Reflection on filling a new Wikidata item
A few days ago I watched a Twitch stream by Molly / GorillaWarfare where they created the Louis W. Roberts English Wikipedia page. I decided to follow along and populate the matching Wikidata item (Q109662645) with as much information as I could from the same references that were being found for the Wikipedia article. Along…
Tech Lead Digest – August 2021
Welcome to the 4th instalment of my Wikidata & Wikibase Tech lead Digest for August 2021. For previous instalments see Q1, Q2 & July. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑Wikidata & Wikibase The Wikidata Query Builder has been deployed. The Wikidata Query Builder provides a visual interface for building a simple Wikidata query. It is ideal for users with little…
Tech Lead Digest – July 2021
Welcome to the third installment of my tech lead digest digest. In order to allow myself some extra space to write, and also to provide these public updates and thoughts on a more regular basis, this is now becoming a monthly digest. I’m going to try to incorporate some of the ongoings from other Wikidata…
A first look at Wikidata through Github Copilot
I was added to the Github Copilot preview in the past days, and the first thing I tested out was code suggestions around Wikidata. Copilot allows you to start writing code, and have a model trained on public Github code suggest block of code that you might want to use. For example, if you start…
Tackling Technical Debt, big and small, in Wikidata and Wikibase
If you’re working with legacy code, chances are you’ve inherited some technical debt. Infact, if you’re working with code, chances you’re already surrounded by technical debt of varying sizes, at least by some measures. Some believe that technical debt is something to be avoided, and that technical debt that exists is a dirty secret that…
Tech Lead Digest – Q2 2021
This is the second installment of my tech lead digest digest with my tech lead hat on for the Wikidata Wikibase team. This is a digest of my internal digest emails. These contain lots of links to reading, podcasts and general goings on that could be useful to a wider audience. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑Wikidata & Wikibase Federated…
Tech Lead Digest – Q1 2021
At some point last year I started sending a weekly internal digest to the Wikidata Wikibase team with my tech lead hat on. The emails are internal only but contain lots of links to reading, podcasts and general goings on that could be useful to everyone. So here is my first Wikidata Wikibase tech lead…
WBStack setting changes, Federated properties, Wikidata entity mapping & more
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…
Twitter bot powered by Github Actions (WikidataMeter)
Recently 2 new Twitter bots appeared in my feed, fullyjabbed & fullyjabbedUK, created by iamdanw and powered entirely by Github Actions (code). I have been thinking about writing a Twitter bot for some time and decided to copy this pattern running a cron based Twitter bot on Github Actions, with an added bit of free…
Testing WDQS Blazegraph data load performance
Toward the end of 2020 I spent some time blackbox testing data load times for WDQS and Blazegraph to try and find out which possible setting tweaks might make things faster. I didn’t come to any major conclusions as part of this effort but will write up the approach and data nonetheless incase it is…