The Whelming

Unix philosophy contains the notion that each program should perform an single function (and perform that function exceptionally well), and then be used together with other single-function programs to form a powerful “toolbox”, with tools connected via the geek-famous pipe (“|”). The Wikimedia ecosystem has lots of tools that perform a specific function, but there […]

Lists. The plague of managing things. But also surprisingly useful for many tasks, including Wikimedia-related issues. Mix’n’match is a list of third-party entries. PetScan generates lists from Wikipedia and Wikidata. And Listeria generates lists on-wiki. But there is a need for generic, Wikimedia-related, user-curated lists. In the past, I have tried to quell that demand […]

As you may know, I have a lot of tools for Wikipedia, Wikidata, Commons, etc. A lot of tools means a lot of code, and that means a lot of bugs, things that could work better, feature requests, and so on. How do I learn about such issues as people encounter them? In a variety […]

My Listeria tool has been around for years now, and is used on over 72K pages across 80 wikis in the Wikimediaverse. And while it still works in principle, it has some issues, an, being a single PHP script, it is not exactly flexible to adapt to new requirements. Long story short, I rewrote the […]

Toolforge , formerly known as wmflabs, is changing its URLs. Where there was one host (tools.wmflabs.org) before, each tool now gets its own sub-domain (eg mix-n-match.toolforge.org). Until now, I have used my WiDaR tool as a universal OAuth login for many of my tools, so users only have to sign in once. However, since this […]

One of my most-used WikiVerse tools is PetScan. It is a complete re-write of several other PHP-based tools, in C++ for performance reasons. PetScan has turned into the Swiss Army Knife of doing things with Wikipedia, Wikidata, and other projects. But PetScan has also developed a few issues over time. It is suffering from the […]

I recently spent a week on Corfu. I was amazed by the history, the culture, the traditions, and, of course, the food. I was, however, appalled by the low coverage of Corfu localities on Wikidata. While I might be biased, living in the UK where every postbox is a historic monument, a dozen or so […]

Rust is a up-and-coming programming language, developed by the Mozilla Foundation, and is used in the Firefox rendering engine, as well as the Node Package Manager, amongst others. There is a lot to say about Rust; suffice it to say that it’s designed to be memory-safe, fast (think: C or better), it can compile to […]

The Cleveland Museum of Art recently released 30,000 images of art under CC-Zero (~public domain). Some of the good people on Wikimedia Commons have begun uploading them there, to be used, amongst others, by Wikipedia and Wikidata. But how to find the relevant Wikipedia article (if there is one) or Wikidata item for such a […]

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 […]