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Category Archives: Uncategorized

Dude, where are my pictures?

Like many people, I take a lot of pictures with my phone. After all, the best camera is the one you have with, and phone cameras produce high quality pictures these days. And like many Wikimedia volunteers, sometimes I take pictures thinking “this should go on Commons/Wikipedia/Wikidata”. But then days pass, and I don’t remember […]

AutoDesc Reloaded

A long, long time ago, in a codebase far, far away, I wrote some code to generate automatic descriptions of Wikidata items for Reasonator. This turned out to be very useful, and I forked the code into its own tool/API, AutoDesc. Many of my tools, including the popular Mix-n-match, use AutoDesc under the hood. As […]

The Depicts

So Structured Data on Commons (SDC) has been going for a while. Time to reap some benefits! Besides free-text image descriptions, the first, and likely most used, element one can add to a picture via SDC is “depicts”. This can be one or several Wikidata items which are visible (prominently or as background) on the […]

Deleted gender wars

After reading the excellent analysis of AfD vs gender by Andrew Gray, where he writes about the articles that faced and survived the “Article for Deletion” process, I couldn’t help but wonder what happened to the articles that were not kept, that is, where AfD was “successful”. So I quickly took all article titles from […]

The Hand-editor’s Tale

Disclaimer: I am the author of Listeria, and maintainer of ListeriaBot. In January 2016, User:Emijrp had an idea. Why not use that newfangled Listeria tool, a bot that generates lists based on Wikidata, and puts them on Wikipedia pages, to maintain a List of Women Linguists on English Wikipedia? It seemed that a noble cause […]

What else?

Structured Data on Commons is approaching. I have done a bit of work on converting Infoboxes into statements, that is, to generate structured data. But what about using it? What could that look like? Inspired by a recent WMF blog post, I wrote a simple demo on what you might call “auto-categorisation”. You can try […]

The blind referee

A quick blog post, before the WordPress editor dies on my again… Wikidata is great. Wikidata with references is even better. So I have written a little tool called Referee. It checks a Wikidata item, collects web pages that are linked via external ID statements, and via associated Wikipedia pages, and checks them for potential […]

Recommendations

Reading Recommending Images to Wikidata Items by Miriam, which highlights missing areas of image coverage in Wikidata (despite being the most complete site in the WikimediaVerse, image-wise), and strategies to address the issue, I was reminded of an annoying problem I have run into a few times. My WD-FIST tool uses (primarily) SPARQL to find […]

Mix’n’match interface update

I have been looking into a JavaScript library called vue.js lately. It is similar to React, but not encumbered by licensing issues (that might prevent its use on WMF servers in the future), faster (or so they claim), but most of all, it can work without interference on the server side; all I need for my […]

More mixin’, more matches

Mix’n’match has seen some updates in the past few days. There are about ~170K new entries, in several catalogs: Yle (Finnish Yle freebase => wikidata migration) Orsay Museum artists PSS-Archi architects and buildings SIKART Lexikon zur Kunst in der Schweiz Kansallisbiografia Also, there is a brand-new import tool that anyone (who has made at least […]