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 rather easy.
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 at the beginning of January instead of the end. The event format changed slightly compared with the previous year and also included a 3rd day of general discussion and hacking in the WMF offices. Many thanks to everyone that helped to organise the event!
I have an extremely long list of things todo that spawned from discussions at the summit, but as a summary of what happened below are some of the more notable scheduled discussion moments:
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 The subscriber has been replaced by retry middleware of which I was provided an extracted example.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 library.
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 … Read more
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 fix can have such a big impact!
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 post I try to explain things as basically as possible. Enjoy!
Myanmar coordinates on Wikidata by Lockal & Widar
In a recent blog post I showed the amazing apparent effect that Wikimania’s location had on the coordinate location data in Mexico on Wikidata. A comment on the post by Finn Årup Nielsen pointed out a massive increase in data in the Myanmar (Burma). I had previously spotted this increase but chosen not to mention it in the post. But now after a quick look at some items and edit histories I have found who we have to thank!
The increase in geo coordinate information around the region can clearly be seen in the image above. As with the Mexico comparison this shows the difference between June and October 2015.
MediaWiki CRAP – The worst of it
I don’t mean Mediawiki is crap! The Change Risk Anti-Patterns (CRAP) Index is calculated based on the cyclomatic complexity and code coverage of a unit of code. Complex code and untested code will have a higher CRAP index compared with simple well tested code. Over the last 2 years I have been tracking the CRAP index of some of Mediawikis more complex classes as reported by the automatic coverage reports, and this is a simple summary of what has been happening.
Impact of Wikimania Mexico 2015 on Wikidata
Recently Wikidata celebrated its third birthday. For the occasion I ran the map generation script that I have talked about before again to see what had changed in the geo coordinate landscape of Wikidata! I found, well, Mexico blossomed! The image to the left is from June 2015, the right October 2015 and Wikimania was … Read more