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…
Submitting a patch to Mediawiki on Gerrit
I remember when I first submitted a patch to Mediawiki on Gerrit. It was a +12 -4 line patch and it probably took me at least half a day to figure everything out and get my change up! There is a tutorial on mediawiki.org but it is far too wordy and over complicated. In this…
Myanmar coordinates on Wikidata by Lockal & Widar
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.…
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…
Impact of Wikimania Mexico 2015 on Wikidata
Recently Wikidata celebrated its third birthday. For the occasion I ran the map generation script that I have talked about before again to see what had changed in the geo coordinate landscape of Wikidata! I found, well, Mexico blossomed! The image to the left is from June 2015, the right October 2015 and Wikimania was…
Mocking Writer.write in Java using EasyMock
I am writing this as finding the solution to the problem that I was having while mocking a Writer in Java using EasyMock took far too long. Hopefully others having the same issue will stumble across this blog post.
Orain backups
There are more Orain backups! More recent than 15th June 2015 as stated in my previous post! Dumps from August 2015 are all on-line right now! Many thanks to WikiTeam at archive.org. Simply search for “Orain subject:wikiteam” and you can find all of the dumps. Of course you can add the name of you wiki to…
WMUK training event Wikidata presentation
In 2015 I attended another WMUK Wikidata training event. Below you can find the presentation that I used, created using slides.com.
Downfall of Orain
So, from where I am sat right now, it looks like Orain is dead. It could just be me but Orain has been struggling with issues for a while now and the events that took place last week were basically the final nail in the coffin. As final nails in coffins go, I don’t see…
Un-deleting 500,000 Wikidata items
Since some time in January of this year I have been on a mission to un-delete all Wikidata items that were merged into other items before the redirect functionality of Wikidata existed. Finally I am done (well nearly). This is the short story… Reasoning Earlier this year I pointed out the importance of redirects on…