Wikifunctions:Status updates/2026-03-06
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Citations in Wikifunctions
Citations are a crucial part of what makes Wikipedia work: a human-edited collection of knowledge, together with references to the sources of knowledge.
We're delighted to announce that we have shipped a long-awaited feature: you can now create Functions that will show a citation in their output. We are providing three exemplar functions creating citations:
- reference marker HTML from string (Z31906)
- create Reference with HTML (Z31917)
- statement with reference (Z31921)
The screenshot shows how citations are rendered with this new system.
You can build more such functions using citations. We are looking forward to seeing citations that are built using Wikidata items and turn them into citations, or that take the references directly from the Wikidata statements and display them as citations.
This is a major step towards providing the necessary capabilities for creating high-quality Abstract Wikipedia articles. We are looking forward to seeing how you are going to use it!
Copy and Paste
This week we also want to announce the release of another of our long-awaited features: a Wikifunctions internal clipboard where you can temporarily store any piece of ZObject so that you can then paste it somewhere else.
After this release, when clicking on the menu button of any editable key ([...]) you will see two new options at the bottom: "Copy to clipboard" and "Paste from clipboard." The copy option will store the whole value of this key in the Wikifunctions clipboard. This clipboard uses the browser's local storage to keep your copied elements, which makes things shareable across tabs and sessions.
Once you have identified a new key to paste a value from your clipboard, you can click on that key's menu button ([...]) and select the "Paste from clipboard" option. This will open a dialog window with a list of all the elements from your clipboard. You can navigate through this list and choose any element that is type-compatible with the selected key.
Once you click "Paste", it will create an identical copy of this block and paste it to the new location after all the necessary modifications to fit the new context. For example, when copying pieces of compositions that use argument references, those will be maintained only when pasting the block within the same composition, but will be reset to blank values when pasting them into different contexts.
Our hope is that this feature speeds up creation of complex compositions when it's more efficient to copy from one implementation to another one and change whatever things are different. But we are also excited about more common use cases: Have you ever created a big, long and complex function call just to find out that you need to wrap it in another function call? Now you don't need to start from scratch! Copy the work that you did, and paste it back into its new key whenever you are ready.
Please note that for browser security reasons we can't re-use your system copy-and-paste feature — this is a Wikifunctions-internal system. It will let you copy-and-paste between items, pages, and tabs of the same browser on the same device when using the wiki, but not further.
Let us know how you feel about it, we are excited to hear from you!
Recent Changes in the software
The main change this week is the copy-and-paste feature, above.
As part of wider work to support new languages in MediaWiki, we're creating Z1991/pwo "Western Pwo" (T417024).
Recording of Volunteers’ Corner
The recording of the March Volunteers’ Corner is now available on Commons. Based on a volunteer’s suggestion, we built a Function together, that creates a link to the Wikipedia article about an item in the given language and the provided display text: link Wikidata label to Wikipedia article (Z29588) We also discussed recent updates, and took questions from the community. Enjoy the recording!
Fresh Functions weekly: 11 new Functions
This week we had 11 new functions. Here is an incomplete list of functions with implementations and passing tests to get a taste of what functions have been created. Thanks everybody for contributing!
- Portuguese syllables from word (Z31772)
- Births header text (Z31799)
- every nth item of list starting with first (Z31809)
- position (1..=N) of first matching substring (Z31826)
- get last Code point of String (Z31845)
- value of k-th place digit in base-b digit string (Z31859)
A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created is available.