Lexeme and MediaInfo, implementing EntityDocument

This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series Wikibase Entities

As we continue the journey, looking at Entity and EntityDocument within Wikibase, another useful thing to look at are the third and fourth widely used (at least within the Wikimedia space) entity types for Wikibase.

Both of these entity types make use of the EntityDocument, with none of the old assumptions baked into the Entity base class that used to exist.

MediaWiki extensions

As these entity types were decoupled from the main body of Wikibase, they were developed as MediaWiki extensions. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikibaseMediaInfo and https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikibaseLexeme

This was the easy choice at the time, and probably still makes perfect sense, as Wikibase itself is a MediaWiki extension, and there is already a common pattern of extensions extending extensions. This ultimately saves some work around coding an extension mechanism, though we should remember that ultimately the Wikibase codebase has free choice when it comes to choose how it can be extended.

Read more

WBStack setting changes, Federated properties, Wikidata entity mapping & more

This entry is part 8 of 12 in the series WBStack

During the first 3 months of 2021, some Wikimedia Deutschland engineers, from the Wikidata / Wikibase team, spent some time working on WBStack as part of an effort to explore the WBaaS (Wikibase as a service) topic during the year, as outlined by the development plan.

We want to make it easier for non-Wikimedia projects to set up Wikibase for the first time and to evaluate the viability of Wikibase as a Service.

Wikibase 2021 Development plan

This has lead to a few new Wikibase features being exposed through the WBStack dashboard for sites that run on the platform. These features are primarily features developed by the Wikibase team in 2020 and 2021. The work also brought some other quality of life improvements for the settings pages.

Here is a quick rundown of what’s new and improved.

Read more