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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
This is a reminder. All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC. Please check on the details on
the announcement message.
[1][2]
Wiki Loves Monuments is starting today, and will last through all of September. All photos of registered cultural heritage in Norway is eligible for the contest – and as usual, there is a
writing contest on the Norwegian Bokmål and Nynorsk and Northern Sámi Wikipedias in conjunction with the photo contest. Good luck!
Virtual wiki meetup
The next
virtual wiki meetup will be on Thursday, October 1st. This time the board chair of Wikimedia Norge, Sigrun Espe, will join us as a guest, and the subject will be the cooperative climate on-wiki. The meet-up will take place on Google Meet as usual, from 17.00 CEST at
https://wikitreff.wikimedia.no/. You don't need a Google login to participate. Everyone is welcome and we would like to remind everyone of Wikimedia Norge's
safe space policy. See you there!
Arctic Knot, Wikimedia language conference in Norway
In the summer of 2021, Wikimedia Norge will organize Arctic Knot 2021. The conference is a continuation of the Celtic Knot series of conferences organized by Wikimedia UK. We are planning for both an in-person and digital conference. The theme will be small languages and the wiki projects.
For the planning of the conference, we are holding a survey. It's rather short, and we would really appreciate if you would answer it. Thank you!
Wikipedia turns 20 on January 15th, 2021
Wikipedia is turning 20! How should it be celebrated? Wikimedia Norge wants to commemorate the occasion in a good way, and we appreciate all ideas related to the celebration! Feel free to write to
Mali if you have any good ideas!
Did you forget to pay your membership fees for 2020? You can always re-register
on this page.
Please be bold and help to translation this article!
Margerie Glacier is a 21 mi (34 km) long tidewater glacier in Glacier Bay, Alaska, United States within the boundaries of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. The glacier begins on the southern slopes of Mount Root, elevation 12,860 feet (3,920 m), on the Alaska–Canada border flowing southeast down the valley, then turning to the northeast toward its terminus in Tarr Inlet. Margerie Glacier is one of the most active and frequently-visited glaciers in Glacier Bay, which was declared a National Monument in 1925, a National Park and Preserve in 1980, a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve in 1986 and a World Heritage Site in 1992.
(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.)
Since some editors are contesting existence of articles associating religions and religious communities to
superstitions, One of the article which concerns topic has been nominated for deletion. You can support or contest the deletion at
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Superstition in Judaism by putting forward your opinion.
This feature uses the help panel to explain what to do after selecting a suggested edit. For instance, if a newcomer selects a copyedit task, they are guided on what sorts of errors to look for. They can see examples of how to rewrite the text. You can try this feature on
test.wikipedia.org. First enable the homepage and the help panel in your preferences there.
Since we launched "Guidance", the data we collected show good results (see image). Now, we see more users completing suggested edits than before Guidance was deployed.
Structured tasks
Design concept for the "add a link" structured task
Structured tasks is a project that aims to break down editing workflows into a series of steps. We hope newcomers can accomplish these tasks easily.
In the previous newsletter,
we asked for feedback from community members on the idea. We had a good discussion in six languages with 35 community members (
summary here). We have now posted
new design mockups. We hope community members can check the mockups out and
react to them (in any language). They are posted along with some of the main questions we are thinking about as we continue to refine our plans.
Other technical updates
Mockup of Variant D of the homepage on desktop.
We are currently
working on Variants C and D (adjacent image) of the homepage. The goal is to increase the number of newcomers who start the newcomer tasks workflow. This is the team's main project at the moment.
We've made it easier to hide the help panel when not needed.
[3]
The
welcome survey has a new question for people who created their account: language skills. The goal is to find out how many newcomers know multiple languages, so that we can learn whether it is a good idea to integrate
Content Translation as a newcomer task. To make room for this question, we removed one that is not being used.
[4]
Community outreach
We continue to engage with more communities. We recently deployed the Growth features to Persian, Hebrew, and Russian Wikipedias. Learn more about
getting the features.
If your community is having a remote event, and you are interested in hearing from the Growth team,
please contact us! We have already participated to two community events online:
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Rob Fernandez (Wikimedia District of Columbia) on Listeria, a tool that uses SPARQL queries to define a list, and provides a bot that will update a wiki page containing that list if the results of that SPARQL query change, all based on Wikidata, 08 September.
Agenda
Upcoming:
live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 8 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #19
Facebook,
YouTube, September 10
Added Wikidata support to Japanese Wikivoyage.
phab:T261451
Investigating the nature of our training outliers to improve the way ORES automatically scores the quality of an Item.
Working on error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an item.
phab:T260869
Completed various investigations to make an informed decision on the output format of WikibaseManifest files (automated configuration detection for toolbuilders)
phab:T261285
Completed various bug fixes and wrap-up tasks to conclude the major engineering work on the
Federated Properties project
More work on Item Quality Scoring and Federated Properties
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
Normally pages can be moved to a title that has no existing page yet or to a page that has only one revision, which is a redirect to the page to be moved. A new user right allows editors to move pages over one-revision pages that redirect to anywhere.
[5]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 September. It will be on all wikis from 10 September (
calendar).
All MediaWiki
API modules will now use watchlist instead of watch. This was inconsistent before.
[6]
Future changes
The
Wikipedia Android app team might work on patrolling tools in the future. You can let them know what tools would be useful for you or for less experienced patrollers. See the
page on mediawiki.org.
OTRS will be updated to a new version. This will probably take around two days. OTRS agents will not have access to the system during these days. Emails that come in during the update will be delivered when the update is done. The plan is to start around 08:00 UTC on 14 September. This could change.
[7]
The Wikipedia Android app will send
push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will need
Google Play Services to work. It will also be possible to get the app without Google Play Services but push notifications will not work. Google Play Services is also used to make the app work for
Android 4.4 users.
[8][9]
Wikimedia code review could move to
GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. You can take part in the
consultation.
Dropdown menus in
the Vector skin use a .menu class. This will not work in the future. Scripts can use nav ul instead. .vectorTabs and .vectorMenu will also not work. Some scripts need to be updated. You can
read more in Phabricator.
Estonia report: Virtual exhibition about Polish-Estonian relations. Rephotography and cultural heritage
Germany report: KulTour in Swabia and 8000 documents new online
India report: Utilising Occasion for Content donation: A story
Netherlands report: WMIN & WMNL collaboration & Japanese propaganda films
Serbia report: Enriching Wiki projects in different ways
Sweden report: Free music and new recordings of songs in the public domain; Autumn in the libraries; Yes, you can hack the heritage this year – online!
Uganda report: Participating in the African Librarians Week (24-30 May 2020)
Please be bold and help to translation this article!
The Tepexpan Man is a Pre-Columbian-era woman skeleton, discovered by archaeologist Helmut de Terra in February 1947, on the shores of the former Lake Texcoco in central Mexico. The skeleton was found near mammoth remains and thought to be at least 10,000 years old. It was fancifully hailed by Time magazine as the oldest Mexican soldier. The skeleton was found lying face down with the arms under the chest and the legs drawn up to the stomach. The body most likely sunk into the mud surrounding it, leaving the shoulder, back, and hips exposed, which might explain why those elements are missing. It is possible that the body was originally deposited in the lake.
(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.)
"Our admiration for Wikidata and for the people who work with it knows no bounds. Having a single source of well modelled, massively interlinked, well managed data that anyone can query at the press of a button is a real thing of wonder." -
says the UK Parliament data team
The Wikidata development team is seeking to evaluate and improve the process of collecting and reacting to bug reports and feature requests. You can give feedback about your experience using
this anonymous form until September 30th or add feedback publically to
Wikidata talk:Contact the development team/Process review 2020.
WikiMap, a tool by
User:DB111 that maps geocoded images from Commons and Wikipedia articles, now supports Wikidata items as well (
Q99232292)
Wikidata QID's are approaching 9 digits. Now is the time to fix any code or schemas that assume that Q numbers are smaller than 9 characters.
Fixing an error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an Item instead of just one. (
phabricator:T260869)
Development of version one of
Federated Properties has concluded! Expect an announcement with timing of the release of this feature soon. Wikibase users who want an early look at the feature are invited to reach out to participate in the pre-release testing round.
Development of the WikibaseManifest extension has continued into its second sprint; we focused on determining a
product specification for the Manifest output.
Finishing a draft documentation for a REST API to get it ready for a feedback round before implementation.
Finished improvements to the automated scoring of the quality of Items with ORES. Still need to retrain ORES and deploy the changes before the scores are actually different though.