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The Signpost: 28 June 2020
News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's weekly journal about Wikipedia and Wikimedia
Please be bold and help to translation this article!
A punt is a flat-bottomed boat with a square-cut bow, designed for use in small rivers or other shallow water. Punting is boating in a punt. The punter generally propels the punt by pushing against the river bed with a pole. A punt should not be confused with a gondola, a shallow draft vessel that is structurally different, and which is propelled by an oar rather than a pole.
(Please update the interwiki links on
Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Merrilee Proffitt, Chris Cyr, and Rob Fernandez on a project to surface library holdings to indicate possible notability for persons, June 30th.
Agenda
It is now possible to search for
EntitySchema pages using a shortcut “E:”, similar to “P:” for Properties and “L:” for Lexemes. For example:
E:E10 or
E:kakapo.
T245529
Continued working on the first version of Federation, which will allow other Wikibase installations to use Wikidata's Properties - getting closer to a first testable version
More work on consistency of user interface components
Finalizing the click-dummy for the first version of the Query Builder so we can start testing it with some editors soon and get feedback.
Continuing to investigate how to improve our APIs and other ways to improve access to the data in Wikidata for programmers
Discussed the future of the Wikidata Query Service and ideas for next steps we can take to make it scale better. Guillaume will join the next office hour to talk about it.
More work on clearer separation of Wikibase repository and Wikibase client code in order to improve maintainability
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Everyone was logged out. This was because a few users saw the wikis as if they were logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now.
[1]
Some readers didn't see new edits to pages. If the page had been recently changed they saw an older version of the page instead. This only affected readers who were logged out. It lasted for ten days. It has been fixed.
[2]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 July. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (
calendar).
Future changes
The
Modern and
Monobook skins use the ID searchGoButton for the go button. This is searchButton for
Vector. To have the same ID for all skins it will change to searchButton in Monobook and Modern too. This will affect gadgets and user scripts. It will happen on 23 July. They should be updated to use searchButton. You can
read more and see a list of affected scripts.
Operation Bernhard was an exercise by
Nazi Germany to forge British
bank notes. The initial plan was to drop the notes over Britain to bring about a
collapse of the
British economy during the
Second World War. The first phase was run from early 1940 by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) under the title Unternehmen Andreas (Operation Andreas, Operation Andrew). The unit successfully duplicated the
rag paper used by the British, produced near-identical engraving blocks and deduced the
algorithm used to create the alpha-numeric serial code on each note. The unit closed in early 1942 after its head,
Alfred Naujocks, fell out of favour with his superior officer,
Reinhard Heydrich.
The operation was revived later in the year; the aim was changed to forging money to finance German intelligence operations. Instead of a specialist unit within the SD, prisoners from
Nazi concentration camps were selected and sent to
Sachsenhausen concentration camp to work under
SS Major
Bernhard Krüger. The unit produced British notes until mid-1945; estimates vary of the number and value of notes printed, from £132.6 million up to £300 million. By the time the unit ceased production, they had perfected the artwork for
US dollars, although the paper and serial numbers were still being analysed. The
counterfeit money was
laundered in exchange for money and other assets. Counterfeit notes from the operation were used to pay the Turkish agent
Elyesa Bazna—code named Cicero—for his work in obtaining British secrets from the British ambassador in
Ankara, and £100,000 from Operation Bernhard was used to obtain information that helped to free the Italian leader
Benito Mussolini in the
Gran Sasso raid in September 1943.
In early 1945 the unit was moved to
Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria, then to the
Redl-Zipf series of tunnels and finally to
Ebensee concentration camp. Because of an overly precise interpretation of a German order, the prisoners were not executed on their arrival; they were
liberated shortly afterwards by the American Army. Much of the output of the unit was dumped into the
Toplitz and
Grundlsee lakes at the end of the war, but enough went into general circulation that the
Bank of England stopped releasing new notes and issued a new design after the war. The operation has been dramatised in a comedy-drama miniseries Private Schulz by the
BBC and in a 2007 film, The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher). (Full article...)
On the Main Page
Today's Featured ArticleApril 29
The Hudson Sesquicentennial half dollar is a
fifty-cent piece struck by the
United States Bureau of the Mint in 1935
as a commemorative coin. The coin was designed by
Chester Beach. Its
obverse depicts the Half Moon, flagship of
Henry Hudson, after whom the city of
Hudson is named. In addition to showing the ship, the coin displays a version of the Hudson city seal, with
Neptune riding a whale, a design that has drawn commentary. Although the city of Hudson was a relatively small municipality, legislation to issue a coin in honor of its 150th anniversary went through Congress without opposition and was signed by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, becoming the Act of May 2, 1935. Most of the coins were likely bought by coin dealers, leaving few for collectors, with the result that prices spiked from the $1 cost at the time of issue. This caused collector anger, but did not lower the coin's value, which has continued to increase in the 80-plus years since it was struck. (Full article...)
The WikiProject Numismatics newsletter is a monthly newsletter published by
WikiProject Numismatics • If you have any questions about the project or numismatics in general, feel free to ask
here • Discuss this newsletter
here • View previous issues
here New members are automatically added to the subscriber list • If you are not a member and would like to receive this newsletter, or are a member but would not like to receive future issues, you may subscribe/unsubscribe
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20:37, 2 July 2020 (UTC)
Editing news 2020 #3
On 16 March 2020, the 50 millionth edit was made using the visual editor on desktop.
Seven years ago this week, the
Editing team made the visual editor available by default to all logged-in editors using the desktop site at the English Wikipedia. Here's what happened since its introduction:
The 50 millionth edit using the visual editor on desktop was made this year. More than 10 million edits have been made here at the English Wikipedia.
More than 2 million new articles have been created in the visual editor. More than 600,000 of these new articles were created during 2019.
Almost 5 million edits on the mobile site have been made with the visual editor. Most of these edits have been made since the Editing team started improving the
mobile visual editor in 2018.
The proportion of all edits made using the visual editor has been increasing every year.
Editors have made more than 7 million edits in the 2017 wikitext editor, including starting 600,000 new articles in it. The
2017 wikitext editor is VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode. You can
enable it in your preferences.
In 2019, 35% of the edits by newcomers, and half of their first edits, were made using the visual editor. This percentage has been increasing every year since the tool became available.
Please be bold and help to translation this article!
The Cobbler (Scottish Gaelic: Beinn Artair) is a mountain of 884 metres (2,900 ft) height located near the head of Loch Long in Scotland. Although only a Corbett, it is "one of the most impressive summits in the Southern Highlands"
(Please update the interwiki links on
Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
Ptable displays the periodic table automatically extracted from information provided by Wikidata; it also provides a check that all the elements are there with some basic properties. Additional pages provide charts of the nuclides under different criteria such as half-life. Each element or nuclide is linked to its Wikidata item for more information or to edit if necessary.
Polishing the first step of Federation (using Wikidata's Properties in another Wikibase installation) (incl. preventing users from selecting a federated property with a non-supported data type (
phab:T252012) and preventing users from accessing Special:NewProperty when federation is enabled (
phab:T255576) and viewing a list of all properties when federation is enabled (
phab:T246339))
Continuing research and interviews around the topic of making it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers
Doing first testing of mockups and prototypes of the first version of the Query Builder - coding can start soon
Convert a few properties from string to external identifier: Linguasphere code (P1396), KOATUU identifier (P1077) and ISIN (P946)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
The
Score extension has been disabled for now. This is because of a security issue. It will work again as soon as the security issue has been fixed.
[3]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 July. It will be on all wikis from 9 July (
calendar).
Future changes
Abstract Wikipedia is a new Wikimedia project. It will collect language-independent information that can be easily read in different languages. It builds on Wikidata. The name is preliminary. You can
read more.
[4]
Some
rules for user signatures will soon be enforced.
Lint errors and invalid HTML will no longer be allowed in user signatures. Nested substitution will not be allowed. A link to your user page, user talk page or user contributions will be required. You can
check if your signature works with the new rules. This is because the signatures can cause problems for tools or other text on the page.