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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Development
More work on widget to add language links on the Wikipedias directly without having to go to Wikidata
Bug fixes for Wikipedias, including:
don't show edit link when noexternallanglinks magic word suppresses Wikidata links (bugzilla:45037)
use Q## links instead of linking to Special:ItemByTitle for “edit links” link (bugzilla:44536)
preference for showing Wikidata edits by default in watchlist (bugzilla:44973)
Catching up on writing tests for untested functionality
More work on the Lua support for accessing data from the repository (wikidata.org) on the Wikipedias
Updated Wikidata’s Vagrant development machine
Created initial QueryStore interface
Created initial setup code for the SQL QueryStore
Discussed and created initial schema for the SQL QueryStore
Simplified code for client settings, including which namespaces can have Wikidata links. The default is now all namespaces, without needing to explicitly specify them in the settings
Improved code for sorting interwiki links in the clients, with step towards allowing the communities to specify custom sort orders per Wikipedia
Improved handling of deleted properties
Further work on replacement for current search box
More work on improving error reporting and edit summaries in the API
Tim and Aaron killed the mystery bug that caused corrupt login tokens (bugzilla:41586)
Asked the Italian, Hebrew and Hungarian Wikipedias if they want to be the first to use phase 2 (will ask a few more to join the first batch later today)
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Hi Andrew, just a quick ping about the Geonotice request I posted for the Women in the Arts edit-a-thon a few days ago. Hoping it can be distributed soon. Cheers, Sarasays (talk) 14:04, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
Many thanks! --Sarasays (talk) 15:39, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
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Wikidata weekly summary #49
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Development
Design improvements to the SetClaim API module
More work on implementing the simple inclusion syntax that will be 1 way to access Wikidata data on Wikipedia
More work on Lua (the second way to access Wikidata data on Wikipedia)
Added parser page property to hold entity id in client. This fixes:
bugzilla:45037 - don’t show edit link if noexternallanglinks has suppressed all Wikidata links
bugzilla:44536 - have the edit link go directly to the Q### pages, instead of Special:ItemByTitle which shall make the link be more reliable and work for all namespaces
Selenium tests for deleted-property-handling
Selenium tests for multiline references
Selenium tests for add-sitelinks-from-client
Selenium tests for Entity-Selector-as-Searchbox
Selenium tests for language-table
Implemented in-process caching for entities
Lua support to access the repo data and implement getEntity (so you can use stuff like entity = mw.wikibase.getEntity("Q1459") in Lua modules)
rebuildTermSearchKey is now ready for production (this still needs to be run but once done it will make search case-insensitive)
Improved error reports from the API
Ground work for better edit summaries from the API
Added a table of content to item pages
Added debug functionality to be able to investigate why it takes longer than it should for Wikidata changes to show up on recent changes and watchlists on Wikipedia
Finished implementation of References-UI
Implemented GUID generator in JavaScript
Worked on fixing a bug related to deleted properties where the UI would display wrong information
Minor fixes/additions to the JS datamodel implementation
If you add a Babel box to your user page Wikidata will show you items and descriptions in other languages you speak as well without you having to switch the language
Want to know which items use a certain property? Try the “what links here” link on a property page
Hello, Andrew Gray. You have new messages at [[User talk:Tim riley (talk) 11:23, 16 March 2013 (UTC)|User talk:Tim riley (talk) 11:23, 16 March 2013 (UTC)]]. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.
Andrew, I wasn't sure whether you wanted to take another look at this DYK nomination now that your earlier comments have been addressed. If not, please let me know. Thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 00:50, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Discussion at
WikiProject Opera
I'm writing to members of
WikiProject Opera who have been active on the talk page over the last year. We currently have a proposal to add infoboxes about individual operas to their articles. As this would involve a fairly major change from our current practice, and lead to a potentially lengthy transition, it would be helpful to hear the views from as many project members as possible. The discussion is at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Opera#Opera infoboxes. Best, Voceditenore (talk
) 09:03, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Geonotice in LA
Hey, I need a geonotice adjusted - sorry! The
Los Angeles metropolitan area and not Los Angeles. Apologies - I just moved to LA and didn't quite realize that! If you could fix that, I would really appreciate it! Wadewitz (talk
) 21:00, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Could you give me some coordinates for the area? I winged it last time based on an old session in LA, and for that I think I just guessed based on an arbitrary centre point!
The geonotice needs a box, so if you can give me two opposite corners of a square (NE and SW, or SE and NW) around the area you want - unfortunately, I don't know the LA area well enough to be sure of what the metropolitan area translates to in practice. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:05, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Ha! No one knows. Let's try this:
34 degrees 17 minutes N, 118 degrees 30 minutes W
33 degrees 41 minutes N, 117 degrees 47 minutes W
Let me know if I did that right! Wadewitz (talk) 21:21, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Interesting - the current geonotice is actually wider than that! [33, -117], [35, -119]. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:23, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Really, because I'm not getting it. That's why I wanted to adjust it. Wadewitz (talk) 21:32, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Strange! This map shows approximately what area it thinks it should cover. This service will return what we think your IP geolocates to - does it fall within 33-35 N and 117-199 W? It might be that you're showing up as outside the area for some reason.
If not that, then I'm baffled! Andrew Gray (talk) 21:37, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
According to that info, I should totally be getting the notice, but I'm not. My co-organizer is not getting the notice, either, and he is also within the area, but at a different IP. We are worried it isn't showing up at all. Wadewitz (talk) 21:41, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Very strange indeed. Is anything else showing up at the top of the watchlist, or just a blank? Andrew Gray (talk) 21:42, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
I'm getting a Wikipedia notice about a discussion to archive citations. That's it. Wadewitz (talk) 21:45, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
I am definitely baffled by this. Checking on IRC, we have one person in LA seeing it and one person not. Which isn't much help! One last possibility - try purging the script? It might help. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:47, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Ok, that worked. So, at least I know some people are getting it! Wadewitz (talk) 22:13, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Sounds like a weird caching problem somewhere. Sorry I can't be of more help! Andrew Gray (talk) 22:27, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Newcastle Library
Hi, I've discovered that the Newcastle Library has several images of Brazilian warships, including Minas Geraes (with a beautiful second image), Rio Grande do Sul, and Sultan Osman I (ex-Rio de Janeiro). I would like to use those four, along with any they have of
[majestic titan]
10:43, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
P.S. There's also several other images I'd love to have (like [3], [4], and [5]), but the ones listed above are what I'd really want, and I don't want to ask too much of them.
[majestic titan]
10:46, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
At the least, there are several other views of the first image I linked—hopefully Tyne has some! If it helps, any high-quality image of
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of papabili in the 2013 papal conclave until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion template from the top of the article. -- --JamboQueen (talk) 08:47, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
Thank you for the good advice. It seems like a mess and I just first thought that people with much experience and who have seen similar situation could help with supportive editorial policy comments. --JamboQueen (talk) 09:44, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Development
Rolled out new code on wikidata.org. The new stuff you probably care about is:
Improved references. They can now have multiple lines. This should make references much more useful. You can now have one reference with for example values for each of the properties "book", "author", "page" to describe one source.
Widget to add language links on the Wikipedias directly: added setting to enable/disable it per wiki and made it available for logged-in users only
Widget to add language links on the Wikipedias directly: improved layout / size
Made it so that the “edit links” link on Wikipedia is also shown when the corresponding item only has a link to this one language and no other languages
Submitted improved Apache config patch to make wikidata.org always redirect to www.wikidata.org, which is awaiting code review and deployment.
Improved the script that is responsible for taking Wikidata changes to the Wikipedias
Added a few ways to better debug the script responsible for taking Wikidata changes to the Wikipedias. This should help with investigating why some changes take way to long to show up on the Wikipedias.
Started work on automatically adding edited items to the user’s watchlist (according to preferences)
Finished script for rebuilding search keys, so we can finally get case insensitive matches in a lot of places
Support for multi-line references in diff view
Selenium tests for inclusion syntax
Improved parser function (that will be used to access Wikidata data on the Wikipedias) to accept property ID or label
Increased isolation of data model component to increase clarity and visibility of bad dependencies
Worked on schema access in the SQLStore (of the query component)
When you edit a statement there is a little wheel in front of the text field. This lets you choose between “custom value”, “unknown value” and “no value”. “No value” means that we know that the given property has no value, e.g. Elizabeth I of England had no spouse. “Unknown value” means that the property has a value, but it is unknown which one -- e.g. Pope Linus most certainly had a year of birth, but it is unknown to us.
Worked on making properties accessible from the client using their label so you can use {{#property:executive director}} instead of {{#property:p169}} for example
Made qualifiers ready for the next deployment (Please test. See details further down.)
Selenium tests for qualifiers
Fixed some issues related to QUnit testing
Worked on improved handling and code design of multiple snak lists in the UI (qualifiers, references)
Discussions/Press
Denny wrote down how we’re planning to support queries on Wikidata. Feedback welcome.
Now that improvements for references have been deployed here’s a discussion on the best way to use them. (You can see an example of how it could be used in the source for “CAS registry number” on d:Q153)
We’re currently carefully monitoring performance after the deployment of phase 2 on the first 11 Wikipedias. There seem to be a few small issues. As soon as they are resolved we'll deploy on English Wikipedia. All other Wikipedias are planned to follow very soon after that.
Bye and a big thank you to Anja, Silke, Jens and John who are leaving the development team at the end of the month and will work on other cool things. You’ll be missed!
Ever had any doubt about the possibilities of Wikidata? Talk to Wiri!
We worked on reducing the time it takes for Wikidata edits to show up in the Wikipedias and made some progress. Daniel posted an analysis
We started running a script on the database in order to make search on Wikidata case-insensitive. This should be finished in a few days and then search should be more useful.
In addition to the above we have rolled out a new search box that suggests items. This should also make finding things on Wikidata a lot easier for you.
We’re making some progress with Internet Explorer 8 support but there are a lot of issues with it (some outside our control). It’s unclear at the moment how much we can improve it still without spending an unjustified amount of time on it. You can follow the progress at bugzilla:44228
Edits are now auto-confirmed for users with more than 50 edits and account age 4 days: bugzilla:46461
Do you need old-style interwiki links for a sister project for example? This is for you
The Wikimedia Foundation applied as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code again. We have proposed some Wikidata projects for students to take up if the Foundation is accepted again. At least 2 other organisations that applied also propose Wikidata ideas. More details on that once we know which organisations are accepted.
Denny hacked together a tree of life based on data from Wikidata
Did you file a bug report for Wikidata or did someone else do it for you? Please take a minute to check if it is still valid. (Thanks for filing it btw!)
Could I have 2 mins of your time? As I’ll be working on some other projects for Wikimedia Germany as well from now on the time I can spend on Wikidata will be reduced. This means I’ll have to figure out what is useful to spend time on. If you’re reading this could you let me know for example on this discussion page? Also if you have ideas how to improve the weekly summaries please post them. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk)
Looks just right to me. Perhaps mention it's a bring-a-laptop party? And conceivably "or" rather than "and" in the list of contacts? Would it help if I sketched out an informal template for ballet articles - history, characters, plot etc? Tim riley (talk) 22:59, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
A good question from the first to sign up, Andy Mabbett, viz "Are WMUK covering travel?" Tim riley (talk) 21:54, 30 March 2013 (UTC)
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WikiCup 2013 March newsletter
We are halfway through round two. Pool A sees the strongest competition, with five out of eight of its competitors scoring over 100, and Pool H is lagging, with half of its competitors yet to score. WikiCup veterans lead overall; Pool A's Sturmvogel_66 (submissions) (2010's winner) leads overall, with poolmate Miyagawa (submissions) (a finalist in 2011 and 2012) not far behind. Pool F's Casliber (submissions) (a finalist in 2010, 2011 and 2012) is in third. The top two scorers in each pool, as well as the next highest 16 scorers overall, will progress to round three at the end of April.
Today has seen a number of Easter-themed did you knows from WikiCup participants, and March has seen collaboration from contestants with
)). All of these subjects were covered on at least 50 Wikipedias at the beginning of the year and, subsequently, each contribution was awarded at least three times as many points as normal.
Wikipedians who enjoy friendly competition may be interested in participating in April's wikification drive. While wikifying an article is typically not considered "significant work" such that it can be claimed for WikiCup points, such gnomish work is often invaluable in keeping articles in shape, and is typically very helpful for new writers who may not be familiar with formatting norms.
A quick reminder: now, submission pages will need only a link to the article and a link to the nomination page, or, in the case of good article reviews, a link to the review only. See your submissions' page for details. This will hopefully make updating submission pages a little less tedious. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on
You are invited to the first ever Glasgow Wiki Meetup which will take place at The Sir John Moore, 260-292 Argyle Street, City of Glasgow G2 8QW on Sunday 12 May 2013 from 1.00 pm. If you have never been to one, this is an opportunity to meet other Wikipedians in an informal atmosphere for Wiki and non-Wiki related chat and for beer or food if you like. Experienced and new contributors are all welcome. This event is definitely not restricted just to discussion of Scottish topics. Bring your laptop if you like and use the free Wifi or just bring yourself. Even better, bring a friend! Click the link for full details. Looking forward to seeing you. Philafrenzy (talk) 10:17, 1 April 2013 (UTC)
+ Brighton Andrew, not on the same day!
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Hand with Doom (bar)
Hi Andrew. I'm trying to get Doom Bar up to featured status and I no longer have access to one of the sources, which I need to update a page reference. HJ Mitchell suggested that you might be able to help me out. Do you think you might be able to find me a copy of this? If that's not enough info, let me know what you'd need. Cheers WormTT(talk) 12:51, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
No online access (not unless I pay, anyway). I've tried to order a copy of the issue from storage - this didn't work properly last time I tried something for HJ, but I'm 90% confident I should be able to get you a photocopy at least :-) Andrew Gray (talk) 13:00, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
Photocopy or a scan would be great. Let me know how you get on, and thanks so much for your help. WormTT(talk) 13:18, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Development
The first year is over. Thank you everyone for being amazing and helping to build Wikidata and making it more than we could possibly have hoped for already. <3
Put a lot of work into improved support for Internet Explorer 8
Worked on improving recent changes code in client
Finished valueview refactoring. Created new extension “ValueView”
Deployment of phase 2 on English Wikipedia is currently planned for April 8. The remaining Wikipedias are scheduled for April 10. As usual this might change if we run into problems along the way.
There is now a page showing the current lag for changes propagating to the Wikipedias so they can show up in watchlists and recent changes for example. This should ideally be in the range of a few minutes. Right now it is higher because of some abnormally high bot activity but decreasing. Should be down to a few minutes soon.
There’s now a badge you can add to Wikipedia articles to indicate there is data about it on Wikidata
Based on feedback for last week’s call for comments we will continue this newsletter. However more community help will be needed. From now on they’ll be drafted at d:Wikidata:Status updates/Next and your help is very welcome.
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Please comment on
Wikipedia talk:Today's articles for improvement
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Wikidata weekly summary #53
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Development
Got some external professional review of our code and architecture and started working on their feedback
Worked on reducing the dispatch lag (the time it takes for changes on Wikidata to be sent to the Wikipedias for display in watchlist, recent changes and to purge affected pages)
Worked on using Redis for job queue to improve the lag situation even further
Created new Wikibase Query extension for phase 3 functionality
We need feedback from contributors working on references addition or having tried to add references to statements. Please comment about your problems or your trials at d:Help:Sources
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Deployment of phase 2 on the remaining Wikipedias was delayed because of a high lag of changes being propagated to the Wikipedias. The lag has been reduced considerably now and is going down even more. The new date for deployment will not be next week because there are other large changes on Wikimedia infrastructure scheduled that we do not want to interfere with. It will hopefully happen very soon after that though.
Next code update on wikidata.org is planned for Wednesday. This should include qualifiers and bugfixes.
There will probably be a short outage/read-only for wikidata.org on Tuesday (database is being switched to MariaDB)
Based on feedback for last week’s call for comments we will continue this newsletter. However more community help will be needed. From now on they’ll be drafted at d:Wikidata:Status updates/Next and your help is very welcome.
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Legal cases
Hello Andrew, in fact the source is always right at the start, eg
R v Lovelass and Others (1834) 172 ER 1380 - that case citation refers to a law report (ER stands for English Reports). Wherever possible I try to link it to one on the free online database at bailii.org, or in the case of Berezovsky v Abramovich [2012] EWHC 2463 (Comm) I've linked to a judiciary.gov.uk file. (I add in the references sections because in advance in the hope I, or someone else, will fill in more later - it is a shame they lie empty!) For the case report citations, I was hoping that we could make a template like they use for American cases - because the case citation method isn't always clear - what they've got is this: Brazee v. Michigan, 241U.S.340 (1916). If you know how to do that, or know anyone else, it'd be super. Best, Wikidea
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Release of an image
Hi Andrew. Can you please enquire whether we could place this image in CC-BY-SA. Many thanks, Robin -- Llywelyn2000 (talk) 14:52, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
Should be practical - I'll see what I can do. --Andrew Gray (talk) 15:42, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
Great talk
GLAM-WIKI in Real Life Barnstar
Great work on GLAM-WIKI. —Tom Morris (talk) 15:02, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
Merge proposals
Hi there
You lodged a couple of merge proposals a while ago, on
10th (North Lincoln) Regiment of Foot articles. There's been little or no objection to these proposals, and (as you say) the same format is used in other, similar, articles, so I would suggest (if you still wish) to go ahead with it. Moonraker12 (talk
) 17:55, 14 April 2013 (UTC)
Geonotice Proposal (Elevated urgency)
Sorry to barge on your talkpage here when there is clearly a geonotice request page; However, we are trying to organize a Contribution month event here in London, Ontario, Canada, in a matter of ten days. The library has already allocated physical resources and technologists to service the event: If we could please get a notice that directs the user in London, Ontario, Canada, to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Contribution_Month_in_Canada#London.2C_Ontario , this would be fantastic; I'm not sure what political or technical barriers there are to this, however. Please respond whenever it is convenient - you are after all, extremely busy! But thank you for taking the time to read this request, and again, sorry for the talk page stalking.
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Geonotice
Hi Andrew. I was hoping to get a geonotice up for the DC area. As it's for an editathon this Saturday, I would be grateful if you could add it as soon as you get a chance. I would like to use the following text:
On Saturday, April 20, Wikimedia DC is partnering with the George Washington University to host the "All Things GW" Edit-a-Thon at the Teamsters Labor History Research Center. Please join us for behind-the-scenes tours of the University Archives and help edit articles about GWU and DC history. Please RSVP today!
Can you help us out with this? Thanks! Dominic·t 13:47, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
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Wikidata weekly summary #54
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Development
Dispatch lag is now down to 0 so changes should show up very quickly on the Wikipedias in watchlists and recent changes
wikidata.org now always redirects to www.wikidata.org. This should among other things solve the issue where people were not able to edit when on wikidata.org (bugzilla:45005)
Fixed weird blocked-user/protected-page handling in UI (bugzilla:45140)
Final meetings for the external professional review of our code and architecture. They were quite happy with the quality of the codebase and gave useful tips for improvements
Worked on automatic summaries for editing claims
Investigation of different JavaScript frameworks dealing with date and time
Worked on using Redis and the job queue for change notifications to clients
Deployment of phase 2 (infoboxes) on English Wikipedia is planned for April 22. All remaining Wikipedias are planned for April 24.
Qualifiers are available now. In the same update several bugs have been fixed mainly related to Internet Explorer 8. At the same time search has been made case-insensitive. More details here.
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ODNB search quirks
We were talking about this. I was asked to comment on Talk:Æthelgeard, and trying the ODNB search for him gets ÃÂthelgeard. Charles Matthews (talk) 07:54, 22 April 2013 (UTC)
Hi! I believe that the Module:Authority control is ready for production use. Do you agree with this? If yes, can you replace the content of the model by the sanboxed version and remove unneeded sub-templates, please? Thanks! Tpt (talk) 16:49, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
If fixing a particular bug is especially important for you then please consider voting for it in Bugzilla to help the development team prioritize. A list of all of the currently open ones is here.
Bugfixes were deployed on wikidata.org. The ones you probably care about are:
when clicking "edit links" on a Wikipedia article the user is automatically taken to the language links part of the item. Hopefully it is now more obvious how to change the links.
fixed a few cases where edit conflicts where detected in error
added automatic edit summaries for adding qualifiers and claims
