My Mix’n’match tool helps matching third-party catalogs to Wikidata items. Now, things happen on Mix’n’match and Wikidata in parallel, amongst them: Wikidata items are deleted Wikidata items are merged, leving one to redirect to the other External IDs are added to Wikidata This leads to the states of Mix’n’match and Wikidata diverging over time. I […]
Also filed in
|
|
So I am trying to learn (modern) Greek, for reasons. I have books, and online classes, and the usual apps. But what I was missing was a simple way to rehearse common words. My thoughts went to Wikidata items, and then to lexemes. Lexemes are something I have not worked with a lot, so this […]
Also filed in
|
|
So the Wikidata query service (WDQS), currently powered by Blazegraph, does not perform well. Even simple queries time out, it lags behind the live site, and individual instances can (and do) silently go out of sync. The WMF is searching for a replacement. One of the proposed alternatives to blazegraph is Virtuoso. It models the […]
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 […]
Wednesday, January 25, 2023
A large part of Wikidata is the collection of external identifiers for items. For some item types, such as items about people (Q5), some of this is what is known as Authority Control (AC) data, for example, VIAF (P214). One thing that distinguishes AC data from other external IDs is that AC data sources are […]
Wednesday, November 2, 2022
So Toolforge is switching from grid engine to Kubernetes. This also means that tool owners such as myself need to change their tool background jobs to the new system. Mix’n’match was my tool with the most diverse job setup. But resource constraints and the requirement to “name” jobs meant that I couldn’t just port things […]
Monday, September 12, 2022
A while ago, Wikimedia sites, including Wikidata, started to use the Vue.js framework to ease the future development of user interface components. Vue is, to some degree, also available for user scripts. I have a few user scripts on Wikidata, and some of them have a seriously outdated interface. There was a modal (page-blocking) dialog […]
Also filed in
|
|
I recently came across an interesting, semi-automated approach to create statements in Wikidata. A SPARQL query would directly generate commands for QuickStatements. These would then be manually checked before running them. The queries exist as links on Wikidata user pages, and have to be run by clicking on them. That seemed useful but tedious. I […]
Also filed in
|
|
Recent Changes is a core functionality of all wikis. It shows which articles or, in the case of Wikidata, items have changed in the last minutes, hours, days. As useful as this is, for Wikidata it is like drinking from the proverbial fire hose; if you look for a specific type of change, it is […]
Also filed in
|
|
Thursday, November 12, 2020
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 […]