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
I finished clearing this report that you were working on. Apologies if that comes across as stealing your thunder. * Pppery *it has begun... 21:24, 15 May 2026 (UTC)