There were two prominent stories this week about how rich and famous people tried to influence Wikipedia's coverage, and depending on your point of view, got their way. I think the coverage of both stories missed the mark so I'd like to dive into them a bit deeper. But first,…
The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that hosts and provides other support for Wikipedia and its sibling projects, has been under fire recently for the messaging it uses in the infamous donation banners and the disconnect with how that funding is used. These criticisms are not particularly new, but the tension…
Recently mastodon.technology announced it was shutting down at the end of the year. It's been a great home for my postings and a bunch of people I follow. My mastodon.technology handle was even printed in my college newspaper (normally reporters' Twitter handles were used). To fill the gap, Taavi and…
I recently did a short sprint on Scribunto, the MediaWiki extension that powers templates written in Lua. It's a very stable extension that doesn't see very many changes but given how useful it is to making most wikis work, I thought it could use some love. Patches written: Simplify creating…
I've published a new crate, mwseaql, which provides typed definitions of MediaWiki's SQL tables for use with the sea_query query builder. It's a pretty simple implementation, there's a small Python script that parses MediaWiki's JSON schema file and outputs Rust structs. Here's an example of it in use from my…
Unfortunately, I didn't make it onto the Wikimedia Foundation board, you can see the full results. In the first round I was behind by ~280 votes, which is pretty close considering nearly 6,000 votes were cast! I already said it, but I'm really thankful to everyone who supported me, whether…
For two straight weeks 9 out of 10 of the top 10 viewed articles on Wikipedia were about the British Royal family. The 10th article was a newly released Bollywood film lmao.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-09-30/Traffic_report
I ported https://apt-browser.toolforge.org/ from Python/Flask to #Rust/RocketIt's already faster and I didn't even finish all the performance improvements on it (e.g lazy_static for regexes).
While we're waiting for the results (September 21st at the earliest), I want to thank everyone who helped with my WMF Board candidacy. From the people who initially gave me the confidence to run, to the people who helped me get through the Affiliate round, and then the people who…
As I posted about earlier, the election for the WMF Board of Trustees is wrapping up. Today is the final day for voting, it closes at 23:59 September 6 UTC (in your local timezone). You should: Read about the candidates Vote! Tell other people to vote! Thank you to everyone…
Kiwix is an offline content reader, best known for distributing copies of Wikipedia. I have been maintaining it in Debian since 2017. This year most of the work has been keeping all the packages up to date in anticipation of next year's Debian 12 Bookworm release, including several transitions for…
I am currently running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board. You can read my answers to community questions and see the endorsements from other Wikimedians. Voting opens in a few hours and runs through September 6. The best way to support me in the election is: Vote using SecurePoll Rank me…
I gave a very quick lightning talk at #Wikimania today about our migration to #Mailman3: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2022_Wiki_World%27s_Fair_lightning_talk_-_Mailman3_migration.webm
In December 2021, I discovered CVE-2022-28201, which is that it's possible to get MediaWiki's Title::newMainPage() to go into infinite recursion. More specifically, if the local interwikis feature is configured (not used by default, but enabled on Wikimedia wikis), any on-wiki administrator could fully brick the wiki by editing the [[MediaWiki:Mainpage]]…
New #Toolforge tool alert: https://steve-adder.toolforge.org/It lets you see what % of page views on Wikimedia wikis come from the specified browser range. This data is already available in dashboards, just this adds up multiple versions for you.More info: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tool:Steve-adderWritten in #Rust using Rocket and the csv crate. I really appreciate…