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:ImportingWikidataDatatypesIntoWikifunctions.webm 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#News_in_Types_I:_Wikidata_quantity and geo-coordinate in the August 22 newsletter https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2025-08-22#News_in_Types:_Wikidata_geo-coordinate . 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&orderby=latest is available.