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…
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…
What is Wikibase Cloud (according to Bing AI)
A few days ago I wrote a post called What is Wikibase Cloud (according to ChatGPT). Now I also have access to the new Bing AI chatbot preview, so time to put it to the same test. This is one of the first times I’m going to have purposefully used Bing since its launch! As…
What is Wikibase Cloud (according to ChatGPT)
In this post, I’ll be asking ChatGPT a bunch of questions about Wikibase Cloud. mainly to see how accurate it manages to be, and how helpful the information is. Messages to Chat GPT will be in bold, things that are wrong, in red, and things that are right in green. Firstly, “What is Chat GPT?“…
Wikimedia Enterprise: A first look
Wikimedia Enterprise is a new (now 1-year-old) service and offered by the Wikimedia Foundation, via Wikimedia, LLC. This is a wholly-owned LLC that provides opt-in services for third-party content reuse, delivered via API services. In essence, this means that Wikimedia Enterprise is an optional product that third parties can choose to use that repackages data from within…
A first Wikidata query service JNL file for public use
Back in 2019 I wrote a blog post called Your own Wikidata Query Service, with no limits which documented loading a Wikidata TTL dump into your own Blazegraph instance running within Google cloud, a near 2 week process. I ended that post speculating that part 2 might be using a “pre-generated Blazegraph journal file to…
Wikidata query service updater evolution
The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) sits in front of Wikidata and provides access to query its data via a SPARQL API. The query service itself is built on top of Blazegraph, but in many regards is very similar to any other triple store that provides a SPARQL API. In the early days of the query…
WikiCrowd at 50k answers
In January 2022 I published a new Wikimedia tool called WikiCrowd. This tool allows people to answer simple questions to contribute edits to Wikimedia projects such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. It’s designed to be able to deal with a wide variety of questions, but due to time constraints, the extent of the current questions…