Wikifunctions:Status updates/2025-03-28
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It’s about time
Time is one of the most important data values in Wikidata: Wikidata has more than a billion time values. In Wikifunctions, we already support Gregorian calendar dates, but the data model for Wikidata has a more complex representation of time.
In order to support the creation of a type for time that is compatible with Wikidata, we have analysed the existing time values in Wikidata, are describing the data model as it is used and as it was envisioned, and are sketching out part of the way for Wikifunctions to work with those values.
You can read our report on time in Wikidata.
Recent Changes in the software
This week we have one immediately user-facing change, and some behind-the-scenes work.
The biggest new feature is that we now integrate with the MediaWiki search tool (T262088). This means that the search box at the top of the page will have type-ahead matching to Objects' labels and aliases across languages, and ZIDs. It will display how it matched to each item, and display their Type; if they're Functions, it will also show their return Type. This is a first attempt at providing something useful here, and we anticipate extending it in future, but it should at least help the majority of cases, especially for newbies who arrive on one Wikifunctions page and are looking for another. Note that this search tool is only available in the Vector-2022 skin; in the legacy experiences, you will have the old search experience, as those unfortunately can't be extended but only replaced.
We've added five internationalisation messages for the wikifunctions.org sidebar that can now be used there, and translated on TranslateWiki.net like the rest of the interface (T389497). If there are other messages that should be widely-available, please get community consensus and then ask for them to also be added to the translation system.
On the Wikipedia integration, we've landed one feature and one fix. The client UX for adding and editing Wikifunctions calls in articles was expanded to allow Types that are enums, like months or eras (T387368); our last planned support before release is Types with read Functions ('parsers'), like numbers. We also tweaked our cross-wiki recent changes integration to exit in non-client mode, such as in some test edge cases, which was causing some breakages.
We fixed the code that fetches Wikidata items to include literal ZObjects for each instance of Z60/Natural language and Z6040/Wikidata statement rank, instead of a Z9/Reference (T388117, T388448, and T386426.)
We expanded our tests around the APIs that let you create Objects to give more assurance, and fix a minor bug. Our browser tests were tweaked as part of across-the-fleet fixes to be more consistently async-aware (T389536).
Fresh Functions weekly: 36 new functions
This week we had 36 new functions. Here is a list of functions with implementations and passing tests to get a taste of what functions have been created. Thanks everybody for contributing!
- Wikidata item reference to Roman day (Z23407)
- Wikidata reference to day of the week (Z23415)
- day of the week to Wikidata reference (Z23419)
- day of the week within a given month from Wikidata (Z23423)
- lexeme reference of lexeme sense (Z23433)
- values from object (Z23439)
- reference string from Key reference (Z23443)
- Wikidata reference of day relative to Easter (Z23447)
- Wikidata claim with higher rank (Z23451)
- Lexeme references from Wikidata item reference (Z23471)
- count lexeme senses in lexeme (Z23486)
- predicate is P5972 (Z23490)
- is Wikidata statement rank undeprecated? (Z23494)
- is Wikidata statement undeprecated? (Z23499)
- filter list of statements for undeprecated ones (Z23502)
A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created is available on wiki.