Running for WMF board, again
I'm running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board (again) with the goal of bringing some much needed technical experience: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2022/Candidates/Kunal_Mehta
Posts about MediaWiki, Wikipedia, and everything else wiki related
Interviewed on Between the Brackets podcast
I was recently interviewed on Between the Brackets: A MediaWiki podcast: Episode 112 - Kunal Mehta. I'm the first ever repeat guest, my first appearance was in 2018 in Episode 9. You can listen through the web interface or in your favorite podcast client. Thanks to Yaron Koren for having…
Interviewed on Between the Brackets
I was recently interviewed on the #MediaWiki Between the Brackets podcast, you can listen at https://betweenthebrackets.libsyn.com/episode-112-kunal-mehta
Photos from today's abortion protest
Posted my freely licensed photos from today's abortion protest in Foley Square at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:May_2022_abortion_protests_in_New_York_CityAdded to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobbs_v._Jackson_Women%27s_Health_Organization#Reactions - we'll see if it lasts (the profanity might be too inflammatory? idk).First time I've used Signal to blur faces for Commons, need to find a different tool (probably GIMP I assume?) that doesn't…
Eleanor Bellows Pillsbury
As part of the #Wikipedia #WikiGap editathon today, I created https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Bellows_Pillsbury - she was the president of Planned Parenthood from 1950-1953, served as vice president of the Red Cross and as her last name gives away, she was a hostess at Pillsbury baking competitions.Her husband had an article since 2009,…
15 years since my first Wikipedia edit
15 years ago yesterday was my first edit to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2006%E2%80%9307_San_Jose_Sharks_season&diff=prev&oldid=122614698It's been a wild ride ever since.
Meeting Chris Smalls
Got to meet Chris Smalls, founder of the #Amazon Labor Union, today, who coincidentally has a new freely-licensed #Wikipedia photo and voice sample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_SmallsPhotos are free for anyone to reuse, with attribution (CC-BY-SA 4.0): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Chris_Smalls
How to mirror the Russian Wikipedia with Debian and Kiwix
It has been reported that the Russian government has threatened to block access to Wikipedia for documenting narratives that do not agree with the official position of the Russian government. One of the anti-censorship strategies I've been working on is Kiwix, an offline Wikipedia reader (and plenty of other content…
New stats from Kiwix
Wow, some new stats from @kiwix: a fifty-fold increase in traffic from Russia, which now accounts for 40% of new downloads!Source: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Forum&type=revision&diff=22975552&oldid=22974473
Uncyclopedia's Community Wishlist Survey
Uncyclopedia continues to parody Wikipedia perfectly, now running its own Community Wishlist Survey: https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Forum:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2022
Building fast Wikipedia bots in Rust
Lately I've been working on mwbot-rs, a framework to write bots and tools in Rust. My main focus is for things related to Wikipedia, but all the code is generic enough to be used by any modern (1.35+) MediaWiki installation. One specific feature of mwbot-rs I want to highlight today…
Did you know...about Tokio?
From Wikipedia's homepage: "Did you know...that the #Tokio platform for the #Rust programming language uses a work stealing scheduler?"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokio_(software)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_stealing
What it takes to parse MediaWiki page titles...in Rust
In the UseModWiki days, Wikipedia page titles were "CamelCase" and automatically linked (see CamelCase and Wikipedia). MediaWiki on the other hand uses the famous [[bracketed links]], aka "free links". For most uses, page titles are the primary identifier of a page, whether it's in URLs for external consumption or [[Page…
Wiki-leak
Today's #MediaWiki security release fixes a pretty bad wiki-leak: https://w.wiki/4ZAeThere's a pretty simple mitigation that can be applied via configuration in LocalSettings.php if you can't patch immediately.Fixes are out for Debian packages, the "official" Docker image, and should land in my Ubuntu PPA for focal/bionic shortly...
How MediaWiki deals with file uploads
I wrote for the #Wikipedia Signpost this month about how #MediaWiki details with file uploads on the backend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2021-11-29/Technology_report