Google Cloud Storage upload with s3cmd
I recently had to upload a large (1TB) file from a Wikimedia server into a Google Cloud Storage bucket. gsutil was not available to me, but s3cmd was. So here is a little how to post for uploading to a Google Cloud Storage bucket using the S3 API and s3cmd. S3cmd is a free command line…
Hunting YouTube Crypto Scams
Back in April 2022 I got annoyed by how prevalent cryptocurrency scams were still on YouTube years after I had first seen them. I spent a few minutes going through the scams that I easily found with a search for live streams including either “ETH” to “BTC” and reporting them via the YouTube flag /…
Sailing: Month 1
I’m writing a lot of content over on sailinghannahpenn.co.uk, and I want to share some of that here, linking to most of the posts and adding a little more. We actually wrote most of the initial blog posts in Month 1, as we had already set off before creating the blog. I’m looking forward to…
A digital nomad boat experience
I have always been somewhat of a digital nomad in my working life, an opportunity that mainly exists due to my very flexible job as a software engineer at Wikimedia Germany. Over the years I have been primarily based in the UK but have travelled with work to California, South Africa, Israel and many places…
Modifying default width of WordPress pages using new themes like Blockbase
I switched to the Blockbase WordPress theme a few weeks ago as it supports full-site editing, which brings blocks to all parts of your site rather than just posts and pages. I found the content to be quite narrow out of the box at 620px. I really wanted the default view for folks with wider…
Wikidata query service updater evolution
The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) sits in front of Wikidata and provides access to query its data via a SPARQL API. The query service itself is built on top of Blazegraph, but in many regards is very similar to any other triple store that provides a SPARQL API. In the early days of the query…
Infrastructure as Code for wbstack deployments
For most of its life wbstack was a mostly one-man operation. This certainly sped up the decision making process around features, requests, communication and prioritization, I also had to maintain a complex and young project supporting hundreds of sites on the side of my regular 8 hour day job. In order to ensure that I’d…
WikiCrowd at 50k answers
In January 2022 I published a new Wikimedia tool called WikiCrowd. This tool allows people to answer simple questions to contribute edits to Wikimedia projects such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. It’s designed to be able to deal with a wide variety of questions, but due to time constraints, the extent of the current questions…
Wikidata maxlag, via the ApiMaxLagInfo hook
Wikidata tinkers with the concept of maxlag that has existed in MediaWiki for some years in order to slow automated editing at times of lag in various systems. Here you will find a little introduction to MediaWiki maxlag, and the ways that Wikidata hooks into the value, altering it for its needs. As you can…
Altering a Gerrit change (git-review workflow)
I don’t use git-review for Gerrit interactions. This is primarily because back in 2012/2013 I couldn’t get git-review installed, and someone presented me with an alternative that worked. Years later I realized that this was actually the documented way of pushing changes to Gerrit. As a little introduction to what this workflow looks, and a…