Hey folks :)

We have quite a lot of changes lined up that are going to be deployed soon. Here's an overview of what's coming up. I hope we can stick to this but if there are any unforeseen issues we might have to delay some of it.

== Tuesday August 19th ==

* Wikinews will be able to manage its sitelinks via Wikidata * Wikidata will become its own client. This means you can for example add a sitelink to Wikidata:Help to the item for all main help pages. You will also be able to make use of the data in items on other pages in Wikidata with lua. (Arbitrary access will be enabled for Wikidata for this but when data in an item changes we will not be able to purge the page using the data yet.) * Sitelinks for projects with just one sitelink in the group (like Commons, Wikidata and in the future Meta for example) will be grouped together in one sitelink group. * Badges for good and featured articles can be stored on Wikidata right next to the sitelink. In a later roll-out we will make it possible to show them on the Wikipiedias and sister projects in the sidebar too. We will start with badges for featured and good articles. More can be added on request later. Thanks to Bene* and lazowik for this feature. I will send another email about this. * Redirects between items will be possible. When two items are merged one of them can then be turned into a redirect. This way our identifiers can be considered much more stable by 3rd parties for example. It will also make it unnecessary to delete duplicate items. This will hopefully reduce the workload of our admins considerably. For now redirects can only be created via the API. * We are introducing the new datatype monolingual text. This will allow you to make statements with a string and an associated language.

Please go and test these on test.wikidata.org and let me know if there are any issues.

== Tuesday August 26th ==

* The entity suggester will be able to suggest properties in qualifiers and references as well. * BREAKING CHANGE: We'll switch the internal serialization format to be the same as the one that is returned by the API. The xml dumps will also be adjusted then. If your tool relies on either the dumps or the internal serialization of an item page then it will likely need to be adjusted. I will send a separate email about that. (This is one of the remaining blockers for statements on properties and further progress on Commons support.) * We'll deploy the "in other projects" sidebar as a beta feature to Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikiquote. This way you will see links in the sidebar of Wikipedia for example linking to Commons, Wikivoyage, Wikisource and so on. This can be configured per-wiki. Thanks to Tpt for this feature. (Wikipedias will get this 2 days later.) * We will make it possible to show badges from Wikidata in the sidebar on Wikipedia and co.

Cheers Lydia