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
Could you clarify which reconciliation service you are using?
OpenRefine itself only sends requests to the external reconciliation endpoint, so errors like this often originate from the service rather than OpenRefine. Knowing which service you are reconciling against will help determine where the issue should be reported.
If this was Wikidata, it was likely stricter rate limits that they were temporarily enforcing triggering bugs in the reconciliation service and OpenRefine.
They seem to have relaxed the rate limits again and users have been reporting that things are working.
Thanks for including the reconciliation service URL. It appears that that service is getting errors from the Wikidata API again. From the outside it's difficult to tell if Wikidata's behavior is changing due to some external factor like increased load or if someone is proactively changing things to make the API be more restrictive. A somewhat standard pattern when sunsetting an API or making it more restrictive is to phase in the restrictions by periodically implementing them for a short period of time, gradually lengthening the period and/or increasing the frequency until they're permanent. I don't have any visibility in Wikidata engineering, so I don't know if that's what's going on here, but it's a possibility.
That recon service is kind of running on autopilot without a maintainer, as far as I know, but it will require enhancement to work with the new restrictions. By rights it should be a production service run by the Wikidata team, but that's an entirely separate conversation. If you find it valuable to help you contribute data to the Wikidata ecosystem, please make sure that the Wikidata PMs know that.
The "No. of recon objects was less than no. of jobs" is due to a bug (#7699) in OpenRefine's error handling for reconciliation service errors. Any place that you see it, you can basically assume that it should have a 403 or 429 error like the other cells. This bug was introduced relatively recently and I'm working on a fix for it, but it won't help with the underlying Wikidata errors. Hopefully those will clear themselves up eventually like they did last time.
Tom