The demise of goo.gl is a good opportunity to write about how we built a less terrible URL shortener for Wikimedia projects: w.wiki. (I actually started writing this blog post in 2016 and never got back to it, oops.) URL shorteners are generally a bad idea for a few main…
A number of tools hosted on Toolforge rely on the replicated MediaWiki databases, dubbed "Wiki Replicas". Every so often these servers have replication lag, which affects the data returned as well as the performance of the queries. And when this happens, users get confused and start reporting bugs that aren't…
tl;dr: You can now chat in #wikimedia-rust:matrix.org and reach folks on IRC Nearly a year ago, the official Libera.Chat <-> Matrix bridge was shut down. There's a lot that went wrong in the technical and social operation of the bridge that the Libera.Chat staff have helpfully documented, but from a…
In 2018 I announced the creation of my "Skip Mobile Wikipedia" Firefox add-on, which automatically redirects you to the desktop version of the site. At the time it worked on both standard desktop Firefox and in Firefox for Android, life was great. Unfortunately at some point, Firefox stopped allowing arbitrary…
I had a wonderful time at the 2023 Wikimedia Hackthon in Athens, Greece, earlier this month. The best part was easily seeing old friends that I haven't met in person since probably 2018 and getting to hack and chat together. I also met a ton of new friends for the…
I did a lot of new, crazy things in 2022, but by far, the most unplanned and unexpected was running a social media server for my friends. Somehow it has been six months since Taavi and I launched Wikis World, dubbed "a Mastodon server for wiki enthusiasts". Given that milestone,…
