Hello folks,

Today I start by sharing a blog post from @Stryn: who's involved on Wikidata since the beginning of the project! Thank you Stryn :)

We received several birthday presents from editors, that's so great! Maybe you already know about Scholia, a tool to create scholarship profiles built on the Query Service. Its creator fnielsen added a search field, you can now type the name of a person (or the Qid) to see more about researchers' education, employers and publications. Thanks Finn for your work!

Lastly, let me introduce you a improved feature my colleagues are offering you for the birthday: the parser function {{#statements:…}}.

As you may know, for three years the function {{#property:…}} is deployed on all Wikimedia projects and allows you to display data from Wikidata, without using LUA. For example, the code {{#property:P1559|from=Q42}} will display Douglas Adams.

We improved this tool in a new parser function: {{#statements:…}}.

The new wikitext format renders statement values as syntactically meaningful elements instead of just plain text. For example, entity IDs are clickable links that link to the corresponding article, external identifiers link to the external authority, and Commons media files are rendered as thumbnails. The new output format will be available via a new {{#statements:…}} parser function, via a new “formatStatements” Lua function, and via the “wbformatentity” API, when used with “generate=text/x-wiki”.

The new parser function is in early development. The output produce may change any time. {{#statements:…}} is currently disabled on all wikis except the beta cluster. We hope to enable it within the next weeks when we consider the feature stable enough. For now, you can see and test it on the beta German Wikipedia. See an example and the difference between the two functions.

We are really interested by your feedbacks: please leave comments on the Phabricator ticket or on Wikidata:Contact the development team.

This feature was built by multiple developers from the Wikidata team with help from volunteers. Mostly hoo_man and Thiemo Mättig (WMDE) as well as Daniel Kinzler (WMDE) and Jonas Kress (WMDE). Special thanks to the volunteers that contributed in Phabricator discussions, especially Izno!