Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Welcome to 2023’s Final Weekly Summary!
A big thank you to everyone who contributed to the newsletter this year!👏🙏 As we step into 2024, we'd love to hear what changes you would like to see in the newsletter. Share your wishlist here: What changes would you like to see in the newsletter in 2024?"
Discussions
Open request for adminship: EPIC (RfP scheduled to end after 26 December 2023 20:34 UTC)
New requests for permissions/Bot: Balyozbot. Tasks:
Import sitelinks, labels, descriptions from ku wikipedia pages which use the template w:ku:Template:Înterwîkî etîket û danasîn. (There are over 1800 articles that use this template waiting to be connected to Wikidata at the moment.)
Add sitelinks to kuwiktionary / kuwikipedia categories / create an item for the category if necessary. I have been doing this manually for quite some time using Quickstatements but since I need to get permission for the first task, I will be handling them using a bot as well.
Upcoming: Introducing WMF Wishathon for Wikimedia’s Community Wishlist! "focused on bringing together people who already contribute to technical aspects of the Wikimedia projects, who know how to find their way on the technical ecosystem, and who are able to work or collaborate on projects rather autonomously." March 15th to 17th, 2024.
African Librarians empowered to share knowledge and enhance information visibility through AfLIA Wikidata Online Course --> The "Promoting Open Knowledge Practices in African Libraries through Wikidata" project, executed by AfLIA with support from the Wikimedia Foundation, trained African librarians on using Wikidata to enhance the visibility of library collections and close the knowledge and gender gap on Africa. The course was facilitated by experienced African Wikimedian editors and included diverse strategies for learner engagement and support.
Papers: Increasing Coverage and Precision of Textual Information in Multilingual Knowledge Graphs by (Conia et al, 2023) --> This paper introduces a novel task of automatic Knowledge Graph Enhancement (KGE) to bridge the gap in the quantity and quality of textual information between English and non-English languages in Wikidata. It presents M-NTA, an unsupervised approach that combines Machine Translation, Web Search, and Large Language Models to generate high-quality textual information, and studies its impact on Entity Linking, Knowledge Graph Completion, and Question Answering tasks.
Videos
Wikidata, Wikisource and Wiktionary: Wikisource for DH (WiSe 2023) --> The lecture "Fundamentals and application-oriented methods of the Digital Humanities" by Kay-Michael Würzner is designed as a series of lectures in which teachers in the "Digital Humanities" course present their fields of work and key topics and present them for discussion.
Empowering Open-Source Generative AI by Integrating the Wikidata knowledge graph --> Generative AI has changed the information ecosystem, and open-source knowledge graphs like Wikidata can become invaluable assets, propelling a myriad of applications forward. Jonathan Fraine & Lydia Pintscher present the practical integration of Wikidata's open-source, open-access knowledge graph to empower Generative AI applications. Harnessing the real-time updated, structured data encapsulated within Wikidata, they explore automated content creation, data augmentation, and semantic analysis, underpinning the generative paradigms. Through a blend of theoretical insights and real-world applications, they elucidate how to leverage Wikidata to elevate generative AI applications, breaking down existing data silos, and fostering a collaborative ecosystem within our global community of developers and contributors.
Wiki Indaba 2023 - African content on Wikidata --> Discussion with Alice Kibombo, Georges Fodouop and Jesse Asiedu-Akrofi, about Wikidata for African Librarians during the Wiki Indaba conference, that took place between 3-5 November 2023 in Agadir, Morocco.
No Time to Wait - S07E10 - ACMI // Wikidata - Paul Duchesne + Simon Loffler --> Report on recent residency program to extensively link together collection data from ACMI with Wikidata. This work has allowed the organisation to import vast quantities of data and media to enrich their own internet collection experience, as well enable writing information back to source and federating with other linked institutions.
Map of K-Pop Idols --> An interactive map where each red dot represents a K-pop Idol (a singer or musician in South Korean Pop music) you are able to click on.
Disney as the Mega Corporation it is Today --> Disney has greatly evolved from the simple animation company that first debuted in 1923 with its signature Steamboat Willie animation. This analysis details some of the major acquisitions Disney has chosen to help expand its reach as a media and entertainment company.
State of statues in the US --> Map of how many statues there are, who is depicted in the statues, their genders, and where the statues are concentrated.
An Analysis on Nepo Babies: Net Worths and Fame --> This work uses Wikidata to analyze the influence and success of children of famous actors (nepo babies) in the entertainment industry, and compares the careers and net worth of these children with their parents to understand the impact of nepotism on their success.
Tool of the week
Cersei - is a tool designed for importing or scraping data from various third-party sources, using source-specific Python code. It can use a "headless browser" to scrape complicated websites that rely on eg JavaScript to navigate. It can therefore access data sources that can not be accessed via eg Mix'n'match. The data from sources can be updated regularly, either for everything, or just changed entries (if the source has a "recent changes" equivalent).
Wikidata:Zotero/Cita - is a Wikidata addon for Zotero that adds citations (i.e., what other items an item cites) metadata support to this open source reference management software, using cites work (P2860) information available from Wikidata, and enabling users to easily contribute missing data.
production manager (manager that is responsible for the administration of a feature film or television production; oversees production plans, controls resources, initiates production, ensures ongoing operations, monitors schedules and expenditures, and creates a detailed production schedule and budget)
Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Städel Museum Wikidata Clean-Up - This WikiProject from the Städel Museum aims to actively participate in the Wikimedia community by maintaining and updating the quality of its data. This includes their collection of public domain art, which has been digitized and made freely available for public use. The project focuses on ensuring that the most current and high-quality data, including high-resolution images and improved metadata, are available on platforms like Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.
Upcoming: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC, 17th January 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Papers: Improving maintenance of community-based knowledge graphs. This paper by Nicolas Ferranti addresses the critical issue of data quality in open knowledge graphs, with a specific focus on Wikidata. It aims to formalize Wikidata's unique approaches to assess and resolve data inconsistencies, proposing a semi-automatic refinement pipeline to empower the Wikidata user community in maintaining and enhancing the reliability of this extensive collaborative knowledge graph.
Videos: WikidataCon 2023 Day 1.5 - The past and future of Wikidata. In this video Lydia Pintscher takes a moment to review the major events of Wikidata over the past few years. Then turns to look forward and predict what Wikidata's prospects will be over the next year.
Tool of the week
WICA: Wikidata's insights for created articles is an updated version of an old tool. It now includes many new features to analyse your list of created articles using Wikidata properties.
Nonprofit Status (Indicating the legal and tax status of a non-profit organization (specific to served legal areas, aka. Countries). Addition to {{P|1454}}. {{P|1628}} to [https://schema.org/nonprofitStatus nonprofitStatus] from schema.org. Organizations can have multiple Nonprofit Status from different countries.)
creative director (person who makes high-level creative decisions, oversees the creation of creative assets such as adverts, products, events or logos and guides and directs the creative people who create the end result)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 17th January 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Blogs: PubChem on Wikidata – What is the state of coverage? by Tiago Lubiana. In summary, Wikidata has good coverage of the structured chemical data in PubChem, though there are improvement points. PubChem displays, and will always display, textual information and vendor-specific data that do not fit Wikidata, but they are complementary tools in the ecosystem of open chemical data.
LIS Journals’ Lack of Participation in Wikidata Item Creation by Eric Willey & Susan Radovsky, discusses the gap of Wikidata items being created for scholarly articles by the scholar's themselves and if this can lead to inconsistent or inaccurate data model.
Quantifying Americanization: Coverage of American Topics in Different Wikipedias: this paper asks whether there is an americanisation bias in the content created by the communities. By Piotr Konieczny & Włodzimierz Lewoniewski.
Videos
Map Kerala Initiative is an opendata portal geospatial map powered by Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, introduced by Manoj Karingamadathil.
Notebooks: Wikipedia article as a timeline - This tool transforms a Wikipedia article in a timeline by parsing all internal links in a Wikipedia article and retrieving the date corresponding to each internal link using the point in time (P585) property in Wikidata.
Tool of the week Map your list of created articles - a notebook display of geolocated articles on a map created by a user per chosen project and batch (featured/good article).
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikimedia Indonesia and Wikimedia Deutschland ended their partnership within the project Software Collaboration for Wikidata prematurely. Read their joint statement here.
IP masking/temporary accounts: We are adjusting Wikibase to be prepared for the upcoming changes to no longer expose IP addresses for non-logged-in users (phab:T351968)
Dumps/lex. data: We’re adjusting how empty lists of Forms and Senses are represented in JSON dumps (phab:T305660)
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the work on making it possible to get all sitelinks of an Item (phab:T344041)
We are working on getting a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344039)
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Translations are available.
Discussions
New request for comments: Domain name as data (Summary: How should Wikidata store the domain name associated with an item? There are many properties for URLs, but a domain name is a different value.)
PLW 2024: Provenance loves Wiki - Fri. 12th - Sun. 14th January. If you missed the event, catch up by reading the slides, Notes and watching the recordings on the Project page
Next: Linked Open Data in Heritage Workshop > Jan. 23rd, 13:00 - 15:00 CET. If you are in the Maastricht University Faculty and want to know enhance heritage research, improve data management, connectivity and visualisation, register for the Workshop.
AskWikidata: Natural language queries to Wikidata, a naive prototype created by Senior Software Engineer for Wikidata, Robert Timm. Want to try? (Google Colab)
IP Masking: We are continuing to adapt Wikibase to the upcoming IP Masking feature. We worked on hiding warnings about IP addresses being saved when they don’t apply (phab:T353807, phab:T352006) and creating temporary accounts when editing (phab:T354730)
Wikibase REST API:
We continued working on the ability to get a sitelink for a given site (phab:T344039)
We started working on the ability to remove a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344685)
We worked on fixing a bug where the REST API PUT request does not handle statement on Items with lowercase statement IDs (phab:T352644)
mul language code: We did user testing to find any remaining issue before release
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-07-01. Please help Translate.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
DifoolBot 4 Task(s) - Split single references containing multiple reference URLs into multiple references.
Bot Bozze Task(s) - Add sitelinks to itwiki draft articles after they've been moved to the main namespace.
New request for comments: Spelling convention for labels and descriptions in English - RfC started 2024-06-25. This RfC requests feedback and input for finding consistency in spelling convention as English has multiple regional variations.
Past: The Lexicodays 2024 was an online event designed to offer a discussion space for the Wikidata community about Lexicographical Data. An archive of some of the slides and session recordings are here c:Category:Lexicodays 2024. More will be added as they become available.
Upcoming:
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 10th July 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Botany-focused Wikidata online workshop online as part of the #IBC2024. Date: Tuesday 9th July at 9pm NZST (GMT+12) / 11 am central Europe. Register here!
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
Querying for audio on Wikidata - This blog post discusses using SPARQL queries on Wikidata to find audio recordings, focusing on musical compositions and their associated genres.
Diff Blog: Imagining a Wikidata future for librarians together - the sixth and final blog post from the LD42023 conference. Silvia Gutiérrez (WMF) and Giovanna Fontenelle (WMF) document the results of the collaborative session on building a bridge between the Library-Wikidata community and WMF.
Library Knowledge as Linked Data: A Wikidata Approach: Contributing to a shared data commons. David Erlandson describes the experiences of using Wikidata for the pilot Program for Cooperative Cataloging to "accelerate the movement towards ubiquitous identifier creation and identity management at the network level".
User:Zvpunry/CreateNewItem - This is a User script to easily add a new Item while editing a Statement and noticing that the desired Item is missing.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The second iteration of the Wikidata:Open Online Course has begun. Class will continue until August 11. Whether you're a beginner taking your first steps, an individual in need of a refresher on Wikidata concepts, or a seasoned trainer looking to level up your skills - this course is right for you.
Newest WikiProjects: Inuktitut - This is the space to organize work to assure that the sum of all knowledge and the supporting infrastructure for necessary services are available in Inuktitut (ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ, Inuktitut).
Wikidata Affinity Group Update: The fourth session of Starting a Wikidata Project, originally set for March 18, will now be an asynchronous Slack discussion in the #wikidata channel of the LD4 Slack Space. Join us at 9am PT / 16:00 UTC to discuss Reporting Your Outcomes and Results. Join Slack here. Note: April programming will pause as we prepare the next series.
(German) Wikipedia Unterwegs - this time in Neu-Ulm: This travelling community meetup for German Wikimedians discusses the growing ecosystem of Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons.
REST in Rust by Magnus: "A new Rust crate has been developed to simplify access to the Wikibase REST API, featuring industry-level coding standards, 248 unit tests, >97% code coverage, and high maintainability. Check out the GitHub repo and contribute via the issue tracker or pull requests!"
The Wikidata Vector Database prototype is almost ready! Developers interested in integrating semantic search into their applications and editors looking to explore Wikidata items using natural language search are invited to reach out for more details: philippe.saadewikimedia.de
OAI formatter (formatter to generate ID compatible with Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting services)
AI-generation prompt (exact prompt that was used to generate this AI-generated media or work)
data analysis method (methods used in the main item for inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information)
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
watercraft prefix (prefix applied to watercraft operated by different organisations)
accused (person or organization who has been accused of carrying out this harmful, illegal, or immoral act without having received a criminal conviction or where the accused have been acquitted in a court of law)
applies to volume (volume of the item (usually edition of a work) to which the claim applies)
oxygen endurance (The maximum time a submarine, spacecraft or enclosed vehicle can sustain life using its onboard oxygen supply.)
Showcase Lexemes: Knoten (L298686) - German noun that can mean "knot", "fundamental unit of which graphs (in graph theory) are formed", "point where an orbit crosses a plane of reference to which it is inclined", or "hair wrapped in a circular coil around itself (bun)."
Development
Wikibase REST API: We continued the work on adding search to the API (phab:T383126)
Search: We are continuing the work on making it easier to search for entities other than Items in the search box (phab:T338483)
Query Service: We set up the constraint checks to use the split graph instead of the full graph (phab:T374021)
Integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are looking into how changes from Wikidata are represented on the other Wikimedia projects and how that can be improved (phab:T386200)
Wikidata and Sister Projects to take place May 29 - June 1. Please send us your session ideas, we still have lots of space for proposals. This is a great chance to highlight the benefits of Wikidata use in other WM projects. See Talk page for proposals.
Lexica - a mobile-friendly tool that simplifies micro contributions to lexicographical data on Wikidata, making various editing tasks accessible and intuitive for contributors of all experience levels.
data analysis method (methods used in the main item for inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information)
Administrator elections will take place this month. Administrator elections are an alternative to RFA that is a gentler process for candidates due to secret voting and multiple people running together. The call for candidates is July 9–15, the discussion phase is July 18–22, and the voting phase is July 23–29. Get ready to submit your candidacy, or (with their consent) to nominate a talented candidate!
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-067-07. Missed the previous one? See issue #686.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
Bovlbbot - Task(s): this bot request asks for admin access (or access to deleted revisions if possible) so it can move the updater task for User:Bovlb/wd-deleted.
Andrebot 3 - Task(s): Fill in historic countries for the settlements, communes, towns and cities of Romania.
New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series! Mark your calendars for our final session of our event series on the Wikidata graph split project and SPARQL skills! We will be diving into the mechanics of federated SPARQL queries and look forward to a hands-on and interactive session exploring how to use the scholarly article query service. Join us Tuesday, July 8th at 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST (Time zone converter https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1751990400). Please see our project page for more information and Zoom links.
Hackathon announced for Wikimania 2025, Nairobi. Call for Projects is now open! Includes a newcomer track for first-time participants. Add yourself to the participants list or see the resources page for further event info.
User:Kod B - ArchiveExternaLinks.js This script automatically archives external links found in the statements of Wikidata items, in order to improve source durability and reduce the risk of broken links (link rot), similar to what already exists on Wikipedia.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
What belongs where in the Wikibase Ecosystem? There is ongoing research to better understand what people are currently thinking about this and you can take part by sorting some scenarios.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 16th July 2025 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Wikimania 2025 Hackathon kicks off on Tuesday, 5 August and a dedicated workspace will be available throughout the conference until Saturday, 9 August. Have a technical idea, tool, or project you want to build during the hackathon? Submit it now and start connecting with collaborators! Add your project here.
WikiCite 2025 will take place from Friday 29th to Sunday 31st of August! in Bern (Switzerland) and online! See the draft program here.
Wikidata for botanists: benefits of collaborating and sharing Linked Open Data By Sabine et al., (2025). This study explores Wikidata as an open, multilingual knowledge base that connects botanical data across sources, and urges botanists to collaboratively enrich its content to support a broad spectrum of plant science.
How To...Wikibase? - Senior Partner Manager, Christos Varvantakis has produced this set of training and educational material to get you started with Wikibase.
Tool of the week
Commons Depictions is a tool that display depictions of Wikidata items on Wikimedia Commons
Showcase Lexemes: reference (L5785) - English noun/verb (ˈɹɛf.ɹəns) meaning "source citation", "supporting document", or "relationship"
Development
Wikibase REST API: We started work on the simple Property prefix search phab:(T397838)
Mobile statement editing: We continued the work on the basics with viewing of statements (phab:T394886])
Search: Fixed a bug when pasting into the search box (phab:T397608)
Integration in Wikipedia and co:
We began research into current limits for collapsing entity usage. (Basically when an article uses more data from an Item than the configured limit then we consider all data on that Item to be used. This is done for infrastructure reasons.) We’d like to improve this to further reduce unnecessary Wikidata changes showing up on watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and co.
We will roll out showing labels instead of IDs in Wikidata edits in watchlist and recent changes to more wikis later this week.
Wikimedia and Open Knowledge Conference (survey) is being planned for 2026 in Poland. This event is to focus on research carried out on or with Wikidata and Wikipedia. Your opinion is wanted! Please fill out the Google Forms survey to help the organisation committee plan. Also available in Polish and Ukrainian.
Wikimania 2025 Program is Live! This is also the time to add your Wikidata meetups. Please start marking your preferred Wikimania sessions (⭐/like) and mark to your mobile apps or calendars. If you are joining online to watch live stream and use the interactive features, please register on eventyay through wikimania.org (source)
Past: Missed the Q3 Wikidata+Wikibase office hour? You can catch up by reading the session log here: 2025-07-15 (Q3 2025)
Wikinity A tool allowing you to find (un)photographed objects, so you can take a picture of them and send it to Wikidata. The tool was created By Martin Urbanec
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Call for Papers is now open for the Journal of Open Humanities Data special collection: "Wikidata across the Humanities: datasets, methodologies, reuse." This editorial will explore how Wikidata is transforming research and collaboration in the humanities. If you're working on a relevant project, submit your proposal here
What belongs where in the Wikibase Ecosystem? There is ongoing research to better understand what people are currently thinking about this and you can take part by sorting some scenarios.
Showcase Lexemes: Września (L1372236) - Polish proper noun (ˈvʐɛɕ.ɲa) meaning "September (month)", "town in Greater Poland", or "village in Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship"
Additional APIs: We are looking a bit more into GraphQL and what it could offer to make programmatic access to Wikidata's data better.
Wikidata integration in the Wikimedia projects: We enabled showing the labels of entities in edit summaries in recent changes and watchlist. Now you no longer have to click to get to Wikidata and check what is behind a mystery ID in an edit summary coming from Wikidata.
Mobile statement editing: We are working on formatting references, qualifiers, various data types and multiple statements for one property. We are planning to enable the new mobile UI on Beta Wikidata soon. Important: For now it is a read-only UI, as we have not started to implement editing yet, and some data types won’t have the correct appearance yet.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-07-28. Missed the previous one? See issue #689.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: Aqurs1 (RfP scheduled to end after 31 July 2025 16:35 UTC)
New requests for permissions/Bot: THEbotIT 3 - New functional aspect to automatic creation of items describing the articles of Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (RE). We want to model now the articles, which amends the main articles, as those information where suppressed so far.
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, get funding, and get in touch with other organizers. Help translate the documentation pages into your language.
Wikimania starts next week August 6 through August 9. Check out the Wikidata related session in the program and start marking your preferred Wikimania sessions (⭐/like) on your mobile apps or calendars. If you are joining online to watch live stream and use the interactive features, please register on eventyay through wikimania.org. Note also the Wikidata meetups organised outside the official conference hours.
The modeling of agrégation ("the most competitive and prestigious examination for civil service in the French public education system" according to w:en:Agrégation) has been reviewed in various aspects: a summary is available in d:Talk:Q397610#Modeling agrégation. Suggestions are welcome.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
organizational chart (image that displays the structure of this organization or government agency and the relationships and relative ranks of it's parts and positions/jobs)
Source Shrine (The shrine that the gods of this shinto shrine came from through Bunrei and Kanjo)
botanical photographs (a distinctive image of a flower, inflorescence, or a similar reproductive structure for this taxon)
WikiProject Highlights: WikiProject Sweden - A project to centralize, expand, and translate Sweden-related data on Wikidata while supporting the Swedish contributor community.
Wikimania begins this week (August 6-9). Check out the Wikidata sessions and meetups in the event schedule and mark them in your calander.
New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series: Join the second session in our Intro to Wikidata/EMCO series. It will be focused on gadgets and user scripts that enhance Wikidata editing. We'll demo useful tools and invite you to share your favorites too! 🗓️ Tuesday, August 5 🕘 9am PT / 12pm ET / 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST ℹ️ More info & Zoom link: Project page
Wikimedia Commons Depicts statements over time - Looking at the user of Wikidata Items to show that Wikimedia commons images depict, since the structured data on commons feature was originally turned on. Roads currently come out on top! By Adshore
Videos: Ongoing Wikidata sessions at the LD4 2025 events. (playlist)
Tool of the week
Who Painted this - is a tool developed by Francesco Negri. The tool is a game that let's you guess who created a painting, using data from Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
If you are using Wikidata's APIs please be aware that the existing user agent policy will be enforced more strictly going forward. Please make sure your application sets a proper user agent. More details are in this announcement.