Google Assistant & Wikipedia
The Google Assistant is essentially a chat bot that you can talk too within the new Allo chat app. The assistant is also baked into some new Google hardware, such as the pixel phones. During a quick test of the assistant, I noticed that if you ask it to “tell me an interesting fact” sometimes…
The RevisionSlider
The RevisionSlider is an extension for MediaWiki that has just been deployed on all Wikipedias and other Wikimedia websites as a beta feature. The extension was developed by Wikimedia Germany as part of their focus on technical wishes of the German speaking Wikimedia community. This post will look at the RevisionSliders design, development and use…
WMDE: Metrics & Data Gatherings
Below you will find an internal WMDE presentation covering the general area of WMDE Metric & Data Gatherings from 2016. This presentation follows on from the initial introduction to engineering analytics activities. The presentation skims through: WMDE Grafana dashboards The Wikimedia Analytics landscape Grafana & graphite Hadoop, Kafka, Hive & Oozie EventLogging, Mysql replicas &…
Add Exif data back to Facebook images
2019 Update: This script now exists with an easy to use GUI 2018 Update: I touched this script again in March 2019 moving it to Github and updating it with Docker support I start this post not by talking about Facebook, but about Google Photos. Google now offers unlimited ‘high resolution’ images within its service where…
BrExit
So, biggest turnout at a UK referendum with 72.2%, we have only had 3 though. It was so close, 27.8% didn’t vote and thus 34.7% of the UK population wanted to remain and 37.5% wanted to leave. The pie chart really emphases this. As for comparing the 2 referendums, the vote to join the EEC…
Geospatial search for Wikidata Query Service
Geospatial search is up and running for the Wikidata Query Service! This allows you to search for items with coordinates that are located within a certain radius or within a bounding box. Along side the the map that can be used to display results for the query service this really is a great tool for…
Wikidata Map May 2016 (Belarus & Uganda)
I originally posted about the Wikidata maps back in early 2015 and have followed up with a few posts since looking at interesting developments. This is another one of those posts covering the changes since the last post, so late 2015, to now, May 2016. The new maps look very similar to the naked eye and…
Using Chrome Extension Generator for the first time
Chrome Extension Generator by yeoman is an npm package that can be used to very easily scaffold out a Chrome extension. Over the past year I have poked and prodded at a few chrome extensions, and ended up publishing one to display download counts on GitHub. I highly recommend this generator, it creates everything you need out…
sMite
sMite stands for ‘simple Mite’, which to most people still means nothing at all. Mite is a time tracking web service, and depending on how companies make use of it things can become more complicated than they should be. smite is how I tried to tackle this complexity in less than 8 hours!
Refactoring around WatchedItem in MediaWiki
The refactoring started as part of [RFC] Expiring watch list entries. After an initial draft patch was made touching all of the necessary areas it was decided refactoring first would be a good idea as the change initially spanned many files. It is always good to do things properly ® instead of pushing forward in…