it's a blog
addshore 2019 EDIT: This extension has been archived as I didn’t actually maintain it.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
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
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!
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!
“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 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..
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.
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 was the Wikidata map created by Denny Vrandečić which came after the introduction of coordinate locations to Wikidata.
Below you can see a GIF showing the additions of the coordinate location property to Wikidata items over roughly the first 40 days of enabling the coordinates data type.
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 every other easy to use cloud storage service out there I jumped on the deal (which was even cheaper when committing to a whole year) and started using it for my backups and data archives.
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 include: