By the time you read this, you'll probably have seen Wikipedia's new layout ("skin"), dubbed "Vector 2022". You can read about the changes it brings. As with most design changes, some people will like it and some people won't. But me? I just feel sad because years ago we had…
Toolforge is a free cloud computing platform designed for and used by the Wikimedia movement to host various tools and bots. One of the coolest parts of using Toolforge is that you get access to redacted copies of the MediaWiki MySQL database replicas, aka the wiki replicas. (Note that whenever…
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…
