WBStack – November review

November 27, 2019 3 By addshore
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.

Shape Expressions

EntitySchema is a MediaWiki extension developed for Wikibase that allows storing of Shape Expressions on wiki pages, currently using ShExC syntax, as well as validating entities against those Schemas using an online validator.

You can find the page to create a new Schema in the ‘Wikibase’ sidebar. If you want to find out more about this topic area, you probably want to talk to the Schemas WikiProject on Wikidata.

Queryservice Examples

Thanks to some recent changes in the Queryservice UI code, example pages can now be loaded without needing to setup a parsoid service, which WBStack doesn’t currently have.

The queryservice UI on WBStack now correctly links to a page on your wiki which it will try to load examples from, currently Project:SPARQL/examples. You can redirect this page to wherever you actually want your queries to be located.

With some simple wikitext:

==Examples==

===Select All Triples===

<syntaxhighlight>
SELECT * WHERE { ?a ?b ?c }
</syntaxhighlight>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

Your queryservice UI will start to render query examples:

There are still some bugs to fix here, note the [edit] appearing where it should not (phabricator). You’ll also notice the large empty space that contains the tag cloud for the Wikidata query service.

Miscellaneous small changes

  • Sped up load times for MediaWiki after a wiki is first created
  • General stability improvements
  • “Project” is now the default meta namespace name
  • 3x Query service UI XSS fixes
  • 2x Endpoints added to the query service federation whitelist
Series Navigation<< An introduction to WBStackWBStack Infrastructure (2020) >>