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…
Grafana, Graphite and maxDataPoints confusion for totals
The title is a little wordy, but I hope you get the gist. I just spent 10 minutes staring at some data on a Grafana dashboard, comparing it with some other data, and finding the numbers didn’t add up. Here is the story in case it catches you out. The dashboard The dashboard in question…
Using Hue & Hive to quickly determine Wikidata API maxlag usage
Hue, or Hadoop User Experience is described by its documentation pages as “a Web application that enables you to easily interact with an Hadoop cluster”. The Wikimedia Foundation has a Hue frontend for their Hadoop cluster, which contains various datasets including web requests, API usage and the MediaWiki edit history for all hosted sites. The install…
Python3, Using some shared state in 2 async methods
The asyncio module was added to Python in version 3.4 to “provides infrastructure for writing single-threaded concurrent code using coroutines, multiplexing I/O access over sockets and other resources, running network clients and servers, and other related primitives”. If you want an introduction to asyncio take a look at this blog post. This post will look…
The Wikimedia Server Admin Logs
The Wikimedia Server Admin Log or SAL for short is a timestamped log of actions performed on the Wikimedia cluster by users such as roots and deployers. The log is stored on the WikiTech Wikimedia project and can be found at the following URL: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Server_Admin_Log An example entry in the log could be: 09:04 addshore: addshore@terbium:~$…