Wikidata is a free knowledge base that you can edit! It can be read and edited by humans and machines alike and you can go to any item page now and add to this ever-growing database!
Need some help getting started? Here are some pages you can familiarize yourself with:
Wikidata:Tools – A collection of user-developed Javascript tools to allow for easier completion of some tasks.
If you have any questions, please ask me on my talk page. If you want to try out editing, you can use the sandbox to try. Once again, welcome, and I hope you quickly feel comfortable here, and become an active editor for Wikidata.
Worked on making properties accessible from the client using their label so you can use {{#property:executive director}} instead of {{#property:p169}} for example
Made qualifiers ready for the next deployment (Please test. See details further down.)
Selenium tests for qualifiers
Fixed some issues related to QUnit testing
Worked on improved handling and code design of multiple snak lists in the UI (qualifiers, references)
Discussions/Press
Denny wrote down how we’re planning to support queries on Wikidata. Feedback welcome.
Now that improvements for references have been deployed here’s a discussion on the best way to use them. (You can see an example of how it could be used in the source for “CAS registry number” on d:Q153)
We’re currently carefully monitoring performance after the deployment of phase 2 on the first 11 Wikipedias. There seem to be a few small issues. As soon as they are resolved we'll deploy on English Wikipedia. All other Wikipedias are planned to follow very soon after that.
Bye and a big thank you to Anja, Silke, Jens and John who are leaving the development team at the end of the month and will work on other cool things. You’ll be missed!
Ever had any doubt about the possibilities of Wikidata? Talk to Wiri!
We worked on reducing the time it takes for Wikidata edits to show up in the Wikipedias and made some progress. Daniel posted an analysis
We started running a script on the database in order to make search on Wikidata case-insensitive. This should be finished in a few days and then search should be more useful.
In addition to the above we have rolled out a new search box that suggests items. This should also make finding things on Wikidata a lot easier for you.
We’re making some progress with Internet Explorer 8 support but there are a lot of issues with it (some outside our control). It’s unclear at the moment how much we can improve it still without spending an unjustified amount of time on it. You can follow the progress at bugzilla:44228
Edits are now auto-confirmed for users with more than 50 edits and account age 4 days: bugzilla:46461
Do you need old-style interwiki links for a sister project for example? This is for you
The Wikimedia Foundation applied as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code again. We have proposed some Wikidata projects for students to take up if the Foundation is accepted again. At least 2 other organisations that applied also propose Wikidata ideas. More details on that once we know which organisations are accepted.
Denny hacked together a tree of life based on data from Wikidata
Did you file a bug report for Wikidata or did someone else do it for you? Please take a minute to check if it is still valid. (Thanks for filing it btw!)
Could I have 2 mins of your time? As I’ll be working on some other projects for Wikimedia Germany as well from now on the time I can spend on Wikidata will be reduced. This means I’ll have to figure out what is useful to spend time on. If you’re reading this could you let me know for example on this discussion page? Also if you have ideas how to improve the weekly summaries please post them. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk)
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Development
The first year is over. Thank you everyone for being amazing and helping to build Wikidata and making it more than we could possibly have hoped for already. <3
Put a lot of work into improved support for Internet Explorer 8
Worked on improving recent changes code in client
Finished valueview refactoring. Created new extension “ValueView”
Deployment of phase 2 on English Wikipedia is currently planned for April 8. The remaining Wikipedias are scheduled for April 10. As usual this might change if we run into problems along the way.
There is now a page showing the current lag for changes propagating to the Wikipedias so they can show up in watchlists and recent changes for example. This should ideally be in the range of a few minutes. Right now it is higher because of some abnormally high bot activity but decreasing. Should be down to a few minutes soon.
There’s now a badge you can add to Wikipedia articles to indicate there is data about it on Wikidata
Based on feedback for last week’s call for comments we will continue this newsletter. However more community help will be needed. From now on they’ll be drafted at d:Wikidata:Status updates/Next and your help is very welcome.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Development
Got some external professional review of our code and architecture and started working on their feedback
Worked on reducing the dispatch lag (the time it takes for changes on Wikidata to be sent to the Wikipedias for display in watchlist, recent changes and to purge affected pages)
Worked on using Redis for job queue to improve the lag situation even further
Created new Wikibase Query extension for phase 3 functionality
We need feedback from contributors working on references addition or having tried to add references to statements. Please comment about your problems or your trials at d:Help:Sources
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Deployment of phase 2 on the remaining Wikipedias was delayed because of a high lag of changes being propagated to the Wikipedias. The lag has been reduced considerably now and is going down even more. The new date for deployment will not be next week because there are other large changes on Wikimedia infrastructure scheduled that we do not want to interfere with. It will hopefully happen very soon after that though.
Next code update on wikidata.org is planned for Wednesday. This should include qualifiers and bugfixes.
There will probably be a short outage/read-only for wikidata.org on Tuesday (database is being switched to MariaDB)
Based on feedback for last week’s call for comments we will continue this newsletter. However more community help will be needed. From now on they’ll be drafted at d:Wikidata:Status updates/Next and your help is very welcome.
The above property is now available and can be used on items. I noticed you participated in its discussion. -- Docu at 11:02, 14 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Sven Manguard Wha? 21:37, 30 November 2012 (UTC)
