Verifying Wikimedia user page links on Mastodon
While reviewing the ongoings of the 2023 Wikimedia hackathon, I learned about the RealMe MediaWiki extension, which is already deployed to Wikimedia sites and allows verification of URLs that appear on user pages within other software or platforms, such as Mastodon. Link verification for dummies Imagine you want to show that your online profiles, like…
Wikidata maxlag, via the ApiMaxLagInfo hook
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…
Small commits
There are many blog posts and articles out there about making small git commits. I’m sure most people (including me) bring up the same few topics around why small commits are good and why we should all probably be making smaller commits. In this post, I’ll look at some of the key topics from my…
Profiling a Wikibase item creation on test.wikidata.org
Today I was in a Wikibase Stakeholder group call, and one of the discussions was around Wikibase importing speed, data loading, and the APIs. My previous blog post covering what happens when you make a new Wikibase item was raised, and we also got onto the topic of profiling. So here comes another post looking…
Laravel 8 with Wikimedia OAuth login
I recently wrote a little app called wikicrowd (blog post to follow) using Laravel and MediaWiki / Wikimedia authentication. It certainly wasn’t entirely out of the box, and the existing docs still need some tweaking. This post reflects the steps I went through to set this app up, and it should only take a few…
SMWCon 2021, Development environments using containers
SMWCon 2021 is happening as I write this post. I was invited to give a short talk as part of a MediaWiki and Docker workshop organized by Cindy Cicalese on day 2. As I am writing a month of blog posts I’m going to turn my slides into a more digestible and searchable online blog…
Tech Lead Digest – Q3/4 2021
It’s time for the 5th instalment of my tech lead digest posts. I switched to monthly for 2 months, but decided to back down to quarterlyish. You can find the other digests by checking out the series. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑Wikidata & Wikibase The biggest event of note in the past months was WikidataCon 2021 which took place…
mediawiki-docker-dev in mwcli
The original mediawiki-docker-dev environment was created by accident and without much design back in 2017. In 2020 I started working on a new branch with some intentional design and quite liked the direction. And now finally, the all of the mediawiki-docker-dev functionality exists in a new home, with more intentional design, tests, stability, releases and…
addwiki php libraries 3.0.0
Back in 2014 I wrote a small collection of PHP libraries, releasing 2.0.0 of the base library in 2015 for interacting with MediaWiki and Wikibase. My goal back then was to create a stable base that PHP bot frameworks could be built on, while also experimenting with some framework like features in surrounding libraries. And…
What happens in Wikibase when you make a new Item?
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…