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Wikidata weekly summary #729
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2026-04-27. Missed the previous one? See issue #728.
Discussions
Closed request for adminship: Yamato Shiya - Congratulations to our newest Admin!
New requests for permissions/Bot: Chamiln17@FineWiki - Task/s: Read-only Wikidata entity cache build for an academic temporal language model dataset.
Events
Upcoming events: Next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session — 28 April 2026 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST. This session covers QuickStatements 3.0, the updated batch-editing tool for Wikidata, redeveloped by Wikimedia Brasil with support from Wikimedia Deutschland, featuring a modern interface and improved performance. Watch the previous session recording: on youtube. More details: QuickStatements3
The Human History Atlas (WikiTime), a browser-based atlas that uses Wikidata and Wikipedia-sourced data to construct timelines and allows exploration of significant historical events.
Wikilympians, a real-time list of all 153,412 known Olympic competitors with Wikidata and Wikipedia coverage statistics
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikibase Suite 7.0 and Wikibase Suite Deploy 7.0.0 have been launched! It brings Wikibase closer to feature parity with Wikidata. Here's what's in the latest release:
Temporary Accounts: The support for temporary accounts without IP address exposure has been added. It will, however, remain disabled by default, in line with Wikibase Cloud.
SELL rating (classification in the Syndicat des éditeurs de logiciels de loisirs rating system)
time expansion (factor by which a recording's duration has been extended or compressed relative to the original real-time event, without pitch correction; values greater than 1 indicate time expansion (e.g. 10 = ten times longer than real life, pitch lowered tenfold); values less than 1 indicate time compression (e.g. 0.1 = ten times shorter, pitch raised tenfold); 1 = real-time)
Newest database reports: Without Claims by Site - this report will list how many Wikidata Items have 0 Statements, with a linked Wiki Article/page. Click reports/all items for a per wiki list, and consider expanding.
Showcase Lexemes: transfer (L29733) - English noun/verb (ˈtræns.fɜːr) meaning "to move from one place to another", "a sports team member moving to another team", or "a ticket allowing continuation of a journey"
Development
Query Service: It is now possible to download query results in Wikidata Query Service that include coordinates as KML & GPX (GeoJSON has been available since last year). Text from the first column in the results is used as the value for naming POIs. Thanks again to Atom.oil.2 for the patch. (phab:T414376)
The Wikidata team continued working on a prototype to make WikiProjects more visible (phab:T420907) and made the new Wikidata mobile UI use auto-resizing text areas instead of single-line text inputs, in order to make longer values easier to edit (phab:T414420)
The Wikidata Integrations team now has a working prototype of LilDiffCheck, injecting wikidata changes into recent changes only if there was a change on the wikipedia html (phab:T421390)
Language fallback will be available this week on the labels of linked entities functionality in GraphQL (phab:T413655)
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
There is a change in how new users are autoconfirmed that will improve anti-vandalism protection. Currently, users who have had an account for a few days and made a few edits are automatically added to the Autoconfirmed users group. This configuration tends to be exploited by some vandals, who create accounts and start to use them only after some time. To mitigate this, the configuration will be updated next week so that – for the purpose of becoming autoconfirmed – the account age will be counted from their first edit, instead of registration date. The numeric value of the age threshold will remain the same. This change will be deployed only to wikis which require at least one edit as part of the autoconfirmation conditions.
All Wikipedia users with new accounts and those who activated the "automatically enable most beta features" option in their preference can now use the reading lists beta feature to save articles for later reading. This helps organize reading interests in one place for convenient access.
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where infobox images have huge padding in Firefox, has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
As a reminder, the global API rate limits will be applied this week to identified API traffic. This is to help ensure fair use of infrastructure. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, including the actual rate limits, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits and Frequently Asked Questions.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2026-05-04. Missed the previous one? See issue #729.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: Chamiln17@FineWiki - Task: This bot performs a read-only cache build for an academic temporal language model dataset.
WikiProjects Days 2026 (online, June 19 to 21). A community gathering focused on making WikiProjects more useful, visible, and alive. Propose a session (deadline for proposals: May 26, 2026) or register now.
LIC Photo Walking Tour + Wikipedia & Wikidata Workshop - May 16, 12:30 - 16:00 EDT (UTC-4). A historical walking tour of Long Island City, New York, concluding with a Wiki-skills workshop at LaGuardia. Registration on the event link.
Ongoing: COORDINATE ME 2026 - a Wikidata competition for geolocatable content has just started and ends 31 May 2026. Visit the link for details on how to participate.
Panel on Wikidata and public domain in Colombia (Spanish): on April 24th, the National Library of Colombia, The Cultural Network of the Bank of the Republic of Colombia, Wikimedia Colombia and Fundación Conector discussed about digital heritage and Wikidata, its challenges and opportunities for collaboration.
Mentor Me! Session 3A - This in-person and hands-on session is provided by the Wikimedia Tyap User Group, and continues in the following sessions: Mentor Me! Session 3B and Mentor Me! Session 3C. Led by Gwakhap D. Anthony, it will cover how to document languages with Wikidata lexemes.
EditHer Africa Contest (April) - a beginner-friendly hands-on Wikidata item creation guide and launch of the monthly contest, with a focus on African Women in Works and Leadership.
Tool of the week
OpenHistory – interactive historical atlas of 21k+ Wikidata-sourced historical events, polities, and territories on a timeline+map. SPARQL-driven pipeline, MIT/CC BY-SA. (GitHub)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
WikiTrivia - the webgame about putting historical events in the correct order recently got a huge update, thanks to creator Tom Watson.
Wikimedia API's / Rate limits - new rate limits are being added for all Wikimedia projects, to ensure sustainable use to the REST an ACTION API's. If you operate a bot and it has recently started producing an error message for producing too many API requests, please consult the linked MediaWiki page and amend your bot as needed.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
(found) liable of (tort or civil wrong a person or organization was found liable of)
DMCA takedown policy URL (DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown policy or submitting page of this hosting site or UGC (User Generated Content) distributor)
monolingual text name properties ((with an associated language code) name by which a subject is recorded in a database, mentioned as a contributor of a work, or is referred to in a particular context)
WikiProject Highlights: WikiProject Ontology has gathered a list of potential projects for the second offering of the Wikidata Ontology course, and has published a subpage to discuss the future of Ontology Classes and Properties.
Newest database reports: Unmarked Supercentenarians - this list displays humans who do not have a claim supercentenarian (Q1200828) (or alleged supercentenarian (Q106991708)), but the difference between their Date of Birth and Date of Death is greater than 110 years.
Showcase Lexemes: gje (L2205) - Norwegian verb (jeː) meaning "to give", "to perform/hold", or "to diminish in strength"
Development
Mobile statement editing: We continued fixing issues uncovered in testing
WikiProjects: We are working on adding links to the sidebar of Items to lead people to the respective WikiProjects for that Item. This way we hope to help people more easily find data modelling documentation as well as other editors interested in the same topic.
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 Article guidance team invites experienced editors of pilot Wikipedias—Arabic, Bangla, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, Turkish, Simple English, Spanish, and French—to help translate and adapt sample outlines. These outlines will guide editors in creating clear, well-structured, and policy-compliant articles when using the feature once it is launched in May 2026. Simple instructions on how to translate and adapt the outlines are available.
The number of available thumbnail size preferences in MediaWiki is being reduced to three standardized options—Small (180px), Regular (250px), and Large (400px), as part of ongoing efforts to improve performance and reduce strain on thumbnail services. As a result, existing preferences will be mapped to the nearest new size (for example, smaller selections like 120px or 150px will render at 180px, while larger ones like 300px or 360px will render at 400px). The preferences interface will soon be updated to reflect these changes, and users who wish to opt out or provide feedback can do so.
From now on, even when a permission expires automatically, users will receive an Echo notification similar to the standard notification for permission changes. There is a difference between this and Global reminder bot in that the latter reminds users a week before the rights are due to expire, so that they can renew the rights.
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the problem where the ULS language selector in Special:Translate would scroll vertically when it shouldn't, has been resolved. Previously, when users opened the "Translate to English" dropdown and typed certain inputs, the dialog would scroll vertically by a few pixels even when there was enough space to display all results. The dropdown no longer shifts unnecessarily when filtering languages.
The Global Watchlist, which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page, continues to improve. For example, watchlists for Wikibase sites such as Wikidata now support EntitySchema elements for better tracking. The Live Updates mode now refreshes the special page every 60 seconds to comply with the updated global API rate limits for improved real-time responsiveness. Additionally, a directionality bug that displayed links as "changes 3" instead of "3 changes" in mixed-direction lists has been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The second phase of global API rate limits has been rolled out to reduce the impact of AI crawlers and ensure fair, sustainable access to Wikimedia resources, prioritising human and mission-aligned traffic. Limits have been shifted from per-hour to per-minute, producing smoother traffic patterns and more predictable API load. Community users are not expected to be affected, and no action is required. Early indications show some User-Agent-based requestors are adjusting behaviour, and around 64% of automated API traffic has been identified. Monitoring continues, and Wikimedia Enterprise remains available for commercial support.
Announcing the Winners of Picture of the Year 2025!
Hi everyone,
Wikimedia Commons is pleased to finally announce the winners of this year's Picture of the Year 2025 contest! We had some truly incredible finalists to choose from, but the community has spoken.
Here are your top three winning images:
First place: The aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on October 9, 2023, leaving widespread destruction in the Rimal area. Attribution: WAFA (Q2915969) / CC-BY-SA 3.0
Second place: Baby cape fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus) sleeping at Cape cross, Namibia. Attribution: Giles Laurent / CC-BY-SA 4.0
Third place: A gigantic jet photographed from the International Space Station by astronaut Nichole Ayers. Attribution: public domain
You can view the full results and see where all your favorite images placed here: Full 2025 Results
I also want to highlight what an incredible turnout we had. In the second round, we saw a massive jump in both the number of users voting and the total votes cast. We had exactly 13,979 votes cast by 3,509 users! To put that in perspective, last year we had 7,403 votes from 2,837 users. It is amazing to see that level of growth and community engagement.
Thank you to everyone who voted, helped organize, and generally made the contest such a huge success this year!
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2026-05-11. Missed the previous one? See issue #730.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: AAU Research NLP Bot 1 - Task(s): Querying Wikidata for entities and relations and paths between them. From 1-hop until 3-hops.
Closed request for permissions/Bot: MarisDreshmanisBot (formerly ReNeuralAgent Bot) has been approved after a community intervention, see the discussion here.
WikiProjects Days 2026 will take place between 19 - 21 June. WikiProjects are crucial to improving data quality and onboarding newcomers to specific areas of Wikidata. This event is the place for all editors to discover WikiProjects, find ones to join, learn about their modelling practices and how to improve the content and tools of your favourite WikiProjects. Register here to get any news or updates about this new Wikidata X Days event. The Call for Proposals is open! If you have an idea for a session, please submit it here by 26 May.
AI Bridges Symposium is taking place at Senate House, University of London across 28 and 29 May. (Free) Registration for this on-site event closes 21 May. The event will begin with introductions to Wikidata, Wikibase, connecting AI with Wikidata and follow on day 2 bringing the full ecosystem together for dialogue, debate, and collaborative action.
Libraries as AI Infrastructure: The African Edition - reflections on overlooked African contributions to linked data and AI infrastructure, highlighting Wikibase-powered projects African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA) and Nigeria’s Semantic Name Authority Recognition (SNAR). By Stuart Michael Edelenbos
Open Data DEx Explorer - "an interactive graph visualizer of semantic Open Data. Relationships are discovered heuristically and a graph structure created in real time, allowing navigation and insight into raw data without building formal ontologies."Read more on The Knowledge Commons blog, by Michelle Tomlyn.
GapMap.Wiki - explore knowledge gaps between different language Wikipedia's. GapMap identifies Wikipedia articles that exist in many languages but missing from the target, helping editors prioritize which articles to translate or create. No AI is used, just comparing publicly available databases.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Mobile editors can now edit all datatypes directly in the mobile view. To help improve this new interface, Wikimedia Deutschland is looking for volunteers (especially editors from Right-to-left languages) 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
New General datatypes property proposals to review: concentration camp prisoner number (registration or prisoner number assigned to a person in camps operated under Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1945)
Project William & May Law School EMCO - to create and enhance entities for persons and corporate bodies related to the law school, for use in the library's metadata and archival work.
Showcase Items: Catch Me If You Can - a 2002 film by Steven Spielberg starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks. A dramatic re-telling of the life and exploits of serial confidence man Frank Abegnale Jr., ironically the events of the film were later found to be mostly fabricated.
Development
Mobile statement editing: We are continuing to improve the UX and fix issues uncovered in testing
Making WikiProjects more visible: We are working on adding links to the sidebar menu of Items to make it easier for people to find the WikiProject(s) associated with an Item, find like-minded people and learn about data modelling conventions etc in that particular area
Query Service: The service is being hit quite heavily and the Wikidata Platform team is working on blocking scrapers and misbehaving tools
Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are continuing our experiment to further reduce the amount of Wikidata changes that show up on Recent changes and Watchlist but don't actually change the article. Specifically we are looking at checking if there is any difference in the rendered article before and after the change coming from Wikidata
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
Community Tech has published new guidance explaining how wishes on Community Wishlist are triaged and prioritized. The documentation is intended to help contributors write stronger proposals by clarifying the factors that influence prioritization decisions. Beyond vote counts, the guidance highlights considerations such as potential impact on the community when determining which wishes move forward.
Updates for editors
The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment to test a new Share Card feature that allows readers to create visually engaging cards from Wikipedia articles or selected article sections and share them online, with each card linking back to the original article to help expand readership and article discovery. The mobile-only A/B test will be available to a portion of readers on Arabic, Chinese, French, Vietnamese, and English Wikipedia to better understand reading and sharing habits, and is scheduled to begin the week of May 18 and run for four weeks.
The Android and iOS Wikipedia apps recently released the 25-day reading challenge into Beta, as part of efforts to drive reader engagement by encouraging users to complete reading milestones. To track their reading streak during the challenge, App users can add a widget featuring Baby Globe to their home screen. The challenge officially begins May 11.
View all 17 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the global preference for enabling syntax highlighting in wikitext could unexpectedly disable itself after being turned on, has now been fixed.
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where infobox images have huge padding in Firefox, has been fixed. 
The ResourceLoader module