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 I have a few user scripts on Wikidata, and some of them have a seriously outdated interface.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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
My Mix-n-match tool deals with third-party catalogs, and helps matching their entries to Wikidata. This involves, as a necessity, importing minimal information about those entries into the Mix’n’match database, but ideally also imports additional metadata, such as (in case of biographical entries) gender, birth/death dates, VIAF etc., which are invaluable in automatically matching entries to […]
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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 […]
QuickStatments is a workhorse for Wikidata, but it had a few problems of late. One of those is bad performance with batches. Users can submit a batch of commands to the tool, and these commands are then run on the Labs server. This mechanism has been bogged down for several reasons: Batch processing written in […]
So there has been an issue with QuickStatements on Friday. As users of that tool will know, you can run QuickStatements either from within your browser, or “in the background” from a Labs server. Originally, these “batch edits” were performed as QuickStatementsBot, mentioning batch and the user who submitted it in the edit summary. Later, […]
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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 […]