wikibase-docker, Mediawiki & Wikibase update
Today on the Wikibase Community User Group Telegram chat I noticed some people discussing issues with upgrading Mediawiki and Wikibase using the docker images provided for Wikibase. As the wikibase-registry is currently only running Mediawiki 1.30 I should probably update it to 1.31, which is the next long term stable release. This blog post was…
A firewall is blocking sharing between Windows and the containers – Docker
I recently encountered this error while trying to run one of my docker setups. I have encountered errors like this before and it has always ended up being related to docker and sharing my drives to the linux VM that actually runs my containers. Checking the shared drives menu of the docker UI everything seemed…
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…
Hacking vs Editing, Wikipedia & Declan Donnelly
On the 18th of November 2018 the Wikipedia article for Declan Donnelly was edited and vandalised. Vandalism isn’t new on Wikipedia, it happens to all sorts of articles throughout every day. A few minutes after the vandalism the change made its way to Twitter and from there on to some media outlets such as thesun.co.uk…
freenode #live – Bristol 2018
freenode #live is a “community-focused live event designed to build and strengthen relationships between Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developers and users”. The 2018 event was held in Bristol, United Kingdom at We the curious with roughly 100-200 people attending (from my guesswork). The event essentially had a single track of talks. The old IMAX theatre above…
Wikidata is 6
It’s was Wikidata’s 6th birthday on the 30th of October 2018. WMUK celebrated this with a meetup on the 7th of November. They also made this great post event video.
Wikidata Map October 2018
It has been another 6 months since my last post in the Wikidata Map series. In that time Wikidata has gained 4 million items, 1 property with the globe-coordinate data type (coordinates of geographic centre) and 1 million items with coordinates [1]. Each Wikidata item with a coordinate is represented on the map with a single…
Quickly clearing out your Facebook advert ‘interests’
2020 EDIT: This solution is now packaged up as a nice browser extension. Click here to read the new post for details and links to the browser extension. Over the past years, Facebook have had a few privacy related issues. First came the ‘scandal’ with Cambridge Analytica and more recently a bug (or series of bugs) that…
Wikibase extensions on Wikidata.org
Wikidata.org runs on MediaWiki with the Wikibase extension. But there is more to it than just that. The Wikibase extension itself is split into 3 different sections, being Lib, Repo and Client. There are also 6 other extensions all providing extra functionality to the site and it’s sisters. The extensions are also loaded on a…
WordPress plugins
2021 EDIT: There is a new version of this post available with a plugin list from 2021 :) A few people I know are now running WordPress installs, or are currently setting them up. The one question that always seems to come up while discussing them is “what plugins are best”? I try to sum…