The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2025-08-29 ---- Accessing Wikidata items now possible from embedded function calls
Functions embedded in other Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia or the Wiktionaries (see also below for an exciting update) can now access entities from Wikidata.
This allows you to access a Wikidata Item or Lexeme in an embedded function, and so pull knowledge out of Wikidata and display it in the result.
Not only that: if an argument of type Wikidata Item Reference is left empty, we will default to the Wikidata Item attached to the page the function is being called on. That means, for example, that if you are on the Wikipedia article about a person, and are calling the age of a person in years https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27758 function, it will automatically default to the correct Item.
This also allows you to copy and paste the function call from one article to another without changes, and it will automatically apply to the connected Item!
Our hope is that the ability to use Lexemes will become particularly useful for Wiktionaries. Wikifunctions available on 65 Wiktionaries
We are available now on many more Wiktionaries! We have deployed the ability to call functions from Wikifunctions to 59 new Wikitionaries: Amharic, Old English, Aragonese, Aymara, Central Bikol, Belarusian, Banjar, Mandailing Batak, Cherokee, Sorani, Corsican, Kashubian, Zazaki, Faroese, Guarani, Goan Konkani, Gorontalo, Gujarati, Gun, Manx, Fiji Hindi, Upper Sorbian, Interlingue, Lojban, Karakalpak, Tyap, Greenlandic, Kashmiri, Cornish, Lingala, Minangkabau, Māori, Macedonian, Meitei, Maltese, Nahuatl, Nias, Punjabi (both Shahmukhi and Gurmukhi scripts), Southern Quechua, Aromanian, Kinyarwanda, Sindhi, Shawiya, Samoan, Somali, Swazi, Sesotho, Sundanese, Tigrinya, Turkmen, Tswana, Tok Pisin, Tsonga, Uyghur, Venetian, Volapük, Wolof, and Yiddish. They join the Bangla, Dagbani, Divehi, Hausa, Igbo, and Malayalam Wiktionaries, and now bring the set where Wikifunctions can be used to 65 Wiktionary language editions.
Please do not use these projects to experiment unless you are a member of the given language community. These are small communities, and if they need to clean up experiments from eager Wikifunctions contributors, we would put more burden on them. If you want to experiment and play around, feel free to do so on the Wikifunctions sandbox https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Embedded_function_calls/sandbox! We are planning to continue to roll out to more Wiktionaries soon-ish.
We are particularly interested in thoughts the Wikifunctions community might have about functions that are useful for Wiktionaries. Take a look at the example function creating a table of the first declension in Latin https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z26333. It also demonstrates how HTML functions can be created, and we hope for these to become available soonish to the projects we have deployed to. Besides declensions and other morphological forms, we can also think about structured definitions, usage examples, quotations, etc.
Or are you an active Wiktionary contributor? Even better! Let us know what you think would be particularly useful. Ongoing fragment work
We are super excited about all your contributions to the fragment experiments https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Abstract_Wikipedia/2025_fragment_experiments. The instantiation fragment is now available in more than 17 languages! This is amazing!
We would like to invite you to also contribute to the other fragments. If you need any help, please reach out to us. We are particularly interested if there are problems with certain fragments in any languages you speak, in order to see where the current system gets to its limits. Recent Changes in the software
We have only a single direct code change going out this week, as we were mostly putting finishing touches to changes 'behind the scenes', which we'll report on later when they become relevant to the Wikifunctions community.
One of the big things we're working on this Quarter is allowing embedded Wikifunctions calls to output rich text (T397402 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T397402). This is so that you can *e.g.* display a conjugation table on a Wiktionary, or provide a contextual link in a Wikipedia fragment. This week, we landed the last piece of our preparatory security work (T398963 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T398963) by building a system to allow links in a very limited way: only to the local wiki or other known wikis in the cluster, without any other attributes ( T398987 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T398987). We're now supporting our colleagues in Security who will be undertaking an Application Security Review (T396486 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T396486) that will decide if we're ready to enable it in production, and any follow-up work needed first.
We, along with all Wikimedia-deployed code, are now using the latest version of the Codex UX library, v2.3.1, as of this week. We believe that there should be no user-visible changes on Wikifunctions, so please comment on the Project chat or file a Phabricator task if you spot an issue. Volunteers’ Corner on 8 September 2025
The next Volunteers’ Corner will be on 8 September. We are skipping 1 September due to the US holiday of Labor Day. The Volunteers’ Corner on 8 September is planned at 17:30 UTC https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1757352600. Unless you have many questions, we will follow our usual agenda, of giving updates on the upcoming plans and recent activities, having plenty of time and space for your questions, and building a Function together. Fresh Functions weekly: 36 new Functions
This week we had 36 new functions. Here is a list of functions with implementations and passing tests to get a taste of what functions have been created. Thanks everybody for contributing!
- type of mutation for singular Breton article (Z27564) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27564 - Breton singular or singulative form as string (Z27569) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27569 - Breton indefinite article (Z27574) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27574 - add indefinite article to Breton lexeme (Z27579) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27579 - Julian date (rational) from datetime (Z27604) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27604 - compare after applying several unary functions (Z27622) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27622 - Luxembourgish name of month (Z27641) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27641 - Luxembourgish date from Gregorian calendar date (Z27655) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27655 - Body Surface Area (Z27661) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27661 - concatenate many untyped lists (Z27665) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27665 - wrap in list unless list (Z27685) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z27685
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.
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