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Category Archives: Wikimedia

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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The Buggregator

Thursday, October 21, 2021

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 […]

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The Listeria Evolution

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 […]

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The Toolforge Composition

Thursday, June 4, 2020

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 […]

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