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Working at lightbug.io on IoT thing as Head of Clouds, after back from sailing “the world” aboard sailinghannahpenn.co.uk.

Previously a staff software engineer working for Wikimedia Deutschland on various projects including Wikibase, Wikidata and MediaWiki.

I use the username “addshore” in most places, such as GitHub, Mastodon, Twitter, Keybase & Wikimedia. Hence, the name of this site.

My side projects are numerous, and you can read about them on a dedicated page. Have a look at my latest posts or various projects. You can also get in touch with me using my contact page.

Latest Posts

  • Editing Grokipedia, a first look
    As a long time editor and developer in the Wikipedia and Wikimedia space, I’m of course sceptical about what Grokipedia is trying to be, and if it stands any chance of success. it may struggle to deliver the resilience, transparency, and community processes that keep projects like Wikipedia thriving, and in the early weeks the untouchable AI generated content was certainly not going to work moving forward. However, in the last week or so editing became an option, hidden behind … Read more
  • How much is “Wikibase Suite” (and deploy) used
    At the start of this year, I spent some time visualizing the Wikibase ecosystem by making use of the data that has been collected on wikibase.world. As part of that, I tried to focus in on Wikibase Suite, trying to determine how many possible installations there were making use of the container images, and or the newer Wikibase Suite Deploy thing. I came to the number 33, based on the fact that there were this many sites online on wikibase.world … Read more
  • Wikidata Map in 2025
    Another year, another map, and another Birthday for Wikidata. Last generated in 2024 by @tarrow and @outdooracorn, this year I have put the work in just ahead of the 13th Wikidata birthday to have a look at what’s changed in terms of items with coordinates this past year on Wikidata. And here it is! But really you need to look at the diff between previous years to see what has changed! Wikidata Map Wikidata Map in 2024
  • Slop in, craft out?
    Earlier today, I sent this absolutely perfectly crafted piece of slop into GitHub Copilot… Right, but i want thje patche sot be / and /* always And as I already expected, due to using these LLM based coding agents and assistants continually throughout their evolution, the resulting change was exactly what I wanted, despite the poor instructions. Now, I’m sure there is actually some difference, and likely this depends on the relevance of the typoed areas, and how often such … Read more
  • Wikidata, instance of and subclass of through time (P31 & P279)
    Last month I looked at all Wikimedia Commons revisions and managed to generate some data and graphs for the usage of depicts statements since they were introduced on the project. This month, I have applied the same analysis on Wikidata but looking at instance of and subclasses of items. A slightly bigger data set, however essentially the same process. This will enable easy updating, of various pie charts that have been published over the years, such as In future, this … Read more
  • Online RDS column type modification, using pt-online-schema-change from EC2
    I’m using percona-tools to do an online schema modification today, and thought I would document the process, especially as even the installation guides seem to be badly linked, out of date, and did not work out of the box… EC2 instance This is all running on a t3.micro EC2 instance with Ubuntu. I deliberately didn’t go with Amazon Linux, as I wanted to be able to use apt. For simplicities’ sake, I’ll be using the EC2 Instance Connect feature, which … Read more