Skip to content

Category Archives: Wikimedia

The beatings will continue until morale improves

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

So over the weekend, Wikimedia Labs ran into a bit of trouble. Database replication broke, and was lagging about two days behind the live databases. But, thanks to tireless efforts by JCrespo, replication has now picked up again, and replication lag should be back to normal soon (even though there might be a few bits […]

Also filed in | | Comments (1)

Enter the Distributed Game

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

The Wikidata Game has been a success, both in terms of work done, as well as a demonstration of micro-contributions to Wikidata. I consider ~2,500 players not a trivial thing, considering the games are neither particularly thrilling, nor resulting in awards (how about one repercussion-free vandalism on English Wikipedia for 1,000 actions in a sub-game?). […]

Also filed in Wikidata | | Comments (6)

Add it to the pile!

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

I have previously blogged about Wikipedia-related page lists, and how they relate to many tools and activities. I also lamented my previous, failed attempts at introducing a “tool pipeline system”. Well, I am not one to give up easily! The latest, greatest iteration in this vein is PagePile. Essentially, this new tool is managing piles […]

Also filed in Commons, Wikidata | | Comments (14)

Reductionism

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

While I do occasionally write Wikimedia tools “to order”, I wrote quite a few of them because I required (or just enjoyed) the functionality myself. One thing I like to do is adding images to Wikidata, using WD-FIST. Recently, I started to focus on a specific list, people with awards (of any kind). People with […]

Also filed in Commons, Wikidata | | Comments (6)

Musing on lists

Thursday, June 4, 2015

As some of you may know, I write the occasional tool to help support Wikipedia, Wikidata, Commons, and other projects in the WikiVerse. Most of my tools work on the same basic principle: Get some data to start with, think about it, and present a result. The input data is often a list of pages […]

Also filed in Wikidata | | Comments Off on Musing on lists

Red vs. blue

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Recently, @notconfusing has been living up to his name by presenting us with preliminary results from the Wikipedia Gender Inequality Index. For me, that report is also an annoyance, because I was not aware this was going on, and had started to prepare my own research, with intend to publish, about the same topic. Fact […]

Also filed in Wikidata | | Comments (1)

Content Ours, or: the sum of the parts

Monday, December 8, 2014

Open source projects like Linux, and open content projects like Wikipedia and Wikidata, are fine things indeed by themselves. However, the power of individual projects is multiplied if they can be linked up. For free software, this can be taken literally; linking libraries to your code is what allows complex applications to exists. For open […]

Also filed in Wikidata | | Comments (1)

Picture this!

Monday, November 24, 2014

Recently, someone told me that “there are no images on Wikidata”. I found that rather hard to believe, as I had added quite a few using my own tools. So I had a quick look at the numbers. For Wikidata, counting the number of items with images is straightforward. For Wikipedia, not so much; by […]

Also filed in Commons, Wikidata | | Comments Off on Picture this!

The way is shut

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

So I saw a mail about the new, revamped Internet Archive. Fantastic! All kinds of free, public domain (for the most part) files to play with! So I thought to myself: Why not celebrate that new archive.org by using a file to improve Wikidata? After all, I just have to upload it to Commons! Easy, […]

Also filed in | | Comments (6)

The Men Who Stare at Media

Monday, August 18, 2014

Shortly after the 2014 London Wikimania, the happy world of Wikimedia experienced a localized earthquake when a dispute between some editors of the German Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation escalated into exchanges of electronic artillery. Here, I try to untangle the threads of the resulting Gordian knot, interwoven with my own view on the issue. […]

Also filed in | | Comments (6)