Wikidata Map – 19 months on
The last Wikidata map generation, as last discussed here and as originally created by Denny Vrandečić was on the 7th of November 2013. Recently I have started rewriting the code that generates the maps, stored on github, and boom, a new map! The old code The old version of the wikidata-analysis repo, which generated the maps (along with other…
MassAction Mediawiki extension
2019 EDIT: This extension has been archived as I didn’t actually maintain it. I still think there might be room for a more flexible version of this extension in the future. MassAction is a Mediawiki extension that allows users to perform mass actions on targets through a special page making use of the job queue. Its development…
DDoS of Orain
During May of 2015 Orain was the target of a DDoS attack. The attack ended up lasting roughly 9 days and bringing the service to its knees repeatedly. The ‘official’ timeline of events and write up can be found here. Below I will discuss why the details of the DDoS as well as how it…
Wikimedia Hackathon 2015 (Lyon)
This years Wikimedia Hackathon was located in Lyon, France at Valpré-Lyon between the 23rd and 25th of May. The hotel (Valpre-Lyon) was absolutely beautiful with large grass areas, great architecture and a place for you weather you wanted to have a large or small discussion, sit quietly or sit outside. As well as Pétanque, table tennis was also available as well as…
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…