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Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin September Issue 1

Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation over the first half of September 2024. Please help Translate.

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Upcoming and current events and conversations Talking: 2024 continues

• The Voting period for the 2024 Board of Trustees election is open until September 17. Go to the SecurePoll voting page to vote.
• Scholarship application for Wikisource Conference 2025 in Bali, Indonesia is open until September 20.
• WikiConference Nigeria 2024 will be held in Abuja, Nigeria from September 12–14.
• Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024 will take place in Istanbul, Türkiye on September 20–22.
• Celtic Knot Wikimedia Languages Conference will take place in Waterford City, Ireland on September 25–27.
• Italian WikiConference will be held in Padua, Italy on September 27–29.
• Join Wiki Loves Onam, a photo campaign dedicated to documenting the vibrant and colorful festival of Onam on Wikimedia Commons. The campaign runs until September 30.

Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Research · Web · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on Mediawiki.org

• Users of all Wikis will have access to Wikimedia sites as read-only for a few minutes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes.
• The Alternative Text suggested edits feature has now been fully deployed to production on the iOS App for Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and French Wikipedias! This feature, part of WE1.2, is designed to enhance how newcomers add alt text to images, aiming to improve accessibility and engagement. For more details, visit the project page and explore the new feature in the app!
• Editors and volunteer developers interested in data visualization can now test the new software for charts. Its early version is available on beta Commons and beta Wikipedia. This is an important milestone before making charts available on regular wikis. You can read more about this project update and help test the charts.
• A new draft text of a policy discussing the use of Wikimedia’s APIs has been published on Meta-Wiki. The draft text does not reflect a change in policy around the APIs; instead, it is an attempt to codify existing API rules. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome on the proposed update’s talk page until September 13 or until those discussions have concluded.
• More recent tech updates from Tech News.
• The latest status updates from Wikifunctions.
• Help us find WikiProjects or other online collaboration spaces!

Annual Goals Progress on Equity See also a list of all movement events: on Meta

• Revamping Movement Strategy Grants with Hub Focus.
• Watch the recordings of Let's Connect Grantee Partner Learning Conversation: Conversation #1 with Wiki in Africa, Wiki Advocates Philippines, and Indic MediaWiki Developers UG and Conversation #2 with Wikimedia Community UG Malta, Wikimedia MA UG, and Wikimedia Canada.

Annual Goals Progress on Safety & Integrity See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog

• Wikimedia Foundation defeats gambling magnate’s lawsuit in Germany.
• Wikimedia Indonesia and UNESCO Jakarta Team Up Against Harmful Content Online.
• Child Rights Impact Assessment at EduWiki Knowledge Showcase and more: Latest updates from the Global Advocacy team.
• Protecting the people: Some recommendations for safety while contributing to Wikimedia projects.

Board and Board committee updates See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter

• The Movement Charter Drafting Committee published their recommendations and bid farewell.
• Read updates from the July 2024 Wikimedia Endowment Board Meeting.
• Learn more about 12 candidates running for 4 seats on the Board by reading their statements and their answers to community questions.
• See the new members of the U4C following the results of the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) special election, a new decision making group that will enforce the UCoC in specific circumstances.

Other Movement curated newsletters & news See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Wikimedia World · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · other newsletters:

• Topics: Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library
• Wikimedia Projects: Milestones · Wikidata
• Regions: Central and Eastern Europe

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Previous editions of this bulletin are on Meta. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!

MediaWiki message delivery 21:40, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #171 is out: Dagbani Wikipedia will be our first wiki for Wikifunctions integration

There is a new update for Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we introduce Dagbani Wikipedia as our first wiki for Wikifunctions integration, discuss the recent stability challenges we've had in the past few days, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 13:51, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #645

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2024-09-16. Please help Translate. Missed the previous one?
See issue #644

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot: Framabot 5 - Task: update a typography error in the French description of homonym pages, seen on 1.
• New request for comments: Additional rights for bureaucrats - The proposal suggests allowing Wikidata bureaucrats to remove admin rights, which they currently cannot do, to streamline processes, reduce reliance on stewards, and align with practices of other wikis.
• Proposal: Mul labels - proposal of massive addition - The proposal suggests massively adding "mul" labels to Wikidata items for given and family names, using a bot to streamline the process and reduce redundant labels.

Events

• Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session 17 September, 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, 17 September, 2024 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter). Christa Strickler will be our first Project Series lead with her joint project with the Wikidata Religion & Theology Community of Practice to contribute biographical data to Wikidata from the IRFA database using the Mix’n’Match tool. We are excited to learn more about this project, provide a forum for discussion and shared learning, and lend a hand while building new skills. Event page: Session 2 (September 17) - Working session using Mix‘n’Match to add Wikidata items
• Wikidata Day 2024 (Seattle) - Agenda: Wikidata Twelfth Birthday, Training and Edit-a-thon. When: Saturday, October 26, from 12:30–4:30pm PDT

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • Looking for Aotearoa's next roving Wikipedian, a Wikidata Te Papa research expeditions publication & the Wikidata WikiProject IBC follow-up workshop - The Aotearoa Wikipedian at Large worked with multiple institutions in 2024, contributing to Wikidata by improving museum exhibition models, creating articles, and collaborating on various projects, including biological field trips and entomology, while also engaging with the local Christchurch editing community.
  • Wikimedians-in-residence assigned to add lexicographical data of 5 endangered languages of West Bengal - The West Bengal Wikimedians User Group, in collaboration with Jadavpur University, has appointed five linguistics students as Wikimedians-in-residence to add lexicographical data for five endangered languages of West Bengal to Wikidata, contributing to their preservation and digital accessibility.
  • Cooperation between National Library and Wikimedia CR was presented at Wikimania 2024 - Wikimedia Czech Republic presented their long-standing collaboration with the National Library at Wikimania 2024, highlighting joint educational and community initiatives, along with additional sessions on media education and successful campaigns during the event.
  • Vacancy Wikimedian in Residence for Wikipedia on Aruba - Aruba on Wikipedia project - Wikimedia Nederland is seeking a Wikimedian in Residence for the "Wikipedia on Aruba" project, which aims to make Aruban and Dutch Caribbean culture and heritage accessible on Wikimedia platforms, with applications open until 16 September 2024.
• Presentations: The knowledge graph of Wikidata in the context of the Human Cell Atlas - presentation by Tiago Lubiana (Q90076935) around their PhD defense
• Essay: User:ASarabadani (WMF)/Growth of databases of Wikidata

Tool of the week

• User:Lagewi/references.js - "Sometimes, the data on Wikidata does not answer all your questions. Some types of information are difficult to encode in statements, or simply has not been encoded on Wikidata yet. In such cases, it might be useful to go through the references attached to claims of the entity, for additional information. To simplify this process, this user script lists all unique references based on stated in (P248) and reference URL (P854). The references are listed in a collapsible list below the table of labels and descriptions, collapsed by default to not be obtrusive." To enable it, include the following line in your common.js: mw.loader.load('//www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User:Lagewi/references.js&oldid=2039248554&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes
  • denomination (value of a currency or type of currency)
  • exponent of base unit (a qualifier of derived from base unit (P12571) used to describe the exponent of the unit)
  • game designer (person(s) who devised and developed this game)
  • handwriting example (sample image of the person's handwriting)
  • objects of occurrence have role (role that objects of this occurrence take on in the context of this occurrence. (For selectional restrictions, use "object class of occurrence" (P12913) instead.))
  • agents of action have role (role that agents of this action take on in the context of this action. (For selectional restrictions, use "agent class of action" (P12994) instead. ))
  • agent class of action (class of items that may initiate this action or class of actions (For roles filled by agents of an action, use "agents of action have role" (P12993) instead))
  • agent of action (particular item that initiates this action or class of actions)
  • Newest External identifiers: Illinois Center for the Book author ID, Slekt og Data grave ID, ‎FolkWiki ID, iasj article ID, 365scores football team ID, speedrun.com series ID, All Musicals lyrics ID, MobyGames critic ID, Polygon game ID, Madain Project ID, 365scores basketball player ID, FOLDOC ID, GameFAQs genre ID, Retromags game ID, Nomes e Voces ID, Altar of Gaming company ID, Altar of Gaming franchise ID, Altar of Gaming game ID, Altar of Gaming person ID, Ciel d'oc ID, VideoGameGeek genre ID, GameSpot genre ID, FranceTerme identifier, DOS Game Modding Wiki article ID, monument ID in the archive of Linz, ‎Altar of Gaming character ID, WikiYeshiva article ID, Yediot Books book ID, Mapcarta ID, VIRIN, cnkgraph person ID, Tabletopia game ID, cnkgraph book ID, cnkgraph poem ID, Lexikon der Mathematik entry ID, ‎CNES ID, ‎Tretyakov Gallery artist ID, ‎TV Maze character ID, Say Who ID, ‎Finnish Business ID, Prosocour person ID, Stadtwiki Karlsruhe ID, Athletics New Zealand athlete ID, Encyclopedia of Tunisian Women person ID, ‎LMFDB knowl ID, ACUM performer ID, ACUM creator/publisher ID, ACUM Work ID, ACUM album ID, culture.ru organization ID, ‎Hindustan Times topic ID, Newgrounds submission ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review
  • Larval host plant (Larval host plant - used only for insects - subclass of P1034)
  • has reading (phonetic reading or pronunciation of the kanji)
  • formula weight (molar mass of an empirical forumula unit of a chemical compound, element or isotope)
  • mode of reproduction (ways for living organisms to propagate or produce their offsprings)
  • initialism (abbreviation containing only first letters of an expression (regardless if pronounced as letters or as a word))
  • health points (health or armor points of this video game, board game or role-playing game character)
  • damage (damage value of this video game weapon, ability or character)
  • magazine capacity (magazine capacity or clip size of this firearm or weapon (real or fictional))
  • male mean age (male mean age in a given place; qualifier of {{P|4442}})
  • female mean age (female mean age in a given place; qualifier of {{P|4442}})
  • Mummy of a person (mummy of a person)
  • publication type of scholarly article (Publication type of scholarly article)
  • characteristic of ((qualifier only) statement value is a characteristic, quality, property, or state of this item)
  • Political foundation (The property allows a link between a political party (usually) and its related political foundation, as is common in Germany, in the Netherlands or at the European level. The reverse property ("political party" or "political party affiliation", still different from P102 which is for individual membership) would be useful too.)
  • Medietilsynets filmdatabase ()
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Encyclopedia of Brno History literature ID, Board Game Arena ID, BoardGaming.com game ID, case id (mainland China), Identifiant dans l'annuaire de l'École des chartes, Trakt episode ID, The Indian Express Topic ID, NWIS site ID, Biblioteka Nauki IDs, MinDat Feature ID, BoardGameGeek game mechanic ID, Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV), Ontobee id, typeset.io journal ID, LWW journal ID, BioMed Central journal ID, Storia della civiltà europea ID, NooSFere editorial collection ID, e-LIS ID, Dictionnaire des guérilleros et résistants antifranquistes ID, Historical Encyclopedia of Siberia ID, pomniky.npmk.cz ID, FightTime fighters ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Map of Karens / Johns per million according to Wikidata
  • People with a connection to Dresden who have an anniversary today (source)
• Newest WikiProjects:
  • Wikibooks pages - The goal is to add Wikidata items for every Wikibooks page.
  • Couchdb - This project has the purpose to investigate how having Wikidata on CouchDb could work.
  • Temporärhaus - This project is intended to document the activities in the temporaerhaus (Q27945856) with reference to Wikidata.
• WikiProject Highlights: Ontology/Cleaning Task Force/Changes - Significant actual and proposed changes to the Wikidata ontology that have come out of the cleaning task force efforts.
• Newest database reports: Wikidata Statements that use a retracted article as reference
• Showcase Items: Among Us (Q96417649) - 2018 video game developed by InnerSloth
• Showcase Lexemes: ਕਰਨ (L45436) - Punjabi verb "to do"

Development

• The development team attended the annual WMDE Software Department retreat, so there wasn't much development activity this week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Help translate · Previous issue · Mohammed Abdulai (WMDE) (talk) · MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:42, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-38

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Improvements and Maintenance

• Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes.
• The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements. [1]
• References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed. [2]
• It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order. [3]
• Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases from both Quarry and Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
• Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes mw-message-box need to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newer cdx-message group of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation, and an example update), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best. [4]

Technical project updates

• Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible. [5]

Tech in depth

• The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
• To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
  • Hackathon Showcase (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available in the Phabricator task.
  • Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:59, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #172 is out: Introducing focus topic areas

There is a new update for Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we introduce focus topic areas for generating natural language texts and we update you on last week's site incident.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 11:30, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-39

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday September 25 at 15:00 UTC. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.

Updates for editors

A screenshot of the interface for the Alt Text suggested-edit feature

• Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see the Alt Text suggested-edit experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback on the discussion page.
• The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. The most noticeable changes for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes.
• It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within <syntaxhighlight> tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax {{…}} are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [6]
• Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [7][8]
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• From Wikimedia Enterprise:
  • The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained on the project's blog post. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too.
  • The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.

In depth

• The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of the WDQS Graph Split project, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly" and "main" subgraphs of Wikidata. The query.wikidata.org endpoint will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please see the announcement on Wikidata.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:33, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #173 is out: Quarterly planning for October–December 2024

There is a new update for Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we give you an overview of what we will focus on in the next three months, we discuss our presentation at Celtic Knot conference 2024, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 15:42, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 September 2024

• In the media: Courts order Wikipedia to give up names of editors, legal strain anticipated from "online safety laws"

• Community view: Indian courts order Wikipedia to take down name of crime victim, editors strive towards consensus

• Serendipity: A Wikipedian at the 2024 Paralympics

• Opinion: asilvering's RfA debriefing

• News and notes: Are you ready for admin elections?

• Gallery: Are Luddaites defending the English Wikipedia?

• Recent research: Article-writing AI is less "prone to reasoning errors (or hallucinations)" than human Wikipedia editors

• Traffic report: Jump in the line, rock your body in time

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:10, 26 September 2024 (UTC)