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…
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today, and thought I would document the process, especially as even the installation guides seem to be badly linked, out of date, and did not work out of the box… EC2 instance This is all running on a t3.micro EC2 instance with Ubuntu.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…
What is Wikibase “Federated Properties” in 2025
I recently wrote a post looking at the history of the Wikibase “Federated Properties” feature. While at Wikimania 2025 the topic of federation came up a few times, particularly given the current discussions ongoing on the Wikidata project chat page including discussions about wikicite, and the recent Wikidata graph split. All the code for the…
What was Wikibase “Federated Properties”
The “Federated Properties” feature allows / allowed a local Wikibase instance to access and utilise properties directly from a remote Wikibase, primarily Wikidata. Its primary purpose is to enable partial federation between a local Wikibase and Wikidata, broadening the base of available data without needing to create a property set from scratch. I’m split between…
Wikimedia Commons Depicts statements over time
Wikimedia Commons now uses Structured Data on Commons (SDC) to make media information multilingual and machine-readable. A core part of SDC is the ‘depicts’ statement (P180), which identifies items clearly visible in a file. Depicts statements are crucial for MediaSearch, enabling it to find relevant results in any language by using Wikidata labels, as well…
Easy WSL Windows path switching alias
I have been primarily developing on WSL for some years now, and still love the combination in terms of all around flexibility. When primarily working on Linux based or focused applications, everything is lovely! However, I’m spending more time straying into the land of hardware, USB devices, and custom IDEs and debug interfaces that are…
AI Code assistant experience comparison (golang-kata-1)
If you’re reading this, and thinking about trying an IDE integrated coding agent, or thinking about switching, maybe stick around, have a read and watch some of the videos. There is at least 6 hours worth of experience wrapped up in this 20 minuite read! I’m watching a thread on the GitHub community forums, where…
Toit: jag monitor proxy
While developing on ESP32 boards at Lightbug on some of our newer products, I have repeatedly wanted to run Toit and Jaguar without WiFi enabled during a development setting. Either to have WiFi off to keep power consumption lower, turn off the default network so that I can make use of a secondary network or…
WikiCrowd for 2025
I wrote the first version of WikiCrowd back in 2022 and haven’t really iterated on it much since, beyond adding the odd new set of image categories, and removing features that I decided were not optimum. At the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon however, WikiCrowd came up as both an entertaining little game to show people during…
Wikibase ecosystem in Q1 2025, according to wikibase.world
I wrote a post in February 2025 looking at what the Wikibase ecosystem (might) look like, according to the data that had at that point been collected on wikibase.world. Now that data has had some time to evolve and expand, we can take a little look at how it has changed throughout the last 2…