Previous updates: 2018, 2021 Kiwix is an offline content reader, best known for distributing copies of Wikipedia. I have been maintaining it in Debian since 2017. This year most of the work has been keeping all the packages up to date in anticipation of next year's Debian 12 Bookworm release,…
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…
As one of the top contributors to MediaWiki, the free wiki engine that powers Wikipedia, I'm often asked how I got started. To celebrate Wikipedia's 20th birthday, here's that unfortuante story. In late 2012, I was a bored college student who was spending most of his time editing Wikipedia. I…
Artemis Fowl, sitting right of center on my "favorite books" shelf. Nearly two decades later, the Artemis Fowl movie is finally happening. It's hard for me to overstate how important Artemis Fowl has been to me. One of my friends asked me if I saw the trailer today and I…
I've spent a decent amount of time reading Wikipedia articles about Senate, House, and state races this week. And...there were inconsistencies. Specifically in the election box result templates: That's what it looked like before I updated the article to use my template instead. There are a few different issues. First,…
