tl;dr: You can now chat in #wikimedia-rust:matrix.org and reach folks on IRC Nearly a year ago, the official Libera.Chat <-> Matrix bridge was shut down. There's a lot that went wrong in the technical and social operation of the bridge that the Libera.Chat staff have helpfully documented, but from a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
