Welcome to the 4th instalment of my Wikidata & Wikibase Tech lead Digest for August 2021. For previous instalments see Tech Lead Digest – Q1 2021, Tech Lead Digest – Q2 2021, Tech Lead Digest – July 2021.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑Wikidata & Wikibase

The Wikidata Query Builder has been deployed at has been deployed. The Wikidata Query Builder provides a visual interface for building a simple Wikidata query. It is ideal for users with little or no experience in SPARQL.

The Wikibase fall release, which will be compatible with MediaWiki 1.36 will be made in the next month or so. At some point in the next 3-6 months we will likely also make a Wikibase 1.37 release. Keep an eye out on the mailing list for these.

Work is about to wrap up on the next iteration of Wikibase Federated Properties which will enable the use of properties from multiple sources at once, such as Wikidata and also the local Wikibase.

Work continues on the Wikidata Mismatch Finder. You can read more about this future tool on wikidata.org.

The campsite worked on many other things. Most notably Ladsgroup spotted that SpamBlacklist was rendering content on Wikidata twice (phabricator). This fix resulted in a rather significant improvement in save times for Wikidata, and users of Wikibase and SpamBlacklist in combination.

Other things included:

  • Quality Constraint checks that involve a regex and run on wikidata.org now have their own dedicated regex evaluation service, rather than using SPARQL. (phabricator)
  • Quality Constraint checks now also run after every single edit on Wikidata (phabricator)
  • Edits on Wikidata from the various frontends now get separately tagged. (phabricator) See data-bridge, client-linkitem-change, client-automatic-update, wikidata-ui, termbox for example.
  • Moving of various DataModel libraries into Wikibase.git for development. These will still be released as separate packages. (phabricator)
  • Some new abstractions were created within Wikibase to make repo and client database connections simpler.
  • The cost of full RDF output via Special:EntityData was reduced by reducing the number of languages returned. This should avoid timeouts for RDF output of larger entities.
  • Lots of clean-up of old configuration withing Wikibase, moving toward entity sources.

Want a super high level overview of of Wikidata?

Overall Context

This diagram comes from the new and in progress architecture documentation for Wikibase. This, including diagrams, will replace the older diagrams used in posts such as Wikidata Architecture Overview (diagrams).

🌎Wider Wikimedia

🔗Links & Reading