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  • 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 […]

  • Altering a Gerrit change (git 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 […]

  • Small commits

    There are many blog posts and articles out there about making small git commits. I’m sure most people (including me) bring up the same few topics around why small commits are good and why we should all probably be making smaller commits. In this post, I’ll look at some of the key topics from my […]

  • Wikibase a history

    I have had the pleasure of being part of the Wikibase journey one way or another since 2013 when I first joined Wikimedia Germany to work on Wikidata. That long-running relation to the project should put me in a fairly good position to give a high-level overview of the history, from both a technical and […]

  • Profiling a Wikibase item creation on test.wikidata.org

    Today I was in a Wikibase Stakeholder group call, and one of the discussions was around Wikibase importing speed, data loading, and the APIs. My previous blog post covering what happens when you make a new Wikibase item was raised, and we also got onto the topic of profiling. So here comes another post looking […]