ARM Cuauhtémoc

Welcome
My coffee mug

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: A Puritan Bohemia (Margaret Sherwood, 1896), and Arrowsmith (Anon), and Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollop), and The Countryside Companion (Tom Stephenson).

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.



Railfest 2024

Fremantle

· trains ·

Flyer for Railfest 2024.

We had a bit of a chat about the WAGR Fs 460 loco, and how it could be set up on Commons and Wikidata.

I have a bunch of other photos to upload (and items and categories to create)… so will tag this as [todo].

WA Biographical Index

Fremantle

· Wikimedia · Western Australia · datsets · open data ·

I noticed the other day that the Western Australian Biographical Index is licensed under CC-BY, so I thought I'd try to copy relevant entries to Freopedia (and other things). I downloaded the 18 CSV files: 

   A-final.csv  DE-final.csv  H-final.csv   L-final_edited.csv  O-final.csv   S-final.csv
   B-final.csv  F-final.csv   IJ-final.csv  M-final.csv         PQ-final.csv  T-final.csv
   C-final.csv  G-final.csv   K-final.csv   N-final.csv         R-final.csv   UVXYZ-final.csv

Combined them into one, without their header rows (which were confirmed to exist before doing this): 

$ awk '(NR == 1) || (FNR > 1)' *.csv > wabi.csv

This was imported into OpenRefine, and resulted in 85,403 records.

Found duplicates by sorting, applying "reorder rows permanently", and then "edit cells" > "blank down". The blanks can then be faceted on, and 421 duplicates were found, e.g. PQ/P2626 (where the second here is the correct record):

POCOCK Ruth Elsie May b. 1900. m. N.S.W. 1928 Edwin Lennard MINCHIN

vs.

PLUSH Edward, son of Thomas Hall (artist). arr 18.3.1886 per Albany (steerage) from SA - listed as G. Plush. m. 1.1.1890 (Perth C/E) Amelia GOLDING, dtr. of William (gardener). PERTH painter. Joined the Police force 1886.

That meant there were 84,982 unique cards.

These were imported to a Mix'n'Match catalogue: https://mix-n-match.toolforge.org/#/catalog/6490 For this, the card text had to be truncated.

I proposed a new property on Wikidata, and it was approved and created a week or so after.

Now the task is to link items to the WABI, probably starting with any mentioning Fremantle.

Freo skin for MediaWiki

Fremantle

· MediaWiki · skins · Freopedia · Wikimedia ·

I've been working a bit lately on Freopedia, and have started building a new MediaWiki skin for it. I just want something very simple. I'd go with any of the existing ones, but it's nice to have different sites looking different I think. I've also been wanting to experiment with putting things in the menus that make most sense to me — I've never really understood why we have 'page information' next to 'upload file'. I'm putting all "per page" actions together in a page menu, and all "whole of site" actions in a site munu. The user menu stays pretty much the same (user page, log in/out, preferences, etc.). The page information and Cargo page data links will sit along with edit, move, delete, etc.

I'll get around to setting up mw:Skin:Freo soon. Once I've convinced myself this isn't all a bit silly.

Southern side of the old synagogue

Fremantle

· Fremantle ·

I should probably take some more photos of things that will be harder to see when the new police station is built. If it ever is.

The beer garden side.

Digital day books

Fremantle

· Flickr · archiving ·

The Flickr Foundation talks about the idea of A Digital Day Book:

Long ago, businesses would keep a log of daily minutiae but we don’t have that today. We want to make one because recording our own history will benefit future colleagues.

That page references an interview with George Oates, which doesn't seem to have a date anywhere but must've been a while ago judging from how they talk about Slack ("the company is growing really fast"):

Companies today […] use hundreds or thousands of additional services owned by other people to keep their most precious information. That's a big hairy problem that, for example, Slack, the 'real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams', is trying to solve.

I don't think Slack can be considered a particularly good way to store an organisation's day book now!

It doesn't seem to have been replaced by anything better though — it hasn't been replaced at all; it has tightened its hold on people's data though, unfortunately.

ARM Cuauhtémoc

Fremantle

· ships · Fremantle Harbour ·

Went on board the Mexican navy's sail training ship Cuauhtémoc this evening.

The poor Leeuwin II was further down the wharf, looking pretty sorry for itself:

Got a couple of photos of D and C sheds as well:

  • C

    C

  • D

    D

  • D

    D

Moving pages

Fremantle

· Fremantle · Freopedia · MediaWiki · Wikimedia ·

I've been doing lots of MediaWiki page moves lately, on Freopedia. I use the accesskey alt+shift+m, and have changed the movepage-moved message to include an edit link so that as soon as I've moved a page I can jump in to editing it (really, I'd rather the edit accesskey worked from that page too, but I guess it's slightly ambiguous which page — old or new — should be edited).

The new message text is: 

"[[$3|$3]]" has been moved to "$2" ([{{fullurl:$4|action=edit}} edit])

(This works because there are parameters to that message that are not used by default: $1 - the source page as a link with display name; $2 - the target page as a link with display name; $3 - (optional) the source page name without a link; $4 - (optional) the target page name without a link.)

I did the import to Freopedia with all original page names maintained, including the path and .html file extension. That was probably unnecessary, and people might think it ugly, but it isn't always obvious what their destination page name should be. Also, by keeping the original location in the page history it's much easier to track down broken links and to generally keep the provenance clearer (i.e. each page's location on the original Freotopia site). I'm working my way through it all and fixing the page names (which reasonably often is more than just a page move, it might also involve merging with another existing page and definitely often is about editing the page contents).

Wikispore things

Fremantle

· Wikispore · wikis · MediaWiki · Wikimedia ·

I've been helping a bit lately with getting the Wikispore site up and running again and upgraded. There's more to do, but it's at least online, and last night I added some fixes for the sitemap and statistics regeneration.

The thing I mainly wonder about is how it should all work. Because I really love the idea of making it easier to get a small topical wiki up and running, and by making that process basically just be the creation of a new namespace on an existing wiki it seems like it could help with more people writing more pages about things they care about. But how to communicate that to people?! I think that's the issue now.

There are of course lots of problems with a free-for-all hosting of whatever content — people like to put crap on the internet — but leaving that aside, there seems to also be a problem with making it easy for people who want to publish meaningful useful content. They end up on Wix or Squarespace or whatever (or, more commonly, just Facebook etc.). MediaWiki is much better than those.

So maybe Wikispore can be the "topical incubator" wiki. With things being spun off (as Stardit has been) on to their own wikis if they get to a certain level of use.

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