Hi everyone,

The lexicographical data part of Wikidata is still in need of some love. Over the last few weeks we have worked on this in 2 areas. The first one was Lua access to Lexemes. We have rolled this out and all Wikimedia projects can now access not just Item data but also Lexemes. See the announcement for more details. The second one is coming today. We have reworked the Special:NewLexeme page. Lexicographical data is still hard to understand for people not familiar with lexicography. The new Special:NewLexeme page has a number of tweaks that we hope will make it more understandable and easier to use. This includes an information panel that gives a bit of context about what Lexemes are as well as a lexical category selector that ranks appropriate Items higher. (Better ranking of the Items in the language selector will come soon as well.) Additionally we have put the page on a better technical base.

The information panel on the new special page includes an example Lexeme, which uses live data of a real Lexeme on Wikidata. That Lexeme is selected by the wikibaselexeme-newlexeme-info-panel-example-lexeme-id interface message in the current user interface language. The idea is that you can override this message on Wikidata to select suitable example Lexemes for various languages (e.g., set the German version of the message to the ID of some suitable German example Lexeme).

Today we’d love for you to test the new page and give feedback.

Test it: Special:NewLexemeAlpha

Give feedback: Wikidata talk:Lexicographical data

This page will be there in parallel to the current version during this testing period. It creates proper Lexemes and you can use it for your regular Lexeme creation work. We currently plan to replace Special:NewLexeme with this new version on August 3rd. At that point we also plan to turn off the temporary Special:NewLexemeAlpha page.

If you have feedback or questions please let us know here. Additionally Lydia is looking for a few people for some short calls to get individual feedback from you. If you are up for that please let me know and we’ll schedule something.

Cheers,