addshore

Letting a Joomla component assign View Levels to Users

June 9, 2019June 28, 2015 by addshore

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 … Read more

Review of the big Interwiki link migration

May 17, 2020June 13, 2015 by addshore

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 all the various language editions of Wikipedia.

On 14 January 2013, the Hungarian Wikipedia became the first to enable the provision of interlanguage links via Wikidata. This functionality was slowly enabled on more sites until it was enabled on all Wikipedias on the 6th March.

The side bar that these interlanguage links are used to generate can be seen to the right.

Wikidata Map – 19 months on

July 8, 2023June 4, 2015 by addshore

This entry is part 4 of 17 in the series Wikidata Map

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 … Read more

MassAction Mediawiki extension

June 9, 2019May 31, 2015 by addshore

2019 EDIT: This extension has been archived as I didn’t actually maintain it.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 … Read more

DDoS of Orain

May 17, 2020May 30, 2015 by addshore

During May of 2015 Orain was the target of a DDoS attack. The attack ended up lasting roughly 9 days and bringing the service to its knees repeatedly. The ‘official’ timeline of events and write up can be found here. Below I will discuss why the details of the DDoS as well as how it … Read more

Wikimedia Hackathon 2015 (Lyon)

August 10, 2019May 30, 2015 by addshore

This years Wikimedia Hackathon was located in Lyon, France at Valpré-Lyon between the 23rd and 25th of May.

The hotel (Valpre-Lyon) was absolutely beautiful with large grass areas, great architecture and a place for you weather you wanted to have a large or small discussion, sit quietly or sit outside. As well as Pétanque, table tennis was also available as well as plenty of people to meet!

I planned on primarily hacking on my MassAction extension along with one of two others but as at any hackathon I got massively distracted talking to people and working on other projects.

Silicon Milkroundabout 9

May 17, 2020May 11, 2015 by addshore

Silicon Milkroundabout is a job fair for the UK tech start-up community.

The 9th event was held on 9 and 10 May 2015 in London with over 200 companies attending.

I attended the 9th event and had a great time, below are some of the highlights!

Ed Miliband’s face and Wikipedia

August 10, 2019May 7, 2015 by addshore

“David Cameron’s Wikipedia page has been hacked as the nation goes to the polls on election day.” — Belfast Telegraph

Well, no, not exactly.

Edits to the UK MP Links and United Kingdom elections templates to name but a few caused a large version of Ed Miliband’s face to appear on over 660 pages relating to the 2015 UK election saying “VOTE LABOUR” today. A full list of the pages affected can be found here and here.

Redirects on Wikidata

May 17, 2020April 14, 2015 by addshore

Redirects in Wikidata are basically the same as redirects on normal wiki pages. However, they have a slightly different meaning and intention.

The main reason why we need redirects is because we want to provide stable identifiers.

The merging of two items has been a common place task since Wikidata gain momentum as often two different people or bots create items representing the same topic or concept, thus the data from one needs to be moved into the other and the empty item removed.

The problem with this is that removing the empty item of course means that one of the two identifiers no longer points to the topic or concept that is represents. This is therefore not a stable identifier..

Browser extension showing blocked sites in searches

May 17, 2020April 13, 2015 by addshore

So last night I took another look at the ever-increasing list of domains that are blocked, due to various court orders, by various ISPs in the UK.

A first look

My first port of call was Wikipedia which has an article titled ‘List of websites blocked in the United Kingdom‘. Now this list, although referenced, doesn’t really contain all domains that are blocked. Luckily the article does include various other links.

From the Wikipedia article I then found the wiki of 451unavailable.org.uk which lists all current UK blocking orders. There is a wiki page for each blocking order, for example UK/temp plixid which lists 17 sites. Again each of these pages contains lots of links, and the main set of links here are to check which ISPs are currently blocking the given domain.

This brings us to blocked.org.uk.