Hi everyone,
Wikidata turns 14 this October, and it’s time to start thinking about
birthday celebrations. Since we launched on 29 October 2012, Wikidata has
grown into a thriving open-source knowledge base, thanks to all of you.
Each year, we come together to mark this milestone. Events and
contributions will happen throughout October and November 2026, across
regions and languages, online and offline.
Why we celebrate:
-
To recognize the work and impact of the Wikidata community
-
To connect and engage with others who care about open knowledge
-
To share Wikidata with new audiences and grow the movement
How you can take part:
🎈 Host Your Own: Organize something with your local community. A short
Wikidata intro, an editathon, or even a cake-cutting meetup. 👉 Visit the
birthday page for support and resources
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Fourteenth_Birthday/Run_an_event>
to help you promote it.
🎉 Join an Event: Whether you’re after a hands-on editathon or an informal
hangout, there are many ways to get involved. 👉 Keep an eye on the list of
events <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Fourteenth_Birthday/Calendar>
and find one near you.
🎁 Prepare a Birthday Gift: Every year, volunteers create “birthday
presents” for the community; new features, playful content, documentation,
and more. 👉 Take a look at previous gifts
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Thirteenth_Birthday/Presents_%26_mes…>
and add your idea to this year’s list.
💬 Join the Online Call On October 29*:* we’ll host a call where people can
present their gifts, share updates, and celebrate live with the global
community. Details will be published closer to the event date.
💡 Need support for your event or gift idea? Microgrants are available
through Wikimedia Deutschland to help cover costs. You can apply until June
30th via this Lime Survey form
<https://lime.wikimedia.de/index.php/638517?lang=en>.
For questions, feel free to reply here, leave a note on the talk page or
contact me directly
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:Fourteenth_Birthday>.
Looking forward to celebrating together again.
Cheers,
--
Mohammed S. Abdulai
*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: cal.com/masssly.
A lot is happening around Wikidata - Keep up to date!
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Status_updates> 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 Charlottenburg, VR 23855 B.
Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin,
Steuernummer 27/029/42207. Geschäftsführende Vorstände: Franziska Heine
Hi all, This is a reminder that the Language Community Meeting is taking
place this coming Friday, May 29th, at 15:00 UTC. Please see more details
and sign up here: <
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_and_Product_Localization/…
>.
Looking forward to your participation!
Cheers,
Srishti
On Wed, May 13, 2026 at 11:39 AM Srishti Sethi <ssethi(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hello everyone!
>
> We are excited to announce that the next Language Community Meeting is
> happening soon on May 29th at 15:00 UTC! If you would like to join, simply sign
> up on the wiki page
> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_and_Product_Localization/…>
> .
>
> This is a participant-driven meeting where we share updates on
> language-related projects, discuss technical challenges in language wikis,
> and collaborate on solutions. In the upcoming meeting, we will hear
> presentations on topics such as building a living dictionary for Dagbani
> and the Starter Kit Dashboard MVP.
>
> Got a topic to share? Whether it is a technical update from your project,
> a challenge you need help with, or a request for interpretation support, we
> would love to hear from you! Feel free to reply to this message or add
> agenda items to the document here
> <https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/language-community-meeting-may-2026>.
>
> Also, a quick update - Wikimedia Foundation renewed its Associate
> membership with the Unicode Consortium earlier this year for another year.
>
> As part of this membership, a coordination group has been set up to help
> bridge community needs with the Consortium. If you have come across any
> language or script related issues in your work on Wikimedia projects that
> could benefit from Unicode’s involvement, it would be great to hear about
> them. You can learn more about ongoing topic explorations here
> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_membership_with_Unicode_Consortium#Unico…>.
> Feel free to share thoughts on this talk page
> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:WMF_membership_with_Unicode_Consortium> or
> reach out directly.
>
> Also, feel free to translate this message into your local language and
> share it on your village pump or other community channels to help spread
> the word.
>
> We look forward to your ideas and participation at the Language Community
> Meeting. See you there!
>
> Cheers,
> Srishti
>
> Srishti Sethi (she / her)
>
> Senior Developer Advocate
>
> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
>
>
>
>
>
Hello Wikidata community 👋
As part of EduWiki Hub’s
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_%26_Education_User_Group/EduWiki_…>
ongoing work to support improvements to the Programs & Events Dashboard
through the Technical Infrastructure Working Group
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_%26_Education_User_Group/Working_…>,
we are gathering community feedback on the next priority update for the
Dashboard, with a focus on improving Wikidata integration and reporting.
We would especially like to hear from Wikidata organizers, campaign
coordinators, trainers, and contributors who have used the Dashboard to
support Wikidata-related activities.
We would appreciate your feedback on questions such as:
• What Wikidata-related metrics or statistics would you like the Dashboard
to report more effectively?
• What challenges have you faced when tracking Wikidata campaigns using the
Dashboard?
• What features, filters, visualizations, or reporting tools would make
Wikidata campaign tracking more useful?
• How can the Dashboard better support Wikidata-focused education programs
and community workflows?
We are also excited to share that the new Advanced Search feature is now
live under the Programs tab: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/explore
This new feature makes it easier to search, filter, and discover programs,
organizers, editors, articles, and alerts across the Dashboard. It is
designed to improve program discoverability, campaign organization, and
navigation of Dashboard data.
You can share your feedback on the P&E Dashboard talk page:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Programs_&_Events_Dashboard or contact
us directly at bukola.james(a)wmnobrasil.org
Your feedback will help shape future Dashboard improvements for the
Wikidata community.
Thank you!
Bukola James <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Bukky658>
*(apologies for cross-posting)*
TLDR: Propose a session for WikiProject Days (online June 19-21) by May 24.
Just one or two sentences. Add your idea here
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Event_talk:WikiProjects_Days_2026>.
Hello everyone,
A quick reminder: WikiProject Days 2026
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Event:WikiProjects_Days_2026> is coming up
(online, June 19 to 21), and the Call for Proposals closes on Sunday May 24.
Do you have a talk, workshop, or discussion about WikiProjects in mind?
Your proposal can be just one or two sentences. Here are some suggestions,
other topics welcome:
- How to use WikiProjects to connect with others and improve data
modelling
- How to revive a neglected WikiProject
- What makes a good WikiProject
If you have an idea, add it here: Event talk:WikiProjects Days 2026
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Event_talk:WikiProjects_Days_2026>
You can also register to attend at this link
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:RegisterForEvent/3670>.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Looking forward to your ideas.
--
Mohammed S. Abdulai
*Snr. 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: cal.com/masssly.
A lot is happening around Wikidata - Keep up to date!
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Status_updates> 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 Charlottenburg, VR 23855 B.
Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin,
Steuernummer 27/029/42207. Geschäftsführende Vorstände: Franziska Heine
Hi there,
Tomorrow is the next Global GLAM Call, 26 May at 13:30 UTC.
This month we will have an update about a Commons Upload tool that was
re-discovered at the NWE Hackathon, an update about the Open Heritage
Statement from Creative Commons, and then also a tutorial for submitting a
request for Translation Admin privileges; + plenty of time for other
updates from you and anyone else in the community.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Event:Global_GLAM_call_2026-05-26
Please remember to register in advance to receive the zoom link in the
registration.
See you online!
All the best,
Connor
(appologies for cross posting on various GLAM, Culture and Heritage related
mailing lists)
TL;DR: We are removing the PHP‑serialized output format from
Special:EntityData on May 28. URLs like Q42.php and Accept:
application/vnd.php.serialized requests will stop working. Please switch to
JSON (example Q42.json) instead.
Hi everyone,
We are making a significant change to the LinkedData interface on Wikidata.
Starting May 28, the Special:EntityData page will no longer support the
PHP‑serialized output format.
This means
-
URLs like https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q42.php will
return an error (HTTP 415 Unsupported Media Type).
-
Requests like https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q42 with
the Accept: application/vnd.php.serialized header will return an error
(HTTP 406 Not Acceptable).
Why are we removing this format?
-
The PHP‑serialized format is not a stable or standardised data format.
It can only be used by PHP applications and poses potential security risks.
-
Maintaining it adds unnecessary complexity and technical debt.
-
Usage is extremely low (approx. 2000 requests per day, mostly from
bots), especially compared to JSON (millions) and RDF/Turtle (tens of
millions).
What should you use instead?
Please use the JSON format, which is fully supported and stable. For
example: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q42.json
For more details on all available formats and how to access them, see the
Linked Data Interface section of the Data access page
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Data_access>.
Timeline
-
May 20: The change is deployed to Test Wikidata
<http://test.wikidata.org> and the Beta cluster
<https://www.wikidata.beta.wmcloud.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page>, where
you can already test the new behaviour.
-
May 22: This announcement
-
May 28: The change will be deployed to Wikidata production.
If you have any questions or concerns, please write directly on the
Phabricator task (phab:T98035 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T98035>).
Cheers,
--
Mohammed S. Abdulai
*Senior 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: cal.com/masssly.
A lot is happening around Wikidata - Keep up to date!
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Status_updates> 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 Charlottenburg, VR 23855 B.
Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin,
Steuernummer 27/029/42207. Geschäftsführende Vorstände: Franziska Heine
Hello dear Wikidata enthusiasts,
I'm one of the authors of a recent paper where we made heavy use of
Wikidata to create a large-scale image-text dataset for training CLIP
vision-language models. I thought this list might find the approach
interesting.
What we did: We used SPARQL queries over the subclass-of (P279) and
parent-taxon (P171) hierarchies to extract ~135k visual entities from 21
super-entity categories (animals, plants, tools, buildings, etc.). For
each entity we collected its name, description, aliases, and sitelink
count. We then extracted attributes from Wikidata related to color,
partonomy, behavior, and other aspects. These entities and attributes
were used to generate search queries for downloading images from the web.
The resulting EntityNet dataset contains 33M images, 46M text
descriptions, and 613k text labels linked back to Wikidata entities. The
dataset and trained models are openly available on HuggingFace:
https://huggingface.co/datasets/lmb-freiburg/entitynet
<https://huggingface.co/datasets/lmb-freiburg/entitynet>
A key finding was that training on a mix of Wikidata's structured entity
information and noisy web alt-texts works better than either alone. The
knowledge graph metadata genuinely improves model quality.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.02746
<https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.02746> | Code:
https://github.com/lmb-freiburg/entitynet
<https://github.com/lmb-freiburg/entitynet>
Happy to answer any questions about how we used Wikidata or discuss
potential improvements to the entity extraction.
Hello everyone!
We are excited to announce that the next Language Community Meeting is
happening soon on May 29th at 15:00 UTC! If you would like to join, simply sign
up on the wiki page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_and_Product_Localization/…>
.
This is a participant-driven meeting where we share updates on
language-related projects, discuss technical challenges in language wikis,
and collaborate on solutions. In the upcoming meeting, we will hear
presentations on topics such as building a living dictionary for Dagbani
and the Starter Kit Dashboard MVP.
Got a topic to share? Whether it is a technical update from your project, a
challenge you need help with, or a request for interpretation support, we
would love to hear from you! Feel free to reply to this message or add
agenda items to the document here
<https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/language-community-meeting-may-2026>.
Also, a quick update - Wikimedia Foundation renewed its Associate
membership with the Unicode Consortium earlier this year for another year.
As part of this membership, a coordination group has been set up to help
bridge community needs with the Consortium. If you have come across any
language or script related issues in your work on Wikimedia projects that
could benefit from Unicode’s involvement, it would be great to hear about
them. You can learn more about ongoing topic explorations here
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_membership_with_Unicode_Consortium#Unico…>.
Feel free to share thoughts on this talk page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:WMF_membership_with_Unicode_Consortium> or
reach out directly.
Also, feel free to translate this message into your local language and
share it on your village pump or other community channels to help spread
the word.
We look forward to your ideas and participation at the Language Community
Meeting. See you there!
Cheers,
Srishti
[image: image.png]
Srishti Sethi (she / her)
Senior Developer Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>