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…
WBStack Infrastructure
WBStack is a platform allowing shared scalable hosting of Wikibase and surrounding services. A year ago I made an initial post covering the state of WBStack infrastructure. Since then some things have changed, and I have also had more time to create a clear diagram. So it is time for the 2021 edition. WBStack currently…
mediawiki-docker-dev v1 rewrite
Back in 2017 at the Wikimedia Hackathon, I played around with Docker and docker-compose in relation to MediaWiki and testing with multiple setups at once while developing, meaning multiple PHP versions, web servers and databases. My original slides can still be found here. Since then mediawiki-docker-dev evolved into less of a testing system and more…
WBStack 2020 Update 1
WBStack has now been up and running for 6 months. During that time it has helped 70 people create 178 MediaWiki installs running Wikibase, a SPARQL query service and quickstatements, all at the click of a button, with a total of around 200,000 edits across all sites. The most active site is currently virus-taxonomy.wiki.opencura.com which…
WBStack Infrastructure (2020)
UPDATE: You can find an up to date 2021 version of this post here. WBStack currently runs on a Google Cloud Kubernetes cluster made up of 2 virtual machines, one e2-medium and one e2-standard-2. This adds up to a current total of 4 vCPUs and 12GB of memory. No Google specific services make up any…
wikibase-docker, Mediawiki & Wikibase update
Today on the Wikibase Community User Group Telegram chat I noticed some people discussing issues with upgrading Mediawiki and Wikibase using the docker images provided for Wikibase. As the wikibase-registry is currently only running Mediawiki 1.30 I should probably update it to 1.31, which is the next long term stable release. This blog post was…
Customizing Wikibase config in the docker-compose example
2019 Edit: If you want to use a Dockerfile and custom image take a look a here. Just over a month ago I setup the Wikibase registry project on Wikimedia Cloud VPS using the docker-compose example provided by Wikibase docker images. The Wikibase registry is the first Wikibase install that I control that uses the…