blogging

Fixing Wikimedia Commons thumbnail sized (on my blog)

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As AI crawling and training continues to stress the web, the Wikimedia foundation continues to change various things in their edge rules and internal processes. Recently the Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026 was likely one of the largest technical events organized after some of the new rate limits came into play, and it wasn’t without issue at the event (though we got by).

Image thumbnails are a bit of a different story, and the backend service has been restricted to the number of thumbnail sizes that can be generated, stored and served, with some new defaults put in place.

Current standard sizes in Wikimedia production: 20px, 40px, 60px, 120px, 250px, 330px, 500px, 960px, 1280px, 1920px, 3840px

Common thumbnail sizes

If you want to read some of the research and decisions that went into it, take a look at T211661#8377883 and other linked tickets.

Anyway, these changes lead to some posts on my blog, which used now non supported thumbnail sizes to fail to load said thumbnails.

Instead of getting the image (or any image at all), the requests is instead served with an error page from the edge, with a link for further information, which also happens to be a 429 response. Though it appears there are no headers around retrying the request.

Error

Use thumbnail steps listed on https://w.wiki/GHai. Please contact noc@wikimedia.org for further information (a765913)

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2022 Year Review

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This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series Year Reviews

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 technology, but far more nautical miles traveled.

(the GPS track below is mostly accurate, but also has some odd artifact in it…)

Blogging (and Boating)

The trip has resulted in some alternative blogging about sailboats, and much of which has been on an entirely separate blog https://sailinghannahpenn.co.uk.

In fact, here is a picture of Hannah Penn from last week after hauling out of the water in Guadeloupe for form extra painting.

There is always lots to be doing while sailing, and second to sailing comes enjoyment. I have also been working 10h per week for Wikimedia Deutschland, and altogether this leaves sparse gaps for other things on the side like blogs.

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2020 Year Review

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This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series Year Reviews

Another year is up, and what a year it has been. I finally open sourced wbstack, I complained about fake news, looked at Minecraft mods and took a look at how COVID-19 was affecting Wikipedia page views.

I make this post mainly for me to be able to look back at each year in a small snapshot. You can find similar posts for previous years in 2019, 2018 and 2017.

Currently I generate this post in a very manual way, sifting through data from WordPress stats, Twitter Analytics and my Github user page. Maybe I should change that for next year!

Blogging

On the whole this blog continues to grow year on year, both in terms of content and readers.

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