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]]…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I just released version 0.2.0 of the mwapi_responses crate. It automatically generates Rust types based on the query parameters specified for use in MediaWiki API requests. If you're not familiar with the MediaWiki API, I suggest you play around with the API sandbox. It is highly dynamic, with the user…
