Month: June 2024

Wikibase Repository development environment (mwcli)

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This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series Wikibase Entities

Back in 2022, while working at Wikimedia Germany, I ran two sessions with people from the Wikibase Stakeholder Group, focused on Ecosystem Enablement.

These sessions were video recorded and documented in quite a lot of detail, but following through with the videos would probably lead to a bit of a drawn out experience, as they were focused around a workshop setting with participants following along.

  • Session 1, 2022-04-28: Using mwcli, loading extensions, understanding Mediawiki’s general extension mechanism (Video, Overview)
  • Session 2, 2022-05-24: Running your first extension, Wikibase stable interface policy, Mediawiki hooks, building a new API function (Video, Overview)

In this post, I will focus on the core steps required to get a MediaWiki and Wikibase Repository development environment setup in a few minutes with mwcli, and will serve as a basis for some blog posts that I will be writing in the future.

Getting mwcli

If you head to the home page of mwcli, you’ll see a link to an installation guide.

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Lexeme and MediaInfo, implementing EntityDocument

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This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series Wikibase Entities

As we continue the journey, looking at Entity and EntityDocument within Wikibase, another useful thing to look at are the third and fourth widely used (at least within the Wikimedia space) entity types for Wikibase.

Both of these entity types make use of the EntityDocument, with none of the old assumptions baked into the Entity base class that used to exist.

MediaWiki extensions

As these entity types were decoupled from the main body of Wikibase, they were developed as MediaWiki extensions. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikibaseMediaInfo and https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikibaseLexeme

This was the easy choice at the time, and probably still makes perfect sense, as Wikibase itself is a MediaWiki extension, and there is already a common pattern of extensions extending extensions. This ultimately saves some work around coding an extension mechanism, though we should remember that ultimately the Wikibase codebase has free choice when it comes to choose how it can be extended.

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Wikibase, from Entity to EntityDocument

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This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series Wikibase Entities

The term document has already come up a few times while discussing what a Wikibase entity is, and if that should change (be that in name only, code or structures), including in my first post of this series.

Looking at the very first definition of entity in the duck duck go search that I performed 6 seconds ago, an entity is:

Something that exists as a particular and discrete unit.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

At the most basic level, it’s fairly straightforward to say that a Wikibase doesn’t hold the actual entities (such as a type of tree), rather data about said entities.

And in a nutshell, this data is collected within a document.

Image from “What is the semantic web” by onotext.com

Quoting a few choice people again, before diving deeper into this topic…

The “entities” in the Wikibase base are not Entities. They are descriptions of entities. The entity is the thing in the world not the data we have about it, even tough colloquially, we don’t make the distinction. But we have separate URIs for the thing and the description in the abstract and for specific renderings.
I think that’s important to mention when discussing what an entity “is”.

Daniel Kinzler in conversation, June 2024

The data model chose to use the term “Entity” for the top-level Thing/class in the hierarchy of the data model. But in reality, a better term would have been “Document” or “Record”. In general, the confusion is often due simply to folks that are more familiar with one of the domains than the other, between OOP Objects and Semantic Web Objects.

Thad Guidry in a comment, June 2024

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