Wikidata weekly summary #693
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-08-18. Missed the previous one? See issue #692.
Events
- Upcoming events: New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series! Mark your calendars for our third session of our event series, an Introduction to Wikidata/EMCO, which is meant to introduce EMCO participants and anyone interested to Wikidata and to develop frameworks and skills for entity management in the Wikidata environment. We will review searching in Wikidata and have a practical, hands-on exercise where everyone can create a new person item and add some statements. Join us Tuesday, August 19th at 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST Time zone converter. Please see our project page for more information and Zoom links.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Videos:
- What Is Wikidata? - Be App Savvy
- OpenStreetMap x Wikidata - Wikidata Taiwan
Tool of the week
- Magnus Manske’s developed a Como Wikidata Game using Autodesc, this game suggests short descriptions for Wikidata items that don't have any. Review each suggestion, improve it if needed, and submit a concise, accurate description. Additioanlly the andriod application for the game is available for download at Google Play Store
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Are you a developer using Wikidata's data in your application with the action API or Query Service? The Wikidata development would love to talk to you to help improve how you can get to Wikidata's data. More details here (Great Question). User interview is 60-mins and you’ll receive compensation as a thank-you for your time.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- New External identifiers: National Library of Nigeria ID, Artfacts artist ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- Código INE (Bolivia) (Official hierarchical identifier of the National Institute of Statistics of Bolivia for administrative entities such as departments, provinces and municipalities.)
- quality for (quality that is described by this sense of adjective/grammatical modifier)
- type of quality (qualifier of "item for this modifier" that specifies the type of quality)
- has wireless capabilities (type of wireless connectivity this device has/supports)
- designed for handedness (hand(s) that this object is intended to be used with)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Valais cantonal parliament ID, Arcanes ID, A Dictionary of Travel and Tourism entry ID, IGDB tag ID, TechnoMusicWorld artist ID, TechnoMusicWorld release ID, TechnoMusicWorld track ID, A Dictionary of Dentistry entry ID, CELL ID, Flemish Community Masterpieces List item ID, A Dictionary of Environment and Conservation entry ID, Hamburger Frauenbiografien ID, GamesIndustry.biz topic ID, Ophardt Team Sportevent person ID, LINDAS ID, Digital ROC people ID, Museum of Fine Arts, Lyon object ID, Nebraska Authors author ID, InfoconDB series ID, InfoconDB conference ID, setlist.fm festival ID, Digital ROC event ID, ScholarGPS scholar ID, ScholarGPS institution ID, ScholarGPS field and discipline ID, ScholarGPS specialty ID, The Digital Ark person ID, ScholarGPS country profile ID, MHOBT ID, Letterboxd person ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Irish Traditional Music - This project aims to enhance the representation of Irish traditional music on Wikidata
- Showcase Items: Olympia (Q737062) - painting by Édouard Manet
- Showcase Lexemes: spegnere (L1250690) - Italian verb (ˈspeɲ.ɲe.re) meaning "to extinguish (a fire)", "to turn off (a device)", or "to die (euphemistic)"
Development
- Mobile editing of statements: We are continuing the work - so far on the read-only mobile version. We will start looking into editing soon. You can follow along with the development on beta Wikidata.
- GraphQL: We are continuing some experiments with GraphQL to see if it is useful for specific types of access to Wikidata's data.
- Dumps: We are starting to experiment with subset dumps to see if we can get meaningful smaller dumps for reusers.
- Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects:
- We are working on scalability issues around the number of changes from Wikidata that get sent to Wikipedia and co. As part of this we are continuing to look into how to decrease the number of changes in recent changes and watchlist on Wikipedia and co that don't actually affect an article there.
- We are investigating how the upcoming larger rollout of Parsoid affects the tracking of Wikidata usage in articles.
- We are looking into improving the Databox Lua module that is used especially in smaller Wikipedias to get Wikidata-powered infoboxes.
- Federation: We are looking at the previous prototype for Federated Properties that allowed to use Wikidata's Properties on another Wikibase instance. We are checking what if anything of it can be revived for our current work to allow other Wikibase instances to use Wikidata's Items and Properties seamlessly.
- Data governance: We are concluding research around the current undestanding of people about which data should go where in the Wikibase Ecosystem.
- Constraint reports: We limited Special:ConstraintReport to logged-in users to avoid AI scrapers hitting the systems too hard ([[phab:T401789]))
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country: Cyprus
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-34
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Later this week, people who are logged-in and have the "Discussion tools" Beta Feature enabled will gain the ability to "Thank" individual comments directly from talk pages, rather than needing to navigate to page history. Learn more about this feature. [1]
- An A/B test comparing two versions of the desktop donate link launched on testwiki on 12 August and on English Wikipedia 14 August for 0.1% of logged out users on the desktop site. The experiment will run for three weeks, ending on 12 September. [2]
- An A/A test to measure the baseline for reader retention was launched 12 August using Experimentation Lab. This measures the percentage of users who revisit a wiki after their initial visit over a 14-day period. No visual changes are expected. The experiment will run through 31 August. [3]
- Five new wikis have been created:
View all 46 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 00:34, 19 August 2025 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 15
[edit]

Special Wikimania issue This is a special Wikimania issue of the Bulletin. We'll be back to our regular format in the next issue
- Wikimania Nairobi: Catch up on missed sessions of Wikimania 2025 by checking session pages in the program. These links will be replaced by Commons links when the uploads are finished.
- Meet the Wikimedians of the Year 2025: The Wikimedian of the Year awards give us an opportunity to pause, taking a moment to recognize people who make our mission possible. Learn about all of this year's winners.
- Highlights: Daily highlights from Wikimania:
- Product and Tech: Wikimania 2025 sessions about Product and Tech you can watch, with links to the recordings.
- Affiliate Strategy: Wikimania 2025 Brings Affiliate Strategy Recommendations into Focus.
- Twentieth edition of Wikimania: Celebrating humans who make Wikipedia possible.
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
- Tech News: Some of the latest update from Tech News week 31, 32, and 33: The Wikimedia Commons community has decided to block cross-wiki uploads to Wikimedia Commons, for all users without autoconfirmed rights on that wiki, starting on August 16; The WikiEditor toolbar now includes its keyboard shortcuts in the tooltips for its buttons. This will help to improve the discoverability of this feature.
- Collaborative Contributions: Share your comments on Collaborative Contributions. This project aims to create a new way to display the impact of collaborative editing activities (such as edit-a-thons, backlog drives, and WikiProjects) on the wikis.
- PTAC: The Product and Technology Advisory Council published a set of proposed experiments the Wikimedia Foundation can try to improve communication with community. Feedback on the proposals are welcomed until August 22.
- Watchlists and Recent Changes: The Foundation will be focusing on wishes related to Watchlists and Recent Changes pages over the next few months. Please read the latest update, and if you have ideas, please submit a wish on the topic.
- Wikifunctions: The Foundation is working on demonstrating functions that generate sentences and fragments in several languages. This is a considerable step towards creating text for Abstract Wikipedia.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events
- Wikimedia Futures Lab: The Wikimedia Futures Lab is a process and convening co-designed by the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland that will help us all learn more about global trends and discuss potential movement-wide responses. You can apply now to join the in-person convening hosted on January 30 – February 1, 2026 in Frankfurt, Germany with participants from affiliates, contributors and external experts.
- Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
- Language and Internationalization: Read about language support for new languages and other highlights from the July 2025 edition of the Language and internationalization newsletter.
- Language Community: The next language community meeting will be held on August 29 at 15:00 UTC.
- UK Online Safety Act: The High Court of Justice has dismissed the Wikimedia Foundation's challenge to the UK's Online Safety Act (OSA) Categorisation Regulations. While the decision does not provide the immediate legal protections for Wikipedia that we hoped for, the Court’s ruling emphasized the responsibility of Ofcom and the UK government to ensure Wikipedia is protected as the OSA is implemented.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Affcom News: Read the latest issue of AffCom News (April-June 2025), the newsletter that distributes relevant news and events about the work of Wikimedia's Affiliations Committee.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcac
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 19:39, 19 August 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #694
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-08-18. Missed the previous one? See issue #693.
Discussions
- Open request for adminship: Rubah Hitam Vukova - RfP scheduled to end after 31 August 2025 14:16 (UTC)
- New requests for permissions/Bot: DifoolBot 7 - task(s): Adding a Wikipedia reference to unsourced day-precision date of birth (P569) and date of death (P570) claims.
- Closed request for permissions/Bot: Dolabbot - task(s): Import module subpages from other wikis (mainly English wiktionary) to Korean wiktionary and addition of corresponding Wikidata sitelinks.
- New request for comments: Pilot project for AI-Assisted Wikidata onboarding and Quality control.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- The call for proposals deadline for WikidataCon 2025 is very close (end of the August). Submit your session proposals at this Call for Proposals page.
- Wikidata's 13th birthday decentralized events will take place in October and November 2025. Feel free to browse the documentation pages to learn how to organize an event in your area and get in touch with other organizers. If you need funding support, make sure to apply for the micro-grants before the deadline of September 1st. Please help translate the documentation pages into your language.
- WikiCite 2025: a 3-day (25 - 31 August 2025) conference, summit and hackathon for creating an ecosystem of bibliographical data. To attend online, please sign-up on the Participants page.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: How Wikidata is coding for humanity - In this interview, Lydia Pintscher of Wikimedia Deutschland speaks with Stephen Harrison on how Wikidata connects human and machine-readable knowledge and why contributing to it is having a global impact.
- Papers: Wikidata's Worldview: A Semantic Network Analysis of an AI Knowledge Pipeline - The paper examines Wikidata as a key AI knowledge source, showing how its structures and classifications influence machine decision-making, and calls for greater transparency in AI data systems.
- Videos:
- Podcast: Tech Talks Daily - What Wikidata reveals about the good side of the internet? - This episode features Lydia Pintscher who reveals how this massive, collaborative dataset empowers communities worldwide to build tools for the public good, and what a truly “good internet” can look like...
- Presentations: Wikimania 2025 - Wikidata a whirlwind tour through the land of Wikidata-powered apps (slides for a talk showcasing Wikidata powered apps at Wikimania 2025) By Lydia Pintscher
Tool of the week
- The Como GWAP (Q125832524) (games with a purpose) app has just released to the iOS App Store. Also playable in your Web Browser and Android (Google Play Store), the latest release includes Stats tracking and Leaderboards.
- A new tool SPARQL Recent Changes 2 has been released and enables mass-validation of entities in Wikidata based on their recent changes. This tool enables users to ensure that whole subgraphs are valid according to any given EntitySchema!
- WikiCrowd A tool for crowdsourced micro-edits on Wikimedia projects, letting users make quick contributions—like labeling images or answering simple questions—to improve data on Commons and Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Wikisource reader app was released. It utilizes the power of Wikidata.
- Paulina won one of this year's Coolest Tool Awards
Newest properties and property proposals to review
[edit]- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- rewards this type of work (kind of work for which an award is given)
- watercraft prefix (prefix applied to watercraft operated by different organisations)
- proposed entity type (what a proposed entity would be)
- Modern Shrine Ranking (Rank in the Modern system of ranked Shinto Shrines)
- Cyclocross24 rider ID (identifier for a cyclo-cross cyclist in the Cyclocross24 database)
- DuckDuckGo bang (Identifier for use of DuckDuckGo bang shortcut)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Database dei fondi musicali toscani ID, Deaf Movie Database person ID, Deaf Movie Database genre ID, Deaf Movie Database language ID, Deaf Movie Database country ID, MacPorts port, dvdcompare.net film ID, Encyclopedia of Indianapolis ID, Mobility Database ID, PCPartPicker product type ID, Library of Congress BIBFRAME Work ID, USB device ID, Rekhta Gujarati author ID, A Dictionary of Public Health entry ID, Yandex Books author ID, CoreTennis.net player ID, rada.info council ID, Athletics Podium person ID, CESAR title ID, Polski Petersburg encyclopedia ID (Russian version), Polish Taxpayer Identification Number, Berardi Arte artist ID, Swiss Films person ID, Swiss Films company ID, médiathèque de Sceaux catalog author ID, EASIN ID, A Dictionary of Genetics entry ID, A Dictionary of Sports Studies entry ID, Open Science Thesaurus ID, PCI vendor hexadecimal ID, NuGet package, LINDAS ID, Archaeological Cadastre (Greece) ID, Dictionary of American Family Names ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- museociclismo (id for museociclismo.it)
- identificativo Viario di Roma (identifier for a street in Rome)
- form factor (physical design paradigm this object is aligned with)
- implies (2) (axiom or conjecture that this axiom or conjecture implies)
- comes with (object which is included with this item, but is not part of it)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Letterboxd person ID, EU-ID, Viario di Roma ID, Kick username, Ene dilim ID, LTT Labs product ID, Concept ID in Arab Encyclopedia, La Fayette ID, Archivio Storico Ricordi partiture ID, United Methodist Church church ID, Record Group Number of National Archives Administration, Taiwan, Autostraddle topic ID, LGBTQ Nation tag ID, The Advocate tag ID, Xtra Magazine topic ID, Out tag ID, Queerty tag ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject They Were Not Witches, They Were Women - A Wikidata project preserving the stories of women accused as witches in Catalonia and Andorra (1419–1796).
- Showcase Items: Le Monde de Dory (Q9321426) - 2016 American animated film directed by Andrew Stanton
- Showcase Lexemes: Showcase lexemes: 消す (L8031) - Japanese verb (けす, kesu) meaning "to erase", "to turn off", or "to delete"
Development
- Mobile editing of statements: After focusing on the initial read-only version, we are now starting the work on the actual editing mode. You can follow along with the development on beta Wikidata.
- Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects:
- We are continuing to work on scalability issues around the number of changes from Wikidata that get sent to Wikipedia and co. As part of this we are continuing to look into how to decrease the number of changes in recent changes and watchlist on Wikipedia and co that don't actually affect an article there.
- GraphQL: We now have a prototype for GraphQL for Wikidata. We'd love to have your feedback about it, especially if you are a developer building applications with Wikidata's data. More details at GraphQL prototype
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country:
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-35
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Template authors can now use additional CSS properties, since the CSS sanitizer used by TemplateStyles was updated. For example: width: fit-content;ruby-align; relative units such aslh; and custom strings inlist-style-type. These improvements are a Community Wishlist wish. [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]- On large wikis, the default time period to display edits from, within the Special:RecentChanges page, has been changed from 7 days to 1 day. This is part of a performance improvement project. This should have no user-facing impact due to the quantity of edits on these wikis. [19]
- Administrators can now access the Special:BlockedExternalDomains page from the Special:CommunityConfiguration list page. This makes it easier to find. [20]
- Wikimedia Commons videos were not shown in the Videos tab in Google Search. The problem was investigated and reported to Google who have now fixed the issue. [21][22]
- One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Betawi (
wikt:bew:) [23]
View all 39 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Two fields of the recentchanges database table are being removed.
rc_newandrc_typeare being removed in favor ofrc_source. Queries to these older fields will start to fail starting this week and developers should userc_sourceinstead. These older fields were deprecated over 10 years ago and should not be in use. This is part of work to improve the performance and stability of queries to the recentchanges table. [24]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: support for new languages in MediaWiki and translatewiki; the start of the Language Onboarding and Development project to help support the growth of new and small wikis; updates on research projects; and more.
Meetings and events
- The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, August 29th at 15:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: the Avro keyboard developers from Wikimedia Bangladesh, who were recently awarded a national award for their contributions to this keyboard; and other topics.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 00:09, 26 August 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #695
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-08-25. Missed the previous one? See issue #694.
Discussions
- Closed request for adminship: Rubah Hitam Vukova
Events
- Upcoming events:
- Last chance to submit a session for WikidataCon 2025, the proposals deadline is imminent: head to this Call for Proposals page to submit an idea (drafts are welcome, they can be edited for a week after the deadline).
- New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series: fourth session, Introduction to Wikidata/EMCO, with a hands-on exercise creating a corporate body item and adding statements. Tuesday, September 2 – 9am PT / 12pm ET / 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST (Time zone converter). More info and Zoom links.
- OpenStreetMap X Wikidata Meetup #80 September 15 Time: 19:30-21:00 UTC+8 at Mozilla Community Space Taipei.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Press: Big Tech locks data away. Wikidata gives it back to the internet
- Blogs: Wikidata, instance of and subclass of through time (P31 & P279)
- Videos:
Tool of the week
- DerDieDas for Danish is a Wikidata-based game to practice Danish.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Wikimedia Deutschland is hiring a Senior Software Engineer (all genders) for the Wikibase Suite, starting October 1, 2025. The role is full-time or part-time, hybrid, and based in Berlin, focused on building open-source tools for linked open data.
- The Rapid Fund/Tech program, launched on July 24, 2025, provides up to $5,000 per project for coding tools that improve contributions to Wikimedia projects. Applications are reviewed every two months, with priority for impactful projects with clear, critical, and well-planned milestones.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- New General datatypes:
- parts per area (average number of parts per unit of area)
- display size (diagonal) (diagonal length of a rectangular electronic display)
- New External identifiers: Digital ROC people ID, Digital ROC event ID, T10 vendor ID string, Confederation of African Tennis player ID, Nextroom building ID, Concept ID in Arab Encyclopedia
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- game stat (metric to what extent a character in a role-playing game (or game with role-playing elements) possesses a specific natural, in-born characteristic common to all characters in the game)
- open meeting page URL (Information page describing open meetings, public meetings or town hall meetings)
- Islamic calligraphy (property that shows the Islamic calligraphy for a person)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Minfin company ID, Swiss Performing Arts vocabularies ID, Doha Dictionary root id, Sharjah Dictionary root id, Fantacalcio ID, GayCities ID, Washington Blade tag ID, IN Magazine tag ID, Teen Vogue tag ID, Diva tag ID, Attitude tag ID, Metro Source tag ID, PLUS tag ID, Wussy Magazine tag ID, Plant Ontology ID, Dimensions.com element ID, ISU-Skating.com-Identifikator
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples: Species of birds and their sounds (source)
- Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Art UK is an effort to document the various properties and volunteer (art-related) work on Wikidata.
- Showcase Items: SARS-CoV-2 (Q82069695) - virus that causes COVID-19
- Showcase Lexemes: øye (L303896) - Norwegian noun (ˈœʏə) meaning "organ of sight", "gaze or look", or "point of view"
Development
- Mobile editing of statements: We developed the first pieces of the edit mode as well as the ability to add statements. You can always follow along on beta Wikidata and find more information on the project page.
- Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are continuing to look into reducing the number of changes that show up on Wikipedia and co's Recent changes and Watchlist (phab:T401284)
- Federation: We looked at previous requests to add new endpoints to the list of SPARQL endpoints you can federate with and are cleaning up the process for getting new ones added. If you have one you'd like to write federated SPARQL queries to now is a good time to request them.
- Lexicographical data: You can now limit searches to Lexemes with a Lemma in a specific spelling variant with the haslemma keywords and to Lexemes with a specific language with the in language keyword. Examples: 1 2 (phab:T271776)
- GraphQL: We are evaluating feedback we received so far. If you are developing applications with Wikidata's data it'd be great if you could have a look at the current prototype and provide feedback.
- Dumps: We are experimenting to see how we can provide smaller subset dumps for Wikidata (phab:T400870)
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country:
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-36
[edit]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
- The Editing team wants to compile a list of templates, jargon terms, and policies used in edit summaries when a copyright violation is removed. This will help them identify the number of edits reverted due to copyright issues. We invite community members from the following Wikis to list these terms in T402601, or to share their list with Trizek_(WMF): Arabic Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. This project is open until September 9th 2025.
Updates for editors
- The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled for all Wikisources. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. The extension has three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the Deployment information page. [25]
- The lists in the footer of the editing interface, such as "Templates used on this page," will now be organized into columns when there is enough space. This enhancement minimizes scrolling when editing lengthy articles on Wikipedia. [26]
- On September 3rd, 2025 we will increase the sampling percentages of our group by toggle experiment of the
Special:RecentChanges,Special:Watchlist, andSpecial:RelatedChangespages on the Chinese, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias to 100 percent, allowing more editors to be part of this experiment. This adjustment is intended to ensure we have sufficient data to make informed decisions when evaluating the experiment results. [27][28] - Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading on English Wikipedia beginning the week of September 22. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. All non-English wikis received this change in June and July. The goal is to make it easier for users to find articles. Learn more.
View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- Wikifunctions now has a new capability called "lightweight enumeration types", an enumeration type is simply a fixed set of values that's in the type's definition. This capability makes it quick and easy to define such a type, and allows for the reuse of values that are already present in Wikidata. Here is a newsletter to learn more.
- The latest Readers Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: the formation of two new teams — Reader Growth and Reader Experience; insights into declining pageviews and account creations; highlights from the Wikimania Nairobi panel on improving the reading experience; upcoming experiments to engage new and existing readers; and more.
Meetings and events
- Spotlight on some Wikimania 2025 Sessions:
- Identifying AI-generated text by searching for ISBNs whose checksums fail: Mathias Schindler of WMDE shared tools to help communities search for these.
- La durabilité du mouvement Wikimedia face aux défis actuels et futurs: This session explored how Wikimedia can stay a trusted source of knowledge in the age of generative AI, information overload, and disinformation.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 20:46, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 16
[edit]


Upcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- Wikimedia Futures Lab: Apply before Sep 4 to join The Wikimedia Futures Lab, the in-person convening hosted on January 30 – February 1, 2026 in Frankfurt, Germany with participants from affiliates, contributors and external experts, to learn more about global trends and discuss potential movement-wide responses.
- Wikimania 2026: The theme and date for Wikimania 2026 have been decided: Liberté, Équité, Fiabilité (Freedom, Equity, Reliability). This edition will take place in Paris, from July 21 to July 25, 2026.
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
- Tech News: Some of the latest updates from Tech News week 34 and 35: An A/B test comparing two versions of the desktop donate link launched on testwiki and English Wikipedia for 0.1% of logged out users on the desktop site. The experiment will run for three weeks, ending on 12 September; Administrators can now access the Special:BlockedExternalDomains page from the Special:CommunityConfiguration list page. This makes it easier to find.
- Spread Wikilove, thank comments: A new improvement was added to the "Discussion tools" Beta feature; it is now possible to thank a user for their comment. This new feature is released for a 3-months long test.
- Community Wishlist: Template authors can now use additional CSS properties, since the CSS sanitizer used by TemplateStyles was updated. These improvements are a Community Wishlist wish.
- Wikipedia Mobile Apps: The Android app team has launched a new experiment in Italy that lets logged-out readers of Italian and English Wikipedia set their own donation reminders based on how often they read. This new approach responds to feedback from donors who say their motivation to give is tied to their reading habits. Instead of one-size-fits-all banners, readers can now choose reminders that fit their own usage, all while keeping their privacy intact.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events
- Wikipedia 25: To celebrate Wikipedia’s 25th birthday, the Wikimedia Foundation is adding several resources to the Wikipedia 25 Meta-Wiki hub.
- The Wikipedia Library: Collections from Dow Jones & Company, including the The Wall Street Journal, are now available to editors who are eligible for The Wikipedia Library.
- Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Affiliate recognition: The recognition of new User Groups, Chapters, and Thematic Organizations is paused until March 31, 2026.
- Board of Trustees selection: The voting period for the upcoming Board selection process will now open on October 8 and close October 23.
- New Board member: Wikimedia Foundation welcomes incoming Board Trustee Mayree Clark.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcac
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 18:13, 2 September 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #696
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-09-08. Missed the previous one? See issue #695.
Discussions
- New requests for permissions/Bot: IndExsBot - Task(s): Add Subject external identifier IndExs Exsiccata editor ID (P12371) to existing persons which are stated in the indexes of Exsiccatae database.
Events
- Past events:
- The WikiCite 2025 conference took place in Berne, Switzerland. It showcased WikiCite-related efforts across multiple wikis, disciplines, languages and countries. Most of it was both streamed and recorded, and the videos are currently being processed.
- The SEMANTICS 2025 conference took place in Vienna, Austria. Wikidata was mentioned in several keynotes and multiple other talks, posters and demos. The poster The Wikidata Query Service split and its impact on the scholarly graph zoomed in on the WDQS graph split.
- Upcoming events:
- Wikidata's 13th Birthday update: Funding applications are now closed, and the review process is underway. Applicants will be notified about the status of their submissions shortly. Are you planning to organize an event for the birthday but haven’t added it to the calendar yet? You can do so here: Wikidata:Thirteenth Birthday/Calendar 🎉
- The deadline for the Fall 2025 MediaWiki Users & Developers Conference CfP is extended until September 15th. The conference will be held on October 28 - 30th, and hosted by the TIB Leibniz Centre in Hanover, Germany.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: Past, Present and Future: a Wikimedian-in-Residence at the Biodiversity Heritage Library: TiagoLubiana reflects on their tenure at the BHL (Q172266), integrating the biodiversity collections into the Wikimedia projects. Read on Diff Blog
- Papers: Revealing hidden figures within natural history collections by empowering students with data sleuthing skills - Mabry et al.,(2025) Read here
- Videos:
- WiLES Wikidata Lexicographical Event Semantics modeling for natural languages (LD4 2025) YouTube
- Wikidata presentations and lightning talks (LD4 2025) YouTube
- On Wikiskills 1st Wikidata Training (Africa Wiki Women) YouTube
- (French) Lors de la 1ère formation Wikidata de Wikiskills YouTube
- Plugging into the WikiVerse: A Plug for a Wikidata Plug-in for ArchivesSpace YouTube
- Presentations:
- WikiCite 2025 presentation slidedecks can be found linked individually from the programme page or collectively on the Commons category.
- Wikidata / GLAM a few experiments... by Tim Sherratt showcasing reuse of Wikidata
Tool of the week
- Dacit is a listening-training app for cochlear implant users, built as part of a Master's Thesis for LMU Munich, it is powered by Wikidata-lexicographical data. Practice with 3 different excercises; identify (German-language) speakers, words and minimal pairs in your browser or as an android app
- LexToWiktonaryis a userscript that adds a Wiktionary links button on Wikidata Lexeme pages. It checks the lemmas of a lexeme, finds matching entries across different Wiktionary language editions, and shows them in a popup for quick access, with an option to expand to all Wiktionaries.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- The submission deadline for WikidataCon proposals has passed. Proposals that were submitted in time can still be edited until Sep 9. Proposals are hidden by default, but a page for sharing submissions is available and can facilitate coordination.
- Help Panel has been deployed on Wikidata Beta.🎉 This is a feature designed to guide contributors with quick links to relevant help pages. It currently appears in read mode across most pages and can be configured by admins. You can enable it in your Beta preferences under "Newcomer features". To help shape its future on Wikidata, we're inviting you to test it and share feedback on this talk page.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- New General datatypes: form factor (physical design paradigm this object is aligned with)
- New External identifiers: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms entry ID, The Oxford Essential Dictionary of the U.S. Military entry ID, Valais cantonal parliament ID, Arcanes ID, A Dictionary of Travel and Tourism entry ID, IGDB keyword ID, A Dictionary of Dentistry entry ID, Record Group Number of the National Archives Administration, National Development Council, Taiwan (R.O.C.), A Dictionary of Environment and Conservation entry ID, Doha Dictionary root id, Sharjah Dictionary root id, Saulchoir library ID, Observer tag, Hamburger Frauenbiografien ID, Ophardt Team Sportevent person ID, Museum of Fine Arts, Lyon object ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- Release date of film (The date when a film was first released to the public)
- part number 2 (identifier for a product or part designated by its manufacturer for inventory and ordering purposes)
- backwards compatible with (backwards compatible with the identified platform, software, or system)
- level or map of (video games that this video game level or map belongs to)
- resistance (Resistance of organisms (systems) to common adverserial influences like pests, pathogens, drugs, attack vectors, ...)
- GBFS feed URL (URL of a GBFS feed for the bicycle-sharing system)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: GENC 3-character code, L'Équipe athlete ID, Sancho el Sabio Foundation ID, British Authors author ID, Gamepadla ID, VGA Legacy MKIII ID, Noormags ID, qamus.inoor.ir entry ID, RSQV ID, Naturalis authority ID, Digital Library of the Community of Madrid ID, Trainspo model ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples: Number of hospital beds (Source)
- Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject ASBS 2025 - Aims to Engage the botanical community at the 2025 ASBS Conference to promote and enhance contributions to Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons.
- Showcase Lexemes: PC (L739282) - English noun (ˌpiːˈsiː) meaning "Personal Computer", "Printed Circuit", or "Peace Corps"
Development
- We're investigate options for improving information saved while publishing (phab:T403149)
- Mobile Editing Experience: we added multi-language support (T402630)
- Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are continuing to look into reducing the number of changes that show up on Wikipedia and co's Recent changes and Watchlist from edits to aliases (phab:T401288), more info
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!
The Signpost: 9 September 2025
[edit]- News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation loses a round in court
UK Online Safety Act remains undefeated.
- In the media: Congress probes, mayor whitewashed, AI stinks
Plus Wiki rules, Wiki Spin, and physicists get street cred!
- Disinformation report: A guide for Congress
The price of Liberty is eternal vigilance.
- Recent research: Minority-language Wikipedias, and Wikidata for botanists
And other new research findings.
- Technology report: A new way to read Wikisource
Tis true: there's magic in the web of it.
- Traffic report: Check out some new Weapons, weapon of choice
With the usual mix of war, death, super heroes, a belt, and Wednesday.
- Essay: The one question
It's an easy one.
Tech News: 2025-37
[edit]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
- The Editing team is working on a new check: Paste check. This check informs newcomers who paste text into Wikipedia that the content might not be accepted. This check is an effort to increase the likelihood that the new content people are adding to Wikipedia is aligned with the Movement's commitment to offering information under a free content license. This check will soon be tested at a few wikis. If your community is interested in this test, please tell us in this task, or contact the team.
Updates for editors
Later this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting" beta feature will be able to use a linting tool to see errors or other potential problems in wikitext in real time. See the help page for more information. [29]
When browsing a wiki (like en.wikipedia.org), the software responds in one of two ways: a desktop page, or a redirect to a mobile version on an "m" domain (likeen.m.wikipedia.org). Over the next three weeks, MediaWiki will start displaying the mobile version to mobile devices directly on the standard domain, without this redirect. This change does not affect existing m-dot URLs, or the "Desktop view" opt-out. Learn more. [30]- When an edit changes the categories of a page, the changes to the category membership counts are now happening asynchronously. This improves the speed of saving edits, especially when moving many pages to or from the same category, and reduces the risk of site outages, but it means that the counts can show outdated information for a few minutes. [31]
- Edits on Wikidata to qualifiers (properties and values) and references (properties and values) in a Wikidata item statement will now not add entries to the RecentChanges or Watchlist pages on all other Wikis. This is a temporary change to improve performance while other solutions are created. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [32][33]
- Japanese-language wikis have had a major upgrade to the way that search works. The new search should generally give more accurate and more relevant search results. [34]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 01:11, 9 September 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #697
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-09-15. Missed the previous one? See issue #696.
Discussions
- Project Chat: Multiple items linked to single categories, redux
Events
- Upcoming events:
- The New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series introduces participants to Wikidata/EMCO. The session guides attendees through creating a project and project page, followed by an open working hour for creating and editing in Wikidata and asking questions. Join on Tuesday, September 16th at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST. More details and Zoom links are on the project page.
- Wikidata Lab XLVI: Wikidata and semantic memory (in English). On September 18th, at 17UTC. Live on Youtube.
- Virtual course: Wikidata and public domain (in Spanish). On September 25th start this online course until March 26, 2026. Registration open on this form.
- Govdirectory US office hour, 25 September
- Apply now: Scholarships for Wikimania 2026 in Paris! Deadline is October 31, 2025 (anywhere in the world). Notification of decisions will be sent in January 2026.
- Notifications for Wikidata Thirteenth Birthday microgrant applications are currently being sent out in batches. If you are planning to run an event but have not yet added your event to the calendar, please do so here: Wikidata:Thirteenth_Birthday/Calendar
- WikidataCon 2025 proposal reviews are about to end. We are currently building an initial programme and will soon inform Speakers before publishing a first Schedule!
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: GLAM Newsletter: Biodiversity Heritage Library update, harvesting Wikidata identifiers and improving the BHL2Wiki Tool - Read the article
- Videos:
- EduWiki Conference - Using AI on Wikipedia and Wikidata Editing for Health Education
- Using Duplicity: Link Wikipedia articles to Wikidata Items
- How to Get the Used Language in WIKIDATA/SPARQL with [AUTO_LANGUAGE Parameter
- (Spanish) Let's improve information about Carnival on Wikidata
- Wikidata Lab XLVI: Wikidata and Semantic Memory, don't miss the workshop! (scheduled: 18.09.25, 1700 UTC) - YouTube
- WikiCite 2025 Presentations:
- Extracting citation relations from legacy publications, by David Lindeman - watch on Commons
- A proposal for managing personal collections in Wikidata, by Tania Maio - watch on Commons
Tool of the week
- Paulina is a Wikidata-based tool for the GLAM community that facilitates searching for authors and works, helps identify their copyright status in different countries, and provides access to works when available.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Help us test the new Help Panel feature, now enabled on Wikidata Beta
- The Wikimedia Foundation launched a new team, the Wikidata Platform Team, to lead development and maintenance of query services, aiming for stable, scalable data access in collaboration with WMDE and the community.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- New General datatypes:
- open meeting page URL (information page describing open meetings, public meetings or town hall meetings)
- LSF rating (Indonesia film classification administered by the Film Censorship Board)
- designed for handedness (hand(s) that this object is intended to be used with)
- New External identifiers: Personnel de l'administration préfectorale depuis 1945 ID, La Fayette ID, Harper's tag, TechnoMusicWorld artist ID, TechnoMusicWorld track ID, Serbian settlement ID, setlist.fm festival ID, ScholarGPS scholar ID, ScholarGPS institution ID, ScholarGPS field and discipline ID, ScholarGPS specialty ID, The Digital Ark person ID, MHOBT ID, Gamepadla ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- NRK topic ID ()
- result of addition (mathematical result obtained by adding two or more numbers or quantities together)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: OpenStreetMap key, Meetup.com Event ID, Biological Imaging Methods Ontology ID, Anne Frank House persond ID, PortableApps ID, Identifiant Maitron d'une commune, National Library Board Singapore ID (new scheme), NWO Project ID, OpenITI Author URI, DisplaySpecifications.com model ID, 网易云音乐专辑编号, PnP vendor ID, PnP device ID, Mellopedia
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Newest WikiProjects: University of Toronto Libraries EMCO, Jewish Studies and Heritage
- Showcase Items: Diary of Anne Frank (Q6911) - famous diary of a 13-year old Dutch Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis to escape the Holocaust
- Showcase Lexemes:blow (L4476) - English verb (bloʊ) meaning "to push air", "to explode", or "to perform fellatio"
Development
- Scalability/sustainability: We have rolled out changes to minimize the number of entries stored in the recent changes tables of Wikipedia and co that are edits coming from Wikidata. This also reduces the number of changes from Wikidata you will see showing up in Recent changes and watchlist on Wikipedia and co further.
- MCP for Wikidata: We are getting it ready for first testing.
- Dumps: We are continuing to investigate how to provide smaller/subset dumps.
- Mobile statement editing: We are continuing the work on making statements editable, especially qualifiers and multiple references.
- Anubis (Q134301689) anti-bot software was deployed on Wikibase Cloud and XTools to prevent site outages caused by bot traffic. (T399851, T400229)
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country: Japan
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-38
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- References lists that are made using the
<references/>tag will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width. [35] - Starting in the week of October 6, on small wikis and medium wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use Event Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made for large wikis unless requested in Phabricator. This change is being made to make it easier for more people to use Event Registration, especially on wikis that are less likely to have policies related to the Event Organizer right. Learn more.
- Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including:
- for the
intitle:keyword: metacharacters for start-of-line (^) and end-of-line ($) anchors [36] - for both
intitle:andinsource:keywords: shorthand character classes for digits (\d), whitespace (\s), and word characters (\w); and escape codes for line feed (\r), newline (\n), tab (\t), and unicode (e.g.\uHHHH). [37]
- for the
- When you search for text that looks like an IP, the system will now show search results. It used to take you to the contributions for that IP instead of showing search results. [38]
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 24. This is planned at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests which happen twice a year. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that affected users who used the page-tabs to switch from wikitext editing of a section into the visualeditor. [39]
Updates for technical contributors
- The MediaWiki Interfaces team is redesigning the Wikimedia REST API Sandbox with Codex. If you have feedback on improvements for the API documentation or what makes developer experiences smooth (or frustrating), you’re invited to join an upcoming discovery interview, or leave feedback onwiki. Learn more.
- Edits to Wikidata aliases (an alternative name for an item or a property) will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [40]
- The new Unicode 17.0 version has been released. The datasets on Commons for the Module:Unicode data have been updated. Wikipedias that do not use the Commons datasets should either update their own data or switch to the Commons datasets.
- Users of the Wikimedia Enterprise Structured Contents endpoints can now access Parsed Tables. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of the Structured Contents initiative. Structured Contents output is freely available through the On-demand API, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services.
- A dataset of English Wikipedia biographical information from Wikimedia Enterprise has been published on Kaggle, for evaluation and research. This provides structured data from more than 1.5 million biographies, including birth and death dates, education, affiliations, careers, awards, and more (from a June 2024 snapshot).
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2026 in Paris, France, are open until October 31.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 17:03, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 17
[edit]
Upcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- Wikimania 2026: The scholarship application for Wikimania 2026 is open. Apply now by October 31.
- Wikipedia 25: Help us find inspiring stories to share during birthday celebrations by September 23.
- Wikimedia Research Showcase: "Readers and Readership Research" will be the featured theme for the next research showcase taking place on September 24 at 16:30 UTC.
- Update to banner and logo policies: Feedback is requested on proposed policy and documentation updates regarding the use of banners and logos for advocacy purposes.
- GLAM Wiki 2025: The registration for GLAM Wiki Conference is open until September 30.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org

- Better bot detection: How we are improving bot detection and replacing our CAPTCHA.
- Temporary Accounts: Temporary accounts are now deployed to almost all wikis except the last 11.
- User Info: This new feature displays data related to a user account when you tap or click on the "user avatar" icon button next to a username. It's meant to be useful for different users with extended rights as well as newcomers.
- Newsletter highlights: The latest Readers Newsletter is now available. It includes considerations about Wikipedia's declining pageviews in the recent years, how the Foundation and communities may work on addressing this together, and the formation of two new teams — Reader Growth and Reader Experience.
- Activity Tab Experiment: The Foundation launched an experiment testing a new Activity tab in the Wikipedia Android app to our beta testers. Instead of only showing editing activity, this tab also surfaces insights about reading and donation behavior.
- Search Suggestions: To make it easier for users to find articles, logged-out users on both desktop and mobile will see suggestions of articles for further reading on English Wikipedia beginning the week of September 22. All non-English wikis received this update in June and July.
- Paste Check: The Foundation is working on a new check: Paste check. This check informs newcomers who paste text into Wikipedia that the content might not be accepted to ensure it is aligned with the Movement's values. This check will soon be tested at a few wikis.
- CampaignEvents extension: The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled for all Wikisources. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the information page.
- Structured Task: The Add a Link Structured Task has been fully released at English Wikipedia. This release is an important step in making editing more accessible for new contributors, especially on mobile.
- Tech News: Read more updates from Tech News week 36 and 37.
- Wikifunctions: Wikifunctions is now available on 65 Wiktionaries and has a new capability to copy function calls from one Wikipedia to another.
- Multilingual Contributors: The Language and Product Localisation team is launching a CentralNotice campaign to attract multilingual contributors to specific Wikipedias. The campaign will feature regionally targeted banners to reach potential native speakers.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events
- Global Resources: Introducing the interim Global Resource Distribution Committee (GRDC).
- Funding the Movement: Key Takeaways, Trends, and Lessons from FY 2024-2025 Community Fund Grants.
- Open Indonesia: Reflections on Open Indonesia, an event in Bandung gathering communities dedicated to advancing open knowledge to build the country's Open Knowledge Roadmap.
- WikiWomen*: Reflections from the WikiWomen* Summit 2025.
- Gender & AI: Is Gendering AI Possible? Reflections from the 2025 Gendering AI Conference.
- Wikipedia 25: What one centenarian can teach us about 25 years of Wikipedia.
- Knowledge Equity Fund: Wikimedia Ghana User Group receives Knowledge Equity Fund Connected Grant.
- Wikimania 2025: ESEAP First Timers at Wikimania Nairobi.
- César do Paço Lawsuit: Update about a lawsuit in Portugal and the Foundation's appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.
- UK Online Safety Act: The Wikimedia Foundation will not appeal the UK High Court’s decision to dismiss our challenge to the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) Categorisation Regulations.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- August board meeting: Updates on board appointments and selection, CEO search, work to strengthen Wikipedia's approach to neutral point of view and updates on three pilots around more shared decision-making and shared accountability across the movement.
- New Endowment board members: Welcoming New Wikimedia Endowment Board Members, Kevin Bonebrake and Ike Kier.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcac
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 01:04, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #698
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-09-22. Missed the previous one? See issue #697.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- Exploring Seediq: A Journey through Translation and Linked Data Documentation 25 October .This event will showcase the Seediq communities’ translation of the OCLC white paper on Wikibase, followed by an overview of the full paper. It will conclude with an open discussion on the lessons learned during the translation project and broader reflections on linked data.
- Govdirectory US office hour, 25 September
- FREE virtual 1hr Wiki webinar focusing on plant biodiversity. Open to anyone wanting to improve their digital outreach skills by enriching Wikidata. Tuesday 14th of October at 3pm NZST. Register to get link.
- Wikidata’s 13th Birthday is just around the corner! Are you planning to host a celebration but haven’t added it to the calendar yet? Join the party! Thirty-nine (39) events are already scheduled, and yours can be too: Birthday Calendar. It’s also the perfect time to contribute a birthday present or message to this list. Gifts can be anything that celebrates Wikidata and its amazing community like a script you’ve written, a tool improvement, a visual, a poem... 🎉
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Videos: (French) Formation Wikidata 2 de WikiSkills By Africa Wiki Women
Tool of the week
- Duplicity This tool can pick a random article on a wiki without associated Wikidata item, and offer some possible matches on Wikidata, so you can add it to an existing item, or create a new one.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Call for Projects and Mentors for Outreachy Round 31! If you have some ideas for coding or non-coding (design, documentation, translation, outreach, research) projects, share them by Sept. 26, 2025, at 4 pm UTC
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- New General datatypes:
- number of ray tracing cores (number of ray tracing cores in a graphics processing unit)
- VRAM capacity (amount of dual-ported video RAM (VRAM) modules used by this device)
- has wireless capabilities (type of wireless connectivity this device has/supports)
- date filed (filing date for a document, e.g. a patent or court case)
- New External identifiers: Gamepadla ID, OpenStreetMap key, EU-ID, Roma road ID, LTT Labs product ID, Swiss Performing Arts Vocabularies ID, wikiHow article ID, GamesIndustry.biz tag ID, Dimensions.com element ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- image+display resolution (pixel resolution of images generated or captured by this item (camera, software, etc))
- firmware (firmware installed on this hardware)
- excluding work (work or narration for or in which this statement is <em>false</em>)
- has grammatical number (grammatical number used in this language)
- Day of Reisai (Annual Festival done by a Shinto Shrine)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: https://football.aek.com/, Météo-France place ID, Hex package, Maptons ID, BVPB catalog ID, dati.lnb.lv ID, The Needle Drop tag ID, AfterEllen tag ID, OpenStreetMap relation type, Them.us tag ID, DOAB book ID, identifiant Liste unique des décorés, Deník tag ID, The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture entry ID, qamus.inoor.ir root ID, Filmarks ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- A map of IEC 60320 power connectors - a cool SPARQL visualisation, by User:IagoQnsi
- 350 people who were married, then married the sibling of their previous spouse (source)
- Showcase Items: Northern Sami
(Q33947) - famoumost widely spoken of all Sámi languages
- Showcase Lexemes: Waage (L37547) – German noun (‘ˈvaːɡə’) meaning "scale (device for measuring mass)", "Libra constellation", or "equilibrium"
Development
- Mobile statement editing: We are working more on the editing state of statements, especially qualifiers and progress indicators during saving (phab:T402620)
- Dumps: We fixed an issue with some of the dumps (phab:T403882) and are improving the monitoring
- GraphQL: We are working on making it easier to get labels of linked entities in an API response, starting with Items (phab:T404692)
- Sustainability: We have now rolled out improvements to the tracking of Wikidata changes on the other Wikimedia projects on all projects in order to decrease the size of the database table that tracks these changes (phab:T401288)
- Bug fixes: Tacsipacsi submitted fixes for two issues in error messages on Special:SetSiteLink. Thank you! (phab:T404499, phab:T404500)
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country: United States of America
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-39
[edit]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
- On September 24th at 15:00 UTC, all Wikimedia sites users will experience a brief read-only period due to a scheduled datacenter server switchover. The Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team will redirect all traffic from one primary server to its backup. You can listen to the switchover using the "Listen to Wikipedia" tool, where you will hear edits stop for a few minutes during the read-only phase, then resume. This twice-yearly datacenter server switchover ensures reliability by testing the backup datacenter, so that our sites can stay online even if the primary datacenter fails. You can read more about the process on the Diff blog.
Updates for editors
- Editors of 60 more Wiktionaries will soon be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them into their pages. A function takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, like adding numbers, converting miles to meters, calculating elapsed time, or declining a word into a case. They will join the other 65 Wiktionary language editions, which already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, plans are in place to expand to more Wiktionaries and the Incubator.
- A new parser function has been added:
{{#contentmodel}}. Template editors and admins can use it to get the localized or canonical name of the content model of a specific page. The function makes it easier to create and edit system messages, such as MediaWiki:editinginterface, even when you switch types of pages, like wiki, JavaScript, CSS or JSON page. [41] - Adding or editing a
DISPLAYTITLEfor an article using VisualEditor will no longer be broken. Editors who use VisualEditor mode to modify the{{DISPLAYTITLE}}would no longer have the literal text "DISPLAYTITLE" or its localized variant added to their articles. A list of pages that may have been affected and might need cleanup is documented in this ticket. - Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- Wikifunctions users can now import many essential facts involving geo-coordinates, quantities and time values from Wikidata. This is made possible by the creation of Wikifunctions types for these values, which makes them available for use by functions in Wikifunctions. Learn more about how this works in this video and Wikifunctions' August 1 newsletter (for quantities) and August 22 newsletter (for geo-coordinates).
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 22:52, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #699
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-09-29. Missed the previous one? See issue #698.
Discussions
- Open request for adminship: Empat Tilda: RfP scheduled to end after 3 October 2025 18:30 (UTC)
Events
- Upcoming events:
- New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series! Mark your calendars for our first session of our WikiProject Personal Pronouns event series, which will provide a high-level overview of WikiProject Personal Pronouns' goals, past work, and implementation plans. The session will also serve as a practical orientation to the implementation work for this project, ending with a demonstration of the workflow to be used in subsequent sessions. No previous Wikidata experience is needed to participate. This session will be recorded. Slides and recordings will be found on the project page after the session. Join us Tuesday, September 30th at 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST (Time zone converter). Please see our project page for more information and Zoom links.
- Wikidata are hosting a webinar on the Embedding Project: AI/ML Project Manager Philippe Saadé (WMDE) will introduce the project, including early experiences, wins and pitfalls, and open up the floor to your questions.
- Takes place 1600 - 1700 UTC, October 9, 2025.
- Embedding Project? Read about it here
- Want to join the Webinar? Please register here with your Wiki account
- 🎁 Countdown to 13!🎁 Wikidata's 13th Birthday is fast approaching and this week marks the start of the first Birthday Events! For a full rundown of all Birthday Events, please see the Birthday Calendar.
Starting the month of celebrations this week include: Wali Wikimedians Community, Latin America in Wikidata 2025, Hausa Wikipedians User Group and the language communities of Zambia, Twi and Kinyarwanda and regional celebrations from the Northern Nigerian, Dagbani and Ghanaians Wikimedian communities!
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- Enhanced Search for Wikibase
- Suggesting new relations in ROR from Wikidata By Charles Tapley Hoyt
- Papers:
- Protoknowledge Shapes Behaviour of LLMs: Text-to-SPARQL
- Wikidata Workflows: with ORCiD and OpenRefine - a Binghamton University Case Study By Sasha Frizzell - This lightning talk outlines Binghamton University Libraries’ pilot project to convert ORCID faculty data into Wikidata entries, showcasing linked data integration, data cleaning workflows, and strategies for enhancing institutional research visibility.
- Videos:
Tool of the week
- senseItemLabel is a UserScript by User:Jon Harald Søby The Script Lets you add the lemma for the current lexeme as a label to items added to the lexeme's senses as item for this sense (P5137) in one click.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- If you've noticed a performance issue with Magnus Manske's MixMatch gagdet, User:IagoQnsi has suggested a fix, the comment and code is available from Talk:Magnus Manske#MixMatch performance
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- Lemmy instance URL (the Lemmy instance of or about the subject)
- part number (identifier for a product or part designated by its manufacturer for inventory and ordering purposes)
- Newest External identifiers: Noormags ID, PnP device ID, PnP vendor ID, GENC 3-character code, Sancho el Sabio Foundation ID, British Authors author ID, VGA Legacy MKIII graphics card ID, qamus.inoor.ir entry ID, PortableApps ID, Chinese Engineers Relational Database ID, DisplaySpecifications.com model ID, Vix Vocal work id, Naturalis author ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- maximum supported display resolution (maximum pixel resolution that this computing hardware or technological standard supports)
- cookie policy (cookie policy of this website, software or digital product)
- yayasan ID (identifier for Indonesian foundation on vervalyayasan.data.kemdikbud.go.id)
- luminance (measured quantity of photometric brightness (luminous intensity per area))
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Filmarks ID, Medicin.dk disorder ID, Interaktionsdatabasen ID, A Dictionary of Food and Nutrition entry ID, OpenStreetMap role, TechPowerUp CPU Specs Database ID, GPUZoo ID, CPU-World ID, Adebiportal author, RIA Novosti person ID, The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion entry ID, Qalamger.kz author ID, Does the Dog Die? media ID, Sultanlar Ligi player ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- WikiProject Highlights:
- Piano Rolls - has bee greatly expanded and subpages added.
- Open Topstukken Maastricht University and Radboud University - A user manual for contributing.
- Showcase Items: Because You Left
(Q1059888) - episode of Lost (S5 E1)
- Showcase Lexemes:Knoten (L298686) - German noun (ˈknoːtn̩) meaning "tied fastening of ropes/strings", "speed unit in aviation/shipping", or "tangled clump of hair"
Development
- Mobile statement editing: We continue to make good progress, which you can check out on beta Wikidata. Specifically it is now possible to
- save changes to edits made to string Properties on statements (without losing qualifier / reference information) (phab:T401405)
- change the rank of statements (phab:T402436)
- Query Service UI: jhsoby submitted patches for two issues related to the example dialog. Thank you! (phab:T405747, phab:T405720)
- Lexicographical data: 1F616EMO submitted a patch to fix a localization issue on the Lexeme page. Thank you! (phab:T322526)
- Dumps: We fixed issues with the n-triples and truthy dumps generation and set up a dashboard for monitoring (phab:T403882)
- GraphQL: We are continuing to make labels of linked entities accessible in the GraphQL endpoint (phab:T404692)
- Wikidata in Wikipedia and co: We are continuing to work on improvements to how we technically track the use of Wikidata in the other Wikimedia projects in order to reduce the amount of changes from Wikidata in the watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and co.
- Wikidata Query Service GUI: We deployed two fixes by User:Jon Harald Søby, thank you! (phab:T405720, phab:T405747)
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country: Bulgaria
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-40
[edit]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
- A major software upgrade has been made to Phabricator. The update introduces performance improvements, a refreshed search interface, enhancements to Maniphest task search, updates to user profile pages and project workboards, new Herald automation features, as well as general text input, mobile experience improvements and more. [42]
Updates for editors
- The Community Tech team will release the new Community Wishlist extension on October 1, that will improve the way wishes will be submitted. The new extension will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances. The old system will be retired. There will be a brief period of downtime while the extension is deployed and wishes are migrated to the new system. You can read more about this in the latest update or you can consult the current documentation on MediaWiki.
- As announced on Diff blog, the production trial of the hCaptcha service for bot detection has begun. The trial is currently using hCaptcha to protect account creation on Chinese, Persian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish Wikipedias, where it will replace our existing CAPTCHA (FancyCaptcha). The goal with the trial is to better block bots while also improving usability and accessibility for users who encounter CAPTCHA challenges.
- The CampaignEvents extension has been deployed to Wikimedia Commons. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. On Commons, anyone who is a registered user can use it as an event participant. To use it as an organizer, someone needs to have the event organizer right.
- Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to German Wikipedia. You can test the feature on testwiki or on betawiki as well. Please share your thoughts on using templates in sub-references or volunteer to become a pilot wiki.
- On wikis using the Mentorship system, communities can now opt experienced editors out of Mentorship through Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship. Within this setting, communities may define thresholds, based on edit count and account age, to decide when an editor is considered experienced enough to no longer receive Mentorship. [43]
- The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Tone check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Tone language model for the following languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian and Latvian. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on October 3, which will be the start date of the test.
- The rollout of multiblocks had the side effect that non-active block logs may have been shown on Special:Contributions and on blocked users' user and user_talk pages. This issue will be fully resolved in a few days. As part of the fix, messages prefixed with
sp-contributions-blocked-noticewill be removed and replaced with those prefixed withblocked-notice-logextractin a few weeks. Please help translate the new messages and update any local overrides if needed. - There was a bug with links added using visual editor if they included characters such as
[ ] |after the fragment identifier (#). They were not encoded properly creating an incorrect link. This has been fixed. [44] - One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (
q:ms:) [45]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks. [46]
Updates for technical contributors
- Later this week, editors using Lua modules will be able to use the
mw.title.newBatchfunction to look up the existence of up to 25 pages at once, in a way that only increases the expensive function count once. - A new Unsupported Tools Working Group has been formed as part of ongoing efforts to collectively determine technical work priorities, similar to the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). The working group will help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. For the first cycle, the group will be prioritizing an unsupported Wikimedia Commons tool.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 20:48, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 18
[edit]
Upcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- CEE Meeting: Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2025 will be held in Thessaloniki, Greece, September 26-28.
- Learning Clinic: The next Let's Connect Learning Clinic will talk about "Mastering the Capacity Exchange (CapX) Tool" and will take place on September 30 at 13:00 UTC.
- Big Fat Brussels Meeting: The tenth in-person gathering of Wikimedians enthusiastic in free knowledge advocacy, Big Fat Brussels Meeting, will take place on October 3-4.
- Wikimedia Research Showcase: "Celebrating 13 Years: Wikidata’s Role in Learning and Culture" will be the featured theme for the next research showcase taking place on October 15 at 16:30 UTC.
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
- Tech News: Read updates from Tech News week 38 and 39.
- Wikifunctions: Wikifunctions is now available on 123 Wiktionary languages and have more than 3,000 functions available.
- Collaborative Contributions: A new feature, called Collaborative Contributions, allows editors to see the impact of their collaborative editing activities. It was live demoed earlier and you can follow instructions to test it out.
- CampaignEvents extension: The CampaignEvents extension was deployed to Wikimedia Commons and all Wikisources -80+ wikis.
- Event registration: Starting the week of October 6, on small and medium wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use Event Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made for large wikis unless requested in Phabricator. More information on Meta.
- Search Suggestions: Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users now see suggestions of articles for further reading on all Wikipedias, in order to make it easier for users to find articles.
- Datacenter server switchover: A successful datacenter server switchover backup test took place on September 24.
- Activity Tab now on Android: Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events
- Banners & Logos policies: The Wikimedia Foundation has published draft proposals for policies related to the use of banners and logo changes for advocacy purposes.
- Wikipedia 25: Wikimedia Foundation is creating playful, celebratory interventions on the Wikipedia portal page, the Wikipedia app, and potentially any interested Wikipedias to celebrate Wikipedia’s 25th birthday. Please share your inputs and add your username on the Talk page if you think your community would be interested in participating.
- Regional Funds: Welcoming new ESEAP Regional Funds Committee Members.
- Peer Learning: Reflections from Let’s Connect at Wikimania Nairobi 2025.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Wikimedia Georgia: Wikimedia Georgia becomes the newest Wikimedia Chapter.
Foundation statements
- Knowledge integrity: The Wikimedia Foundation launches a new series that explores how Wikipedia can inspire new standards of knowledge integrity for our times.
Highlights from other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
- National award: Wikipedian and current chair of Wikimedia Deutschland, Alice Wiegand, receives the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for her voluntary commitment to Wikipedia and the global Wikimedia movement.
- Supporting admins and patrollers: Motivating, training and networking – Wikimedia Ukraine’s plan to support Wikipedia admins and patrollers.
- Wikimania roundup: A roundup of Wikimania and this year's Wikimedians of the year by the French-speaking community's newsletter, Regards sur l’actualité du mouvement Wikimédia (Views on Wikimedia movement's events, or RAW).
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcac
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 16:26, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
The Signpost: 2 October 2025
[edit]- News and notes: Larry Sanger returns with "Nine Theses on Wikipedia"; WMF publishes transparency report
This time "not merely negative".
- In the media: Extraordinary eruption of "EVIL" explained
Wickedpedia wrangles post-truth politics.
- Disinformation report: Emails from a paid editing client
Unexpected news!
- Discussion report: Sourcing, conduct, policy and LLMs: another 1,339 threads analyzed
Fifty hot topics from fourteen noticeboards.
- Community view: The pressing questions of the modern WWW, as seen from the Village Pump
Policy, politics, icons, captchas, and LLMs.
- Recent research: Is Wikipedia a merchant of (non-)doubt for glyphosate?; eight projects awarded Wikimedia Research Fund grants
And other recent publications.
- Opinion: Some disputes aren't worth it
When to walk away.
- Obituary: Michael Q. Schmidt
Rest in peace.
- Traffic report: Death, hear me call your name
Celebrities, deaths and software.
- Comix: A grand spectacle
All invited!
Wikidata weekly summary #700
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-10-06. Missed the previous one? See issue #699.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- WikidataCon 2025 - The first version of the conference schedule has been released! See the Event page for links to the schedule (and to register if you haven't already).
- 13th Birthday Events - check the calendar to see which Birthday events are happening this week!
- Webinar: Embedding Project - join us this week, October 9 1600 ~ 1700 UTC, to hear a presentation and then pose your questions regarding the Embedding Project
- The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 18:00 CEST, 15th October 2025 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 events:
- Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2025 - Learning Day (September 25, at the Goethe Institut in Thessaloniki): the main topic was Wikidata and libraries; the program and the materials of the hands-on session are available in the Meta page, the slides of the presentations are available in the Commons category
- Convegno NILDE (October 2-3, University of Genoa; website): in the first session, regarding Il futuro dei cataloghi [The future of the catalogs], many presentations (in Italian) have mentioned the use of Wikidata in collective library catalogs; the proceedings of the conference (in Italian) will be published in open access in early 2026:
- Lianna D'Amato and Emanuela Secinaro, Cobis LOD: integrare e aumentare i cataloghi eterogenei delle biblioteche specialistiche [Cobis LOD: Integrating and Enhancing the Heterogeneous Catalogs of Specialized Libraries] (slides)
- Stefano Bargioni, La catalogazione per entità, esperienze pratiche della rete URBE con Parsifal [Entity cataloging: practical experiences of the URBE network with Parsifal] (slides; Wikidata project page)
- Elena Ravelli e Camillo Pellizzari, Authority file di SBN e Wikidata: un esempio di interoperabilità e riutilizzo dei dati [SBN Authority File and Wikidata: An Example of Data Interoperability and Reuse] (slides; Wikidata project page)
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: Diff: Building Wikidatacapacity in East Africa - Wikimedia Deutschland’s 2025 outreach initiative expanded Wikidata capacity in East Africa by training nearly 100 local Wikimedians across 13 countries, and fostering a new network of regional Wikidata champions
- Press: A milestone for open AI: The Wikidata Embedding Project goes live, read also in Deutsch / TheVerge and TechCrunch blogs.
- Videos:
- Africa Wiki Women - Wikidata Birthday Launch Celebration 2025
- SAT - Wikidata - OSM - länkade data By Magnus Sälgö
- Roman Provinces Project (RPP) WikiDataTraining (add WMC image)
- Wikidata and public domain - Clase 1 (Spanish) By Wikimedistas de Uruguay
- Open Tool Registries: Resolving the Directory Paradox with Wikidata - Livestream (today!) Oct 6, 16:00 - 17:00 CEST. (Maybe in German but description is English)
Tool of the week
- Script newentity.js is a UserScript by GZWDer it helps to generates new items (including lexemes) from the given JSON object.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- The Wikidata Team at Wikimedia Deutschland would like to talk to developers who use Wikidata’s data dumps, or have tried using them but ran into challenges. Your feedback will help us make data dumps easier and more reliable to use. If you’re open to chatting, we’ll schedule a 60-minute user interview. As a thank-you for your time, you’ll be eligible for compensation. Sign up here.
- For anyone interested in open and interoperable data, the DCMI 2025 Conference might be interesting. More information and registration here.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- calligraphy (calligraphy of this person)
- cookie policy URL (cookie policy of this website, software or digital product)
- Newest External identifiers: TechnoMusicWorld release ID, Biblioteca Digital de la Comunidad de Madrid ID, Trainspo model ID, AGORHA UUID, Biological Imaging Methods Ontology ID, Anne Frank House person ID, Maitron municipality ID, National Library Board Singapore ID, Euploos Project ID, SpaceReference.org celestial object ID, Hex package
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- formally denounced by (person or organization which has publicly issued or enacted a denunciation of this item)
- code of conduct (URL of a resource that contains the Code of Conduct of a project or organization)
- award judge (judges for an award)
- start and end work (work in which this statement begins to be valid)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Organ Index ID, BLGBL ID, American Kennel Club ID, CRT Database model ID, Jeune Afrique country ID, Vocabulary.com word ID, Newegg item ID, Catalogue of sundials ID, BeWeb historical or artistic asset ID, PriceRunner product ID, SofaScore sports team ID, FootballFakts.ru football match ID, Kicker sports match ID, BDFutbol match ID, Foot Mercato players ID, Meetup.com Event ID, Mapillary username, Soccerway player ID 2025
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Showcase Items: Kwame Nkrumah (Q8620) - Ghanaian pan-Africanist and the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana (1909-1972)
- Showcase Lexemes: delve (L22859) – English verb (/dɛlv/) meaning "to investigate thoroughly", "to dig physically", or "to discuss in detail
Development
- The
{{USERLANGUAGE}}magic word is now enabled on Wikidata and Test Wikidata. It can be used to display templates in the user interface language, replacing the previous{{int:lang}}hack. (phab:T405830)
GraphQL: We have continued working on the functionality that provides labels of linked entities
- Wikidata vector embedding and MCP: We have released the vector embedding and MCP
- Wikidata integration in Wikipedia and co:
- We are continuing the rollout of improvements to ow we track Wikidata changes in Wikipedia's watchlist and recent changes in order to reduce the size of the database table and reduce the noise on editors' watchlists. (phab:T401288, phab:T401290)
- We are working on some improvements to the Databox module and template (phab:T400322)
- Mobile statement editing:
- We improved the display of qualifiers and made it possible to add qualifiers (editing will still come) as well as the value type (value/some value/no value) (phab:T404991, phab:T404956, phab:T402431, phab:T403246)
- We are working on adding editing support for more datatypes (tabular data and geoshape) (phab:T403973)
- We are working on making it possible to edit references (phab:T402433)
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country: North Carolina
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-41
[edit]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
- Paste Check is a new Edit Check feature to help avoid and fight copyright violations. When editors paste text into an article, Paste Check prompts them to confirm the origin and licensing of the content. Starting Wednesday, 8 October, 22 wikis will test Paste Check. Paste Check will help new volunteers understand and follow the policies and guidelines necessary to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia projects.
Updates for editors
- Mobile devices will receive mobile articles directly on the standard domain (like
en.wikipedia.org), instead of via a redirect to an "m" domain (likeen.m.wikipedia.org). This change improves performance. This week it will be enabled on Wikipedias. The existing mobile URLs and the "Desktop view" opt-out remain available. Learn more. [47] - New date filters,
creationdate:andlasteditdate:, are now available in the wiki search engine. This allows users to filter search results by a page's first or last revision date. The filters support comparison operators (e.g.>2024) and relative dates (e.g.today-1d), making it easier to find recently updated content or pages within specific age ranges. [48] - Wikifunctions now supports rich text in embedded calls across the 150 wikis where it's enabled. To showcase this, the team created a Latin declination table that Wiktionary editors can use to automatically generate noun forms, producing clear, formatted results — see an example output. If you need any help or have any feedback, please contact the Wikifunctions Team. [49]
- An edit link will now appear inside the categories box on article pages for logged in users, which will directly launch the VisualEditor category dialog. [50]
View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a problem downloading pdf files last week and that has been resolved. [51]
Updates for technical contributors
- The field
rev_sha1in the revision database table is being removed in favor ofcontent_sha1in the content database table. See the announcement for more information. - The Reader Experience team will roll out Dark Mode user interface on all Wikimedia sites on October 29, 2025. All anonymous users of Wikimedia sites will have the option to activate a color scheme that features light-colored text on a dark background. This is designed to provide a more comfortable reading experience, especially in low-light situations. Template authors and technical contributors are encouraged to learn how to make pages ready for Dark mode and address any compatibility issues found in templates in their wiki before the enablement. Please contact the Web team for questions or any support on this talk page before the enablement. [52]
- Starting on Monday, October 6, API endpoints under the
rest.phppath will be rerouted through a new internal API Gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board. [53]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 17:19, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #701
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-10-13. Missed the previous one? See issue #700.
Discussions
- Closed request for permissions/Bot: DifoolBot 7 - closed as approved.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- The next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session: Tuesday 14 Oct, 2025 from 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST (click for your Time zone) WikiProject Personal Pronouns members will lead three implementation sessions to improve the data modeling and ethics of personal pronoun representation in Wikidata based on newly-established best practices and Wikidata policy by remediating legacy statements with participants. No prior Wikidata experience required. More info on the Personal Pronouns event page.
- Upcoming LD4 Affinity Group sessions: Oct 14, Nov 25, Dec 9, at 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 4pm UTC / 6pm CEST.
- Wikidata + Wikibase Office Hour, join us in the Wikidata Telegram channel for our Quarterly roundup of what's been happening with Wikidata and Wikibase. If you can't make it, read the transcript later. Oct 15, 18:00 - 19:00 CEST (UTC 16:00 - 17:00).
- The Next Wikimedia Research Showcase is Wednesday, October 15, at 9:30 AM PT / 16:30 UTC. The theme is "Celebrating 13 Years: Wikidata’s Role in Learning and Culture". Watch via the YouTube stream.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- Developing an enhanced dataset for the history of Photography - National Archives researchers used Wikidata during a hackathon to link people and places from 19th-century photographic copyright records, enriching the archive’s metadata through linked open data.
- Viusalisations of Philosophers Influence in history - Take a look if you're interested in the history of philosophy, temporal graphs, or Wikidata!
- Videos:
- (Spanish) How to identify and fill information gaps in Wikidata Tabernacle and Integrality - In preparation for Latin America month on Wikidata, this tutorial will introduce the Tabernacle and Intergraality tools.
- Curationist: 2024 Metadata Learning and Unlearning Summit - Curationist researches and debates on transitioning to a Wikidata/Wikibase style of schema for its images of digital open-access collections.
- Data Ethics and Open Science - At 19:00 of the video, Lambert Heller discusses using Wikidata, and later Wikibase for the NFDI4 Culture Proposal.
- Linked Open Data Location Identifiers for Pacific Archaeology - Hardy & Leclerc at the CAA Australia conference show how Wikidata identifiers enrich Kuden and Pacific island databses.
- Presentations: Slides for the Wikidata: Embedding Project Webinar presentation
Tool of the week
- Wikidata Useful is a UserScript by Magnus Manske that adds a box of quick "add statement" links to the right side of the page. Entity and phylogeny types, countries (location and citizenship). Also, tries to load and display a blurb from en or de Wikipedia.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- The 2024 Wikidata Community Survey results are out! Read the full report on Commons: Wikidata Community Survey 2024 Report. If you have any thoughts or questions feel free to write on this discussion page: Wikidata talk:Usability and usefulness/2024-Community-Survey
- Wikimedia Deutschland is seeking feedback on the Mobile Editing Experience prototype, especially from contributors who edit right-to-left (RTL) languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu, etc. We’ve already received helpful input from various editors, but feedback from RTL language communities is still missing. Your perspective is important to ensure the design works well for everyone. Please go to Beta Wikidata (in mobile view) to test the prototype with the instructions below and share your feedback on this talk page.
- Add "businessperson" as an occupation
- Add a start date to the relationship with A$AP Rocky and provide a reference
- Find the place of birth (Saint Michael) and open that page
- Add the coordinate location for Saint Michael
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- luminance (measured quantity of photometric brightness (luminous intensity per area))
- excluding work (work or narration for or in which this statement is false)
- intervener (name of a third-party group or person allowed to participate in a legal case)
- Newest External identifiers: NWO project ID, Vocabulary.com word ID, Fnac person ID, African Music Library band ID, Spanish-German Dictionary ID, Encyclopedia of Marxism ID, Kulturenvanteri place ID, Encyclopædia Universalis index ID, ISFDB award category ID, CCCA Canadian Art Database work ID, CCCA Canadian Art Database creator ID, CPU-World ID, AMNH entity ID
- New External identifier property proposals to review: NZ Charities Register Number, Memorial Book of Social Democracy-ID, Biographical Dictionary of Almería identifier, Operabase (additional) ID, NLAI ID, SIK-ISEA group ID, Wikimini article ID, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain entry ID, The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts ID, Antique Chinese and Japanese Porcelain Dictionary and Glossary of Terms entry, Filmfriend Movie ID, Schulnummer Hessen, The Oxford Dictionary of Dance entry ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Showcase Items: Biodiversity Assessment of the Fishes of Saba Bank Atoll, Netherlands Antilles (Q15625490) - scholarly article by Williams, Jeffrey et al., 2010
- Showcase Lexemes: pukka (L339628) - English adjective (puh-kuh) that can mean "genuine", "highest class", or "complete"
Development
- Wikidata integration on Wikipedia and co:
- We finished work on adding an icon to changes coming from Wikidata in recent changes and watchlist (phab:T397258)
- We are finishing work on a new usage aspect for qualifiers and references so their use can be tracked separately. This will lead to less Wikidata changes showing up in recent changes and watchlist that don't actually affect the article (phab:T397258)
- We are continuing the work on improving Databox (phab:T400322)
- GraphQL: We are continuing to work on making labels of linked entities in the values of statements accessible (phab:T404692)
- Mobile statement editing: We have been working on showing the different value types (phab:T404684) and making references editable (phab:T405236)
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country:
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-42
[edit]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
- Last week, improvements to account security and two-factor authentication (2FA) features were enabled across all wikis. These changes include user interface improvements for Special:AccountSecurity, the support of multiple 2FA methods via authenticator apps and portable security keys (previously users could only enable one method), and a new Recovery Codes module which facilitates fewer account lockouts due to lost two-factor apps and devices. As part of the Account Security project, work is continuing through the rest of 2025 on further user experience improvements, and support for passkeys as an alternate second factor.
Updates for editors
- Another part of the Account security project is making 2FA generally available to all users. Along with editors with advanced privileges, such as administrators and bureaucrats, 40% of editors now have access to 2FA. You can check if you have access at Special:AccountSecurity. Instructions for activation are on the linked page. The plan is to continue increasing availability if it is determined that the user support capabilities are able to support global usage. [54]
- This week, users at wikis where talk page Usability Improvements are already available by default (everywhere except the 12 wikis listed in T379264) will gain the ability to Thank a comment directly from the talk page it appears on. Before this change, Thanking could only be done by visiting the revision history of the talk page. You can learn more about this change. [55]
- Users who have not verified their email address will soon be receiving monthly Notification reminders to do so. This is because users who have verified their email can more easily recover their account. These reminders will not be sent if the user is inactive or removes the unverified email from their account. [56][57]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a fix was made for an occasional error with saving translated paragraphs in the Content Translation tool, and the related error messages are now easier to see. [58]
Updates for technical contributors
- The Unsupported Tools Working Group has chosen Video2Commons as the first tool for its pilot cycle. The group will explore ways to improve and sustain the tool over the coming months. Learn more on Meta.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 18:56, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 19
[edit]
Upcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Selection: Announcement of the final ballot for the 2025 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election and more answers about the decision. Eligible voters can vote between October 8 – October 23.
- Wikipedia 25: Are you planning to organize events to celebrate Wikipedia's 25th birthday? The Wikimedia Foundation offers grants to support active Wikimedia groups in organizing short-term, low-cost projects to celebrate this milestone. Applications are open until November 1.
- WikiConference North America 2025: WikiConference North America will take place from October 16–19 in New York City, USA.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org

- Mobile Editing: Insights on mobile web editing on Wikipedia in 2025 are now available. This report highlights that ~95% of IP mobile users editing via wikitext open the editor but make no changes at all, a vast untapped potential. It also pinpoints where contributors most often drop off.
- Dark Mode: Dark Mode user interface will be rolled out on all Wikimedia sites on October 29. All anonymous users of Wikimedia sites will have the option to activate a color scheme that features light-colored text on a dark background. This is designed to provide a more comfortable reading experience, especially in low-light situations.
- Community wishlist extension: The new Community Wishlist extension has been released. This will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances.
- Paste Check: 22 Wikis are now testing a new Edit Check feature, Paste Check, to help avoid and fight copyright violations. When editors paste text into an article, Paste Check prompts them to confirm the origin and licensing of the content.
- Tone Check: The Wikimedia Foundation is working on a new check for newcomers: Tone check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits.
- Search Suggestions: Search Suggestions was deployed on English Wikipedia. Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users see suggestions of articles for further reading. The feature is available on both desktop and mobile.
- Unsupported Tools Working Group: A new Unsupported Tools Working Group has been formed to help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. The group has chosen Video2Commons as the first tool for its pilot cycle. The group will explore ways to improve and sustain the tool over the coming months.
- Tech News: Read updates from Tech News week 40 and 41 including about Sub-referencing – a new feature to re-use references with different details.
- Wikimedia Research Showcase: Don't miss the next Wikimedia Research Showcase, "Celebrating 13 Years: Wikidata's Role in Learning and Culture" taking place on October 15 at 16:30 UTC.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events
- Wikimania: Wikimania Nairobi has been featured in more than 100 stories across community platforms and international media outlets.
- Wikifunctions: Rich text is now available for embedded Wikifunctions calls across the 150 wikis where it’s enabled.
- WikiLearn: New Wikipedia online courses you can join to strengthen your Wikimedia editing skills.
- Human Rights: Making sure AI serves people and knowledge stays human: Wikimedia Foundation publishes a Human Rights Impact Assessment on the interaction of AI and machine learning with Wikimedia projects.
- Don't blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
- Digital Safety & Privacy: Frequently Asked Questions about Wikimedia Foundation's Legal Work.
- Transparency Report: Wikimedia Foundation publishes its Latest Transparency Report.
- Privacy Policy: The Wikimedia Foundation Privacy Policy is getting a minor update in preparation for Temporary Accounts.
- Learning Clinic: Join the next Let's Connect Learning Clinic on the topic of "Mastering the Capacity Exchange (CapX) Tool (Part 2)" taking place on October 20 at 17:00 UTC.
Foundation statements
- Knowledge integrity: Lessons from Wikipedia on the 3 building blocks of trustworthy information. This is part of the new series from the Wikimedia Foundation that explores how Wikipedia can inspire new standards of knowledge integrity for our times.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcac
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 14:50, 14 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #702
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-10-20. Missed the previous one? See issue #701.
Discussions
- Open request for adminship: Ternera - RfP scheduled to end after 23 October 2025 16:10 (UTC)
- New requests for permissions/Bot: Rebot - Task: Make changes in w.wiki/Fed9, such as changing depicts (P180) = herbarium (Q181916) to herbarium specimen (Q61726742).
Events
- Upcoming:
- WikidataCon 2025: Have you seen the Program yet?
Available now on Pretalx, check now and plan your schedule. - 🎉 Wikidata's 13th Birthday! Join us online, October 29 17:00 UTC (in your timezone) for presents, birthday messages, games...and a 📣surprise announcement (don't miss it!). 🎁 Add your own gifts to the list - anything that celebrates Wikidata and its amazing community... a script you’ve written, tool improvement, visual, poem...the sky's the limit.
Get the call link here: 13th Birthday Presents & Messages call. - The Dublin Core DCMI 2025 conference will take place in Barcelona, Oct 22-25.
- Presentation: Derivative Relationships and Bibliographic Families Among Creative Works: A Systematic Study of Their Application by the Wikidata Community from the FRBR and BIBFRAME Perspective
- Workshop by Jneubert on converting a complex web application into a large static site integrated with Wikidata
- Tutorial from Jelabra on shaping linked data and knowledge graphs.
- Wikidata Lab XLVII: Wiki Infographics, about a tool for data visualization. On October 21, 17 UTC.
- Wikimania 2026 Scholarships are open! Deadline is Friday, October 31st, 2025.
- Wikidata 13th birthday celebration in the Igbo Wikimedians User Group on October 24 and 25, 2025
- WikidataCon 2025: Have you seen the Program yet?
- Past:
- Missed the Q4 Wikidata+Wikibase office hour? You can catch up by reading the session log here: 2025-10-15 (Q4 2025)
- Wikidata 13th birthday celebration in the WUGN Abuja Network
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: (Finnish) From Wikidata to GEO (AI) optimization? by Johanna Janhonen
- Videos:
- Genealogical tree creation with Wikidata - by Thimira Sahan
- (Chinese) Wikidata 13 週年聚會暨 OpenRefine 工作坊 - by Wikidata Taiwan
- (Spanish) Taller en línea: Introducción a Wikidata y Wikibase by bibliotecasUNAM
- Wikimedia Research Showcase: Celebrating 13 Years: Wikidata’s Role in Learning and Culture
Tool of the week
- WikiLokal - The tool uses your device location to find Wikidata Items and Wikipedia articles within a 3 kilometre radius of your location. Created by User:Affandy Murad
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Project Chat:
- Help choose a name for the Abstract Wikipedia Project - combining WikiFunctions and Wikidata, a voting contest will run from Oct 20 - Nov 17, 2025.
- How can Wikidata be useful IRL if it has less data than Wikipedia? - an ongoing discussion touching on data scraping tools such as Harvest templates (github) and data consistency between Wikipedia and Wikidata in places such as Infoboxes.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes: organizational chart (image that displays the structure of this organization or government agency and the relationships and relative ranks of its parts and positions/jobs)
- Newest External identifiers: The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture entry ID, TechPowerUp CPU Specs Database ID, Catalogue of sundials ID, A Dictionary of Food and Nutrition entry ID, GPUZoo ID, NetEase Music album ID, Corporation Number in Canada, Biographical Dictionary of Almería identifier
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- image of outdoor seating (an image of the outdoor seating)
- Elo rating (rapid) (Current or historical Elo rating of a player in rapid time control chess games)
- ECHL profile ID (Id (number) used by ECHL on their website ehcl.com. URL takes a slug.)
- award category or rank ((qualifier of P166) specific category or rank of an award received, for awards with more than one category or rank)
- public key (cryptographic public key (some ASCII encoding of it))
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Schulnummer Sachsen, Team Austria ID, IFES Election Guide ID, BNB agent ID, Arte de la Argentina ID, Democratic Memory Bank ID, Kicker competition ID, Soccer365.net team ID, LUDAP, Genbu.net ID, ztgd.com, ISTAMPIE entity, MIT Press edition id
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples: List of Airports/Airstrips in Florida, USA
- Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject IDEA (translation tasks)
- WikiProject Highlights: Govdirectory South Korea was created.
- Showcase Items: Jagiellonian Library
(Q24101) - library of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków
- Showcase Lexemes: led (L762994) - Norwegian Nynorsk noun (leː) meaning "a joint between bones", "a movable body part", or "a generation"
Development
- Mobile statement editing: We made progress on support for more datatypes for editing.
- Wikidata integration in Wikipedia and co:
- We are investigating an issue with infoboxes using data from Wikidata after some recent changes to usage tracking (phab:T407684)
- We are working on more improvements to the Databox module
- Ontology federation: We are starting to work on making it possible for other Wikibase instances to use Wikidata's Items as values in their statements. This expands on previous work around federated properties.
- Dumps: We have worked on fixing issues with the dumps that were failing recently. They should now be generated again and we continue to look into the cause.
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country: Bahamas
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-43
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- To optimize how user data is stored in our databases, the saved preferences of users who haven't logged in for over five years and have fewer than 100 edits will be cleared. When those users return, default settings will apply. [59]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a broken link from the GlobalContributions interface message to the XTools GlobalContributions page which has now been fixed. [60]
Updates for technical contributors
- The work to reroute all traffic to API endpoints under the
rest.phproute through a common API gateway is now complete. If any issues are observed, please file a phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board. - Edits to Wikidata references or qualifiers will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. [61]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 19:32, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
The Signpost: 20 October 2025
[edit]- News and notes: Board shuffles, LLM blocks increase, IPs are going away
And the "Global Resource Distribution Committee" emerges.
- Special report: The election that isn't
Two shortlisted WMF Board candidates removed from the ballot.
- Interview: The BoT bump
Who was bumped and why?
- In the media: An incident at WikiConference North America; WMF reports AI-related traffic drop and explains Wikipedia to US conservatives
...while Musk prepares to launch "Grokipedia".
- Traffic report: One click after another
Serial-killer miniseries, deceased scientist, government shutdowns and Sandalwood hit "Kantara" crowd the tubes.
- Humour: Wikipedia pay rates
Don't get too excited before you read this.
Wikidata weekly summary #703
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-10-27. Missed the previous one? See issue #702.
Discussions
- Open request for adminship: Samoasambia - RfP scheduled to end after 27 October 2025 15:10 (UTC)
- Closed request for adminship: Ternera - Closed as successful by Ymblanter (talk) 19:24, 23 October 2025 (UTC)
Events
- Upcoming events:
- 🎉 Wikidata's 13th Birthday! Join us online, October 29 17:00 UTC (in your timezone) for presents, birthday messages, games...and a 📣surprise announcement (don't miss it!). 🎁 Add your own gifts to the list - anything that celebrates Wikidata and its amazing community... a script you’ve written, tool improvement, visual, poem...the sky's the limit. Get the call link here: 13th Birthday Presents & Messages call.
- WikidataCon 2025, October 31 - November 2, make sure to register at the event page.
- SPARQL workshop (in German): "From Zero to SPARQL. Eine Einführung in die Abfrage von Wissensgraphen (Schwerpunkt Wikidata)", 4 Nov 2025, 10-13, free and open to all, online via Zoom. more information and registration
- The scholarship deadline for Wikimania 2026 is approaching fast: 31st of October. Apply today if you want to attend on a scholarship.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Videos:
- (Spanish) Visualizaciones con el Servicio de Consultas de Wikidata
- (Spanish)¿Cómo identificar y completar vacíos de información en Wikidata? Tabernacle e integraality
- I Have 1000s of Items in Commons – What Do I Do Now?: Utilization Opportunities on Wikimedia Commons
- (Chinese [Trad]) 鏈結資料文獻翻譯賽德克語成果發表會 Exploring Seediq: A Journey through Translation and Linked Data Documentation
- Presentations: Will AI Erase Us Again? The Role of Wikimedia Communities. Talk by John Samuel, Queering Wikipedia 2025 (Slides)
Tool of the week
- Nemo is a new Wikidata query tool by User:Markus Krötzsch the tool can answer queries, extracts subsets, and perform analyses in ways that SPARQL alone can't. It also lets you combine Wikidata with other data sources.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- start work (work in which this statement about a fictional entity begins to be valid)
- end work (work in which this statement about a fictional entity ceases to be valid)
- image resolution (pixel resolution of images generated or captured by this item (camera, software, etc))
- display device resolution (physical pixel resolution of an electronic display)
- firmware (firmware installed on this hardware)
- Newest External identifiers: MultimediaWiki page ID, Letopis of MSU person ID, QCC Code, Jamaica company ID, SEC Number, Thailand company ID, gosfilmofond.ru ID, Cambodian company ID, English solicitors ID, Caixin company ID, Nebraska Authors author ID, Kick username, Archivio Storico Ricordi partiture ID, Fantacalcio ID, Plant Ontology ID, L'Équipe athlete ID, RSQV ID, NRK topic ID, OpenITI author ID, Mellopedia ID, Liste unique des décorés ID, Deník tag ID, Interaktionsdatabasen ID, Adebiportal author ID, Biographische Lexikon zur Geschichte der böhmischen Länder ID, ISLRN, Danskefilmstemmer.dk character ID, Audiovisual Identity Database page, RIA Novosti person ID, The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion entry ID, Qalamger.kz author ID, Does the Dog Die? media ID, Organ Index ID, American Kennel Club ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- Responsable de departamento ()
- Lämningsnummer ({{Q|Q10498015}} is a database of archaeological monuments in Sweden, maintained by {{Q|Q631844}}. Each item in the database has an identifier containing the year of registration and a number, e.g. ''L1970:5203''.)
- number of comments per day ()
- Commonwealth Sport country code (Commonwealth Sport country code)
- operating humidity (humidity at which a device operates)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: NCL Taiwan Periodical Literature Periodical ID, HarmonyOS NEXT APP ID, Rechtsinformationen des Bundes-ID, UNESCO Virtual Museum inventory ID, South Korean Business Registration Number, SetesdalWiki ID, Biography.com ID, Mackolik football manager ID, S1 No.1 Style actress ID, biserici.org church ID, RFC, Hudobné centrum IDs, FAIR Epigraphic Vocabularies ID, NVLI ID, SerBenfiquista.com players ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples: Map of pubs in Scotland (source)
- Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Kazakhstan
- Showcase Items:Lake Zanzibar
(Q22530539) - lake in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Canada
Development
- Wikidata in Wikipedia and co:
- We worked on making Wikidata change summaries in recent changes and watchlist on the other Wikimedia projects more understandable by adding icons. This will be rolled out soon (phab:T397258)
- We continued the improvements to the Databox module (phab:T400322, phab:T400318)
- Mobile statement editing: We continued working on editing references (phab:T405236) and did clean-ups for the beta release (phab:T405743)
- GraphQL: We continued work on including labels of linked entities in responses
- Dumps: We are looking into why dump generation is slower than it should be recently
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country: South Korea
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-44
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The Wikipedia iOS app has launched an A/B/C test of improvements made to the tabbed browsing feature for select regions and languages. The test, named “More dynamic tabs”, explores new tab experiences and includes “Did you know” and “Because you read” article recommendations. You can read more on the project page.
- Autoconfirmed users on small and medium wikis with the CampaignEvents extension can now use Event Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue of flashing colors when holding or pressing the arrow keys under the dark mode settings in Vector 2022 has been fixed. [62]
Updates for technical contributors
- The CampaignEvents extension will be deployed to all remaining wikis during the week of 17 November 2025. The extension currently includes three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. For this rollout, Invitation List will not be enabled on Wikifunctions and MediaWiki unless requested by those communities. Visit the deployment page to learn more.
- The SwaggerUI-based REST sandbox experience is now live on all wiki projects. The sandbox can be accessed through the Special:RestSandbox page. Please report any issues to the MediaWiki Interfaces team board, or join the discussion on the project launch page. [63]
- Transform endpoints with a trailing slash path in the MediaWiki REST API are now marked as deprecated. They will remain functional during this time, but removal is expected by the end of January 2026. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found and tested using the REST Sandbox. See the MediaWiki REST API Deprecation page for more detailed information about the API deprecation policies and procedures.
- A dedicated changelog now exists for the MediaWiki REST API. The changelog provides an overview of these changes, making it easier for developers to keep track of improvements and iterations. Announcements will also continue to flow through the standard communication channels, including Tech News and email distribution lists, but can now be more easily referenced from a central location. If you have feedback about the style, structure, or content of this changelog, please join the discussion.
- Administrators can delete the tracking category which was previously added by the JsonConfig extension, as it is no longer used. See the categories linked from Q130635582. It is OK if there are still pages listed in the category as that is just a caching issue, and they will be automatically cleared out the next time each page is edited. [64]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 19:28, 27 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 20
[edit]
Upcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees selection: Additional perspectives on current and future board selection processes.
- Global trends: We are seeing 8% declines in human page views on Wikipedia as some users don't directly visit Wikipedia to get information. Learn about this new user trend, how the Wikimedia Foundation anticipate these changes, and how you can help.
- WECUDI 2025: The second conference of Wikimedia, Education, and Digital Cultures will be held from October 29–31 in Mexico City, Mexico.
- GLAM Conference: Wiki GLAM Culture and Heritage Conference (WGCHC) will take place on 30 October – 1 November in Lisbon, Portugal.
- WikidataCon 2025: WikidataCon 2025 will take place online from October 31 – November 2.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Making it easier to say thanks: Users on most wikis will now have the ability to thank a comment directly from the talk page it appears on. Before this change, thanking could only be done by visiting the revision history of the talk page.
- Account security: Improvements to account security and two-factor authentication (2FA) features were enabled across all wikis. Another part of the project is making 2FA generally available to all users. Along with editors with advanced privileges, such as administrators and bureaucrats, 40% of editors now have access to 2FA. You can check if you have access at Special:AccountSecurity.
- Abstract Wikipedia: The naming contest for the new Wikimedia project, known until now as Abstract Wikipedia, is ongoing. Voting is now open until November 3.
- Tech News: Read updates from Tech News week 42 and 43 including the community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
- Wikimedia apps: The Wikipedia iOS App launched an A/B/C test of improvements to the Tabbed browsing feature into Beta for select regions & languages. Called “More dynamic tabs”, the experiment adds user-requested improvements and introduces article recommendations within the tabs overview, showing “Did you know” or “Because you read” content depending on how many tabs are open.
- CampaignEvents extension: Campaignevents extension will be deployed to all remaining wikis during the week of 17 November 2025. The extension currently includes three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. For this rollout, Invitation List will not be enabled on Wikifunctions and MediaWiki unless requested by those communities.
- Event registration tool: Autoconfirmed users on small and medium wikis with the extension can now use Event Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events
- Digital safety: Explore how you can help make Wikimedia safer by taking our new self-paced course, Safety for Young Wikimedians.
- Wikimedia Core Curriculum: The Wikimedia Foundation has developed seven online video learning modules covering the core English Wikipedia policies. You are invited to use, adapt, and translate the course.
- Advocacy: The Wikimedia Foundation has signed onto a statement that calls on governments and UN bodies to keep discussions about the future of internet governance accessible to non-government actors like industry and civil society. This statement is part of ongoing joint advocacy with affiliates to influence UN discussions about the future of internet governance such as the Global Digital Compact campaign and WSIS+20 deliberations.
- GLAM: The Wikimedia Foundation and several affiliates have signed onto the Open Heritage Statement, which supports galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM institutions) to have the legal rights they need to collect, preserve, and provide access to cultural heritage.
Foundation statements
- How Wikipedia works: Wikimedia Foundation responds to questions about how Wikipedia works.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcac
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 16:08, 28 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #704
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-11-03. Missed the previous one? See issue #703.
Discussions
- Closed request for adminship: Samoasambia
- New requests for permissions/Bot: langCodesBot - Task(s): Python script to automate the cleanup of deprecated language codes (e.g., kr) from Wikidata items. Delete or move labels, descriptions, and aliases based on comparisons with fallback and related languages. The script uses the Pywikibot framework to process each item and logs cases it skips due to data inconsistencies or ambiguity to a CSV file for manual review.
- New request for comments: Exhibition models by Hexatekin - This proposal focuses on standardizing models for art exhibitions. There is not a consistent data model used for art exhibitions that factors in parent-child relationships for traveling exhibitions, show series, or biennials, despite these being important and common types of events in international art history.
Events
- Past:
- Happy Birthday, Wikidata 🎉! We celebrated Wikidata’s 13th birthday with a community call to unveil presents and play games. Check out the replay of the event and the cool gifts people made: Wikidata:Thirteenth Birthday/Presents & messages
- WikidataCon: You can catch up on the recordings and slides in the program
- Wikidata Workshop at ISWC: You can catch up on the published papers on the website.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- Building an Internet for Everyone: Wikidata Recognized as a Digital Public Good
- Enriching Wikidata with AuthorityBox. An interview with Stefano Bargioni
- examples of AuthorityBox can be seen in PUSC catalogue, URBE catalogue (code), Keratsini-Drapetsona catalogue; cf. also Stefano Bargioni, From Authority Enrichment to AuthorityBox. Applying RDA in a Koha environment (2020)
- Exploring Nairobi and Building a Global Network: The Inspiring Wikimania@20 Experience
- Supercharging Cultural Institution Collections with Wikidata
- Videos:
- Por qué el conocimiento libre importa más que nunca | Gustavo Candela | Jornadas Anuales 2025
- Wikidata Ontology Course | A NotebookLM Deep Dive
- Odia Wikimedians User Group Celebration of the 13th Wikidata Birthday
- Como utilizar o OpenRefine para cadastrar artigos científicos na Wikidata? - WikiTutoriais #05
- Supercharging Cultural Institution Collections with Wikidata [October 2025]
- ¿Cómo es la ontología de Wikidata?
- Wikidata @13 celebration by the Tyap Wikimedians
Tool of the week The Wikidata Reference Validator by User:JosefAnthony helps check and replace broken or outdated references — keeping Wikidata’s knowledge verifiable and trustworthy. It checks whether external references are still accessible or offline, so we can ensure that every statement on Wikidata shows how we know what we know.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Wikidata has been recognized as a digital public good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance
- Wikimedia chapters are providing scholarships for Wikimania 2026. Apply here if you're interested: Wikipedia:Förderung/Wikimania/English
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest External identifiers: Newegg item ID, Hardcore Gaming 101 game ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- Luminous flux (Numerical value of the luminous flux emitted by a lighting device or light source, measured in lumens)
- anatomical structure in view (the anatomical structure in view in the photo, e.g. head, wing, habitus (body))
- anatomical view (view of an anatomical structure, e.g. ventral, dorsal, frontal)
- collector (person or group who physically collected a specimen or object in the field)
- Serbo-Croatian preferred project code (For an interwiki article, the property points to the Serbo-Croatian project (sh, bs, hr, sr) that either has a special connection to the topic or the highest quality article.)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: BG IISDA org ID, BG NACID person ID, GCatholic former diocese ID, Grokipedia ID, The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland ID, Encyclopedia of African American History 1896 to the Present entry ID, Davis Cup player ID 2025, Eiga.com drama ID, AntCat ID, Last Address ID, Disney+ browse ID, Japanese Film Database ID, Japan Location Database ID, Fight.ru fighters ID, IMI person id
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Showcase Items: perestroïka
(Q167634) - political movement for reformation within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the 1980s, widely associated with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost policy reform
- Showcase Lexemes:baseline (L46097) - English noun (ˈbeɪslaɪn) meaning "a starting point for comparison", "a benchmark in budgeting", or "a reference line in typography or surveying"
Development
- Mobile editing of statements: We are continuing the work on qualifiers and reference editing
- GraphQL: We are continuing the work on making labels of linked entities available in GraphQL (phab:T404692)
- Dumps: We are continuing to look into improvements for the dump process
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country:
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-45
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Administrators will now find that Special:MergeHistory is now significantly more flexible about what it can merge. It can now merge sections taken from the middle of the history of the source (rather than only the start) and insert revisions anywhere in the history of the destination page (rather than only the start). [65]
- For users with "Automatically subscribe to topics" enabled in their preferences, starting a new topic or adding a reply to an existing topic will now subscribe them to replies to that topic. Previously, this would only happen if the DiscussionTools "Add topic" or "Reply" widgets were used. When DiscussionTools was originally launched existing accounts were not opted in to automatic topic subscriptions, so this change should primarily affect newer accounts and users who have deliberately changed their preferences since that time. [66]
- Scribunto modules can now be used to generate SVG images. This can be used to build charts, graphics and other visualizations dynamically through Lua, reducing the need to compose them externally and upload them as files. [67]
- Wikimedia sites now provide all anonymous users with the option to enable a dark mode color scheme, featuring light-colored text on a dark background. This enhancement aims to deliver a more enjoyable reading experience, especially in dimly lit environments. [68]
- Users with large watchlists have long faced timeouts when editing Special:EditWatchlist. The page now loads entries in smaller sections instead of all at once due to a paging update, allowing everyone to edit their watchlists smoothly. As part of the database update, sorting by expiry has been removed because it was over 100× slower than sorting by title. A community wish has been created to explore alternative ways to restore sort-by-expiry. If this feature is important to you, please support the wish! [69]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the fixing of the persisting highlighting when using VisualEditor find and replace during a query. [70]
Updates for technical contributors
- Since 2019 the Wikimedia URL Shortener at https://w.wiki is available for all Wikimedia wikis to create short links to articles, permalinks, diffs, etc. It is available in the sidebar as "Get shortened URL". There are 30 wikis that also install an older "ShortUrl" extension. The old extension will soon be removed. This means
/s/URLs will not be advertised under article titles via HTMLclass="title-shortlink". The/s/URLs will keep working. [71] - On Thursday, October 30, the MediaWiki Interfaces and SRE Service Operations teams began rerouting Action API traffic through a common API gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
- MediaWiki Train deployments will pause for the final two weeks of 2025: 22 December and 29 December. Backport windows will also pause between Monday, 22 December 2025 and Thursday, 2 January 2026. A backport window is a scheduled time to add things like bug fixes and configuration changes. There are seven deployment trains remaining for 2025. [72]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- In 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that AI systems and search engines increasingly use Wikipedia content without driving users to the site, contributing to an 8% drop in human pageviews compared to 2024. After detecting bots disguised as humans, Wikimedia updated its traffic data to reflect this shift. Read more about current user trends on Wikipedia in a Diff blog post.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 19:31, 3 November 2025 (UTC)
The Signpost: 10 November 2025
[edit]- News and notes: Temporary accounts go live and WMF board member self-suspends
ArbCom elections draw close, and Wikimania '27 in Santiago.
- Community view: Six Wikipedians' thoughts on Grokipedia, and the humanity of it all
It ain't a five course meal, according to one of our interviewees.
- Wikicup report: BeanieFan11, WikiCup victor of 2025, covers the results
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
- In the media: Jimbo's book, an argument about genocide, and a train of shame
Wikipedia's new rival, political controversy in Italy and other Wiki-reports.
- Recent research: Taking stock of the 2024–2025 research grants
$400,000 USD in total funding: what did we get?
- Opinion: With Grokipedia, top-down control of knowledge is new again
Does it shed any light on particular topics that are better suited to LLM-generation than others?
- Obituary: Struway
Rest in peace.
- Traffic report: The documentaried, the disowned, the deceased, Diwali and the Dodgers
You know your man is working hard, he's worth a deuce.
- Comix: Head of steam
'Sblood!
Wikidata weekly summary #705
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-11-10. Missed the previous one? See issue #704.
Discussions
- Other: Draft policy for temporary account IP viewers. What requirements should be set for this user right?
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: Introducing the Unicode Inflection Library Technical Preview Release : The Unicode Inflection Library leverages comprehensive lexicons from Wikidata to support standardized, multilingual grammatical transformations for global software applications.
- Videos:
- Art+Feminism Celebrates Wikidata!
- Day 5_Using WikiData with Spyral Notebook and Project Presentation
- Wikidata and Wikipedia training for Art+Feminism 2025 in Uganda
- What are Wikidata WikiProjects, and why should you join one? Watch this great explainer from the #LevelingUpDays2024 to see how these communities work together! Then, find your project: Wikidata:WikiProjects
Tool of the week
- User:Difool/WikidataCleanup.js: gadget allowing to do, in one click, a wide series of cleanups in an item: normalize labels, descriptions, and aliases (double spaces, certain Unicode characters), remove weak references, remove weakly referenced dates when they have lower precision than a strongly referenced date and downgrade unnecessary preferred ranks; about the general issue of redundancies in Wikidata, you can check WikiProject Redundancy
- Ghanasupremecases is a webapp that dynamically pulls and displays over 2,000 Supreme Court of Ghana cases from Wikidata, allowing users to access case details linked directly to Wikidata items. The goal is to make African legal data more open, structured, and discoverable, and to demonstrate how Wikidata can serve as a foundation for national-level legal archive
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Temporary accounts rollout: Starting November 12, the community will see logged‑out edits handled through temporary accounts instead of IPs, prompting tool and bot checks.
- Help shape the future WikidatCon! If you attended WikidataCon 2025, please take 10 minutes to share your feedback in this anonymous GDPR-compliant survey (sslsurvey)
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- operating humidity (humidity at which a device operates)
- collector (person or group who physically collected a specimen or object in the field)
- Serbo-Croatian preferred project code (For an interwiki article, the property points to the Serbo-Croatian project (sh, bs, hr, sr) that either has a special connection to the topic or the highest quality article.)
- Newest External identifiers: CACI company ID, AEK Football player ID, Sultanlar Ligi player ID, BeWeb historical or artistic asset ID, SofaScore sports team ID, FootballFakts.ru football match ID, Kicker sports match ID, BDFutbol match ID, Foot Mercato / Fichajes / Fussball Transfers player ID, Disney+ browse ID, Filmarks ID, Memorial Book of Social Democracy-ID, NLAI ID, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain ID, The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts ID, Antique Chinese and Japanese Porcelain Dictionary and Glossary of Terms entry, Filmfriend movie ID, Hesse School ID, The Oxford Dictionary of Dance entry ID, Saxony School ID, NCL Taiwan Periodical Literature periodical identifier, NZ Charities Register Number, IFES Election Guide ID, Arte de la Argentina ID, Democratic Memory Bank ID, Kicker competition ID, Soccer365.net team ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- time of deposition (date or point in time when an archaeological object or assemblage was buried, hidden, lost, or otherwise deposited.)
- readiness (readiness)
- greenhouse gases emissions (amount of greenhouse effect emited by a given company or industry sector)
- neuter form of label (neuter form of name or title)
- current season ({{TranslateThis | an identifier for the team's current season <!-- | xx = descriptions in other languages --> }})
- flag carrier of (country of which the airline is the flag carrier)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: BFXC authority ID, BWB-nummer, Schulnummer Brandenburg, Encyclopedia of Shinto ID, Power Thesaurus ID, WDSF person ID, Blu-Ray.com film ID, Japanese Law Translation ID, USGS Publication ID, Afrikaregisteret ID, National cultural monument of Czechia ID, Admirable Façades styles ID, Brussels Inventory of Architectural Heritage buildings ID, Brussels Inventory of Architectural Heritage streets ID, Dicionário Biográfico de Cientistas, Engenheiros e Médicos em Portugal ID, TikTok User ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples: Map of all places related to persons with layers by property of the place (source)
- WikiProject Highlights: Passionate about highlighting women's achievements? WikiProject Women is dedicated to creating and improving data about women worldwide. Help close the gender gap in knowledge! #WikidataWikiProjects
- Showcase Items: Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape (Q1136251) - cultural landscape in South Africa
- Showcase Lexemes: fold (L4479) - English verb (foʊld) meaning "to bend over on itself", "to mix ingredients gently", or "to fail or give in"
Development The development team were involved in roadmap planning meetings so not much happened in the past 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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country: Paraguay
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-46
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors

- Starting November 12, users will see a change in the appearance of talk pages on some Wikipedias. Almost all wikis have received this design change; English Wikipedia will get these changes later. You can read more on Diff. Users can opt out of these changes in their user preferences in "Show discussion activity". [73]
- MediaWiki can now display a page indicator automatically while a page is protected. This feature is disabled by default. It can be enabled by community request. [74]
- Using the "Show preview" or "Show changes" buttons in the wikitext editor will now carry over certain URL parameters like 'useskin', 'uselang' and 'section'. This update also fixes an issue where, if the browser crashed while previewing an edit to a single section, saving this edit could overwrite the entire page with just that section’s content. [75][76][77]
- Wikivoyage wikis can use colored map markers in the article text. The text of these markers will now be shown in contrasting black or white color, instead of always being white. Local workarounds for the problem can be removed. [78]
- The Activity tab in the Wikipedia Android app is now available for all users. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging. [79]
- The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment called "Image browsing" to test how to make it easier for readers to browse and discover images on Wikipedia articles. This experiment, a mobile-only A/B test, will go live on English Wikipedia in the week of November 17 and will run for four weeks, affecting 0.05% of users on English wiki. The test launched on November 3 on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese wikis, affecting up to 10% of users on those wikis. [80]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example the inability to lock accounts on mobile sites has been fixed. [81]
Updates for technical contributors
- Nominations are open on Wikitech for new Toolforge standards committee members. The committee oversees the Toolforge Right to fork policy and Abandoned tool policy among other duties. Nominations will remain open through 2025-11-28.
- The JWT issuer field in OAuth 2 access tokens for SUL wikis has been changed to
https://meta.wikimedia.org. Old access tokens will still work. [82] - The JWT subject field in OAuth 2 access tokens will soon change from
<user id>tomw:<identity type>:<user id>, where<identity type>is typicallyCentralAuth:(for SUL wikis) orlocal:<wiki id>(for other wikis). This is to avoid conflicts between different user ID types, and to make OAuth 2 access tokens and thesessionJwtcookie more similar. Old access tokens will still work. [83] - MediaWiki's block messages (blockedtext, blockedtext-partial, autoblockedtext, systemblockedtext, blockedtext-tempuser, autoblockedtext-tempuser) now support additional parameters indicating whether the user is blocked from editing their own user talk page
$9or emailing other users$10. [84] - A
REL1_45branch for MediaWiki core and each of the extensions and skins in Wikimedia git has been created. This is the first step in the release process for MediaWiki 1.45.0, scheduled for late November 2025. If you are working on a critical bug fix or working on a new feature, you may need to take note of this change. [85] - The process for generating CirrusSearch dumps has been updated due to slowing performance. If you encounter any issues migrating to the replacement dumps, please contact the Search Platform Team for support. [86][87]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 20:36, 10 November 2025 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 21
[edit]
Upcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues

- Wikimania 2027: Santiago, Chile is announced as the location for Wikimania 2027. The annual conference returns to Latin America after more than 10 years, following previous editions in Buenos Aires (2009) and Mexico City (2015).
- Wikidata recognized as a Digital Public Good: Wikidata became the second Wikimedia project to be officially recognized as a digital public good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Tech News: Read updates from Tech News week 44 and 45 including the community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
- Activity Tab: The Wikipedia Android app expands the new Activity tab to all users. It offers a complete view of your Wikipedia activity: reading time, saved articles, edits, and donation history (for known donors). This change aims to make Wikipedia a more engaging experience for readers and contributors alike, while keeping all personal data private and stored locally on your device.
- Tabbed browsing: Tabbed browsing is now available on the Wikipedia App for iOS. Tabs will let you keep more than one article open at a time, making it easier to explore complex topics, follow links without losing your place, and pick up where you left off.
- CampaignEvents extension: Autoconfirmed users on small and medium wikis with the CampaignEvents extension can now use Event Registration without the Event Organizer right. This feature lets organizers enable registration, manage participants, and lets users register with one click instead of signing event pages.
- Image browsing: The Wikimedia Foundation launched image browsing, an experiment that puts images on top of your Wikipedia article reading journey, on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
- Temporary accounts: Temporary Accounts are now enabled on 1,000+ projects including English Wikipedia.
- Abstract Wikipedia naming contest: The first round of “abstract content wiki” naming vote has ended and the first legal review had begun to determine the 6 names that will make it to the second round on November 17.
- Wikifunctions: Wikifunctions is now deployed across 12 Wiktionaries and 4 Wikipedias.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events

- Privacy in Wikipedia research: The Wikimedia Foundation published Privacy in Public: Navigating Research, Personal Data, and Safety on Wikipedia, a whitepaper which guides researchers in navigating privacy of Wikipedia editors in their research. Read the highlights and key takeaways for researchers and Wikipedians.
- Digital Safety: The Wikimedia Foundation is launching Digital Safety Office Hours to explore how to stay safe digitally, what does digital safety mean, what extra precautions can Wikimedians take. The first session will take place on November 28 at 9 AM and 7 PM UTC. Check out also our Digital Safety Resources Center to learn practical tips and tools you can use immediately.
- Volunteer roles for movement governance: The Movement governance committees are seeking new volunteers to support essential and high-impact work across the Wikimedia ecosystem. The current appointment cycle is open for the AffCom, Ombuds Commission, and Case Review Committee. Applications for these committees will remain open until December 11. The team will host a community conversation on November 26, at 3 AM UTC.
- Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
- Wikimedia Core Curriculum: Want to learn how to edit Wikipedia? – A new free self-paced course, all in video with subtitles, is available from the Wikimedia Foundation!
Foundation statements
- Transparency builds trust: The latest edition from the series "Lessons from Wikipedia" explores how deep transparency has helped make Wikipedia one of the most trusted sources on the internet.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcac
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 23:05, 12 November 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #706
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-11-17. Missed the previous one? See issue #705.
Discussions
- New requests for permissions/Bot:
- Che-W-bot - Task(s): Possible duplicate of the bot below.
- CheWikibot - Task(s): Import new articles created on Chechen Wikipedia (ce.wiki) to Wikidata.
- DDResearchBot - Task(s): This bot will facilitate adding structured, cited data from trusted integrity sources to Wikidata for Dewey Digital.
- Closed request for comments:
- Adapt blocking policy to IPv6 networks - While there is a general agreement for admins to block /64, no consensus to add to the blocking Policy was reached.
- Proposal to better document featured SPARQL queries - Consensus was reached and a vote is planned.
- Gender neutral Labels for occupations/positions in French - Majority support for using male and female forms in French labels and aliases, gender-neutral descriptions, and completing male/female label properties.
- Items for videos of online platforms that represent notable Items - No consensus could be reached.
- Should Labels of interlanguage links from other Wikipedia Projects? - There is general support to import labels, however there are concerns about the import as an Alias.
- Signed Statements - No consensus could be reached.
- Use of dates in descriptions of items regarding humans - Dates on Wikidata are community-specific; add only to disambiguate, don’t remove, and format per language conventions.
- Project chat: Proposal:Prohibiting LLM-generated content
- Other:
- Wikidata:Temporary account IP viewer - users who may view IP addresses associated with temporary accounts.
- Wikidata:Self-promotion - an essay on creating an Item about yourself, your organisation, or your work is a form of self-promotion and is strongly discouraged. Feel free to update this page.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- Wikidata Days: IWUG and WAFTAI - A 4 day edit-a-thon beginning November 26, 2025, for Cameroonian and Nigerian educational institutions.
- WikiLatih Wikidata - November 21, 08:50am (WIB), learning around Wikidata: how to reuse data and edit Items. Organised by the Faculty of Science and Technology Universitas Airlangga.
- Just missed it: First steps in Wikidata for the Wikimedia LGBT Community - two introductory workshops for English, French and Spanish Wikipedians with an interest in learning Wikidata.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: GLAM Netherlands report The joint Radboud–Maastricht project Open Topstukken concluded at the Dutch National Library, showcasing 30 digitized collection highlights enriched with Linked Open Data via Wikidata and supported by new tools, documentation, and visualizations to enhance digital accessibility and interoperability.
- Videos:
- (Spanish) Mujeres que Inspiran: Layla Michán - Wikidata e investigación (Women who inspire. Wikidata & research)
- Wikidata Workshop: Improving African Authors and Books Items
- (Spanish) Enriquecer, reutilizar y modelar datos y metadatos usando Wikidata. Tomás Saorín Pérez (Enrich, reuse, and model data and metadata using Wikidata.)
- Guide to the Wikidata Notability Policy
- Wikidata: Wikimedia's knowledge graph in a world of generative AI
- (Portuguese) O que saber antes de editar no Wikidata (What to know before editing on Wikidata)
- (Portuguese) Para além da Wikipédia: como os dados estruturados conectam saberes (Beyond Wikipedia: how structured data connect knowledge)
Tool of the week
- ArchiveExternaLinks is a UserScript by Poro26. The UserScript automates the archiving of all external links present in an item, whether they appear in statements, references or identifiers. For each external link, the script automatically adds an archive link [archive], similar to what is done on Wikipedia for web sources cited in references
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- data collection method (scientific data collection procedure used in/by the subject)
- time of deposition (point in time when an archaeological object or assemblage was buried, hidden, lost, or otherwise deposited)
- Commonwealth Sport country code (code for countries participating in Commonwealth Sport events)
- Newest External identifiers: Japanese Film Database ID, GCatholic former diocese ID, Myanmar Company Registration Number, Team Austria athlete ID, ECHL.com player ID, Genbu.net ID, ISTAMPIE ID, HarmonyOS NEXT APP ID, Federal Legal Information ID, UNESCO Virtual Museum inventory ID, South Korean Business Registration Number, Lämningsnummer, Mackolik football manager ID, Biserici.org church ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review: role in naming (the role the namesake played in relation to this item, i.e. why the item is named after the namesake)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Korea Heritage Service Heritage Portal ID, Lubimyczytać version/edition ID, UEA catalogue ID, CRA program account number, PL-AED, Yandex Object Answer ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject LGBTQ History - aims to improve and organize data related to the history, people, places, events, and organizations that have contributed to LGBTQ+ experiences across time and geography.
- WikiProject Highlights:
- 👩🔬Passionate about highlighting women's achievements? WikiProject Women is dedicated to creating and improving data about women worldwide. Help close the gender gap in knowledge! WikiProject Women
- 🗳️ Interested in democracy and political data? Join WikiProject Elections to model data about elections, candidates, and results from around the globe. Make electoral data open and accessible! WikiProject Elections
- 🏛️ How do you find info on government institutions? WikiProject Govdirectory has a structured data model for that! Help improve data about public agencies on Wikidata. WikiProject Govdirectory
- 🎵 Into music? From classical to K-pop, WikiProject Music needs your expertise to harmonize data on songs, artists, and releases. Join the band! WikiProject Music
- 🧬 Your skills can help model lifesaving data. WikiProject Medicine works on structured data for diseases, drugs, clinical trials, and anatomy. Join a project that matters. WikiProject Medicine
- 🔍 Interested in how knowledge itself is structured? WikiProject Ontology delves into the fundamental classes and properties of Wikidata. Shape the backbone of the knowledge graph! WikiProject Ontology
- Showcase Items: Aboriginal Australians (Q12060728) - First Nations people of Australia
- Showcase Lexemes: ਦਿਮਾਗ਼ (L1078947) - Punjabi noun (dɪ.mäːɣ) meaning "brain (organ)", "intellect/mind", or "understanding/consciousness"
Development
- Mobile statement editing:
- We are working on editing statements that link to other entities in their value (phab:T403974, phab:T409149)
- We enabled mobile statement editing as a beta feature on test.wikidata.org (phab:T407737)
- GraphQL prototype: We finished the work on making labels of linked entities available (phab:T404692)
- Dumps: We are continuing to work on making the dump process more robust
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country:
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-47
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The Reader Experience team is experimenting with reading lists on mobile web, allowing logged-in readers with no edits to save private lists of articles for later. The experiment is running on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias since the week of 10 November, and will begin on English Wikipedia the week of 17 November.
- Users who can’t receive their email verification code during login can now get help by submitting a form on a new special page. This update is part of the Account Security initiative. If your account has an email address, please make sure you still have access to it. When logging in from a new device or location without 2FA, you may be asked to enter a 6-digit code sent by email to finish logging in. Learn more.
- One new wiki has been created: a Wikisource in Minangkabau (
s:min:) [88]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- As part of the Parser Unification project, the Content Transform Team rolled out Parsoid as the default parser to many low-traffic Wikipedias and is preparing the next step to high traffic ones. This message is an invitation for you to opt-in to Parsoid, as described in the Extension:ParserMigration documentation, and identify any issues you might encounter with your own workflow using bots, gadgets, or user scripts. Please, let us know through the "Report Visual Bug" link in the Tools sidebar or create a phab ticket and tag the Content Transform Team in Phabricator.
- Unsupported Tools: Several issues with Video2Commons have been fixed, including filename-related upload failures, black-video imports, and retry handling. AV1 support has also been added. Ongoing work focuses on backend stability, ffmpeg errors, subtitle imports, metadata handling, and playlist uploads. To track specific tasks, check the Phabricator board.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- Save the date for the next Wikimedia Hackathon happening in Milan, Italy from May 1–3, 2026. Registration will open in January 2026. Scholarship applications are currently open, and will close on November 28, 2025. If you have any questions, please email hackathon@wikimedia.org.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 17:24, 17 November 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #707
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-11-24. Missed the previous one? See issue #706.
Discussions
- New requests for permissions/Bot:
- News2DataBot - Task(s): Check for new, unlinked articles on Polish Wikinews and create relevant Items.
- WikidataLiteraryWorksMetaDataUpload - Task(s): Upload metadata for literary works from research project.
- New request for comments: The Exhibition Models RfC was split into 2 Schema proposals: Exhibition Concept and Exhibition Manifestation.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- Upcoming LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session on 25 November 2025: Join the community-driven effort led by WikiProject Personal Pronouns to improve pronoun data modeling and ethics in Wikidata. This is part of a three-session series (Oct 14, Nov 25, Dec 9) focused on implementing new best practices. No prior Wikidata experience required. Join at 17:00 UTC. Event page.
- Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 - Hosted in Milan, Italy, scholarships are now open, apply on Pretix.
- Art+Feminism & Whose Knowledge? - A conversation on building a feminist data future, Dec 5, 2025, 13:00 UTC (Time zone converter).
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- Presentations: Wikidata as a challenge for rule systems (Declarative AI 2025 Conf.) - Slides / Recording
- Papers: Snapshot of bibliographic metadata from Wikidata for all Arabic periodicals published worldwide before 1930 - Project Jarāʾid, by T. Grallert, (2025).
- Videos:
- An introduction to Wikidata and its use for librarians and researchers; slides available on Commons
- WikidataCon 2025 Session Playlists (YouTube):
Day 1 (31.10) / Day 2 (01.11) / Day 3 (02.11) - Wikidata in library catalogues: Introduction to the Primo VE linked data feature - By Dr Thneed
- Wikidata Live Editing: Stolpersteine and the Holocaust victims they commemorate
- Towards Linked Data Fluency: Takeaways from a Wikidata Workflow Pilot Program
- Enhancing authority files through SPARQL federated queries - Thomas Kerboul and the Bibliothèque de Genève improved person data by comparing Wikidata and IdRef, with manual checks preventing ID mix-ups.
- (Spanish) Inspiring Women: Layla Michán - Wikidata and research - Dr. Aguirre (UNAM) discusses Wikidata as a collaborative research tool and shared experiences in the “Women Who Inspire” series.
Tool of the week
- Timetrail is a website that visualizes the movement of Wikidata items over time by mapping their associated events and locations.
- The redesigned WikiProvenance is now live, featuring a new front end and backend for exploring and comparing Wikidata provenance information. Try examples like Johann Sebastian Bach or Human vs. City and Paris vs. London. Explore it here: https://wikiprovenance.toolforge.org/
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- LDF endpoint retirement considered: The unstable and low-traffic LDF endpoint may be retired to reduce maintenance effort and unnecessary load on WDQS. If your workflow depends on it and you would hate to see it go, please let the Wikidata development team know at Wikidata talk:Data access.
- WDQS Legacy endpoint deprecation: The legacy endpoint (
query-legacy-full.wikidata.org) will be fully decommissioned on 7 January 2026. Please migrate tools and workflows to the supported endpoints:query.wikidata.org(Main) orquery-scholarly.wikidata.org(Scholarly). Assistance is available on the Data Access and Request a Query pages. - Insights from Data Governance Research Process 2025: Results of the research to better understand how the communities currently think about which data and communities are best served by Wikidata, Wikibase Cloud or Wikibase Suite respectively.
- Abstract Wikipedia naming contest: Help pick a name for the new Wikimedia wiki project which is provisionally known as Abstract Wikipedia. The second phase of voting is now open until December 1.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest External identifiers: CUIT, REGAFI id, Hong Kong company ID, California Entity Number, Mã số doanh nghiệp, InfoconDB series ID, InfoconDB conference ID, Biography.com ID, Hudobné centrum person ID, Hudobné centrum group ID, FAIR Epigraphic Vocabularies ID, NVLI ID, SerBenfiquista.com players ID, BG IISDA org ID, BG NACID person ID, The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland ID, Encyclopedia of African American History 1896 to the Present entry ID, National cultural monument of Czechia ID, Davis Cup player ID since 2025, Eiga.com drama ID, Last Address ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- parliamentary group leader (the identity of the leader of a parliamentary group)
- SignWriting transcription (representation in SignWriting)
- free height (vertical distance from the floor level to the lowest obstruction in the ceiling of an indoor or outdoor space)
- thumbtime (Time for video thumbnail in seconds)
- Credibly accused of (entity (person or organization) that has been credibly accused of a crime or serious misconduct, but is not (yet) convicted)
- New External identifier property proposals to review:: CHZZK streamer ID, FC Barcelona players ID, Qalamos person ID, KISTI conference ID, KaraokeTexty.cz artist ID, KaraokeTexty.cz song ID, DLSite dōjin circle ID, DLSite person ID, DLSite work ID, Showlabs ID, DEUMM Online ID, Kvinnehistorie.no persons ID, Foot Résultats player ID, Manga-DB person ID, Manga-DB publisher ID, Manga-DB magazine ID, Slekt og Data cemetery ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Newest WikiProjects:
- Bookbindings - share metadata and images from the currently offline Database of Bookbindings at the British Library
- Irish Traditional Music:Projects - aims to systematically create and enhance Wikidata items for people profiled in the 2024 edition of Fintan Vallely's The Companion to Irish Traditional Music.
- Basketball: Western Illinois Leathernecks Women's
- WikiProject Highlights: Lost Media/Subpages - aim to list all media lost to time in Wikidata
- Showcase Items: arXiv (Q118398) - online digital archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers
- Showcase Lexemes: Bogucin (L1405411) - Polish proper noun (bɔˈɡu.t͡ɕin) meaning "village in Greater Poland", "village in Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship", or "village in Lublin Voivodeship"
Weekly Tasks
- Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
- Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country:
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-48
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Last week, the Wikimedia Search Team recreated the "DWIM" (Do What I Mean) gadget functionality server-side, for Russian and Hebrew Wikipedias. This feature adds cross-keyboard suggestions to the standard search-box suggestions. For example, searching for cxfcnmt on Russian Wikipedia will now add suggestions for счастье ("happiness") that the user probably intended. They plan to enable this feature for other Russian and Hebrew wikis this week. [89]
- Later this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting" beta feature will have syntax highlighting available in DiscussionTools. This requires that the "Enable editing tools in source mode" preference be set. [90]
- Campaign events extension – the set of tools for coordinating events and other on-wiki collaborations has now been deployed to all Wikimedia wikis. A new feature known as Collaborative contribution to help organizers and participants see the impact of activities has also been added. Join the upcoming learning session to see the new feature in action and share your feedback.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the bug which stopped CodeReviewBot from working, has now been fixed. [91]
Updates for technical contributors
- Users of Wikimedia API can join a usability study to help validate the new design of Wikimedia REST API sandboxes. Interested participants should fill the recruitment survey. [92]
- The MediaWiki Interfaces team is deprecating XSLT stylesheets within the Action API. Support for
format=xml&xlst={stylesheet}will be removed from Wikimedia projects by the end of November, 2025. In addition, it will soon be disabled by default in MediaWiki release versions: v1.43 (LTS), v1.44, and v1.45. Support for XSLT stylesheets will be fully removed from MediaWiki v1.46 (expected to release between April and May 2026). [93] - The WDQS legacy endpoint (query-legacy-full.wikidata.org) will be decommissioned at the end of December 2025, and finally closed down on 7th January 2026. After this date, users should expect requests to query.wikidata.org that require the full graph to fail or return invalid results if they are not rewritten to use SPARQL federation. The team encourages users to ensure that tools and workflows use the supported WDQS endpoints (https://query.wikidata.org/ - Main graph or https://query-scholarly.wikidata.org/ - Scholarly graph). For support with migrating use cases, please review the Data Access and Request a Query pages for details and assistance on alternative access methods.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 15:54, 24 November 2025 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 22
[edit]
Upcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues

- Board election: The 2025 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees vote has elected two new trustees, Bobby Shabangu (Bobbyshabangu) and Michał Buczyński (Aegis Maelstrom), who will be appointed at the next Board meeting in December 2025.
- Wikipedia 25: Wikipedia is turning 25 and it’s time to party! Register now for Wikipedia’s 25th virtual birthday bash on 15 January at 16:00 UTC.
- Wikimedia Hackathon: The 2026 Wikimedia Hackathon will be taking place in person May 1 - 3, 2026 in Milan, Italy. Scholarship applications are open until November 28.
- Language Community: The next language community meeting will be held on November 28 at 16:00 UTC.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Tech News: Some of the latest updates from Tech News week 46 and 47: Wikimedia Foundation is experimentating with reading lists on mobile web, allowing logged-in readers with no edits to save private lists of articles for later; One new wiki has been created: a Wikisource in Minangkabau.
- Wikifunctions: The second round of voting for naming the wiki with abstract content is kicking off with six name proposals to vote for.
- Reference check: The A/B test for reference check has begun on English Wikipedia and will run until December 17. This is a feature which prompts new editors to add citations before they publish an edit adding content to an article.
- Image browsing: Wikimedia Foundation is launching an experiment called "Image browsing" to test how to make it easier for readers to browse and discover images on Wikipedia articles. This experiment, a mobile-only A/B test, is taking place on on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese wikis, affecting a small number of users.
- CampaignEvents extension: Campaign events extension is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. The extension offers tools for running and coordinating events and other on-wiki collaborations. These features include Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List, plus a new feature, Collaborative contribution, which helps organizers and participants see the impact of their collaborative activities. Join the upcoming learning session to see the new feature in action and share your feedback.
- Dark Mode: Dark mode is now available on all Wikimedia projects for all anonymous users! This enhancement aims to deliver a more enjoyable reading experience, especially in dimly lit environments. Learn how to activate this feature.
- Wikimedia Apps: The Activity tab in the Wikipedia Android app is now available for all users. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
- Usability Improvements: Improvements for talk pages is being rolled out. Users can opt out of these changes in their user preferences in “Show discussion activity.”
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events
- Wikipedia 25 Press toolkit: Wikimedia Foundation is providing press toolkit as guidance and resources to Wikimedia volunteers and affiliates to spread the word about Wikipedia’s 25th birthday to local and regional media.
- Language and Internationalization: Read some key highlights from the October 2025 edition of the Language and internationalization newsletter.
- Information integrity: Wikimedia Project from South America Selected by the UNESCO Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change Fund.
- The Wikipedia Library: The Wikipedia Library team attended the CEE Meeting 2025 celebrated a new partnership with Times of Malta.
- Understanding movement organizers: Wikimedia Foundation concluded a literature review on organizers in the Wikimedia movement focused on capturing their personas, motivations, and impact in order to highlight best practices and opportunities for further support.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan
- Wikimedia Enterprise: Reef Media uses Wikimedia Enterprise Snapshot API to Fact Check and Verify Sources.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Affiliations Committee: Draft recommendations on three strategic areas that need continuous consideration to best support Wikimedia affiliates.
Foundation statements
- Lessons from Wikipedia: The latest edition from the series explores the art of disagreement and how Wikipedia navigates disputes.
- Artificial Intelligence: In the AI era, Wikipedia has never been more valuable. This explainer shows how human-created knowledge isn’t replaceable.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcac
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 17:30, 25 November 2025 (UTC)
The Signpost: 1 December 2025
[edit]- News and notes: Election cycles come and go, and Wikimedia Foundation achieves record revenue in 2024–2025!
Admin and ArbCom elections upcoming, BoT elects two new members, task force advises to close Wikinews and keep Wikispore, and other news from the Wikimedia world.
- In the media: Wales walk-off, antisemitism, supernatural powers, feminism turmoil, saints, and sex
Plus mammoth mummy sex-change operation completed!
- Recent research: At least 80 million inconsistent facts on Wikipedia – can AI help find them?
And other recent publications about contradictions and retractions.
- Disinformation report: Epstein email exchanges planned strategy, edits and reported progress
At work on Wikipedia whitewashing. How much should they be paid?
- Traffic report: It's a family affair
Even in these times there is something to be thankful for!
- Book review: The Seven Rules of Trust
Jimmy Wales and Dan Gardner write a book inspired by Wikipedia. What's in it?
- From the archives: "I have been asked by Jeffrey Epstein ..."
The twists and turns of Epstein’s portrayal on Wikipedia.
- Humour: An interview with Wikipe-tan
A conversation about being the mascot of Wikipedia.
- Opinion: AI finds errors in 90% of Wikipedia's best articles
Using ChatGPT to fact-check a month's worth of Today's featured articles.
- Serendipity: Highlights from the itWikiCon 2025
A recap of the latest convention of the Italian Wiki-community, held in Catania from 7–9 November.
- Comix: Madness
It could happen to anyone.
Wikidata weekly summary #708
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-12-01. Missed the previous one? See issue #707.
Discussions
- A Project Chat discussion (here) on mul / fallback language for Labels, Descriptions and Aliases has continued on Help Talk: Default values for labels and aliases
Events
- Upcoming events:
- Mark your calendars
- Workshop: The Swiss archival landscape – Wikidata and interactive map
February 2 & April 20 (German) / June 2 (French), 2026. Workshops are on-site and online, registration mandatory (closes January 20). - Citizen Technology Community Gathering and Taiwan Translation Launch of Linked Open Data Documents December 7 Time: 13:30-16:50 UTC+8 at West District (Q707524) Xi Project
- OpenStreetMap X Wikidata Meetup #83 December 8 Time: 19:30-21:00 UTC+8 at Mozilla Community Space Taipei (Q61752245).
- Workshop: The Swiss archival landscape – Wikidata and interactive map
- Mark your calendars
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- Papers: Benchmarking SPARQL Engines on Wikidata Queries - Four open-source SPARQL engines were benchmarked on Wikidata, with QLever fastest, Blazegraph slower, and all showing SPARQL standard deviations. By Peter F. Patel-Schneider (2025).
- Videos:
- Records in Contexts (RiC) Wikibase Working Session - Regine Heberlein of the (SAA) Description Section Steering Committee hosts a workshop on Wikibase implementation of the Records in Context Conceptual Model (RiC-CM).
- Wikidata Live Editing: Stolpersteine and the Holocaust victims they commemorate - Follow along as WMDE's Lukas Werkmeister expands Items of Berlin Stoelpersteine.
- Wikidata in library catalogues: Introduction to the Primo VE linked data feature - by Dr Thneed
Tool of the week
- Prix Littéraires lists French-speaking literary prizes and their recipients, also computing statistics (see also WikiProject)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Nov 27: The Wikibase Community User Group met for a Wikibase Live Session and to discuss the Federated Values demonstration.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest External identifiers: Federal Taxpayer Registry ID, WDSF athlete ID, TikTok numeric user ID, USGS Publication ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- concurring opinion by (judicial opinion agreed to by less than half of the members of a court agreeing with the majority's final decision but providing different or additional reasons)
- audio version of text (The audio version of a text (e.g. book). Not the audio version of the Wikipedia article about the text (e.g. book).)
- Hong Kong fire alarm level (Hong Kong fire alarm levels classification system)
- overnight stays (number of tourists that stay overnight at a place)
- specimen determiner (person who assigned the identification to a specimen)
- collection date (the date-time or interval during which a specimen or object was collected in the field)
- position holder name string (name of person holding a position)
- Crowdfunding target (target goal of this Crowdfunding campaign)
- image sensor format (shape and size of a digital camera's image sensor)
- random page URL (link to random page on website)
- translates from (language(s) that this person, company or organization translates works texts from)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Twitter broadcast ID, Petal Maps Place ID, MJ character glyph name, Mastercaller player ID, dartn.de player ID, darts1.de player ID, pdpa.co.uk player ID, Antiquitatum Thesaurus ID, Theaterencyclopedie-identificatiecode, Buy Me a Coffee username, GoFundMe ID, Identifiant Maitron d'une biographie (nouvelle version), Michaelis Portuguese-English properties, U.S. Copyright Office Public Records System name slug, FCC ID Database company ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples: Objects bearing the handwriting of Moses Maimonides (Source)
- Newest WikiProjects: Uzbekistan, Natural History Specimen Data Model
- Newest database reports: Popular Items without Claims - these are the most-connected or linked Items that do not have any Statements.
- Showcase Items: The Walt Disney Company (Q7414) - American multinational mass media company
- Showcase Lexemes: Showcase Lexemes: девочка (L103836) - Russian noun (dʲɪˈvot͡ɕkə) meaning "female child", "affectionate address to a woman", or "female organism"
Development
- Mobile editing of statements:
- We have added editing support for more data types (entity IDs, geographical shapes and tabular data).
- It is now available as a beta feature on test.wikidata.org. You can enable it here.
- Wikidata integration in Wikipedia and co: We are rolling out improvements to the Databox Lua module to a number of Wikipedias to make it easier to have out-of-the-box Wikidata-powered infoboxes
- Ontology federation: We are making progress with making it possible to use Wikidata Item's as statement values in other Wikibase instances
- GraphQL: We are continuing the work on the prototype, focusing on getting data from a batch of Items
- Wikidata Query Service: The Wikidata Platform team is working on benchmarking of different replacement options for Blazegraph, the software powering the Wikidata Query Service
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country: Togo
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-49
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The Wikipedia Year in Review 2025 will be available on December 2 for users of iOS and Android Wikipedia apps, featuring new personalized insights, updated reading highlights, and refreshed designs. Learn more on the review's project page.
- The Growth team is working on improving the text and presentation of the Verification Email sent to new users to make them more welcoming, useful and informative. Some new text have been drafted for A/B testing and you can help by translating them. See Phabricator.
- Add a link will now be deployed at Japanese, Urdu and Chinese Wikipedias on December 2. Add a link is based on a prediction model that suggests links to be added to articles. While this feature has already been available on most Wikipedias, the prediction model could not support certain languages. A new model has now been developed to handle these languages, and it will be gradually rolled out to other Wikipedias over time. If you would like to know more, please contact Trizek (WMF).
View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where search boxes on some Commons pages showed no results due to switch from SpecialSearch to MediaSearch, has now been fixed. [94]- Two new wikis have been created:
Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
In depth
- The Wikimedia Foundation is in the early stages of exploring approaches to Article guidance. The initiative aims to identify interventions that could help new editors easily understand and apply existing Wikipedia practices and policies when creating an article. The project is in the exploration and early experimental design phase. All community members are encouraged to learn more about the project, and share their thoughts on the talk page.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 18:56, 1 December 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #709
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-12-08. Missed the previous one? See issue #708.
Discussions
- New requests for permissions/Bot:
- Well, Well, Bot! - Task/s: Database imports, maintenance.
- RijksBot - Task/s: Adding Rijksmuseum IDs (P13234) to Wikidata items based on a CSV mapping of QIDs to Rijksmuseum URIs.
- CostamiriBot - Task/s: Chess related tasks such as monthly updates to the elo rating of chess players.
- New draft: Wikidata:External identifiers/Obsolescence (opinions are welcome in its talk page)
Events
- Upcoming events:
- How to view #25N with Wikidata? - a community hour with Wikimedia Chile, 21:00 UTC+1 (Time zone converter)
- Fact-Checking with Wikidata Workshop - January 20, 2026, 16:30 ~ 18:00 UTC+1 (Time zone converter) - WMDE's Philippe Saadé will show hands-on methods using the Wikidata MCP to retrieve, filter and classify Wikidata statements with semantic search, reranker LLM and NLI models, registration required.
- (Portuguese) Meeting Point Editatona II - Warm your hands modeling festival on Wikidata: December 10, 2025, 15:00 - 19:00 UTC+1, Porto, Portugal.
- Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session 9 December, 2025: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, 9 December, 2025 at 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter). WikiProject Personal Pronouns members will lead three implementation sessions to improve the data modeling and ethics of personal pronoun representation in Wikidata based on newly-established best practices and Wikidata policy by remediating legacy statements with participants. No previous Wikidata experience is needed to participate. Sessions will be held on October 14, November 25, and December 9, 2025 at our regular time of 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET. Event page: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_LD4_Wikidata_Affinity_Group/Project_Series/PersonalPronouns
- Past Events: Digital Humanities Hub: Documenting epigraphic data, Wikidata ontology practice - December 2 & 3, 2025, both 14:00 ~ 15:30 UTC.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: Wikidata 13th Birthday Celebration in Lafia
- Papers:
- Wikontic: Constructing Wikidata-Aligned, Ontology-Aware Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models - Chepurova et al., (2025)
- Victims of Posterity. Identifying Gaps on 19th-Century French Art History with Wikidata - first paper in the Wikidata Across the Humanities: Datasets, Methodologies, Reuse collection by the Journal of Open Humanities Data. Authored by Claire Dupin de Beyssat.
- Videos: GB Claude Code AI Agent: Fully Autonomous Wikidata Query & Visualization (Zero Human Intervention)
- (Taiwanese Mandarin) Wikidata Taiwan translation project on "Creating Library Linked Data with Wikibase: Lessons Learned from Project Passage" (as published by the OCLC)
Tool of the week
- Wikiguessr Game Is a Wikidata game it guess the location from Image from anywhere around the world by User: Ranjithsiji
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Remembering Amos Bairoch, co-contributor to Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics Semantic Web of data and consulted often for TiagoLubiana's CellosaurusBot.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- GBFS feed URL (URL of a GBFS feed for the bicycle-sharing system)
- code of conduct URL (URL of a resource that contains the Code of Conduct of a project or organization)
- Newest External identifiers: BFXC authority ID, Out tag ID, GayCities ID, Fight.ru fighters ID, Personality Database group ID, Codes for the administrative divisions of the People's Republic of China, Macanese company ID, MovieID film ID, Teen Vogue tag ID, CRT Database model ID, PriceRunner product ID, BWB number, Brandenburg School ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- fragrance gender (category for which a fragrance is marketed)
- perfumer (person who created a perfume)
- Discharge regime (The '''[[:en:Discharge regime|discharge regime]]''' can be Glacial, Nival or Pluvial. It can be a combination of 2 : Nivo-pluvial, Pluvio-nival, Nivo-glacial, etc. Be specific (e.g. pluvial tropical, meridional, etc.). Or be complex)
- minimal pair of (lexeme that differ from this one in only one phonological element)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Cookpad Recipe ID, Sector.sk game ID, Card Player ID, Fragrantica perfume ID, Fragrantica perfume brand ID, My Abandonware theme ID, Identificador Banrep Cultural, izoh.uz word ID, VGChartz game ID, Metacritic video game genre ID, Place Names and Places of Nova Scotia ID, Taking Stock ID, Game Font Library ID, Fragrantica perfume notes ID, EAGER game ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- WikiProject Highlights: WikiProject Turkmenistan
- Showcase Items: Goosebumps - 2015 film directed by Rob Letterman
- Showcase Lexemes: course (L3958) - English noun (kɔːrs) meaning "direction of movement", "program of study", or "part of a meal"
Development
- Mobile statement editing:
- It's now possible to edit existing references (phab:T405236)
- We fixed a number of issues such as a problem when adding the first statements to an item (phab:T409069)
- We started work on showing constraint violation indicators (phab:T400676)
- We're working on showing errors in the edit form (phab:T408928)
- We're improving the edit summaries (phab:T411247)
- Wikidata integration in the Wikimedia projects: We continued working on improvements to the Databox Lua module and template
- GraphQL: We continued working on the first version of GraphQL support
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country: Togo
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-50
[edit]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
- Anybody who wishes to secure their user account can now use two-factor authentication (2FA). This is available to all registered users of all Wikimedia projects. This is part of the Account Security initiative. Later, 2FA will be required for all users who can take security- or privacy-sensitive actions.
Updates for editors
- Following last week's deployments, the Add a link feature, which allows editors to add suggested links during editing, will be available to an additional 33 Wikipedias starting on 9 December. This expansion is possible thanks to the new prediction model that now supports all languages, including those that were previously not covered. While the feature has been available on most Wikipedias for some time, this rollout brings us closer to using the improved model everywhere. If you have any questions or would like more details please contact Trizek (WMF).
- Last week, the Search Platform team added transliterated as-you-type search suggestions to Georgian wikis. If there are only a few regular search suggestions, then queries in Latin or Cyrillic script are now rewritten into Georgian script to look for more matches. For example, searching for either bedniereba or бедниереба will now suggest the existing article about ბედნიერება ("happiness"). You can recommend other languages where transliterated suggestions would be useful on Phabricator for future development.
- Later this week, a controlled experiment will begin for editors on the 100 largest Wikipedias who are editing a section in the mobile web visual editor. 50% of these editors will notice a new "Edit full page" button that will enable them to expand their editing session to the whole page. This feature is intended to make it easier for people on mobile web to edit any article section, regardless of which section-edit icon they tapped to begin. The experiment will last ~4 weeks. You can find more details about the project.
- Later this week, the Reader Growth team will launch a mobile web experiment to expand all article sections by default (currently they are collapsed by default) and pin the section header the user is currently reading to the top of the page. The experiment will affect 10% of users on Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. [97]
- The Wikipedia Year in Review 2025, a feature in the Wikipedia mobile apps (iOS and Android) that provides users with a personalised summary of their engagement with Wikipedia over the year, is now available on the iOS and Android apps. This edition includes expanded personalised insights, improved reading highlights, new donor messaging, and updated designs. Open the app to view your Year in Review and explore your reading journey from 2025.
- A recent software bug caused edits made with VisualEditor to make unintended changes to wikitext, including removing whitespace and replacing spaces with underscores in wikilinks inside citations. This was partially fixed last week, and further fixes are in progress. Editors who used VisualEditor between November 28 and December 2 should review their edits for unexpected modifications. [98]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the incorrect handling of URLs copied from the address bar of Microsoft Edge users, has been resolved. [99]
Updates for technical contributors
- Starting this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting" beta feature will have CodeMirror as the editor for Lua, JavaScript, CSS, JSON and Vue content models, instead of CodeEditor. With this, the linters will be upgraded. This is part of a larger effort to eventually replace CodeEditor and provide a consistent code editing experience. [100]
- Developers are encouraged to take the 2025 Developer Satisfaction Survey, which remains open until 5 January 2026. If you build software for the Wikimedia ecosystem and would like to share your experiences or feedback, your participation is greatly appreciated. [101]
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 17:43, 8 December 2025 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 23
[edit]

Upcoming and current events and conversations
Let's Talk continues
- CEO appointment: The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has appointed Bernadette Meehan as the new CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. She will be meeting communities around the puzzle globe when she officially joins on January 20, 2026.
- Wikipedia's 25th birthday party: Join the virtual celebration for games, prizes, musical performances, volunteer spotlights, data visualization, surprise guests and more. January 15 at 16:00 UTC. Register on Meta.
- Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees: Join the next Conversation with the Trustees on December 11 at 17:30 UTC.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Wishathon: 15 patches were written and 5 merged, as part of a Wishathon for the Community Wishlist. One wish from the community was completed ("Preview page with this template" should not work with pages that do not transclude the template), and three more now have a clearer path forward.
- Activity Tab on Mobile App: The Wikipedia iOS app is running an experiment that replaces the History tab with a redesigned Activity tab. This new tab surfaces personalized insights about reading, editing, and donations — all stored locally on your device for privacy. The goal is to see whether the new experience increases engagement and retention among logged-in readers.
- Wikipedia Year in Review in Apps: The Wikipedia Year in Review 2025 is now available for the iOS and Android apps. This year introduces new personalized insights, updated reading highlights, and refreshed designs.
- Add a Link: A feature that suggests links to be added to articles based on a prediction model, Add a link, has been deployed at Japanese, Urdu and Chinese Wikipedias. While this feature has already been available on most Wikipedias, the prediction model could not support certain languages. A new model has now been developed to handle these languages, and it will be gradually rolled out to other Wikipedias over time.
- Abstract Wikipedia: The second round of voting on the name of Abstract Wikipedia concluded with Abstract Wikipedia as the top-voted name with 100 votes, followed by Wikigenerator with 91 votes. The name for the wiki project will now remain Abstract Wikipedia.
- Anti-vandalism tool: Automoderator, now has the option to choose between two machine learning models to power the software on wikis using the tool.
- Tools to support newcomers: Newcomers failing to add a citation to support added content has been one of the most common mistakes on Wikipedia. Reference Check, a tool that prompts them to add a citation before publishing an edit, has gone live for an A/B test on English Wikipedia.
- Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 48 and week 49 include the Foundation working on improving the text and presentation of the Verification Email sent to new users to make them more welcoming, useful, and informative; and two new wikis being created: a Wikipedia in Toki Pona and a Wikiquote in Nigerian Pidgin.
- Infrastructure: Unifying our mobile and desktop domains achieved 20% faster mobile response times, improved SEO, and reduced infrastructure load.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events
- Legal win in France: Wikimedia Foundation secures crucial legal win in France against legal attacks on freedom of speech.
- CEE Hub: Overview of three years of growth, learning, and regional impact of CEE Hub.
- Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
- Digital Violence: How the Wikimedia movement is responding to digital gender based violence.
- Wikimedia Research Showcase: The next research showcase will feature a special panel on "Experimentation on Wikipedia" and will take place on December 10 at 17:30 UTC.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan
- Audit Report: Key takeaways from the Foundation’s audit report for fiscal year 2024-2025.
- Wikimedia Enterprise: Wikimedia Enterprise Financial Report for fiscal year 2024-2025.
- Annual Plan Progress: A look back at progress made against the plan during the second half of our fiscal year. Up to date regular updates are included in the Foundation Bulletin.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Sister Projects Task Force: Results of the consultation about Wikispore and Wikinews: No immediate changes should be made to Wikispore's current technical setup and archive all editions of Wikinews, preserving their content.
Foundation statements
- Wikipedia's unique revenue model: How is Wikipedia funded and how does the Wikimedia Foundation use donations to Wikipedia?
- Most read articles: Wikipedia’s most-read articles of 2025.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcac
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 04:50, 11 December 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #710
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-12-15. Missed the previous one? See issue #709.
Discussions
- The mass editing policy Request for Comments has a number of open questions looking for votes and comments to shape the mass-editing policy.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- A Scholia hackathon is ongoing this week, focused on completing the transition of Scholia to QLever as the SPARQL backend for its Wikidata queries.
- Data and Technology Week 2025 from 19th of December 2025 to 22 of December 2025, organized by Wikimedia Indonesia (Q13098516). Consisted of a Wikidata Workshop, a Wikifunction Introductory Seminar and Geodatathon. This event is in Indonesian.
- (English) WM Malaysia / 2025 SEA Games Datathon - 20.12.2025, 1200 ~ 1400 UTC. Register to contribute to items about athletes competing in South East Asian Games 2025 (Q25041680)
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: (French) Facebook post: ArkéoTopia: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques (CTHS) to begin integrating Wikidata
- Papers:
- Open Data Practices of Art Museums in Wikidata: A Compliance Assessment - second paper of the Wikidata Across the Humanities: Datasets, Methodologies, Reuse collection. By Dişli et al., (2025).
- VIAF Governance Concerns about the Refurbished VIAF Web and API Interfaces by Stefano Bargioni (2025): a detailed account of the technical and governance issues experienced by VIAF in 2025 and its impact on its many external reusers, including Wikidata
- Videos:
- (Italian) Wikidata and Wikibase for research: Camillo Pellizzari gives an overview of Wikidata, the data model, potential as scientific research subject and tool, then a Wikibase intro and its uses beyond Wikidata, with example instance: Hypotheseis; slides on Commons
- Feminist Structured data: A Conversation with Art+Feminism and Whose Knowledge?: How feminist values can reshape structured data on Wikidata to address gaps, representation, and opportunities for collaboration across communities.
- Community Hours: Art+Feminism community in Armenia: Former regional A+F ambassador, Arminé Aghayan-Flisch, tells us of her experiences growing the A+F Armenian community through GLAM, Wikidata and Wikipedia.
- (Spanish) PADEP 2025: Using Wikidata in Sociocultural Research: Dr. Luis Álvarez Azcárraga teaches the course: Using Wikidata in Sociocultural Research: Open Databases for Social, Artistic, and Cultural Studies
- See something, change something Webinar: @58:10, a presentation on the Wikidata agent plug-in for ArchivesSpace is given.
- Wikibase Live Session / November 27: First demo presented of federation of values from Wikidata to Wikibases.
Tool of the week
- Broomstick - Broomstick is a tool to uncover Lexemes that can be improved on Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Congratulations to Govdirectory, the winner of the FSF's Award for Projects of Social Benefit.
- wikibase-cli got support for claim reconciliation. This is typically useful to add a claim unless it already exists.
- The Wikimedia Research Fund is open for funding applications for research projects around the Wikimedia Projects, including Wikidata.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes: has grammatical number (grammatical number used in this language)
- Newest External identifiers: NLI Newspaper Collection ID, Cabinet minutes of the German Government ID, neodb.social ID, Flemish Community Masterpieces List item ID, Medicin.dk medical condition ID, Mapillary username, Sector.sk game ID, My Abandonware theme ID, Encyclopedia of Shinto ID, Blu-Ray.com film ID, Japanese Law Translation ID, Brussels Inventory of Architectural Heritage streets ID, Brussels Inventory of Architectural Heritage buildings ID, Getty Collections Archival Component ID, CRA program account number, FC Barcelona player ID, Qalamos person ID, KISTI conference ID
- New External identifier property proposals to review: survivalhorrors.com ID, Diccionari de la llengua catalana entry ID, GamesIndustry.biz game ID, WhatsOnStage Stage Names ID, Adventure Game Hotspot game ID, identifiant Netflix titre, 4gamer.net game ID, Fragrantica perfumer ID, PC Guru game ID, British Newspaper Archive publication ID, GOG tag ID, Open Food Facts brand ID, Games for Change directory ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Newest WikiProjects:
- WikiProject P244 maintenance - For coordination and improvement of Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAP) via Library of Congress authority ID
- WikiProject Museum of Glass (Q2894440) - improving the visibility of visiting artists to the University of Washington Information School
- WikiProject Highlights: Egezort's efforts in Mereology: removing/migrating part of statements in Recipe relationships
- Newest database reports: 34 Bots operating without a Bot flag
- Showcase Items: Fort George (Q1426707) - 18th-century fortress built in the Scottish Highlands in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising of 1745
- Showcase Lexemes: mesa (L31222) - Spanish noun (ˈme.sa) meaning "table (furniture)", "mesa (flat-topped hill)", or "served table for dining"
Development
- Edit summaries: We made changes that will improve the automatic edit summaries of edits made using the wbeditentity API endpoint. Tools that use this endpoint to edit statements will, in some cases, now have more accurate edit summaries; this also affects how such edits are summarized in edit groups. (phab:T411247)
- Wikidata integration in the Wikimedia projects: We are collecting feedback from the first wikis who got the new and improved Databox module.
- Mobile statement editing:
- We are making remaining changes for the first roll-out as a beta-feature.
- We are working on showing constraint violations. (phab:T411602, phab:T400676)
- GraphQL: We are working on making it possible to query for Items by Property/value pair (phab:T403576)
- REST API: We are improving error messages for requests that failed due to an IP block (phab:T404727)
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country: Germany
- 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!
Tech News: 2025-51
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, one of the fixes addressed an issue for temporary accounts adding an external URL, which triggered an hCaptcha request in more cases than intended, and did not display the required popup on the first attempt to publish the edit. [102]
Updates for technical contributors
- To improve database and site performance, external links to Wikimedia projects will no longer be stored in the database. This means they will not be searchable in Special:LinkSearch, will not be checked by the Spam Blacklist or AbuseFilter as new links, and will not be in the
externallinkstable on database replicas. In the future this may be extended to other highly-linked trusted websites on a per-wiki basis, such as Creative Commons links on Wikimedia Commons. [103]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 19:01, 15 December 2025 (UTC)
The Signpost: 17 December 2025
[edit]- Interview: Part 1: Bernadette Meehan
Say hello to the new WMF CEO.
- News and notes: We're gonna have a party!
And a new WMF CEO!
- In the media: The "bigg" bosses: Robertsky and the Pope
Pay up, big guys!
- Traffic report: Death and stranger things
And going for the FIFA prize!
- Gallery: A feast of holidays and carols
Something old and something new!
- Obituary: Michal Lewi (Iwelam) and Alan R. King (A R King)
Rest in peace.
- Concept: List of xxtreme sports (redirected from Electrojousting)
You are viewing an old revision of this page, as edited on 2065-11-10 04:33:10.
- Comix: display: flex-inline;
ampersand nb semicolon ampersand nb semicolon ampersand nb semicolon
Wikidata weekly summary #711
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-12-22. Missed the previous one? See issue #710.
Discussions
- Open request for adminship: Vitaly Zdanevich
- New requests for permissions/Bot: Title markup bot - Task(s): There is a variety of HTML markup found in , violating various constraints on the property. The following task description is for a bot that can start the required cleanup process. I would like to request permission to implement the functionality outlined here as a first iteration, on the understanding that it will be extended and refined to cover more cases. It will operate within the limitation that it will only modify values, add qualifiers and update labels to keep them in-line with altered titles.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Videos:
Tool of the week
- Timetrail - is a website that visualizes the movement of Wikidata items over time by mapping their associated events and locations.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Wikimedia Deutschland jobs:
- Director of Engineering (all genders)
- Senior Data Analyst (all genders)
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- Japanese court rank (Japanese court rank of a person or a shrine)
- value of this mathematical characteristic (non-numeric value of this characteristic applied to this mathematical object)
- Newest External identifiers: Taking Stock ID, Antiquitatum Thesaurus ID, The Advocate tag ID, Game Font Library ID, IMI person ID, Metacritic video game genre ID, Banrep Cultural ID, FCC ID Database company slug, EDBO institution code, GamesIndustry.biz game ID, PC Guru game ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- common organism (organisms known by a common name of a biological taxon)
- part (exact number denoting the part of a creative work or edition)
- heir apparent (person designated to take on royal position after death of subject)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Parfumo perfume ID, Parfumo perfumer ID, Parfumo perfumes ID, Parfumo fragrance notes ID, BoomerShooterDB game ID, identifiant Rappels d'une production théâtrale, Parfinity notes ID, Vandal game ID, Google Ads Transparency Center advertiser ID, GBIF ID, MetroidvaniaDB game ID, Games.cz game ID, Basenotes perfume brand ID, Basenotes perfume people ID, Basenotes perfume ID, CICAP Encyclopedia ID, Zelda Wiki ID, Yaba Sanshiro ID, identificador Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia, Finnish railway station code, Fight-A-Base game ID, Sketchfab model ID, Sketchfab channel ID, Sketchfab user ID, DVIDS Video ID, DeVuego game ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- WikiProject Highlights: Niryhpr's efforts in organising the page User:Niryhpr/WikiProject_Ports (part of WikiProject Indonesia/Geodatathon)
- Newest database reports: Language statistics for Items
- Showcase Items: Mansa Musa - 14th-century ruler of the Mali Empire
- Showcase Lexemes: ਮਰਨ (L689064) - Punjabi verb (mərəɳ) meaning "to die (cease living)", "to wither or spoil", or "to give up (lose hope/energy)"
Development
- Mobile statement editing:
- We added an indicator showing which Properties are not yet supported when creating new statements in mobile editing (T412719)
- We continued working on showing constraint violations on mobile (T411602, T411608)
- We are working on musical notation statements on mobile (T407247)
- We are improving error handling for incorrectly filled and unfilled fields in mobile editing (T408928)
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!
Tech News: 2025-52
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- From January, edit filters can be set to automatically suppress their details such as rules and list of attempted edits and actions. This will help oversighters use edit filters to prevent doxxing or other suppressible material. [104]
- The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 12 January 2026 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
View all 16 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the crash that occurred when tapping "First Steps" in the Wikipedia Android Year in Review has now been fixed, and the feature opens as expected. [105]
Updates for technical contributors
- Interface elements such as diffs and categories generated by MediaWiki used to have the attribute
data-mw="interface"to distinguish from wiki content. The attribute has been replaced withdata-mw-interface="", to avoid potential conflicts with otherdata-mwattributes, which are generated by Parsoid. [106]
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
Meetings and events
- The Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026 will take place on 13-14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Applications just opened mid-December and will close in mid-January or earlier if capacity is reached. With space for approximately 100 participants, early application is encouraged.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 21:43, 22 December 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #712
[edit]
week leading up to 2025-12-29. Missed the previous one? See issue #711.
Discussions
- Open request for adminship: Ppolar bear - RfP scheduled to end after 3 January 2026 13:40 (UTC)
- QubeCubeBot - Task/s: Continue import of Swedish Parliament documents inline with the modeling work in Wikidata:WikiProject Sweden/Swedish Riksdag documents.
- AinaliBot 3 - Task/s: Continue import of Swedish Parliament documents inline with the modeling work in Wikidata:WikiProject Sweden/Swedish Riksdag documents.
Events
- This month's Scholia hackathon has moved Scholia closer to its planned switch to a QLever backend. Beta testers can assist by exploring the interim QLever-backed Scholia instance and reporting any issues.
- Upcoming events:
- SWAT4HCLS 2026. Amsterdam, March 23-26, with a "Wikidata in healthcare and life sciences" session and Prof. Hannah Bast as one of the keynotes
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Videos:
- (Indonesian) Introduction to Wikifunctions presented by NikolasKHF (Niko). In this session, Niko introduced Wikifunctions project, how to edit a function, how to add an implementation and test, and demonstrated them. This is the first Wikifunctions training in Indonesian. Slides are available on Commons.
- (Indonesian) Wikidata for Academician presented by Wikimedia Indonesia's Data and Technology team. They introduced Wikimedia Indonesia, and then explained Wikidata, its underlying concepts and a glance to its history, how to add statements and references, how to query with Wikidata Query Services, Wikidata and its potential in research fields, Wikiprojects and Wikidata:For development resources. Slides are available on Commons.
Tool of the week
- WD-NearbyItems : browse Wikidata Items nearby
- Quizicle is a daily quiz/puzzle game that's not really a quiz and not really a puzzle. Deduce the answer from crossword-style clues with hot/cold feedback.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- random page URL (link to random page or item on website)
- specimen classifier (person who assigned the identification to a specimen)
- collection date (date-time or interval during which a specimen or object was collected in the field)
- land degradation (amount of land that is degraded by an object, mainly for infrastructure projects)
- Hong Kong fire alarm level (Hong Kong fire alarm levels classification system)
- page offset (difference between external page number printed on the work (P304) and the actual page in digital file (P7668))
- logical implication (axiom or conjecture that this axiom or conjecture implies)
- Newest External identifiers: survivalhorrors.com ID, VGChartz ID, Adventure Game Hotspot game ID, BoomerShooterDB game ID, Vandal game ID, GoFundMe fundraising ID, Adult Film Database director ID, S1 No.1 Style actress ID, MetroidvaniaDB game ID, EAGER game ID, EAGER developer ID, Games.cz game ID, 4gamer.net game ID, GOG tag ID, Yaba Sanshiro ID, Games for Change directory ID, DLSite work ID, DLSite person ID, DLSite doujin circle ID, Fight-A-Base game ID, DeVuego game ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review: Erdős Problem number (Erdős Problem number)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: PixelatedArcade genre ID, BRAHMS identifier, LegiStorm person ID, Game Boy Database game ID, NHK Archives Program ID, Wendingen object ID, Wendingen person ID, RetroCollect games ID, FIP.IT basketball player ID, Lenta.ru person ID, Polski Petersburg encyclopedia ID (Polish version)., Télérama film ID., Bercail ID, Panoramax picture ID, InterSportStats athlete ID, Before I Play game ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Showcase Lexemes: turn (L3568) - English verb (tɜːrn) meaning "to rotate", "to change direction", or "to transform"
Development
- No development happened in the past week as the team are on holidays. Happy new year everyone!
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country: Czech Republic
- 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!
Wikidata weekly summary #713
[edit]
week leading up to 2026-01-05. Missed the previous one? See issue #712.
Discussions
- Open request for adminship: Morne06 - RfP scheduled to end after 8 January 2026 20:35 (UTC)
- Closed request for adminship: Ppolar bear - general consensus is to reapply after gaining more experience.
- New request for comments: Notability policy reform: first drafted in 2013, Wikidata has grown vastly since the original Notability policy was created. This first-round discussion is intended to collect ideas, comments, and reflections on how to improve the Notability Policy for what Wikidata currently is and will become.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- OpenStreetMap X Wikidata Meetup #84 January 12 Time: 19:30-21:00 UTC+8 at Mozilla Community Space Taipei (Q61752245).
- Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026: a two-day event that will take place from 13 to 14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Apply for a grant and join the event.
- The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 18:00 CEST, 14th January 2026 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.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- Rescuing Scholia #2: getting closer
- African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA)
- Wikontic: Ontology-Aware KG Pipeline - this article introduces Wikontic, a pipeline that builds knowledge graphs from text by enforcing Wikidata's ontological rules and merging duplicate entities.
- Papers:
- Using Wikidata’s Ontology in Practice: A Neuro-Symbolic, Community-Centred Workflow for Integrating and Reusing Humanities Datasets - This article introduces an ontology-first, community-driven workflow that aligns humanities datasets with Wikidata to address data silos and gender inequities, offering reusable modelling patterns, SPARQL-based analysis, and a neuro-symbolic AI framework that reduces bias and supports reproducible, ontology-backed knowledge graph practices. By Velilla & Ferran-Ferrer (2025).
- A Semantic Wiki for Language Learning: The Case of the Baoulé Language - The BAOULE-WIKI project introduces a semantic wiki and homograph-detection model to preserve and teach the endangered Baoulé language, achieving high accuracy while paving the way for broader digital preservation of African languages through community collaboration and integration with knowledge bases like Wikidata and DBpedia. By Kra et al., (2026).
- Transforming the Digital Landscape: Towards a Medieval Knowledge Graph - Digitization has transformed medieval studies by expanding access and enabling new research methods, with future progress hinging on Linked Open Data, shareable identifiers, and collaborative knowledge graphs to truly democratize and enrich scholarship. By Burrows, (2026).
- Towards a Linked Open Index: Reconciling Museum Records to Wikidata for Index of American Design Constituents - The Index of American Design project’s reconciliation of thousands of records with Wikidata reveals both challenges and strategies for improving data alignment, while a linked Power BI tool supports ongoing monitoring of quality, access, and representation in humanities research. By Foster et al., (2026).
- The “Dizionario Degli Scrittori Italiani Contemporanei Pseudonimi” in Wikidata. Pseudonymous Authors in Wikidata: Dataset and Queries - The dataset from the MA thesis structures biographical data on 19th–20th century pseudonymous Italian authors in Wikidata, including corpus items, SPARQL queries, and analysis documents, and is reusable for further research or case studies. By De Monaco, (2025).
Tool of the week
- Broomstick is a tool by Wikicollabs it uncover Lexemes that can be improved on Wikidata.
- Explore your Wikimedia activity year in review with Wiki Year in Review
- Wikilokal (Android version): explore the world within a 3 km radius by Affandy Murad
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- New project: Dissemination of polymer science through Wikipedia and Wikidata (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (Q33438))
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- crowdfunding target (target goal of this crowdfunding campaign)
- free height (vertical distance from the floor level to the lowest obstruction in the ceiling of an indoor or outdoor space)
- Newest External identifiers: PixelatedArcade genre ID, Game Boy Database game ID, RetroCollect games ID, MyWaifuList work ID, Nonbinary Wiki ID, Diccionari de la llengua catalana entry ID, DVIDS video ID, FIP.IT basketball player ID, Card Player ID, Télérama film ID, Boosty author ID, Before I Play game ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- Fungal Names taxon ID (ID number in the [[:w:Fungal Names]] database.)
- Braille transcription (transcription in Braille)
- Braille represents (graphene or phone that the Braille cell represents)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: CNVD-ID, Trismegistos editor ID, woordenlijst lemma ID, European Vehicle Number, CourtListener person ID, Norwegian railway station code, Australian National Kennel Council ID, Museo del Marchio Italiano ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Schema examples: (E498) district electoral division: Schema to describe an electoral division (small political division of Ireland).
- Newest WikiProjects:
- Project IrishForges: Describing forges and forge buildings of Ireland using Wikidata, Wikimedia and other sources.
- Project Ireland: A hub for all Ireland-related Wikidata activities including cross-Wikiproject tasks.
- Project Historic Irish Placenames: focusing on County Kilkenny, connect historic placenames with their modern counterparts or create new items for "lost places".
- Svenska psalmodikon: A sub-project for the psalmodikon (Q3354977), a stringed-instrument popular in Sweden.
- WikiProject Highlights: WikiPojects as decentralized governance - this sub-page of the Limits of Wikidata project proposes WikiProjects become caretakers of collections or subgraphs of relevant items.
- Showcase Items: Venezuela (Q717) - country in South America
- Showcase Lexemes: размах (L155644) - Russian noun (rɐzˈmax) meaning "amplitude (of a swing)", "physical span or width", or "scale/scope (of an activity)"
Development
- No development happened in the past week as the team are just returning from the holidays.
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country:
- 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!
Wikidata weekly summary #714
[edit]
week leading up to 2026-01-12. Missed the previous one? See issue #713.
Discussions
- New requests for permissions/Bot: AmeisenBot 3 - Task/s: Adding descriptions (and possibly labels and aliases as well) to items based on their statements.
- New CheckUser requests: Saroj (RfP scheduled to end at 25 January 2026 09:31 UTC)
Events
- Upcoming events:
- The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 18:00 CEST, 14th January 2026 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.
- WMF Wikidata Platform team is launching a new office hours series starting January 27th, 2026 and continuing on the first Tuesday of each month. The scope of this series is be limited to Blazegraph migration support for the entirety of 2026. Participants are encouraged to register in advance for each session and may optionally add a brief description of their migration-related questions to the shared Etherpad to help guide preparation. See Blazegraph Migration office hour page for more details
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: Wikidata at 13: Fante Wikimedians Joins the Celebration
- Papers: Structuring the Sights and Stories of Pausanias with Wikidata - The Digital Periegesis project leverages Wikidata and linked open data tools to annotate, disambiguate, and connect Pausanias’s complex 2nd‑century text, enhancing accessibility, interoperability, and scholarly engagement with Greece’s historical and mythological landscape. By Kiesling et al., (2025)
- Videos: (Papiamento) Wikipedia on Aruba | Episode 8: How to add a new topic (item) to Wikidata
Tool of the week
- Knowledge Train A game to create a train of knowledge with the power of Wikidata - User:Athulvis
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Mobile statement editing is now available as a beta feature on Wikidata. Enable the Beta feature in your preferences settings, head to Wikidata Sandbox (Q4115189) (in mobile view) to test it and share your feedback here: Mobile editing of statements.
- The WMF Wikidata Platform team has published its January 2026 newsletter. It includes updates on the legacy full-graph endpoint decommissioning, the User-Agent policy change, the monthly Blazegraph migration office hours, and efforts to reduce regressions caused by the legacy endpoint shutdown. To have new issues of the WDP monthly newsletter delivered to your user talk page, Subscribe to WDP newsletter!
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes: common organism (organisms known by this common name)
- Newest External identifiers: Boosty author ID, Before I Play game ID, Korea Heritage Service Heritage Portal ID, KaraokeTexty.cz artist ID, KaraokeTexty.cz song ID, Showlabs ID, DEUMM Online ID, Slekt og Data cemetery ID, Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia ID, EZB library ID, topic of Dictionary of Canadian biography identifier, Cover Art Archive image, X broadcast ID, Theaterencyclopedie ID, Maitron biography ID (new version), Scilit organization ID, Fragrantica perfume ID, Fragrantica perfume brand ID, izoh.uz word ID, Place Names and Places of Nova Scotia ID, Fragrantica perfume notes ID, Fragrantica perfumer ID, Parfumo perfume brand ID, Parfumo perfumer ID, Parfumo perfume ID, Parfumo fragrance notes ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- Artistagraph ID (Identifies the Artistagraph for an artistIdentifier for creative works on Artistagraph, a platform for documenting and discovering artist information and creative work connections)
- number of tunnel tubes (Number of parallel tubes in a tunnel.)
- New External identifier property proposals to review:: Mapillary sequence ID, People's Graphic Design Archive creator ID, Uni24k indentifier, Brussels BeStAddress municipality ID, Brussels BeStAddress street name ID, Brussels BeStAddress address ID, Wikifunctions object, MAX username, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei ID, The Retro Web company ID, Schulnummer Berlin, KCI article ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Showcase Items: mojito - traditional Cuban highball cocktail
Development
- Mobile editing of statements: We have released the first version of mobile statement editing as a beta feature (see details above). In addition we are improving it further and are adding missing functionality to get it ready for a full release. This includes adding editing support for additional data types such as date and musical notation.
- Blazegraph replacement: The Wikidata platform team is continuing their evaluation of alternative backends for the Wikidata Query Service.
- Graph QL: We are continuing to work on the prototype to get it ready for wider testing and are waiting on a security review.
- Dumps: We fixed an issue where the "latest" symlinks to data dumps weren't working correctly.
- Wikidata integration in the Wikimedia projects: We are investigating how to further reduce the number of unnecessary changes showing up in watchlist and recent changes coming from Wikidata. The work on this is also helping reduce the size of the recent changes database table, which is especially important on larger Wikipedias. In addition we are continuing to improve the Databox module to make it easier for smaller Wikipedias to get Wikidata-powered infoboxes.
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country: Kazakhstan
- 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!
Tech News: 2026-03
[edit]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
- The Wikimedia Foundation has shared some guiding questions for the July 2026–June 2027 Annual Plan on Meta and Diff. These focus on global trends, faster and healthier experimentation, better support for newcomers, strengthening editors and advanced users, improving collaboration across projects, and growing and retaining readership. Feedback and ideas are welcome on the talk page.
Updates for editors
- As part of the current work of Community Tech team on the Multiple watchlists project, the display of EditWatchlist will be updated as a first step towards multiple watchlists. Additionally, the pagination on Search will be updated too, as a part of the work on the Revamp pagination / page navigation wish. [107]
- The Global Watchlist is a MediaWiki extension that lets you see your watchlists from different wikis on the same page. It was recently updated to look more like the regular Watchlist, such as preparing it for temporary accounts in IP masking (including rerouting user links to contributions pages), making page titles bold, and opening links in edit summaries and tags in new browser tabs. [108][109][110][111]
View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where global blocks did not have the option to disable sending emails, has now been fixed, and will be available for use in the week of January 13. [112]
Updates for technical contributors
- The VisualEditor citation tool and Reference Previews now support "map" as a reference type. [113]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki/MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 19:31, 12 January 2026 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 1
[edit]


Highlights
- Wikipedia turns 25: Time to start the party! Join the virtual celebration featuring musical performances, games, and more on January 15 at 16:00 UTC. and The party will be live interpreted into Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Annual planning: Key questions for the Wikimedia movement to shape the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2026-2027 annual goals. Join the discussion on-wiki.
- Hackathon:
- Apply to join the Northwestern Europe 2026 Hackathon from March 13-14 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Application will close mid-January 2026 or earlier based on event capacity.
- General Registration for the 2026 Wikimedia Hackathon is now open! The hackathon will take place in Milan, Italy from May 1 - 3, 2026. Event details can be found here and registration will remain open until March 30th or until event capacity is reached.
- Semantic search: Wikimedia Foundation is working on making it easier to find the information readers want.
- Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 50, week 51, and week 52 include that now edit filters can be set to automatically suppress their details which will help oversighters to prevent doxxing.
- Wikifunctions: The first Wikifunctions Volunteers' Corner of the next year will take place on February 9.
- Blazegraph Migration: To support the migration away from Blazegraph as the backend of Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), we are hosting regular calls starting on January 27. Wikidata users and tool maintainers are are invited to join, ask questions, and share migration-related concerns.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events · The Wikipedia Library
- Upcoming Conferences: Announcing the six Wikimedia conferences funded for 2026 in the first round.
- Wikimania 2026: A glimpse on what the team is currently working on to prepare for Wikimania 2026 in Paris.
- Public Policy: Explore the resources available for public policy advocacy work, including explainers that describe key policy positions, guides on how to build a campaign or write a policy brief, and examples of open letters submitted to governments.
- Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
- Public-Interest content: The Project Gayatri content expansion program brought 7,656 new articles on Indonesian Wikipedia.
- Wikimedia Research Showcase: The research showcase will return on January 22 at 17:30 UTC with the theme "Celebrating 25 Years of Wikipedia and the Research Behind It".
- Wikimedia Research Report: The Wikimedia Foundation has published its 13th bi-annual Research Report, highlighting the work completed during the first six months of this fiscal year.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Past issues of the bulletin for progress on the annual plan
- Wikimedia Enterprise: Read the full annual wrap-up of 2025 of Wikimedia Enterprise and how the year marked a fundamental shift in open knowledge.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Board of Trustees: Wikimedia Foundation welcomes two new Board Trustees Bobby Shabangu and Michał Buczyński.
- Affcom News: Read the year-end issue of AffCom News (July-December 2025), the newsletter that distributes relevant news and events about the work of Wikimedia's Affiliations Committee.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters ·Milestones ·
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletin
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 00:30, 14 January 2026 (UTC)
The Signpost: 15 January 2026
[edit]- News and notes: Wikipedia's 25th anniversary is here!
Where does the time go?
- Special report: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call
The internet is booming. We are not.
- Serendipity: The WMF wants to buy you books!
Really! A major triumph.
- WikiProject report: Time for a health check: the Vital Signs 2026 campaign
The campaign to get all of our top-importance medical articles up to B-class or above.
- In the media: Fake Acting President Trump and a Wikipedia infobox
D.J.T. assumes a new position.
- Community view: The inbox behind Wikipedia
What the Volunteer Response Team actually does!
- Recent research: Art museums on Wikidata; comparing three comparisons of Grokipedia and Wikipedia
And other research.
- Traffic report: Tonight I'm gonna rock you
A world in white gets underway.
- Comix: Oh come on man.
Really?
Wikidata weekly summary #715
[edit]
week leading up to 2026-01-19. Missed the previous one? See issue #714.
Discussions
- Closed request for comments: Deprecate P642? - Consensus to deprecate was reached.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- Wikifying Te Tiriti 10-workshop series, attendees will learn how to contribute to Wikipedia and create Wikidata items, to increase the visibility of people and their projects working in Te Tiriti and anti-racism areas. Further information can be found on the WikiProject page / Workshop timetable. Register to attend.
- Wiki Loves Folklore 2026 in Uganda - contribute to the project by expanding or creating Wikidata Items connected to the project categories, such as Ugandan folklore, food, music, dances, traditional clothing, and more.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- The London School of Economics and Political Science have employed a Wikimedian in Residence
- Wikimedia Indonesia held Data and Technology Week 2025 in last December 2025, organized introductory workshops on Wikidata and Wikifunctions. Read key takeaways and participants' discussion at Diff.
- Wikidata Days 2025 Journey in Africa: Building Knowledge, Languages and Communities
- Wikidata Botswana 2025: Celebrating 13 Years (And We Really Showed Up!)
- Papers:
- A new monographic number of JLIS.it has been published regarding the OPAC SBN (the biggest collective library catalogue in Italy, with more than 7 thousands of libraries participating; about its collaboration with Wikidata, see the Wikidata coordination page); it contains 3 papers focusing on the use of Wikidata for authority control (all in Italian, with abstract in English):
- Wikidata and SBN: An Assessment of Two Years of Work (2023–2025): an overview Wikidata-SBN of the collaboration in 2023-2025, focusing on the methods of reconciliation
- Wikidata-Enhanced Authority Records: A Project for Personal Names in SBN: a description of the procedure to extract data from Wikidata items matches with SBN authority records and adapt these data to be copied into non-individualised SBN authority records
- NaMo, utility for populating missing date fields in authority records: a description of an utility to keep an authority file up-to-date finding missing death dates through Wikidata
- Wikidata-Enhanced Authority Records: A Project for Personal Names in SBN - A collaboration between Wikimedia Italy and ICCU is enriching incomplete SBN authority records using Wikidata identifiers, enhancing catalogue accuracy and accessibility as entries continue to grow. By Ravelli, (2026).
- A new monographic number of JLIS.it has been published regarding the OPAC SBN (the biggest collective library catalogue in Italy, with more than 7 thousands of libraries participating; about its collaboration with Wikidata, see the Wikidata coordination page); it contains 3 papers focusing on the use of Wikidata for authority control (all in Italian, with abstract in English):
Tool of the week
- Puzzles By Nathan is a game that arrange words so each connects to the next
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Mobile editing for RTL languages: The Wikimedia Deutschland team is seeking users of right-to-left (RTL) scripts, including Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu, to help test and improve the mobile statement editing experience. If you edit in an RTL language and would like to join user interviews or deeper testing, sign up here.
- (French) Gendered place names in the public space of French-speaking Switzerland
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest External identifiers: Parfinity notes ID, Google Ads Transparency Center advertiser ID, Basenotes perfume brand ID, Basenotes perfume people ID, Basenotes perfume ID, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei ID, MAX username
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- location collected (geographic location where a specimen or sample was collected in the field)
- Category for music in this language (link to category item that contains music in this language)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Thyssen-Bornemisza work ID, CriticDB IDs, MPA certificate number, WorldFootball.net person ID (new), The Session tune ID, Parfumo fragrance note ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Schema examples: film director (E24)
- WikiProject Highlights:
- Rijksmonumenten Unmerge list - list of items with more than one P359 (Rijksmonumenten ID).
- Stanford Libraries added an event: Love Data Week 2026
- Newest database reports: Entities without a Label - this list is dynamically created, search by language code and entity type: Item or Property.
- Showcase Items: FIFA (Q253414) - international governing body of association football
- Showcase Lexemes: charge (L3922) - English verb (tʃɑːrdʒ) meaning "to supply with energy", "to rush forward", or "to have responsibility for"
Development
- Mobile statement editing:
- We continued work on supporting more datatypes for editing, specifically date, musical notation and monolingual text.
- We worked on displaying constraint violation indicators.
- You can try out the current state by enabling it in the beta features section of your preferences.
- Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are continuing to investigate options for further reducing the amount of Wikidata changes in recent changes and watchlist on the other wikis to reduce the size of the database tables.
- Dumps: We finished our research on dumps, especially looking into different ways to define subsets. We will publish the report with results by end of February.
- Wikidata Query Service: The Wikidata Platform team is continuing the evaluation of potential replacements for Blazegraph.
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.
- Govdirectory weekly focus country:
- 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!
Tech News: 2026-04
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The tray shown on Special:Diff in mobile view has been redesigned. It is now collapsed by default, and incorporates a link to undo the edit being viewed, making it easier for mobile editors and reviewers to take action while keeping the interface uncluttered. [114]
- The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now automatically determines the text direction (ensuring correct display of sites with unusual domain names) and shows detailed descriptions for log actions. Later this week, a new permanent link for page creations and CSS classes for each entry element will be added. [115][116][117][118]
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the previously observed issue in Vector 2022, where anchor link targets were obscured by the sticky header, has now been addressed. [119]
Updates for technical contributors
- As mentioned in the October 2025 deprecation announcement, MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin sunsetting all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API the week of January 26. Changes are expected to roll out to all wikis on or before January 30th. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found, compared, and tested using the REST Sandbox. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in Phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
- Interactive reference documentation for the Wikimedia REST API has moved. Requests to API docs previously hosted through RESTBase (e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/) are now redirected to the REST Sandbox. - The WMF Wikidata Platform team (WDP) has published its January 2026 newsletter. It includes updates on the legacy full-graph endpoint decommissioning, the User-Agent policy change, the monthly Blazegraph migration office hours, and efforts to reduce regressions caused by the legacy endpoint shutdown. As a reminder, you can subscribe to the WDP newsletter!
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- The Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026 will take place on 13-14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Applications opened mid-December and will close soon or when capacity is reached. It's a two-day, technically oriented hackathon bringing together Wikimedians from the region. Hope to see you there!
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.