Wikidata, instance of and subclass of through time (P31 & P279)
Last month I looked at all Wikimedia Commons revisions and managed to generate some data and graphs for the usage of depicts statements since they were introduced on the project. This month, I have applied the same analysis on Wikidata but looking at instance of and subclasses of items. A slightly bigger data set, however…
What was Wikibase “Federated Properties”
The “Federated Properties” feature allows / allowed a local Wikibase instance to access and utilise properties directly from a remote Wikibase, primarily Wikidata. Its primary purpose is to enable partial federation between a local Wikibase and Wikidata, broadening the base of available data without needing to create a property set from scratch. I’m split between…
Wikimedia Commons Depicts statements over time
Wikimedia Commons now uses Structured Data on Commons (SDC) to make media information multilingual and machine-readable. A core part of SDC is the ‘depicts’ statement (P180), which identifies items clearly visible in a file. Depicts statements are crucial for MediaSearch, enabling it to find relevant results in any language by using Wikidata labels, as well…
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…
Vuetify app with Wikimedia OAuth login
Do you often find yourself wanting to make a basic (or complex) web app that is client side only and will log users into Wikimedia sites with ease? Me to! I have been trying this every year or so, and it’s gradually been getting easier. This year it only took me a couple of to…
Visualizing Wikibase ecosystem, using wikibase.world
In October last year, I wrote a post starting to visualize the connections between Wikibases in the ecosystem that had been found and collected on wikibase.world thanks to my bot that I occasionally run. That post made use of the query service visualizations, and in this post I’ll take the visualizations a step further, making…
mwcli (a MediaWiki focused command line tool targeting developers) over the years
mcwli includes the third of so generation of “developer environments” that I have made for MediaWiki over the years. You can see the backstory in this earlier post. Since the early days of 2022, there has been optional metric collection included within the mwcli tool. This metric collection simply collects what command you run, and…
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…
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…
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…