• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: WikiBayer (RfP scheduled to end after 8 January 2024 12:01 UTC)
  • Closed request for adminship: EPIC (closed as successful). Welcome onboard \o/
  • New requests for permissions/Bot: HVSH-Bot . Task: Import data about politicians from the Q119949776, now only partially online available.

• Events
  • Upcoming: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC, 17th January 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
  • Ongoing: Weekly Lexeme Challenge #123: Ologist

• Press, articles, blog posts, videos
  • Papers: Improving maintenance of community-based knowledge graphs. This paper by Nicolas Ferranti addresses the critical issue of data quality in open knowledge graphs, with a specific focus on Wikidata. It aims to formalize Wikidata's unique approaches to assess and resolve data inconsistencies, proposing a semi-automatic refinement pipeline to empower the Wikidata user community in maintaining and enhancing the reliability of this extensive collaborative knowledge graph.
  • Videos: WikidataCon 2023 Day 1.5 - The past and future of Wikidata. In this video Lydia Pintscher takes a moment to review the major events of Wikidata over the past few years. Then turns to look forward and predict what Wikidata's prospects will be over the next year.

• Tool of the week
  • WICA: Wikidata's insights for created articles is an updated version of an old tool. It now includes many new features to analyse your list of created articles using Wikidata properties.

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties:
    • General datatypes: none
    • External identifiers: Shamela book edition ID, ‎HistoriaGames series ID, ‎Schnittberichte.com title ID, ‎Kemono Games game ID, ‎Internet Game Database event ID, Xemu compatibility database ID, ‎GamesMeter game ID, ‎GameGear.jp ID, Walmart product ID, Swissubase person ID, RPGWatch game ID, RPGWatch company ID, RPGWatch press ID, ‎Indie DB company ID, ‎NIWA article ID, turismoroma.it place ID, ‎ScummVM ID, ORBi author ID, Abandonware-France video game series ID, Abandonware-France video game compilation ID, Abandonware-France person ID, Abandonware-France company ID, Abandonware-France magazine ID, Abandonware-France award ID, Kanjipedia word ID, Moviefone movie ID, South African NPO number, ‎Nigerian registered company ID, Abandonware-France video game ID, ‎AFJV directory ID
  • New property proposals to review:
    • General datatypes:
      • Nonprofit Status (Indicating the legal and tax status of a non-profit organization (specific to served legal areas, aka. Countries). Addition to {{P|1454}}. {{P|1628}} to [https://schema.org/nonprofitStatus nonprofitStatus] from schema.org. Organizations can have multiple Nonprofit Status from different countries.)
      • International Classification of Nonprofit Organizations ({{Q|2976602}} for {{Q|163740}} created by the {{Q|193727}} and adapted by the {{Q|1065}}.)
      • creative director (person who makes high-level creative decisions, oversees the creation of creative assets such as adverts, products, events or logos and guides and directs the creative people who create the end result)
      • television judge ()
    • External identifiers: SERNEC taxon ID, Consortium of Bryophyte Herbaria taxon ID, Rhineland-Palatinate school ID, nebula channel id, Deutsche Bahn station number, ISzDb series ID, BG localisation unit ID, Cathopedia article ID, Native Plants Hawaii ID, Taiwan Biographical Database ID, Penstemon Database ID, Wikisage ID
  • Query examples:
    • Visual artists whose works will enter the Public Domain in Mexico on January 1, 2024 (source)
    • Top music album languages found on Wikidata right now (Week 52, 2023) (source)
    • Western composers until the end of the Renaissance (source)
  • Newest database reports: Merge candidates: Identical birth and death dates
  • Showcase Items: Team Fortress 2 (Q382108) - team-based first-person shooter multiplayer video game.
  • Showcase Lexemes: ورھا لگّݨ / ਵਰ੍ਹਾ ਲੱਗਣ (L907713) - Punjabi verb expressing the setting in of a new year.

• Development
  • The development team is just returning from the winter holidays so there is no development update at the moment.

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.

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • 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!

Discussions

• Closed request for adminship: WikiBayer (closed as successful). Welcome onboard \o/
• New requests for permissions/Bot: So9qBot 9. Task: Add DDO identifier to Danish lexemes.

Events

• Upcoming:
  • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 17th January 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
  • Wiki Mentor Africa (WMA) Hackathon, 19th to 21st January 2024
  • Forschungsdatenmanagement: Wikidata as a collaborative information resource on research data management (German), takes place online, Wednesday 10th January 2024, 10-11am (CET).

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs: PubChem on Wikidata – What is the state of coverage? by Tiago Lubiana. In summary, Wikidata has good coverage of the structured chemical data in PubChem, though there are improvement points. PubChem displays, and will always display, textual information and vendor-specific data that do not fit Wikidata, but they are complementary tools in the ecosystem of open chemical data.
• Papers
  • Linked data: un’opportunità per il riuso (Q124079430) "scientific article published in 2023" (paper in Italian) - deals with linked data in library catalogues, with many mentions of Wikidata.
  • Automatically Constructed Indonesian Question Answering Dataset by Leveraging Wikidata by K. Doxolodeo & A.A. Krisnadhi - researchers have created a new Indonesian Question Answering dataset that is produced automatically end-to-end using Context Free Grammar, the Wikipedia Indonesian Corpus, and the concept of the proxy model
  • LIS Journals’ Lack of Participation in Wikidata Item Creation by Eric Willey & Susan Radovsky, discusses the gap of Wikidata items being created for scholarly articles by the scholar's themselves and if this can lead to inconsistent or inaccurate data model.
  • Quantifying Americanization: Coverage of American Topics in Different Wikipedias: this paper asks whether there is an americanisation bias in the content created by the communities. By Piotr Konieczny & Włodzimierz Lewoniewski.
• Videos
  • Map Kerala Initiative is an opendata portal geospatial map powered by Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, introduced by Manoj Karingamadathil.
  • This video on Biodiversity Explorations with Machine Learning: Biodiversity Data Access Functions shows how Wikidata is being used to populate species entity profiles at Wolfram U, presented by Jofre Espigulé-Pons.
• Notebooks: Wikipedia article as a timeline - This tool transforms a Wikipedia article in a timeline by parsing all internal links in a Wikipedia article and retrieving the date corresponding to each internal link using the point in time (P585) property in Wikidata.

Tool of the week Map your list of created articles - a notebook display of geolocated articles on a map created by a user per chosen project and batch (featured/good article).

Other Noteworthy Stuff Wikimedia Indonesia and Wikimedia Deutschland ended their partnership within the project Software Collaboration for Wikidata prematurely. Read their joint statement here.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • Flora of the Hawaiian Islands URL (URL of the entry for a plant genus, species, subspecies, or variety in the Flora of the Hawaiian Islands website)
  • (Montana Plant Life URL (URL for a plant family, genus, or species on the Montana Plant Life website)
  • ‎plate(s) (plate number(s) in the reference source being cited to support the statement being made)
• Newest External identifiers: Abandonware-France book ID, ‎MilliBase taxon ID, Monasticon Hibernicum database ID, Rhineland-Palatinate school ID, Enciclopedia di Roma monument ID, Enciclopedia di Roma street ID, Mid-Atlantic Herbaria Consortium taxon ID, ‎The Criterion Collection spine number
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • Water bottle volume (Volume of the water bottle)
  • Is it metric? (To check if it's a metric.)
  • Anti-Cheat software used (anti-cheat solution used by this multiplayer video game)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: turismo.marche.it place ID, Joseph Smith Papers person ID, Team Scotland ID, Globoplay ID, DoblajeVideojuegos game ID, National Natural Parks System ID, Commonwealth Games Australia ID, Adventure-Treff game ID, TouchArcade game ID, Mod.io ID, The Models Resource game ID, The Models Resource entity ID, tourist information point number, Jinji Koshinjyo ID, Bandcamp track ID

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Average age of supporters of Gérard Depardieu according to Appel de 50 personnalités du monde de la culture (source)
  • Map of running/out of service railway stations in France
  • Bridges in the UK with photos (source)
  • Programming languages influenced by Niklaus Wirth (directly or indirectly) (source)
• Newest WikiProject: Podcast Episodes 2024 - The goal of this project is to add episode pages for individual podcasts.
• Newest database report: children of unborn parents
• Showcase Item: Helsinki (Q1757) - capital and most populous city of Finland
• Showcase Lexeme: Allah korusun (L1226849) - Turkish for 'God forbid'

Development

• IP masking/temporary accounts: We are adjusting Wikibase to be prepared for the upcoming changes to no longer expose IP addresses for non-logged-in users (phab:T351968)
• Dumps/lex. data: We’re adjusting how empty lists of Forms and Senses are represented in JSON dumps (phab:T305660)
• Wikibase REST API:
  • We finished the work on making it possible to get all sitelinks of an Item (phab:T344041)
  • We are working on getting a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344039)

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.
• Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Participate in this week's Lexeme challenge: Ologies
• 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!

Discussions

• New request for comments: Community request for the development team to access inverse properties on client wikis. (Summary: We currently cannot access inverse property values on Wikipedia. This can be a data management issue on Wikipedia as we must always ask ourself if we must introduce an inverse property for cases where we need them. So I think it’s useful to gather the usecases community would want and draft a request for an API to the devteam to do that.)

Events

• Upcoming: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 17th January 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
• Past
  • Provenance Loves Wiki (PLW24), Jan 12th - 14th, research and data on the origin of artworks and cultural heritage and how Wikibase and Wikidata can support this.
  • WikiLovesWomen #SheSaid campaign wrapped up the 2023 campaign by visiting Kinshasha and Kisangani, where local Wikimedians improved quotes from women on FR Wikipedia and Wikidata.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • Building Connected Libraries in Nigeria: --> Reflections from the Wikibase Journey on collaboration and resouce sharing between Nigerian Libraries.
  • Wikidata and ChatGPT integration failure --> read about Finn Årup Nielsen's attempts to integrate LLM's with Wikidata.
  • QLever: a new way to query OpenStreetMap --> Discussion of the new opportunities offered by QLever to query OpenStreetMap and to run federated queries with Wikidata
  • Wikidata for authority control: 3 years of work --> The three-year Wikidata for authority control project, a collaboration between Wikimedia Sverige and Swedish museums, concluded in December 2023. It equipped museum staff with tools and skills to integrate their authority databases with Wikidata, resulting in added identifiers, SPARQL query proficiency, and enhanced knowledge sharing within the GLAM sector.
  • Go-ahead for Wikidata Project of GLAM institutions from Baden-Württemberg --> The GLAM-BW project, under "GLAM goes OpenData," connects major collections in Baden-Württemberg, focusing on the württembergische Kunstkammer. With over 3,000 objects, the project integrates information on collectors, histories, and objects into a knowledge graph for semantic searches, contributing to the broader realm of linked open data, akin to Wikidata.
  • Swiss GLAM Programme --> Wikimedia CH imported the Museum of Natural History of Neuchâtel's urchin fossil casts to Wikimedia Commons, connecting structured data on Wikidata. The project involved data cleaning, adding missing elements, and file imports via OpenRefine, highlighting seamless integration between Wikidata and Commons.
• Papers
  • Reflections on the PCC Wikidata Pilot at UCLA Library: --> Undertaking the PCC Learning Objectives. Discusses the 14-month Pilot programme for cooperative cataloguing of UCLA Library and Museum Collections. By E. Zhang, P. Biswas & I. Dagher.
  • Few-Shot Event Classification in Images using Knowledge Graphs for Prompting --> How can Wikidata and Wikipedia help Vision-Language Models improve their classification of images. Tahmasebzadeh et al., 2024.
• Videos
  • SMWCon 2023: Semantics, Wikis, and AI --> Day 1, Keynote by Prof. Markus Krötzsch who explores origins and principles of semantic wikis and key challenges that lie ahead in managing knowledge.
  • GLAM on Tour 2023 im Museum Barberini (German) --> find out what Museums have got to do with Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. More Info Here.
• Interactive notebooks: GLAM : Geolocated and Labelled Articles Map - explore Featured and Good Wikipedia articles through a map, powered by Wikidata.

Tool of the week

• Brian M Sperlongano released US boundary QA checker, a quality assurance tool for finding issues with boundary data in the United States by using Wikidata, OpenStreetMap, and US Census Bureau data.
• The Surrounding Ocean (available at vrandezo.github.io/TheSurroundingOcean) - is a tool that allows you to browse lexicographical data. You can use the tool to explore words and their meanings, translations, and synonyms. The tool is currently under development, and the developer, Danny, would appreciate feedback to fix any issues with the tool. More info: Wikidata:The Surrounding Ocean.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• OS-Wikidata Map Framework List of tools and maps which combines OSM and Wikidata.
• Call for Projects and Mentors for Google Summer of Code 2024 and Outreachy Round 28 is OPEN!
• Got an idea for a project to reclaim the public nature of the internet? With Wikidata? NLNet has a new fund you could apply to.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes: none
• Newest External identifiers: Walk Score ID, HistoriaGames game ID, ‎Deutsche Bahn station number, Legends Tour player ID, Moscow Cultural Heritage ID, USOPC Hall of Fame ID, Cathopedia article ID, ‎TouchArcade game ID, ‎DoblajeVideojuegos game ID, ‎Adventure-Treff game ID, Biota of New Zealand ID, Consortium of Bryophyte Herbaria taxon ID, Consortium of Lichen Herbaria taxon ID, Native Plants Hawaii ID, SERNEC taxon ID, TORCH taxon ID, Penstemon Database ID, Digicarmel ID, ‎Retskrivningsordbogen ID, MAMCS artwork ID, Sofascore player ID, ‎Mod.io game ID, Sina Chinese Basketball player ID, turismo.marche.it place ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • describes (Data objects that are described by this entity (e.g. an encyclopedia or topic-related book; intended for input of several data objects.))
  • memory type (specifies the type of working memory of this data object)
  • filial church (church which acts as the less important temple of a parish)
  • TOPO id (unique code to identify topographical features of France (department, city, thoroughfare...))
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Bluesky handle, Merkur author ID, Bavarian school ID, Rugby Database ID, Playstation Store Concept ID, ArchDaily Architecture Office ID, Il Nuovo De Mauro ID, Bluesky DID

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Historical events by a city sorted by importance (source)
  • Bubble chart showing countries with the highest number of children out of school in 2013 (source)
  • Timeline of writing systems and alphabets (source)
• Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Decolonise Wiki --> intends to focus on decolonising text, depictions and media within all relevant Wikipedia articles.
• WikiProject Highlights: Ontology Cleaning Task Force: A group of people have started a task force to discuss problems with the Wikidata ontology and how to clean them up. Anyone interested in participating is welcome. The task force maintains Wikidata:WikiProject Ontology/Cleaning Task Force as a record of its activities. You can add yourself to the participants list there and find out how to join group meetings or otherwise participate in the group. (Got something noteworthy happening in your WikiProject? Share it in the upcoming issue!)
• Newest database reports: Lexicographical data/Reports/Empty lexemes - Lexemes with no statements, no forms and no senses. (Do you see Lexemes from your language in the list that you can fix?)
• Showcase Items: January 15, 2018 (Q45919591) - Monday in January 2018
• Showcase Lexemes: در جنگ حلوا بخش نمی‌کنند (L1081423) - Persian with a meaning similar to "all's fair in love and war"

Development

• IP masking: We are working on adjusting Wikibase to handle the upcoming introduction of IP masking, which will give editors who are not logged in a temporary account name instead of using their IP to attribute edits to (phab:T351968)
• Lexicographical data: We are changing how empty Senses and Forms are represented in the dumps (phab:T305660)
• mul language code: We are doing user testing for the current implementation to see if it is understandable for people.
• Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on migrating it to the Codex design system.
• REST API:
  • We improved the handling of lower-case statement IDs (phab:T354262)
  • We are working on getting a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344039)

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.
• Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Participate in this week's Lexeme challenge: Pigs
• 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!

Discussions

• New request for comments: Domain name as data (Summary: How should Wikidata store the domain name associated with an item? There are many properties for URLs, but a domain name is a different value.)

Events

• Past
  • Wikidata+Wikibase office hour session log: Telegram office hour 2024-01-17
  • PLW 2024: Provenance loves Wiki - Fri. 12th - Sun. 14th January. If you missed the event, catch up by reading the slides, Notes and watching the recordings on the Project page
• Next: Linked Open Data in Heritage Workshop > Jan. 23rd, 13:00 - 15:00 CET. If you are in the Maastricht University Faculty and want to know enhance heritage research, improve data management, connectivity and visualisation, register for the Workshop.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • Languages with the best lexicographic data coverage in Wikidata 2023
  • Working with catalogues: a Wikidata volunteer’s perspective --> interview with Epìdosis where they discuss the challenges and opportunities of working with catalogues on Wikidata.
• Papers
  • The reconciliation of SBN authority records with Wikidata. Progresses and perspectives after a decade of work (2013-2023) (Q124289369) (Italian title: Riconciliare le voci di autorità in SBN con Wikidata. Progressi e prospettive dopo un decennio di lavoro (2013-2023)) (paper in Italian) - deals with the reconciliation of the authority file of the biggest Italian collective library catalogue (OPAC SBN) with Wikidata
  • The evolution of authority work in SBN. From origins to Alphabetica and future prospects (Q124289388) (Italian title: L’evoluzione dell’authority work in SBN. Dalle origini ad Alphabetica e prospettive future) (paper in Italian) - deals with the evolution of the authority work in the biggest Italian collective library catalogue (OPAC SBN), with many references to Wikidata
  • Biological Pathway Abstractions: From 2D drawings to Multidimensional Linked Data > this thesis by Andra Sachinder Waagmeester discusses the utility of using Wikidata as a Knowledge Graph for Life Sciences.
• Videos
  • "From Wiki to Digital Humanities - Establishing a Literature Index Network" Symposium(Taiwanese) from Wang Shiqing. A scholar of Taiwanese history, this symposium explores linking their historical and academic research with Wikidata.
  • Semantic MediaWiki Con 2023
    • AskWikidata: Natural language queries to Wikidata, a naive prototype created by Senior Software Engineer for Wikidata, Robert Timm. Want to try? (Google Colab)
    • Fixing Wikidata: by viewing it as a series of tables by Yaron Koren, who challenges that Wikidata can become more useful with more structured editing and querying practices.

Tool of the week

• Wikimedia Commons based streaming services by Magnus: WikiFlix for movies and the companion tool WikiVibes for audio.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Wikimedia Deutschland hiring:
  • Software Engineer, Wikidata
  • Software Engineer, Wikidata for Wikimedia Projects
  • Senior Software Engineer, Wikidata for Wikimedia Projects

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • underlying structure (an instance of the subject becomes an instance of the object if some of its data are lost)
  • working memory type (specifies the type of working memory of this data object)
  • production manager (manager that is responsible for the administration of a feature film or television production)
  • simulate (the element imitates or makes the value of the property appear real)
  • Philippine middle name (maternal surname generally placed in the middle of this person's name)
• Newest External identifiers: ‎ISzDb series ID, IFTTT service ID, National-Football-Teams.com team ID, Moviefone person ID, Commonwealth Games Australia athlete ID, Team Scotland athlete ID, Kicker team ID, goalzz.com team ID, vesti.kz team ID, ‎Am Faclair Beag ID, tourist information point number, Alexandria.dk person ID, Babelio serial ID, Moviebuff ID, RCS number, Sayed Ganj Balochi Glossary ID, Vazhaju Word ID, Stage, Qué series ver ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • If non-metric ()
  • civil rank (non-military rank of a civil office holder in Russian Empire)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: PhoneScoop phone ID, TopKar ID, IFOPT stop identifier, Flashback lexicon ID, Letterboxd director ID, Letterboxd user ID, HbVar ID, MobiTUKI Swahili-English Dictionary entry, HistoryMakers Digital Archive Maker ID, Wörterbuch zur Verbvalenz sense ID, Euro+Med PlantBase taxon ID, Code de la collectivité territoriale ayant les compétences départementales, Dansk Forfatterleksikon ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Distance between the birthplace of UK ministers and London (source)
  • Map of countries receiving the Nobel peace prize
  • People who have returned to being their country’s head of government after the longest gap
• Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Media art - to work together with initiatives archiving media art and find common best practices.
• Newest database reports: Count of Senseless Lexemes per language
• Showcase Items: Mona Lisa (Q12418) - oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci
• Showcase Lexemes: grilldress (L1131949) - track suit for grilling in Bokmål

Development

• IP Masking: We are continuing to adapt Wikibase to the upcoming IP Masking feature. We worked on hiding warnings about IP addresses being saved when they don’t apply (phab:T353807, phab:T352006) and creating temporary accounts when editing (phab:T354730)
• Wikibase REST API:
  • We continued working on the ability to get a sitelink for a given site (phab:T344039)
  • We started working on the ability to remove a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344685)
  • We worked on fixing a bug where the REST API PUT request does not handle statement on Items with lowercase statement IDs (phab:T352644)
• mul language code: We did user testing to find any remaining issue before release

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.
• Participate in this week's Lexeme challenge: Cinematography
• 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!