Year: 2019

WBStack – November review

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This entry is part 2 of 12 in the series WBStack

It’s been roughly 1 month since WBStack appeared online, and it’s time for a quick review of what has been happening in the first month. If you don’t already know what WBStack is, then head to my introduction post.

The number of users and wikis has slowly been increasing. In my last post I stated ” 20 users on the project with 30 Wikibase installs”. 3 weeks after that post WBStack now sits at roughly 38 users with roughly 65 wikibases. Many of these wikibases are primarily users test wikis, but that’s great, the barrier to trying out Wikibase is definitely lowered.

If you would like an invite code to try WBStack, or have any related thoughts of ideas, then please get in touch.

What’s changed

As WBStack is a shared platform, all changes mentioned in this blog post are immediately visible on all hosted Wikibases. In the future there will be various options to turn things on and off, but at this early stage things are being kept simple.

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An introduction to WBStack

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This entry is part 1 of 12 in the series WBStack

WBStack is a project that I have been working on for a couple of years that finally saw the light of day at Wikidatacon 2019. It has gone through a couple of different names along the way, MWaas, WBaas, WikWiki, OpenCura and finally WBStack.

The idea behind the project is to provide Wikibase and surrounding services, such as a blazegraph query service, query service ui, quick statements, and others on a shared platform where installs, upgrades and maintenance are handeled centrally.

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Changing the concept URI of an existing Wikibase with data

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Many users of Wikibase find themselves in a position where they need to change the concept URI of an existing Wikibase for one or more reasons, such as a domain name update or desire to have https concept URIs instead of HTTP.

Below I walk through a minimal example of how this can be done using a small amount of data and the Wikibase Docker images. If you are not using the Docker images the steps should still work, but you do not need to worry about copying files into and out of containers or running commands inside containers.

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Your own Wikidata Query Service, with no limits

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This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Your own Wikidata Query Service

The Wikidata Query Service allows anyone to use SPARQL to query the continuously evolving data contained within the Wikidata project, currently standing at nearly 65 millions data items (concepts) and over 7000 properties, which translates to roughly 8.4 billion triples.

Screenshot of the Wikidata Query Service home page including the example query which returns all Cats on Wikidata.

You can find a great write up introducing SPARQL, Wikidata, the query service and what it can do here. But this post will assume that you already know all of that.

EDIT 2022: You may also want to read https://addshore.com/2022/10/a-wikidata-query-service-jnl-file-for-public-use/

Guide

Here we will focus on creating a copy of the query service using data from one of the regular TTL data dumps and the query service docker image provided by the wikibase-docker git repo supported by WMDE.

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Wikidata Map July 2019

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This entry is part 12 of 17 in the series Wikidata Map

It’s been another 9 months since my last blog post covering the Wikidata generated geo location maps that I have been tending to for a few years now. Writing this from a hammock, lets see what has noticeably changed in the last 9 months using a visual diff and my pretty reasonable eyes.

Wikidata “Huge” map generated on the 13th May 2019

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Santa Elena (Monteverde, Costa Rica) to Granada (Nicaragua)

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I’m writing this post in the hope that someone making the same journey will find it somewhat useful. We were a bit uncertain how our journey was going to pan out, but it ended up working pretty well.

If you want to know what we ended up doing, skip the “Initial research” section, and head straight to “The journey”.

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Add Exif data back to Facebook images – 0.1

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Screenshot of the Facebook Exif tool

EDIT: Version 0.10 was released in April 2020 https://addshore.com/2020/04/add-exif-data-back-to-facebook-images-0-10/

In 2016 I wrote a blog post with this exact title when moving all of my pictures from Facebook to Google photos. I wrote a hacky little script which met my needs and added exif data from a HTML Facebook data dump back to the images that came along with it.

A few months ago I took another look at the script and made it slightly easier to run, but it still fell short on the usability side of things.

Since then more and more people have and been commenting and messaging me wanting to do exactly the same thing, and so I finally made a more usable version of my little tool.

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Creating a Dockerfile for the Wikibase Registry

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Currently the Wikibase Registry(setup post) is deployed using the shoehorning approach described in one of my earlier posts. After continued discussion on the Wikibase User Group Telegram chat about different setups and upgrade woes I have decided to convert the Wikibase Registry to use the prefered approach of a custom Dockerfile building a layer on top of one of the wikibase images.

I recently updated updated the Wikibase registry from Mediawiki version 1.30 to 1.31 and described the process in a recent post, so if you want to see what the current setup and docker-compose file looks like, head there.

As a summary the Wikibase Registry uses:

  • The wikibase/wikibase:1.31-bundle image from docker hub
  • Mediawiki extensions:
    • ConfirmEdit
    • Nuke

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wikibase-docker, Mediawiki & Wikibase update

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Today on the Wikibase Community User Group Telegram chat I noticed some people discussing issues with upgrading Mediawiki and Wikibase using the docker images provided for Wikibase.

As the wikibase-registry is currently only running Mediawiki 1.30 I should probably update it to 1.31, which is the next long term stable release.

This blog post was written as I performed the update and is yet to be proofread, so expect some typos. I hope it can help those that were chatting on Telegram today.

Starting state

Documentation

There is a small amount of documentation in the wikibase docker image README file that talks about upgrading, but this simply tells you to run update.php.

Update.php has its own documentation on mediawiki.org.
None of this helps you piece everything together for the docker world.

Installation

The installation creation process is documented in this blog post, and some customization regarding LocalSettings and extensions was covered here.
The current state of the docker-compose file can be seen below with private details redacted.

This docker-compose files is found in /root/wikibase-registry on the server hosting the installation. (Yes I know that’s a dumb place, but that’s not the point of this post)

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A firewall is blocking sharing between Windows and the containers – Docker

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I recently encountered this error while trying to run one of my docker setups. I have encountered errors like this before and it has always ended up being related to docker and sharing my drives to the linux VM that actually runs my containers. Checking the shared drives menu of the docker UI everything seemed … Read more