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.
Crawley
· UWA · Swan River ·
We went for a bit of a wander along the beach at Pelican Point, pausing to have morning tea with the Swan Estuary Reserves Action Group (and to create their Wikidata item), and then to Shenton House and to peer at the old photos on the walls of the tavern (none of which are well labelled).
[todo – Add remaining photos.]
-
The old shed at the rear of Shenton House, c.1852? -
It looks like there's a cellar. Note also the beam ending directly above the door, with lots of cracks in the brickwork. -
Looking through a grubby window by the front door.
Fremantle
· museums · Fremantle Hospital · Freopedia ·
We had a good time at the Fremantle Hospital Museum today. It takes up the entirety of N Block it seems, although we didn't really get to look at many of the exhibits because we were focussed on checking out Curley Molyneux's big plaque and then mostly with talking with the volunteer archivists who run the place. They are amazing! It's a huge collection, and they're cataloguing and digitising all of it, as well as writing up stories to display with the exhibits.
It was interesting hearing about the issues with things like integrating into the hospital's data storage system (or rather, not integrating at all), and avoiding Collections WA (partly because of its insistence on overly-detailed catalogue records that aren't feasible with such a large collection and small number of volunteers). It was good to talk to people about the issues of running a community archive as many are similar to what we face at the Buffalo Club (and maybe the wider internet in general, in some ways!). Their digitisation programme seems pretty comprehensive.
The museum has a huge collection of photos and documents relating to nurses and other people who have worked at the hospital since the late 19th Century. Fascinating to see the maps and aerial photos of the site, and to get a bit of an impromptu tour of the Knowle and Ron Doig Block. We were trying to find the location of Curley's famous drinking fountain, but it looks like it might've been in the old main entrance to the Ron Doig Block, which has been removed to make way for car parking.
There are so many connections to Fremantle in the museum's collection (although really it's mostly about medical topics and people, and not really local history). I want to go back and dig more into things like the Princess May school's involvement in the children's hospital, and get copies of some of the Board minutes relating to Curley.
I've probably rambled about it before, but the one real strength I think in small archives like this is in their ability to share material with others. It shares the knowledge, but also the burden of digital preservation, in a way that centralised systems do not (even things like Wikimedia Commons that have fully open contributions).
Fremantle
· MediaWiki · Wikimedia · Git · Composer ·
When installing MediaWiki extensions with Composer, it can fail for extensions that are hosted on Gerrit. For example, here PluggableAuth is not able to be cloned from https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/extensions/PluggableAuth and is prompting for user credentials:
$ composer update -o --no-dev
Composer could not detect the root package (mediawiki/core) version, defaulting to '1.0.0'. See https://getcomposer.org/root-version
> MediaWiki\Composer\VersionChecker::onEvent
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies
Nothing to modify in lock file
Installing dependencies from lock file
Package operations: 50 installs, 6 updates, 7 removals
- Syncing mediawiki/pluggable-auth (7.5.0) into cache
Authentication required (gerrit.wikimedia.org):
Username:
Providing a username and password here won't help, because the issue is that Varnish is returning 403:
$ curl -sI https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/extensions/PluggableAuth
HTTP/2 403
date: Sun, 18 Oct 2026 02:59:51 GMT
server: Varnish
…
The fix is to conform to the WMF user agent policy, by setting Git's userAgent to something that identifies you (in .gitconfig):
[http]
userAgent = "Your Wiki (you@example.org)"
Then the composer update works fine.
Fremantle
· genealogy · Flickr ·
Who FediFlick Archive Is Actually For, 13 September 2026, by Leo Gaggl:
The third is genealogists and family historians, and everyone who travels specifically to the town their grandmother left, the church a great-grandfather was married in, the street that shows up in one faded photo with no caption. It’s the same anthropogeography as the first group, narrowed from a region or a species to a single family’s line. And the practical gap is sharp: most genealogists’ photo finds live on one person’s Flickr account with no succession plan. When that person dies or deletes, the photos vanish from the record.
"No succession plan" here is true, but one good thing about Flickr is that anyone can pay for someone else's account, to keep it alive. That's not true of very many services.
Fremantle
· Buffalo Club · oral history ·
Know Thy Neighbour Residency: Cara Teusner-Gartland with Vessel and Fremantle Buffalo Club #2, 2026-09-16:
The club would mean nothing without these people, and their stories.
This project we’re doing, I’d like to think, is an acknowledgement of that. It’s as much about the building as the people, because the building is a reflection of everyone’s labour of love.
Over the last few months Anna Farrant and I have interviewed at least twelve members; some young, some old, all folks I’m grateful to have met.
We ended each interview with the same question: What would you like this club to look like in 50 years?
Fremantle
· internet · websites ·
The radical history of personal computing—looms, coding, beige boxes and AI, ABC Radio National, Conversations, 18 September 2026:
When I found out that anyone could put anything online, and anyone could access it from any other computer, the idea just blew my mind.
Fremantle
· beer · Buffalo Club ·
It's the same name, but a new beer. Does that make it new? I'm not sure.
This one is from Limestone Coast Brewing, who are one of the companies that run lots of little microbreweries in pubs and restaurants around the place.
Fremantle
· ArchivesWiki · Lua ·
I've been playing around with improving the item details panels on ArchivesWiki, to split the bottom text into two parts: date, and ident. The ident is the unique identifier of the item (the bold bit in the top left is the sequence number, shown only for the galleries used on storage location pages, because the sequence in the storage location is the most useful thing in that situation).
The ident is used in the URLs, e.g. https://archives.org.au/HMW458 for this one.
Fremantle
· exiftool · photography ·
Not sure why I find it hard to remember how to remove the GPSLatitude and GPSLongitude tags from images:
$ exiftool -gps:all= -xmp:geotag= -overwrite_original ./lorem.jpg
Fremantle
The old RAOB building at 19 Stirling Street:
Trades Hall plaques:
Epoch café:
Grant Street
· Calibre · EPUBs · AI ·
Calibre have added an AI thing they're calling "Create your own adventure": a writing game, or "interactive storytelling with an AI managing the world you create."
This is a little different from the usual run of calibre features. It started out as a way to test the AI backends in calibre but turned into something fun to use. As always with AI features its completely optional and not even loaded unless you explicitly run it.
Calibre already has a reputation for being a pretty strange bit of software, but it's well-liked by lots of open source people because it is really good at converting ebooks to various formats, and managing large libraries of books, and moving them on to ereader devices. I'm not quite sure anyone's wanting it to generate AI slop.
Personally I only really use it (or rather the built-in ebook-editor tool) for debugging EPUBs.
Perth
· ALIA · conferences · SLWA ·
The 2026 ALIA West conference was held on a Thursday and Friday in September 2026. I'm not a librarian, and was attending as a Wikimedian partly to help with the idea of Wikifying a Conference. The venue was the State Library of WA, and it's good that the café there opens before the library itself does, because we got an extra hour of talking time. (It's a clique but so often true that conferences are about talking to people more than listening to presentations!)
It was good to meet the WA Military Digital Library folk. There were two of them, representing a team of about ten. WAMDL uses MediaWiki and it was great to hear more about what they think of it (they like it of course). It turns out they're running from a self-hosted server at the home of one of the organisers! There's a possibility that we'll get organised and start a chat channel for Australian history wiki people, because there are about five such wikis currently operating (plus a few defunct ones). Time for an Aussie MediaWiki users' group!
The Welcome to Country was by Freda Ogilvie, a retired school principal from the north west.
Trish Ryder's keynote about the 1940s Carrolup artworks was very moving. The John Curtin Gallery is using the term 'once known' rather than 'unknown' to refer to children who's names weren't recorded alongside their art (it's also the name of the exhibition that's opening soon at the Cloisters).
An autistic LIS student gave a lively talk about what it's like to be neurodivergent and attend conferences. It sounds like the library world is fairly supportive — perhaps there's some sort of overlap between librarians and neurodivergence?
Curtin have set up a mature age student club, run by the library. I think they need a wiki club (although really I'd rather Notre Dame had one, because they're closer to me).
Two metadata nerds from UWA presented about UWA Collected. I spoke to one of them, Jonah Highman (a self-confessed metadata nerd), and it does sound like some sort of UWA-Wikimedia communication could be fun. The Two Centuries of Chinese Heritage in WA project looks terrific (and huge). I found a letter that I added to my family archives: archiveswiki:Letter to H. Gregory 20 October 1920. UWA Collected uses the Recollect software, which seems to be growing in popularity these days.
FamilyHistoryWA presented about their on-going ghost town project. They're a good bunch for planning (like perhaps many organisations run by retired nerds). Two years of thinking before they created their first database record; they've now got 140,000, although none are public yet. They're only including people relating to any of the 950 "ghost communities" that they're tracking. I'm not sure how much interlinking they're doing to other sites such as Wikidata or WikiTree. There were two ghost communities on Rottnest! I'm guessing one was the Army camp, not sure about the other. Some currently-disappearing towns are being included too (like Sandstone).
The are creating records of every person, and leaving disambiuation up to future researchers.
Alice Woods and Gnangarra talked about Wikimedia Australia and the partner projects and other things (and I even spoke briefly about MediaWiki, and Noongarpedia!). In none of the sessions was there much time for questions, so it's hard to know what the library folk think of wiki stuff. Hopefully they're keen.
There was plenty more talked about, all very interesting, but I was trying to listen more than get distracted with note-taking.
Links
- Conference website: https://aliawest.alia.org.au/the-value-of-us-conference/
- Wikidata item: d:Q141488547
- Commons category: commons:Category:ALIA West 2026
- WMAU post: wmau:ALIA West Conference 2026
Photos
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