User talk:Tommyang/Archives/2013/8
Latest comment: 12 years ago by EdwardsBot in topic The Signpost: 28 August 2013
| This is an archive of past discussions with User talk:Tommyang/Archives/2013. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
The Signpost: 31 July 2013
- Op-ed: The VisualEditor Beta and the path to change
One of the narratives I've heard a lot is that Wikipedia is unable to change, that it's too stagnant, too poorly resourced, too inherently resistant to change. I don't believe that at all.
- Recent research: Napoleon, Michael Jackson and Srebrenica across cultures, 90% of Wikipedia better than Britannica, WikiSym preview
An ArXiv preprint titled "Highlighting entanglement of cultures via ranking of multilingual Wikipedia articles" is about the Wikipedia articles on individuals and their position in the hyperlink network of the articles in each Wikipedia language edition, considering the whole hyperlink network.
- Traffic report: Bouncing Baby Brouhaha
Somewhat predictably, the birth of a new heir to the House of Windsor on 22 July led the English-speaking world to suddenly embrace Monarchism. In honour of this occasion, the Traffic report will be assiduously employing British spelling and dating conventions. Cheers.
- WikiProject report: Babel Series: Politics on the Turkish Wikipedia
This week, we visited the Turkish Wikipedia for an interview with VikiProje Siyaset (WikiProject Politics). The project began in April 2010 and has sustained a small but enthusiastic group of editors focusing on both the domestic politics of Turkey and international politics. The basics for article quality and importance ratings have been determined, but tracking this data has not yet become widespread on the Turkish Wikipedia. The project maintains a portal, a variety of resources, and a rotating selection of images to spruce up the project's page.
- News and notes: Gearing up for Wikimania 2013
The ninth annual Wikimania conference will open in just over a week at the Jockey Club Auditorium, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Wikimania is for people worldwide who have an interest in Wikimedia Foundation projects. It features presentations and discussions on those projects, on free knowledge and content, and on related social and technical issues.
- Arbitration report: Race and politics case closes
The case Race and politics was closed, while three other cases remain open.
- Featured content: Caterpillars, warblers, and frogs—oh my!
Eight articles, five lists, seven pictures, and one topic were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week.
- Discussion report: Defining consensus; VisualEditor default state; expert and layperson terms in article titles
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia this week include...
Wikidata weekly summary #69

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
- Discussions
- Request for comment on defining CheckUsers.
- Request for comment on class ⇄ instance relationship in Wikidata
- The d:Wikidata:Global Economic Map task force is starting its property list. Please go there to propose important properties about economics for countries, regions or companies.
- Events/Press
- Next office hour on August 26
- COSCUP this weekend, Taipei (August 3-4, 2013)
- Wikimania is nearly here!, Hong Kong (August 7-11, 2013)
- Other Noteworthy Stuff
- The list of interwiki links has been updated with more infomation and now also includes wikivoyage!
- Did you know?
- Newest properties: removed feature, introduced feature, Parent company
- Newest task forces: Global Economic Map task force
- Development
- Custom edit-summaries added for the majority of API modules
- Started working on implementation for ordering qualifiers in the JavaScript user interface
- ChangeOps for wbsetclaimvalue, wbcreateclaim, wbremoveclaims and refactoring of wbremoveclaim
- Fix handling of '0' value in API response
- Solved bugs related to copyright notice
- Some minor UI speed improvements
- EditEntity refactored
- Test cases improved
- Further work on URLs
- Work on implementing QueryEntity
- Open Tasks for You
- Add some data about Hong Kong and related things. Denny promises nice visualizations ;-)
- Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
- Respond to a "Request for Comment".
- Hack on one of these.
Wikidata weekly summary #70

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
- Discussions
- Events/Press
- Wikimania continues! If you are around make sure you come and say Hi!
- Wikidata meetup in the chapters village on Saturday at 1 PM at Wikimania.
- Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Following numerous discussions we are happy to present the new version of the proposal that would lead to Wikidata supporting structured data for the Wiktionaries.
- There are now only an estimated 1,000,000 articles remaining with inter language links, down from the previous 26,000,000!
- Did you know?
- Newest properties: LAU (local administrative unit), Sikart (identifier in SIKART), symptoms (the possible symptoms of a medical condition)
- Frequently used for cities and other places, P17 ("country") indicates the sovereign state an item relates to. There now at least 100 items for most present day sovereign states. Leading is China (Q148) with 607,817 items, followed by Iran (!794) with 105,875 items and the United States of America (Q30) with 99,243 items. China rose from just 5266 items a month ago.
- Development
- Changeops implemented for all Api modules
- All Api modules now have better auto comments and custom summaries
- Work on claim ordering started
- Work on refactoring Api Tests
- Bug Fixes!!
- Open Tasks for You
- Add some data about Hong Kong and related things. Denny promises nice visualizations ;-)
- Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
- Respond to a "Request for Comment".
- Hack on one of these.
The Signpost: 07 August 2013
- Arbitration report: Fourteen editors proposed for ban in Tea Party movement case
Fourteen editors have been proposed for a six-month page ban in the Tea Party movement case. In the Infoboxes and Kiefer.Wolfowitz and Ironholds cases, the workshop and evidence phases have closed, and proposed decisions are scheduled to be posted.
- Traffic report: Greetings from the graveyard
It's crickets and tumbleweeds this week, as the top 10 sees its lowest view-count since the project began. If Wikipedia were selling anything, we'd be having a fire sale by now.
- News and notes: Chapters Association self-destructs
The opening days of the annual Wikimania, referred to as the "pre-conference", are not typically newsworthy. This changed dramatically when the Chapters Association council met on Thursday.
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Freedom of Speech
This week, we journey into a WikiProject that focuses about what keeps Wikipedia running, the freedom of speech.
- Featured content: Mysterious case of the grand duchess
The week's newest featured content includes...
- Discussion report: CheckUser and Oversighter candidates, and more
Recent discussions on the English Wikipedia include...
The Signpost: 14 August 2013
- News and notes: "Beautifully smooth" Wikimania with few hitches
About a thousand Wikimedians journeyed to Hong Kong this week for the annual Wikimania conference, the annual gathering of the Wikimedia movement. Wikimania, which has been held since 2005, serves as the principal physical meetup for Wikimedians around the world.
- In the media: Chinese censorship
One major story that came out of Wikimania was Jimmy Wales' statements at the conference that he would prefer to have Wikipedia banned entirely in mainland China than censored as it is currently.
- Featured content: Wikipedia takes the cities
The week's newest featured content includes seven articles, four lists, and twelve pictures.
- Special report: Jimmy Wales: media favors entertainment over raising public awareness
Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and its public face to most of the media, has declared that media organizations are missing out on the "opportunity of the century" by not conducting true investigative reporting into American surveillance practices, a debate kindled by information leaked by Edward Snowden.
- Discussion report: Wikivoyage, reliable sources, music bands, account creators, and OTRS
Recent discussions on the English Wikipedia include...
- WikiProject report: For the love of stamps
- Arbitration report: Kiefer.Wolfowitz and Ironholds case closes
The Kiefer.Wolfowitz and Ironholds case has closed, with a unanimous decision to desysop a Wikimedia Foundation employee and indefinitely ban another editor. The Tea Party movement case has stalled yet again, in the wake of a controversial proposal to ban 14 editors. A proposed decision in the Infoboxes case was scheduled to be posted on 14 August.
Wikidata weekly summary #71

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
- Events/Press/Blogs
- Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Wikivoyage is scheduled to get access to Wikidata data (aka phase 2) on August 26th.
- Listen to and watch beautiful Wikidata edits
- To support the inclusion of geographical coordinates in Wikidata, just about two months a new data type came available and d:Property:P625 "coordinate location" was created. Already 565,000 pairs of coordinates are now available on WikiData. Compare this to 870,000 coordinates on English Wikipedia or 1,500,000 items with d:Property:P17 "country", likely to have coordinates. Have a look at them on a map.
- Did you know?
- Newest properties: approved by (P790), ISIL ID (P791), chapter (P792), Key event (P793), as (P794), distance along (P795), geo datum (P796), executing authority (P797), mission design series designation (P798), air ministry specification (P799), work (P800), notable work (P801), student (P802), professorship (P803), GNIS Antarctica ID (P804), subject of (P805). Italian cadastre code (P806) In Addition new properties to describe mushrooms were created: hymenium type (P783), mushroom cap shape (P784), hymenium attachment (P785), stipe character (P786), spore print color (P787), mushroom ecological type (P789), edibility (P789). These will allow to build the data for a mushroom infobox (as w:Template:Mycomorphbox).
- Newest task forces: Physics task force
- Wikidata helped remove 240,000,000 language links from Wikipedia's wiki text.
- Development
- Want to get an overview of what Pragun, our Google Summer of Code student working on Wikidata for mobile, is doing? Check here
- Worked on simple special page to make a query (bugzilla:52385)
- Worked on ability to move qualifiers
- Started improving API and Special Page tests
- Fixed links to Special:SetSiteLink in non-JavaScript interface (bugzilla:51914)
- ChangeOps, custom summaries and autocomments for SetStatementRank API module
- Fixed displaying “0” as label/description in autocomments
- Some minor fixes for rare crashes of editing UI
- Worked on moving Selenium tests to Cucumber
- Open Tasks for You
- See if you can connect some of these Wikivoyage pages to their item on Wikidata.
- Check if some of the items on this and this list can be merged. But be careful to only merge if they are really about the same topic! Help about merging is at d:Help:Merge.
- Update, expand and translate d:Wikidata:Introduction to make it easier for newcomers to understand what Wikidata is all about.
- Hack on one of these.
Wikidata weekly summary #72

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
- Discussions
- Events/Press/Blogs
- Report from Wikimania
- Wikidata meets Incubator
- Office hour on 26th
- Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Average edits per page is nearly 5 now.
- Wikivoyage is still scheduled to get access to data on Wikidata (aka phase 2) on August 26.
- Developers are working hard to also make the URL datatype available by August 26 but there are factors that are not in their hands so it might have to be delayed until the next deployment in 2 weeks. URL as a datatype will soon be available on test.wikidata.org. Please give it some thorough testing and report bugs.
- Outsch! (Help collect and fix paper cuts.)
- Did you know?
- 20 undescribed monsters
- Newest properties: separated from (P807), code Bien de Interés Cultural (P808), WPDA id (P809), academic minor (P811), academic major (P812), date retrieved (P813), IUCN protected areas category (P814), ITIS TSN (P815), decays to (P816), decay mode (P817)
- Development
- Prepared deployment of phase 2 on Wikivoyage
- Worked on ability to sort qualifiers and references inside a statement
- Started work on an api module to merge items
- Worked on special page to query for items with one specific property and value
- Cleaned up code for handling recent change entries from Wikidata in the clients (Wikipedia/Wikivoyage)
- Worked on generic script for populating sites table and better integration with WMF process for creating new wikis
- Setup new git repo for WikibaseMobile skin and extension
- Fixed SetClaim api module to properly mark bot edits in recent changes and advised pywikipedia maintainers about adding support for the module. SetClaim can be used to create claims with references in a single edit.
- Reviewed code for Google Summer of Code students
- Updated doxygen documentation
- Open Tasks for You
- Report a paper cut (see above).
- Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
- Hack on one of these.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
New features
- The previous version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on August 15. It was enabled on non-Wikipedia sites on August 19, and on all Wikipedias on August 22.
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on August 22. It will be enabled on non-Wikipedia sites on August 26, and on all Wikipedias on August 29.
- You can now use new styles of galleries. Please give feedback to User:Bawolff.
- You can now visit a random page in a category, for example Special:RandomInCategory/Science. (25931)
- You can now use the
<wbr>HTML5 tag to say where a word can be cut. (52468) - Gadget authors: you can now use the
wikipage.contenthook, so that your scripts are re-run when a page is changed after thedocument-readyevent (for example using Ajax). (30713)
Problems fixed
- There was a bug where file redirects didn't work when a file was renamed; it is now fixed. There is still an issue with purging, but it should be fixed soon. (52200)
- Maintenance reports provided by special pages will now all be updated on each wiki every six months. This will for example give you recent information on uncategorized pages, unused templates and most wanted pages (see details).
- There was a bug that caused false positives for anti-blanking edit filters; it is now fixed. (52077)
VisualEditor news
- The "edit" and "edit source" tabs and section edit links can now be changed more easily; for example, some wikis are using "edit source" for wikitext editing, and "edit beta" for VisualEditor. You can ask for the same change in bugzilla.
- You can now edit references that are added inside a
<references>block. (51741) - You can now test on mediawiki.org new basic tools to add and edit struck text (with the
button for the <s>tag), lower text (
for <sub>), upper text (
for <sup>), underlined text (
for <u>), computer code (
for <code>and<tt>), math text (
for <math>), Egyptian hieroglyphs (
for <hiero>), and to say that text is in another language (
for lang="ar" dir="rtl"). (51609, 51612, 51611, 51590, 51610, 52352) - You can now use VisualEditor with the Opera browser.
Future
- Starting on August 26, you will be able to use data from Wikidata on Wikivoyage sites.
- Starting on August 27, you will also get notifications on the mobile site if you're logged in to a wiki using notifications.
- Starting on August 28, all users with an account will be using HTTPS to access Wikimedia sites. HTTPS brings better security and improves your privacy. Some countries (like China) will not use HTTPS. If HTTPS causes problems for you, tell us on meta.
- Starting on August 29, you will get the code editor interface to edit JavaScript and CSS pages on all wikis.
- The plan to use Solr for search in MediaWiki was changed; instead, Elasticsearch is now planned.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
19:55, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
The Signpost: 21 August 2013
- In the media: Chelsea Manning, Box-office predictors, and 'Storming Wikipedia'
Wikipedia's gender identity MOS section and its effect on Chelsea Manning was both praised and emulated in the media this week. ... Coverage of the distributed open collaborative course called "Storming Wikipedia" continued this week.
- Recent research: WikiSym 2013 retrospective
98 registered participants attended the annual WikiSym+OpenSym conference from August 5-7 at Hong Kong's Cyberport facility.
- WikiProject report: Loop-the-loop: Amusement Parks
This week, we secured free admission for WikiProject Amusement Parks, the project dedicated to amusement rides, roller coasters, theme parks, traveling carnivals, and funfairs.
- Traffic report: Reddit creep
The debt that Wikipedia owes sites like Reddit or Google often goes unacknowledged around here. If the purpose of Wikipedia is to bring knowledge to the world, then it is sites like these that are actually doing it.
- Featured content: WikiCup update, and the gardens of Finland
The 2013 WikiCup competition is entering its final round. Eleven articles and nine pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week.
- News and notes: Looking ahead to Wiki Loves Monuments
Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), Wikimedia's annual volunteer-driven and the world largest photo contest, is gearing up to be conducted throughout September 2013. The event, originally developed in the Netherlands in 2010, has gone global with 34 countries taking part last and 49 this year.
- Technology report: Gallery improvements launch on Wikipedia
Wikipedia's traditional image gallery format, produced by the markup, has remained largely unchanged for years. The resulting layout, seen below, does not adapt well to variations in image size, and has been characterized by some critics as aesthetically unappealing.
Wikidata weekly summary #73

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
- Discussions
- Events/Press/Blogs
- State of the Map (September 6-8, 2013)
- Recent office hour logs now availible.
- Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Abraham, Denny and Lydia sat down for an evening trying to capture what Wikidata is about in a video.
- Deployment! Wikivoyage now has access to the wikidata dataset and various other bugs have also been fixed (including the copyright warning)!
- Did you know?
- Newest properties: interchange station (P833), public holiday (P832), parent club (P831), Encyclopedia of Life (P830), OEIS ID (P829), possible causes (P828), BBC programme identifier (P827), tonality (P826), dedicated to (P825), Meteoritical Bulletin Database ID (P824)
- Newest task forces: Wikidata:País Valencià task force
- Development
- Work on allowing API module editentities to edit claims
- Work on entity / item redirects
- Work on support for moving qualifiers in API and Frontend
- Adding coordinates to diff display and improving diff display code
- Allowing site groups for language links on clients to be configurable (needed for commons)
- EntityId changes, we are now working on 0.5!
- Show snaktype in summary for novalue and somevalue snaks
- Further work on merge module for the API
- Wrote missing tests for various jQuery widgets
- Work on value formatters
- Continue on moving tests to cucumber
- Bug fixes for coordinates following the latest deployment
- Open Tasks for You
- Report a paper cut (see above).
- Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
- Hack on one of these.
The Signpost: 28 August 2013
- In the media: Chelsea Manning, Box-office predictors, and 'Storming Wikipedia'
Wikipedia's gender identity MOS section and its effect on Chelsea Manning was both praised and emulated in the media this week. ... Coverage of the distributed open collaborative course called "Storming Wikipedia" continued this week.
- Recent research: WikiSym 2013 retrospective
98 registered participants attended the annual WikiSym+OpenSym conference from August 5-7 at Hong Kong's Cyberport facility.
- WikiProject report: Loop-the-loop: Amusement Parks
This week, we secured free admission for WikiProject Amusement Parks, the project dedicated to amusement rides, roller coasters, theme parks, traveling carnivals, and funfairs.
- Traffic report: Reddit creep
The debt that Wikipedia owes sites like Reddit or Google often goes unacknowledged around here. If the purpose of Wikipedia is to bring knowledge to the world, then it is sites like these that are actually doing it.
- Featured content: WikiCup update, and the gardens of Finland
The 2013 WikiCup competition is entering its final round. Eleven articles and nine pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week.
- News and notes: Looking ahead to Wiki Loves Monuments
Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), Wikimedia's annual volunteer-driven and the world largest photo contest, is gearing up to be conducted throughout September 2013. The event, originally developed in the Netherlands in 2010, has gone global with 34 countries taking part last and 49 this year.
- Technology report: Gallery improvements launch on Wikipedia
Wikipedia's traditional image gallery format, produced by the markup, has remained largely unchanged for years. The resulting layout, seen below, does not adapt well to variations in image size, and has been characterized by some critics as aesthetically unappealing.