Wikidata-tech August 2015

wikidata-tech@lists.wikimedia.org

12 participants
10 discussions

Wikidata API breaking changes
by Addshore 09 Sep '15

09 Sep '15

Hi all! We have some breaking API changes that will soon be deployed to wikidata.org. The deployment date should be: 9th September 2015 (just under 2 weeks) The change making the breaks an be found at: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/227686/ The breaking changes are: - XML output aliases are now grouped by language - XML output may no longer give elements when they are empty - XML any claim, qualifier, reference or snak elements that had an '_idx' element will no longer have it - ALL output may now give empty elements, ie. labels when an entity has none If you want to see a wikipage explaining these changes take a look at: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Addshore/API_Break_September_2015 If you have any questions regarding these breaking changes please ask! Addshore

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API JSON format for warnings
by Markus Krötzsch 09 Sep '15

09 Sep '15

Hi, I am wondering how errors and warnings are reported through the API, and which errors and warnings are possible. There is some documentation on Wikidata errors [1], but I could not find documentation on how the warning messages are communicated in JSON. I have seen structures like this: { "warnings" : {"wbeditentity": {"messages": [{"name":"wikibase-self-conflict-patched", "parameters":[], "html": { "*":"Your edit was patched into the latest version, overriding some of your own intermediate changes."} }] } } } I don't know how to provoke more warnings, or multiple warnings in one request, so I found it hard to guess how this pattern generalises. Some questions: * What is the purpose of the map with the "*" key? Which other keys but "*" could this map have? * The key "wbeditentity" points to a list. Is this supposed to encode multiple warnings of this type? * I guess the "name" is a message name, and "parameters" are message "arguments" (as they are called in action="query") for the message? * Is this the JSON pattern used in all warnings or can there also be other responses from wbeditentity? * Is this the JSON pattern used for warnings in all Wikibase actions or can there also be other responses from other actions? * Is there a list of relevant warning codes anywhere? * Is there a list of relevant error codes anywhere? The docs in [1] point to paraminfo (e.g., http://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=paraminfo&modules=wbeditentity) but there are no errors mentioned there. Thanks, Markus [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/API#Errors

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how is the datetime value with precision of one year stored
by Raul Kern 01 Sep '15

01 Sep '15

Hi, how is the datetime value with precision of one year stored? For example for birt date in https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q299687 fine grain value for "1700" is "1.01.1700" But for population date field in https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q216 the fine grain value for "2014" is "30.11.2013" Which is kind of unexpected. -- Raul

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Fetching properties by label or by datatype
by Markus Krötzsch 31 Aug '15

31 Aug '15

Hi, What is the correct API call to find a property by its label (in a given language)? As the label is unique, the function I am looking for would return 1 or 0 answers. I only found wbsearchentities, which might return any number of results since it also searches aliases. The problem I am facing is rather simple: I want to program an example that shows how to edit Wikidata using Wikidata Toolkit. To do this, I need a valid property that I can use in statements. I want to work on test.wikidata.org, of course, so I don't know which properties exist. I can create my own, but I should only do this if I did not do this yet (else I will get a "failed-save" error, which contains an error message, but it does not seem safe to parse this string for finding the id I am looking for). I could also create new properties every time someone is running the example program ;-) Since I could use any property, it would also help me if I could retrieve a list of properties by type. All I need is some (any) string property ... Thanks, Markus

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Content negotiation
by Richard Light 28 Aug '15

28 Aug '15

Hi, I am doing some 'kicking the tyres' tests on Wikidata as Linked Data. I like the SPARQL end-point, which is more helpful than most, and successfully managed a query for "people with the surname Light" last night. (Only five of them in the world, apparently, but that's another matter. :-) ) What I do have an issue with is the content negotiation. I kept failing to get an RDF rendition of my results, and as a last resort I read the documentation [1]. This described a postfix pattern which delivers RDF XML (e.g. [2]). However, this pattern is itself subject to content negotiation, and an initial 303 response converts the URL to e.g. [3]. I am interested in knowing what pattern of URL will deliver RDF/XML /without /requiring content negotiation, and the answer to that question is not [2] but [3]. This matters, for example, in scenarios where one wants to use XSLT's document() function to retrieve an RDF XML response directly. The URL pattern [2] will fail. So the documentation is currently unhelpful. In a similar vein, is there a syntax for running a SPARQL query on Wikidata such that the response is delivered as RDF XML? In many end-points there is a parameter you can add to specify the response format, which allows you to submit searches as HTTP requests and include the results directly in your (in my case XML-based) processing chain. An HTML results page isn't very machine-processible! Thanks, Richard [1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Data_access [2] https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3807415.rdf [3] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q3807415.rdf -- *Richard Light*

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Question on bot flag in wbeditentity
by Markus Krötzsch 27 Aug '15

27 Aug '15

Hi, I wondered why wbeditentity has a parameter "bot". The documentation says that this will mark the edit as a bot edit, but only if the user is in the bot group. In other words, users in the bot group can use this parameter to decide if they want to have their API-based edit flagged as bot or not. Is there any reason why a user in bot group would *not* want their API-based edit flagged as bot? Cheers, Markus

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Deleting labels/descriptions/aliases via API
by Markus Krötzsch 26 Aug '15

26 Aug '15

Hi, How do you delete, say, the English label of an entity via wbeditentity? I could not find documentation on this. Whatever the answer, I guess it is the same for descriptions, right? How about aliases? I know that writing one English alias will delete all existing aliases, but how can you write "no English aliases"? In either case, I do not want to use the "clear" flag, of course :-) Thanks, Markus

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WD interface JavaScript documentation
by Magnus Manske 19 Aug '15

19 Aug '15

Hi, is there a decent documentation of the JavaScript exposed in the Wikidata interface, so one can re-use it in user scripts? To give a specific example: I want to add a reference to a statement. I can do that in JavaScript via the API, but I can't update the changed statement easily. I could try to re-implement the existing routines, but that would be duplication of effort, and likely break with the next interface update.

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SUL will no longer auto-login on test.wikidata.org
by Legoktm 14 Aug '15

14 Aug '15

Hi, SUL auto-login will no longer automatically log you in to test.wikidata.org. You will have to visit the site once, wait for the "You are centrally logged in..." popup, and then reload the page. We are now only setting a cookie for "www.wikidata.org" instead of the general ".wikidata.org" so the cookie does not apply to the new query.wikidata.org domain, which has the side-effect of it also not applying to test.wikidata.org. There are some more details at [1], [2] and [3]. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T108101 [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T107602 [3] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/230247/ Thanks, -- Legoktm

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Write data with Wibase API 'wbeditentity'
by Bo Ferri 12 Aug '15

12 Aug '15

Hi all, (apologies, if this is not the right place for raising the following issue (if this is the case, then please delegate me to a more appropriated place ;) )) we are currently evaluating Wikibase as storage for D:SWARM GDM data (see [1,2]). Right now, we have a prototype client [3] that makes use of a Wikidata Toolkit fork [4]. So far, we were able to write/create simple items and properties. However, we also would like to create new items with a given set of statements. Therefore, we intended to utilise the 'wbeditentity' HTTP API (and I had (and still have) a lively conversation with Markus Krötzsch about this topic, see [5]). We get (a kind of) item JSON serialisation (e.g. with help of JacksonObjectFactory-based DatamodelConverter (Wikidata Toolkit code)). However, when sending this to the 'webeditentity' API we always receive an error response like this: " { "error": { "code": "modification-failed", "info": "array instead of string", "messages": [ { "name": "wikibase-validator-bad-type", "parameters": [ "string", "array" ], "html": { "*": "array instead of string" } } ], "*": "See http://[OUR WIKIBASE SERVICE IP]/api.php for API usage" } } " We cannot really interpret what's wrong with the data model that we send to this API (note: we make use of the POJOs below 'org.wikidata.wdtk.datamodel.json.jackson' package of Wikidata Toolkit, see [6]). An example of a data JSON is attached to this e-mail. Thanks a lot in advance for all your help. Cheers, Bo/T [1] http://dswarm.org [2] https://github.com/dswarm/dswarm-documentation/wiki/Graph-Data-Model [3] https://github.com/zazi/wikidata-d-swarm-importer/tree/own_mediawiki_api_cl… [4] https://github.com/zazi/Wikidata-Toolkit/tree/wikibase_api_write_modificati… [5] https://github.com/Wikidata/Wikidata-Toolkit/issues/162 [6] https://github.com/zazi/wikidata-d-swarm-importer/blob/own_mediawiki_api_cl…

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Wikidata-tech August 2015