Add columns from reconciled values not working via Wikidata

[datasteward8]

Hello everyone!

For several days now I encounter an error when reconciling with Wikidata.

I reconciled the items via Wikidata Qid without problem but when I try to use the “add columns from reconciled values” it does not recognise any property name.

The error is simply saying: “Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again later”

I have been using OR 3.9.5 but now downloaded the new version and the error still remains.

I have some personal wikibases connected with my OR and reconciliation/adding new columns works fine with them. Thus I assume the error is on Wikidata’s end.

Any tips? Or anyone else encountering this error?

[colognella]

Can confirm with 3.9.5: It happens when you type in a property name, not when using the suggested properties:

Column with „value as identifier”:

“normal” reconciled column:

[tfmorris]

That error could be more informative :(, but if you look on your browser's Javascript console, there may be more detail available.

Please create a ticket in our issue tracker with as much information as you're able to collect and we'll have a look.
https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/issues/

Tom

[Martin]

This looks related to another recent thread reporting reconciliation failures:

Error while reconciliating

Hello, I’m trying to use OpenRefine, but there are some troubles that have been happening this week. After I enter “Reconcile”, there are many cells showing “No. of recon objects was less than no. of jobs” in red. And when I try to match the others cells, the screen shows “No. of recon objects was less than no. of jobs”. I remember this exact same error happened in late 2025, and after a week it turned out to be okay. But does anybody knows the origin of the problem? Thank you

In both cases the errors appear to come from the Wikidata reconciliation service (https://wikidata.reconci.link/en/api) rather than from OpenRefine itself. Reported symptoms include:

• “No. of recon objects was less than no. of jobs”
• “The reconciliation service returned an invalid response”
• HTTP 403 errors during reconciliation operations

While investigating this, I also checked the service monitoring endpoint: https://wikidata.reconci.link/monitoring

Recent statistics show that the processing time per query has increased significantly compared to the 24-hour average, which suggests the service performance has deteriorated recently.

To help investigate this on the service side, I opened a task on Wikimedia Phabricator with logs and details: ⚓ T419770 Intermittent errors from Wikidata reconciliation service (wikidata.reconci.link) used by OpenRefine

[tfmorris]

Thanks Martin. That was a question that I realized that I left out of my reply - "What reconciliation service are you using?" I'm not sure who maintains the wikidata.reconci.link service these days (or if it is maintained).

Your Phabricator ticket says "intermittent" which I haven't seen in the other reports. Have you (or others) seen it work recently? If it is actually an intermittent failure, something that comes to mind is that this week's Wikidata newsletter mentioned more aggressive rate limits being introduced. I wonder if that could be related? (Although I'd expect a different error than 403 Forbidden). If it's a hard error, perhaps Wikidata changed some other aspect of their rules.

[Martin]

@tfmorris, here is a screenshot of my test today, on the same batch, I got a mix of success, 403, and errors

[tfmorris]

Thanks. That's weird that it's returning 403 Forbidden if it's a rate limit problem. I guess we'll have to wait for the Wikidata folks to sort it out. I confirmed that the 403 is coming from Wikidata and is not being generated by the reconciliation service (by running my own version of the service).

The property suggest/autocomplete problem might be a separate issue, because it never seems to work (unless I'm very, very unlucky).

[datasteward8]

I encountered this error too! Some days it works and reconciles everything, some days its full of that error (that was last week’s experience). I also noticed that the error always presents itself when I am reconciling using multiple properties e.g. the label and an ID property.

My original post was made about using https://wikidata.reconci.link/en/api too.

[datasteward8]

Update, today it is working for me, I do not know what happened, or if this is permanent.

[tfmorris]

I had a look at it when it was failing and the reconciliation service isn't sending the User-Agent header required by Wikidata for this particular case. That subjects it to stricter rate limits.

My best guess is that the Wikidata dev ops folks were messing with the rate limits over the past few days.