I recently discovered the Wikimedia Grafana instance. After poking it for a little while here are some slightly interesting graphs that I managed to extract.
addshore
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 a special page on a MediaWiki site easy, and also easily enable things such as sorting.
The code interacts with the database and gets a ResultWrapper object, and the Pager uses the numRows(), seek() and fetchObject() methods, all of which I thought would be incredibly simple to mock.
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 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
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
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
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