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This Month in GLAM: December 2025
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Wikidata weekly summary #714
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week leading up to 2026-01-12. Missed the previous one? See issue #713.
Discussions
- New requests for permissions/Bot: AmeisenBot 3 - Task/s: Adding descriptions (and possibly labels and aliases as well) to items based on their statements.
- New CheckUser requests: Saroj (RfP scheduled to end at 25 January 2026 09:31 UTC)
Events
- Upcoming events:
- The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 18:00 CEST, 14th January 2026 in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
- WMF Wikidata Platform team is launching a new office hours series starting January 27th, 2026 and continuing on the first Tuesday of each month. The scope of this series is be limited to Blazegraph migration support for the entirety of 2026. Participants are encouraged to register in advance for each session and may optionally add a brief description of their migration-related questions to the shared Etherpad to help guide preparation. See Blazegraph Migration office hour page for more details
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: Wikidata at 13: Fante Wikimedians Joins the Celebration
- Papers: Structuring the Sights and Stories of Pausanias with Wikidata - The Digital Periegesis project leverages Wikidata and linked open data tools to annotate, disambiguate, and connect Pausanias’s complex 2nd‑century text, enhancing accessibility, interoperability, and scholarly engagement with Greece’s historical and mythological landscape. By Kiesling et al., (2025)
- Videos: (Papiamento) Wikipedia on Aruba | Episode 8: How to add a new topic (item) to Wikidata
Tool of the week
- Knowledge Train A game to create a train of knowledge with the power of Wikidata - User:Athulvis
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Mobile statement editing is now available as a beta feature on Wikidata. Enable the Beta feature in your preferences settings, head to Wikidata Sandbox (Q4115189) (in mobile view) to test it and share your feedback here: Mobile editing of statements.
- The WMF Wikidata Platform team has published its January 2026 newsletter. It includes updates on the legacy full-graph endpoint decommissioning, the User-Agent policy change, the monthly Blazegraph migration office hours, and efforts to reduce regressions caused by the legacy endpoint shutdown. To have new issues of the WDP monthly newsletter delivered to your user talk page, Subscribe to WDP newsletter!
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes: common organism (organisms known by this common name)
- Newest External identifiers: Boosty author ID, Before I Play game ID, Korea Heritage Service Heritage Portal ID, KaraokeTexty.cz artist ID, KaraokeTexty.cz song ID, Showlabs ID, DEUMM Online ID, Slekt og Data cemetery ID, Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia ID, EZB library ID, topic of Dictionary of Canadian biography identifier, Cover Art Archive image, X broadcast ID, Theaterencyclopedie ID, Maitron biography ID (new version), Scilit organization ID, Fragrantica perfume ID, Fragrantica perfume brand ID, izoh.uz word ID, Place Names and Places of Nova Scotia ID, Fragrantica perfume notes ID, Fragrantica perfumer ID, Parfumo perfume brand ID, Parfumo perfumer ID, Parfumo perfume ID, Parfumo fragrance notes ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- Artistagraph ID (Identifies the Artistagraph for an artistIdentifier for creative works on Artistagraph, a platform for documenting and discovering artist information and creative work connections)
- number of tunnel tubes (Number of parallel tubes in a tunnel.)
- New External identifier property proposals to review:: Mapillary sequence ID, People's Graphic Design Archive creator ID, Uni24k indentifier, Brussels BeStAddress municipality ID, Brussels BeStAddress street name ID, Brussels BeStAddress address ID, Wikifunctions object, MAX username, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei ID, The Retro Web company ID, Schulnummer Berlin, KCI article ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Showcase Items: mojito - traditional Cuban highball cocktail
Development
- Mobile editing of statements: We have released the first version of mobile statement editing as a beta feature (see details above). In addition we are improving it further and are adding missing functionality to get it ready for a full release. This includes adding editing support for additional data types such as date and musical notation.
- Blazegraph replacement: The Wikidata platform team is continuing their evaluation of alternative backends for the Wikidata Query Service.
- Graph QL: We are continuing to work on the prototype to get it ready for wider testing and are waiting on a security review.
- Dumps: We fixed an issue where the "latest" symlinks to data dumps weren't working correctly.
- Wikidata integration in the Wikimedia projects: We are investigating how to further reduce the number of unnecessary changes showing up in watchlist and recent changes coming from Wikidata. The work on this is also helping reduce the size of the recent changes database table, which is especially important on larger Wikipedias. In addition we are continuing to improve the Databox module to make it easier for smaller Wikipedias to get Wikidata-powered infoboxes.
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: Kazakhstan
- 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!
Tech News: 2026-03
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The Wikimedia Foundation has shared some guiding questions for the July 2026–June 2027 Annual Plan on Meta and Diff. These focus on global trends, faster and healthier experimentation, better support for newcomers, strengthening editors and advanced users, improving collaboration across projects, and growing and retaining readership. Feedback and ideas are welcome on the talk page.
Updates for editors
- As part of the current work of Community Tech team on the Multiple watchlists project, the display of EditWatchlist will be updated as a first step towards multiple watchlists. Additionally, the pagination on Search will be updated too, as a part of the work on the Revamp pagination / page navigation wish. [1]
- The Global Watchlist is a MediaWiki extension that lets you see your watchlists from different wikis on the same page. It was recently updated to look more like the regular Watchlist, such as preparing it for temporary accounts in IP masking (including rerouting user links to contributions pages), making page titles bold, and opening links in edit summaries and tags in new browser tabs. [2][3][4][5]
View all 28 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where global blocks did not have the option to disable sending emails, has now been fixed, and will be available for use in the week of January 13. [6]
Updates for technical contributors
- The VisualEditor citation tool and Reference Previews now support "map" as a reference type. [7]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki/MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 19:33, 12 January 2026 (UTC)
Affiliations Committee News (July-December 2025)
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Recognition Status Report: Updates of affiliate applications
AffCom Conflict Intervention: Updates on conflict intervention cases
AffCom Movement Contribution: AffCom at WikiConference North America
AffCom Administration: AffCom and EDs Discuss Affiliate Ecosystem
AffCom Events: AffCom at WikimaniaAffiliations Committee News (July-December 2025)
This newsletter is best translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki. Please help translate to your language
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:11, 13 January 2026 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 1
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Highlights
- Wikipedia turns 25: Time to start the party! Join the virtual celebration featuring musical performances, games, and more on January 15 at 16:00 UTC. and The party will be live interpreted into Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Annual planning: Key questions for the Wikimedia movement to shape the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2026-2027 annual goals. Join the discussion on-wiki.
- Hackathon:
- Apply to join the Northwestern Europe 2026 Hackathon from March 13-14 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Application will close mid-January 2026 or earlier based on event capacity.
- General Registration for the 2026 Wikimedia Hackathon is now open! The hackathon will take place in Milan, Italy from May 1 - 3, 2026. Event details can be found here and registration will remain open until March 30th or until event capacity is reached.
- Semantic search: Wikimedia Foundation is working on making it easier to find the information readers want.
- Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 50, week 51, and week 52 include that now edit filters can be set to automatically suppress their details which will help oversighters to prevent doxxing.
- Wikifunctions: The first Wikifunctions Volunteers' Corner of the next year will take place on February 9.
- Blazegraph Migration: To support the migration away from Blazegraph as the backend of Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), we are hosting regular calls starting on January 27. Wikidata users and tool maintainers are are invited to join, ask questions, and share migration-related concerns.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · list of movement events · The Wikipedia Library
- Upcoming Conferences: Announcing the six Wikimedia conferences funded for 2026 in the first round.
- Wikimania 2026: A glimpse on what the team is currently working on to prepare for Wikimania 2026 in Paris.
- Public Policy: Explore the resources available for public policy advocacy work, including explainers that describe key policy positions, guides on how to build a campaign or write a policy brief, and examples of open letters submitted to governments.
- Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
- Public-Interest content: The Project Gayatri content expansion program brought 7,656 new articles on Indonesian Wikipedia.
- Wikimedia Research Showcase: The research showcase will return on January 22 at 17:30 UTC with the theme "Celebrating 25 Years of Wikipedia and the Research Behind It".
- Wikimedia Research Report: The Wikimedia Foundation has published its 13th bi-annual Research Report, highlighting the work completed during the first six months of this fiscal year.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Past issues of the bulletin for progress on the annual plan
- Wikimedia Enterprise: Read the full annual wrap-up of 2025 of Wikimedia Enterprise and how the year marked a fundamental shift in open knowledge.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Board of Trustees: Wikimedia Foundation welcomes two new Board Trustees Bobby Shabangu and Michał Buczyński.
- Affcom News: Read the year-end issue of AffCom News (July-December 2025), the newsletter that distributes relevant news and events about the work of Wikimedia's Affiliations Committee.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters ·Milestones ·
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletin
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 00:31, 14 January 2026 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #715
[edit]
week leading up to 2026-01-19. Missed the previous one? See issue #714.
Discussions
- Closed request for comments: Deprecate P642? - Consensus to deprecate was reached.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- Wikifying Te Tiriti 10-workshop series, attendees will learn how to contribute to Wikipedia and create Wikidata items, to increase the visibility of people and their projects working in Te Tiriti and anti-racism areas. Further information can be found on the WikiProject page / Workshop timetable. Register to attend.
- Wiki Loves Folklore 2026 in Uganda - contribute to the project by expanding or creating Wikidata Items connected to the project categories, such as Ugandan folklore, food, music, dances, traditional clothing, and more.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- The London School of Economics and Political Science have employed a Wikimedian in Residence
- Wikimedia Indonesia held Data and Technology Week 2025 in last December 2025, organized introductory workshops on Wikidata and Wikifunctions. Read key takeaways and participants' discussion at Diff.
- Wikidata Days 2025 Journey in Africa: Building Knowledge, Languages and Communities
- Wikidata Botswana 2025: Celebrating 13 Years (And We Really Showed Up!)
- Papers:
- A new monographic number of JLIS.it has been published regarding the OPAC SBN (the biggest collective library catalogue in Italy, with more than 7 thousands of libraries participating; about its collaboration with Wikidata, see the Wikidata coordination page); it contains 3 papers focusing on the use of Wikidata for authority control (all in Italian, with abstract in English):
- Wikidata and SBN: An Assessment of Two Years of Work (2023–2025): an overview Wikidata-SBN of the collaboration in 2023-2025, focusing on the methods of reconciliation
- Wikidata-Enhanced Authority Records: A Project for Personal Names in SBN: a description of the procedure to extract data from Wikidata items matches with SBN authority records and adapt these data to be copied into non-individualised SBN authority records
- NaMo, utility for populating missing date fields in authority records: a description of an utility to keep an authority file up-to-date finding missing death dates through Wikidata
- Wikidata-Enhanced Authority Records: A Project for Personal Names in SBN - A collaboration between Wikimedia Italy and ICCU is enriching incomplete SBN authority records using Wikidata identifiers, enhancing catalogue accuracy and accessibility as entries continue to grow. By Ravelli, (2026).
- A new monographic number of JLIS.it has been published regarding the OPAC SBN (the biggest collective library catalogue in Italy, with more than 7 thousands of libraries participating; about its collaboration with Wikidata, see the Wikidata coordination page); it contains 3 papers focusing on the use of Wikidata for authority control (all in Italian, with abstract in English):
Tool of the week
- Puzzles By Nathan is a game that arrange words so each connects to the next
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Mobile editing for RTL languages: The Wikimedia Deutschland team is seeking users of right-to-left (RTL) scripts, including Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu, to help test and improve the mobile statement editing experience. If you edit in an RTL language and would like to join user interviews or deeper testing, sign up here.
- (French) Gendered place names in the public space of French-speaking Switzerland
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest External identifiers: Parfinity notes ID, Google Ads Transparency Center advertiser ID, Basenotes perfume brand ID, Basenotes perfume people ID, Basenotes perfume ID, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei ID, MAX username
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- location collected (geographic location where a specimen or sample was collected in the field)
- Category for music in this language (link to category item that contains music in this language)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Thyssen-Bornemisza work ID, CriticDB IDs, MPA certificate number, WorldFootball.net person ID (new), The Session tune ID, Parfumo fragrance note ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Schema examples: film director (E24)
- WikiProject Highlights:
- Rijksmonumenten Unmerge list - list of items with more than one P359 (Rijksmonumenten ID).
- Stanford Libraries added an event: Love Data Week 2026
- Newest database reports: Entities without a Label - this list is dynamically created, search by language code and entity type: Item or Property.
- Showcase Items: FIFA (Q253414) - international governing body of association football
- Showcase Lexemes: charge (L3922) - English verb (tʃɑːrdʒ) meaning "to supply with energy", "to rush forward", or "to have responsibility for"
Development
- Mobile statement editing:
- We continued work on supporting more datatypes for editing, specifically date, musical notation and monolingual text.
- We worked on displaying constraint violation indicators.
- You can try out the current state by enabling it in the beta features section of your preferences.
- Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are continuing to investigate options for further reducing the amount of Wikidata changes in recent changes and watchlist on the other wikis to reduce the size of the database tables.
- Dumps: We finished our research on dumps, especially looking into different ways to define subsets. We will publish the report with results by end of February.
- Wikidata Query Service: The Wikidata Platform team is continuing the evaluation of potential replacements for Blazegraph.
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:
- 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!
Tech News: 2026-04
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The tray shown on Special:Diff in mobile view has been redesigned. It is now collapsed by default, and incorporates a link to undo the edit being viewed, making it easier for mobile editors and reviewers to take action while keeping the interface uncluttered. [8]
- The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now automatically determines the text direction (ensuring correct display of sites with unusual domain names) and shows detailed descriptions for log actions. Later this week, a new permanent link for page creations and CSS classes for each entry element will be added. [9][10][11][12]
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the previously observed issue in Vector 2022, where anchor link targets were obscured by the sticky header, has now been addressed. [13]
Updates for technical contributors
- As mentioned in the October 2025 deprecation announcement, MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin sunsetting all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API the week of January 26. Changes are expected to roll out to all wikis on or before January 30th. All API users currently calling them are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. Both endpoint variations can be found, compared, and tested using the REST Sandbox. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in Phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
- Interactive reference documentation for the Wikimedia REST API has moved. Requests to API docs previously hosted through RESTBase (e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/) are now redirected to the REST Sandbox. - The WMF Wikidata Platform team (WDP) has published its January 2026 newsletter. It includes updates on the legacy full-graph endpoint decommissioning, the User-Agent policy change, the monthly Blazegraph migration office hours, and efforts to reduce regressions caused by the legacy endpoint shutdown. As a reminder, you can subscribe to the WDP newsletter!
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- The Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026 will take place on 13-14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Applications opened mid-December and will close soon or when capacity is reached. It's a two-day, technically oriented hackathon bringing together Wikimedians from the region. Hope to see you there!
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 20:30, 19 January 2026 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #716
[edit]
week leading up to 2026-01-26. Missed the previous one? See issue #715.
Events
- Reminder: Blazegraph Migration Office Hours: The WMF Wikidata Platform team is kicking off its monthly Blazegraph migeration office hours tomorrow, . These sessions focus exclusively on supporting the migration away from Blazegraph as the backend of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS). See the office hours page for details and future sessions.
- Art+Feminism online hands-on training session: Intro to Wikidata + Archives. January 29, 15:00 UTC (16:00 CET). Alan Ang (WMDE) and d:User:Epìdosis host this workshop on collective editing and how Wikidata connects with archives. More info and Zoom registration @ Art+Feminism.org
- OpenStreetMap X Wikidata Meetup #85 February 9 Time: 19:30-21:00 UTC+8 at Mozilla Community Space Taipei (Q61752245).
- Mapping Africa: Visualizing Knowledge and Communities - 28.01.2026, 16:00 UTC. Episode #54 of the WikiAfrica Hour explores the power of maps and geospatial data.
- General Registration is Open! 2026 Wikimedia Hackathon - May 1-3, 2026
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: Wikidata replaces the CLARIN Concept Registry in the Component Registry
- Papers:
- Analysis and Generation of Wikidata Descriptions Focusing on Bangla Language - A rule-based Grammatical Framework resource grammar for Bangla generates accurate, consistent Wikidata descriptions across diverse entities, achieving over 99% coverage and enhancing low-resource language content in multilingual knowledge bases. By Mohammad, (2025).
- Videos:
- Fact-Checking with Wikidata by Philippe Saadé - a recording of the workshop hosted by DataTalks.Club in collaboration with User:Philippe Saadé
- Wikimedia and Biodiversity Data: A Mutualistic Relationship in the Open Knowledge Ecosystem
- Collaborative Cultural Heritage Geodata, session 2 of SunoikisisDC's Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage. Discusses how Wikidata is used and contributes data to the field of spatial and geographic technologies.
- Wikimedia projects & smell-related content: WMUK Sandbox Session - User:Lajmmoore describes how to add and model sensory experiences such as smell, to Wikidata.
Tool of the week
- Wikidata Property Creation Helper is a tool by ArthurPSmith. The tool takes a property proposal page and translates it into a QuickStatements batch (and then a second one for the examples) that a property creator can use to quickly create a new property.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Wikimedia Deutschland 2026 first quarter development plan has been published: Wikidata:Linked Open Data development plan.
- Job opening: The Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a Wikidata Platform Backend Migration Specialist (contract position) to support backend migration work on the Wikidata Query Service. This role focuses on technical work related to the migration away from Blazegraph. If you're interested in the role or want to learn more, see the full job description and application details.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- translates from (language(s) that this person, company or organization translates works texts from)
- translates into (language(s) that this person, company or organization translates works and texts into)
- Newest External identifiers: MAX username, CriticDB game ID, Finnish railway station code, Sketchfab model ID, Sketchfab channel ID, Sketchfab user ID, BRAHMS identifier, LegiStorm person ID, NHK Archives program ID, Polski Petersburg encyclopedia ID (Polish version), Bercail ID, InterSportStats athlete ID, Erdős Problem number, Trismegistos editor ID, woordenlijst lemma ID, European Vehicle Number, CourtListener person ID, Australian National Kennel Council ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review: incompatible type (instances of this type or of its subclasses cannot be instances of that type nor of its subclasses)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: KaraokeTexty.cz album ID, Biographical encyclopedia of Maros County-ID, ShotOnWhat film ID, Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Architects 1800-1950 ID, CardCow.com publisher ID, Stockholms SL Realtidsinformation identificator, Lost Pubs Project ID, Handball Base ID, Handballnews.pl person ID, SFDb förlaga-ID, RITVA company ID, RITVA corporate body ID, TC Infos network identifier, French Trade Mark Number
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples: Wikidata Items with a frequency (hertz) within human-hearing range (source)
- Schema examples: WikiProject Schemas: A tutorial - to create a simple ShEx schema and apply it to a set of Wikidata items.
- Newest WikiProjects: No Longer at the Margins - 2026 Hackathon
- WikiProject Highlights: WikiProject Bahamas - list of buildings in Nassau
- Newest database reports: Entities missing a description - choose a language and entity type (Item or Property) and generate a list of entities that have no description.
- Showcase Items: Mount Kilimanjaro - mountain massif in Kilimanjaro National Park in Tanzania
- Showcase Lexemes: мундштук (L130056) - Russian noun (mʊnʂˈtuk) meaning "mouthpiece (of a musical instrument)", "mouthpiece (of a pipe/cigar holder)", or "a horse's bit"
Development
- Mobile statement editing:
- We started working on supporting editing of monolingual text statements
- We continued working on supporting editing of geocoordinate and quantity statements
- We are fixing display issues with date statements
- We continued work on showing constraint violations
- GraphQL:
- The security review was finished, removing a blocker to deploying GraphQL support to Wikidata
- We added pagination to querying items by statement properties or values
- We are extending the labels of linked entities functionality to also let you get the descriptions of the Items linked in a statement
- Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are continuing to investigate options for further reducing the amount of Wikidata changes in recent changes and watchlist on the other wikis to reduce the size of the database tables.
- Wikidata Query Service: The Wikidata Platform team is continuing the evaluation of potential replacements for Blazegraph.
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 countries: Albania and Kosovo
- 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!
Tech News: 2026-05
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Wikimedia Foundation invites comments on proposed future of the Product and Technology Advisory Council until 28 February.
- All users with registered accounts can now use passkeys for two-factor authentication (2FA). Passkeys are a simple way to log in without using a second device. They verify the user's identity using a fingerprint, face scan, or a PIN code. To set up a passkey, first set up a regular 2FA method. Currently, to log in with a passkey, users must also use a password. Later this quarter, passwordless login will allow users to log in with a single click and a passkey. Users with advanced rights will also be required to have 2FA enabled. This is part of the Account Security project.
- Unregistered contributors on blocked IPs or blocked IP ranges can now interact on-wiki to appeal a block by creating a temporary account to appeal a block on the user talk page, unless the "prevent this user from editing their own talk page" is enabled. This solves the problem of logged-out users unable to use the default unblock process via user talk page. [14]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) methods description on the management page has been updated. It is now clearer and easier for users to understand and make use of. [15]
Updates for technical contributors
- A new AbuseFilter variable,
account_type, has been added to provide a reliable way to determine the account type being created in thecreateaccountandautocreateaccountactions. As part of this change, the variableaccountnamehas been renamed toaccount_name, andaccountnameis now deprecated. Edit filter managers should update any filters that use hardcoded account type checks or the deprecated variable. [16] - Image thumbnails that are requested in non-standard sizes, and using non-standard methods such as direct requests to
upload.wikimedia.org/…will stop working in the near future. This change is to prevent ongoing external abuse by web-scrapers and bots. Some users with custom CSS/JS, Interface Admins who can fix gadgets and local skins, and Tool-authors, will need to update their code to use standard thumbnail sizes. Details, search-links, and examples of how to fix them, are available in the task.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 21:17, 26 January 2026 (UTC)
This Month in Education: January 2026
[edit]This Month in Education
Volume 15 • Issue 1 • January 2026
- Strengthening Wikimedia Education and Digital Literacy in 2026
- Dzongkha Wikipedia Education Program in Bhutan
- Wikipedia Education Program – Train The Trainer in Nepal
- Wikipedia 25 celebration in the Igbo Wiki Fan Club Alvan and IMSU
- CBSUA boosts Open Knowledge and Local Culture through expanded Wiki Education Program
- WikiChallenge African Schools: Young voices, real impact, and continued (reasonable) growth
- Updates on Auckland Museum Summer Student Programme
- Stronger and bolder Wikiforhumanrights 2025 in Anambra Network
- Official Opening of IFAK Secondary School Wiki Club: Engaging Youth in Learning Through Open Knowledge
- Greetings from the Jeronim de Rada WikiClub in Elbasan, Albania, for Christmas 2025
- Great and productive final activities of 2025 Wikimedia MKD education programme
- Envisioning an Open Future together – WikiForAll
- A look back: reviewing the main education activities in Brazil in 2025
- A 147-Year-Old Institution Celebrates 25 Years of Wikipedia: St Aloysius University and the Spirit of Open Knowledge
- Celebrating 25 years of free knowledge! The '25x25' Project reaches the classrooms of Córdoba, Argentina
- The collaborative efforts of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora for the dissemination of free knowledge on Wikipedia
Wikidata weekly summary #717
[edit]
week leading up to 2026-02-02. Missed the previous one? See issue #716.
Discussions
- New requests for permissions/Bot: Sapper-bot 2 - Task: Monthly updates of the Dead Sea level and the "lowest point" property for Israel, Jordan, and Asia.
- Closed request for permissions/Bot: LiteraryWorksMetaDataUploadBot - Task: Upload metadata for literary works from research project. (Approved)
- Other: Proposal to configure the Newcomer Dashboard for Wikidata
Events
- Upcoming events:
- Call for Sessions: Wikimania 2026 is Coming to Paris! The submission form will remain open until March 1. Results will be published in May.
- Who's hiding behind museum collections? - A Wikidata Edit-a-thon by WiNoDa Knowledge Lab (February 24th, 1:00pm-4:30pm CET). This online Edit-a-thon will focus on the many collectors that contributed to the Arachnida and Miryapoda collection of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. Join us to uncover the unspoken human networks that shaped the history of science! Register here: http://winoda.de/en/event/wikidata-edit-a-thon/
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: Strengthening the Latin American public domain with Wikidata
- Thesis: Hebeis, Maximilian (2026): Entity Matching for Person Records in Authority Files, Bamberg: Otto-Friedrich-Universität (Master thesis in computer science: "a case study into applying learningbased entity matching to person records from two large authority databases, namely the German national Integrated Authority File (GND) and the crowd-sourced open knowledge base Wikidata")
- Papers: Special Collection of the Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD): Wikidata across the humanities: datasets, methodologies, reuse, https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/collections/wikidata_across_the_humanities (new papers have been published during the last week; see a list at d:Q136325279#P527)
- Videos:
- Africa Wiki Women 1st Newbies Community Meetup - held an orientation for new members on editing Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Commons, to help bridge knowledge gaps of African women on Wiki platforms.
- Mapping Africa: Visualizing Knowledge and Communities - explores how African communities use maps and geospatial data to enhance Wikidata, improve Wikimedia articles, and make local knowledge more visible globally.
Tool of the week
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Wikimedia Deutschland Job vacancy - Architect of Storage Solutions - (freelance contract / 4-6 weeks)
- You can now nominate your favorite Wikidata research award for 2025. Call for Nominations now open until February 15, 2026.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest External identifiers: U.S. Copyright Office Public Records System name ID, Lenta.ru person ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- value type of this mathematical property (type of the value of this mathematical property when applied to this object or this type of objects)
- Gifu Prefectural Shrine Association ranking (One of the three rankings given by the Gifu Prefectural Shrine Association)
- instances must not have (instances of this class or of its subclasses must not have given property or statement)
- African Scientists Directory ID (identifier for a scientist in the African Scientists Directory)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Center for Jewish History person ID, LINCS ID, Artdoc.Media film ID, Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Architects 1800-1950 practice ID, Walloon-French dictionary ID, Russian Register of Film Distribution Certificates ID, Hentaigana for Academic Information Exchange ID, Identifiant inventaire Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek ID, Woordenboek van Nieuwe Woorden ID, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal ID, Woordcombinaties ID, Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands ID, Database of the Southern Dutch Dialects concept ID, GiveSendGo ID, CrowdRepublic project ID, European Dictionary Portal ID, Gravestone Project Cemetery ID, Uzbek-Russian dictionary ID, Ruwiki ID, Swedish National Archives ID, GDUNO ID, JMRC person id, Catalunya Romànica ID, Mercantile Navy List ID, Igromania author ID, Danmarks Kirker, Medvik ID, Obálky knih ID, National Theatre in Prague artist ID, National Theatre in Prague performance ID, Alpine Linux Wiki article, Microsoft Store developer ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples: Item with a Wikipedia page in lang. X but not Y (source) - modify the wd: QID and the schema:isPartOf for your own purposes.
- Newest WikiProjects:
- WikiProject Highlights: WikiProject every Politician / Canada - all Commons lists were updated.
- Newest database reports: Variety of reports for deletion candidates
Development
- Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects:
- We are making progress with identifying additional ways in which we can reduce the number of irrelevant changes from Wikidata showing up in recent changes and watchlist on Wikipedia and co.
- We are discussing with pilot Wikipedias about turning on showing Wikidata changes by default in watchlist and recent changes (moving it from opt-in to opt-out)
- GraphQL: We are putting the last touches on a GraphQL endpoint for Wikidata. We are planning to get it live later this month for feedback.
- LDF endpoint: We are planning to decommission the endpoint in preparation for the migration away from Blazegraph on the 18th of February (phab:T415696)
- Mobile statement editing:
- We are almost done with adding support for editing statements with quantity and monolingual text datatype and finished support for mathematical expression statements. We started support for editing coordinate statements.
- We are continuing the work on showing constraint violations.
- Wikibase Ecosystem: We are in the process of setting up a demo system for ontology federation (i.e. using Wikidata Items as values in statements on another Wikibase instance)
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:
- 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!
Tech News: 2026-06
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- The "Page information" feature, which gives validating information about a page (example), now automatically includes a table of contents. If there is a local MediaWiki:Pageinfo-header page created by individual users, it can now be removed. [17]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, VisualEditor previously added bold or italic formatting inside link descriptions, making the wikicode complex. This has now been fixed. [18]
Updates for technical contributors
- There was no XML dump on 20 January. Additionally, from now on, dumps will be generated once per month only. [19]
- The MediaWiki Interfaces team removed support for all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API. All API users currently calling those endpoints are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Weekly highlight
- Users are reminded that the Wikimedia Foundation has shared some guiding questions for the July 2026–June 2027 Annual Plan on Meta and Diff. These focus on global trends, faster and healthier experimentation, better support for newcomers, strengthening editors and advanced users, improving collaboration across projects, and growing and retaining readership. Feedback and ideas are welcome on the talk page.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 17:44, 2 February 2026 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 2
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Highlights
Let's Talk continues
- Annual planning: The Annual Plan is the Wikimedia Foundation’s description of what we hope to achieve in the coming year. This is a time of urgency and focus for the Wikimedia projects and we invite you to shape this plan together with us.
- Year 2 of PTAC: As it reached its first year, Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) shared a retrospective and proposed future improvements.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Account security: All users with registered accounts can now use passkeys for two-factor authentication (2FA), providing a simple and secure way to log in.
- Wikifunctions: An overview of the quarterly plan (January–March) and how it connects to the broader goals for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions.
- Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 03, 04 and 05 include unregistered contributors on blocked IPs can now interact on-wiki to appeal a block by creating a temporary account.
- Collaborative contributions: Wikimedia Foundation is hosting a learning session to share new releases around collaborative contributions and discuss future project ideas.
- Structured task: The Revise Tone Structured Task is now live in A/B testing on pilot wikis: English, Arabic, Portuguese, and French Wikipedia. It helps new editors improve promotional language in existing articles through a quiz style onboarding experience and a guided in article suggestion.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events
- Wikimania 2026: Call for sessions is open until March 1.
- Wikipedia 25: Wikipedia celebrates 25 years of knowledge at its best with docuseries, time capsule, and more.
- Virtual celebration: In case you missed it, over 10,000 people have watched the virtual celebration that brought together generations of Wikimedians, featured an ode to the talk page, a dramatic reading of a real talk page, a Magnetikpunk song dedicated to Wikipedia, a passing of the cake baton from Maryana to Bernadette, "The Birthday Cake Song" and more. All of it written and performed by humans of Wikimedia.
- Birthday mascot: Meet the Wikimedian whose casual sketch inspired Wikipedia’s 25th birthday mascot.
- Legal: Learn about two recent submissions advocating the need for proportionality in Brazil’s new online child safety law.
- Policy: The Global Advocacy team shared a report from digital policy organization InternetLab about the intersection between the open knowledge movement and public interest journalism.
- Global Resource Distribution Committee: Refreshed Funding Principles are ready for review.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan
- Solving puzzles together: A final reflection from Maryana Iskander.
- Wikimedia Enterprise: Mistral AI and Wikimedia Enterprise announced a new strategic partnership.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletin
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 02:06, 4 February 2026 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #718
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week leading up to 2026-02-09. Missed the previous one? See issue #717.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs: Numishare Blog: Improving searchability using Natural language Processing + Wikidata - How NLP-based search improvements for numismatic collections for the American Numismatic Society. Python NLP tools and Wikidata add a semantic layer that links equivalent terms (e.g. “serpent” and “snake”) to improve discovery across coin databases such as OCRE and MANTIS. Author: Ethan Gruber.
- Videos:
- Art+Feminism Conversations / Intro to Wikidata + Archives: Led by User:Epìdosis and User:Alan Ang (WMDE), this recording covers tools that support collaborative Wikidata editing, and includes with brief updates on mobile editing, Wikibase software, and work at the intersection of AI and Wikidata. Find more info and tools covered on Meta:Art+Feminism
- Custom Upload Funnel Creation on Wikimedia Commons: Wiki Loves Africa 2026 - User:Kambai Akau and the Tyap User Group demonstrate how to contribute to the Wiki Loves Africa 2026 contest, incl. how to add a Wikidata Infobox to your contributions, and how to create Wikidata Items if they are missing.
- (Papiamento) Add a different language Label to a Wikidata Item Wikipedia Above Aruba|Ep. 9 - it's not always obvious how to add labels, descriptions and aliases of different languages to Wikidata items, this short video demonstrates how.
- Hands-on Exercise: Data Cleaning & Preparation with OpenRefine - Daniel Garjio guides through exercises to cluster and merge duplicate values, standardise formats, reconcile data with external authority sources such as Wikidata.
- (Spanish) Mapeo colaborativo, plataformas libres y autonomía local, part of the Conference on Climate Justice, Indigenous Voices, and Wikimedia Platforms (2024) - speaker: Túllio Morais Franca shows how to integrate mapping tools suchas OpenStreetMap and Mapillary with Wikidata, Commons and Wikipedia.
Tool of the week
- Wiki Clarity Tool: Clarity Tool is a lightweight web application built to empower editors across Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons. It helps contributors identify missing information in articles and suggests structured data from Wikidata to fill those gaps.
- Name Suggestion Index : Submit a Brand - A tool that links Wikidata brand items to the Name Suggestion Index project on OpenStreetMap.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Mobile editors can now edit String and External ID datatypes directly in the mobile view. To help improve this new interface, Wikimedia Deutschland is looking for volunteers for UX testing sessions. Participants will be compensated for their time. Sign up here (greatquestion) and learn more on the project page: Mobile editing of statements
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes:
- braille transcription (transcription in Braille)
- location collected (geographic location where a specimen or sample was collected in the field)
- Newest External identifiers: Rappels theatrical production ID, Berlin School ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- Siège occupé ({{TranslateThis | fr = siège occupé par une personne au sein d'une académie ou autre société à ''numerus clausus'' }})
- Standard Number (A standard serial number)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: MusicaPopular.cl ID, JMRC person id (en), Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography ID, CAMEO page ID, TeamNL athlete ID (new), World Flora Online Plant List, radeberger-stadtgeschichte.de Objekt Identifikator, Master Ideographs Seeker Character ID, Flohic ID, Oricon News person ID, radiko person ID, Xcity actress ID, TV Drama Database Program ID, Van Dale Rijmwoordenboek sentences ID, Van Dale Rijmwoordenboek word ID, BISMaL taxon ID, Vlaams Woordenboek ID, Kotobank Japanese ID, Nişanyan Adlar ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Items with two or more Olympedia people ID (source) - find duplicate external identifier.
- Music roll releases with recordings of works performed by composer (source)
- Newest WikiProjects:
- Newest database reports: 'Template' items with only one sitelink - per Wikidata:Notability, "If a link is a template, the item must contain at least two such sitelinks..."
- Showcase Items: It Was Just an Accident (Q133866932) - a 2025 thriller film, winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival
- Showcase Lexemes:
Development
- Dumps: We published the report from our research into the user experience with Wikidata's dumps.
- Mobile editing: We are finalizing the support for quantity, monolingual text, mathematical expression and musical notation statements as well as a first version for coordinate statements.
- Wikidata integration in the Wikimedia projects: We have continued our investigation into existing Lua modules in order to find more ways in which we can reduce unwanted entries from Wikidata in Recent changes and watchlists on Wikipedia and co. We found a number of options that we are looking into now. (phab:T416822, phab:T416825, phab:T416826, phab:T416827)
- Wikidata Vector embedding: We added German to the embedding (next to English, French and Arabic)
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:
- 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!
Tech News: 2026-07
[edit]Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Logged-in contributors who manage large or complex watchlists can now organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows with the new Watchlist labels feature. By adding custom labels (for example: pages you created, pages being monitored for vandalism, or discussion pages) users can more quickly identify what needs attention, reduce cognitive load, and respond more efficiently. This improves watchlist usability, especially for highly active editors.- A new feature available on Special:Contributions shows temporary accounts that are likely operated by the same person, and so makes patrolling less time-consuming. Upon checking contributions of a temporary account, users with access to temporary account IP addresses can now see a view of contributions from the related temporary accounts. The feature looks up all the IPs associated with a given temporary account within the data retention period and shows all the contributions of all temporary accounts that have used these IPs. Learn more. [20]
- When editors preview a wikitext edit, the reminder box that they are only seeing a preview (which is shown at the top), now has a grey/neutral background instead of a yellow/warning background. This makes it easier to distinguish preview notes from actual warnings (for example, edit conflicts or problematic redirect targets), which will now be shown in separate warning or error boxes. [21]
- The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now properly supports more than one Wikibase site, for example both Wikidata and testwikidata. In addition, issues regarding text direction have been fixed for users who prefer Wikidata or other Wikibase sites in right-to-left (RTL) languages. [22][23]
- The automatic "magic links" for ISBN, RFC, and PMID numbers have been deprecated in wikitext since 2021 due to inflexibility and difficulties with localization. Several wikis have successfully replaced RFC and PMID magic links with equivalent external links, but a template was often required to replace the functionality of the ISBN magic link. There is now a new built-in parser function
{{#isbn}}available to replace the basic functionality of the ISBN magic link. This makes it easier for wikis who wish to migrate off of the deprecated magic link functionality to do so. [24] - Two new wikis have been created:
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- A new global user group has been created: Local bots. It will be used internally by the software to allow community bots to bypass rate limits that are applied to abusive web scrapers. Accounts that are approved as bots on at least one Wikimedia wiki will be automatically added to this group. It will not change what user permissions the bot has. [27]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Meetings and events
- The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Spring 2026 will be held March 25–27 in Salt Lake City, USA. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend. [28]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:30, 9 February 2026 (UTC)
This Month in GLAM: January 2026
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