The Whelming

Just a fun little statistic for Mix’n’match. This is how many entries were matched in MnM, per year. Note: This includes Wikidata imports (eg a property exists, matches from Wikidata are imported when the catalog is created). 2013 1,905 2014 86,562 2015 572,467 2016 1,667,843 2017 2,570,586 2018 5,166,435 2019 4,002,785 2020 7,203,921 2021 4,930,444 […]

Like many people, I take a lot of pictures with my phone. After all, the best camera is the one you have with, and phone cameras produce high quality pictures these days. And like many Wikimedia volunteers, sometimes I take pictures thinking “this should go on Commons/Wikipedia/Wikidata”. But then days pass, and I don’t remember […]

A long, long time ago, in a codebase far, far away, I wrote some code to generate automatic descriptions of Wikidata items for Reasonator. This turned out to be very useful, and I forked the code into its own tool/API, AutoDesc. Many of my tools, including the popular Mix-n-match, use AutoDesc under the hood. As […]

So Structured Data on Commons (SDC) has been going for a while. Time to reap some benefits! Besides free-text image descriptions, the first, and likely most used, element one can add to a picture via SDC is “depicts”. This can be one or several Wikidata items which are visible (prominently or as background) on the […]

After reading the excellent analysis of AfD vs gender by Andrew Gray, where he writes about the articles that faced and survived the “Article for Deletion” process, I couldn’t help but wonder what happened to the articles that were not kept, that is, where AfD was “successful”. So I quickly took all article titles from […]

Disclaimer: I am the author of Listeria, and maintainer of ListeriaBot. In January 2016, User:Emijrp had an idea. Why not use that newfangled Listeria tool, a bot that generates lists based on Wikidata, and puts them on Wikipedia pages, to maintain a List of Women Linguists on English Wikipedia? It seemed that a noble cause […]

Structured Data on Commons is approaching. I have done a bit of work on converting Infoboxes into statements, that is, to generate structured data. But what about using it? What could that look like? Inspired by a recent WMF blog post, I wrote a simple demo on what you might call “auto-categorisation”. You can try […]

A quick blog post, before the WordPress editor dies on my again… Wikidata is great. Wikidata with references is even better. So I have written a little tool called Referee. It checks a Wikidata item, collects web pages that are linked via external ID statements, and via associated Wikipedia pages, and checks them for potential […]

Reading Recommending Images to Wikidata Items by Miriam, which highlights missing areas of image coverage in Wikidata (despite being the most complete site in the WikimediaVerse, image-wise), and strategies to address the issue, I was reminded of an annoying problem I have run into a few times. My WD-FIST tool uses (primarily) SPARQL to find […]

I have been looking into a JavaScript library called vue.js lately. It is similar to React, but not encumbered by licensing issues (that might prevent its use on WMF servers in the future), faster (or so they claim), but most of all, it can work without interference on the server side; all I need for my […]