WBStack 2020 Update 1
WBStack has now been up and running for 6 months. During that time it has helped 70 people create 178 MediaWiki installs running Wikibase, a SPARQL query service and quickstatements, all at the click of a button, with a total of around 200,000 edits across all sites. The most active site is currently virus-taxonomy.wiki.opencura.com which…
Automatic cleanup of old gcloud container images
I have been using Google Cloud Build for a budget project for roughly a year now. Cloud Build stores built images in a storage bucket which you are of course billed for. Within the first weeks of using it I realized that I needed some automated way to cleanup unused and old images that were…
Add Exif data back to Facebook images – 0.10
In 2019 I wrote a post introducing a tool that I created to add Exif data back to images downloaded as part of a Facebook information download. The tool allowed me to download and delete my uploaded Facebook images while keeping some of the useful data such as date taken. After some Twitter pressure I…
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…
WBStack Infrastructure (2020)
UPDATE: You can find an up to date 2021 version of this post here. WBStack currently runs on a Google Cloud Kubernetes cluster made up of 2 virtual machines, one e2-medium and one e2-standard-2. This adds up to a current total of 4 vCPUs and 12GB of memory. No Google specific services make up any…
WBStack – November review
It’s been roughly 1 month since WBStack appeared online, and it’s time for a quick review of what has been happening in the first month. If you don’t already know what WBStack is, then head to my introduction post. The number of users and wikis has slowly been increasing. In my last post I stated…
An introduction to WBStack
WBStack is a project that I have been working on for a couple of years that finally saw the light of day at Wikidatacon 2019. It has gone through a couple of different names along the way, MWaas, WBaas, WikWiki, OpenCura and finally WBStack. The idea behind the project is to provide Wikibase and surrounding…
Changing the concept URI of an existing Wikibase with data
Many users of Wikibase find themselves in a position where they need to change the concept URI of an existing Wikibase for one or more reasons, such as a domain name update or desire to have https concept URIs instead of HTTP. Below I walk through a minimal example of how this can be done…
Your own Wikidata Query Service, with no limits
The Wikidata Query Service allows anyone to use SPARQL to query the continuously evolving data contained within the Wikidata project, currently standing at nearly 65 millions data items (concepts) and over 7000 properties, which translates to roughly 8.4 billion triples. You can find a great write up introducing SPARQL, Wikidata, the query service and what…
Wikidata Map July 2019
It’s been another 9 months since my last blog post covering the Wikidata generated geo location maps that I have been tending to for a few years now. Writing this from a hammock, lets see what has noticeably changed in the last 9 months using a visual diff and my pretty reasonable eyes.