Since 2018, Wikidata has been the default reconciliation service packaged with OpenRefine and plays a critical role in many workflows. According to our 2024 user survey, a significant portion of users rely on it (25% identify as Wikimedians, and 44% use the Wikidata reconciliation service).

Over the past weeks, users have reported intermittent issues when reconciling data against Wikidata, including errors and incomplete results. These reports surfaced across our forum and issue trackers here, here, here and on #7741.

In parallel, the Wikimedia engineering team opened #7731 to communicate upcoming changes in API rate limiting.

Recent changes at the service and infrastructure level have addressed the immediate outage, and the situation should be returning to normal. However, the incident highlighted deeper structural issues, and further improvements are needed to ensure compliance with evolving Wikidata and Wikimedia rate limits.

For now, we encourage users to continue reporting issues. The OpenRefine forum remains a practical place to surface problems until clearer support channels exist for the reconciliation service.

This post aims to clarify the structure and ownership of the Wikidata reconciliation ecosystem, and outline paths toward a more reliable setup.

As we close the 2025 community giving campaign, I want to take a moment to share the results, reflect on what we learned, and thank everyone who supported OpenRefine over the past few months.

This campaign was one part of a broader effort to better understand how community giving and merchandise sales can contribute to OpenRefine’s sustainability, alongside grants and institutional funding. It was also our first time running a structured community giving campaign, and the results provide a useful benchmark if we decide to repeat this exercise in the coming years.

As 2025 comes to a close, we want to take a moment to reflect on the year behind us. It has been a year defined less by headline moments than by steady, deliberate progress. Across the project, we focused on consolidation, care, and continuity, strengthening the foundations that keep OpenRefine useful, resilient, and rooted in its community.

This review offers a look back at some of the work that shaped the year, and at the people and practices that continue to sustain the project.

We are excited to announce the launch of the OpenRefine Merchandising Store! 🎉

This new store is a way for our community to access OpenRefine-branded items, show support at events, and help sustain the project.

After about 8 years of contributing to OpenRefine, I am moving on to other projects and want to give some more context about this move.

Working on OpenRefine has been a real honor. I am very grateful for the trust and warm welcome I was given when I discovered the tool in 2017, looking for ways to import data in Wikidata. I was, and still am, a strong believer in maintaining existing software, avoiding its unnecessary obsolescence and adapting it to the changing needs of its users. As a maintainer, I have always considered my role as limited in time and have tried to keep in mind the duty to onboard other contributors so that they are also able to take this project in new directions.

For already quite some time, I have had it as a goal to leave the project to better make space for others. This has now happened. I have left the advisory committee last year, the core dev group this year and stopped developing and maintaining OpenRefine a few months ago. It's not an easy move to do, as I still care about this project and I can still see many areas that I would have hoped to leave in a better state, but I think it is the right thing to do and I have a lot of trust in the team to take good care of this tool and its ecosystem.

I'm very grateful for the many past and current team members for their involvement and wish the community the best. Have a great 2025 barcamp too!

The annual unconference for the OpenRefine community

The OpenRefine 2025 BarCamp starts Monday, September 8 and runs through Thursday, September 11, online from 13:00 to 18:00 UTC each day.

Key Information​

• ✅ Review, Propose, and Vote on Sessions: To see what's already been proposed, visit the list of BarCamp 2025 session ideas on the forum. You can vote, comment, or use those as inspiration to propose your own.

• 🔗 Access to Zoom, Miro Board, and Telegram: Links to join the BarCamp are shared by email only with registered participants. 👉 Register here - Registration closes Sunday September 7.

• 📅 Live Schedule (Public Calendar) You can view the evolving session schedule here: 👉 OpenRefine BarCamp Public Calendar

• ❓ Questions: Email Martin at martin@openrefine.org

We are excited to announce that Rory Sawyer has joined the OpenRefine team as our new Developer and Contributor Engagement Specialist. After our job posting in November 2024 and a thorough interview process, Rory emerged as the best candidate for this position.

The OpenRefine AI Extension bridges the power of modern language models with OpenRefine's robust data transformation capabilities. This extension enables users to leverage any LLM provider that supports a chat completion API endpoint, bringing AI-powered data wrangling, enhancement, and analysis directly into your OpenRefine workflows.

The OpenRefine Advisory Committee is excited to announce that we are now recruiting new members.

As a key part of our governance structure, the Advisory Committee runs the administrative aspect of the project on a day to day basis with the support of our fiscal sponsor, Code for Science and Society (CS&S). Its members are bound by the fiscal sponsorship agreement with Code for Science and Society. The committee meets weekly including once per month with Code for Science and Society. Weekly calls are open to the OpenRefine community. We invite interested candidates to join us for a first-hand experience of the advisory committee's daily operations work.

OpenRefine 3.9.0 was released today and is the first stable release of our 3.9 series. It contains a range of improvements and bug fixes, most of which can be found in the release notes for 3.9-beta1.

The following webinar presents many of the new features in this release, with a focus on improvements around the newly developed Wikimedia Commons integration:

Thanks go to our many contributors who have helped shape this release in a variety of ways. Please report any issues with this release on our forum or GitHub.