Un-deleting 500,000 Wikidata items
Since some time in January of this year I have been on a mission to un-delete all Wikidata items that were merged into other items before the redirect functionality of Wikidata existed. Finally I am done (well nearly). This is the short story… Reasoning Earlier this year I pointed out the importance of redirects on…
Misled by PHPUnit at() method
So it turns out the at() method doesn’t quite do what I had initially thought…. I have recently been working on some tests for the new Newsletter extension for Mediawiki, specifically to test the NewslettterTablePager class. This thing extends the TablePager class in Mediawiki which is designed to make displaying information from a database table on…
Removing use of Mediawiki’s API ‘rawmode’ in Wikibase
Rawmode was a boolean value used to determine if an API result formatter in Mediawiki needed extra metadata in order to correctly format the result output. The main use of said metadata was in the XML output of the Mediawiki API. How hard can removing it be? This is the story of the struggle to…
Axel Springer Hack Day Presentation
During 2015 I attended another Axel Springer Hack Day similar to the one in 2014, with Wikidata being one of the APIs that was presented. The presentation can be seen below:
Barack Obama GeneaWiki, 1 year later
GeneaWiki is a tool created by Magnus Manske to visualize the family of a person using data pulled from Wikidata. I used the GeneaWiki tool as an example use of Wikidata in a presentation a year ago (2014) and below you can see the screenshot I took from it. It shows 10 people in Barack Obamas…
Letting a Joomla component assign View Levels to Users
So I recently came across an issue with my speedy rewrite of the component that is used to power the SWA website. Here is a quick summary of the issue and how I went about fixing it! The rewrite maintains information about users and members in tables that it has created. A User, in Joomla…
Review of the big Interwiki link migration
Wikidata was launched on 30 October 2012 and was the first new project of the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006. The first phase enabled items to be created and filled with basic information: a label – a name or title, aliases – alternative terms for the label, a description, and links to articles about the topic in…
Wikidata Map – 19 months on
The last Wikidata map generation, as last discussed here and as originally created by Denny Vrandečić was on the 7th of November 2013. Recently I have started rewriting the code that generates the maps, stored on github, and boom, a new map! The old code The old version of the wikidata-analysis repo, which generated the maps (along with other…
MassAction Mediawiki extension
2019 EDIT: This extension has been archived as I didn’t actually maintain it. I still think there might be room for a more flexible version of this extension in the future. MassAction is a Mediawiki extension that allows users to perform mass actions on targets through a special page making use of the job queue. Its development…