User talk:GerardM
Add topicSharon Witherspoon (Q60584152)
[edit]Привет! А вот эта правка [1] - это, случайно, не ошибка? --Мит Сколов (talk) 10:33, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
Mini Wikimedia Hackathon
[edit]Hoi, we organiseren weer een Mini Wikimedia Hackathon in Utrecht op 25 oktober. Misschien wat voor jouw? Het is kleinschalig, technisch georiënteerd en in-person. Als dit bij jou past kan je je aanmelden via de evenement pagina Daanvr (talk) 15:47, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026
[edit]Hello! I wanted to let you know about a hackathon we're organizing: the Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026, on 13–14 March in Arnhem, Netherlands.
It's a two-day, technically oriented hackathon bringing together Wikimedians from the region. Registration closes mid-January or when full. Let me know if there are any questions. Hope to see you there! Daanvr (talk) 23:30, 4 January 2026 (UTC)
Date precision changes with references
[edit]Hi! When changing a date from year to day precision, you can't keep the same references - they only support the year. For example, see your edit and the bot's correction. Best practice is to add the day-date as a new value with its own references and mark it preferred, or else remove the year-date entirely before adding the day-date with correct references. Thanks!
(This is an automatic message generated by a bot to explain the correction.) DifoolBot (talk) 21:58, 5 January 2026 (UTC)
Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026
[edit]Hello! I came across your name on a previous Wikimedia hackathon participant page, so I thought you might be interested in this.
We're organizing the Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026, taking place on 13–14 March 2026 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. It's a two-day, in-person hackathon for technical Wikimedians from the region.
Since you've attended a hackathon before, you already know how valuable these events can be for collaboration, learning, and getting things done together. We'd love to have you join us!
Apply here – registration closes mid-January or when full.
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions. Hope to see you in Arnhem! Daanvr (talk) 14:37, 12 January 2026 (UTC)
Wikidata Platform Newsletter - August 2026
[edit]
This is the 9th issue of our monthly newsletter! The next issue will be published in September 2026.
This is the 9th issue of our monthly newsletter! The next issue will be published in September 2026.
- WDQSv2 Scaling: Work in Progress: The new QLever public endpoints are serving live traffic and are generally available to pilot cohort clients for testing. Our partner team at WMDE started porting the Query UI to https://query-next.wikidata.org and https://query-scholarly-next.wikidata.org. We have also rolled out a number of improvements to support federation and increase availability of the service. We have stood up a new staging environment on Kubernetes. Lastly, we are experimenting with a bleeding edge version of QLever that significantly improves memory footprint and update performance, and supports index rebuilds without needing service restarts.
- SPARQL Query Re-Writing Tool: We have begun work on a tool that will rewrite Blazegraph-specific SPARQL queries into a format that is compatible with our new QLever implementation. This tool will apply the rewrite guidance we have published on WikiTech, offering an easier path for users to migrate to WDQS v2. The purpose of this tool is not to fully adapt all queries to the new endpoint, but to support users through their migration efforts. Development on the test infrastructure is underway and expected to be complete by August 14th. An evaluation of rewrite performance will be complete by September 4th, when we will share our results. We will iterate throughout the month of September and provide access to the tool by the first week of October.
- Reminder to Report Use Cases: We encourage all members of the community to continue helping us identify higher-risk areas, namely SPARQL queries that are highly complex, by reporting use cases on our high-impact use cases and tools page. As a reminder, any use case can be reported through this mechanism. The purpose of this page is to give the WDP team visibility into user-level migration needs.
- Blazegraph Migration Office Hour (August session): Our next Blazegraph Migration Office Hour will take place tomorrow, Tuesday, 4th August 2026. This session is focused on supporting the migration away from Blazegraph as the backend of WDQS. Whether you have questions, need clarification, or want to discuss how your use case may be affected. You can register for the session via the event page.
- In preparation, we encourage you to add questions, feedback, or migration-related support needs to this etherpad. This helps us shape the agenda and focus on the most relevant topics during the session.
Udehb-WMF (talk) 17:10, 3 August 2026 (UTC)
Wikidata Platform Newsletter - September 2026
[edit]This is the 10th issue of our monthly newsletter! The next issue will be published in October 2026.
- Blazegraph Service Support in v2: In the last quarter, the Wikidata Platform team has investigated Blazegraph-specific features that are not one-to-one compatible with the SPARQL 1.1 standard and our chosen backend for the v2 system, QLever. Working with a contracted SPARQL expert, we’ve drawn the following conclusions on what will be supported and available in v2, what won’t, and how WDQS users can continue to support their use cases. Below is a summary of the impacted features.
| Category | Feature | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Services | wikibase:mwapi | Evaluation pending |
| wikibase:decodeURI | not supported in v2 | |
| GAS | Supported in v2 | |
| wikibase:box | Supported in v2 | |
| bd-sample | Supported in v2 | |
| bd-slice | Supported in v2 | |
| wikibase:around | Supported in v2 | |
| wikibase:label | Supported in v2 | |
| Functions | geof-globe | Supported in v2 |
| geof-latitude | Supported in v2 | |
| geof-longitude | Supported in v2 | |
| geof-distance | Supported in v2 | |
| is-some-value | Supported in v2 | |
| Syntax | named-subquery | Supported in v2 |
| query-hint | Supported in v2 |
Queries that either do not use Blazegraph-specific features or use the features that can successfully be rewritten account for ~86.5% of WDQS v1 query volume. The only feature that cannot be supported, decodeURI, is largely a tool used to improve readability and only accounts for ~.4% of traffic volume. The MediaWiki API (mwapi) service, which accounts for ~13% of query volume on v1, cannot be supported by WDQS v2 with exact parity. Wikimedia Deutschland’s Reuse team is currently evaluating a path to support for mwapi service that leverages the other data access methods maintained by their team.
The underlying rewrite logic for these features can be found on Wikitech, where you can leave feedback directly on the discussion page. As mentioned in previous newsletters, a tool that will rewrite Blazegraph-specific SPARQL queries into a format that is compatible with our new QLever implementation is currently under development and will be released and demo’d for the community at the Query Service Days event during October.
- Query Service Days event: We are excited to announce the upcoming Wikidata Query Service Days (October 17-23, 2026), an online event focused on the migration of the Wikidata Query Service from Blazegraph to QLever. The event is organized by Wikimedia Deutschland in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation's Wikidata Platform team. It will be a space for the community to come together around this major transition.
This event is designed to:
- Update the community on the current state of the migration
- Help people get familiar with the new system and try it out
- Explain what is changing and what you need to adapt to
- Provide hands-on support for rewriting queries
- Give the development teams deeper insight into community use cases and concerns
The event will be fully online, with live sessions spread over one week (October 17-23). Sessions will be recorded and made available afterwards. We will try to cover different time zones by repeating key sessions at multiple times. Register here to get the access link to the event: Event:Query Service Days 2026.
- Rate Limiting update: Work on rate limiting is under progress for WDQS v2. Many targeted fixes have been deployed for WDQS v1 to protect against harmful use. In the new service, we will aim to implement cost-based rate limiting. This implementation is still being evaluated and will be experimented with over the coming months. Our end goal is to provide a stable service with equitable access to all users.
- Reminder to Report Use Cases: We encourage all members of the community to continue helping us identify higher-risk areas, namely SPARQL queries that are highly complex, by reporting use cases on our high-impact use cases and tools page. As a reminder, any use case can be reported through this mechanism. The purpose of this page is to give the WDP team visibility into user-level migration needs.
- Blazegraph Migration Office Hour (September session): Our next Blazegraph Migration Office Hour will take place Tuesday, 8th September 2026 at 16:00 UTC. This session is focused on supporting the migration away from Blazegraph as the backend of WDQS. Whether you have questions, need clarification, or want to discuss how your use case may be affected. You can register for the session via the event page.
In preparation, we encourage you to add questions, feedback, or migration-related support needs to this etherpad. This helps us shape the agenda and focus on the most relevant topics during the session.
--User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 09:33, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
Wikidata Platform Newsletter - October 2026
[edit]This is the 11th issue of our monthly newsletter! The next issue will be published in November 2026.
- Query Service Days event: We are excited to announce that the program of the upcoming Wikidata Query Service Days (October 17-23, 2026), an online event focused on the migration of the Wikidata Query Service from Blazegraph to QLever, is now online. You can check the program on the event page.
The event is organized by Wikimedia Deutschland in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation's Wikidata Platform team. It will be a space for the community to come together around this major transition. The program includes sessions on:
- The migration to QLever, explaining what will happen and the timeline.
- What is changing and how to adapt your queries.
- Adapting queries together in workshop-style settings.
Live sessions are scheduled at different times over the course of the week to cover multiple time zones, and recordings will be available afterwards.
The event will be fully online. Register here to get the access link to the event: Event:Query Service Days 2026.
- Updating the Current Documentation for WDQS: As part of our work on moving away from Blazegraph and adopting QLever, we are reviewing the existing documentation about the Wikidata Query Service, consolidating what has accrued during the years and deprecating what will become obsolete once the migration is complete.
As of the end of September, published a revised and expanded Migration Guide with useful information about what is changing, the current timeline of events, how you can start to migrate your queries to QLever, and how to get more involved.
In addition to that, introductory content from the WDQS User Manual on mediawiki.org was removed when it was already covered in other places, and/or integrated into more appropriate pages, such as Wikidata:SPARQL tutorial. The remaining sections of the User Manual all relate to technical details of the current Blazegraph-based implementation. Some of these sections will become obsolete when Blazegraph will be fully deprecated, while some others will be replaced with v2 documentation, when ready.
- Clarity on service support in WDQS v2: In last month’s newsletter, a table featuring all known Blazegraph features and services was included that marked each as “supported in v2” or “not supported in v2.” Based on community feedback, we understand that this may have caused confusion about how each service will be supported.
To clarify: "supported" means that the functionality will be achievable through SPARQL 1.1 or QLever capabilities. Queries that use these features will still need to be rewritten. Guidance on the required rewrites is available in the WDQS Backend Migration Guide.
- Request Early Access to WDQS v2: As we continue to get our new service fully ready for production, we are happy to welcome users to test and begin migrating their use cases. The new endpoint is still under development and subsequently does not have any committed SLOs (yet). In addition to providing test traffic for your work flows, we welcome feedback on the experience and performance of the service.
Information for signing up and participating as an early adopter of WDQS v2 is available here.
- Outage Report - 21/09/2026: WDQS (query.wikidata.org) suffered sustained high replication lag (ElevatedMaxLagWDQS, >10min) across most of the eqiad/codfw fleet for roughly 48+ hours starting on September 21st. High lag also triggered Wikibase's edit-throttling protection mechanism, which began rate-limiting legitimate Wikidata bot writes as a side effect. Requests with low share of total request count but high share of total elapsed time and very few successful responses (e.g. few but extremely expensive queries) were found to be the main culprit of the incident. The queries were complex multi-join SPARQL (e.g., "monuments from the 20th century depicting a person with exactly two spouses and no children"), computationally expensive for Blazegraph well beyond their small LIMIT. We were able to resolve the issue with targeted blocks of the requestors sending the expensive queries and stabilize the system within 2 days of first alert. This event underscores the importance of our ongoing efforts to implement global rate limiting of WDQS (ETA: January, 2027).
- Reminder to Report Use Cases: We encourage all members of the community to continue helping us identify higher-risk areas, namely SPARQL queries that are highly complex, by reporting use cases on our high-impact use cases and tools page. As a reminder, any use case can be reported through this mechanism. The purpose of this page is to give the WDP team visibility into user-level migration needs.
- Blazegraph Migration Office Hour (October session): Our next Blazegraph Migration Office Hour will take place on Tuesday, 6th October 2026, at 16:00 UTC. This session is focused on supporting the migration away from Blazegraph as the backend of WDQS. Whether you have questions, need clarification, or want to discuss how your use case may be affected. You can register for the session via the event page.
In preparation, we encourage you to add questions, feedback, or migration-related support needs to this etherpad. This helps us shape the agenda and focus on the most relevant topics during the session.