Language usage on Wikidata
Wikidata is a multilingual project, but due to the size of the project it is hard to get a view on the usage of languages. For some time now the Wikidata dashboards have existed on the Wikimedia grafana install. These dashboards contain data about the language content of the data model by looking at terms (labels, descriptions…
The break in Wikidata edits on 28 Jan 2016
On the 28th of January 2016 all Wikimedia MediaWiki APIs had 2 short outages. The outage is documented on Wikitech here. The outage didn’t have much of an impact on most projects hosted by Wikimedia. However due to most Wikidata editing happening through the API, even when using the UI, the project basically stopped for roughly…
My Joomla Component development workflow
My first and currently only Joomla component development was for the SWA UK website. The component manages memberships, events, tickets, results and more and is a rewrite of a previous component for Joomla 1. But in this post lets ignore what the component does and instead concentrate the development workflow that is used. After lots of…
Building applications around Wikidata (a beer example)
Wikidata provides free and open access to entities representing real world concepts. Of course Wikidata is not meant to contain every kind of data, for example beer reviews or product reviews would probably never make it into Wikidata items. However creating an app that is powered by Wikidata & Wikibase to contain beer reviews should be…
Mediawiki Developer Summit 2016
The Wikimedia Developer Summit is an event with an emphasis on the evolution of the MediaWiki architecture and the Wikimedia Engineering goals for 2016. Last year the event was called the MediaWiki Developer Summit. As with last year the event took place in the Mission Bay Center, San Francisco, California. The event was slightly earlier this year, positioned…
Wikidata references from Microdata
Recently some articles appeared on the English Wikipedia Signpost about Wikidata (1, 2, 3). Reading these articles, especially the second and third, pushed me to try to make a dent in the ‘problem’ of references on Wikidata. It turns out that this is actually not that hard!
Guzzle 6 retry middleware
Recently I switched from using Guzzle 5 to Guzzle 6 in my mediawiki-api-base PHP library. Everything went very smoothly except for there being no compatible version of the retry-subscriber that I had previously used. The subscriber has been replaced by retry middleware of which I was provided an extracted example. In this post I cover my implementation for the…
mediawiki-api-base 2.0.0
Roughly a year and a half ago I started writing a collection of PHP libraries to make interaction with the Mediawiki API and extension APIs super easy. The base library has just made it to 2.0.0! The new release really only uses the new version of the Guzzle HTTP library which makes use of PSR-7 and adds…
Reducing packet count to Statsd using Mediawiki
Recently I have been spending lots of time looking at the Wikimedia graphite set-up due to working on Grafana dashboards. In exchange for what some people had been doing for me I decided to take a quick look down the list of open Graphite tickets and found T116031. Sometimes it is great when such a small…
Submitting a patch to Mediawiki on Gerrit
I remember when I first submitted a patch to Mediawiki on Gerrit. It was a +12 -4 line patch and it probably took me at least half a day to figure everything out and get my change up! There is a tutorial on mediawiki.org but it is far too wordy and over complicated. In this…