I recently released 5.0.0 of my grr tool that makes working with Gerrit easier. It is an alternative to git-review; I personally think grr is more straightforward to use, but I also haven't used git-review since 2014 when I first got frustrated enough to create grr. I had let it…
The demise of goo.gl is a good opportunity to write about how we built a less terrible URL shortener for Wikimedia projects: w.wiki. (I actually started writing this blog post in 2016 and never got back to it, oops.) URL shorteners are generally a bad idea for a few main…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
