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: Canadian Short Stories (Robert Weaver, 1960), and Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollop), and England, Their England (A. G. Macdonell, 1933), and The Ante-Room (Lovat Dickson, 1959), and The Countryside Companion (Tom Stephenson), and The Factory Floor (Carolyn Polizzotto), and The Oatmeal Ark (Rory Maclean), and Vesper Flights (Anon).
To contact me, you can email me, find me on Matrix as '@samwilson:matrix.org' or Telegram as @freosam.
This site is on webring.wiki; explore other sites: [ ←previous | next→ ]
Below are my recent blog posts, and you can jump to the bottom to navigate to other posts from earlier times.
Fremantle
· 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).
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.
The (nerd) world seems to be much more interested in ActivityPub than RSS these days, but RSS feels so much simpler and also in a way more powerful. It's sad that even podcasts are abandoning it.
This is an interesting list of different ways to reply to blog posts: Please let me interact with your blog post! (22 August 2026, Michael Harley).
It's slightly ironic that I came across the post in via my RSS feed reader (via the IndieNews feed), where it didn't have any body and just looked like this:
I still hope to implement Webmentions on my own blog one of these days.
Fremantle
· MediaWiki · Miraheze · DisplayTitle · extensions ·
Interesting that Miraheze are looking to disable the DisplayTitle extension because of performance concerns. I've recently been removing it from some wikis, mainly because people have gotten confused about what a page's title actually is. There are also a bunch of places that used to make use of DisplayTitle that now have templates that basically follow redirects to figure out titles, and it's more obvious what's going on when those are used.
Fremantle
· DDD Perth · conferences ·
The DDD Perth programme is out now: https://dddperth.com/agenda
I'd forgotten that I bought a ticket actually, but now I'm looking forward to going. I've not been to a DDD for a few years.
Fremantle
· copyright · metadata · British Library ·
Sharing British Library open metadata with our communities, August 2026:
This policy reaffirms the British Library’s commitment to making metadata as open as possible, and confirms the terms of licence, limitations and exceptions for sharing the British Library's open metadata.
The default licence offered is Creative Commons (CC0). This is in line with comparable open metadata services such as Europeana and research infrastructure such as the Barcelona Declaration and the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure.
Fremantle
· AI ·
Paul Cantrell, 21 Aug 2026, 05:44:
contrary to popular belief, developers actually care quite a lot about the people who use our software and we derive a sense of purpose and meaning from doing what we believe to be good work; the current environment undermines that, not just LLMs but LLMs as part of a broader vortex of enshittification, and our world is effectively saying “everything you cared about doesn't matter, you can't hope to fight to make it matter, and you are stupid for caring”
A good thread about what LLMs are doing to software development. It definitely does feel like people are caring less these days.
Fremantle
· AI · programming ·
It's becoming more and more common for people to leave AI-generated comments during code reviews. This is to be expected I guess, as more and more people are using AI to write the code, it makes sense that they also use it for the discussion part. It's sometimes incredibly obvious when they do, and sometimes less so. I'm also starting to wonder if people are intentionally using AI-style language though, even when they write things themselves! Like always re-phrasing what they're replying to, being overly grateful, and using the name of the person they're replying to.
I wish people would just go back to being themselves.
Fremantle
· 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.
Fremantle
· websites · blogging ·
Little Websites Everywhere, by Michelle Barker, 18 August 2026:
Building a website feels old-fashioned these days. How many more websites do I have left in me before the old fire flickers and dies? Is snuffed out. Before making websites is no longer a viable way to earn a living? The web will change drastically within my lifetime, maybe someday soon, indeed it already has. Maybe it really will fizzle out, a graveyard haunted only by bots and crawlers. But I have a hunch that there will be a long tail. Amid the dying embers, a resilient cohort of indie web bloggers, artists and creators will keep going, keep on talking to each other through their blogs, without tracking, pop-ups or invasive ads.
Fremantle
· Fremantle Maritime Museum · Fremantle · H.M. Wilson Archives ·
I dropped in to the maritime museum this morning to get a photo of Shakespeare Hall's diving trunk that's on display on the deck of Trixen, and also noticed that there's a document of his on display in the same location.
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The Swandocks' crane is half re-built now. -
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Shakespeare's trunk. -
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Shame about the heavy tinting, otherwise it'd be a good place to take photos from. -
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Crawley
· UWA · books · Save the Children ·
The UWA book sale is on this weekend, and today I went up to see what I could find; I bought ten books. There's a definite feeling of competition along some of the trestle tables, people slowly moving along and pretending to not focus on each other, but fiercely guarding their spot — and look out should they eye a volume they want that happens to be in front of you! Politeness disappears fairly quickly, or maybe that's just around the nerdy history tables.
I got a few more Fremantle-related books, and will add them to my new list at freo:User:Samwilson (that way they're catalogued in the normal Freopedia list of works).
Fremantle
· Fremantle ·
I wandered through Freo to the pub, getting some piccies for the wikis:
And then on to the PSAS gallery:
Fremantle
· Leake Street · Fremantle ·
Leake Street has been changing lately, with new pavements, the Terminus renovations, and soon the cops will move from here.
Fremantle
· Fremantle · Bathers Beach ·
A few pics taken while walking the long way around to the railway station.
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