User talk:Rich Farmbrough

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.

Events

• Upcoming events:
  • 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.
  • Wikidata Live Editing, 11 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.
• Ongoing: Coordinate Me 2026 - edit items with a P625 (coordinate location) from the focus countries and be in the running for a prize. Ends 31 May 2026.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs:
  • Building Wikimedia tools in Northern Nigeria: launch of Arewa TechCom through the Arewa Wikimedia Hackathon 2026
  • Editing wikibase.world (a MediaWiki site), with Jules (an AI agent) by Addshore.
  • 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
  • Tabakalera promotes open access to cultural knowledge by linking their medialab catalogue to Wikidata
  • The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics - report on Linked Pasts 11 - Epigraphic Data in Wikidata, from Ontology to Practice
  • Technical tinkering for CommonsDB at the WM Hackathon by Ainali.
  • Ezra Brand - Introducing a New Index of Biblical, Talmudic, and Medieval Jewish Figures - Wikidata helps index and categorise Jewish figures into distinct periods.
  • (Deutsch) ArtHist: New Art-Historical Resource on the Web and TIB Blog: Embossed story – the Meistersiegel-Wiki is online are both articles about the new Meistersiegel Wikibase instance.
• Papers: Volume 12,2 of Digital Classics Online contains many papers regarding the use Wikidata and Wikibase in the field of Classics:
  • Hypotheseis, a Database of Named Entities Surrounding Greek Rhetorical Exercises by Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo
  • Altinum: a Wikidata Project for Digital Epigraphy and Prosopography by Anna Clara Maniero Azzolini
  • The NIKAW Project: An Infrastructure of Texts, Entities and Language Models to Study the Circulation of Knowledge in the Ancient World by Margherita Fantoli
• Videos:
  • OpenDataDEx - Exploring Supreme Court Rulings in Wikidata, for The Knowledge Commons project. Try it out for yourself: Open Data Explorer
  • Wikidata: Introduction and Basics - an introductory session provided by WMUG Uganda.
  • (Arabic) Introduction to Wikidata hosted by Michel Bakhni for the channel: Wikimedia group for those interested in Islamic civilization
• Presentations:
  • (Deutsch) Wikidata in Museums, Archives and Libraries
  • White Paper (PDF) - Wikidata Days and Wikicite (2025) - Open bibliographic metadata in practice, what was learned in Bern and what libraries and the community can do next.

Tool of the week

• 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

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • ‎energy density (amount of energy extractable from a substance (e.g. in a combustion engine) per unit of volume or of mass)
  • ‎Parental Advisory System rating (content rating for coin-operated video games)
• Newest External identifierss: Cyprus company ID, ‎DBNL title ID, ShotOnWhat film ID, ‎Shinmei database ID, ‎ColBase ID, Lubimyczytać version/edition ID, Files of the Reich Chancellery ID, ‎Darwin Correspondence person ID, ‎Gidrologicheskaya Izuchennost Code, ‎Brew TV movie ID, National Archives of Japan Digital Archive ID, PlayStation Trophies trophy ID, Tax Identification Number (Spain), ‎19star actor ID
• 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)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: ID für Kulturdenkmale in Lübeck, Datenbank-ID für Kulturdenkmale in Lübeck, Prime Video URL ID, Prime Video GTI, Portable Antiquities Scheme record ID, Identifiant d'un(e) éditeurice dans le DEF19 2.0, Apple TV parson ID, CINEMATODAY film ID, Verfassungsblog author ID, Blätter author ID, EGAFD film ID, Museum of Canadian Music artist ID, Museum of Canadian Music work ID, BGAFD film ID, Movielens ID, Instrumentalistinnen-Lexikon ID, parliament.scot member ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Astronauts members of Space Missions
  • All Horses in Wikidata
• Newest WikiProjects:
  • Project Horse Racing : On topics relating to horse racing.
  • 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.
• WikiProject Highlights:
  • Project GovDirectory: How to use QuickStatements 3.0 to add data to GovDir
  • Ontology Course: Projects Offering 2 - Modelling Dictionary Usage Labels in Wikidata, Roots and Rhythms: Modelling music as cultural heritage.
• 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

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: public universities
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot:
  • PatsaBot 1 - Task/s: Add sitelink from Template:Taxonomy/* on thwiki to same entry from enwiki and update Thai description from generic template format to "แม่แบบอนุกรมวิธาน" (taxonomy template).
  • MarisDreshmanisBot 2 - Task/s: Create occupation Q-items and add native-language labels on existing occupation Q-items from 33 state-issued national occupation classifiers (165 national registries, 154 countries, ~30,000 new Q-items, ~120,000 native labels across 53 languages).
  • ias-kbase - Task/s: Read-only bulk entity lookups for an internal knowledge graph project. Fetches labels, claims, and sitelinks from Wikidata and intro-paragraph extracts from English Wikipedia. No writes.

Events

• Upcoming events:
  • Reminder: Propose a session for WikiProject Days 2026. Your proposal can be just one or two sentences. Suggestions include topics on how to use WikiProjects to connect with others and improve data modelling, how to revive a neglected WikiProject, and what makes a good WikiProject. Propose a session now. Deadline Sunday May 24.
  • Wikimedia Indonesia is hosting the 2026 Data Visualization Competition from 10th to 31st May 2026. We welcome visualization and essay submissions from Indonesian participants on various topics ranging from Indonesian history to biological diversity.
  • The three-hundred online Wikidata meetup in Swedish, May 24
  • Wikidata: An Open Knowledge Graph for Research and Beyond, a workshop on-site at the Digital Humanities Lab (C2003), University Hamburg, 27 May, 14:15 – 15:45 CEST. Registration (via link).

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs: Easy way to add images to Wikipedia & Wikidata items, with WikiShootMe and Mapillary
• Papers:
  • Wikidata and authority files: reconciliation and cooperation procedures by Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo: an overview of the interactions between Wikidata and library authority files and of the usage of Wikibase by library authority files up to July 2025
  • Institutional practices in gender recording: an analysis of National Libraries by Novaes de Mendonça, and Ana Carolina Simionato Arakaki: contains references to Wikidata and its interconnection with library authority files
  • Modellizzazione delle conoscenze: Thesaurus Nuovo soggettario e Wikidata, due strumenti a confronto by Elena Cencetti, Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo and Elisabetta Viti (in Italian): a detailed comparison of Wikidata and the Nuovo soggettario Thesaurus as knowledge organization systems, with a case study regarding the reconciliation with Wikidata of a group of terms of the Nuovo soggettario Thesaurus regarding photography
• Videos:
  • Curating shared knowledge about artifacts on Wikidata with Till Grallert, it explores how the Jarāʾid project used Wikidata to build a multilingual, open knowledge graph of pre-1930 Arabic periodicals.
  • LIVE Wikidata editing #122 with User:Ainali and User:Abbe98 do some live editing on Wikidata (in English), and discuss the thought process of what they are doing and why they do it.
  • Every Major Oil and Gas Pipeline in History Mapped - a visualisation utilising Wikidata, OpenStreetmap, Wikipedia and Global Energy Monitor.
• Presentations
  • La fabrique collective des histoires queer dans les communs numériques. Presentation by John Samuel and panel, 2e Rencontres du Reseau Jeune Recherche LGBTQI+, Université Lyon 1, 12 May 2026

Tool of the week

• Wikidata Property Explorer is a tool by user Steven Liu. The tool is used for exploring Wikidata properties
• securitybaseline use Wikidata to get the domain names for institutions

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• MapRoulette Challenge (Chile): Improve heritage-related items around Santiago, Chile, linking them to Wikidata and OpenStreetMap.
• The Wikidata Platform team has published its backend replacement recommendation and accompanying technical architecture for the migration of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) away from Blazegraph. Feedback is invited until May 25th 2026, especially on potential gaps and impacts on advanced use cases. Wikidata community members and WDQS users are also encouraged to help identify high-impact tools and workflows that may need attention on this page. Feedback can be shared on the Migration talk page or during the next office hour. See the WDP team newsletter for more details

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • contains cadastral area (cadastral area that is wholly or partly contained by a municipality)
  • algebraic closure (‎algebraic closure of the field)
  • real closure (real closure of the formally real field)
  • eusocial caste (specialized type of an eusocial animal)
  • Wikimedia Commons content descriptor (Wikimedia Commons content descriptor which applies to this media file)
  • ‎time expansion (factor by which a recording's duration has been extended or compressed relative to the original real-time event, without pitch correction.)
  • ‎SELL rating (French video game content rating (1999–2003))
  • age requirement documentation URL (URL for a website's statement of compliance with U.S. legal record-keeping requirements related to visual depictions of actual sexually explicit conduct)
  • maximum vehicle length (maximum authorized length for vehicles (especially heavy goods vehicles) on a bridge, tunnel or road segment)
  • maximum vehicle width (maximum authorized width for vehicles (especially heavy goods vehicles) on a bridge, tunnel or road segment)
  • maximum vehicle weight (maximum authorized weight (tonnage / gross vehicle weight) for vehicles (especially heavy goods vehicles) on a bridge, tunnel or road segment (load limit))
  • maximum vehicle height (maximum authorized height for vehicles (especially heavy goods vehicles) on a bridge, tunnel or road segment (regulatory limit from signage))
  • ‎independent of theory (theory that proves neither this proposition nor its negation)
  • ‎gender-neutral form of label (form of name or title with no assumption of gender)
  • subject named as (monolingual text) (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)
  • alternative name (monolingual text) (with an associated language code) qualifier for alternative name(s), given for a subject in a database entry, or preserved in references (even these are no longer the preferred name)
  • ‎CWSAC classification (Level of military significance for American Civil War battles as defined by the 1993 Civil War Sites Advisory Commission (CWSAC) report.)
  • DMCA takedown policy URL (DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown policy or submitting page of this hosting site or UGC (User Generated Content) distributor)
  • election result map (map that displays the result of this election)
  • ‎paid-up capital (portion of a company’s issued share capital that has been paid by shareholders)
• Newest External identifiers: ‎19star actor ID, ACM Digital Library institution ID, Stockholm public transport stop ID, Go2Senkyo.com politician ID, SensCritique person ID, Census of Italian Architecture since 1945, CINEFOX film ID, ‎CINEFOX person ID, Cultural heritage Database-ID in Lübeck, Dijital İstanbul cultural property ID, VG homicide ID, Portable Antiquities Scheme record ID, ‎EGAFD film ID, Cairn.info publisher ID, ‎BGAFD film ID, ‎Apple TV person ID, Blätter author ID, ‎critify.de publication ID, Semanticscience Integrated Ontology ID, Prime Video ID, Objectif plumes author ID, ‎Museum of Canadian Music artist ID, ‎Museum of Canadian Music work ID, Lübeck Culturul heritage ID, Rhineland-Palatinate Cultural heritage ID, DEF19 2.0 publisher ID, MovieLens movie ID, Verfassungsblog author ID, QueenBallers player ID, NaPTAN stop area code, CycleBase cyclist ID (new), ‎Book Notification author ID, ‎Prime Video GTI, ‎parliament.scot member ID, Instrumentalistinnen-Lexikon ID, Goodreads genre ID, ‎Giant Bomb Wiki ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to reviews:
  • contributed to narrative universe (''(no English description proposed yet)'')
  • Grokipedia page title (page title used in a Grokipedia article URL)
  • especially (qualifier for statements to refine a value that applies more generally, but applies especially to a more specific value; a more specific qualifier than "including" (P1012))
  • Common Vulnerability Scoring System score (Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score)
  • Depicts taxon (depicts taxon)
  • Still taken from the film (Still taken from the film)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: StaphBase ID, Geohashing wiki page, identifiant d'un fonds au catalogue collectif de France, Oireachtas bill ID, Defense Technical Information Center Accession Number, European System of Accounts ID (Germany), Identifiant d'un éditeur sur OpenEdition, Natalie ID, AV CHANNEL actress ID, Mineral Resources Data System deposit ID, Wikimedia Phabricator project, AWA artist ID, Rakuten Music artist, recochoku artist ID, identifiant AnnuSéries d'une série télévisée

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples: Library of Congress occupations by Label and Lccn no. (source)
• WikiProject Highlights:
  • Project Malaysia / Wiki x K-pop 2026 Datathon
  • Project Occupations / Roadmap
  • Project LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group / SummerCoworking
• Newest database reports: Children born after Mothers death date

Development

• Tighter connection of the Wikibase Ecosystem: We've been working on making it possible to use Wikidata Items (and later from other Wikibase instances) as values in statements on other Wikibase instances. You can now try it out on a demo system or set up your own test instance to give it a try. More details in the announcement.
• Wikidata integration in the Wikimedia projects: We are continuing the work on showing less irrelevant changes on recent changes and watchlist on Wikipedia and co by trying to determine if an edit from Wikidata actually changed the rendered article or not
• Mobile statement editing:
  • We worked on reducing the load for users with limited data
  • We are continuing to fix issues uncovered in testing
• Making Wikiprojects more visible: We are getting ready for testing of the prototype. We'll be adding links to the respective Wikirojects on Item pages in the tools menu to make it easier for people to find the corresponding Wikiprojects. This is based on statements already on the Item such as specific external IDs.

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!