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Category Archives: Wikimedia

Buggregator dashboard

Friday, October 16, 2026

I have ~350 tools running on Toolforge (and on-wiki scripts), so some years ago, I wrote a tool to rule manage them all. That included core to scour my talk pages (and my tools talk pages) on various wikis, github, bitbucket, codeberg, etc. for issue reports, keyword-guess (on wikis) which tool they belong to, and […]

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BaGLAMa2 – Back to Business

Thursday, October 8, 2026

BaGLAMa2 has been collecting view data for Wikipedia pages that contain image from a Commons category tree since March 2010. If your organisation “donated” images, audio, or video to Commons, this kind of data gives highly valuable feedback. Look, out images were viewed 20 million times on Wikipedia last month! There are over 1200 category […]

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The Issue Whisperer

Friday, September 4, 2026

There is a clear no to LLM-generated content on Wikimedia projects, which is a good thing IMO. On the other hand, I found that LLM-assisted coding helps me significantly in Getting Things Done as a volunteer, that would otherwise turn tools into bitrot graveyards over time. Given that LLMs can be useful for some tasks, […]

Also filed in Wikidata | | Comments (1)

A little controversy

Thursday, May 7, 2026

This is going to be controversial, so I would ask you to reserve judgement until the end of this post (with the average internet crowd, such an appeal would be pointless, but people who read this blog are usually familiar with the NPOV concept, so I have hope). I have been writing code for over […]

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All about the images

Monday, April 27, 2026

I have a collection of tools around images (or these days files in general) and their use on the various Wikimedia projects, that run under a single Toolforge tool name. These are: FIST, the Free Image Search Tool, where you can find images for Wikipedia articles on various sources, including Commons, Flickr, the Internet Archive, […]

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From PHP to Lua

Thursday, April 16, 2026

A minor tech announcement for Mix’n’match: Code fragments for Mix’n’match catalogs are switching from PHP to Lua. User-supplied PHP is not secure enough, and will not scale for future development. I have converted many code fragments from PHP to Lua already, and new code fragments have to be Lua. Lua is not exactly my favorite […]

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APIs and Descriptions

Thursday, March 12, 2026

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 […]

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geohack rust

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 […]

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Get into the Flow

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 […]

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GULP

Monday, March 20, 2023

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 […]

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