Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot: ThesaurusLinguaeAegyptiaeBot - Task(s): Creating and updating Hieroglyphic Ancient Egyptian and Coptic lexemes and ancient Egyptian text artifact items. It is also to maintain links to the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae project via approved properties.
• New request for comments: Schema Virtual Tour - User:Brechtd would like feedback on determining a data model and schema for Wikidata items that are an instance of virtual tour(Q2915546) - See Schema Proposal - Virtual Tour for more info.
• Closed request for comments: Create items for Property proposals - Despite a spirited discussion with many comments both in favour and opposition, no consensus was reached.

Events

• Upcoming:
  • Wikimedia Deutschland is providing a total of 15 participation scholarships for Wikimania 2025 (7 individual and 4 tandem scholarships). Further information is available on this page. An overview of all questions in the application form is here. Apply here. Closes 8 December 2024.
  • Talk to the Search Platform / Query Service Team—December 4, 2024. The time is 17:00 CET
  • Tomorrow / 3rd December 2024: Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session @ 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm UTC / 6pm CET. If you would like to attend, please fill out the Etherpad form to ensure all necessary materials are provided for you.
  • Deadline for the Central Asian WikiCon 2025 scholarship application is December 30, 2024. We encourage you to make Wikidata-related submissions (the deadline for submission is March 22, 2025.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Research
  • Statement Signals: Wikidata usage on other Wikis: A new research report is available. Explores what trace Wikidata data is measurable on other Wiki pages and proposes initial metrics for measuring Wikidata statement usage on Wikimedia content pages. Also suggests methods to improve data analysis and collection. PDF is available on Commons
• Blogs
  • Celebrating Wikidata’s 12th birthday across the world - Wikidata celebrated its 12th birthday in October and November 2024, with a series of global events and activities aimed at commemorating the platform's contributions to the open knowledge movement, engaging its community of volunteers, and highlighting the significant role Wikidata plays in the digital landscape. By Dan Shick
• Papers
  • Beyond the Library Catalogue: Connecting Library Metadata to Wikidata - This paper explores how libraries can leverage Wikidata to enhance resource discoverability, foster interoperability, and integrate into the global knowledge ecosystem. By Omorodion Okuonghae (2024).
  • A framework for integrating biomedical knowledge in Wikidata with open biological and biomedical ontologies and MeSH keywords - Enhancing Wikidata’s biomedical knowledge by integrating OBO ontologies and PubMed’s MeSH keywords, addressing gaps, improving classification accuracy, and verifying relations for stronger interoperability and accuracy. By Chebil et al. (2024).
  • Class Order Disorder in Wikidata and First Fixes analyzes class order violations in Wikidata's ontology using SPARQL, evaluates fixes, and offers solutions through improved tools or community involvement. By P. Patel-Schneider and E. Doğan.
• Videos
  • Edit a Wikidata Item and Lexeme - The Tyap Wikimedia User Group produced this tutorial on editing as part of the Wikidata 12th Birthday celebrations for the Wikidata @12 Data-a-thon.
  • State of the art in combining OpenStreetMap and Linked Data - Covers Linked Data basics, its potential with OSM, and popular methods for linking, extracting, combining, and querying data from both sources. Jump to (Wikidata)
  • (正體字, CN Trad.) Getting Started with Wikidata - An introduction and overview to Wikidata and some associated tools such as ORES and LiftWing.
  • (正體字, CN Trad.) Wikidata Basic Editing Tutorial - This session was given as part of the COSCUP '24 conference on the OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Agenda Track.
  • LLM-based natural-language representations for SPARQL queries over Wikidata and DBpedia - LORiS: This tool can help you understand complex SPARQL queries by converting them to natural language.
  • Towards an Open NLI LLM-based System for KGs: A Wikidata Case Study - At the 7th ISRITI 2024 conference, Jaycent Ongris shows how RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) has been used in a natural-language question-answer platform to directly query Wikidata.
  • How knowledge representation is changing in a world of LLM's - Denny Vrandečić gives this keynote session at the SWIB (Semantic Web in Libraries) conference.
  • the Capacity to Grieve Once More - Alexandros Kosiaris of the Wikimedia Foundation explains changes made to make Wikipedia more stable and prevent outages, including how it calls and fetches data from Wikidata. Session given at SREcon24.

Tool of the week

• LoRiS - Generate natural-language descriptions of SPARQL queries via LLM's.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Wikidata:WordGraph: Google released the WordGraph dataset as a belated present for Wikidata’s 12th birthday. The dataset contains 968,153 forms in 39 languages.
• Product Manager: Wikibase Suite: Wikimedia Deutschland has an open and exciting vacancy for a Product Manager of Wikibase Suite. Apply!
• Tools or bots which use the wiki replicas (such as Quarry) will observe outdated data for up to 8-10 days, as a result of necessary database maintenance (T367856). Tools or bots which use the APIs will not be affected. (This was previously announced 2024-11-11 but didn’t actually take place yet.)

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest properties:
  • General datatypes:
    • picture of this person doing their job (picture of a person in action, especially for a sportsperson, visual artist, musican, actor. P18 is normally used for portraits)
    • ISCC (ISCC hash code that identifies a media object based on fuzzy hashing)
  • External identifiers: Kultboy editor ID, WikiBaseball ID, Ninilchik Russian Dictionary ID, ANID Researcher Portal ID, TOPO ID, DBIS Resource ID, ITV News topic ID, Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites ID, ISFDB editorial collection ID, Great Norwegian Encyclopedia contributor ID, ILEC World Lake Database ID, Sage Social Science Thesaurus ID, El Moudjahid tag ID, SGES monument ID, DEX ’09 entry ID, Electronic Language International Festival person ID, Medieval Coin Hoards of the British Isles ID, Paramount+ video ID, Le Club Mediapart blogger ID, Phish.net venue ID
• New property proposals to review:
  • General datatypes:
    • study or design for this work (preliminary work for this finished work)
    • OAI formatter (formatter to generate ID compatible with {{Q|2430433}} services)
    • Open Library Collection (Link to Open Library Collection which contain manually and automaticallly collections of editions and works on certain topics)
    • scientific illustration (an illustration of this subject to provide a detailed reference for its appearance. It should be ideally tied to the primary literature on the item.)
    • thesis submitted for (academic degree for which a thesis or dissertation is submitted)
    • meeting of (subject is a meeting or session of this body (legislature, committee, convention, etc.))
    • UMC rating (Age rating category as designated by the UAE Media Council (UMC))
    • Third-gender population (number of third-gender people inhabiting the place)
    • role named as (use as qualifier to indicate how the object's role was named in the credits of it's respective work)
    • bequest income (The sum a organisations receives from bequests/legacies in a timeframe.)
    • Audio tour ()
    • Augmented reality tour ()
    • Virtual reality tour ()
    • extension that populates category (analogous to {{P|4329}} for tracking cat:s populated by extensions of MediaWiki, linking to extension causing the population)
    • CUATM statistical code (7-digits code attributed to administrative-territorial units of Moldova)
    • CUATM unique identification code (4-digits code attributed to administrative-territorial units of Moldova)
  • External identifiers: ISLRN, erail.in railway station identifier, Gallimard author ID, Japanese Health Insurance System Facility ID, Identifiant d'un(e) artiste sur Reg-Arts, Eyrolles author ID, Zvuk album ID, Chtyvo author ID, Bibliothèque du Séminaire de Tournai IDs, EU Corporate body code, SBOID, Waymark code, Radio Algeria tag ID, Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian entry ID, PBY Ben-Yehuda dictionary identifier, ThePWHL.com player ID, Radio Algeria tag ID (Arabic), Identifiant L'AF au champ d'honneur, Identifiant d'un(e) auteurice dans Vidas, Open Source Security Foundation Best Practices Identifier, OpenSSF Best Practices ID, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language entry, Identifiant sur Mémoire des avocats, BCU Kirundi-English Dictionary ID, Wurfhand, University Bibliography Tübingen ID, ZSL Authority ID, PUG authority ID, Three Decks class ID, HCERES expert ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Using cross-product / cross-join to produce list of categories
  • Map of individuals charged, convicted and/or exonerated of Witchcraft with place of death in Switzerland
  • Names and Locations of French Castles (Château)
  • Train Station information (with a Spanish Wikipedia article)
• Newest WikiProjects:
  • Bibliothek UvA/HvA - documenting, archiving and creating items from collections from the UvA/AUAS Library in Amsterdam, beginning with the works of Allard Pierson.
  • Ghana - A hub for Ghanaian activities and entities, including regional languages: Dagbanli, Twi and Dagari.
  • Thao (Taiwan): For collecting information related to Thao cultural themes, including statistics and activity records.
• Newest database reports: Recent Deaths
• Showcase Items: Miguel de Cervantes: Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright (1547-1616)
• Showcase Lexemes: புறவு (L1236574) - A Tamil lemma for dense forest, impassable jungle and a pigeon dove.

Development

• EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on making it possible to search for an EntitySchema by its label or alias when making a new statement linking to an EntitySchema.
• PropertySuggester: We have updated the script that generates the suggestions and will update the suggestions next.
• Lexicographical data: We fixed a visual issue with search results on the Codex-based Special:NewLexeme (phab:T370057)
• Vector 2022: We are working on designs to fix the remaining issues with the skin on Wikidata.
• Wikibase REST API: We are finishing the prototype for supporting search in the API.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country: Ghana
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot: KlaraBot - Task(s): Append a human's lifespan to descriptions when they can be authoritatively sourced.
• Closed request for comments: Audio transcription (P9533) - Closed with no consensus. The discussion is ongoing on the Property P5933 talk page.

Events

• Past: Amical Wikimedia, the Catalan-language and culture focused thematic Wikimedia Organization organized the Celebrem Wikidata (Let's celebrate Wikidata) project to celebrate Wikidata's 12th anniversary, from November 10 - 30. This included a Wikidata introduction workshop to equip participants with the editing skills to tackle the project's main aim. This was presented as a game to delete duplicate info on Wikidata and Catalan Viquipèdia infoboxes, in three areas: protected buildings, officers' positions and data related to sports teams players. At the end of the event, ~200 Wikidata-fed infoboxes and Wikidata items were improved and many Wikipedia editors edited Wikidata for the first time!
• Upcoming events:
  • (Deutsch)Wikidata for Legal Historians - Tue. 10 December, 3pm - 7pm (UTC+1). This presentation explores Wikidata as a key platform for LOD, explains its Semantic Web foundation, introduces FactGrid (a Wikidata-based platform for historical research). Highlights potential of both platforms using examples and encourages discussion for legal historical research. Register here.
  • Today (09.12.2024) is the last chance to submit an Abstract for the Wikidata and Research conference (5 - 6 June 2025). If you are interested in participating, please review the submission acceptance format before submitting here.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • MediaWiki Conference Highlights, featuring Wikibase talks including one by Christos Varvantakis and Jon Amar from Wikimedia Deutschland.
  • Semantic Wikibase 2024 Update
  • WMDE launches AI Knowledge project in collaboration with DataStax built with NVIDIA AI
  • Ten years of Philippine local Govt. data for Wikidata's 12th Birthday. Read about SKAP's (Shared Knowledge Asia Pacific) efforts to add 10 years worth of financial data of local Government assets to Wikidata during a Datathon.
• Papers
  • Developing an OCR - Wikibase Pipeline for Place Names in the RGTC Series - introduces a semi-automated workflow for extracting and digitally storing geographically relevant information, including spatial relations and contextual details, from place names in the Répertoire géographique des textes cunéiformes. By Matthew Ong (2024).
• Videos
  • Wikibase4Research - Kolja Bailly presents ways in which the Wikibase4Research tool by the TIB Open Science Lab supports researchers in dealing with Mediawiki software for knowledge bases such as Wikibase and facilitates better and FAIR Research Data Management. Includes a live demonstration and beginner-friendly instructions.

Tool of the week

• CAT🐈: Metrics computing simple metrics (number of labels, number of descriptions, number of sitelinks, number of statements) for item matching a simple claim.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Template:Image properties New template listing properties that link to images.
• Let's Connect invites you to get involved in helping spread awareness and knowledge of Wikidata, potentially help organise a Wikidata Learning Clinic. Are you interested in participating? Please sign-up on this registration form.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest properties:
  • General datatypes:
    • reference illustration (an illustration of this subject to provide a detailed reference for its appearance. It should be ideally tied to the primary literature on the item.)
  • External identifiers: Gallimard author ID, Football Kit Archive ID, Bibliothèque du Séminaire de Tournai author ID, Bibliothèque du Séminaire de Tournai publisher ID, Reg-Arts artist ID, EU Corporate body code, PBY Ben-Yehuda dictionary identifier, Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian entry ID, L'AF au champ d'honneur ID, Radio Algeria tag ID (Arabic), Radio Algeria tag ID (French), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language entry ID, Kamus Dewan Edisi Keempat ID
• New property proposals to review:
  • General datatypes:
    • land acknowledgement (acknowledgement of indigenous or native people whose ancestors lived at a location)
    • homonym of (taxon item of which the taxon name is an exact homonym)
    • taxon known by this common name (taxon item of which this common name refers)
  • External identifiers: PCGames.de product ID, AniSearch character ID, Hachette author ID, El Watan tag ID, Albin Michel author ID, DNCI label ID, Battle.net game ID, Collectie Nederland ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Items missing Hungarian labels or description that are part of Library and Information Science (Q13420675)
  • Items from Maori Wikipedia missing English labels or descriptions
  • Instances of "Shopping Center" located in administrative territorial entity subclass of Norway
• Newest WikiProjects:
  • Nonprofit Organisations in Nigeria, Belgium and Italy.
• WikiProject Highlights:
  • Rwanda - since its creation a couple of weeks ago, it has expanded greatly with new sections for Lists, Museums and Hospitals.
• Newest database reports: Unauthorized Bots - A list of bots and their edits, operating without a Bot flag.
• Showcase Items: Das Erste: A German public service television channel broadcasting for more than 70 years.
• Showcase Lexemes: Kerzu (L8153) the Breton word for December, directly translates from "totally black", rather appropriate for the cold, dark last month of the year.

Development

• You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country: Ghana
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!