Silicon Milkroundabout 9
Silicon Milkroundabout is a job fair for the UK tech start-up community. The 9th event was held on 9 and 10 May 2015 in London with over 200 companies attending. I attended the 9th event and had a great time, below are some of the highlights!
Ed Miliband’s face and Wikipedia
“David Cameron’s Wikipedia page has been hacked as the nation goes to the polls on election day.” — Belfast Telegraph Well, no, not exactly. Edits to the UK MP Links and United Kingdom elections templates to name but a few caused a large version of Ed Miliband’s face to appear on over 660 pages relating to the 2015 UK election saying…
Redirects on Wikidata
Redirects in Wikidata are basically the same as redirects on normal wiki pages. However, they have a slightly different meaning and intention. The main reason why we need redirects is because we want to provide stable identifiers. The merging of two items has been a common place task since Wikidata gain momentum as often two different…
Browser extension showing blocked sites in searches
So last night I took another look at the ever-increasing list of domains that are blocked, due to various court orders, by various ISPs in the UK. A first look My first port of call was Wikipedia which has an article titled ‘List of websites blocked in the United Kingdom‘. Now this list, although referenced,…
Wikidata map visualizations
In 2013 and 2014 I made a few presentations to various groups of people talking about Wikidata. When creating those presentations I used as many graphical representations of the data in Wikidata as possible to try and give people an clearer picture of what is already stored. One of the best visualisations at the time…
My issues with the MediaFire desktop app
MediaFire (read about me on wikipedia) is a file hosting, file synchronization, and cloud storage service. MediaFire was first founded in 2006 but in 2014 it did something that really caught my eye. They increased their baseline storage service from 100GB to 1TB and reduced the price down to just $2.50 a month. With the price beating…
Quick overview of Orain
Orain is a community-driven, not-for-profit wiki network that I help to maintain. It runs Mediawiki and has been around for the past couple of years. Over the years it has been hosted on VPSs from multiple different providers and its technical layout has changed massively from each provider. Below I will try to summaries it’s current layout! This will…
Github release download count – Chrome Extension
GitHub tracks the number of downloads for all assets (files) that are attached to a release, but GitHub currently makes it very hard for users to get at this information. The number of downloads is currently only accessible through the API. I noticed this many months ago when wondering how many people were downloading the new…
The importance of a strict comparison
Now if you have ever come across issues caused by non strict comparisons before then this is going to seem like a piece of cake, but remember, everyone makes mistakes. Strict equality compares two values for equality where the values must also be the same type. Non strict or loose equality compares values while not caring…
Mediawiki Developer Summit 2015
The MediaWiki Developer Summit is an invitation-only event with an emphasis on the evolution of the MediaWiki architecture and the Wikimedia Engineering goals for 2015. It took place on Monday, January 26 and Tuesday, January 27, 2015 in the Mission Bay Center, San Francisco, California. Overall it was very interesting and a lot of good discussion happened. Again…