Following
an RfC,
TFAs will be automatically semi-protected the day before it is on the main page and through the day after.
A discussion at
WP:VPP about revision deletion and oversight for
dead names found that [s]ysops can choose to use revdel if, in their view, it's the right tool for this situation, and they need not default to oversight. But oversight could well be right where there's a particularly high risk to the person. Use your judgment.
The SmallCat dispute case has closed. As part of the final decision, editors participating in
XfD have been reminded to be careful about forming local consensus which may or may not reflect the broader community consensus. Regular closers of
XfD forums were also encouraged to note when broader community discussion, or changes to policies and guidelines, would be helpful.
Miscellaneous
Tech tip: The "Browse history interactively" banner shown at the top of
Special:Diff can be used to easily look through a history, assemble composite diffs, or find out what archive something wound up in.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship:
FlyingAce (RfP scheduled to end after 8 September 2023 23:32 UTC)
New request for comments:
Must 'Serious' WikiData sources be selective? (The disagreement regards the interpretation of WD:N rule number two, which states an item is acceptable if: "It refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity that can be described using serious and publicly available references.")
Job opening:
Software Engineer (Wikidata) (m/f/d). For our Team Wikidata, based in Berlin, we are looking for a permanent Software Engineer (m/f/d), full-time or part-time (min. 32h/week), as soon as possible.
Wikidata's eleventh birthday is around the corner! One of our traditions is to prepare birthday presents to the community. Now is a great time to start preparing yours!
has heir or beneficiary (people or organizations that received, or will receive, (all or part of) the subject's property or title)
towing capacity (the maximum sustainable force with which this vehicle can pull or push another object. Alternatively for road- or track-vehicles, the maximum weight of an object on wheels that this vehicle can reliably and safely pull given usual slopes)
learning outcome (specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that students are expected to acquire as a result of participating in a particular education program)
tribe (recognised membership in a society, mainly denoted by shared cultural heritage; for ethnicity use P172)
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
EditInSequence, a feature that allows users to edit pages faster on Wikisource has been moved to a Beta Feature based on community feedback. To enable it, you can navigate to the
beta features tab in Preferences.
[1]
There is a new option for Administrators when they are changing the usergroups for a user, to add the user’s user page to their watchlist. This works both via
Special:UserRights and via the API.
[3]
The
LoginNotify extension was not sending notifications since January. It has now been fixed, so going forward, you may see notifications for failed login attempts, and successful login attempts from a new device.
[5]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (
calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "
Add a link" (Eastern Mari Wikipedia, Maori Wikipedia, Minangkabau Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Mongolian Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Western Mari Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Maltese Wikipedia, Mirandese Wikipedia, Erzya Wikipedia, Mazanderani Wikipedia, Nāhuatl Wikipedia, Neapolitan Wikipedia, Low German Wikipedia, Low Saxon Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Newari Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Novial Wikipedia, N'Ko Wikipedia, Nouormand Wikipedia, Northern Sotho Wikipedia, Navajo Wikipedia, Nyanja Wikipedia, Occitan Wikipedia, Livvi-Karelian Wikipedia, Oromo Wikipedia, Oriya Wikipedia, Ossetic Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Pangasinan Wikipedia, Pampanga Wikipedia, Papiamento Wikipedia, Picard Wikipedia, Pennsylvania German Wikipedia, Palatine German Wikipedia, Norfuk / Pitkern Wikipedia, Piedmontese Wikipedia, Western Punjabi Wikipedia, Pontic Wikipedia, Pashto Wikipedia). This is part of the
progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can
configure how this feature works locally.
[6][7]
Hello and welcome to the September 2023 newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since June. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below.
David Thomsen: Prolific Wikipedian and Guild member David Thomsen (Dthomsen8) died in November 2022. He was a regular copy editor who took part in many of our Drives and Blitzes. An obituary was published in the mid-July issue of The Signpost. Tributes can be left on David's
talk page.
Election news: In our
mid-year Election of Coordinators, Dhtwiki was chosen as lead coordinator, Miniapolis and
Zippybonzo continue as assistant coordinators, and Baffle gab1978 stepped down from the role. If you're interested in helping out at the GOCE, please consider nominating yourself for our next election in December; it's your WikiProject and it doesn't organize itself!
June Blitz: Of the 17 editors who signed up for our
June Copy Editing Blitz, 12 copy-edited at least one article. 70,035 words comprising 26 articles were copy-edited. Barnstars awarded are
here.
July Drive: 34 of the 51 editors who took part in our
July Backlog Elimination Drive copy-edited at least one article. They edited 276 articles and 683,633 words between them. Barnstars awarded are
here.
August Blitz: In our
August Copy Editing Blitz, 13 of the 16 editors who signed up worked on at least one article. Between them, they copy-edited 79,608 words comprising 57 articles. Barnstars awarded are available
here.
September Drive:Sign up here for our month-long September Backlog Elimination Drive, which is now underway. Barnstars awarded will be posted
here.
Progress report: As of 14:29, 9 September 2023 (UTC), GOCE copy editors have processed 245
requests since 1 January. The backlog of tagged articles stands at 2,066.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators, Dhtwiki,
Miniapolis and
Zippybonzo.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from
our mailing list.
Peppercat is a website listing government ministers, and other key political leaders, from all over the world, taking data from Wikidata.
More information
state of transmission (state of transmission of a work (as a concept, not as a physical item; for that, use P5816))
describes actor of (predicate sense whose actor (an agent or a cause—basically the instigator of an action) is denoted by this sense)
describes undergoer of (predicate sense whose undergoer (a patient, a theme, or a recipient—basically a non-instigator of an action) is denoted by this sense)
Machine learning: We are migrating some tools that currently use ORES to the new Lift Wing (
phab:T343731)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work around the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements
Query Builder: We fixed some issues in the Query Builder language selector (
phab:T344231)
We’re making the warning for anonymous editors more useful by letting them return to the page they came from after logging in (
phab:T330550); we’re also working on showing those warnings in the first place in WikibaseLexeme (
phab:T343979)
Wikibase REST API: We are working on the ability to remove a statement from a Property (
phab:T342976) and get the labels of a Property (
phab:T342977)
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
ORES, the revision evaluation service, is now using a new open-source infrastructure on all wikis except for English Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two will follow this week. If you notice any unusual results from the Recent Changes filters that are related to ORES (for example, "Contribution quality predictions" and "User intent predictions"), please
report them.
[8]
When you are logged in on one Wikimedia wiki and visit a different Wikimedia wiki, the system tries to log you in there automatically. This has been unreliable for a long time. You can now visit the login page to make the system try extra hard. If you feel that made logging in better or worse than it used to be, your feedback is appreciated.
[9]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (
calendar).
As part of the changes for the
Better diff handling of paragraph splits wishlist proposal, the inline switch widget in diff pages is being rolled out this week to all wikis. The inline switch will allow viewers to toggle between a unified inline or two-column diff wikitext format.
[10]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 20 September.
This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
[11]
The Enterprise API is launching a new feature called "
breaking news". Currently in BETA, this attempts to identify likely "newsworthy" topics as they are currently being written about in any Wikipedia. Your help is requested to improve the accuracy of its detection model, especially on smaller language editions, by recommending templates or identifiable editing patterns. See more information at
the documentation page on MediaWiki or
the FAQ on Meta.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour September 15, 2023. We will learn how to use Zotero, the reference management software, and its
browser plugin to automatically extract metadata for articles and convert them to a Wikidata format that can be batch uploaded using QuickStatements.
More information on the event page
chronological designation (as a typical instance, the stated scholarly journal year to which reference is made by: the reference source being cited to support the statement being made)
We are planning the migration of some of our existing components from the Wikit to the Codex design system in Query Builder, Mismatch Finder and the Special:NewLexeme page.
Warnings about not being logged-in will now have a returnto= parameter attached to their links, so that you can don’t use your flow from logging in (
phab:T330550)
We fixed an issue with the LanguageSwitcher in Query Builder where it would open out of the viewport on some tablet screen widths (
phab:T344231)
Wikibase REST API: We finished the work on making it possible to remove a statement from a Property (
phab:T342976) and getting the labels of a Property (
phab:T342977)
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
MediaWiki now has a
stable interface policy for frontend code that more clearly defines how we deprecate MediaWiki code and wiki-based code (e.g. gadgets and user scripts). Thank you to everyone who contributed to the content and discussions.
[12][13]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (
calendar).
WikidataCon 2023, the conference dedicated to the Wikidata community, is taking place on October 28-29, online all around the world and onsite in Taipei. You can now
register for the conference.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour September 29. This event is part of a series where you can gain hands-on experience with Wikidata by working on a diverse library and information science (LIS) dataset. In this fourth session, we'll introduce the Wikimedia PAWS environment for data gathering and processing in your Wikidata projects. We'll focus on web scraping for article data using Python and the Beautiful Soup package for parsing. You'll learn about data models for making your data accessible to both machines and humans. This session will be recorded and shared on the event page.
Event page.
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #110,
Ohm's law (Challenge started on 2023-09-25 12:01:32)
User:Luca.favorido/linkypop.js is a script that can be used to search an identifier on an external site. It provides a button to search for an identifier as soon as you type it in the property input field. For example, if you type “ORCID”, an icon with a lens will appear, and when you click it, a new tab will open with the ORCID site looking for the name of the researcher. You can then copy the URL and paste it to Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Want to play a game?
Wikidata:Games has some Wikidata-related ones for you.
Citation.js Toolforge is a service to export citations from Wikidata items in various formats (BibTeX, RIS) and various citations formats (Vancouver, APA, etc)
type of musical notation (system of musical notation used on a given music source or composition)
chronological designation (stated scholarly journal year to which reference is made by: source cited in support of a particular statement may not be the same as the publication date or volume)
We worked on making it possible to upload mismatches on qualifiers (
phab:T313467)
We are continuing to migrate tools from ORES to Lift Wing (
phab:T343731)
We've added Wikifunktions as a new wiki for sitelinks (
phab:T342857)
Wikibase REST API: We are working on making it possible to get labels, descriptions and aliases from a Property as well as modify the description of an Item
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
The Vector 2022 skin will now remember the pinned/unpinned status for the Table of Contents for all logged-out users.
[16]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September (
calendar).
Gadget definitions will have a
new "namespaces" option. The option takes a list of namespace IDs. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages in the given namespaces.
Future changes
New variables will be added to
AbuseFilter: global_account_groups and global_account_editcount. They are available only when an account is being created. You can use them to prevent blocking automatic creation of accounts when users with many edits elsewhere visit your wiki for the first time.
[17][18]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on
27 October at 17:00 (UTC). See
details and how to join.
New Page Review article queue, March to September 2023
Backlog update:
At the time of this message, there are 11,300 articles and 15,600 redirects awaiting review. This is the highest backlog in a long time. Please help out by doing additional reviews!
October backlog elimination drive:
A one-month backlog drive for October will start in one week! Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled. Articles will earn 4x as many points compared to redirects. You can
sign up here.
PageTriage code upgrades:
Upgrades to the
PageTriage code, initiated by the
NPP open letter in 2022 and actioned by the
WMF Moderator Tools Team in 2023, are ongoing. More information can be found
here. As part of this work, the
Special:NewPagesFeed now has a new version in beta! The update leaves the NewPagesFeed appearance and function mostly identical to the old one, but updates the underlying code, making it easier to maintain and helping make sure the extension is not decommissioned due to maintenance issues in the future. You can try out the new Special:NewPagesFeed
here - it will replace the current version soon.
Notability tip:
Professors can meet
WP:PROF #1 by having their academic papers be widely cited by their peers. When reviewing professor articles, it is a good idea to find their
Google Scholar or
Scopus profile and take a look at their
h-index and number of citations. As a very rough rule of thumb, for most fields, articles on people with a h-index of
twenty or more, a first-authored paper with more than a thousand citations, or multiple papers each with more than a hundred citations are likely to be kept at AfD.
Reviewing tip:
If you would like like a second opinion on your reviews or simply want another new page reviewer by your side when patrolling, we recommend pair reviewing! This is where two reviewers use
Discord voice chat and screen sharing to communicate with each other while reviewing the same article simultaneously. This is a great way to learn and transfer knowledge.
Hello, HeartGlow30797! Here is the September 2023 for the
TheWikiWizard!
Wiki(p/m)edia News
On the EN Wikipedia, there were 4 successful
RFAs between the period of July and September! Congrats to the candidates! Also on Simple English Wikipedia, they had 1 successful RFA in August!
For those wondering why you were unable to edit for a period of time on 20th September, there was a
server testing going on. You can follow the link to read more. We will always inform you here if one of these kinds of tests is going to take place, or has taken place. You can also head on over to the Meta Wiki main page, information on these kinds of tests will always be displayed there.
Did you know you that
Wikimedia Commons has monthly photo challenges? You can check out more
here!
The USA has viewed Wikipedia
4 Billion times in August!