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 page to see if {{#function}} is listed, or more generally you can refer to the official source of truth.
We have created a new page, 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. If you prefer to use a different workflow, please let us know.
Late last week, we were alerted to a security issue by 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). We wrote and immediately deployed some quick fixes, which removed the issue (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) 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 (T398307).
On the back-end services, we've identified and fixed a bug that meant that the new caching of Wikidata objects (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).
We've landed a fix to the category labels for embedded Function calls that go wrong — our thanks as always to User:Amire80 for his diligence in supporting translators.
As part of wider MediaWiki language support work, we have added a new language: Z1977/ckv (T381061).
We added a display function that was created earlier this year to the monolingual text Type. 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 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 and geo-coordinate in the August 22 newsletter.
The Wikimedia CEE Meeting 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.
The next NLG SIG Meeting will be on Tuesday, 23 September, 16:00-17:00 UTC. Denny Vrandečić will be presenting on abstract representation.
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!
A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created is available.