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The Signpost: 17 February 2026
[edit]- In the media: Global powers see Wikipedia as fundamental target for manipulation
Attempted Wikipedia shenanigans apparent from Epstein, AI, various governments.
- News and notes: Discussions open for the next WMF Annual Plan
Plus, WikiFlix going places, steady progress on older FAs and other news from the Wikimedia world.
- Serendipity: Maintenance crews continue to slog through Wikipedia's oldest Featured Articles
Hundreds of old FAs have been triaged since project began, but thousands remain — and they need reviewers.
- Disinformation report: Epstein's obsessions
The sex offender's attempts to whitewash Wikipedia run deeper than we first thought.
- Technology report: Wikidata Graph Split and how we address major challenges
A personal perspective on a major update to the Wikimedia social machine.
- Traffic report: Deaths, killings, films, and the Olympics
I'll have the usual!
- Opinion: Incoming Incurables
A poem for Wikipedia Day 2026.
- Crossword: Pop quiz
Sharpen your pencil. How well do you really know Wikipedia?
- Comix: herculean
efforts.
Wikidata weekly summary #720
[edit]week leading up to 2026-02-23. Missed the previous one? See issue #719.
Discussions
- Open request for adminship: Jan Myšák - RfP scheduled to end after 28 February 2026 11:11 (UTC)
- Closed request for adminship: Sjö - Closed as successful, congratulations User:Sjö.
- New request for comments: Notability policy reform: Round 2, where policy is suggested based on round 1 discussions.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- Apply Now: Scholarships for the Language Diversity Conference 2026 - scholarship application deadline: 13 March 2026 / Conference dates: 2 - 4 October 2026 in Accra, Ghana.
- Office Hour: Notability Policy - February 26th 2026 at 5PM UTC (your timezone).
- (Catalan) They were not witches, they were women from Andorra - a Wikimarathon for Witches edit-a-thon to make biographies of Andorran women accused of witchcraft more visible on Wikidata and Wikipedia. Sign-up on Meta: 09:30 – 12:30 UTC, 7 March 2026.
- Ongoing: International Mother Language Day 2026 Datathon - February 21, 2026 – March 3, 2026
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- Stack Overflow: Even GenAI uses Wikipedia (+Wikidata) as a source - transcript of the podcast audio between Ryan Donovan and Philippe Saade, on the Wikidata Embedding Project and vectorizing 30 million entities for semantic search.
- Diff Blog: Revitalizing UK History, Series 2: Expanding Multilingual Access on Wikidata - Josef Anthony describes the projects efforts in documenting underrepresented UK historical figures in multiple languages.
- Diff blog: Into the Spotlight: Sharing Archival Objects through Wikimedia Commons by User:LadyRabbit. Experience documenting Ellen Winstone, a historical figure, non-notability on Wikipedia doesn't mean they are not worth documenting. Wikidata and Commons can help.
- Papers: The Wikidata Query Logs Dataset (WDQL) - presenting a dataset of 200,000 question-query pairs intended to help train Natural Language questions into SPARQL. By S. Walter, H. Bast (2026).
- Videos: 3rd Wikidata Training of the On Wiki Skill Mentorship Program by Africa Wiki Women. Dives deeper into the core data modelling concepts, Wikidata-speciifc terminology and practical editing tips for beginners. Led by User:King ChristLike
Tool of the week
- Dagbanli dictionary - a monolingual Dagbanli dictionary built using Wikidata lexemes, with 20000 native audio recordings as usage examples pulled from Mozilla Common Voice. This means when you look up a word, you can hear it spoken in example sentences. See this in action here: suɣulo
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Wikimania:2026 - The call for submissions for the program is open until March 1, 2026.
- OpenSanctions: As the CIA closes The World Factbook, we’re opening our global map of political power - introduces EveryPolitician.org, a global database of 690,000+ political office-holders across the globe. PoliLoom, GovDirectory, a dedicated WikiProject and the Wikidata community are helping make structured data on politicians transparent. Learn how you can contribute.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes: annual greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by this entity in a year)
- Newest External identifiers: RFI topic ID, Delfi.lv theme ID, SFDb original ID, Artdoc.Media film ID, Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Architects 1800-1950 practice ID, Walloon-French dictionary ID, Bolivia INE code, Russian Register of Film Distribution Certificates ID, Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek ID, Woordenboek van Nieuwe Woorden ID, Woordcombinaties ID, Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands ID, Uzbek-Russian dictionary ID, JMRC person id (he), Catalunya Romànica ID, IEC 61355 identifier, Yandex Object Answer id, Michaelis Portuguese-English Modern Dictionary ID, Michaelis English-Portuguese Modern Dictionary ID, Uni24k indentifier, The Retro Web company ID, Hentaigana for Academic Information Exchange ID, Gravestone Project Cemetery ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review:
- CWSAC classification ()
- IBAN countries (The country which the bank with this property may create accounts in. For example "MyBank" can create bank accounts in "France" with the prefix "FR". Some banks have a single country they may create accounts in and other have many.)
- Kloekecode (identifier for locations in the Netherlands, Flanders, French Flanders, and north-western Germany)
- ICAO 24-bit aircraft address (Unique 24-bit ICAO aircraft address assigned to an individual aircraft’s Mode S transponder, expressed as a six-character hexadecimal code and used in ADS-B and air traffic surveillance systems.)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: Faulhaber-Edition ID, OldRacingCars.com drivers ID, ID Prix de Lausanne, Spellingwijzer Onze Taal ID, Uitleenwoordenbank ID, EpiMedDat ID, REVENCYT code, X Games athlete ID (new), Pinkhof ID, Scheikunde ID, JWS II ID, Buitenlandse aardrijkskundige namen in het Nederlands ID, PeeringDB Facility ID, DBNL place ID, DBNL country ID, DBNL titel ID, Movist person ID
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Property table for a set of Wikidata items (the Memory of the World International Register)
- People with PolSys ID (P1980), and with or without Norwegian historical register of persons ID (P4574) - (source)
- Schema examples: federally recognized tribe (E502): required and optional properties for items representing federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States.
- Newest WikiProjects:
- Ski - The goal of WikiProject Ski is to improve items about athletes, events and results from the different skiiing and snowboarding disciplines.
- Nonprofit Orgs: South Africa - aims to add financial data to the biggest nonprofits
- WikiProject Highlights:
- Showcase Lexemes: чурка (L179567) - Russian noun (ˈtɕurkə) meaning "a wooden block or stump", "a short piece of wood used in games", or "an offensive term for a person"чурка (L179567) - Russian noun (ˈtɕurkə) meaning "a wooden block or stump", "a short piece of wood used in games", or "an offensive term for a person"
Development
- Wikidata integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are preparing to reach out to editors about improving specific templates that are written in a way that creates a lot of unnecessary entries in Recent Changes and Watchlists.
- Mobile statement editing: We are getting close to having editing support for all datatypes. We are currently still working on the support for globe coordinates. We also added support for showing constraint violations on qualifiers and references.
- Data quality: We are doing technical investigations about how to make constraint violations available for querying again.
- GraphQL: We are getting ready to make GraphQL available on Wikidata later this week.
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: Spain
- 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: 2026-09
[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
- Reference Check has been deployed to English Wikipedia, completing its rollout across all Wikipedias. The feature prompts newcomers to add a citation before publishing new content, helping reduce common citation-related reverts and improve verifiability. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web. [1]
Updates for editors
- The InterwikiSorting extension, which allowed for the sorting of interwiki links, has been undeployed from Wikipedia. As a result, editors who had enabled interwiki link sorting in non-compact mode (full list format) will now see links reordered. The links moving forward will be listed in the alphabetical order of language code. [2]
- Later this week, people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor, will notice a new "Edit full page" button. When tapped, you will be able to edit the entire article. This helps when the change you want to make is outside the section you initially opened. [3][4]
- The Reader Experience team is inviting editors to assess whether dark mode should still be considered "beta" on their wiki, based on their experience of how well it functions on desktop and mobile. If the feature is deemed mature, editors can update the interface messages in
MediaWiki:skin-theme-descriptionandMediaWiki:Vector-night-mode-beta-tagto indicate that dark mode is ready and no longer considered beta. - The improved Activity tab which displays user-insights is now available to all users of the Wikipedia iOS app (version 7.9.0 and later). Following earlier A/B testing that showed higher account creation among users with access to the feature, it has been rolled out to 100% of users along with some updates. The Activity tab now shows your edited articles in the timeline, offers editing impact insights like contribution counts and article view trends, and customization options to improve in-app experience for users.
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug that prevented DiscussionTools from working on mobile has now been fixed, restoring full functionality. [5]
Updates for technical contributors
- The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension that makes this possible continues to improve. The latest upgrade is the inclusion of a new hook,
ext.globalwatchlist.rebuild, which fires after each watchlist rebuild. This allows you to run gadgets and user scripts for the Special page. [6]
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 19:01, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
Women in Red - March 2026
[edit]
Announcements from other communities: Tip of the month:
Other ways to participate:
|
--Rosiestep (talk) 09:27, 25 February 2026 (UTC) via MassMessaging
Wikidata weekly summary #721
[edit]week leading up to 2026-03-02. Missed the previous one? See issue #720.
Discussions
- Closed request for adminship: Jan Myšák: Closed as successful, congratulations to Wikidata's newest admin!
- New request for comments: Notability Policy - Round 2: we are still requesting your input on the new Notablity policy. Including whether to elevate the self-promotion essay to a policy.
Events
- Upcoming events:
- Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session 3 March, 2026: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, March 3 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter). Wikiproject P244 maintenance uses SPARQL queries to identify and resolve two types of constraint violations in Wikidata: instances of Wikidata items with more than one LCNAF identifier and instances of the same LCNAF identifier existing on more than one Wikidata item. The February 17th session walked participants through how to resolve the former issue, while the March 3rd session will focus on the latter. This session will be more discussion-focused, since instances where two LCNAF identifier have the same Wikidata item can be difficult to resolve because of Wikidata’s innate quirks. Maybe your ideas will become the official best practice! Event page: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_LD4_Wikidata_Affinity_Group/Project_Series/LCNAF_Duplicate_Detection_P244_Maintenance
- Bring-Your-Own-Data-Lab, on 24.04.2026, the HERMES Data Competence centre hosts an online BYODL. Dr. Katrin Moeller and Dr. Olaf Simons will share how to enrich your own personal data with standard data and the Wikibase FactGrid. Click the link for registration and more information.
- Wikidata Workshop w/ Wikipedia Riba Aruba + University of Aruba Research Center (UARC), March 2, 12 - 2pm GMT-4. Click here to register.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Blogs:
- The Museo del Prado and Wikimedia Spain consolidate Wikidata as the connector axis of digital cultural heritage - gathering of the second edition of Connected Heritage: Wikidata in the GLAM Ecosystem
- (Dutch) Wikipielen: an informal mini-hackathon for the GLAM sector, Olaf Janssen (WM coordinator at National Library of Netherlands) on the 10th edition of this micro-hackathon for people in cultural and heritage sector interested in Wikidata, Wikibase, SPARQL, OpenRefine and other technical skills.
- Boundary Issues—Michal Migurski on representing disputed boundaries using Wikidata and OpenStreetMap.
- Papers:
- From Websites to Wikidata: Digitising Scotland’s Stories by Ross et al. (2026)
- Entity Linking with Wikidata: A Systematic Literature Review
- A Dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction from Art-historical Image Descriptions by Schneider et al. (2026)., introduces FRAME for extracting art-historical entities and relationships from texts, enabling automatic linking of artworks, artists, and related metadata via Wikidata.
- Review of Ethics in Linked Data by Rebecca Fried.
- Videos:
- (Swedish) Fotbollsspelare Wikipedia / Wikidata - using QuickStatements to add P54 (member of sports team) to football players
- Jukun Wikipedia Outreach, day 2 took attendees through adding interwiki links, Wikidata essentials and adding Template:Databox to Jukun Wiki articles.
- Set-up Tutorial: Language Preferences and Gadgets on Wikidata, the International [Digital] Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA) takes us through enabling gadgets and setting your preferred languages (Babel).
Tool of the week
- Maps Of the World / Stadiums - explore the stadiums of the world (at least the ones with Wikidata Items), mapped by SPARQL.
Newest properties and property proposals to review
- Newest General datatypes: SignWriting transcription (representation in SignWriting)
- Newest External identifiers: Microsoft Store developer ID, Apple Music Classical work ID, SIK-ISEA group ID, CHZZK streamer ID
- New General datatypes property proposals to review::
- Objectif plumes (Database managed by the General Service for Literature and Books, a department of the Cultural Administration of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (basically the Ministry of Culture for the French-speaking part of Belgium). The database currently includes entries on books by more than 8.000 Belgian writers.)
- usual forename (A name usually derived from a given name used to address a person in everyday life.)
- apportionment diagram (image that displays the representation of seats won by party in an election to an assembly)
- New External identifier property proposals to review: LibriVox reader ID, All Skies Encyclopaedia ID, KCUE academy ID, Catálogo de autoridades da BUSC, ISSN-H, Hong Kong Cinema title ID, NPPM ID, Parlement.com ID, Kokugakuin University god name database ID, Czech National Register of Health Service Providers ID, Génération Nintendo game ID developer ID, Génération Nintendo game ID publisher ID, wikiru.jp wiki ID, Tribuna.com football players ID, SnokaDB, abadis.ir Persian word ID, AIK soccer player ID, BOIShistory
You can comment on all open property proposals!
Did you know?
- Query examples:
- Showcase Items: Zanzibar Islands (Q1774) - semi-autonomous part of Tanzania
- Showcase Lexemes: snap (L14515) - English verb (snæp) meaning "to break suddenly", "to lose control emotionally", or "to take a photograph"
Development
- Mobile statement editing:
- We worked on removing the constraint violations indicator from a statement after an edit that fixed it.
- We are fixing bugs uncovered in testing, such as phab:T218477, phab:T418104, phab:T417861 and phab:T417647.
- GraphQL: We are getting ready to launch the first version later this week, including preparing the documentation for how to use it.
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: 2026-10
[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
- Wikipedia 25 Birthday mode is now live on Betawi, Breton, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Gorontalo, Indonesian, Italian, Luxembourgish, Madurese, Sicilian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese Wikipedias! This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on ~2,500 articles, waiting to be discovered by readers. Communities can choose to turn Birthday mode on by getting consensus from their community and asking an admin to enable the feature and customize it via community configuration on the local wiki.
Updates for editors
- Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to Swedish Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia and a couple of other wikis. You can try the feature on these projects or on testwiki and betawiki. Learnings from the first pilot wiki German Wikipedia have been published in a report. Reach out to the Wikimedia Deutschland team if you are interested in becoming a pilot wiki.
- Paste Check will become available at all Wikipedias this week. The feature prompts newcomers who are pasting text they are not likely to have written into VisualEditor to consider whether doing so risks a copyright violation. Paste Check tags all edits where it is shown for potential review. Local administrators can configure various aspects of the feature via Special:EditChecks. Research across 22 wikis found that Paste Check resulted in an 18% decrease in relative reverted-edits compared to the control group. Translators can help to localize this and related features.
- The Reader Experience team will be standardizing the user menu in the top right for all mobile users so that it is closer to the desktop experience. Currently this user menu is only visible to users with Advanced Mobile Controls (AMC) turned on. The only change is that a couple buttons previously in the left-side menu will move to the top right for users who do not have AMC turned on. This change is expected to go out March 9 and seeks to improve the user interface. [7]
- Starting in the week of March 2, the emails sent out when an email address was added, removed, or changed for an account will switch to a substantially nicer and clearer HTML email from the prior plaintext one. [8]
- Notifications are currently limited to 2,000 historic entries per user, and extend back to 2013 when the feature was released. This is going to be changed to only store Notifications from the last 5 years, but up to 10,000 of them. This will help with long-term infrastructure health and help to prevent more recent notifications from disappearing too soon. [9]
- The Global Watchlist which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page continues to see improvements. The latest update improves label usage experience. The extension now allows activating the language fallback system for Wikidata items without labels in the viewed language, and showing those labels in the user’s preferred Wikidata language if no
uselang=URL parameter is provided. [10][11] - The Wikipedia Android team has started a beta test of hybrid search on Greek Wikipedia. Hybrid search capabilities can handle both semantic and keyword queries enabling readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily.
- For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Currently, 2FA is required to use the group, but not to be a member of it. Given that this model still has some vulnerabilities, the situation will gradually change in March. Members of these groups will be unable to disable last 2FA method on their account, and it will be impossible to add users without 2FA to these groups. Users will still be able to add new authentication methods or remove them, as long as at least one method is continuously enabled. In the second half of March, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. This applies to: CentralNotice administrators, checkusers, interface administrators, suppressors, Wikidata staff, Wikifunctions staff, WMF Office IT and WMF Trust & Safety. Nothing will change for other users. See the linked task for deployment schedule. [12]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue preventing users from creating an instance in Wikibase.cloud has now been fixed. [13]
Updates for technical contributors
- To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, over the next month the Wikimedia Foundation will implement global API rate limits across our APIs. In early March, stricter limits will be applied to unidentified requests from outside Toolforge/WMCS and API requests that are made from web browsers. In April, higher limits will be applied to identified traffic. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. 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, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
- The Wikidata Query Service Linked Data Fragment (LDF) endpoint will be decommissioned in February. This endpoint served limited traffic, which was successfully migrated to other data access methods that were better suited to support existing use cases. The hardware used to support the LDF endpoint will be reallocated to support the ongoing backend migration efforts. [14]
- The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, improving platform sustainability and making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. Parsoid is now the default parser on 488 WMF wikis (268 Wikipedias), now covering more than 10% of all Wikipedia page views.
- The process and criteria for requesting exceptional access to the high volume feed of the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs (at no cost for mission-aligned usecases), have now been published. This is to provide more thorough and clearer documentation for users.
- Tech Blog, the blog dedicated to the Wikimedia technical community will be migrating to Diff, the community news and event blog. The migration should be complete in April 2026, after which new posts will be accepted for publishing. Readers will be able to access posts – old and new – on the landing page at https://diff.wikimedia.org/techblog.
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.