it's a blog
Wikidata tinkers with the concept of maxlag that has existed in MediaWiki for some years in order to slow automated editing at times of lag in various systems.
Here you will find a little introduction to MediaWiki maxlag, and the ways that Wikidata hooks into the value, altering it for its needs.
As you can see above, a high maxlag can cause automated editing to reduce or stop on wikidata.org
A recent Wikibase email list post on the topic of Wikibase and bulk imports caused me to write up a mostly human readable version of what happens, in what order, and when, for Wikibase action API edits, for the specific case of item creation.
There are a fair few areas that could be improved and optimized for a bulk import use case in the existing APIs and code. Some of which are actively being worked on today (T285987). Some of which are on the roadmap, such as the new REST APIs for Wikibase. And others which are out there, waiting to be considered.
This post is is written looking at Wikibase and MediaWiki 1.36 with links to Github for code references. Same areas may be glossed over or even slightly inaccurate, so take everything here with a pinch of salt.
Reach out to me on Twitter if you have questions or fancy another deep dive.
The title is a little wordy, but I hope you get the gist. I just spent 10 minutes staring at some data on a Grafana dashboard, comparing it with some other data, and finding the numbers didn’t add up. Here is the story in case it catches you out.
The dashboard in question is the Wikidata Edits dashboard hosted on the Wikimedia Grafana instance that is public for all to see. The top of the dashboard features a panel that shows the total number of edits on Wikidata in the past 7 days. The rest of the dashboard breaks these edits down further, including another general edits panel on the left of the second row.
Below you will find an internal WMDE presentation covering the general area of WMDE Metric & Data Gatherings from 2016. This presentation follows on from the initial introduction to engineering analytics activities. The presentation skims through: WMDE Grafana dashboards The Wikimedia Analytics landscape Grafana & graphite Hadoop, Kafka, Hive & Oozie EventLogging, Mysql replicas & … Read more
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
This is an internal WMDE presentation given at the start of “metric driven development” for the WMDE & Wikidata dev teams. The presentation is pretty bare bones but it provides a general overview of the plan and links to the current state of things. The main area of interest from the presentation is the … Read more
I recently discovered the Wikimedia Grafana instance. After poking it for a little while here are some slightly interesting graphs that I managed to extract.