User talk:Rich Farmbrough/Archive/2026 March

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Wikimedians for Sustainable Development - February 2026 Newsletter

This is our fifty second newsletter. This issue has news related to SDG 4, 5, 10, 13, 15, 16 and 17.

User group news

• A proposal for a climate and sustainability meetup at Wikimania has been submitted. Keep your fingers crossed it gets accepted!

Other news

• Metabase, a project to create a movement-wide knowledgebase for activities and initiatives, now has the property relates to sustainable development goal, target or indicator and all the Sustainable Development Goals, Targets and Indicators. This makes it possible to make sure that your projects and initiative that supports these are marked as doing so and also find previous efforts related to them.
• Wiki for Botanists: Why thematic engagement matters (SDG 15)
• Influence of Seasonal and Eco-climatic Factors on Butterfly Diversity: Insights from Wiki Loves Butterfly (SDG 15)
• African Women in Climate Action: A Continued Editing Journey through the EditHer Africa Contest 2026 (SDG 5 & 13)

Events

• March is Women's History Month and also has the Internaltional Women's day, so there are plenty of related events. Check out Special:AllEvents to find some near you. (SDG 5)
• Wiki Loves Ramadan 2026 (SDG 16)
• International Mother Language Day 2026 Datathon (SDG 4, 10 &17)

This message was sent with Global message delivery by Ainali (talk) 12:13, 2 March 2026 (UTC) • Contribute • Manage subscription

Wikidata weekly summary #721

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-03-02. Missed the previous one? See issue #720.

Discussions

• Closed request for adminship: Jan Myšák: Closed as successful, congratulations to Wikidata's newest admin!
• New request for comments: Notability Policy - Round 2: we are still requesting your input on the new Notablity policy. Including whether to elevate the self-promotion essay to a policy.

Events

• Upcoming events:
  • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session 3 March, 2026: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, March 3 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 walked participants through how to resolve the former issue, while the March 3rd session will focus on the latter. This session will be more discussion-focused, since instances where two LCNAF identifier have the same Wikidata item can be difficult to resolve because of Wikidata’s innate quirks. Maybe your ideas will become the official best practice! Event page: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_LD4_Wikidata_Affinity_Group/Project_Series/LCNAF_Duplicate_Detection_P244_Maintenance
  • Bring-Your-Own-Data-Lab, on 24.04.2026, the HERMES Data Competence centre hosts an online BYODL. Dr. Katrin Moeller and Dr. Olaf Simons will share how to enrich your own personal data with standard data and the Wikibase FactGrid. Click the link for registration and more information.
  • Wikidata Workshop w/ Wikipedia Riba Aruba + University of Aruba Research Center (UARC), March 2, 12 - 2pm GMT-4. Click here to register.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs:
  • The Museo del Prado and Wikimedia Spain consolidate Wikidata as the connector axis of digital cultural heritage - gathering of the second edition of Connected Heritage: Wikidata in the GLAM Ecosystem
  • (Dutch) Wikipielen: an informal mini-hackathon for the GLAM sector, Olaf Janssen (WM coordinator at National Library of Netherlands) on the 10th edition of this micro-hackathon for people in cultural and heritage sector interested in Wikidata, Wikibase, SPARQL, OpenRefine and other technical skills.
  • Boundary Issues—Michal Migurski on representing disputed boundaries using Wikidata and OpenStreetMap.
• Papers:
  • From Websites to Wikidata: Digitising Scotland’s Stories by Ross et al. (2026)
  • Entity Linking with Wikidata: A Systematic Literature Review
  • A Dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction from Art-historical Image Descriptions by Schneider et al. (2026)., introduces FRAME for extracting art-historical entities and relationships from texts, enabling automatic linking of artworks, artists, and related metadata via Wikidata.
  • Review of Ethics in Linked Data by Rebecca Fried.
• Videos:
  • (Swedish) Fotbollsspelare Wikipedia / Wikidata - using QuickStatements to add P54 (member of sports team) to football players
  • Jukun Wikipedia Outreach, day 2 took attendees through adding interwiki links, Wikidata essentials and adding Databox templates to Jukun Wiki articles.
  • Set-up Tutorial: Language Preferences and Gadgets on Wikidata, the International [Digital] Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA) takes us through enabling gadgets and setting your preferred languages (Babel).

Tool of the week

• Maps Of the World / Stadiums - explore the stadiums of the world (at least the ones with Wikidata Items), mapped by SPARQL.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes: SignWriting transcription (representation in SignWriting)
• Newest External identifiers: Microsoft Store developer ID, Apple Music Classical work ID, ‎SIK-ISEA group ID, ‎CHZZK streamer ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review::
  • Objectif plumes (Database managed by the General Service for Literature and Books, a department of the Cultural Administration of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (basically the Ministry of Culture for the French-speaking part of Belgium). The database currently includes entries on books by more than 8.000 Belgian writers.)
  • usual forename (A name usually derived from a given name used to address a person in everyday life.)
    • apportionment diagram (image that displays the representation of seats won by party in an election to an assembly)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: LibriVox reader ID, All Skies Encyclopaedia ID, KCUE academy ID, Catálogo de autoridades da BUSC, ISSN-H, Hong Kong Cinema title ID, NPPM ID, Parlement.com ID, Kokugakuin University god name database ID, Czech National Register of Health Service Providers ID, Génération Nintendo game ID developer ID, Génération Nintendo game ID publisher ID, wikiru.jp wiki ID, Tribuna.com football players ID, SnokaDB, abadis.ir Persian word ID, AIK soccer player ID, BOIShistory

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Works in Scottish museums by female artists, lacking an English Wikipedia article (source)
  • Graph of Moominworld
• Showcase Items: Zanzibar Islands (Q1774) - semi-autonomous part of Tanzania
• Showcase Lexemes: snap (L14515) - English verb (snæp) meaning "to break suddenly", "to lose control emotionally", or "to take a photograph"

Development

• Mobile statement editing:
  • We worked on removing the constraint violations indicator from a statement after an edit that fixed it.
  • We are fixing bugs uncovered in testing, such as phab:T218477, phab:T418104, phab:T417861 and phab:T417647.
• GraphQL: We are getting ready to launch the first version later this week, including preparing the documentation for how to use it.

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 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-10

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

• Wikipedia 25 Birthday mode is now live on Betawi, Breton, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Gorontalo, Indonesian, Italian, Luxembourgish, Madurese, Sicilian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese Wikipedias! This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on ~2,500 articles, waiting to be discovered by readers. Communities can choose to turn Birthday mode on by getting consensus from their community and asking an admin to enable the feature and customize it via community configuration on the local wiki.

Updates for editors

• Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to Swedish Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia and a couple of other wikis. You can try the feature on these projects or on testwiki and betawiki. Learnings from the first pilot wiki German Wikipedia have been published in a report. Reach out to the Wikimedia Deutschland team if you are interested in becoming a pilot wiki.
• Paste Check will become available at all Wikipedias this week. The feature prompts newcomers who are pasting text they are not likely to have written into VisualEditor to consider whether doing so risks a copyright violation. Paste Check tags all edits where it is shown for potential review. Local administrators can configure various aspects of the feature via Special:EditChecks. Research across 22 wikis found that Paste Check resulted in an 18% decrease in relative reverted-edits compared to the control group. Translators can help to localize this and related features.
• The Reader Experience team will be standardizing the user menu in the top right for all mobile users so that it is closer to the desktop experience. Currently this user menu is only visible to users with Advanced Mobile Controls (AMC) turned on. The only change is that a couple buttons previously in the left-side menu will move to the top right for users who do not have AMC turned on. This change is expected to go out March 9 and seeks to improve the user interface.
• Starting in the week of March 2, the emails sent out when an email address was added, removed, or changed for an account will switch to a substantially nicer and clearer HTML email from the prior plaintext one.
• Notifications are currently limited to 2,000 historic entries per user, and extend back to 2013 when the feature was released. This is going to be changed to only store Notifications from the last 5 years, but up to 10,000 of them. This will help with long-term infrastructure health and help to prevent more recent notifications from disappearing too soon.
• The Global Watchlist which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page continues to see improvements. The latest update improves label usage experience. The extension now allows activating the language fallback system for Wikidata items without labels in the viewed language, and showing those labels in the user’s preferred Wikidata language if no uselang= URL parameter is provided.
• The Wikipedia Android team has started a beta test of hybrid search on Greek Wikipedia. Hybrid search capabilities can handle both semantic and keyword queries enabling readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily.
• For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Currently, 2FA is required to use the group, but not to be a member of it. Given that this model still has some vulnerabilities, the situation will gradually change in March. Members of these groups will be unable to disable last 2FA method on their account, and it will be impossible to add users without 2FA to these groups. Users will still be able to add new authentication methods or remove them, as long as at least one method is continuously enabled. In the second half of March, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. This applies to: CentralNotice administrators, checkusers, interface administrators, suppressors, Wikidata staff, Wikifunctions staff, WMF Office IT and WMF Trust & Safety. Nothing will change for other users. See the linked task for deployment schedule.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue preventing users from creating an instance in Wikibase.cloud has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, over the next month the Wikimedia Foundation will implement global API rate limits across our APIs. In early March, stricter limits will be applied to unidentified requests from outside Toolforge/WMCS and API requests that are made from web browsers. In April, higher limits will be applied to identified traffic. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
• The Wikidata Query Service Linked Data Fragment (LDF) endpoint will be decommissioned in February. This endpoint served limited traffic, which was successfully migrated to other data access methods that were better suited to support existing use cases. The hardware used to support the LDF endpoint will be reallocated to support the ongoing backend migration efforts.
• The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, improving platform sustainability and making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. Parsoid is now the default parser on 488 WMF wikis (268 Wikipedias), now covering more than 10% of all Wikipedia page views.
• The process and criteria for requesting exceptional access to the high volume feed of the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs (at no cost for mission-aligned usecases), have now been published. This is to provide more thorough and clearer documentation for users.
• Tech Blog, the blog dedicated to the Wikimedia technical community will be migrating to Diff, the community news and event blog. The migration should be complete in April 2026, after which new posts will be accepted for publishing. Readers will be able to access posts – old and new – on the landing page at https://diff.wikimedia.org/techblog.
• 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 17:50, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

Cite journal on MG WP

Trying to get this to work with Content Translation. I imagine it does not work as it is such an old version. How best does one update this? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 09:17, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

Are you trying to translate the documentation or the template itself? All the best: Rich Farmbrough 16:36, 28 February 2026 (UTC).

Trying to use a version of Content Translation to translate into MG and want the citation templates to come through. I have added template metadata. But still not working perfectly. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:01, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

OK. Not automated, but here's how I recommend migrating specific templates. This is a potentially very resilient method. (I have a lot more ideas, but they are not as easily compatible with Lua as with the pure template system.) All the best: Rich Farmbrough 19:59, 28 February 2026 (UTC).

If the mg wiki doesn't have the Extension:Cite that may be an issue. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 20:09, 28 February 2026 (UTC).

You added the Cite Journal template on MG WP in 2011. The question is does it just need updating? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 08:02, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

Looks like it is working now Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:25, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

Your edit to Talk:Killing of Renée Good

On February 2nd, you added a hidden comment - 15 <-- please do not reduce this without discussion --> - and also changed the number of posts retained to before auto-archiving. Now the talk page has posts & threads from all through January etc. with no new comments. Since the posting furor has gone down a bit, I would like to change the auto-archiving from 7 days to 14 & the number of 'threads kept' to 5 (instead of 15), but wanted to have your thoughts on the matter first. Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 01:43, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

HI, thanks for messaging me. I'm completely happy for you to make the timescale 14 days, but I'd rather not let the number of threads fall as low as 5, maybe 10 would be more appropriate. Established articles tend to have shorter threads, and letting these sit on the talk page for a long time allows editors to see consensus on the most relevant topics, without resulting in excessively long talk pages: effectively the talk page is a FAQ. While it's sometimes advisable to read, or at least look at, archives, in general it's not something we can expect most editors to do most of the time. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 00:42, 8 March 2026 (UTC).

Your explanation makes sense. Will adjust the archiving. Thanks - Shearonink (talk) 01:22, 8 March 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary 722

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-03-09. Missed the previous one? See issue #721.

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot: DifoolBot 8 - Task: Remove Wikipedia import references from statements where the referenced article has since been deleted.

Events

• Upcoming events:
  • The 6th Wikidata Workshop has been announced for ISWC 2026. If you are interested in joining the wWorkshop for the scientific Wikidata community, contact: 6th-wikidata-workshop@googlegroups.com
  • Open Scholarly Profiles with Wikidata - April 22, 2026, 13:00 - 14:30, at the University of Central Florida.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs:
  • Diff blog: Becoming a Trainer Assistant at Wikilatih Wikidata BRIN: A Journey of Sharing Knowledge by Affandy Murad
  • Diff blog: Why Dagbanli Needs a Dictionary (And How We Built One with Wikidata) - by User:Masssly
• Papers: Scholia 2026: Compliance with SPARQL 1.1, to be presented at SWAT4HCLS 2026
• Videos:
  • (Swedish) Mix'n'Match IFKDB / Mix'n'Match DIF Historia - Magnus Sälgö
  • (Spanish) Introducción a Wikidata, Dinah M. W.Fraites and Dr. Claudia De Souza give a comprehensive tour and introduciotn of Wikidata for the Centro para la Excelencia Académica
  • Accessibility and Gen AI - Ep 15 w/ Denny Vrandečić (Head of Special Projects at Wikimedia Foundation) - a conversation about Abstract Wikipedia, the relationship between Wikimedia, Wikipedia and other Projects and how the Foundation will adopt and adapt to emergent technologies such as LLM's.
  • Epigraphic Object Encoding - Session 7 of the SunoikisisDC Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage. Experiences encoding epigraphic data into Wikidata starts at 58:27.
  • (Arabic) Arabic Wikidata Days 2025: Adding Wikidata to include Arabic Content (example: Hijri Calendar), Saeed Hubaishan presents a practical example of adapting Wikibase to enable adding new data types that haven't previously been modelled, such as dates in the Hijri Calendar.
  • Wikimania 2025 - Unpopular Opinions: Bold Lightning Talks to Shake Up Wikimedia: Moving Categories to Wikidata ((Ad Huikeshoven)) / Introducing Wiki AI (Sam Klein)
  • Unlocking Government Data for Wikidata: Stories, Impacts & Open Dialogue from Wikimania 2025. Panelists: Butch Bustria, James M. Heilman (Doc James), Jan Ainali, Vanj Padilla, Wisdom Ferrer, Seddon explore how the reuse of public domain & government datasets enriches Wikidata & bolsters public engagement with Wikimedia projects.Slides

Tool of the week

• Data2Go : An iOS app for browsing and editing Wikidata with a mobile-first UI. It combines fast search, rich item detail views, statement editing, map previews, media galleries, and account-based write access to Wikidata.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Wikidata now has a GraphQL API! Read more about it and try it out or sign up for the usability tests.
• The WMF is in the process of rolling out new global API rate limits. This will also affect Wikidata. For more details see mw:Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest External identifiers: ICAO 24-bit aircraft address, BISMaL taxon ID, Xcity actress ID, All Skies Encyclopaedia ID, Power Thesaurus ID, Kvinnehistorie.no persons ID, Mastercaller player ID, dartn.de player ID, darts1.de player ID, pdpa.co.uk player ID, ‎People's Graphic Design Archive creator ID, HKCinema film ID, Medvik ID, Obálky knih ID, MusicaPopular.cl ID, CAMEO page ID, ciss.org sportsperson ID (deaf sport)
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • maximum vehicle length (maximum authorized length for vehicles (especially heavy goods vehicles) on a bridge, tunnel or road segment)
  • Peer-review propertiy for journals or publications ({{TranslateThis | de = <!-- Beschreibung auf Deutsch --> <!-- | xx = Beschreibungen in anderen Sprachen --> }}Scholarly journals or publications should have a property "peer review process" indicating which peer review process (if any) is applied for the publication.)
  • maximum vehicle width (maximum authorized width for vehicles (especially heavy goods vehicles) on a bridge, tunnel or road segment)
  • maximum vehicle weight (maximum authorized weight (tonnage / gross vehicle weight) for vehicles (especially heavy goods vehicles) on a bridge, tunnel or road segment (load limit))
  • regional conservation status (conservation status of species in national or regional Red List publications that follow the IUCN red list criteria)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: LINE official account ID, Kulturbase.no ID, CROWCASS file number, Integbio Database Catalog ID, norsk fangeregister historie ID, Census of Italian Architecture since 1945, TMDB award ID, SocioMap ID, AVefi ID, NSK new ID, Atlas of Endangered Alphabets ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Property count of characters in Tolkien's Universe (source)
  • Data about Norwegians in captivity during WWII (using Norwegian prisoner register person ID (P8269) + others (source)
• Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Beer
• Showcase Items: Melbourne Airport (Q733738) - international airport serving Melbourne, Australia
• Showcase Lexemes: sampaa (L1154759) - Dagbanli noun that translates to a hut within a compound to provide shelter for people during the warm season.

Development

• GraphQL: We have released the first version of this new API. You can read more about it and try it out.
• Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We have worked with editors to improve some highly-used modules that access Wikidata in a suboptimal way. They have been adjusted to lead to less unneeded change notification in people's watchlists and recent changes on Wikipedia and co.
• Mobile statement editing: We fixed an issue where certain Properties were not accessible in the new mobile UI. We are also working on fixing a bug with saving musical notation statements. We are continuing the work on supporting editing of geocoordinates.

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: agencies for the environment and nature conservation.
• 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) 15:51, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-11

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

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 25 March 2026 at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.
• Last week, all wikis had 2 hours of read-only time, and extended unavailability for user-scripts and gadgets. This was due to a security incident which has since been resolved. Work is ongoing to prevent re-occurrences. For current information please see the post on the Stewards' noticeboard (translations).

Updates for editors

• Users facing multiple blocks on mobile will now see the reasons for each block separately, instead of a generic message. This helps them understand why they are blocked and what steps they can take to resolve the issue. For example, users affected for using common VPNs (such as iCloud Private Relay) will receive clearer guidance on what they need to do to start editing again.
• Later this week, Suggestion Mode will become available as a beta feature within the visual editor at all Wikipedias. This feature proactively suggests various types of actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, and learn about related guidelines. The feature is locally configurable, and can also be locally expanded with custom Suggestions. Current settings can be seen at Special:EditChecks and there are instructions for how administrators can customize the links to point to local guidelines. The feature is connected to Edit check which suggests improvements while someone is writing new content. In the future, the Editing team plans to evaluate the feature's impact with newcomers through a controlled experiment.
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where the cursor became misaligned during the use of CodeMirror’s syntax highlighting, which makes wikitext and code easier to read, has now been fixed. This problem specifically affected users who defined a font rule in a custom stylesheet while creating a new topic with DiscussionTools.

Updates for technical contributors

• API rate limiting update: To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, global API rate limits will be applied this week to requests without a compliant User-Agent that originate from outside Toolforge/WMCS and to unauthenticated requests made from web browsers. Higher limits will be applied to identified traffic in April. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
• The new GraphQL API has been released. The API was developed as a flexible alternative to select features of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), to improve developer experience and foster adaptability, and efficient data access. Try it out and give feedback. You can also sign up for usability tests.
• The PTAC Unsupported Tools Working Group continued improvements to Video2Commons in February, with fixes addressing authentication errors, large-file handling, task queue visibility, and clearer upload behavior. Work is still ongoing in some areas, including changes related to deprecated server-side uploads. Read this update to learn more.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The Article Guidance team invites experienced Wikipedia editors from selected pilot wikis and interested contributors from other Wikipedias to fill out this questionnaire which is available in English, Arabic, Bengali, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, and Turkish. Your answers will help the team customize guidance for less experienced editors and help them learn community policies and practices while creating an article. Learn more on the project page.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:51, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

Most murders

Hi, I am trying to understand your reasons for creating the article about most murders back on 29 June 2025. None of your edit summaries meaningfully explain your edits, so I have no idea of your reasons for creating this article. Also, many of your edits are marked it as "minor", but it may not have been. On Wikipedia, "minor edit" refers only to superficial edits that could never be disputed, such as fixing typos or reverting obvious vandalism. Any edit that changes the meaning of an article is not minor, even if it only concerns a single word. One of your edits removed a proposal for speedy deletion, without explaining why you are opposed to the article being deleted. While another reverted a blank and redirect to murder, again without explanation. Based on its current content, most of the existing article content is probably off-topic, and I have added clean-up tags to suggesting better locations for most of this content, but I would welcome you sharing your opinion at Talk:Most murders. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 21:38, 7 March 2026 (UTC)

See talk page for discussions about the content page. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 19:57, 9 March 2026 (UTC).

The Signpost: 10 March 2026

• Interview: Bernadette Meehan, new Wikimedia Foundation CEO
  Part 2.

• News and notes: Security testing unleashes computer worm on Meta-wiki
  Dormant worm awakes; a sketchy archiving site struck; ether burns.

• Special report: What actually happened during the Wikimedia security incident?
  A horrifying exploit took place, which could have had catastrophic and far-reaching consequences if used maliciously; instead, it seems to have happened by accident and was used for childish vandalism. How did this happen, and what did the script actually do?

• In the media: Indonesian government blocks Wikimedia logins; archive site scoured from Wikipedia after owner runs malware
  As well as controversy over LLM translations.

• Recent research: To wiki, perchance to groki
  Comparisons continue.

• Obituary: Madhav Gadgil, Fredrick Brennan, Mark Miller, Chip Berlet
  Rest in peace.

• Opinion: Interface administrators and trusting trust
  Potential attacks are the logical consequence of giving a group of users unlimited control over JavaScript.

• Technology report: English Wikipedia deprecates archive.today after DDoS against blog, altered content
  After the archive site launched a DDoS campaign against a small blog in January 2026, a request for comment was started, with consensus to deprecate the site used almost 700 thousand times.

• Op-ed: Why is "Trypsin-sensitive photosynthetic activities in chloroplast membranes" cited in "List of tallest buildings in Chicago"?
  The answer is slop.

• Essay: The pursuit of a button click
  Volunteering for Wikipedia has its rewards. The thank-button, for example.

• In focus: Short descriptions: One year later
  A discussion of the challenge set forth to the Wikipedia community one year ago!

• WikiProject report: Unreferenced articles backlog drive
  Unreferenced articles in English Wikipedia - help us in the backlog drive!

• Community view: Speaking of planning ...
  The WMF planning process is underway.

• Traffic report: Over the mountain, kissing silver inlaid clouds
  Death and the Winter Olympics.

• Crossword: "It will never happen"
  Want to take a break?

• Comix: BRIEn't
  Or is it.

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:12, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

US place names

Rich, what is the MOS entry relating to this change? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:17, 13 March 2026 (UTC)

See MOS:GEOLINK. I think your change is incorrect. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:17, 15 March 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #723

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-03-16. Missed the previous one? See issue #722.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs:
  • The African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA) project - The ALMEDA project’s key outcome is a linked, open, and searchable metadata repository—built from extensive cataloguing of previously uncatalogued materials and enriched through a user-friendly interface launching in 2025, designed to support ongoing growth beyond the project’s initial five-year funding.
  • https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/03/13/structuring-dagbanli-on-wikidata-lexemes-senses-and-the-digraph-challenge/
• Papers: Understanding Wikidata Qualifiers: An Analysis and Taxonomy - This study develops a refined taxonomy of Wikidata qualifiers—based on their semantics, frequency, and diversity—to help contributors select appropriate qualifiers, improve querying and inference, and enhance knowledge graph design, ultimately offering a structured framework that covers the most important qualifiers and supports better recommendation systems. By Falquet & Aljalbout (2026).
• Videos: LIVE Wikidata editing #118 at the Open Data Day - Wikipedia Weekly Network:
  • Introduction to editing Wikidata on mobile - Art + Feminism in Wikimedia Botswana
  • Queer women in the Arts (English): A panel discussion and Wikidata workshop
• Podcasts: Wikipediapodden interviews Lydia Pintscher about the ongoing Wikidata notability reform (also available on Commons)
• Notebooks: Who gets a biography on French-language Wikipedia? A country-by-country portrait of biographical coverage for people born between 1950 and 2000.

Tool of the week

• Wdquery : GraphQL-powered Wikidata item advanced search.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• https://casier-politique.fr
• Fornland—aggregates over a million cultural heritage sites from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland into one interface, combining Wikidata and other sources .
• m:Coolest Tool Award
• The WMF Wikidata Platform team has published its March 2026 newsletter. To have new issues of the WDP monthly newsletter delivered to your user talk page, Subscribe to WDP newsletter!
• Reminder that the 4 week grace period for switching to the v1 route for the Wikibase REST API search endpoints will end this week. The v0 route will be turned off and hence will no longer function.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • river regime (predominant pattern of annual changes to a stream's discharge at a particular period)
  • seat occupied (seat held by a person within an academy or other society)
• Newest External identifiers: Génération Nintendo publisher ID, KCI article ID, ‎LINCS ID, radeberger-stadtgeschichte.de Object Identificator, Flohic ID, ‎Vlaams Woordenboek ID, ‎Bach digital person ID, ‎Bach digital work ID, Identificativo Antenati, ‎Liiga.fi player ID, ‎Pesistulokset.fi player ID, ‎Letterboxd producer ID, Fragplace brands ID, Fragplace fragrances ID, Fragplace notes ID, Fragplace perfumers ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • population pyramid (Age pyramid image for demography articles)
  • StatsF1 ID (Link to a Formula 1 specific database)
  • maximum vehicle height (maximum authorized height for vehicles (especially heavy goods vehicles) on a bridge, tunnel or road segment (regulatory limit from signage))
  • Bibliografi.dk (Bibliografi.dk)
  • PeerTube instance URL (the PeerTube instance of/about the subject)
  • Central Registration Number (Indonesia) (primary service registration number assigned to a member of the Indonesian Armed Forces or Indonesian National Police)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Digital Public Good, LUBW-RIPS-Wasserkraftanlage-ID, Identifiant QueenBallers.com d'une joueuse, Foto Atlas taxonomy ID, Brewver beer ID, Göteborgsalliansen, Consumer Rights Wiki article ID, Royal Air Force service number, Identifiant d'une personne dans le Bianco, Tajik-Russian Dictionary word ID, AmericanAristocracy person ID, AmericanAristocracy house ID, Shinmei database ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Showcase Items: Patrice Lumumba (Q161672) - Congolese politician and independence leader (1925–1961)

Development

• Mobile statement editing:
  • If you have not tried it yet, now is an excellent time to turn it on in the beta features section of your preferences, test it and give feedback.
  • We have added support for editing globe coordinate statements
• Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are continuing to work on the issue of too many Wikidata in recent changes and watchlists on Wikipedia and co. We are currently prototyping a way to only consider changes that actually have an impact on the article (phab:T419823). We also finished the work on an emergency switch to turn off sending changes for qualifiers and references to Wikipedia and co in case of major database disruptions (phab:T412956).
• Ontology federation: We are working towards getting the code for ontology federation (in its first version of using Wikidata Items as values on other Wikibase instances) ready for wider testing.

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: Bangladesh
• 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 · JosefAnthony talk ·MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:35, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-12

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 ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature, also known as CodeMirror 6, has been used for wikitext syntax highlighting since November 2024. It will be promoted out of beta by May 2026 in order to bring improvements and new features to all editors who use the standard syntax highlighter. If you have any questions or concerns about promoting the feature out of beta, please share.
• Some changes to local user groups are performed by stewards on Meta-Wiki and logged there only. Now, interwiki rights changes will be logged both on Meta-Wiki and the wiki of the target user to make it easier to access a full record of user's rights changes on a local wiki. Past log entries for such changes will be backfilled in the coming weeks.
• On wikis using Flagged Revisions, the number of pending changes shown on Special:PendingChanges previously counted pages which were no longer pending review, because they have been removed from the system without being reviewed, e.g. due to being deleted, moved to a different namespace, or due to wiki configuration changes. The count will be correct now. On some wikis the number shown will be much smaller than before. There should be no change to the list of pages itself.
• Wikifunctions composition language has been rewritten, resulting in a new version of the language. This change aims to increase service stability by reducing the orchestrator's memory consumption. This rewrite also enables substantial latency reduction, code simplification, and better abstractions, which will open the door to later feature additions. Read more about the changes.
• Users can now sort search results alphabetically by page title. The update gives an additional option to finding pages more easily and quickly. Previously, results could be sorted by Edit date, Creation date, or Relevance. To use the new option, open 'Advanced Search' on the search results page and select 'Alphabetically' under 'Sorting Order'.
• View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug that prevented UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons from importing files from Flickr has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• A new special page, Special:LintTemplateErrors, has been created to list transcluded pages that are flagged as containing lint errors to help users discover them easily. The list is sorted by the number of transclusions with errors. For example: Special:LintTemplateErrors/night-mode-unaware-background-color.
• Users of the ⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽ beta feature have been using CodeMirror instead of CodeEditor for syntax highlighting when editing JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Vue and Lua content pages, for some time now. Along with promoting CodeMirror 6 out of beta, the plan is to replace CodeEditor as the standard editor for these content models by May 2026. Feedback or concerns are welcome.
• The CodeMirror JavaScript modules will soon be upgraded to CodeMirror 6. Leading up to the upgrade, loading the ext.CodeMirror or ext.CodeMirror.lib modules from gadgets and user scripts was deprecated in July 2025. The use of the ext.CodeMirror.switch hook was also deprecated in March 2025. Contributors can now make their scripts or gadgets compatible with CodeMirror 6. See the migration guide for more information.
• The MediaWiki Interfaces team is expanding coverage of REST API module definitions to include extension APIs. REST API modules are groups of related endpoints that can be independently managed and versioned. Modules now exist for GrowthExperiments and Wikifunctions APIs. As we migrate extension APIs to this structure, documentation will move out of the main MediaWiki OpenAPI spec and REST Sandbox view, and will instead be accessible via module-specific options in the dropdown on the REST Sandbox (i.e., Special:RestSandbox, available on all wiki projects).
• The Scribunto extension provides different pieces of information about the wiki where the module is being used via the mw.site library. Starting last week, the library also provides a way of accessing the wiki ID that can be used to facilitate cross-wiki module maintenance.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The 2026 Coolest Tool Award celebrating outstanding community tools, is now open for nominations! Nominate your favorite tool using the nomination survey form by 23 March 2026. For more information on privacy and data handling, please see the survey privacy statement.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:34, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #724

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-03-23. Missed the previous one? See issue #723.

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot:
  • AraBot - Tasks: Adding Aragonese sitelinks and updating articles on Aragonese Wikipedia with Wikidata's data.
  • InventaireBot - Task: Make automated edits generated by the inventaire.io (Q32193244) server and manual edits on behalf of users without a Wikidata account.
• Closed request for permissions/Bot: DelintBot - Task: Fix lint errors on pages across all namespaces where Wikitext can be written (namespaces not managed by Wikibase).
• New request for comments: archive.today - due to a RfC and policy on enwiki, this discussion needs your input on whether Wikidata will continue listing archive.today links.
• Ongoing request for comments: Notability policy reform is looking for input about remaining questions around marginalized knowledge and external identifiers

Events

• Upcoming events: (German) Art History Loves Wiki im Museum Schnütgen, YouTube livestream – 28 March 2026 (UTC+1): presentations by Lisa Dieckmann at 12.30 - 12.50 (“Bilder verknüpfen – prometheus, Normdaten und Wikidata”), Lucy Patterson & Lukas Fuchsgruber at 16.30 - 16.45 (“Kritische Arbeit mit Sammlungsdaten auf Wikidata”), and Max Kristen at 17.30 - 17.45 (“usefulQueries: Unkompliziert Kunstgeschichte in Wikidata erkunden”).

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs:
  • Structuring Dagbanli on Wikidata: Lexemes, Senses, and the Digraph Challenge by Masssly and Mohammed Awal Alhassan
  • Open Knowledge Graphs: A Search Engine for Ontologies, Controlled Vocabularies, and Semantic Web Tools, by Steve Hedden
  • (German) Erinnerungskultur zum Mitmachen: eine digitale Landkarte zum Gestapoterror in Niedersachsen by Gabriele Fahrenkrog
• Papers: Understanding Wikidata Qualifiers: An Analysis and Taxonomy presents an analysis of Wikidata qualifiers, focusing on semantics and usage, in order to develop a taxonomy to help in selecting appropriate qualifiers, querying the knowledge graph, and making logical inferences. By Gilles Falquet and Sahar Aljalbout (2026).
• Videos:
  • Creating a Wikidata item for a Historic Building - OpenStreetMap for History Buffs gives a practical example of creating a Wikidata Item for a historic Irish building, but you can adapt it for other historical or archeological sites.
  • Introduction to Wikidata (Creating items, Statements & References) - Africa Wiki Women continue their introductory series with trainer, Blessing Timothy.
  • (French) Introduction à Wikidata is also provided by Africa Wiki Women.
  • Simple steps to edit Wikidata Episode 1(WAMP) - User:Dsp13 of the Wiki Afrodemics Project covers a variety of topics to help new editors make meaningful contributions to Wikidata.
  • (French) Introduction à la modification de Wikidata sur mobile - Art+Feminism in partnership with WM Botswana provide a training session for mobile editing (with a focus on women artists, feminist movements and underrepresented cultural contributions).
  • Queer Women in the Arts: Art+Feminism teamed up with WikiLGBT+ (Event page) for a panel discussion and Wikidata training centering on Queer Women in the Arts, in honour of International Women's Day. Also available in Spanish and Portuguese.
  • Wikidata tools: Pet Scan - User:Epìdosis introduces this handy tool that allows you to query and generate lists of Wikipedia pages or Wikidata items based on defined criteria such as Categories, Properties, Templates, and others.
  • Introduction to Wikidata & Property Dashboard - Essential Wikidata Tools: Automating Your Workflow workshop given 13 March 2026. Hosted by Alan Ang, Camillo Pellizari, Pru Mitchell, and Taufik Rosman for the ESEAP community.

Tool of the week

• Wikidata Property Creation Helper takes a property proposal page and translates it into a QuickStatements batch (and then a second one for the examples) that a property creator can use to quickly create a new property. By ArthurPSmith

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• GraphQL API ongoing feedback: If you haven’t tried it yet, you can still explore it as a developer-friendly alternative to select WDQS features. Please Share your feedback on the project page, or sign up for deeper usability testing.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • mass number (total number of baryons in an atomic nucleus)
  • soil acidity preference (soil acidity preference of a plant species or lichen)
  • Diepkloof (Place in Johannesburg, South Africa)
  • paid-up capital (portion of a company’s issued share capital that has been paid by shareholders)
• New External identifier property proposals to review:: Shinmei database ID, Kulturdenkmal-ID Baden-Württemberg, Central Registration Number (Police), NIP 9-digit, MeetStadium ID, indexxx.com performer ID, BGAFD actress ID, Shellers From the Past ID, معرف منشور في قاعدة بيانات معرفة, London Book Trades ID, KCI journal ID, KCI publisher ID, PeerJ person ID, BIORAB–FRANKFURT ID, BIORAB–WEIMAR, BIORAB-KAISERREICH, Wikiparfum perfume ingredient ID, Wikiparfum perfumer ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject LAGL (Linked Ancient and Greek Latin) has been established to develop guidelines for adding statements for ancient authors.
• WikiProject Highlights: WikiProject IDEA: Oral Histories - International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA) added a subpage for resources, guidelines and progress for adding oral history Items and Statements.
• Showcase Items: Ngondo (Q3339328) - worship of water oracles and associated cultural traditions among the Sawa

Development

• Infrastructure sustainability: We started working with a contractor to look at Wikidata's data storage to find opportunities for improving it.
• Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are continuing the work on a prototype to compare a wiki page before and after it has been parsed to see if this is a feasible way to reduce the number of Wikidata changes in recent changes and watchlist that do not affect the article (phab:T419823)

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) 15:58, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-13

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

• Wikimedia site users can now log in without a password using passkeys. This is a secure method supported by fingerprint, facial recognition, or PIN. With this change, all users who opt for passwordless login will find it easier, faster, and more secure to log in to their accounts using any device. The new passkey login option currently appears as an autofill suggestion in the username field. An additional "Log in with passkey" button will soon be available for users who have already registered a passkey. This update will improve security and user experience. The screen recording demonstrates the passwordless login process step by step.
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 25 March 2026 at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.

Updates for editors

• Wikimedia site users can now export their notifications older than 5 years using a new Toolforge tool. This will ensure that users retain their important notifications and avoid them being lost based on the planned change to delete notifications older than 5 years, as previously announced.
• Wikipedia editors in Indonesian, Thai, Turkish, and Simple English now have access to Special:PersonalDashboard. This is an early version of an experience that introduces newer editors to patrolling workflows, making it easier for them to move from making edits to participating in more advanced moderation work on their project.
• The Special:Block now has two minor interface changes. Administrators can now easily perform indefinite blocks through a dedicated radio button in the expiry section. Also, choosing an indefinite expiry provides a different set of common reasons to select from, which can be changed at: MediaWiki:Ipbreason-indef-dropdown.
• Mobile editors at several wikis can now see an improved logged-out edit warning, thanks to the recent updates from the Growth team. These changes released last week are part of ongoing efforts and tests to enhance account creation experience on mobile and then increase participation.
• View all 36 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug that prevented mobile web users from seeing the block information when affected by multiple blocks has been fixed. They can now see messages of all the blocks currently affecting them when they access Wikipedia.

Updates for technical contributors

• Images built using Toolforge will soon get the upgraded buildpacks version, bringing support for newer language versions and other upstream improvements and fixes. If you use Toolforge Build Service, review the recent cloud-announce email and update your build configuration as necessary to ensure your tools are compatible.

• The API Portal documentation wiki will shut down in June 2026. API keys created on the API Portal will continue to work normally. api.wikimedia.org endpoints will be deprecated gradually starting in July 2026. Documentation on the API Portal is moving to mediawiki.org. Learn more on the project page.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• WMDE Technical Wishes is considering improvements to automatically generated reference names in VisualEditor. Please check out the proposed solutions and participate in the request for comment.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 16:49, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #725

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2026-03-30. Missed the previous one? See issue #724.

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot:
  • Thetalentone - Tasks: Adding and updating references, qualifiers, publication dates, and provenance on my own personal and company items (Q138324775 and Q138324581) to improve entity confidence for Google Knowledge Graph. Small batches only, no edits to unrelated items.
  • Dušan Kreheľ - Task: Sitelinks existing and newly created municipality pages on hrwiki and Wikidata.
• New request for comments: Wikidata:Requests for comment/Mass-editing policy has a new proposal incorporating feedback and is awaiting votes.

Events

• Upcoming events:
  • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 18:00 CEST, 08th April 2026 in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
  • Wiki Mentor Africa - Women Tech Summit takes place until 20:00 CET, 30 May 2026.
  • "Wikidata in der Sammlungserschließung" (free online event in German on how GLAM institutions can use Wikidata, 20 April 2026, 10-11:30 CET, organized by Research and Competence Centre Digitalisation Berlin (Q51845259). More info and registration here.
  • Wikidata Ontology Course: The second offering of the Wikidata ontology course will be given in May and June 2026, with sessions 1-3 pm EDT (UTC-4) on Thursdays. The Wikidata ontology provides structure and organization for the rest of Wikidata and is thus fundamental to Wikidata. The course starts with the basic notions underlying the Wikidata ontology and goes on to cover querying using SPARQL, inference, constraints, advanced ontology notions, problems with the ontology, and other ontology-related aspects of Wikidata. Participants in the course are expected to complete weekly exercise sets and a project. More information on the course can be found at WikiProject Ontology/Ontology Course. To register for this offering fill in and submit the Google form.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs:
  • Wikidata contains many gaps in its political data. We’ve built a tool to change that (PoliLoom)
  • From a summer school idea to an ESWC paper: Teaching AI to “repair” Wikidata
• Papers:
  • Did AI Crawlers Kill SPARQL Federation?, including Wikidata examples
  • Gender and intersectional bias in featured biographies on the front page of the Italian edition of Wikipedia, 2014–2024 Open Access - Wikidata featured heavily in the design and methodology. By Rovira et al., (2026).
• Videos:
  • Adding architectural data to a Wikidata item for a Historic Building from OpenStreetMap for History Buffs.
  • Live Wikidata Editing #119 - Ainali and Abbe98 are back to edit Wikidata and explain their thinking along the way.
  • (Spanish) Wikidata and the public domain - Tools for bulk editing in Wikidata: Mix n Match and QuickStatements, last class of a 9-part series provided by Jorge Gemetto.
  • (German) Art History Loves Wiki im Museum Schnütgen, day 2, digital/local collection loves wiki.
  • (German) Von OpenStreetMap zu semantisch vernetzten Wissensgraphen FOSSGIS 2026 Conference.
  • Using Wikibase as an Integration Platform with Matthew Ong. Originally given at the Digital Classicist Seminar Berlin, 19 November 2024.

Tool of the week

• WikiVisage - Train a machine learning model to detect depicted subjects in Wikimedia Commons images and assist with adding the P180 (depicts) property.
• Yesterdays - A web platform for cataloging and georeferencing historical images of Richmond, Virginia. It uses Wikidata items to help organize the georeferenced images.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Mobile editing user testing: join the participant panel: Wikimedia Deutschland is planning new user tests for the mobile editing experience (including more data types as a beta feature) in late April–early May. Participants of all experience levels are welcome, and users of right‑to‑left scripts are especially encouraged to sign up. Register here. Participants will be compensated for their time.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • Digital Public Good ID (identifier of a digital public good in the Digital Public Goods Registry)
  • apportionment diagram (image that displays the representation of seats won by party in an election to an assembly)
  • peer-review process for scholarly journals or publications (''(without English description)'')
• Newest External identifiers: ‎X Games athlete ID (new), AIK soccer player ID, ‎Uitleenwoordenbank ID, abadis.ir word ID, ‎AmericanAristocracy house ID, ‎AmericanAristocracy person ID, British Newspaper Archive publication ID, ‎Buitenlandse aardrijkskundige namen in het Nederlands ID, Landskrona BoIS player ID, Library of the University of Santiago de Compostela authority ID, ‎DBNL place ID, Faulhaber edition ID, Foto Atlas taxonomy ID, ‎Integbio Database Catalog ID, ‎KCUE academy ID, ‎LibriVox reader ID, ‎Manga-DB person ID, ‎Manga-DB magazine ID, ‎Manga-DB publisher ID, Digital Public Goods Registry, NSK ID, Tribuna.com football players ID, Sport Express person ID, ‎Open Food Facts brand ID, ‎RITVA company ID, OldRacingCars.com drivers ID, ‎Spellingwijzer Onze Taal ID, ‎EpiMedDat ID, ‎Pinkhof ID, ‎Scheikunde ID, ‎Movist person ID, ‎ISSN-H, Names, Persons, and Groups of People of the Middle Ages ID, ‎Parlement.com object ID, wikiru.jp wiki ID, BGAFD actress ID, IFK Norrköping player, ‎LINE official account ID, Norwegian war prisoner histories ID, ‎indexxx.com performer ID, SetesdalWiki ID, ‎Shellers From the Past ID, ‎SocioMap ID, Publication ID in e-Marefa database
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • civil service position level (classification level of a civilian public service position within a government administrative hierarchy)
  • Usenet newsgroup (Usenet newsgroup associated with the item)
  • predicted winning party (the party predicted to win an election, according to some source)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Numen ID, member of the Azorean assembly ID, identifiant Rappels d'une personne, Identifiant dans la base de noms France Archives, Anarâš aavis topic ID, Perfumery Glossary ingredient ID, MangaBaka manga ID, JVID performer ID, PlayStation Trophies achievement ID, BERON lexeme ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Hogback - Hogbacks are a type of gravestone marker used in 10th - 12th Century Northern England.
• WikiProject Highlights:
  • University of Otago/Books of Mana
  • Schnütgen Museum Collection/Sum of all paintings
  • Govdirectory/United Nations
  • Nonprofit Organisations
• Newest database reports: Humans with the same date of birth year (P569) and date of death year (P570).
• Showcase Items: Australia (Q275180) - 2008 film by Baz Luhrmann
• Showcase Lexemes: viɛla - Dagbanli adjective (of quality that is pleasing to human senses).

Development

• Wikibase GraphQL: We added support for a number of additional datatypes and started working on the functionality for querying Items by the external ID statement values or site links.
• Mobile editing of statements: We spent time testing the current state and fixing remaining issues we found.

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: Mongolia
• 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) 15:31, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-14

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 Beta version of Abstract Wikipedia a new Wikimedia project which is language-independent, was launched last week. The project allows communities to build Wikipedia articles in their native language, which can be readily accessed by other users in their own languages. The wiki is powered by instructions from Wikifunctions and also based on structured content from Wikidata. Read more.

Updates for editors

• The Growth team is running an A/B test to evaluate a clearer, more user-friendly message that promotes account creation on wikis. Currently when logged-out mobile users begin editing, they see a jarring warning message that can feel abrupt and discouraging. This also presents temporary account editing as the default rather than encouraging account creation. The test is running on ten Wikipedias, including Arabic, French, Spanish and German. Read more.
• The Wikimedia Apps team is inviting feedback on how editing should work on the Wikipedia mobile apps. The discussion focuses on improving how users access editing tools when they tap "Edit". This is part of a broader effort to convert readers who develop an interest in editing, to access a more user-friendly pathway to start contributing.
• View all 45 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where citation fetching from the large newspaper archive Newspapers.com was no longer working, due to a block in Citoid requests, has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• 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 19:24, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

"Wikpedia:job queue" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Wikpedia:job queue 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 March 30 § Wikpedia:job queue until a consensus is reached. Mathguy2718 (talk) 22:42, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 March 2026

• News and notes: Entirety of Wikinews to be shut down
  All languages to be shut down in May; first AI agent blocked; new name for AfD?

• In the media: AI ban, newspapers disrupt archiving; and antisemitism complaints
  Perennial challenges with AI, demographic representation, and attacks from people buying media influence.

• Community view: Videos from WikiConference North America 2025 in NYC
  In attendees' own words.

• Disinformation report: Cleaning up after Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Nygard, and Mohamed Al-Fayed
  Countering the edits of the rich and dangerous.

• WikiConference report: WikiConference North America 2025 in NYC review
  About the conference series, and this conference particularly.

• Obituary: Dr. Subas Chandra Rout
  Rest in peace.

• Traffic report: Call in the dogs of war, soldier of fortune
  Though of course the picture needs to be Chuck Norris...

• Gallery: Canadian Rangers participate in Operation Enduring Encyclopedia
  Analogies between how Wikipedia works and how Canada works.

• Comix: n00bsitting
  ...!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:06, 31 March 2026 (UTC)