There's a yearly programming contest called Advent of Code (AoC). If you haven't heard about it, I'd recommend reading betaveros's post explaining what makes it unique. This was my third attempt at AoC, previously trying it in 2019 (made it to day 5) and 2021 (day 6). This year I…
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…
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]]…
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…
