Mix’n’match is one of my more popular tools, and with over 262 million entries one of the largest. It also has been around for awhile (November 2013), almost as old as Wikidata. It started out as a PHP script, which then grew into a collection of classes, but eventually the size of the data, as […]
AutoDesc has been a longstanding tool to generate descriptions for Wikidata items. Originally a spin-off from Reasonator, it started as my only JavaScript-based server application, generating both short and (for biographical items, and two languages) long descriptions. When the usual bitrot set in, I decided to move it over to Python, hoping to attract more […]
Wednesday, November 19, 2025
One of my oldest (first commit: 2013-06-24) tools is geohack, which was majorly improved by Egil Kvaleberg, who also co-maintained it. The tool is not only old but popular; many Wikipedia languages, including English and German, link to it from basically every page that uses coordinates. Its popularity recently became a problem; it exceeded the […]
A while ago I wrote about WD-infernal, an API to infer some information about a Wikidata item, that needs to be checked by a user (somehow). The idea was to offer standardized inference to multiple tools and Wikidata user scripts. I have now added two new functionalities: 1. referee, which follows extrnal IDs and external […]
The new Wikibase REST API brings standardized and simplified querying and editing of items, properties, statements etc. to Wikibase installations, first and foremost Wikidata. Last year, Wikimedia Sverige was entertaining the idea of a grant application to Wikimedia Deutschland. Part of the proposal was for me to write a Rust crate (i.e. library) for easier […]
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
After I recently wrote a small on-Wiki tool that can suggest statements to add to a Wikidata item, I thought that something like this might be useful in other tools as well. So, using the same concept and technology (Rust/axum) from my Authority Control API, I wrote WD-Infernal, an API that takes data, such as […]
Originally, I wanted to blog about adding new properties (taxon data speficially, NCBI, GBIF, and iINaturalist) to my AC2WD tool (originally described here). If you have the user script installed on Wikidata, AC2WD will automatically show up on relevant taxon items. But then I realized that the underlying tech might be useful to others, if […]
Monday, September 25, 2023
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 […]
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 […]