What was Wikibase “Federated Properties”
The “Federated Properties” feature allows / allowed a local Wikibase instance to access and utilise properties directly from a remote Wikibase, primarily Wikidata. Its primary purpose is to enable partial federation between a local Wikibase and Wikidata, broadening the base of available data without needing to create a property set from scratch. I’m split between…
2 years of wikibase.cloud by WMDE
It’s been somewhere between 2 and 3 years since WMDE took over WBStack, turned it into wikibase.cloud. During this time, my techy focus has slowly shifted away from the world of Wikibase, though I still enjoy following along and working on other Wikimedia areas. Here I will ramble on about what I saw in terms…
2022 Year Review
I’ve been doing year reviews since 2017 under the #year-review tag, and 2022 is no different. Expect I have been living aboard a sailboat traveling the world for the latter half of the year. So this year is probably going to look a little different in retrospect, including far less time coding and writing about…
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…
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…
WBStack close and migration
The time is approaching for the end of life of the WBStack alpha platform (don’t worry, it’s still some months away, and there is a migration path to a new platform etc :)). In this post you’ll find an update on the current state of WBStack, another introduction to Wikibase.Cloud, some rough dates and connections…
Pre-launch Announcement of Wikibase.Cloud [WikidataCon Writeup]
WikidataCon 2021 was in October 2021, and one of the sessions that I spoke in was a “Pre-launch Announcement and Preview of Wikibase.Cloud”. The recording is now up on YouTube, and below you’ll find a write-up summary of what was said. You can also find: Original conference schedule entry Etherpad notes for the lightning talk…
WBStack in 2021 and the future
2021 is nearly over, WBStack is over 2 years old (initially announced back in 2019), and has continued to grow. The future is bright with wikibase.cloud looking to be launched by Wikimedia Deutschland in the new year (announced at WikidataCon 2021), and as a result, the code under the surface has had the most eyes…
Delete all Github releases, using the Github cli
If you are like me, at some point while developing projects on Github you will have started and stopped using releases, opting to switch back to only creating tags. Github defaults leave you in a bit of an awkward position here where the “Releases” section in the side bar will continue to show your old…
WBStack setting changes, Federated properties, Wikidata entity mapping & more
During the first 3 months of 2021, some Wikimedia Deutschland engineers, from the Wikidata / Wikibase team, spent some time working on WBStack as part of an effort to explore the WBaaS (Wikibase as a service) topic during the year, as outlined by the development plan. We want to make it easier for non-Wikimedia projects…