Hello world, and welcome to my corner of the web. This is where I write words about what I'm working on, and post photographs of things I've seen.
I'm a Software Engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and so of course my personal website is a wiki (running on MediaWiki). In my spare time I volunteer with WikiClubWest to work on Wikimedia projects, mostly around my family's genealogy and local Western Australian history (especially to do with Fremantle). I try to keep up with issues on all the things I maintain (but usually fail), as well as listing the software that I use.
I try to find time to work in my workshop on various woodworking projects. Recently, that's been focused on building a metalworking bench, and will soon be about a set campaign-style drawers that's in the works. I've a good-sized workshop because I don't have a car.
Travel features in my life, not because I really hugely want to go elsewhere but because I just do — and also because then I can do some interesting mapping on OpenStreetMap, and take photos for Wikimedia Commons. Sometimes I ride my bike to get there, or walk, but more often it's planes, trains and ferries.
I'm currently reading the following books: Arrowsmith (Anon), and Canadian Short Stories (Robert Weaver, 1960), and Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollop), and Messing About in Earnest (Nick Burningham, 2003), and The Countryside Companion (Tom Stephenson), and Vesper Flights (Anon).
To contact me, you can email me, find me on Matrix as '@samwilson:matrix.org', the fediverse as @samwilson@wikis.world, or Telegram as @freosam. If you want to leave a comment on this site (by creating an account), you need to know the secret code Tuart (it's not very secret, but seems to be confusing enough for most spammers).
Below are my recent blog posts.
Own your own place on the web
Fremantle
· indieweb ·
Own what’s yours by PJ Onori, 4 February 2025:
Is taking control of your content less convenient? Yeah–of course. That’s how we got in this mess to begin with. It can be a downright pain in the ass. But it’s your pain in the ass. And that’s the point.
And this isn’t just about blogs. This relates to portfolios, code snippets, photos. You name it. What’s made by you should be owned and controlled by you.
Web 2.0 failed. True online sharing died a long time ago. So start taking. Take your ideas, your words, your work–and go home.
WordPress is even getting RSS wrong now
Fremantle
· feeds ·
Looks like WordPress.com's main blog feed is failing (and has been since at least 2025-02-14 07:02 Z):
$ curl -I https://wordpress.com/blog/feed/
HTTP/2 301
server: nginx
date: Tue, 18 Feb 2025 11:39:17 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
location: https://wordpress.com/blog/feed-oddities/
x-redirect-by: WordPressEscape down and up
Bali
· hotels ·
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Exit route (down)
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Tsunami route (up)
S1159
Bali
· Wikisource Conference 2025 ·
Sounds like there's amazing work going on in the Philippines around training people (with actual curriculum integration in high schools, if I'm understanding it?) to edit Wikisource —
Collaboration Toward an Open GLAM: The Case of Wikisource Loves Manuscripts in the Philippines
The first phase comprised the 24-hour basic training course on transcribing, proofreading, and validating of Wikisource pages held from the first week of June toward mid-July 2024. In the second phase, the 40-hour WILMA PH advanced Wikisource workshop commenced with the two-day Bikol Wikisource Training of Trainers (TOT).
PER→DPS
Bali
An incredibly easy arrival in Bali: I was sitting near the front of the plane so got off quickly, but then getting through immigration look about three minutes. Too quick, as it turned out, because the luggage collection listing had been updated with the wrong info, so I then stood at carousel six for twenty minutes wondering where my bag was — only to find that it was actually carousel three that I should've been at, and where my case was among four others forlornly going around and around on their own.
Selecting translation language in wdlocator
Perth Airport
· wdlocator ·
I nerdsniped myself yesterday I guess, and as I've found myself at the airport a bit early (or rather it was quieter than I'd thought it might be and I got through check-in, customs, and security quickly), I'm working on phabricator:T386289.
The modern way (and the old fashioned way; there was a time in between when we thought of it as 'clutter') is to always have a submit button when there's a form input, so I'm going to do that. Something along the lines of this:
Even though that means it takes up two lines instead of one. Perhaps all those things should be hidden in a popup menu of some sort. But that's more work, and the whole sidebar UI of this tool needs an overhaul, so for now I'll just do the bare minimum. Really I want to dig into why the automatic language selection isn't working as expected.
The other thing I've noticed is that there are some languages missing from krinkle/intuition, like Fante. I think I've wondered before about how those are updated, but I can't now remember what the process is. Perhaps that's a nice easy thing to do
Translations for wdlocator
Fremantle
· wdlocator · Wikimedia · OSM ·
I've upgraded toolforge:wdlocator to PHP 8.2 and Symfony 7, and in doing so I think have fixed a long-standing (but unknown to me!) bug with how it was selecting the user interface language. It's supposed to change based on the Accept-Language header, but there was a bug with that in our ToolforgeBundle. I think we fixed that bug ages ago, but I forgot to update wdlocator. So now I have, and it can be read in Indonesian at e.g. https://wdlocator.toolforge.org/?uselang=id#map=17/-8.72520/115.17650
(I mention Indonesian, and the map above is centred on Denpasar, because that's where I'm going tomorrow. For the Wikisource Conference.)
I know I should also add a UI for actually selecting a language, but that'll have to wait.
Empire mapping on OHM
Fremantle
· OSM · history · OpenHistoricalMap ·
Amazing work has been done by CharliePlett with Mapping the British Empire on OpenHistoricalMap:
_(2846280)_OpenHistoricalMap.png)
That screenshot is how the Empire looked between 1900-10-09 when the Cook Islands were added, and 1900-10-19 when Niue was added (not to bowdlerise the act of empire building or anything with a word like 'added').
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