Wikidata:Wikidata Platform team/Newsletter

This is a monthly update from the WMF Wikidata Platform team on our work to maintain stable, reliable and sustainable data access for Wikidata. Subscribe to this newsletter!

August 2026

This is the 9th issue of our monthly newsletter! The next issue will be published in September 2026.

WDQSv2 Scaling: Work in Progress

• WDQSv2 Scaling: Work in Progress: The new QLever public endpoints are serving live traffic and are generally available to pilot cohort clients for testing. Our partner team at WMDE started porting the Query UI to https://query-next.wikidata.org and https://query-scholarly-next.wikidata.org. We have also rolled out a number of improvements to support federation and increase availability of the service. We have stood up a new staging environment on Kubernetes. Lastly, we are experimenting with a bleeding edge version of QLever that significantly improves memory footprint and update performance, and supports index rebuilds without needing service restarts.

SPARQL Query Re-Writing Tool

• SPARQL Query Re-Writing Tool: We have begun work on a tool that will rewrite Blazegraph-specific SPARQL queries into a format that is compatible with our new QLever implementation. This tool will apply the rewrite guidance we have published on WikiTech, offering an easier path for users to migrate to WDQS v2. The purpose of this tool is not to fully adapt all queries to the new endpoint, but to support users through their migration efforts. Development on the test infrastructure is underway and expected to be complete by August 14th. An evaluation of rewrite performance will be complete by September 4th, when we will share our results. We will iterate throughout the month of September and provide access to the tool by the first week of October.

Reminder to Report Use Cases

• Reminder to Report Use Cases: We encourage all members of the community to continue helping us identify higher-risk areas, namely SPARQL queries that are highly complex, by reporting use cases on our high-impact use cases and tools page. As a reminder, any use case can be reported through this mechanism. The purpose of this page is to give the WDP team visibility into user-level migration needs.

Blazegraph Migration Office Hour (August session)

• Blazegraph Migration Office Hour (August session): Our next Blazegraph Migration Office Hour will take place tomorrow, Tuesday, 4th August 2026. This session is focused on supporting the migration away from Blazegraph as the backend of WDQS. Whether you have questions, need clarification, or want to discuss how your use case may be affected. You can register for the session via the event page.

In preparation, we encourage you to add questions, feedback, or migration-related support needs to this etherpad. This helps us shape the agenda and focus on the most relevant topics during the session.

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