Wikidata map visualizations
In 2013 and 2014 I made a few presentations to various groups of people talking about Wikidata. When creating those presentations I used as many graphical representations of the data in Wikidata as possible to try and give people an clearer picture of what is already stored. One of the best visualisations at the time…
My issues with the MediaFire desktop app
MediaFire (read about me on wikipedia) is a file hosting, file synchronization, and cloud storage service. MediaFire was first founded in 2006 but in 2014 it did something that really caught my eye. They increased their baseline storage service from 100GB to 1TB and reduced the price down to just $2.50 a month. With the price beating…
Quick overview of Orain
Orain is a community-driven, not-for-profit wiki network that I help to maintain. It runs Mediawiki and has been around for the past couple of years. Over the years it has been hosted on VPSs from multiple different providers and its technical layout has changed massively from each provider. Below I will try to summaries it’s current layout! This will…
Github release download count – Chrome Extension
GitHub tracks the number of downloads for all assets (files) that are attached to a release, but GitHub currently makes it very hard for users to get at this information. The number of downloads is currently only accessible through the API. I noticed this many months ago when wondering how many people were downloading the new…
The importance of a strict comparison
Now if you have ever come across issues caused by non strict comparisons before then this is going to seem like a piece of cake, but remember, everyone makes mistakes. Strict equality compares two values for equality where the values must also be the same type. Non strict or loose equality compares values while not caring…
Mediawiki Developer Summit 2015
The MediaWiki Developer Summit is an invitation-only event with an emphasis on the evolution of the MediaWiki architecture and the Wikimedia Engineering goals for 2015. It took place on Monday, January 26 and Tuesday, January 27, 2015 in the Mission Bay Center, San Francisco, California. Overall it was very interesting and a lot of good discussion happened. Again…
Wikimania
Wikimania 2014 was a 2000+ person conference, festival, meetup, workshop, hackathon, and celebration, spread over five days in August 2014, preceded and followed by fringe events. Wikimania is the official annual event of the Wikimedia movement, where one can discover all kinds of projects that people are making with wikis and open content, as well…
Wikimania Open Data Weekend
The Open Data Weekend was fringe event to the Wikimania conference this year. It took place in Frobisher Room One at The Barbican Centre in London on the 5 & 6th of July and was well attended. The weekend included: Discussion about how open data, specifically Wikidata, is helping the Wikimedia movement as a whole covering its current integration…
Zürich Wikimedia Hackathon
This year the Wikimedia Hackathon was held in Zürich, Switzerland from the 9th to 11th May 2014. The organization of the event was great, from lanyards and badges that included a USB memory stick to a city map and a ticket for public transport, Wikimedia Switzerland had prepared fantastic hackathon. More than 150 developers, engineers, sysadmins,…
Spaghetti Open Data
Spaghetti Open Data is made up of a group of Italian citizens interested in the release of public data in open formats, in order to make it easy to access and reuse. Starting in 2010 they have had yearly conferences. I was lucky enough to be invited to their conference this year (SOD14) as the keynote speaker…