Category: Tech

Building applications around Wikidata (a beer example)

Wikidata provides free and open access to entities representing real world concepts. Of course Wikidata is not meant to contain every kind of data, for example beer reviews or product reviews would probably never make it into Wikidata items. However creating an app that is powered by Wikidata & Wikibase to contain beer reviews should be…

By addshore January 8, 2016 0

Mediawiki Developer Summit 2016

The Wikimedia Developer Summit is an event with an emphasis on the evolution of the MediaWiki architecture and the Wikimedia Engineering goals for 2016. Last year the event was called the MediaWiki Developer Summit. As with last year the event took place in the Mission Bay Center, San Francisco, California. The event was slightly earlier this year, positioned…

By addshore January 8, 2016 0

Wikidata references from Microdata

Recently some articles appeared on the English Wikipedia Signpost about Wikidata (1, 2, 3). Reading these articles, especially the second and third, pushed me to try to make a dent in the ‘problem’ of references on Wikidata. It turns out that this is actually not that hard!

By addshore December 29, 2015 8

Guzzle 6 retry middleware

Recently I switched from using Guzzle 5 to Guzzle 6 in my mediawiki-api-base PHP library. Everything went very smoothly except for there being no compatible version of the retry-subscriber that I had previously used. The subscriber has been replaced by retry middleware of which I was provided an extracted example. In this post I cover my implementation for the…

By addshore December 18, 2015 15

mediawiki-api-base 2.0.0

Roughly a year and a half ago I started writing a collection of PHP libraries to make interaction with the Mediawiki API and extension APIs super easy. The base library has just made it to 2.0.0! The new release really only uses the new version of the Guzzle HTTP library which makes use of PSR-7 and adds…

By addshore December 18, 2015 1

Reducing packet count to Statsd using Mediawiki

Recently I have been spending lots of time looking at the Wikimedia graphite set-up due to working on Grafana dashboards. In exchange for what some people had been doing for me I decided to take a quick look down the list of open Graphite tickets and found T116031. Sometimes it is great when such a small…

By addshore December 17, 2015 1

Myanmar coordinates on Wikidata by Lockal & Widar

This entry is part 2 of 15 in the series Wikidata Map

In a recent blog post I showed the amazing apparent effect that Wikimania’s location had on the coordinate location data in Mexico on Wikidata. A comment on the post by Finn Årup Nielsen pointed out a massive increase in data in the Myanmar (Burma). I had previously spotted this increase but chosen not to mention it in the post.…

By addshore November 22, 2015 3

MediaWiki CRAP – The worst of it

I don’t mean Mediawiki is crap! The Change Risk Anti-Patterns (CRAP) Index is calculated based on the cyclomatic complexity and code coverage of a unit of code. Complex code and untested code will have a higher CRAP index compared with simple well tested code. Over the last 2 years I have been tracking the CRAP index…

By addshore November 21, 2015 0