Abstract-Wikipedia September 2025

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Newsletter #219: Accessing qualifiers in Wikidata statements
by Denny Vrandečić 26 Sep '25

26 Sep '25

The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2025-09-26 -- Accessing qualifiers in Wikidata statements Wikifunctions has recently begun importing statements with *qualifiers*, whenever an entity is fetched from Wikidata. (Statements are imported inside Wikidata items, properties, lexemes, lexeme forms, and lexeme senses, whenever any of those entities is fetched.) This change gives Wikifunctions users access to a substantially greater variety of facts and, in particular, multi-faceted facts that go beyond the bare assertion of a property’s value for a subject. For example, a population statement might say *(Chicago, population, 2,746,388)*, but it will also usually have a qualifier that tells *when* that number was true; *e.g.* *(point-in-time 2020)*, because the number came from the 2020 census. Many useful properties, in addition to population, are associated with temporal and other qualifiers. Qualifiers are expressed using a new Wikifunctions Type Wikidata claim <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z6007> (which corresponds to Wikidata’s "*Snak*" type). This type includes three keys, for *property reference*, *value*, and *claim subtype* (discussed in the *News in Types* section below). Because the Wikidata statement <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z6003> Type also has these three keys, plus several others, a claim may be thought of as a skeletal (reduced, simpler) version of a Wikidata statement. If a statement has qualifiers, they show up as a list of claims, in the statement’s *qualifiers* key. As an example, the Function Most recent year-specific sentence about item <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28445> makes use of *point in time* qualifiers to generate sentences like *The population of Chicago was 2,746,388 in 2020*. It takes three arguments – a Wikidata item, a Wikidata property reference, and a natural language. The property reference should be a property, like *population*, whose instances are typically associated with a particular year and are annotated with *point in time* qualifiers. The function filters the item’s statements for those with the given property, selects the statement with the most recent *point in time* qualifier, extracts the year from that qualifier, and uses it in the generated sentence. It is currently only supported in English, but is configured (via Year-specific sentence from statement per language <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28435>) to allow for the addition of other languages. Coming: Wikifunctions to 25 more Wiktionaries and Wikimedia Incubator Next week we are planning to roll out embedded Wikifunctions calls to a further 25 Wiktionaries, and to the Wikimedia Incubator. The new Wiktionaries are: French, Greek, Spanish, Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch, Vietnamese, Italian, Finnish, Turkish, Korean, Swedish, Czech, Portuguese, Armenian, Tamil, Thai, Malagasy, Hindi, Persian, Catalan, Romanian, Hebrew, Bulgarian, and Simple English. This will add to the existing 123 language editions of Wiktionaries that already have the ability to embed calls to Wikifunctions in their wiki. Recent Changes in the software <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/File:WE_2.2_Lexeme_Sense_UI_component_fo…> This week we finished our Quarterly commitment around Lexeme senses, made some progress on another around errors, as well as a number of small issues. One of our promised changes this Quarter was a new special view for interacting with Lexeme senses on Wikifunctions (T398307 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T398307>), which went live this week. It should improve the experience when using Functions that interact with them, like Z6826. We have a video that shows how this component works, and how it improved on the previous version <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WE_2.2%20Lexeme%20Sense%20UI%20comp…> . As part of our work to make it easy to create and use errors (T395475 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T395475>), we are preparing a number of pre-defined Functions for this: Z850/try-catch <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z850>, Z851/throw <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z851>, Z852/is error type <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z852>, and Z853/get error <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z853> (T404092 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T404092>). We are also adding pre-defined test cases to these, to demonstrate that and how they are working. We are also changing how error types work, adding an identity key so they can be compared (T405114 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T405114>). We also added a way for user-created errors to have rich content inside them (T404469 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T404469>). Documentation and guidance on how to use these features will be coming soon. We have fixed the light-weight enum display to work when more than 50 items are requested, which should fix the chemical enum that was showing QIDs unlabelled (T404353 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T404353>). Following a Wikifunctions community member's request, we have added two new languages for the two scripts of Rohingya, Z1978/rhg-rohg <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z1978> and Z1979/rhg-arab <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z1979>. Another request has led us to create a new pre-defined Function, Z6896/Get values from Wikidata enum <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z6896>, for working with light-weight Wikidata enum Types (T397494 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T397494>). To better understand how people are using the integration into the visual editor to create embedded Wikifunctions calls, we have added some instrumentation to track activity (T402711 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T402711>). News in Types I: Some value and no value statements *Some value and no value statements.* Wikifunctions has also recently begun importing *some value* and *no value* statements. These come from Wikidata’s data model <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Data%20model#No_value_and_unknown_va…>. A *some value* statement asserts that *there is a value* for the statement’s property that applies to the statement’s subject – but does not state what that value is. In other words, the specific value is unknown. (A *some value* statement also allows for the possibility that there could be multiple unknown values.) A *no value* statement asserts that *there is no value* for the statement’s property that applies to the statement’s subject. These distinctions are made using the new Wikidata claim subtype <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z6020> Type – an enumeration type with the the instances value <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z6021> (for the usual kind of statement that includes a specific value), no value <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z6022>, and some value <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z6023>. Each Wikidata statement <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z6003> now has a key *claim subtype*, which contains one of these instances. Each Wikidata claim <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z6007> also has a key *claim subtype* containing one of these instances. News in Types II: Six new types for grammatical enumerations This week, six community proposals for lightweight enumerations were implemented, all in on the topic of grammar: - Grammatical number <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals/Grammatical…> with singular, paucal, and plural - Grammatical definiteness <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals/Grammatical…> with definite and indefinite - Grammatical voice <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals/Grammatical…> with active and passive - Grammatical polarity <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals/Grammatical…> with affirmation and negation - Grammatical cases <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals/Grammatical…> with Nominative, Genitive, Dative, and Accusative - Grammatical degrees of comparison <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals/Grammatical…> with positive, comparative, and superlative There are more proposals out there <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals>, and your review and vote matters! Lightning talk at Celtic Knot by Vigneron This week on Tuesday was the Celtic Knot – Wikimedia Language Conference 2025 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Celtic%20Knot%20Conference%202025>, offering a mix of workshop activities, presentations, lightning talks and activities. Nicolas Vigneron <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/User:VIGNERON> presented a lightning talk about Wikifunction. The slides are available on Commons <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikifunctions%20-%20Celtic%20Knot%2…> . Presentation at Wikimedia CEE by Cory The Wikimedia CEE Meeting <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia%20CEE%20Meetin…> will be held in Thessaloniki, Greece, 26–28 September, organized by Wikimedia UG Greece. Our own Cory Massaro will hold a presentation on Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia there. He will discuss the kinds of natural language content that can currently be generated with Wikifunctions, then give a brief exploration of existing Functions that already work in multiple languages. Recording of NLG SIG from Tuesday <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/File:Abstract_Wikipedia_NLG_SIG_Meeting_…> This week Tuesday was also the latest meeting of the Wikifunctions:NLG SIG <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:NLG_SIG>. Denny <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/User:DVrandecic_(WMF)> was presenting a proposal for representing abstract content in the future Abstract Wikipedia project. A recording of the meeting is available on Commons <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abstract%20Wikipedia%20NLG%20SIG%20…>. Thanks to everyone participating in the discussion! Fresh Functions weekly: 36 new Functions This week we had 36 new functions. Here is an incomplete list of functions with implementations and passing tests to get a taste of what functions have been created. Thanks everybody for contributing! - predicate of Wikidata property claim (Z28294) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28294> - value of Wikidata property claim (Z28297) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28297> - claim type of Wikidata property claim (Z28300) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28300> - claim has value? (Z28304) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28304> - claim predicate matches? (Z28308) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28308> - qualifiers of Wikidata statement with predicate (Z28312) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28312> - filter with second common element (Z28316) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28316> - qualifier values of statement with predicate (Z28321) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28321> - filter statements by claim type (Z28326) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28326> - statement has claim type (Z28327) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28327> - is a temperature unit? (Z28341) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28341> - are bounds equal to value? assume explicit bounds (Z28359) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28359> - Type from quoted Reference (Z28373) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28373> - intro for year in Bangla (Z28378) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28378> - read Rational number in Bangla (Z28381) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28381> - quoted references from first object (Z28387) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28387> - estimated hiking time in hours (Z28392) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28392> - estimated horizontal hiking time in hours (Z28395) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28395> - estimated ascent hiking time in hours (Z28399) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28399> - estimated descent hiking time in hours (Z28403) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28403> - estimated vertical hiking time in hours (Z28407) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28407> - rational number of hours to whole minutes (Z28416) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28416> - Natural numbers in Eastern Nagri script (Z28422) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28422> - float64 as string (Eastern Nagri) (Z28425) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28425> - Year-specific sentence from statement, in English (Z28432) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28432> - Year-specific sentence from statement (Z28436) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28436> - value of first key (Z28439) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28439> - value of second key (Z28442) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28442> - Most recent year-specific sentence about item (Z28445) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28445> - Most recent qualified statement from item (WIP) (Z28446) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28446> - Key references from object (Z28451) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28451> A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Special:ListObjectsByType?type=Z8&orderb…> is available.

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Newsletter #218: Wikifunctions available on 123 Wiktionary languages
by Denny Vrandečić 19 Sep '25

19 Sep '25

The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2025-09-19 ---- Wikifunctions available on 123 Wiktionary languages We deployed the ability to embed calls to Wikifunctions to another set of Wiktionaries. We deployed to the following 59 languages: Kannada, Lithuanian, Telugu, Ido, Norwegian (Bokmal and Nynorsk), Malay, Arabic, Burmese, Khmer, Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Esperanto, Estonian, Mongolian, Limburgish, Danish, Croatian, Sanskrit, Breton, Slovak, Albanian, Swahili, Mon, Latin, Occitan, Slovenian, Basque, Tagalog, Kyrgiz, Javanese, Sango, Lao, Min Nan, Sicilian, Urdu, Shan, Cantonese, Sinhala, Irish, Kazakh, Luxembourgish, Low German, Latvian, Western Frisian, Lombard, Welsh, Saraiki, Oriya, Pashto, Pa’O, Nepali, Bosnian, Fijian, Marathi, Nauru, Tatar, Oromu, and Kabardian. Last week’s announcement also stated that we would rollout to Georgian, but we missed that Parsoid has not been enabled there yet, and so we had to postpone Georgian. They have joined the 64 Wiktionary language editions that already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, we plan to expand to further Wiktionaries and some Wikipedias. If you ever need to check whether a specific Wikimedia wiki has Wikifunctions enabled, you can look at the bottom of your wiki's Special:Version <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Special:Version> page to see if {{#function}} is listed, or more generally you can refer to the official source of truth. Asking for help We have created a new page, Request for cleanup <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Request_for_cleanup>, where we ask the community to weigh in and clean up certain objects for various reasons. It could be Objects which are seemingly duplicates, that don’t seem to make sense to us, that have values that seem to be wrong, *etc.* Instead of just going in and heavy-handedly fixing those issues ourselves, we think that the content of Wikifunctions really should be controlled by the community. Just because an Object doesn’t make sense to us might just mean that we missed something, or didn’t get the full picture on something. We plan to add this page to the list on Wikifunctions:Community portal <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Community_portal>. If you prefer to use a different workflow, please let us know. Recent Changes in the software Late last week, we were alerted to a security issue by User:Dv103 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/User:Dv103>. This was in the forthcoming system we developed following on from usability tests, which allows the Wikifunctions community to show custom errors to users (T395475 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T395475>). We wrote and immediately deployed some quick fixes, which removed the issue (T404392 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T404392>), but slightly broke the feature; we have followed that up with further work that should restore the feature fully. Alongside this emergency work, we also continued development of the system to display these custom errors when used on Wikifunctions or in embedded calls. We'll announce more about this feature soon, once it's complete. We also fixed the breakage of all Python running (T404797 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T404797>) by re-deploying the service in the normal weekly roll-out (all the changes we deployed were to undeployed code, so we cannot take credit for the fix). We will investigate to see if we can work out what the breakage was. In user-facing code, we have created a special view for interacting with Lexeme senses on Wikifunctions, which should improve the experience when using Functions that interact with them, like Z6826 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z6826> (T398307 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T398307>). On the back-end services, we've identified and fixed a bug that meant that the new caching of Wikidata objects (T397956 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T397956>) wasn't as fast as it should have been; with this deployment, fetches of most Wikidata items is now significantly faster, which should improve issues related to that, such as Functions failing for some Wikidata inputs but not others (like in T403594 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T403594>). We've landed a fix to the category labels for embedded Function calls that go wrong — our thanks as always to User:Amire80 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/User:Amire80> for his diligence in supporting translators. As part of wider MediaWiki language support work, we have added a new language: Z1977 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z1977>/ckv (T381061 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T381061>). News in Types: display function for monolingual text and Wikidata types We added a display function <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z21583> that was created earlier this year to the monolingual text Type <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z11>. This doesn’t change the display in Wikifunctions, as monolingual texts have a bespoke display component anyway, but it enables Functions that have this Type as a return type to be used as embedded Wikifunctions calls. We recently added support for three of Wikidata's most widely used datatypes – those for quantity, geo-coordinate, and date/time. Three new Wikifunctions types allow functions to import facts involving these datatypes from Wikidata. An introductory video <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ImportingWikidataDatatypesIntoWikif…> about these types, which gives an overview and examples of how they show up in Wikifunctions' UI, was recently made available on Commons. Two of these types have been discussed in previous newsletters: quantity in the August 1 newsletter <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2025-08-01#…> and geo-coordinate in the August 22 newsletter <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2025-08-22#…> . Cory presenting at the CEE 2025 meeting The Wikimedia CEE Meeting <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia%20CEE%20Meeting%202025> will be held in Thessaloniki, Greece, 26–28 September, organized by Wikimedia UG Greece. Our own Cory Massaro will hold a presentation on Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia there. He will discuss the kinds of natural language content that can currently be generated with Wikifunctions, then give a brief exploration of existing Functions that already work in multiple languages. Upcoming NLG SIG meeting The next NLG SIG Meeting <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:NLG_SIG#Upcoming_meeting> will be on Tuesday, 23 September, 16:00-17:00 UTC <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1758636000>. Denny Vrandečić <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/User:DVrandecic_(WMF)> will be presenting on abstract representation. Fresh Functions weekly: 50 new Functions This week we had 50 new functions! Here is an incomplete list of functions with implementations and passing tests to get a taste of what functions have been created. Thanks everybody for contributing! - are within a minute? (Z28037) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28037> - sunset solar hour angle in radians (with altitude) (Z28046) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28046> - defining role sentence, Bangla (Z28049) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28049> - defining role sentence, Italian (Z28052) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28052> - Unlabelled (Z28060) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28060> - weighted average (floating point values) (Z28066) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28066> - seconds to hour angle (radians) (Z28072) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28072> - German nominative def article + noun from Item (Z28079) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28079> - is masculine grammatical gender (Z28084) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28084> - switch grammatical gender (m/f/n) (Z28086) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28086> - grammatical gender (m/f/n) of lexeme (Z28089) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28089> - approximate solar longitude (rad) from day of year (Z28100) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28100> - defining role sentence in English as string (Z28109) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28109> - archive a web link with the Wikiwix Archive (Z28111) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28111> - Julian calendar in Gregorian calendar (Z28119) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28119> - best Gregorian date describing property of item (Z28124) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28124> - Wikidata statement in Gregorian date (Z28128) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28128> - valid Gregorian date from Wikidata datetime (Z28133) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28133> - return default if void (Z28137) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28137> - day of month from Gregorian calendar date (Z28143) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28143> - throw error (Z28154) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28154> - first element, otherwise throw error (Z28159) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28159> - ID of Wikidata item (Z28163) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28163> - atomic mass (quantity) (Z28174) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28174> - electronegativity of element (quantity) (Z28177) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28177> - contains square brackets (Z28182) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28182> - chemical element from symbol (Z28188) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28188> - chemical element from atomic number (Z28197) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28197> - chemical symbol from atomic number (Z28201) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28201> - atomic number from chemical symbol (Z28205) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28205> - expand condensed electron configuration (Z28209) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28209> - Multiplication table (code) (Z28219) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28219> - number of arguments of a function (Z28222) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28222> - type of the first element of a function (Z28227) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28227> - ZID of a function (Z28231) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28231> - apply function with 1 or 2 arguments (Z28236) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28236> - type of the second argument of a function (Z28243) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28243> - apply unless Throw error (Z28249) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28249> - header from item in plural (Z28254) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28254> - next chemical element (Z28261) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28261> - previous chemical element (Z28267) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28267> - same chemical element (Z28272) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28272> - qualifiers of Wikidata statement (Z28278) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28278> - list of languages to sequence of ISO codes (Z28282) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28282> - Bangla superlative form of lexeme (adjective) (Z28286) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28286> A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Special:ListObjectsByType?type=Z8&orderb…> is available.

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MediaWiki Users & Developers Conference
by Bernhard Krabina, KM-A 15 Sep '25

15 Sep '25

Hello everyone, Apologies for cross-posting. Gentle reminder that the Fall 2025 MediaWiki Users & Developers Conference<https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Users_and_Developers_Conf…> will be held on October 28-30th, and hosted by the TIB Leibniz Centre in Hanover, Germany. On behalf of the Program Committee with this email we want to extend an invitation for tutorial proposals on any topic related to MediaWiki usage, deployment or development, including the MediaWiki extension ecosystem (Wikibase, Semantic MediaWiki, etc). Tutorials can be up to 90 mins long and held in hybrid format. The call for contributions<https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Users_and_Developers_Conf…> remains open until September 5th. To propose a tutorial or any other form of contribution talk for this conference, just fill out this form<https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:FormEdit/Talk?Talk%5BConfer…>. Everyone is encouraged to attend, to meet and discuss MediaWiki-related topics relating to both the Wikimedia world and uses within companies, organizations, etc. Thank you, and I hope to see many of you in Hanover! Lozana Rossenova, on behalf of the conference team

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Newsletter #217: More than 3,000 functions on Wikifunctions
by Denny Vrandečić 12 Sep '25

12 Sep '25

The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2025-09-12 ---- More than 3,000 functions on Wikifunctions Since last week, thanks to the diligent work of the volunteer contributors, we now have more than 3,000 functions available on Wikifunctions! We want to congratulate the community on this milestone. That is about *four new functions every single day* since WIkifunctions has been launched. Thank you! In order to mark this occasion, we have identified the 3000th Function and look at it as the Function of the Week section below. (It is a little bit vague on how to choose the 3000th Function. At time of writing, we sorted all still existing functions by time of creation, and took the 3000th entry on that list. Note that this may lead to a different result in the future if older Functions get deleted). I can tell you that there is a lot to talk about with this function! But see below. A Path to a World Where Everyone Can Share in the Sum of All Knowledge Veronica Thamaini <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:VThamaini%20(WMF)> and Denny Vrandečić <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/User:DVrandecic_(WMF)> published a short perspective for the MacArthur Foundation, discussing the Abstract Wikipedia proposal, one of five finalists for MacArthur’s ongoing 100&Change program <https://www.100andchange.org/>. You can read the text here: A Path to a World Where Everyone Can Share in the Sum of All Knowledge <https://www.macfound.org/press/perspectives/a-path-to-a-world-where-everyon…> Cory presenting at the CEE 2025 meeting The Wikimedia CEE Meeting <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia%20CEE%20Meeting%202025> will be held in Thessaloniki, Greece, 26-28 September, organized by Wikimedia UG Greece. Our own Cory Massaro <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/User:CMassaro_(WMF)> will hold a presentation on Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia there. He will discuss the kinds of natural language content that can currently be generated with Wikifunctions, then give a brief exploration of existing functions that work in multiple languages. Recent Changes in the software This week, most of our landed work has been addressing issues found in usability testing (T397411 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T397411>). We have extended the Function search system to split user inputs if they contain spaces, so searching for 'fish count' will find 'counts of fishing' and 'levels of fish' and 'fishing' and 'counting' which would have been hidden before; previously we used the whole term only (T400268 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T400268>). We also clarified the message shown when there are no results, which might prompt people to try a different term. We know that this will not work for languages that do not use spaces or where users don't know what term to use, but we hope that this will help users in more cases to find Functions with different names to what they type in, and we're keen to re-test the experience (T395477 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T395477>). When you add or edit a function call, the dialog checks your inputs for validity. We have changed how often it does this, rather than waiting for you to click out of the field, which should give feedback faster and let you click the "Insert" button more swiftly (T395476 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T395476>). We have changed the design for the search dialog in the visual editor integration to be more prominent, so that suggested functions and search results look more different (T395474 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T395474>). We believe that we have fixed a user-facing bug that meant the "details" link in some cases would not work but instead silently crash, if the result was 'wrong' but no error was given (T403834 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T403834>). We re-wrote and so improved the speed of the database query when fetching labels based on the user's requested languages, hopefully making the interface much snappier and less load on the databases when doing this step. We fixed some of our internal tests that broke when MediaWiki's fall-back language for Asturian switched from Spanish to English (T292750 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T292750>). We have tweaked the definition of some of our APIs so that they don't error when the help descriptions are generated on client wikis (T403151 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T403151>). We added some logging to track down a noisy error related to incomplete data (T402670 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T402670>). We switched the test version of Codex to v2.3.1 to match MediaWiki's (T403722 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T403722>). Next round of Wiktionaries to receive embedded Wikifunctions calls Next week, we plan to deploy the ability to embed calls to Wikifunctions to another set of Wiktionaries. We currently plan to deploy to the following 60 languages: Kannada, Lithuanian, Telugu, Ido, Norwegian (Bokmal and Nynorsk), Malay, Arabic, Burmese, Khmer, Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Esperanto, Estonian, Limburgish, Danish, Croatian, Sanskrit, Breton, Slovak, Albanian, Swahili, Mon, Georgian, Latin, Occitan, Slovenian, Basque, Tagalog, Kyrgiz, Javanese, Sango, Lao, Min Nan, Sicilian, Urdu, Sinhala, Irish, Kazakh, Luxembourgish, Low German, Latvian, Western Frisian, Lombard, Welsh, Saraiki, Oriya, Pashto, Pa’O, Nepali, Bosnian, Fijian, Marathi, Nauru, Tatar, Oromu, and Kabardian. They will join the 64 Wiktionary language editions that already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, we plan to expand to further Wiktionaries. News in Types: Grammatical number (singular / dual / plural) and Chemical elements In some languages, there isn’t just a singular and a plural – there’s also a dual <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual%20(grammatical%20number)>, a specific form only used when there are exactly two items. Based on the proposal by Dv103 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals/Grammatical…>, we have no created a lightweight enumeration: Grammatical number (singular / dual / plural) (Z28215) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28215> We are looking forward to creating more of the requested lightweight types, but I’d like to see more people voting, reviewing, and discussing them. I think just one vote in addition to the proposer isn’t really enough. Please join the proposal discussions <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals>. The situation around the chemical elements (Chemical element (Z27951) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27951>) type has improved, and they seem to work in most functions, but their display is still showing QIDs instead of labels (T404353 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T404353>). Until this is resolved, I am keeping that type in the “In progress” category. Upcoming NLG SIG meeting on 23 September[edit source <https://www.wikifunctions.org/w/index.php?title=Wikifunctions%3AStatus_upda…> ] The next NLG SIG Meeting <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:NLG_SIG#Upcoming_meeting> was planned next Tuesday. Due to some conflicting meetings we are moving the meeting by one week, to Tuesday, 23 September, 16:00-17:00 UTC. Denny Vrandečić will be presenting on abstract representation. Function of the Week: name for table header (Z27885) Name for table header <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27885> is a Function that takes a Wikidata item reference <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z6091> and a language <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z60>, and returns a text representing that Wikidata item in the given language. This is specifically for using it in tables. The interesting part is how clever the function is in order to get a good name for an item – and certainly something that can be reused or built upon: First, it looks for a Lexeme that is connected to the item. If there is none, it takes the Label of the Item, also going through a fallback chain <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27899>. If there are Lexemes, it takes the best Lexeme for the given Item <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27327> and then picks the representation string that is better matching <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27327> against a set of grammatical features: singular, singulative, nominative, no mutation. These are three quite complex Functions working together, with the goal to get a good representation for a given Item and increase coverage. Each of these Functions would be worthwhile to dive into and understand. This also reminds me of Mahir Morshed’s talk in March on finding lexemes for concepts <https://elemwala.toolforge.org/static/nlgsig-18march.html>, where he explores many more paths to finding the right Lexeme. This is a fascinating and useful Function. Recording of September Volunteers’ Corner This week, our Volunteers’ Corner stumbled over some service outages by Google Meet. Quite a few people who wanted to join, couldn’t, and others had issues with audio or video. We still had a corner, although with a number of improvisations. The recording of the September’s Volunteers’ Corner is, as always, available on Wikimedia Commons <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abstract_Wikipedia_Volunteer_Corner…> . Fresh Functions weekly: 27 new Functions This week we had 27 new functions. Here is an incomplete list of functions with implementations and passing tests to get a taste of what functions have been created. Thanks everybody for contributing! - quantities have identical units (Z27979) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27979> - UTC time of sunset for coordinates on date (Z27999) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27999> - UTC time of sunset for Wikidata location on date (Z28005) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28005> - sum of finite zero-centred power series (Z28009) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28009> - defining role sentence in German (Z28018) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28018> - default defining role sentence (Z28019) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28019> - defining role sentence in English (Z28026) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28026> A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Special:ListObjectsByType?type=Z8&orderb…> is available.

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Newletter #215: Copying function calls from one Wikipedia to another
by Denny Vrandečić 07 Sep '25

07 Sep '25

The on-wiki version oft his newsletter can be found here: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2025-09-07 ---- Copying function calls from one Wikipedia to another We now have the option to use natural languages <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z60> as a default value in embedded function calls. If an argument of Type natural language is omitted, we automatically use the language of the page as the default value for that argument. Together with Wikidata items and Gregorian calendar dates, this allows for quite powerful flexibility: for example, a function call can omit a date, a Wikidata item *and* a language, and automatically apply to the item of the page, return in the language of the given wiki, and use the current date for its calculation. Such a call can then be copied and pasted from one article to another — even across different language Wikipedias or Wiktionaries! We don’t have a function yet that uses all three default values, but if you make one that is useful for Wikipedias, let us know! We would love to feature it here. For example, one of the most frequently occurring sentences on English Wikipedia is “She is a vegetarian. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%22She+is+a+vegetarian.%22&titl…>” or “He is a vegetarian. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%22He+is+a+vegetarian.%22&title…>”, respectively. <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/File:Menu_for_editing_embedded_function_…>Menu for editing embedded function calls Now, one can have an embedded function call such as {{#function:Z26039||Q18338317|}} If you copy that into the article of Brian May on English Wikipedia (once we deployed to English Wikipedia), it will show the following sentence: “Brian May is a vegetarian.” You can copy and paste that exact same call to the article about Paul McCartney on English Wikipedia, and get the following sentence: “Paul McCartney is a vegetarian.” You can also copy it to the German Wikipedia article of Paul McCartney, and you will get the following sentence: “Paul McCartney ist ein Vegetarier.” Or Swedish: “Paul McCartney är en vegetarian.” Or Arabic: "بول مكارتني نباتي" Or Esperanto: “Paul McCartney estas vegetarano.” And once that is done, you can go back to the article about Brian May in English, and change it to: {{#function:Z26039||Q27522900|}} Which will result in the slightly more correct sentence: “Brian May is a vegan.” Now, if we only had a way to update that in all languages at once… 😉[1] <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2025-09-07#…> Thanks to Visual Editor, you wouldn’t be editing the raw QIDs, but use a form-based editor to create and maintain the function call. Only when using the raw source editor, you would be confronted with ZIDs and QIDs directly. 1. <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2025-09-07#…>This is a not particularly veiled plug for Abstract Wikipedia. Recent Changes in the software <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/File:Displaying_error_messages_(Wikifunc…>Displaying error messages As part of our work this Quarter to improve the usability of the experience when using Wikifunctions embedded in wiki articles (T397411 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T397411>), we have improved the experience to show custom, translatable errors in the interface (T402382 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T402382>). This allows the Wikifunctions community to get more value when they create clear, specific error types and throw them from their code, helping end-users understand what they might have done wrongly and how to fix it. We plan to write some guidance on how to use this feature, and encourage its use, in the near future. Alongside this work, we've been spending a fair bit of time this Quarter re-writing the back-end function evaluator service to use Rust rather than Node, as it is better suited at juggling multiple WASM sub-processes ( T343720 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T343720>). Last week we reached the milestone of the prototype Rust code running the lifecycle of routing an incoming call to the correct JavaScript or Python executor (T399321 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T399321>), and maintaining a ready pool of executors to which to route requests (T399322 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T399322>). We have also switched the base images over to use Node 22, up from Node 20, as part of wider Wikimedia service updates. We unfortunately had a partial service outage on Wednesday afternoon/evening US time, caused by a corrupted cached Object (T403671 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T403671>). The caching layer we added last Quarter for Objects had a flaw that meant it would cache whatever the API gave it, including a corrupted/broken item, and would not re-try. In this case, the crucial Type Z13518/Natural number was mis-cached, and because it is used in many different other Types and Functions, it led to a widespread inability to use the system. We made some urgent fixes to discard error Objects from the cache, and not cache them in future, and emergency deployed the new version of the service that night, fixing new calls. Earlier attempted calls may be cached in a bad state, but these will expire and be replaced over time. Our apologies again for all affected, and our thanks to Wikifunctions community members who first spotted the issue and alerted us to it. News in Types: grammatical person and Celtic mutations We implemented two new enumerations, Grammatical person (3) (Z27970) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27970> and Celtic mutation (Z27971) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27971>. Many languages have the notion of a grammatical person <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical%20person>, and they often have three distinct grammatical persons: referring to the speaker, or to the listener, or to someone else. Based on the proposal by Dv103 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals/Grammatical…>, we now have an enumeration for these three values. Breton and other Celtic languages are characterised by consonant mutations <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breton%20mutations> at the beginning of certain words. In order to describe them easier, a proposal by Dv103 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals/Breton_muta…> to identify the five different mutations has been made, agreed on, and implemented. We also tried to create a Type for Chemical element <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals/Chemical_el…>, but due to the unprecedented size of the Type for us, it surfaces two issues so far, which we are currently working on. We hope to have these fixed soon. There are further type proposals <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals>, and I will assess them regularly and keep implementing them – particularly those that have consensus, or wide support. So, keep making proposals, keep discussing and voting on the existing proposals, and we keep implementing them. Fresh Functions weekly: 36 new Functions Last week the community created 36 new functions. Here is an incomplete list of functions with implementations and passing tests to get a taste of what functions have been created. Thanks everybody for contributing! - round rational with numerator length (Z27699) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27699> - round rational to fixed decimal places, simplified (Z27705) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27705> - round rational to fix decimal places, unsimplified (Z27719) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27719> - decimal places in rational significant figures (Z27730) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27730> - decimal exponent in unrounded scientific notation (Z27737) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27737> - switch on gender (m/f) and number (s/p) (Z27748) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27748> - age of a person in years (Z27758) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27758> - decimal exponent in rounded scientific notation (Z27762) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27762> - round to decimal (simplified) with sig figs (Z27765) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27765> - round natural to significant figures (Z27778) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27778> - winning probability from ELO rating (Z27783) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27783> - update ELO rating after matches (Z27791) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27791> - round to decimal (unsimplified) with sig figs (Z27803) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27803> - is simplified denominator divisible by factor (Z27811) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27811> - is simplified denominator a factor of multiple (Z27815) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27815> - signed numerator of simplified rational number (Z27820) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27820> - multiply natural by integer (Z27826) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27826> - unsimplified rational from Z, N (Z27836) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27836> - scale Wikidata quantity to new units (Z27846) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27846> - join two HTML fragments (Z27849) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27849> - raw content of HTML fragment (Z27854) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27854> - HTML raw content in HTML fragment (Z27861) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27861> - string in HTML fragment (Z27868) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27868> - wrap an HTML fragment in a tag (Z27873) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27873> - create wikitable with columns and rows headers (Z27878) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27878> - name for table header (Z27885) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27885> - choose the language and replace the parameters (Z27893) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27893> - label of item in fallback language (Z27899) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27899> - choose string in first available language (Z27905) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27905> - replace parameters in a string (Z27908) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27908> - typed key–value pairs from typed map (Z27915) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27915> - Body Mass Index (metric, rational) (Z27919) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27919> - Unlabelled (Z27924) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27924> - join multiple HTML fragments (Z27926) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27926> - transform HTML fragment with unary string function (Z27932) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27932> - weight of a configuration (Z27938) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27938> A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Special:ListObjectsByType?type=Z8&orderb…> is available.

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2025

2024

2023

2022

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2020

Abstract-Wikipedia September 2025