Sam Wilson: wikimedia

Organised Labour Month

Sam Wilson — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 08:07:00 GMT

Fremantle
2026 August 31 (Monday), 4:07PM
· Wikimedia · unionism ·

September is Organized Labour Month and Wikimedia Australia is taking part (and fixing the spelling to be Organised Labour Month). There are photos needed for a bunch of Trades' Halls in Australia, and trade unionism in general.

It's pure coincidence that Wikimedia Foundation employees are currently voting on unionizing in the United States.

I'm not getting sidetracked with a book I picked up the other week about William Lane.

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Web collecting

Sam Wilson — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:33:00 GMT

Fremantle
2026 August 27 (Thursday), 7:33PM
· Wikimedia · websites · MediaWiki · InstantCommons ·

I've written before about websites as collecting endeavours. That there's some good aspects to features like MediaWiki's insistence on not being able to embed foreign images. Keeping things together within one place, and pulling in things that we find elsewhere, can build a more coherent and resilient website. Having copies/duplicates/multiples of things, spread out and maintained by completely separate people or organisations, increases the chances that things will survive. The web is an ephemeral place.

Some sites, such as many of those on the fediverse, don't like archiving. They have very clever systems of interchange that does result in multiple copies being hosted in different places, but they also have good systems of those copies being strongly linked — so they can all be deleted if the original is. In the more disperse indieweb world that's not really how it's done: some RSS feed readers, for example, will keep all copies (following some retention policy perhaps, but that might be "keep forever" — that's certainly how I do it for a bunch of sites I follow).

This is an image loaded via InstantCommons (a thing I uploaded recently to Commons).

MediaWiki does allow embedding foreign images in one specific way: if they come from Wikimedia Commons. This is called InstantCommons, and it's a very cool feature. It pulls in the image and its metadata, and links to the thumbnail hosted on Wikimedia's servers. This has a few issues, such as the image being able to be changed at any point without the local wiki knowing, and the fact that it makes the local wiki's collection dependent on an external service. It also puts quite a lot of load on the Wikimedia servers, which is probably fine if it's for a purpose that's aligned with that of Commons (that's a tricky thing to figure out of course).

A better system would download the thumbnail to the wiki's own storage, and serve it from there. But I also have been wondering about a system of copying the image (and its metadata) into the local wiki, to remove any dependency on the external service. That uses even fewer of Wikimedia's resources, and makes the wiki self-contained. The trick to it I think would be to make it quick and easy to pull the image in (and perhaps it could work with any website), and also maybe to view any changes that had been made since it'd been pulled in.

Then the site would be more of a standalone collection — perhaps annoyingly indivisible.

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OCR 1.10.2

Sam Wilson — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 07:41:00 GMT

Fremantle
2026 August 19 (Wednesday), 3:41PM
· Wikimedia · OCR · tools ·

The Wikimedia OCR tool is now at version 1.10.2. Nothing big in this change, I mainly made it because there were a bunch of localisation updates that had not yet been released, and lately there's been some TranslateWiki.net comments about how important it is to keep on top of these updates.

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Mediawiki-feeds revisited

Sam Wilson — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 06:18:00 GMT

Murdoch
2026 June 9 (Tuesday), 2:18PM
· mediawiki-feeds · RSS · Toolforge · Wikimedia ·

Yesterday someone messaged me about an issue with a wonky little tool I wrote ten years ago. I actually the thing, because it creates feeds for a couple of things I follow on wikis, but as is often the way with RSS-related code I'd forgotten all about it — it just keeps working and doesn't need any changes.

But I fixed it up a bit to sort out their issue, and in doing so also upgraded a few bits of it and moved the code to GitLab. It also seems that on 22 March this year it got popular for some reason: twenty-two thousand hits in a day. I guess it was stupid scrapers, but I'll look a bit closer and also try to sort out some more aggressive caching.

Traffic to the tool over the last 12 months. (I'm not quite sure how to make the toolviews tool show with more contrast; there are actually axes in this image!)

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OCR tool 1.10.0

Sam Wilson — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 11:45:00 GMT

Fremantle
2026 June 3 (Wednesday), 7:45PM
· Wikimedia · OCR · Toolforge ·

The Wikimedia OCR tool now supports rotating the image, thanks to mw:User:Okerekechinweotito.

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Wikipedia doesn't include everything

Sam Wilson — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 01:46:00 GMT

Fremantle
2026 January 16 (Friday), 9:46AM
· Wikimedia · Wikipedia · research ·

There was an interesting thread this morning about reasons that people get annoyed at Wikipedia. There were some comments about how hard it can be to get even well-cited material into articles. Which is probably fairly true in many parts of Wikipedia. I don't really edit it very much; I spend most time on Commons and Wikidata, and I think that's because I'm more interested in archiving and documentation than the really quite tricky work of summarising existing research.

Dariusz Jemielniak put it well this week in saying that Wikipedia is "a systematic literature review that anyone can improve, based on a sophisticated system of peer review." Looking at it like that, it becomes clear that before you can edit you really should a) have a good general knowledge of the topic, so that you can evaluate sources appropriately and see how they fit into it in general; and b) have source literature to work from.

The thing that doesn't seem to get talked about all that much is the idea that, for all the — vastly more extensive — knowledge that doesn't belong in Wikipedia, people can set up their own 'pedia wikis. Just set up MediaWiki and start writing about the things you care about!

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Wikipedia 25

Sam Wilson — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:07:00 GMT

Fremantle
2026 January 15 (Thursday), 8:07AM
· Wikimedia · Wikipedia · birthdays ·

Wikipedia was launched 25 years ago today, at wikipedia.com. I think I first found it at the end of that year, and immediately ignored it and went off to play with UseModWiki. It wasn't until 2006 that I tried editing properly, and even then not very extensively because I was more interested in how to run MediaWiki. Maybe at some point my MediaWiki investigations will run their course and I'll get back to editing Wikipedia.

Australians are coordinating their Wikipedia25 celebrations at wikipedia:Event:Australia wishes Wikipedia a Happy 25th Birthday, and adding notes about what this milestone means to them. And in Fremantle this evening we're having a birthday meetup at the Buffalo Club.

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MediaWiki for everything

Sam Wilson — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 08:57:00 GMT

Perth
2025 December 10 (Wednesday), 4:57PM
· MediaWiki · Wikimedia · Markdown · websites ·

People say we shouldn't try to smush every feature possible into MediaWiki. That when we get to the point of integrating an email client (or some chat system, I guess, to modernise the cliche) then we'll have Gone Too Far. Not to mention that perhaps some people don't see a future for MediaWiki outside the Wikimedia movement (which I don't agree with at all).

But I don't know. I do still think that there's great power in the everything's-a-page model. It's what all the cool kids do with Obsidian or static Markdown-derived websites, and a wiki is just like that but packed up and run in one place—and old and uncool.

So I'll persist, I think, in adding things I want to MediaWiki. Maybe not a mail client, but definitely something to do with indieweb tools, possibly webmentions. But maybe a mail client.

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Setting white balance on a Sony RX100 mk.V

Sam Wilson — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 01:46:00 GMT

Fremantle
2025 September 27 (Saturday), 9:46AM
· photography · Wikimedia · archiving · Buffalo Club ·

When photographing documents (in the slightly slap-dash but productive way we've been doing it at the Buffalo Club) it's necessary to set the camera's white balance to match the day's lighting conditions. With the Sony RX100 mk.V it's a matter of:

Set up the camera with the lighting conditions for the session, with nothing but a large white piece of paper in the frame. (Some paper has whitening chemicals added, which can throw things out, but that's a topic for another day.)
Use the Fn key to enter the menu, then go to the 'White balance' submenu.
At the bottom is the item, which enters the set mode. The white object only needs to fill the central area.
Click the centre of the control wheel to set the white balance:
Choose one of the three custom registers in which to save it:

The new values are saved and selected. To view them, you can go into the custom register, and view the values:

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S1269

Sam Wilson — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 09:09:00 GMT

Fremantle
2025 August 12 (Tuesday), 5:09PM
· Wikimedia · Nairobi ·

Wikimania finished a couple of days ago, and it's nice to see that there are photos of the Nairobi Railway Museum starting to be uploaded!

Nairobi Railway Museum, 10 August 2025, by commons:User:Motoko C. K.

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