it's a blog
Wikidata.org runs on MediaWiki with the Wikibase extension. But there is more to it than just that. The Wikibase extension itself is split into 3 different sections, being Lib, Repo and Client. There are also 6 other extensions all providing extra functionality to the site and it’s sisters. The extensions are also loaded on a different combination of Clients (such a Wikipedia) and the Repo itself (wikidata.org).
The RevisionSlider is an extension for MediaWiki that has just been deployed on all Wikipedias and other Wikimedia websites as a beta feature. The extension was developed by Wikimedia Germany as part of their focus on technical wishes of the German speaking Wikimedia community. This post will look at the RevisionSliders design, development and use so far.
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.
So it turns out the at() method doesn’t quite do what I had initially thought….
I have recently been working on some tests for the new Newsletter extension for Mediawiki, specifically to test the NewslettterTablePager class. This thing extends the TablePager class in Mediawiki which is designed to make displaying information from a database table on a special page on a MediaWiki site easy, and also easily enable things such as sorting.
The code interacts with the database and gets a ResultWrapper object, and the Pager uses the numRows(), seek() and fetchObject() methods, all of which I thought would be incredibly simple to mock.
GitHub tracks the number of downloads for all assets (files) that are attached to a release, but GitHub currently makes it very hard for users to get at this information. The number of downloads is currently only accessible through the API.
I noticed this many months ago when wondering how many people were downloading the new C++ version of Huggle. At the time I started coming up with some odd little script that I could set running somewhere checking the download counts and updating a static list, I even thought about just uploading the build files to some other site that tracked this information.
A few days ago I took my first look at developing chrome extensions for a referencing tool for Wikidata, and thus today I thought, why not just make an extension for chrome that adds the download counts to the GitHub releases page!