Dear everyone,
As presented at last year's WikidataCon
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_VxTlBNkyk>, Wikimedia Deutschland has
set out to find new ways for collaboration around Wikidata software
development to enhance the diversity of our movement, increase Wikibase’s
scalability and robustness and breathe life into our movement principles of
knowledge equity. With a grant from Arcadia
<https://www.arcadiafund.org.uk/>, a charitable fund administered by Lisbet
Rausing and Peter Baldwin, we will be able to implement such a
collaboration in the next two years.
Today, we are happy to share an exciting update on the progress of this
project with all of you. After spending the last few months with
conversations with the movement groups who were interested in joining such
a partnership, we have now reached a point where we can spread the news
about the future partners and projects that will shape this Wikidata
software collaboration.
Wikimedia Indonesia, the Igbo Wikimedians User Group and Wikimedia
Deutschland will be joining forces to advance the technical capacities of
the movement around Wikidata development and with this, make the software
and tools more usable by cultures underrepresented in technology, people of
the Global South and speakers of minority languages.
Wikimedia Indonesia, a non-profit organization based in Jakarta, Indonesia
and established in 2008, is dedicated to encouraging the growth,
development & dissemination of knowledge in Indonesian and other languages
spoken in Indonesia. Since then, Wikimedia Indonesia has supported the
development of 14 Wikipedias in the languages spoken in Indonesia, 12
regional Wikimedian communities spread across the country, and two
Wikimedia project-based communities.
For this project, in collaboration with Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia
Indonesia wants to build up a software team of their own in the course of
the next 2 years. The tools will hopefully help under-resourced language
communities contributing to the flourishing of their languages online
through lexicographical data, and also involving the local language
communities in contributing to lexemes in Wikidata.
Igbo Wikimedians is a group of Wikimedians that are committed to working on
various wiki projects related to Igbo language
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igbo_language> and culture. The user group
is organizing projects around community building in the Igbo community,
content improvement for Wikipedia and its sister project and has
established its own Wikidata hub in 2021.
The Igbo Wikimedia User Group and their program of the Wiki Mentor Africa
<https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiki_Mentor_Africa> is aiming at
building up technical capacity in African Wikimedia communities by
mentoring African developers for Wikidata Tool Development. Wikimedia
Deutschland will support the user group in the implementation of their
project and mentoring program.
Wikimedia Deutschland has been founded in 2004 as a member’s association
and is located in Berlin, Germany. Wikimedia Deutschland support
communities like the Wikipedia community, develop software for Wikimedia
projects and the ecosystem of Free Knowledge, and wants to improve the
political and legal framework for Wikipedia and for Free Knowledge in
general.
Specifically, Wikimedia Deutschland has been working on the development of
Wikidata since 2012. Since then, an active and vibrant community of
volunteer editors and programmers, re-users, data donors, affiliates and
more has formed around Wikidata.
Wikimedia Deutschland will be responsible for the administrative setup of
those collaborations and the communication with Arcadia. We are also happy
to share our experiences and knowledge about establishing software teams,
software development in the Wikidata/Wikibase environment, the Wikidata
community and providing support for emerging tech communities.
If you want to find out more about the partnership, you can read up on this
on our project page on Meta
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Software_Collaboration_for_Wikidata>,
where we will keep updating the community on the progress of this
collaboration. If you have any comments, suggestions or questions please
use the talk page there to get in contact with us.
We are all excited to see those collaborations coming to life!
With kind regards,
Igbo Wikimedians User Group
Wikimedia Indonesia
Wikimedia Deutschland
--
Maria Heuschkel
Projektmanagerin
Softwareentwicklung
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0
https://wikimedia.de
Unsere Vision ist eine Welt, in der alle Menschen am Wissen der Menschheit
teilhaben, es nutzen und mehren können. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
https://spenden.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland — Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
Hello everyone,
Here are a few updates from the Wikidata development team.
You can find the *development updates of 2022* on this page:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Development_plan/archive2022/status_…
This page will give you an overview of the outcomes of the various
development goals of last year, both for Wikidata as a platform and the
Wikibase ecosystem.
You can find the *development plan for 2023* on this page:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Development_plan This page gives you
an overview of the main goals of the development team, and the activities
we plan to run in the first part of the year (updates will be added
throughout the year).
If you have any *questions or feedback*, feel free to use the related talk
page: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:Development_plan
On behalf of Mohammed that will soon be back and will follow up on this
topic,
Best,
--
Léa Lacroix
Community Engagement & Events Consultant
Contractor for Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Hello!
We will soon deploy some fixes for date parsing that especially affect
Czech and possibly other languages as well.
Wikidata’s parsing of dates in the Czech language has long been affected by
some issues (T221097 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T221097>), where
some reasonable representations couldn’t be parsed (e.g. 01.02.2023), while
others were parsed incorrectly: for example, 11.12.2023 (11 December 2023)
was parsed as 12 November 2023, and 07.05.1997 (7 May 1997) bizarrely
became 30 June 1997.
Matěj Suchánek <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Mat%C4%9Bj_Such%C3%A1nek>
has investigated these errors and implemented a solution, which will be
deployed on February 15. As far as we can tell, all the changes it produces
are positive: that is, if the way a date is parsed changes, then the old
behavior was bad, and the change is an improvement. Nevertheless, it’s
possible that some users expected the old behavior, or that some external
programs might even be broken by the change. Users who add time data to
Wikidata should make sure that the date shown to them as a result of their
edit is correct. If you want to test the behavior changes, the new code is
already live on Beta Wikidata.
We are currently looking into other languages that may be affected as well.
If you have any questions or want to provide feedback please leave us a
comment on this ticket <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T221097>.
Cheers,
--
Mohammed Sadat
*Community Communications Manager, Wikidata*
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0) 30 577 116 2466
https://wikimedia.de
Grab a spot in my calendar for a chat: calendly.com/masssly.
Keep up to date! Current news and exciting stories about Wikimedia,
Wikipedia and Free Knowledge in our newsletter (in German): Subscribe now
<https://www.wikimedia.de/newsletter/>.
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. Help us to achieve our vision!
https://spenden.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland – Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
Hello all!
The Search Platform Team usually holds an open meeting on the first
Wednesday of each month. Come talk to us about anything related to
Wikimedia search, Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), Wikimedia Commons Query
Service (WCQS), etc.!
Feel free to add your items to the Etherpad Agenda for the next meeting.
Details for our next meeting:
Date: Wednesday, March 1st, 2023
Time: 16:00-17:00 UTC / 08:00 PST / 11:00 EST / 17:00 CET
Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Search_Platform_Office_Hours
Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/vgj-bbeb-uyi
Join by phone: https://tel.meet/vgj-bbeb-uyi?pin=8118110806927
Have fun and see you soon!
Guillaume
--
*Guillaume Lederrey* (he/him)
Engineering Manager
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello Wikidata!
I'm happy to report that the WDQS reload <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T323096> is now complete. We believe the reload has eliminated the data discrepancies mentioned in the linked ticket. However, please let us know if this is not the case.
Thank you for your patience and have a great rest of your week!
Best,
Brian King
SRE, Search Platform Team
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC: inflatador
Hello all!
TL;DR: We expect to successfully complete the recent data reload on
Wikidata Query Service soon, but we've encountered multiple failures
related to the size of the graph, and anticipate that this issue may worsen
in the future. Although we succeeded this time, we cannot guarantee that
future reload attempts will be successful given the current trend of the
data reload process. Thank you for your understanding and patience..
Longer version:
WDQS is updated from a stream of recent changes on Wikidata, with a maximum
delay of ~2 minutes. This process was improved as part of the WDQS
Streaming Updater project to ensure data coherence[1] . However, the update
process is still imperfect and can lead to data inconsistencies in some
cases[2][3]. To address this, we reload the data from dumps a few times per
year to reinitialize the system from a known good state.
The recent reload of data from dumps started in mid-December and was
initially met with some issues related to download and instabilities in
Blazegraph, the database used by WDQS[4]. Loading the data into Blazegraph
takes a couple of weeks due to the size of the graph, and we had multiple
attempts where the reload failed after >90% of the data had been loaded.
Our understanding of the issue is that a "race condition" in Blazegraph[5],
where subtle timing changes lead to corruption of the journal in some rare
cases, is to blame.[6]
We want to reassure you that the last reload job was successful on one of
our servers. The data still needs to be copied over to all of the WDQS
servers, which will take a couple of weeks, but should not bring any
additional issues. However, reloading the full data from dumps is becoming
more complex as the data size grows, and we wanted to let you know why the
process took longer than expected. We understand that data inconsistencies
can be problematic, and we appreciate your patience and understanding while
we work to ensure the quality and consistency of the data on WDQS.
Thank you for your continued support and understanding!
Guillaume
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T244590
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T323239
[3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T322869
[4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T323096
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_condition#In_software
[6] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T263110
--
*Guillaume Lederrey* (he/him)
Engineering Manager
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Thanks to all mentors for their participation! Results are out - Wikimedia
got accepted as a mentoring organization in GSoC 2023. There is still a
month before the contributor application period begins (on March 20th), in
case you would like to propose more projects. All the finalized ideas are
published here: <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2023>
[1]. For Outreachy, we have finalized two project ideas <
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreachy/Round_26> [2]; contributors who
meet the eligibility criteria will be able to view the project details and
contribute from March 6th onwards.
Cheers,
Srishti, Sohom & Gopa (Wikimedia Org Admins)
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2023
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreachy/Round_26
*Srishti Sethi*
Senior Developer Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
On Tue, Feb 14, 2023 at 9:09 AM Susanna Ånäs <susanna.anas(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi. I am reposting the Wikidocumentaries proposal as I somehow managed to
> send it to a separate thread, so here we go!
>
> Thank you for the opportunity, we are excited to join this round of GSoC
> with this Wikidocumentaries proposal!
>
> Wikidocumentaries[1] is a website that provides a language-independent way
> of browsing Wikimedia projects based on Wikidata items. It displays media
> from external repositories and integrates them as part of the pages. The
> idea is to allow the users to find relevant open content and contribute it
> to the Wikimedia projects by using the content for their purposes.
>
> So far, Wikidocumentaries has not been enabled for contributions to
> Wikimedia projects. The goal of the GSoC project is to establish the entire
> process for retrieving media from a given media repository related to the
> currently viewed topic in Wikidocumentaries, displaying it in
> Wikidocumentaries and uploading it to Wikimedia Commons, adding structured
> data statements to it.
>
> When this workflow has been completed, it will be possible to make
> available further features to match, enrich or organize the data. It is
> possible to expand the work to these areas, based on the interests of the
> intern.
>
> Tech: The UI code is created with Vue, and the API code is JavaScript. The
> work focuses on Structured Data on Commons, therefore understanding of the
> MediaWiki API, Wikidata and Structured Data on Commons is needed.
>
> * Mentors: TuukkaH, Susannaanas
> * Codebase: GitHub[2]
> * Phabricator: Ticket[3], Project[4], Microtasks[5]
> * Documentation website[6]
>
> Looking forward to tackling these issues together!
>
> Cheers
> Susanna & Tuukka
>
> [1] https://wikidocumentaries-demo.wmcloud.org/
> [2] https://github.com/Wikidocumentaries
> [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T329023
> [4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikidocumentaries/
> [5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T329256
> [6] https://wikidocumentaries.wmcloud.org/wiki/Main_Page
>
> la 14. tammik. 2023 klo 1.31 Srishti Sethi (ssethi(a)wikimedia.org)
> kirjoitti:
>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> TLDR; Wikimedia will soon be applying as a mentoring organization to *Google
>> Summer of Code 2023* <
>> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2023> [1] and *Outreachy
>> Round 26* <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreachy/Round_26> [2]. We
>> are currently working on a list of interesting project ideas to include in
>> the application. If you have some ideas for *coding or non-coding
>> (design, documentation, translation, outreach, research) projects*,
>> share them by* February 7th* here: <
>> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T326991> [3]. For non-coding projects
>> that can be promoted via Outreachy, there are only two available slots,
>> which will be allocated to mentors on a first-come, first-serve basis.
>>
>> *Timeline*
>> As a mentor, you will engage potential candidates in the application
>> period for both programs between March and April. You will help candidates
>> make small contributions to your project and answer any project-related
>> queries during this time. You will work more closely with the accepted
>> candidates during the coding period between May and August.
>>
>> *Tips for proposing projects*
>> * Follow this task description template when you propose a project in
>> Phabricator: <
>> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/outreach-programs-projects> [4].
>> You can also use this workboard to pick an idea if you don't have one
>> already. Add #Google- Summer-of-Code (2023) or #Outreachy (Round 26) tag.
>> * Project should require an experienced developer ~15 days and a newcomer
>> ~3 months to complete.
>> * Each project should have at least two mentors, including one with a
>> technical background.
>> * Ideally, the project has no tight deadlines, a moderate learning curve,
>> and fewer dependencies on Wikimedia's core infrastructure. Projects
>> addressing the needs of a language community are most welcome.
>>
>> Learn more about the roles and responsibilities of mentors on
>> MediaWiki.org: <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreachy/Mentors> [5], <
>> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/Mentors> [6].
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Srishti
>>
>> [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2023
>>
>> [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreachy/Round_26
>>
>> [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T326991
>>
>> [4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/outreach-programs-projects/
>>
>> [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreachy/Mentors
>>
>> [6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/Mentors
>>
>> *Srishti Sethi*
>> Senior Developer Advocate
>> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
>
>
