Altering a Gerrit change (git workflow)
I don’t use git-review for Gerrit interactions. This is primarily because back in 2012/2013 I couldn’t get git-review installed, and someone presented me with an alternative that worked. Years later I realized that this was actually the documented way of pushing changes to Gerrit. As a little introduction to what this workflow looks, and a…
Profiling a Wikibase item creation on test.wikidata.org
Today I was in a Wikibase Stakeholder group call, and one of the discussions was around Wikibase importing speed, data loading, and the APIs. My previous blog post covering what happens when you make a new Wikibase item was raised, and we also got onto the topic of profiling. So here comes another post looking…
A first look at WikiCrowd
I have quite enjoyed the odd contribution to an app by Google called Crowdsource. You can find it either on the web, or also as an app. Crowdsource allows people to throw data at Google in controlled ways to add to the massive pile of data that Google uses to improve its services and at…
Laravel 8 with Wikimedia OAuth login
I recently wrote a little app called wikicrowd (blog post to follow) using Laravel and MediaWiki / Wikimedia authentication. It certainly wasn’t entirely out of the box, and the existing docs still need some tweaking. This post reflects the steps I went through to set this app up, and it should only take a few…
Tech Lead Digest – Q3/4 2021
It’s time for the 5th instalment of my tech lead digest posts. I switched to monthly for 2 months, but decided to back down to quarterlyish. You can find the other digests by checking out the series. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑Wikidata & Wikibase The biggest event of note in the past months was WikidataCon 2021 which took place…
mwcli CI in Wikimedia GitLab (docker in docker)
mwcli is a golang CLI tool that I have been working on over the past year to replace the mediawiki-docker-dev development environment that I accidently created a few years back (among other things). I didn’t start the CLI, but I did this mediawiki-docker-dev like functionality. As some point through the development journey it became clear…
Covid-19 Wikipedia pageviews, a first look
World events often have a dramatic impact on online services. A past example would be the death of Michael Jackson which brought down Twitter and Wikipedia and made Google believe that they were under attack according to the BBC. Events like the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic have less instantaneous affect but trends can still be seen…
Wikidata Architecture Overview (diagrams)
Over the years diagrams have appeared in a variety of forms covering various areas of the architecture of Wikidata. Now, as the current tech lead for Wikidata it is my turn. Wikidata has slowly become a more and more complex system, including multiple extensions, services and storage backends. Those of us that work with it…
Grafana, Graphite and maxDataPoints confusion for totals
The title is a little wordy, but I hope you get the gist. I just spent 10 minutes staring at some data on a Grafana dashboard, comparing it with some other data, and finding the numbers didn’t add up. Here is the story in case it catches you out. The dashboard The dashboard in question…
Using Hue & Hive to quickly determine Wikidata API maxlag usage
Hue, or Hadoop User Experience is described by its documentation pages as “a Web application that enables you to easily interact with an Hadoop cluster”. The Wikimedia Foundation has a Hue frontend for their Hadoop cluster, which contains various datasets including web requests, API usage and the MediaWiki edit history for all hosted sites. The install…