Posts Archives - Addshore

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 to change. Cloudflare recently posted about some of the internet wide traffic changes due to the pandemic and various government announcements, quarantines and lockdowns.

Currently the main English Wikipedia article for the COVID-19 pandemic is receiving roughly 1.2 million page views per day (14 per second). This article has already gone through 4 different names over the past months, and the pageview rate continues to climb.

Wikipedia pageviews tool showing English Wikipedia COVID-19 pandemic article views up to 21 March 2020 (source)

WBStack Infrastructure

January 25, 2020 / addshore / 7 Comments

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 part of the core platform at this stage meaning WBStack can run wherever there is a Kubernetes cluster with little to no modification.

A simplified overview of the internals can be seen in the diagram below where blue represents the Google provided services, with green representing everything running within the kubernetes cluster.

WBStack – November review

November 27, 2019 / addshore / 2 Comments

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 ” 20 users on the project with 30 Wikibase installs”. 3 weeks after that post WBStack now sits at roughly 38 users with roughly 65 wikibases. Many of these wikibases are primarily users test wikis, but that’s great, the barrier to trying out Wikibase is definitely lowered.

If you would like an invite code to try WBStack, or have any related thoughts of ideas, then please get in touch.

What’s changed

As WBStack is a shared platform, all changes mentioned in this blog post are immediately visible on all hosted Wikibases. In the future there will be various options to turn things on and off, but at this early stage things are being kept simple.

An introduction to WBStack

November 6, 2019 / addshore / 1 Comment

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 services, such as a blazegraph query service, query service ui, quick statements, and others on a shared platform where installs, upgrades and maintenance are handeled centrally.

Changing the concept URI of an existing Wikibase with data

November 5, 2019 / addshore / 0 Comments

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 using a small amount of data and the Wikibase Docker images. If you are not using the Docker images the steps should still work, but you do not need to worry about copying files into and out of containers or running commands inside containers.

Your own Wikidata Query Service, with no limits (part 1)

October 23, 2019 / addshore / 2 Comments

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.

Screenshot of the Wikidata Query Service home page including the example query which returns all Cats on Wikidata.

You can find a great write up introducing SPARQL, Wikidata, the query service and what it can do here. But this post will assume that you already know all of that.

Guide

Here we will focus on creating a copy of the query service using data from one of the regular TTL data dumps and the query service docker image provided by the wikibase-docker git repo supported by WMDE.

Wikidata Map July 2019

July 2, 2019 / addshore / 4 Comments

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.

Wikidata “Huge” map generated on the 13th May 2019

Santa Elena (Monteverde, Costa Rica) to Granada (Nicaragua)

June 7, 2019 / addshore / 1 Comment

I’m writing this post in the hope that someone making the same journey will find it somewhat useful. We were a bit uncertain how our journey was going to pan out, but it ended up working pretty well.

If you want to know what we ended up doing, skip the “Initial research” section, and head straight to “The journey”.

Add Exif data back to Facebook images – 0.1

February 10, 2019 / addshore / 68 Comments

In 2016 I wrote a blog post with this exact title when moving all of my pictures from Facebook to Google photos. I wrote a hacky little script which met my needs and added exif data from a HTML Facebook data dump back to the images that came along with it.

A few months ago I took another look at the script and made it slightly easier to run, but it still fell short on the usability side of things.

Since then more and more people have and been commenting and messaging me wanting to do exactly the same thing, and so I finally made a more usable version of my little tool.

Creating a Dockerfile for the Wikibase Registry

February 7, 2019 / addshore / 1 Comment

Currently the Wikibase Registry(setup post) is deployed using the shoehorning approach described in one of my earlier posts. After continued discussion on the Wikibase User Group Telegram chat about different setups and upgrade woes I have decided to convert the Wikibase Registry to use the prefered approach of a custom Dockerfile building a layer on top of one of the wikibase images.

I recently updated updated the Wikibase registry from Mediawiki version 1.30 to 1.31 and described the process in a recent post, so if you want to see what the current setup and docker-compose file looks like, head there.

As a summary the Wikibase Registry uses:

The wikibase/wikibase:1.31-bundle image from docker hub
Mediawiki extensions:
- ConfirmEdit
- Nuke

Addshore

It's a blog

Category: Posts (page 1 of 11)

Covid-19 Wikipedia pageviews, a first look

WBStack Infrastructure

WBStack – November review

What’s changed

An introduction to WBStack

Changing the concept URI of an existing Wikibase with data

Your own Wikidata Query Service, with no limits (part 1)

Guide

Wikidata Map July 2019

Santa Elena (Monteverde, Costa Rica) to Granada (Nicaragua)

Add Exif data back to Facebook images – 0.1

Creating a Dockerfile for the Wikibase Registry

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