WikiCrowd for 2025
I wrote the first version of WikiCrowd back in 2022 and haven’t really iterated on it much since, beyond adding the odd new set of image categories, and removing features that I decided were not optimum. At the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon however, WikiCrowd came up as both an entertaining little game to show people during…
Wikidata Map in 2024
Another year on from the last generation of the Wikidata map, @tarrow and @outdooracorn spent some time in preparation for the Wikidata birthday to prepare a new map (see git commits). The latest images have already been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and appear in the Wikidata map commons gallery. In this post, I’ll have a…
Visualizing Wikibase connections, using wikibase.world queries
Over the past week I have spent some time writing some code to start running a little bot on the wikibase.world project, aimed at expanding the number of Wikibases that are collected there, and automating collection of some of the data that can easily be automated. Over the past week, the bot has imported 650…
2 years of wikibase.cloud by WMDE
It’s been somewhere between 2 and 3 years since WMDE took over WBStack, turned it into wikibase.cloud. During this time, my techy focus has slowly shifted away from the world of Wikibase, though I still enjoy following along and working on other Wikimedia areas. Here I will ramble on about what I saw in terms…
Wikibase: What is an entity?
I left the Wikidata and Wikibase teams roughly a year ago, and at the time there were some long and deep discussions going on inside the team trying to define what an entity was, and what should and should not be an entity. At the recent Hackathon in Tallinn, this topic resurfaced to me, as…
Review & Removal of Wikidata query service Blazegraph JNL on Cloudflare R2
Back in August, I uploaded a new Wikidata query service Blazegraph JNL file to both Cloudflare and the Internet Archive. 4 months on, it is time for me to remove the R2 version of this file, which is costing me around 18 USD per month to store, and fall back to the Internet Archive version…
COVID-19 Wikipedia pageview spikes, 2019-2022
Back in 2019 at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, Wikipedia saw large spikes in page views on COVID-19 related topics while people here hunting for information. I briefly looked at some of the spikes in March 2020 using the easy-to-use pageview tool for Wikimedia sites. But the problem with viewing the spikes through this…
Wikidata query service Blazegraph JNL file on Cloudflare R2 and Internet Archive
At the end of 2022, I published a Blazegraph JNL file for Wikidata in a Google Cloud bucket for 1 month for folks to download and determine if it was useful. Thanks to Arno from weblyzard, inflatador from the WMF search platform team, and Mark from the Internet Archive for the recent conversations around this…
Creating properties with statements using Wikidata Integrator
Wikidata Integrator is a Python library that simplifies data integration from Wikidata (and other Wikibases). It is written in Python, is focused on Wikibase concepts (as opposed to some libraries which are MediaWiki focused) and has a user-friendly interface. I’m currently working on a demo Wikibase and decided to bring all of the data into…
Wikidata Map in 2023
It’s been 2 years since the 2021 Wikidata map. Yesterday I was sitting in the WMDE office and Lydia raised the point that we hadn’t made a map in quite some time (T331124). Maps used to try to generate in a somewhat automated fashion, but the process was rewritten in 2021 and still needs to…