Wikimedia

2025 Year Review

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This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series Year Reviews

Well, I’m still not back on a boat as I was in 2023… Where to start…

Lightbug

I havn’t written a whole lot about Lightbug yet on this blog, but its still been a fun year of new developments at, and I think it’s time to share some of them with pictures ;)

We released small handheld RTK device, with programmable ESP32 onboard, giving high precision accuracy, in a nice small package.

I’v enjoyed seeing how folks have been using these devices, from tracking lane changes in cars, to finding accuract path positions, or traking things around race courses.

You can find the documentaiton to read through on the docs site, a fancy looking marketing booklet on the website or look at some of the code examples for the programmable ESP32 also on the docs site.

Hopfully this year I’ll get to the point of writing my GPS, RTK, phone etc comparison blog post, comparing the tracks recorded from a bunch of different devices to compare accuracy etc.

Given my open source / open data interests, I do wonder if this will end up being useful for the OpenStreetMap community.

Now we also developed and worked on the ZCard device, though this has primarily remained inhouse, or for show and conferences and workshops. So much so, that there isn’t even a picture of one on the Lightbug website yet, but here is one sitting on one of our tshirts bak at MWC earlier this year, where we had a demo application running on it, allowing basic interactions from a web page.

Think of it kind of like a Flipper Zero in a way, but running the same hardware and firmware stack as the rest of the Lightbug devices, at a fraction of the price, focued on developers. Buttons, Lights, Eink screen, but more importantly, cellular connectivity (GSM LTE CAT 1), LORA, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and more.

The primary processor, and high levels SDKs take care of the complexities of connectivity, power management and eink screen renderings, and give you a high level API for interacting the the device in many ways, such as drawing on the screen, communicating over LORA, or connecting to a server to send and receive data.

Wikimedia

Meanwhile, in my non work Wikimedia volunteer time, I have the privilege of attending both Wikimania 2025 in Nairobi, as well as the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025 in Istanbul, Turkey.

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Wikidata Map in 2025

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This entry is part 17 of 17 in the series Wikidata Map

Another year, another map, and another Birthday for Wikidata. Last generated in 2024 by @tarrow and @outdooracorn, this year I have put the work in just ahead of the 13th Wikidata birthday to have a look at what’s changed in terms of items with coordinates this past year on Wikidata.

And here it is!

But really you need to look at the diff between previous years to see what has changed!

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Wikidata, instance of and subclass of through time (P31 & P279)

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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 essentially the same process.

This will enable easy updating, of various pie charts that have been published over the years, such as

In future, this could be easily adapted to show per Wikipedia project graphs, such as those that are currently at Wikidata:Statistics/Wikipedia

Method

The details of the method can be seen in code in my previous post about depicts statements, and this mostly stays the same.

In words:

  • Look at every revision of Wikidata ever
  • Parse the JSON to determine what values there are for P31 and P279 for each revision
  • Find the latest revision of each item in each given month, and thus find the state of all items in that month
  • Plot the data by number of items that are P31 or P279 of each value item

There are some minor defects to this logic currently that could be cleaned up with future iterations:

  • Deleted items will continue being counted, as I don’t consider the point items are deleted
  • Things will be double counted in this data, as 1 item may have multiple P31 and P279 values, and I don’t try to join these into higher level concept at all

We make an OTHER and UNALLOCATED count as part of the final data summarization. OTHER accounts for things that have not made it into the top 20 items by count, and UNALLOCATED means that we didn’t have a P31 or P279 value in the latest revision.

2025

For August 2025 (or at least part way through it), this is the current state of Wikidata per the above method.

You can now find a PNG of this pie chart on Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikidata_P31_%26_P279_analysis_August_2025.png

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What was Wikibase “Federated Properties”

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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 using the present and past tense here, as all of this code still exists within the Wikibase extension, however no one has used it since 2022, and it certainly doesn’t seem to be on the short or medium term (or maybe even long term) roadmaps.

This overview comes from the Wikibase – Federated Properties Phabricator project, which I’ll quote the whole of here for prosperity.

Federated Properties v2 (2021)
An initiative to give users the ability to access remote properties from their local Wikibase and use them in combination with custom local properties. The primary use case is enabling partial federation between a Wikibase and Wikidata. This version of the feature will allow you to:

  • Opt-in to use Wikidata’s properties in addition to your own custom local properties
  • Create and view statements about local entities that contain both local and federated properties
  • Query your Wikibase using both local and federated properties

Federated Properties v1 (2020-2021)
An initiative to give users the ability to access remote properties from their local Wikibase (no local properties were possible in this MVP). This version was launched in the Wikibase Spring Release in May 2021.

As far as I remember, the project died with v2, and I don’t even recall if v2 really saw the light of day outside WMDE internal testing and or hidden testing on wikibase.cloud.

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Wikimedia Commons Depicts statements over time

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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 as having pre precise definition and structure than the existing category structures.

SDC functionalities began to roll out in 2019. Multilingual file captions were introduced early that year, enabling broader accessibility, followed by the ability to add depicts statements directly on file pages and through the UploadWizard.

Although there are numbers floating around showing a general increase in usage of structured data on Commons, there didn’t seem to be any concrete numbers around the growth in use of depicts statements.

I was particularly interested in this, as must tool WikiCrowd is steadily becoming a more and more efficient way of adding these statements en masse. So I decided to see what data I could come up with.

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WikiCrowd for 2025

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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 beers, and also a project similar (ish) to something Daanvr was working on (I think it was Suggestion-Engine-Commons-prototype ?)

Upgrades

During the hackathon, and in the weeks following, WikiCrowd went through quite a number of changes

  • The YAML config files for the pre-calculated depicts statements are now on Commons for all to edit
  • Generation of the questions has been spruced up to stop it breaking as it gets deeper into category trees
  • Generation can now be triggered in the UI, as can deleting pending questions
  • The old one by one image mode was removed, and instead replaced by a grid mode
  • More categories and depict options were added
  • A custom grid view was added, allowing users to specify their own category and or Wikidata item
  • Ability to zoom in on an image being displayed
  • Addition of “levels” of questions
  • Display of Wikidata labels and descriptions in the UI (Making use of the new REST API)

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Vuetify app with Wikimedia OAuth login

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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 get a really nice template web app setup using Vue, Vuetify and a OAuth 2.0 Wikimedia consumer (thanks to the OAuth extension).

Firstly, some links that you’ll find useful:

Starting off with a default Vuetify app install using vite (commit c3edb0f), you’ll end up with a basic web page that just says welcome to Vuetify. You can copy the code in my commit, or just follow the Vuetify instructions.

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Visualizing Wikibase ecosystem, using wikibase.world

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This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Wikibase ecosystem

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 use of IPython notebooks and plotly.

Previously I reported the total number of Wikibases tracked in wikibase.world being around 784, with around 755 being active (however I didn’t write down exactly how I determined this). So I’m going to take another stab at that with some code backing up the determinations, rather than just my late night data ramblings.

All of the data shown in this post is generated from the IPython notebook available on Github, on 16 Feb 2025, based on the data on wikibase.world which is maintained as a best effort system.

General numbers

MetricValue
Wikibases with properties777
Wikibases with properties, and more than 10 pages600
Wikibases with properties, and more than 10 pages, and 1 or more active users264
Wikibases with properties, and more than 10 pages, and 2 or more active users129
Wikibases that link to other wikibases194
Wikibases that only link to non Wikimedia Foundation wikibases5
Wikibases that link to other wikibases, excluding Wikimedia Foundation35

A few things of note:

  • “with properties” is used, as a clear indicator that Wikibase is not only installed, but also used in at least a very basic way. (ie, it has a created Wikibase property). I would use the number of items ideally as a measure here, however as far as I can tell, this is hard to figure out?)
  • “with more than 10 pages” is my baseline measure of the site having some content, however this applies across all namespaces, so can also be wikitext pages…
  • “active users” are taken from MediaWiki statistics, and apply across all namespaces. These numbers also rely on MediaWiki being correctly maintained and these numbers actually being updated. (Users who have performed an action in the last 30 days)
  • “link to other wikibases” are links extracted from sites by Addbot either via external links or specific properties that state they are links to other wikibases. (The code is not pretty, but gives us an initial view)

And summarized in words:

  • 264 Wikibases with some content that have been edited in the past 30 days
  • 194 Wikibases link in some way to other Wikibases
    • Excluding links to Wikidata and Commons, this number comes down to 35 (So Wikidata is very much the centre)

And of course, take all of this with a pinch of salt, these numbers are an initial stab at trying to have an overview of the ecosystem.

An updated web

My October post included some basic visualizations from the query service of wikibase.world.

However, it’s time to get a little more fancy and interactive. (As well as showing all wikibases, not just the linked ones)

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mwcli (a MediaWiki focused command line tool targeting developers) over the years

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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 when you run it (without any parameters or inputs) so that the data can be aggregated, and the various commands usage can be graphed.

Each command run includes something like:

Commanddocker mediawiki exec
DateTime2025-01-07T12:45:18.213Z
Version0.25.1

I used to have live (ish) graphs in the Wikimedia Superset installation, however, the queries there appear to fail now. So I took some time to export the dataset as a CSV, and shove it around a bit in a Python notebook.

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2 years of wikibase.cloud by WMDE

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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 of potential for wikibase.cloud within the Wikibase ecosystem, as well as what developments have happened within the past years.

The initial problems, goals and dreams

From An introduction to WBStack, I said:

The idea behind the project is to provide Wikibase and surrounding services, such as a blazegraph query service, query service ui, quick statements, and others on a shared platform where installs, upgrades and maintenance are handled centrally.

Now, this is fairly obvious, and clearly something that wikibase.cloud still offers today, however I didn’t write why!? And this is potentially something that has gotten lost through the years of multiple PMs, multiple engineers, multiple project names etc.

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