Hello all,
This is an important announcement for all the tool builders and maintainers
who access Wikidata’s data by *querying Labs database replicas directly*.
In April 2019, the Wikidata development team started a heavy redesign of an
important table of the database, wb_terms. Over the years, this table has
become too big, causing various issues. That’s why we decided to split it
into several smaller tables. For more context, you can have a look at
previous announcements: April 2019
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2019-April/012987.html>, May
2019 <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2019-May/013052.html>.
We encountered a lot of unexpected issues on the road which required us to
postpone the timeline, but the final steps of the migration are now
happening. We published a blog post
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/195/coming_to_terms_with_…>
to explain in more detail what we did and why it was important to optimize
the database structure.
Here’s an overview of what happened, what are the next steps and how you
can update your code:
- The new structure is now in place on Labs. You can read more details
on this documentation page
<https://doc.wikimedia.org/mediawiki-extensions-Wikibase/master/php/md_docs_…>
- Wikidata is entirely reading from and writing to the new tables since
March 18th, which means the existing wb_terms table is *not updated
anymore*
- This means that any tools that are still reading from wb_terms and
updating Wikidata based on its content have to be updated as soon as
possible
- In order to fully deprecate the table and make it clear that it is
outdated, the wb_terms will be renamed to wb_terms_no_longer_updated on
Monday, *March 30th*. Tools still querying this table at that date will
certainly encounter errors.
- To get an overview on how to update your queries, you can have a look
at these examples <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T221767>
If you have questions or encounter any issues, please write on this
Phabricator ticket <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T208425> or write me
an email.
We apologize for the delay and the lack of recent updates regarding this
change.
Cheers,
--
Léa Lacroix
Project Manager Community Communication for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.