it's a blog
So, biggest turnout at a UK referendum with 72.2%, we have only had 3 though. It was so close, 27.8% didn’t vote and thus 34.7% of the UK population wanted to remain and 37.5% wanted to leave. The pie chart really emphases this. As for comparing the 2 referendums, the vote to join the EEC … Read more
Geospatial search is up and running for the Wikidata Query Service! This allows you to search for items with coordinates that are located within a certain radius or within a bounding box.
Along side the the map that can be used to display results for the query service this really is a great tool for quickly visualizing coverage.
I originally posted about the Wikidata maps back in early 2015 and have followed up with a few posts since looking at interesting developments. This is another one of those posts covering the changes since the last post, so late 2015, to now, May 2016.
The new maps look very similar to the naked eye and the new ‘big’ map can be seen below.
So while at the 2016 Wikimedia Hackathon in Jerusalem I teamed up with @valhallasw to generate some diffs of these maps, in a slightly more programatic way to my posts following up the 2015 Wikimania!
Chrome Extension Generator
by yeoman is an npm package that can be used to very easily scaffold out a Chrome extension. Over the past year I have poked and prodded at a few chrome extensions, and ended up publishing one to display download counts on GitHub. I highly recommend this generator, it creates everything you need out of the box and also enables easy set-up of permissions, actions as well as auto rebuild and reload into Chrome for testing.
The refactoring started as part of [RFC] Expiring watch list entries. After an initial draft patch was made touching all of the necessary areas it was decided refactoring first would be a good idea as the change initially spanned many files. It is always good to do things properly ® instead of pushing forward in a hacky way increasing technical debt.
The idea of a WatchedItemStore was created that would remove lots of logic from the WatchedItem class as well as other watchlist database related code that was dotted around the code base such as in API modules and special pages.
The main patches can be seen here.
A few weeks ago I was blessed with a new Lenovo ThinkPad T460 to replace my old and very beaten up HP Pavilion DV6-3180EA. This also meant an upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 that I have been putting off for some time. Here are my first impressions of both the T460 and Windows 10.
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 and aliases) as well as data about the language distribution of the active community.
For reference the dashboard used are:
All data below was retrieved on 1 February 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 … Read more
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 research at the beginning of development I decided to ignore other methods of developing a component and this is what I ended up coming up with.