This page is an
archive of past discussions. 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: 2 August 2020
News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's weekly journal about Wikipedia and Wikimedia
This page is an
archive of past discussions. 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.
Please be bold and help to translation this article!
During the first and second civil conflicts which took place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), all sides involved in the war actively recruited child soldiers, known locally as Kadogos which is a Swahili term meaning "little ones". It has been estimated that the militia led by Thomas Lubanga Dyilo was 30 percent children. In 2011 30,000 children were still operating with armed groups. The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO), released a report in 2013 which stated that between 1 January 2012 and 31 August 2013 up to 1,000 children had been recruited by armed groups, and described the recruitment of child soldiers as "endemic".
(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.)
SQID allows you to analyse, browse and query Wikidata. SQID is inspired by Magnus Manske's Reasonator, but focuses on prominently featuring information about Wikidata classes and properties.
a
graph of MPs and parties in the Swedish Parliament and with whom they worked together with to create motions 2018
SPOILER: >95% is just with people in the same party
The last week was our quarterly prototyping week. We worked on the following projects. None of them are ready for prime-time yet but we'll continue with them.
Slices: We've had a lot of requests for accessing dumps of a smaller part of Wikidata's data since rarely anyone needs the complete data in Wikidata. The tricky part is figuring out which part is needed and if any of that can be generalized. We looked into for example how to make dump generation faster so we could potentially produce more smaller dumps that only cover a part of Wikidata's data, either thematically (e.g. humans) or by type of data (e.g. only statements and English labels and aliases but not sitelinks or descriptions).
REST API: As part of our effort to make it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers we looked into a REST API. We tried to see if we could cover the existing action API modules in a REST API. We could. We'll take this as input for our ongoing API work now.
Improving quality ratings through ORES: ORES can judge the quality of an Item automatically. It is currently not very good at it however. We tried a few things to make it more accurate and found some easy wins we'll probably make happen in the next weeks.
Query manipulator: One of the ways we could potentially improve the load situation of the Wikidata Query Service is by automatically analyzing and then redirecting a bunch of queries to other systems that are more suitable for that particular type of query. The nice thing about that would be that the person/program sending the query wouldn't have to care about it but it'd be done automagically for them. We tried to build such a system and the results look very promising but more work/experimenting is needed, especially together with the WMF Search team.
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
All queries to the
Wikidata Query Service failed between 17:50 and 17:59 UTC on Thursday 23 July. Some queries failed during a longer period.
[1]
Interlanguage links were ordered incorrectly for the past few weeks. This problem was also mentioned in
Tech News two weeks ago. The problem is now fixed.
[2]
There is a problem with the
global preferences for the "Use Legacy Vector" option. Developers are working on fixing it.
[3]
A bug in the Wikibase extension had disabled the "move" and "create" types of protection in the main (Gallery) namespace on Wikimedia Commons. New protections could not be added, and existing protections were not enforced, allowing some page moves and page creations that should not have been possible. This has now been fixed.
[4]
Changes later this week
The
video player will change to be simpler and more modern. This week, the current beta feature will become the video player for everyone on most non-Wikipedia wikis. The old player will be removed.
[5]
Users' global.js and global.css pages will now also be loaded on the mobile site. You can read
documentation for how to avoid applying styles to the mobile skin.
[6]
In the
MonoBook skin, the searchGoButton identifier is now searchButton. This may affect CSS and JS gadgets. Migration instructions can be found in
T255953. This was previously mentioned in
issue 27.
Bot operators can use Pywikibot to regularly archive discussions. The behavior when the bot uses counter to prevent large archives was changed.
[7]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 5. It will be on all wikis from August 6 (
calendar).
Please be bold and help to translation this article!
HelloFresh SE is an international publicly traded meal-kit company based in Berlin, Germany. It is the largest meal-kit provider in the United States, and also has operations in Canada, Western Europe (including Luxembourg, Germany, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands), New Zealand and Australia.
(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: Daniel Mietchen and Lane Rasberry about Scholia, a project to present bibliographic information and scholarly profiles of authors and institutions, 11 August. [
Agenda
Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - QuickStatements and Distributed Wikidata games
Facebook,
YouTube
Video: Collaboration, contribution and use of Wikidata and Wikipedia by academic libraries (in Greek).
YouTube
Librarians work to broaden Vanderbilt’s research reputation with Wikidata tools. "To speed up the creation of metadata about faculty and their publications, Steven Baskauf, data science and data curation specialist for libraries, developed “
VanderBot,” a set of scripts that can read and write to Wikidata, greatly improving the efficiency by which Vanderbilt’s faculty are discoverable through Wikidata".
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
FileImporter and FileExporter became standard features on all Wikis during the first week of August. They help you transfer files from local wikis to Wikimedia Commons with the original file information and history intact.
[8]
Problems
The mobile skin displays a message at the bottom of the page about who edited last. This message showed raw wikitext. This has now been fixed. Some messages in
Structured Discussions and
content translation may still appear as raw wikitext. Developers are working on it.
[9]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 12. It will be on all wikis from August 13 (
calendar).
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
[10][11]
Please be bold and help to translation this article!
GRS 1915+105 or V1487 Aquilae is an X-ray binary star system which features a regular star and a black hole. It was discovered on August 15, 1992 by the WATCH all-sky monitor aboard Granat.
(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.)
Video: Editing Wikidata with information from Son jarocho (in Spanish).
YouTube
Tool of the week
Entity Explosion: a new multilingual Chrome browser extension. "Taking the power of Wikidata with me wherever I go across the web!". Uses API calls to the Wikidata Query Service to match the URL you are browsing on to a Wikidata item, and then displays data and links to other sites about the same entity. (
Video)
Fixed a bug where a length limit for strings seems to have reverted itself back from 1500 to its default 400 (
phabricator:T259440)
Fixed a bug that Wikibase is not always adding &redirect=no in situations when MediaWiki usually does (
phabricator:T255387)
Wrapping up the initial work on the design system so it is ready for use in the first new feature (Query Builder)
Fixed the serialization of statements on Forms and Senses not containing the datatype (
phabricator:T249206)
Wrapping up work on the first version of Federated Properties so that other Wikibase installations can use Wikidata's Properties instead of having to maintain their own
Worked on ensuring the data from the linked data interface at Special:EntityData is always up to date after an edit has been made (
phabricator:T128486)
Enabling clients to use Lua to request labels, descriptions and aliases in some (often minority) languages even when they are not content languages (
phabricator:T259340,
phabricator:T260118)