User:Danny Benjafield (WMDE)/sandbox2

Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects: Best wishes for the new year!

[[File:something_cute: maybe the team in xmas hats?]] Hello everyone, I hope this message finds you well and that you had a joyful and relaxing festive season. Whether spent celebrating, recharging batteries or making new memories, Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects hope it brought you happiness and renewal.

As we step into the new year, we're excited about what lies ahead and all we’ll achieve together.

2024: A Year in Review

This year is our team's first full calendar year and brought with it many exciting changes...

New colleagues - a growing team
First development work
First Wikimania and Hackathon

New Colleagues, a growing Team

My favourite thing about 2024 was the wonderful new colleagues that joined the Wikidata For Wikimedia projects team!
Joely, Sean and Suzanne (respectively) joined us and the team nearly doubled in size!

Joely previously worked in runway fashion for clients such as Beyonce! Joely enjoys swing-dancing, anthropology and dreams of owning a dog and trekking through Patagonia.

A quote from Joely: “I'm super excited to have joined the team and try to find ways for Wikidata's data to be more widely used. Not least because it gave me a good reason to remove my phone's screentime limit on my Wikipedia app! I'm really passionate about user-led development, and implementing a delightful experience for editors and readers, so my talk page is always open”

Sean has background experience in Computer Sciences, Telecomms and Finance. Sean can speak 5 languages (excl. programming ones) and his most recent interest is the operation and logistics of super-container ships.
Suzanne enjoys sci-fi, pondering about space and nebulas and getting good-vibes from music. Suzie brings a wealth of experience at SoundCloud and fraud prevention in the financial sector.

First Developmental Projects

With the arrival of our Software Engineers, comes the ability to start putting fingers to keyboard and making our first technical contributions to the Wikiverse. But before taking on any major project, we had preselected a variety of tasks appropriate for onboarding our developers and exposing them to the nuances of the MediaWiki codebase so the tasks may seem haphazard, but they all involve an instance of Wikidata being used in another Wikimedia project:

We began by moving the Wikidata Item sitelink into the In Other Projects section of the sidebar menu (of any WM project), with the rest of its sibling project links. (More info here.)
When a new Wiki project is born, such as a new language-Wikipedia...it needs to be connected to Wikidata to start benefiting from sitelinking, language-switching and Wikidata-powered Infoboxes. Our engineers completed the training to faciltate this process and have already connected Wikidata to Tulu Wikipedia and Tulu Wikisource.
We are tackling some quite technical "behind the curtains" topics for Wikibase entity usage when invoked by functions or calls (Caching to improve article load time).
Did you know there's a limit to how many Wikidata entities (items, properties, statements) that can be accessed from a Wikimedia project page? We're working on making this clearer for technical contributors. (More info here.)

All our open tickets can be seen on our Phabricator board and if you have an issue you think we can help with, please tell us about it!

Research

Through the efforts of UX researcher and designer, Elisha Cohen and data analyst, Andrew Green, two foundational research projects were conducted in 2024. The first research helped to define the scope of our project team and establish definitions of what a Wikidata integration is. The second research project extends upon that initial research defining Wikidata integrations and attempts to establish metrics to measure the usage of Wikidata present on other Wikimedia projects.

Conferences and Events

Did you meet us or catch us this year? Danny, Ifeatu and Cynthia were present at the WM Hackathon, Wikidata Levelling Up Days and Wikimania.

Levelling Up Days 2024 was an online conference with a focus on welcoming new editors to Wikidata and through pre-recorded video resources, provide an introduction to a selection of useful tools and topics.

If you missed us, you can still see what we were upto with our video sessions and poster on Wikidata usage in Wikimedia projects (based on the research provided by our UX researcher, Elisha).

Coming in 2025!

We acknowledge that we are still a fledgling team, flying under-the-radar any maybe that's because we didn't have many updates about our work to share before now. But with a growing development team and foundational research to build on, we are excited for the projects yet to tackle in the coming year! Aside from our work online, meet us in-person at the Hackathon, Wikimania and join us for our participation in an upcoming Wikidata XXX Days Conference (online).

Thanks for reading

All that's left to be said for this year then is that we look forward to collaborating with you on future projects and to wish you a happy holidays and wonderful start to the New Year! - Danny Benjafield (WMDE) on behalf of the Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects team.

Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects at Wikimania '24 poster session
Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects created street art and bonded together.