Demo

Try out the extension yourself via the Wikibase Export demo wiki.

Documentation and Installation Instructions

Learn how to install, use, and configure the extension via the Wikibase Export documentation.

Development of Wikibase Export

Development of Wikibase Export was led by our Wikibase Developers Jeroen De Dauw and Morne Alberts. Learn more about our Wikibase software development services.

We thank our client Universität Mannheim for sponsoring the development of Wikibase Export.

Thanks also go to Renat Shigapov and Irene Schumm for conceptualizing the extension and to the Wikibase Stakeholder Group for their feedback.

Wikibase Hosting

Check out our tailored Wikibase hosting and Wikibase cloud hosting services.
Both include Wikibase Export and many other MediaWiki extensions.

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Changes

• Improved compatibility with MediaWiki 1.38 and 1.39
• Improved compatibility with PHP 8.1 (not complete yet)
• Fixed type error occurring during specific number formatting on PHP 8.0+
• Fixed bug causing the job queue to be flooded with jobs
• Fixed issue with the pipe character in the Ask API
• Fixed rebuildData.php issue for the smw_ftp_sesp_usereditcntns table
• Fixed issue in the category result format
• Fixed upsert warning log spam
• Added user preference that allows enabling or disabling the entity issue panel
• Added support for partial ISO dates
• SMW now ships with updated vocabularies including Schema.org, Dublin Core, FOAF and SKOS
• Various grammar and spelling fixes
• Translation updates

Credits

Over 20 people contributed to this release. We would like to thank all contributors.

Special credits go to Abijeet Patro (and TranslateWiki), Bernhard Krabina from KM-A, Sébastien Beyou from WikiValley and Alexander from gesinn.it.

Upgrading

We recommend that everyone running older versions of SMW upgrades. Especially if you are running SMW 4.0.1 or older, as these versions contain a known security vulnerability.

No need to run "update.php" or any other migration scripts.

Get the new version via Composer:

• Step 1: if you are upgrading from SMW older than 4.0.0, ensure the SMW version in composer.json is ^4.1.0
• Step 2: run composer in your MediaWiki directory: composer update --no-dev --optimize-autoloader

Get the new version via Git:

This is only for those that have installed SMW via Git.

• Step 1: do a git pull in the SemanticMediaWiki directory
• Step 2: run composer update --no-dev --optimize-autoloader in the MediaWiki directory

Semantic MediaWiki hosting

If you are looking for a hosting provider for your wiki, we recommend ProWiki. We provide MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki hosting. Create your wiki instantly via the free trial.

Demo

Download and Installation

View the installation instructions and documentation.

External Content is available on our fully managed MediaWiki wikis.

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The Yearly SMW Overview

You can find the slides on Google Slides.

Recordings on YouTube

You can find the recordings of the SMWCon Fall 2021 talks on the SMW YouTube channel.

A good place to start is the excellent keynote by Rich Evans:

Overview

Even today, there are not many choices when it comes to a mobile and responsive skin. I’ve done the research for you and in this blog post, I will look at the available alternatives serving the content of your wiki best for mobile devices.

All of the mobile and responsive skins to MediaWiki I will mention in this blog post both integrate with Semantic MediaWiki and VisualEditor. According to my opinion these two requirements need to be met. In addition, these skins are under active development, meaning that support for new major releases of MediaWiki is added within a short period of time. The latter is good to know if you would like the next major upgrade of your MediaWiki instance to be smooth when it comes to the skin used.

Let us now look at the selection of mobile and responsive skins for MediaWiki I made for you.

Chameleon

The Chameleon skin comes by default with a layout offering two navigation bars enclosing the wiki’s content at the top and bottom. The top bar holds the menu for editing and actions on the center right as well as the user menu on the very right. The bar at the bottom holds the tool menu.

It is the most versatile and flexible skin when it comes to customizing the look and feel of your wiki. Moreover it can easily be extened with further features from the Bootstrap framework. If you are into creating an unique impression of your wiki then this skin is your choice.

Medik

The Medik skin serves a fixed layout in four choosable variants resembling that of the established classic Vector and Monobook skins with a sidebar on the left side of the screen. The user menu is located in the very right of the top bar. The editing, the actions and the tools menu are merged together and are located on the top left of the content area.

This is one of the two mobile and responsive skins covered here offering the classic wiki appearance. At the same time it is clear and straigt. The Bootstrap framework it uses can easily be extended with the features provided by the BootstrapComponents extension. If you are into the classic wiki layout and just want to do a couple of configuration changes then this skin is your very best choice. Besides that no further changes need to be done.

Foreground

The Foreground skin serves a fixed layout providing one navigation bar at the top above the wiki’s content which holds the tool menu as well as the user menu. The menu for editing and actions is located at the top right of the content area.

It is one of the skins with a clear and straigt appearance and serves by default the features provided by the Foundation framwork. If you are happy with the layout and just want to do a couple of changes to the CSS then you should pick this skin.

Pivot

The Pivot skin serves a fixed layout resembling that of the well-known classic Vector and Monobook skins with a sidebar on the left of the screen. The user menu is toggled in and out on the right side of the screen. The menu for editing and actions is located at the top right of the content area.

This is the other one of the two mobile and responsive skins offering the classic wiki appearance. It serves by default the features provided by the Foundation framwork. If you are into the classic wiki layout and just want to do a couple of changes to the configuraion and the CSS then this skin is your pick.

Tweeki

The Tweeki skin brings a flexible layout by default providing one navigation bar at the top above the wiki’s content. It holds the menu for tools as well as for actions. The editing action was placed as a button on the top right of the content area.

It is a skin with a clean aesthetic layout by default bringing the features provided by the Bootstrap framwork. If you like the layout provided by the Tweeki skin and you just want to do a couple of changes to the CSS, then this skin is definitely something for you. If you would like to build intensely upon the skin, it is also a very nice choice.

Adoption

Let us now look at the basic data like usage numbers, web framework used, and other information:

The data was sourced from WikiApiary.com, MediaWiki.org and GitHub in March 2022.

The usage numbers of these mobile and responsive MediaWiki skins do not convey a relevant volume of serious adoption. However, we need to remember that private wiki instances running MediaWiki are not covered at all. From experience, these are much more likely using one of the skins mentioned here. Thus, these numbers do, indeed, provide a pretty good overview of how usages compare by skin. Moreover, their overall adoption is steadily increasing since their inception.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, none of the mobile and responsive skins mentioned here is deployed on wikis run by the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia. One reason for that is due to the skins’ focus on being mobile and responsive, they provide features that may break content on Wikipedia. Moreover these features are even unwanted within the scope of Wikipedia. Think of features like accordions, carousels or tabs here. Another reason is that they were not developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, thus not assuring direct control over their code base and release process, which is also an important factor for Wikipedia and related projects.

This leads to the questions: Which mobile skin is used for Wikipedia, and why wasn’t it considered in this blog post? Well, the skin is called Minerva Neue, which is best used with the MobileFrontend extension. They piggy-back on the classic MediaWiki skins we all know - Vector and MonoBook. In my experience, this solution to a mobile skin for MediaWiki is generally viewed by users with a resigned acceptance. Also it lacks the possibility for adaptation to individual wiki’s requirements.

Conclusion

All mobile and responsive skins for MediaWiki I have covered in this blog post are recommended and can cheerfully be used for your wiki.

In the end your decision will not just depend on your individual use case for running a wiki but also on which kind of changes you would like to have for the skin and on either your personal technical skill level or on how much you would like to get involved yourself in doing these.

All of these skins can be used out of the box with you probably wanting to make only a few necessary adaptations regarding the visual appearance. Two of the skins, Chameleon and Tweeki allow for more or less invasive changes to the layout and visual appearance and require a medium to high level of technical skills to do them. The other three, Foreground, Pivot and Medik are fixed in their layout however still can be changed regarding their visual appearance. The adaptations needed here can be made by people with a medium and even low level of technical skills.

I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post and got something out of it. Please have a look at the follow-up blog posts covering the mobile and responsive skins mentioned here.

Hosting and Support

All of Professional Wiki’s hosting plans either offer or allow to optionally include the mobile and responsive skins for MediaWiki covered by this blog post. Also professional support is available to help you get the most out of your wiki. We will be very happy to assist you and make a difference for you!

Further reading

• Chameleon
• Foreground
• Medik
• Pivot
• Tweeki

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Compatibility

The Semantic MediaWiki 3.2 release was worked on for about a year. It now provides support for the new MediaWiki 1.35 Long Term Support (LTS) release that was published about a fortnight later. So you can now upgrade both MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki in one go, great for administrators.

Since it also supports the earlier MediaWiki 1.31 LTS release and every version in-between you can just upgrade Semantic MediaWiki. This means you take advantage of new features without being forced to upgrade MediaWiki at the same time. From experience I know that this may also be preferable in some cases.

Release Policy

The release policy was refined to improve the experience of administrators in maintaining Semantic MediaWiki.

Thus we will see more major releases (first version number change) in the future. The new release policy makes sure that upgrades do not need special attention and do not come with breaking changes (database schema changes, data consistency changes, syntax changes, etc.) within a specific release series of Semantic MediaWiki, i.e. versions 3.x, 4.x, etc.

Minor and patch releases will in the future only bring compatible feature improvements and bug fixes. Have a look at the details of the release policy document.

Enhancements for Editors and Readers

Related to the display and validation of schema definitions

Improvements to the accessibility of schemas located in the "smw/schema" namespace were implemented.

The buttons for toggling parts of the schema definitions as well as copying it as a whole were placed in a new top navigation. This navigation now also comes with a nice search field allowing you to search for given strings within a schema definition.

Editors and readers can now easily find specific parts of a schema definition, making it easier if the given one is rather complex and large. Plus, this new search feature comes with a really useful highlighting function of the results found.

Moreover the formal validation of JSON schema definitions has been improved. Any resulting error messages are now more specific and provide better ways of identifying the cause of the problem within the given schema.

Also in a dedicated tab on property pages you now see a JSON representation of the property profile schema for that given property that was defined with special property "Profile schema". Profile schemas usually define sequence mapping or range grouping for values annotated to the property.

Last but not least, Semantic MediaWiki now provides a predefined JSON schema for property groups which are automatically imported to your wiki upon initial installation or during the upgrade process.

If you already have manually defined a property group schema you do not have to worry since that will take precedence. Still, you may have to adapt your property group schema since the structure was changed which was breaking for previous definitions.

Related to the #info parser function

The #info parser function allowing to generate tooltips now provides two new parameters for you.

One parameter allows to define a maximum width (max-width) and the other allows to choose from a predefined theme (theme). This way you can improve the automatically generated appearance of tooltips that should be shown to the editors and readers. See the help page on adding tooltips for more information on this nice enhancement.

New entity issue panel

An entity issue panel was introduced that will inform you of issues with the data stored to the given page and provide easily accessible context for them. In general two different kinds of issues are shown. One kind of issue is classified as warnings that are indicated with an orange icon. These issues are problems with formal data validation such as constraint violations or otherwise improper data. In this situation the editor needs to check and update the data stored to the page.

The other kind of issue is classified as errors, shown with a red icon. These issues arise when the data store is or should be in maintenance mode or if inconsistencies with the storage backend are discovered. In these cases the administrators need to take action, however the editor at the same time knows that there are issues.

Help on value filtering on property pages

The value filtering functionality on property pages which was introduced with version 3.0 of Semantic MediaWiki is now feature rich.

Historically these features were only documented on wiki, preventing them from being easily accessible. With the 3.2 release with the new tooltip it provides details of all the options available.

Enhancements for Administrators

Setup checks

The previous version of Semantic MediaWiki introduced setup checks to generate information about the state of the Semantic MediaWiki software.

This information was gathered in a special file (".smw.json"). These checks have now been refined and reorganized providing better information to administrators about actions to be taken when a check detects an issue. In most cases these issues prevent the wiki from being fully accessible by showing an error screen to the wiki user.

These issues need to be resolved before editing can safely commence or continue on the wiki which prevents potential data inconsistencies or even data loss.

Also, avoidable setup mistakes are being addressed by the checks to ensure a smooth operation of the wiki. The detected problems can e.g. be issues coming from extension loading, extension incompatibilities, etc. or are triggered by missed software requirements. See the documentation on setup checks. for further information.

Maintenance alerts

These days MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki have become increasingly dependent on maintenance tasks. This need to be done on a regular basis to assure the operating stability of the wiki.

These maintenance tasks are usually worked on by running dedicated scripts to assure that the respective maintenance jobs are being executed by the softwaer.

Starting with this new version 3.2 of Semantic MediaWiki, maintenance alerts are supported to assist administrators in identifying the maintenance tasks in need of attention.

These alerts also cover information about outdated or superfluous configuration and are shown on the special page "SemanticMediaWiki" in the alerts section. Alternatively on the special page "PendingTaskList" you have an overview that lists maintenance jobs.

I believe this is an important improvement making required maintenance work more visible and creates better awareness for it. See the documentation on maintenance alerts for further information.

Maintenance scripts

This new release serves two new maintenance scripts, "runImport.php" and "disposeOutdatedEntities.php".

The first one "runImport.php" was introduced to allow re-run of the import of content in case this step was suppressed during the setup or update of the wiki. For example, if you wanted to prevent predefined content from rolling into a specific wiki.

However, this script is also very useful if new content was placed on the server for import.

The second new maintenance script "disposeOutdatedEntities.php" was created as a short-hand for using the "rebuildData.php" maintenance script together with the --skip-properties and --dispose-outdated parameters in previous versions of Semantic MediaWiki. There is no immediate need to migrate to using this new script but I like the idea of separating concerns for this specific task.

A nice enhancement brought to you for all maintenance scripts was the modernization and improvement of the script's client output on your shell. I was about to write that it now makes it fun just to watch the scripts performing their actions.

Configuration preloading

Configuration preloading is a new mechanism added to allow a preload of a set of configurations. These would otherwise have been added manually when creating or updating a wiki.

Thus you can prepare reusable configuration profiles for your wiki and load them individually to specific instances. This is a great improvement for maintainers of wikifarms since it eases the work of distributing specific configuration to individual wikis.

Moreover a couple of common profiles are already provided by Semantic MediaWiki such as one for providing settings relating to the usage of media files.

Also, there is a specialized one for adding primary keys to Semantic MediaWiki owned tables to help specific relational data store environments like e.g. "Percona". See the documentation on configuration preloading for further information.

Conclusion

Semantic MediaWiki 3.2 is not directly comparable to the features fests celebrated by the previous two major releases but rather focused on improving and updating existing features.

This makes this release a different one in character. It is however another solid release and allows us to take a breath and dig into the features we already have.

I personally very much appreciate that it brought support for MediaWiki 1.35 (LTS) and was published prior to the MediaWiki release.

Also, revising and formally publishing the release policy was a good step to take. Let's cheerfully move on to this version of Semantic MediaWiki.

Hosting and Support

All of Professional Wiki’s hosting plans ship with the latest version of Semantic MediaWiki covered by this blog post.

Since we do the administration of the wiki for you you can enjoy the benefits for users without needing to worry about the technical implications.

Additionally professional support is available to help you get the most out of your wiki. We will be very happy to assist you and make a difference for you!

→ Contact us for more information.

In this blog post I only covered the most important changes this release introduced to us as the users of the software. During last weeks SWMCon 2020 I provided a presentation on Semantic MediaWiki 3.2 which you can also check out if you are interested in more details.

Still I hope you enjoyed reading this very blog post and got a lot out of it, and let me know if you have more questions or what your thoughts are about the latest release.

Also interesting

• Semantic MediaWiki vs Wikibase vs Cargo
• Semantic Wikibase Released

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Demo

Download and Installation

View the installation instructions and documentation.

We provide professional Wikibase services, including managed Wikibase hosting, Wikibase setup and Wikibase software development. Contact us for more information.

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