• Discussions
  • Restrict merging rights to autoconfirmed users
  • Change "Nearby" link to list items nearby the item?
  • New request for comments: P31 or P279 for geo-objects

• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Upcoming: Wikifying Westminster: Wikidata workshop around UK political data, August 19th, London
  • Past: Wikimania, Wikimedia hackathon. A lot of things happened during these events, reports and news should be published in the next days.
  • Exploring the world with Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, by Mapbox
  • Enriching catalogue pages in Evergreen with Wikidata by Dan Scott
  • Why data partners should link their vocabulary to Wikidata: a new case study on Europeana blog

• Wikimania
  • You can try the demo system for lexicographical data
  • Talk: Structured Commons: what changes are coming? by Sandra Fauconnier
  • Talk: New Frontier: Using Wikidata on Commons by Jarekt
  • List of wishes during the "Wikidata pink pony session"
  • Talk: the (Wiki)data (R)evolution, by Lydia Pintscher
  • Talk: Wikidata and performing arts by Beat Estermann during Wikimania
  • Talk: How to use Wikidata in infoboxes (panel)
  • New template: A fully automated template system was presented: Oh!WTFs
  • Talk: WikiCite: Citations needed for the sum of all human knowledge
  • Notes about the Wikispecies & Wikidata session
  • Documents to organize a Wikidata translathon: level 1, level 2, level 3 (by Kvardek_du) and the translathon tool (by Envel)
  • Talk: Sum of all paintings is just the start, by Multichill

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Share your feedback on the draft strategic direction, a basis on which strategic plans will be built.
  • Wikidata reached d:Q36000000. The number of items has been increased by 20% in less than three months

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: YCBA agent ID, IEDB Epitope ID, Dagens Næringsliv topic ID, Georgian National Register of Monuments ID, CODECS ID, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum ID, magnification, AUR package, Michelin Voyages ID, Michelin Restaurants ID, WeRelate person ID, autores.ar id, MEG ID, Czech Registration ID, separator, National Forest Foundation ID
  • Query examples:
    • Most-depicted musical instruments (source)
    • People who died in 2017 without a French label (source)
    • Moar goats (source)
  • Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Goats, WikiProject Torture
  • Newest external tools: WD edits stats counting edits mades on a certain dataset between two dates

• Development

Most of the team was at Wikimania, talking to people, getting meaningful input from the editors, giving talks, hacking around :)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Suggested and open tasks!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • 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!

• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Upcoming: Open Source Ladies, meetup for women who want to start coding for Mediawiki and other open source projects, August 22nd, Berlin
  • Data Partnerships in Wikidata: Project Durchblick with Humboldt University by Jens Ohlig (in German)
  • What do Wikidata and Wikipedia have in common? An analysis of their use of external references by Alessandro Piscoppo et al.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • New documentation page: How to use Wikidata data on Wikimedia projects (feel free to help improving it)
  • The growth of items continues: we have Q37000000 and even Q37500000; Scientific article (Q13442814) becomes the most used Wikidata item (source)
  • More than 80K locations in Belgium added to Mix'n'Match

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: World Heritage Tentative List ID, eParks unit ID
  • Query examples:
    • Surnames, similar to Muller, according to Cologne phonetics, Caverphone and Soundex algorithms
    • Shortest streets in Moscow
    • A timeline of theologians with a connection to Berlin (source)
    • Timeline of the life of Honoré de Balzac (source)
    • Twin cities of places in South Africa (source)
    • 51st UK parliament (1992) was the first one with more women than Johns (source)
    • All places that are named "earth" in at least one language (source)
  • Newest WikiProjects: Parliaments

• Development
  • Working on making constraints work on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
  • Working on making it easier to see when input in property or value fields is not recognized/wrong (phabricator:T170531)
  • Added new language codes (eya, fuf, ood, pjt, yap, zun) for use in monolingual text values
  • Fixed an issue with badges not being shown next to interwiki links on Wikipedia and co (phabricator:T172592)
  • Worked on showing labels when linking to a redirect (phabricator:T96553)
  • Worked on making change dispatching to Wikipedia and co work better so changes made on Wikidata show up there in a reasonable time. There were issues because of significantly increased edit activity on Wikidata.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Suggested and open tasks!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • 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
  • Open request for adminship: علاء
  • New request for comments: How to capture negative results in Wikidata?
  • Comment about approach on items about pages in cebwiki created by Lsjbot
  • Comment about whether to have a "Wikimedia username" property

• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Upcoming: WikiArabia, in Cairo, Egypt, on 23-25 October. They're looking for a volunteer to give a Wikidata workshop. Please contact them if you're interested!
  • A Glimpse into Babel: An Analysis of Multilinguality in Wikidata, by Lucie-Aimée Kaffee et al. (Q37859976)
  • The Gene Wiki: Using Wikipedia and Wikidata to organize biomedical knowledge August Wikimedia Research Showcase (second half), presented by Andrew Su, about how GeneWiki is using Wikidata. Video on YouTube
  • Citation.js: Endpoint on RunKit shows a demo REST API to convert Wikidata entries into BibTeX, Bib.TXT, citations, and CSL-JSON.
  • Video of 3 Wikimania 2017 sessions: Wikidata Revolution, Performing arts in Wikidata, and Sum of all paintings. Others videos can be found on Andrew's channel.

• WikidataCon
  • The organization team is still looking for sponsors to support the event and provide even more awesome stuff to the attendees. If your company can support the WikidataCon, please get in touch with Lydia.
  • Seeing the enthusiasm of the community for the WikidataCon, we raised our attendees limit from 150 to 200 persons. The last tickets will be released on September 1st. People who registered on the waitlist will be notified when a ticket is available.
  • The program committee is currently reviewing and organizing the submissions. We will contact the speakers soon, and publish the program in the beginning of September (around 6th).
  • We're looking for a keynote speaker who could bring an external point of view on ontologies. If you know interesting people, feel free to help

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Q38000000 was created
  • Language fallback indicators hidden on variant fallback languages

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: National Natural Landmarks site ID, GujLit Book ID, GujLit Person ID, tabular population, Beazley Archive Pottery Database ID, Finnish National Gallery person ID, effective firing range, Patreon person ID, Wikimedia username, Instagram location ID, America's Byways road ID
  • Query examples:
    • number of persons per QID (using P735=Q4925477) (source)
    • QID milestones by date
    • Timeline for biochemist and Nobel Laureate Hans Adolf Krebs (source)
    • Canadian actors who twice played a US president (source)
    • Duration of Steven Spielberg's films (source)
  • Newest external tools: Metaphacts, a feature to search in Wikidata via Alexa

• Development
  • Worked on fixing the technical glitch in the UI (phabricator:T173543)
  • Did polishing on the Constraint Checks gadget (for example phabricator:T173738)
  • Worked on caching constraints checks results which is needed to enable constraints checks for all logged-in users (phabricator:T173696)
  • Made progress on checking constraints also on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
  • Worked more on making it easier to see when input in a property or value input field is not recognized (phabricator:T170531)
  • Fighting with load issues in the job queue (phabricator:T173710)
  • Looking into not showing language fallback hints for dialects to make the UI less cluttered for them and make it less necessary to enter labels and descriptions for them (phabricator:T174318)
  • Wrapping up our experiments with the new front-end technologies

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Suggested and open tasks!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • 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!

• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Upcoming: Wikidata workshop in Chandigarh, India - September 9-10
  • Doctoral Advisor or Medical Condition: Towards Entity-specific Rankings of Knowledge Base Properties, by Simon Razniewski et al.
  • ctj rdf: Part One, showing linking text minded data to Wikidata with SPARQL.
  • Creating parliament charts with Wikidata by Knut
  • The great Wikipedia bot-pocalypse by Aaron Halfaker on WMF's blog
  • When Westminster Was Wikified, by Luca Martinelli

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • New admin: congrats to علاء
  • Open Library, the biggest resource of freely-licensed books, now links to Wikidata (through Reasonator) and to VIAF (example here; see "Wikidata" in the right-hand column).
  • With 200 attendees, the WikidataCon is now complete. Thanks all for your enthusiasm \o/ If you registered on the waitlist or submitted a talk, check your mailbox for more information.
  • The WikidataCon program will be released this week, and we will call for volunteers soon

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: THL Simplified Phonetic Transcription, Tibetan pinyin, Wylie transliteration, Australian Women's Register ID, iconographic symbol, slope, angle from vertical
  • Query examples:
    • The most famous painting from each country (source)
    • Ranking universities according to PageRank (source)
    • Actors who were casted in two different films with the same name (source)
  • Newest external tool: official map for Wiki Loves Monuments 2017 displays cultural heritage monuments worldwide, using Wikidata
  • Newest database reports: Mireille Darc filmography, given names by soundex

• Development
  • Looked into all the things necessary to make it possible to store forms and senses on Lexeme pages.
  • Worked more on caching constraints checks results which is needed to enable constraints checks for all logged-in users (phabricator:T173696)
  • Making progress on checking constraints also on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
  • Removed language fallback hints for dialects to make the UI less cluttered for them and make it less necessary to enter labels and descriptions for them (phabricator:T174318)
  • Fixed an issue that links to an item were not showing the label when it pointed to a redirect (phabricator:T96553)
  • Unrecognized input in entity selectors will be highlighted in red (phabricator:T170531)
  • Added language code fr-ca for monolingual text input (phabricator:T151186)
  • Added an additional normalization for page titles when linking pages on Wiktionary via Cognate (phabricator:T172987)
  • The API will not only output the hashes for qualifier snaks, but also for main snaks as well as references snaks (phabricator:T174692). Note that hashes (other than IDs) are not meant to be stable identifiers, and should not be stored for a longer time.
    • Snak hashes will also appear as part of CSS classes in entity pages (phabricator:T171725)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Suggested and open tasks!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • 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!

• Events/Press/Blogs
  • RDFIO: extending Semantic MediaWiki for interoperable biomedical data management - Paper demonstrating interoperatility between WikiData and Semantic MediaWiki, among other things.
  • Données structurées, la puissance de Wikidata au service de Wikimedia Commons - French-language article by Rama about Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons.
  • Europeana is interested in linking its new Entity Collection to Wikidata, and will talk about this at the WikidataCon.
  • Upcoming (21.9.2017): "Wikidata as a linking hub for knowledge organization systems? Integrating an authority mapping into Wikidata and learning lessons for KOS mapping". Presentation by Joachim Neubert at the 17th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop, TPDL 2017 Conference, Thessaloniki (Greece)
  • Upcoming: Wikidata Zurich, one day dedicated to Wikidata and the Query Service in Zurich, Switzerland, September 14th
  • Upcoming: Monthly Wikidata meetup in Paris, France, September 15th
  • Upcoming: Wikidata workshop in Kolkata, India, September 16th and 17th
  • Past: Wikidata workshop in Chandigarh, India

• WikidataCon
  • The program of the WikidataCon is now published on-wiki. You will find there a lot of different formats, topics and speakers, during the two days of the conference.
  • The official visuals have also be released! Check out the conference logo and the volunteers visual, both designed by Bleeptrack under CC-BY-SA.
  • The event is now complete, no more tickets available. The last tickets have been attributed to the first persons who registered on the waitlist. If some more seats get free because another attendee cancels participation, the next person on the waitlist will be informed.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Q39000000 was created
  • Wikidata passed 7 average statements per item
  • The ArticlePlaceholder is now deployed on Albanian Wikipedia

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: danskfilmogtv title ID, Billboard artist ID, Italian National Earthquake Center ID, Flemish organization for Immovable Heritage person ID, Foursquare username, The Times of India Topic ID, ROARMAP ID, WFD Chemical status, PagesJaunes ID, Christie's creator id, Google Play Music album ID, Google Play Music artist ID, Graphic character set global ID, cytogenetic location, category for employees of the organization, CNPS taxon ID, Familypedia person ID, LNH player ID, Alljudo athlete ID, Rivers.gov river ID
  • Query examples:
    • Places of education of the UK members of Parliament (source)
    • Pairs of churches in the UK that are within 25 metres of each other (source)
    • National parks in India (source)
    • Persons buried more than 13000 km away from their death place (warning: some errors needing correction)
  • Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject India
  • Newest user scripts: Overpass (adds a map showing features tagged, in OpenStreetMap, with the ID of the current Wikidata item, if any)

• Development
  • The new Echo notification is now deployed on all wikis
  • Looked into further possible improvements for change dispatching
  • Worked on persistently storing edits in more parts of a Lexeme
  • Worked on getting expanded URIs for identifiers into the RDF exports (phabricator:T121274)
  • Continued work on caching constraints results so we can roll it out for more users (phabricator:T173696)
  • Fixing a bug that highlights input in value fields as not recognized when it shouldn't be (phabricator:T175525)
  • Released version 2.1.0 of the Serialization JavaScript component (phabricator:T174011)
  • Released version 2.0.0 of the DataValues base component (phabricator:T168681)
  • Released version 0.9.0 of the DataValues JavaScript component (phabricator:T172916)
  • Released version 0.8.6 of the DataValues Time component (phabricator:T151088)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Suggested and open tasks!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • 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!

• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Upcoming: Wikidata Wahldaten Workshop 2017 – 30 September 2017 in Vienna, Austria
  • Upcoming: Wikimedia Research Showcase
  • Past: Wikidata workshop in Zurich (the slides of the speakers are linked on the page)
  • Past: GLAMhack Wikidata workshop in Lausanne (see the slides of the Query Service introduction)
  • Past: Wikidata workshop in Kolkata, India
  • Bridging real and fictional worlds in Wikidata, by Martin Poulter
  • Weekend at the Museum (of Brittany), by Envel Le Hir
  • Wiki Loves Monuments und Wikidata, by SW
  • The French Connection at the Wikimania 2017 Hackathon, by Envel Le Hir

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata ontology explorer: creates a tree of a class or property, shows common properties and statements
  • Join the mysterious group of Wikidata:Flashmob who improve labels, or summon them on an item
  • A breaking change to the wbcheckconstraints API output format was announced
  • Q40000000 was created
  • Improvements coming soon to Recent Changes
  • Several new catalogs in Mix'n'Match incl. Encyclopædia Britannica, National Gallery artists and ArtCyclopedia

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: United Nations Treaty Series Registration Number, Sefaria ID, ICD-10-CM, Encyclopedia of Australian Science ID, Indonesian Small Islands Directory ID, Cyworld ID, IPA Braille, category contains, Enciclopedia Italiana ID, United Nations Treaty Series Volume Number, National Criminal Justice ID, order of battle, Tyrolean Art Cadastre inventory ID, shelf life, UK Electoral Commission ID, LNB Pro A player ID, nLab ID, highest observed lifespan, Unicode hex codepoint, PACTOLS thesaurus ID, Bashkir encyclopedia (Russian version) ID, Bashkir encyclopedia (Bashkir version) ID
  • Query examples:
    • Algorithms and the problems they solve (source)
    • Swiss items with article in exactly one of German-, French-, Italian-, and Romansh-language Wikipedias (source)
    • Popular gender-neutral given names (source)
    • Computer network protocols and their ports (source)
    • Software developers by number of software titles (source)
    • Spacecraft and what they were named after (source)
  • Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject property constraints

• Development
  • Worked more on the constraints gadget in order to make it also qork for references and qualifiers
  • Made progress on persistently storing edits for the new Lexeme entity type (next to items and properties)
  • Worked on the RDF mapping for full URIs of external identifiers (phabricator:T121274)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Suggested and open tasks!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • 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!

• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Past: Wikimedia Research Showcase - A Glimpse into Babel: An Analysis of Multilinguality in Wikidata
  • Upcoming: Wikidata Workshop about the Austrian election data, September 30th, Vienna
  • Upcoming: The next IRC office hour will take place on November 14th, 19:00 (Berlin time, UTC+2) on the channel #wikimedia-office
  • Weekend at the Museum (of Brittany)

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata's 5th birthday is about 1 month away. Time to think about birthday presents? ;-)
  • Siri shows more information based on Wikidata in iOS 11
  • 2 funding proposals are looking for comments and support: soweego and CrossWikiFact
  • Quick graph of the relation of the number of labels in a given language on Wikidata and the number of first language speakers of that language

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: candidate number, maximal rate of climb, refine date, regular expression syntax, vocalized name, webcam page URL, Heritage Building in Finland ID, PatientLikeMe symptom ID, PatientLikeMe treatment ID, PatientLikeMe condition ID, Figshare author ID
  • Query examples: standards bodies by number of standards they are connected to (source)

• Development
  • Rolled out more fine-grained usage tracking on Greek Wikipedia. This will lead to less irrelevant changes showing up in watchlist and recent changes on those projects. We're testing this on Greek Wikipedia to see if the solution we have scales before rolling it out further. (phabricator:T151717)
  • Adding an API module to copy a statement from one item to another (phabricator:T55619)
  • Working more on checking constraints also on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
  • Added support for the Creator namespace to the constraints check for Commons links (phabricator:T176062)
  • Fixed an error message on Special:GoToLinkedPage (phabricator:T176327)
  • Finishing touches on including full URIs for external IDs in the RDF export (phabricator:T121274)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Suggested and open tasks!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • 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!

• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Using Wikidata data, fixing wrong Wikipedia and Wikidata tags, by Mateusz Konieczny
  • One Knowledge Graph to Rule Them All? Analyzing the Differences Between DBpedia, YAGO, Wikidata & co
  • Modeling the Domain of Digital Preservation in Wikidata
  • Wikidata as a linking hub for knowledge organization systems? Integrating an authority mapping into Wikidata and learning lessons for KOS mappings (Paper and presentation), by Joachim Neubert, NKOS Workshop 2017 at TPDL
  • Knowledge exploration in public linked data ontologies

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The ArticlePlaceholder has been enabled on Bengali Wikipedia (example)
  • There is a new page with information around Wikidata:Wikidata in Wikimedia projects. You can help expand and improve it.
  • New Wikidata Game to help you evaluate merge candidates based on projectmerge.
  • A reading tip from Spinster (not mentioning Wikidata, but interesting general background knowledge): Indigenous peoples and responsible data: an introductory reading list from responsibledata.io
  • Where's Wally (aka Waldo)? Right here on Wikidata, of course!
  • Wikidata passed 8 average statements per item
  • Statement 300.000.000 was created
  • 20 million edits were done in September 2017

• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: TSE number, defined daily dose, Vincoli in Rete ID, The Black Book ID, Tagesschau election ID, LfD-HB object ID, cultural heritage monument in Serbia ID, Bavarian monument authority ID
  • Query examples: What exists in the "... as a service" genre? (source)

• Development
  • Added a css class to values that link to redirects so they can more easily be identified by editors who want that for maintenance work (phabricator:T70567) Thanks Matej!
  • Continued work on persistent editing of forms as part of the work to support lexicographical data (phabricator:T173742, phabricator:T173744)
  • Finishing touches on adding full URIs for external identifiers to our RDF export so we're good citizens of the semantic web (phabricator:T121274)
  • Added a new mw.wikibase.getAllStatements Lua function in addition to the existing getBestStatements, that returns all statements regardless of their rank (phabricator:T176124)
  • Looking into an issue where unwanted email notifications are being sent (phabricator:T174794)
  • Released version 2.1.1 of the base DataValues component

• Monthly Tasks
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
  • Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
  • Suggested and open tasks!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item.
  • 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!