
  • Custom Upload Funnel Creation on Wikimedia Commons: Wiki Loves Africa 2026 - User:Kambai Akau and the Tyap User Group demonstrate how to contribute to the Wiki Loves Africa 2026 contest, incl. how to add a Wikidata Infobox to your contributions, and how to create Wikidata Items if they are missing.
  • (Papiamento) Add a different language Label to a Wikidata Item Wikipedia Above Aruba|Ep. 9 - it's not always obvious how to add labels, descriptions and aliases of different languages to Wikidata items, this short video demonstrates how.
  • Hands-on Exercise: Data Cleaning & Preparation with OpenRefine - Daniel Garjio guides through exercises to cluster and merge duplicate values, standardise formats, reconcile data with external authority sources such as Wikidata.
  • (Spanish) Mapeo colaborativo, plataformas libres y autonomía local, part of the Conference on Climate Justice, Indigenous Voices, and Wikimedia Platforms (2024) - speaker: Túllio Morais Franca shows how to integrate mapping tools suchas OpenStreetMap and Mapillary with Wikidata, Commons and Wikipedia.

Tool of the week

• Wiki Clarity Tool: Clarity Tool is a lightweight web application built to empower editors across Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons. It helps contributors identify missing information in articles and suggests structured data from Wikidata to fill those gaps.

• Name Suggestion Index : Submit a Brand - A tool that links Wikidata brand items to the Name Suggestion Index project on OpenStreetMap.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Mobile editors can now edit String and External ID datatypes directly in the mobile view. To help improve this new interface, Wikimedia Deutschland is looking for volunteers for UX testing sessions. Participants will be compensated for their time. Sign up here (greatquestion) and learn more on the project page: Mobile editing of statements

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • ‎braille transcription (transcription in Braille)
  • location collected (geographic location where a specimen or sample was collected in the field)
• Newest External identifiers: Rappels theatrical production ID, Berlin School ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • Siège occupé ({{TranslateThis | fr = siège occupé par une personne au sein d'une académie ou autre société à ''numerus clausus'' }})
  • Standard Number (A standard serial number)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: MusicaPopular.cl ID, JMRC person id (en), Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography ID, CAMEO page ID, TeamNL athlete ID (new), World Flora Online Plant List, radeberger-stadtgeschichte.de Objekt Identifikator, Master Ideographs Seeker Character ID, Flohic ID, Oricon News person ID, radiko person ID, Xcity actress ID, TV Drama Database Program ID, Van Dale Rijmwoordenboek sentences ID, Van Dale Rijmwoordenboek word ID, BISMaL taxon ID, Vlaams Woordenboek ID, Kotobank Japanese ID, Nişanyan Adlar ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Items with two or more Olympedia people ID (source) - find duplicate external identifier.
  • Music roll releases with recordings of works performed by composer (source)
• Newest WikiProjects:
  • WikiProject progressive Metal
  • Wikiproject Basque Cultural heritage and GLAM
• Newest database reports: 'Template' items with only one sitelink - per Wikidata:Notability, "If a link is a template, the item must contain at least two such sitelinks..."
• Showcase Items: It Was Just an Accident (Q133866932) - a 2025 thriller film, winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival
• Showcase Lexemes:

Development

• Dumps: We published the report from our research into the user experience with Wikidata's dumps.
• Mobile editing: We are finalizing the support for quantity, monolingual text, mathematical expression and musical notation statements as well as a first version for coordinate statements.
• Wikidata integration in the Wikimedia projects: We have continued our investigation into existing Lua modules in order to find more ways in which we can reduce unwanted entries from Wikidata in Recent changes and watchlists on Wikipedia and co. We found a number of options that we are looking into now. (phab:T416822, phab:T416825, phab:T416826, phab:T416827)
• Wikidata Vector embedding: We added German to the embedding (next to English, French and Arabic)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country:
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

· Previous issue . Full report · Unsubscribe . JosefAnthony talk ·MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:26, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

User:Mirror Bot/threads is up for pending deletion under criterion for speedy deletion U6

Hi Rich, as the subject line says, User:Mirror Bot/threads is up for pending deletion under criterion for speedy deletion U6, as a page in the userspace of a user with no edits outside their userspace that hasn't been edited for more than six months. It was tagged by CSD U6 Bot under Category:Candidates for U6 speedy deletion as of 2026-02-08. I'll leave it up to you to do whatever you want (or nothing) with this page. User:Mirror Bot/threads/7357 will eventually be tagged for deletion too by the U6 bot (or it can be tagged for deletion by a human editor at any time); somehow I was the last one to edit it; I can't figure out how I got there. If you want the bot's pages exempted from deletion, you can add them to User:CSD U6 Bot/Ignore list as a template editor. It could be added to the list of userspace-editing bots already on that page, but because the bot never really got off the ground, I'll leave the ball in your court regarding that. Its situation is similar to this discussion about a bot page I added to and then removed from the ignore list. Either way, I fixed the closing template at Mirror Bot's BRFA. Graham87 (talk) 13:16, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

I've added it to the ignore list as your edits to the pages only had the effect of resetting CSD U6 Bot's six-month counter. Hope you don't mind. Graham87 (talk) 02:02, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks Graham. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 20:00, 9 February 2026 (UTC).

Tech News: 2026-07

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

Updates for editors

• Logged-in contributors who manage large or complex watchlists can now organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows with the new Watchlist labels feature. By adding custom labels (for example: pages you created, pages being monitored for vandalism, or discussion pages) users can more quickly identify what needs attention, reduce cognitive load, and respond more efficiently. This improves watchlist usability, especially for highly active editors.
• A new feature available on Special:Contributions shows temporary accounts that are likely operated by the same person, and so makes patrolling less time-consuming. Upon checking contributions of a temporary account, users with access to temporary account IP addresses can now see a view of contributions from the related temporary accounts. The feature looks up all the IPs associated with a given temporary account within the data retention period and shows all the contributions of all temporary accounts that have used these IPs. Learn more.
• When editors preview a wikitext edit, the reminder box that they are only seeing a preview (which is shown at the top), now has a grey/neutral background instead of a yellow/warning background. This makes it easier to distinguish preview notes from actual warnings (for example, edit conflicts or problematic redirect targets), which will now be shown in separate warning or error boxes.
• The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now properly supports more than one Wikibase site, for example both Wikidata and testwikidata. In addition, issues regarding text direction have been fixed for users who prefer Wikidata or other Wikibase sites in right-to-left (RTL) languages.
• The automatic "magic links" for ISBN, RFC, and PMID numbers have been deprecated in wikitext since 2021 due to inflexibility and difficulties with localization. Several wikis have successfully replaced RFC and PMID magic links with equivalent external links, but a template was often required to replace the functionality of the ISBN magic link. There is now a new built-in parser function {{#isbn}} available to replace the basic functionality of the ISBN magic link. This makes it easier for wikis who wish to migrate off of the deprecated magic link functionality to do so.
• Two new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Jju (w:kaj:)
  • a Wikipedia in Nawat (w:ppl:)
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• A new global user group has been created: Local bots. It will be used internally by the software to allow community bots to bypass rate limits that are applied to abusive web scrapers. Accounts that are approved as bots on at least one Wikimedia wiki will be automatically added to this group. It will not change what user permissions the bot has.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Spring 2026 will be held March 25–27 in Salt Lake City, USA. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:28, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

Listing for discussion of Template:BibTeX

Template:BibTeX has been listed for discussion, which may result in the template being merged or deleted by consensus. You are invited to comment on the proposed action at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:28, 12 February 2026 (UTC)

Listing for discussion of Module:BibTeX

Module:BibTeX has been listed for discussion, which may result in the template being merged or deleted by consensus. You are invited to comment on the proposed action at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:28, 12 February 2026 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Yadavilli (name)

The article Yadavilli (name) has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Tagged as Unreferenced for almost 15 years. No other language has a reliably sourced article from which to translate. Unsourced WP:BLP. Fails the relevant notability guidelines, including WP:NLIST.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion based on established criteria.

If the proposed deletion has already been carried out, you may request undeletion of the article at any time. Bearian (talk) 20:48, 15 February 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #719

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-02-16. Missed the previous one? See issue #718.

Discussions

• Open request for adminship: Sjö - RfP scheduled to end after 17 February 2026 10:02 (UTC)
• New requests for permissions/Bot: SEEKCommonsBot - Task: Synchronize Wikidata records created by the SEEKCommons project with OpenAlex
• Closed request for permissions/Bot:
  • AmeisenBot 3 - Task: Adding descriptions (and possibly labels and aliases as well) to items based on their statements. Request closed as approved.
  • Che-W-bot - Request withdrawn.

Events

• Upcoming events: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session 17 February, 2026: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, February 17 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter). Wikiproject P244 maintenance uses SPARQL queries to identify and resolve two types of constraint violations in Wikidata: instances of Wikidata items with more than one LCNAF identifier and instances of the same LCNAF identifier existing on more than one Wikidata item. The February 17th session will walk participants through how to resolve the former issue, while the March 3rd session will focus on the latter. Event page: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_LD4_Wikidata_Affinity_Group/Project_Series/LCNAF_Duplicate_Detection_P244_Maintenance

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs:
  • Wiki for Botanists, why thematic engagement matters: WMNZ/Aotearoa on how sustained outreach with botanists via Wikidata workshops, edit-a-thons, and conferences is improving plant-related knowledge on the Wikimedia projects and building strong collaborative relationships with scientific communities.
  • Tech News Week 7 / Global Watchlists extension: now supports multiple Wikibase instance (i.e. Wikidata + Test Wikidata) and fixes right-to-left (RTL) text directionality issues.
  • The Spark of Linked Data and Libraries: OCLC Passage Project White Paper Translation Report
• Papers: Federating Open Knowledge through Wikibase: the case of the Finno-Ugric data sharing space: Antal et al. (2026) present a community-driven, federated prototype to link multilingual cultural heritage data, open ontologies and preserve local epistemologies.
• Videos:
  • How to Unlock Knowledge Graph Data for LLMs with AI Retrieval - User:Philippe Saade (WMDE), AI/ML Project Manager talks to Chad Jennings of Beyond the Blueprints (IBM Product Hub) on making Wikidata more accessible for AI developers, replacing SPARQL-heavy workflows with vector search and hybrid retrieval.
  • (French) Créer une carte uMap à partir de données géolocalisées extraites de Wikidata - video presentation of 2026 Digital Encounters "Mapping territorial data in uMap"
  • Africa Wiki Women 2026 On Wiki Skills Mentorship Program - Introduction to Wikidata
  • Africa Wiki Women 2026 On Wiki Skills Mentorship Program - Major and Minor edits on Wikidata
  • EMCO Wikidata CoP meeting (2026-01-28) - participants discuss progress on the early adopter phase, incl. how to categorise and track contributions, what statistics to measure and progress on MCO application profiles (persons + corporate bodies)

Tool of the week

• Queer Memory multilingual web app that explores global queer history through live Wikidata timelines, places, rights, culture, and activism. Currently available in English, French, and Spanish.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Etherpad cleanup, save your pads now. All pads after 1st March 2026 willbe deleted so if you need any of your pads, please make a local backup.
• The Wikibase REST API search endpoints are now available on v1 and considered stable! It's important to note that the older v0, which has been live on Wikidata since July 2025, will remain available for a two month transition period until mid-April 2026. We encourage all users to migrate to the new v1 endpoints during this time to ensure that their applications can continue to work seamlessly.
• The WMF Wikidata Platform team has published its February 2026 newsletter. It includes result of an initial evaluation of open-source triple store candidates as part of the migration away from Blazegraph, the next Blazegraph migration office hour, and more. To have new issues of the WDP monthly newsletter delivered to your user talk page, Subscribe to WDP newsletter!

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes: category for music in this language (link to category item that contains music in this language)
• Newest External identifiers: ‎DOAB book ID, ‎qamus.inoor.ir root ID, ‎The Session tune ID, Parfumo fragrance note ID, ‎KaraokeTexty.cz album ID, Biographical encyclopedia of Maros County, Alpine Linux Wiki article, ‎Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Architects 1800-1950 person ID, Igromania author ID, French Trade Mark Number, ‎Bane NOR location code, ‎CardCow.com publisher ID, ‎Lost Pubs Project ID, Handball Base ID, Handballnews.pl person ID, Center for Jewish History person ID, African Scientists Directory ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • Number of translations (Number of translations)
  • Panoramax instance URL (the Panoramax instance of/about the subject)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Hentaigana for Academic Information Exchange ID, Bach digital person ID, Bach digital work ID, YList ID, identificativo Antenati, Pesistulokset.fi player ID, Liiga.fi player ID, Letterboxd producer ID, Topplista artist ID, Apple Music Classical work ID, Fragplace brands ID, Fragplace fragrances ID, Fragplace notes ID, Fragplace perfumers ID, Sport Express person ID, ciss.org sportsperson ID (deaf sport)

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Newest WikiProjects: Learned Societies
• WikiProject Highlights: a discussion regarding how to standardise the data model of the membership of learned societies
• Showcase Items: Super Moscato Show (Q3324704) - French radio program and audio podcast
• Showcase Lexemes: collection (L3941) - English noun (kəˈlɛkʃən) meaning "a group of gathered items", "money gathered for charity/church", or "the act of acquiring"

Development

• Mobile statement editing:
  • We are putting finishing touches on editing support for external ID, URL, monolingual text, quantities and coordinate statements.
  • We worked on visually highlighting preferred and deprecated statements on the mobile site similar to how it is done on desktop.
  • We worked on showing more than one constraint violation when a statement violates multiple constraints.
• Ontology Federation: We continued working allowing other Wikibase instances to use Wikidata Items in their statements (and later from other Wikibase instances). You can see a demo video of the current development state at ontology federation demo.
• GraphQL: We worked on documentation to get get the GraphQL endpoint ready for a first release.
• Wikidata Query Service: The Wikidata Platform team published their report of the evaluation of Blazegraph alternatives. You can read it at File:WDQS Triple Store Evaluation - Benchmark Results Report.pdf.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country:
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

· Previous issue · Full report · Unsubscribe . JosefAnthony talk ·MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:26, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-08

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

Weekly highlight

• The SRE Team will be performing a cleanup of Wikimedia's Etherpad instance, the web-based editor for real-time collaborative document editing. All pads will be permanently deleted after 30 April, 2026 – if there are still migration projects in progress at that point the team can revisit the date on a case by case basis. Please create local backups of any content you wish to keep, as deleted data cannot be recovered. This cleanup helps reduce database size and minimize infrastructure footprint. Etherpad will continue to support real-time collaboration, but long-term storage should not be expected. Additional cleanups may occur in the future without prior notice.

Updates for editors

• The Information Retrieval team will be launching an Android mobile app experiment that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The improvement of on-platform search will enable readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily. The experiment will first be launched on Greek Wikipedia in late February, followed by English, French, and Portuguese in March. Read more on Diff blog.
• The Reader Growth team will run an experiment for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
• Previously, site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice and MediaWiki:Anonnotice) would only render on the desktop site. Now, they will render on all platforms. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed. Site administrators should be prepared to test and fix notices on mobile devices to avoid interference with articles. To opt out, interface admins can add #siteNotice { display: none; } to MediaWiki:Minerva.css.
• View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue on Special:RecentChanges has been fixed. Previously, clicking hide in the active filters caused the "view new changes since…" button to disappear, though it should have remained visible. The button now behaves as expected.

Updates for technical contributors

• New documentation is now available to help editors debug on-site search features. It supports troubleshooting when pages do not appear in results, when ranking seems unexpected, and when you need to inspect what content is being indexed, helping make search behavior easier to understand and analyze. Learn more.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:15, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 February 2026

• In the media: Global powers see Wikipedia as fundamental target for manipulation
  Attempted Wikipedia shenanigans apparent from Epstein, AI, various governments.

• News and notes: Discussions open for the next WMF Annual Plan
  Plus, WikiFlix going places, steady progress on older FAs and other news from the Wikimedia world.

• Serendipity: Maintenance crews continue to slog through Wikipedia's oldest Featured Articles
  Hundreds of old FAs have been triaged since project began, but thousands remain — and they need reviewers.

• Disinformation report: Epstein's obsessions
  The sex offender's attempts to whitewash Wikipedia run deeper than we first thought.

• Technology report: Wikidata Graph Split and how we address major challenges
  A personal perspective on a major update to the Wikimedia social machine.

• Traffic report: Deaths, killings, films, and the Olympics
  I'll have the usual!

• Opinion: Incoming Incurables
  A poem for Wikipedia Day 2026.

• Crossword: Pop quiz
  Sharpen your pencil. How well do you really know Wikipedia?

• Comix: herculean
  efforts.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:01, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Engvar

Hi Rich Farmbrough, I've just done a partial revert on some of your edits to the use British English tag but I don't know how many articles you have added it to and don't want to go through them all. The Use British English tag only accepts one variable which is the date it was last checked e.g. 'Use British English|date=February 2026'. It won't process an additional '|Engvar=February 2026'. Was there a reason you've been adding it? Jonesey95 is pretty knowledgeable on that sort of thing so I've pinged them here too. Dgp4004 (talk) 20:10, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

Also, just FYI, maintenance tags should be added at the top of the article per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section, rather than the bottom as here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=No_Woman_No_Cry_(painting)&diff=prev&oldid=1339426060 Dgp4004 (talk) 20:20, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

Yes, it shows that the Engvar script has been run. The categorizing functionality has been destroyed by someone, but should have been implemented when {{EngvarB}} was merged to {{Use British English}}. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 21:10, 20 February 2026 (UTC).

Please link to a version of {{EngvarB}} that accepted an |Engvar= parameter. I was unable to find one. Nor do I see such a parameter in the edit history of {{EngvarB/doc}}, but I might be missing it. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:05, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

See

See also: Wikipedia:Engvar_workshop

Engvar used a different category hierarchy rooted in Category:EngvarB , which had a different meaning. The disjunct between the Engvar and Use Foo English templates, which we need to maintain in the new system, or the redirect is damaging.

You reverted the changes I made to integrate the two systems without discussing it. You deleted the Category tree without mentioning it to me. We seem to have lost the work of those editors who used the Engvar script. We seem to have also lost, or almost lost, the author. Disenfranchising Wikipedians is not "tidying up". Tidying up may or may not support the project, it's not a project goal. If tidying makes life more difficult for other editors it's damaging. Namespace pollution may be a "thing" but it's not a big thing, and need an entropy based understanding.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough 22:29, 21 February 2026 (UTC).

You're being asked not to add a parameter to transclusions of a template that does not support it. I have asked for any evidence that the parameter ever existed. If you can provide that evidence, please do so.

As for what you posted above, I'm not sure which "you" is being referred to here, who is being quoted as saying "tidying up", or what I am supposed to glean from a link to a 9,000+ word discussion in which "Engvar=" does not appear. And Wikipedia:Engvar_workshop was a one-person show. I see that there is a proposal there to add "Engvar=" to the template, but I don't see that it ever happened. {{EngvarB}} and the categories that it used were modified after consensus discussions. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:54, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

Here. You removed this without discussion. You could have joined the workshop and expressed any opinion, or brought it up at the time of the discussion. My goal was to enable the merging of the two systems without loosing functionality. This seems perfectly reasonable and easy to understand. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 06:47, 22 February 2026 (UTC).

Sorry for being grumpy about this, I put a considerable amount of effort into ensuring that this otherwise contentious template merge went smoothly and avoided the pitfalls of previous attempts to do similar things. The amount of effort to write the workshop was probably less than was put into the discussion, and this seemed to me to be the most constructive way to get those involved to move forward together. I also rewrote the script and made the necessary template changes. I now find that this is being ignored or reverted and those who might have disagreed with the merge have found their interests overridden. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 09:26, 22 February 2026 (UTC).

Thank you for that link. The template supported |Engvar= for almost nine hours due to an undiscussed, no-consensus edit to a widely used template. It can be tough to put work into a proposed change and have it ignored or rejected by the community, but such is life at Wikipedia. If you have followed any of the TFDs around these Use X English templates, you have also seen me make arguments that I thought were persuasive, only to have them rejected. So it goes. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:21, 22 February 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #720

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-02-23. Missed the previous one? See issue #719.

Discussions

• Open request for adminship: Jan Myšák - RfP scheduled to end after 28 February 2026 11:11 (UTC)
• Closed request for adminship: Sjö - Closed as successful, congratulations User:Sjö.
• New request for comments: Notability policy reform: Round 2, where policy is suggested based on round 1 discussions.

Events

• Upcoming events:
  • Apply Now: Scholarships for the Language Diversity Conference 2026 - scholarship application deadline: 13 March 2026 / Conference dates: 2 - 4 October 2026 in Accra, Ghana.
  • Office Hour: Notability Policy - February 26th 2026 at 5PM UTC (your timezone).
  • (Catalan) They were not witches, they were women from Andorra - a Wikimarathon for Witches edit-a-thon to make biographies of Andorran women accused of witchcraft more visible on Wikidata and Wikipedia. Sign-up on Meta: 09:30 – 12:30 UTC, 7 March 2026.
• Ongoing: International Mother Language Day 2026 Datathon - February 21, 2026 – March 3, 2026

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs:
  • Stack Overflow: Even GenAI uses Wikipedia (+Wikidata) as a source - transcript of the podcast audio between Ryan Donovan and Philippe Saade, on the Wikidata Embedding Project and vectorizing 30 million entities for semantic search.
  • Diff Blog: Revitalizing UK History, Series 2: Expanding Multilingual Access on Wikidata - Josef Anthony describes the projects efforts in documenting underrepresented UK historical figures in multiple languages.
  • Diff blog: Into the Spotlight: Sharing Archival Objects through Wikimedia Commons by User:LadyRabbit. Experience documenting Ellen Winstone, a historical figure, non-notability on Wikipedia doesn't mean they are not worth documenting. Wikidata and Commons can help.
• Papers: The Wikidata Query Logs Dataset (WDQL) - presenting a dataset of 200,000 question-query pairs intended to help train Natural Language questions into SPARQL. By S. Walter, H. Bast (2026).
• Videos: 3rd Wikidata Training of the On Wiki Skill Mentorship Program by Africa Wiki Women. Dives deeper into the core data modelling concepts, Wikidata-speciifc terminology and practical editing tips for beginners. Led by User:King ChristLike

Tool of the week

• Dagbanli dictionary - a monolingual Dagbanli dictionary built using Wikidata lexemes, with 20000 native audio recordings as usage examples pulled from Mozilla Common Voice. This means when you look up a word, you can hear it spoken in example sentences. See this in action here: suɣulo

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Wikimania:2026 - The call for submissions for the program is open until March 1, 2026.
• OpenSanctions: As the CIA closes The World Factbook, we’re opening our global map of political power - introduces EveryPolitician.org, a global database of 690,000+ political office-holders across the globe. PoliLoom, GovDirectory, a dedicated WikiProject and the Wikidata community are helping make structured data on politicians transparent. Learn how you can contribute.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes: annual greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by this entity in a year)
• Newest External identifiers: RFI topic ID, ‎Delfi.lv theme ID, SFDb original ID, Artdoc.Media film ID, ‎Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Architects 1800-1950 practice ID, ‎Walloon-French dictionary ID, Bolivia INE code, Russian Register of Film Distribution Certificates ID, ‎Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek ID, ‎Woordenboek van Nieuwe Woorden ID, ‎Woordcombinaties ID, ‎Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands ID, Uzbek-Russian dictionary ID, ‎JMRC person id (he), Catalunya Romànica ID, ‎IEC 61355 identifier, Yandex Object Answer id, Michaelis Portuguese-English Modern Dictionary ID, Michaelis English-Portuguese Modern Dictionary ID, Uni24k indentifier, The Retro Web company ID, Hentaigana for Academic Information Exchange ID, ‎Gravestone Project Cemetery ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • CWSAC classification ()
  • IBAN countries (The country which the bank with this property may create accounts in. For example "MyBank" can create bank accounts in "France" with the prefix "FR". Some banks have a single country they may create accounts in and other have many.)
  • Kloekecode (identifier for locations in the Netherlands, Flanders, French Flanders, and north-western Germany)
  • ICAO 24-bit aircraft address (Unique 24-bit ICAO aircraft address assigned to an individual aircraft’s Mode S transponder, expressed as a six-character hexadecimal code and used in ADS-B and air traffic surveillance systems.)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Faulhaber-Edition ID, OldRacingCars.com drivers ID, ID Prix de Lausanne, Spellingwijzer Onze Taal ID, Uitleenwoordenbank ID, EpiMedDat ID, REVENCYT code, X Games athlete ID (new), Pinkhof ID, Scheikunde ID, JWS II ID, Buitenlandse aardrijkskundige namen in het Nederlands ID, PeeringDB Facility ID, DBNL place ID, DBNL country ID, DBNL titel ID, Movist person ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Property table for a set of Wikidata items (the Memory of the World International Register)
  • People with PolSys ID (P1980), and with or without Norwegian historical register of persons ID (P4574) - (source)
• Schema examples: federally recognized tribe (E502): required and optional properties for items representing federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States.
• Newest WikiProjects:
  • Ski - The goal of WikiProject Ski is to improve items about athletes, events and results from the different skiiing and snowboarding disciplines.
  • Nonprofit Orgs: South Africa - aims to add financial data to the biggest nonprofits
• WikiProject Highlights:
  • Ontology: List of Ontology Pages
  • Sociotechnology: Resources
  • Chantiers MNBAQ
  • India: International Mother Language Day 2026 Datathon
• Showcase Lexemes: чурка (L179567) - Russian noun (ˈtɕurkə) meaning "a wooden block or stump", "a short piece of wood used in games", or "an offensive term for a person"чурка (L179567) - Russian noun (ˈtɕurkə) meaning "a wooden block or stump", "a short piece of wood used in games", or "an offensive term for a person"

Development

• Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are preparing to reach out to editors about improving specific templates that are written in a way that creates a lot of unnecessary entries in Recent Changes and Watchlists.
• Mobile statement editing: We are getting close to having editing support for all datatypes. We are currently still working on the support for globe coordinates. We also added support for showing constraint violations on qualifiers and references.
• Data quality: We are doing technical investigations about how to make constraint violations available for querying again.
• GraphQL: We are getting ready to make GraphQL available on Wikidata later this week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country: Spain
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

· Previous issue · Full report · Unsubscribe . JosefAnthony talk ·MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:51, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-09

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

Weekly highlight

• Reference Check has been deployed to English Wikipedia, completing its rollout across all Wikipedias. The feature prompts newcomers to add a citation before publishing new content, helping reduce common citation-related reverts and improve verifiability. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web.

Updates for editors

• The InterwikiSorting extension, which allowed for the sorting of interwiki links, has been undeployed from Wikipedia. As a result, editors who had enabled interwiki link sorting in non-compact mode (full list format) will now see links reordered. The links moving forward will be listed in the alphabetical order of language code.
• Later this week, people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor, will notice a new "Edit full page" button. When tapped, you will be able to edit the entire article. This helps when the change you want to make is outside the section you initially opened.
• The Reader Experience team is inviting editors to assess whether dark mode should still be considered "beta" on their wiki, based on their experience of how well it functions on desktop and mobile. If the feature is deemed mature, editors can update the interface messages in MediaWiki:skin-theme-description and MediaWiki:Vector-night-mode-beta-tag to indicate that dark mode is ready and no longer considered beta.
• The improved Activity tab which displays user-insights is now available to all users of the Wikipedia iOS app (version 7.9.0 and later). Following earlier A/B testing that showed higher account creation among users with access to the feature, it has been rolled out to 100% of users along with some updates. The Activity tab now shows your edited articles in the timeline, offers editing impact insights like contribution counts and article view trends, and customization options to improve in-app experience for users.
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug that prevented DiscussionTools from working on mobile has now been fixed, restoring full functionality.

Updates for technical contributors

• The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension that makes this possible continues to improve. The latest upgrade is the inclusion of a new hook, ext.globalwatchlist.rebuild, which fires after each watchlist rebuild. This allows you to run gadgets and user scripts for the Special page.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:01, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

"Cladotherianthrope" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Cladotherianthrope has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2026 February 28 § Cladotherianthrope until a consensus is reached. Abesca (talk) 15:41, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

Time spent handling this request, 1 hour 25 minutes. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 17:41, 28 February 2026 (UTC).

CfD nomination at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2026 February 28 § Category:Session musicians

Categories you have created have been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2026 February 28 § Category:Session musicians on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. ^SMason_Garrison 19:28, 28 February 2026 (UTC)