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,…
The Wikimedia Foundation is currently going through layoffs, reducing headcount by about 5%. I am disappointed that no public announcement has been made, rather people are finding out through rumor and backchannels. In February when I asked whether the WMF was planning layoffs at the "Conversation with the Trustees" event…
There was recently a request to generate a report of featured articles on Wikipedia, sorted by length, specifically the "prose size". It's pretty straightforward to get a page's length in terms of the wikitext or even the rendered HTML output, but counting just the prose is more difficult. Here's how…
I landed file upload support in the mwapi (docs) and mwbot (docs) crates yesterday. Uploading files in MediaWiki is kind of complicated, there are multiple state machines to implement and there are multiple ways to upload files and different options that come with that. The mwapi crate contains most of…
I was intending to write a pretty different blog post about progress on mwbot-rs but...ugh. The main dependency of the parsoid crate, kuchiki, was archived over the weekend. In reality it's been lightly/un-maintained for a while now, so this is just reflecting reality, but it does feel like a huge…