Discussions

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

Events

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

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

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

Tool of the week

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

Other Noteworthy Stuff

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

Newest properties and property proposals to review

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

Did you know?

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

Development

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

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Participate in this week's Lexeme challenge: Pigs
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!