Toolforge Bundle version 1.4.6 is released.

Pattypan is a great tool for uploading lots of files to Commons. I’m using it today for a set of scans of airgraphs. I scanned them all yesterday, and gave them hopefully-useful filenames that contain a prefix, date, and bit of info about each. These documents all look pretty much the same when viewed as thumbnails, so it’s important to be able to determine at least something by glancing at the filename. That said, it’s never good to ‘‘rely’’ on metadata being in the filename nor on all files having the same structure to their names.

Anyway, after creating the spreadsheet for these files, I did some tweaking to the data columns:

1. Filled the source column based on the name column:
   • Formula: =CONCAT("{{HMW|wiki=",B2,"}}")
   • Result: {{HMW|wiki=Airgraph 1943-12-30 Adele to Murray}}
2. Extracted the date:
   • Formula: =REGEX(B3,"[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}")
   • Result: 1943-12-30
3. Crucially, any column that uses a formula needs to be copied to a new column with ‘‘values only’’ (i.e. “Edit / Paste special / Values only”). Otherwise Pattypan can’t see the formula result.

It’s Hackathon day 2, and I’ve nearly wrapped up my first draft of a pretty hacky system for editing documentation pages in ToolDocs. It’s fun learning the GitLab API, although that’s also making me question a bunch of assumptions I made about this project in the beginning! It’s seeming more like it’d be better to just build the whole thing as effectively a custom UI to GitLab. But we’ll see…

I’ve been wondering for a while how it’d be setting up a package on Packagist from Wikimedia’s GitLab… turns out it’s incredibly simple, and we now have wikimedia/toolforge-skeleton added and working! There’s still more to be done on it, but hopefully it’ll make it super quick to bootstrap the development of new PHP tools.

I was writing some user documentation for RedirectManager just now, and wrote this sentence-and-a-bit:

If you provide a name of an existing page to create as a redirect, an error message will be shown and no redirect will be created. Similarly, if you

I was going to say something about how it’s not possible to create a redirect to a page that doesn’t exist. This isn’t a limitation of MediaWiki, but when I was writing the RedirectManager API I thought it would be good to prevent these “dangling redirects”. It wasn’t until I came to write the documentation that I realised the most obvious use-case: creating a redirect to a page that you’re in the process of creating! As in, while writing a new page, you want to add a shortcut to it — hardly a rare thing, I think.

This is why I really like “documentation-driven development”, where one writes the docs first and pretends that they’re describing features that already exist. It really does help focus the mind on what’s required of the code, and (as in today’s example) highlights things that might otherwise be overlooked.

So I’ll now go and change the API error to a warning, and not show it at all in the UI (although it might be worth having some indication that the target page doesn’t exist).

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Extension:RedirectManager

In a bit over three weeks’ time we’re going to have the first of what will hopefully become a series of Wikisource “triage meetings”, in which we’ll go through the backlog of Phabricator tickets relating to Wikisource tech. It’s basically an idea to get some clarity around what needs doing, what is being worked on, and probably what things are out of date and can be closed. Read more and sign up here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikisource_Triage_meetings

Wikisource technical contributors are not vast in number, but there are still quite a few of us! So hopefully through some judicious collaboration we can continue to slowly and steadily (and without too much disruption!) improve Wikisources’ software.

I’m working from a new office now, and just uploaded a 1950 photo of it to Commons: https://w.wiki/4yWT (at some point I guess I’ll be able to embed photos in the text of my blog…).

The Community Wishlist Survey 2022 is over! We would like to thank everyone who participated in this year’s edition and express our special gratitude to those who made outstanding contributions to the survey below the results. We could not have done it without all of you!

Curious about what happens next? Learn about our prioritization process and check out the ranking of prioritized proposals for this year.

Nominations for the Coolest Tool Award are open now, until the 27th. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Coolest_Tool_Award

I’m not sure what to vote for yet, but I’ve got a shortlist.

We’re reaching out to invite you and your team to participate in the #1Lib1Ref campaign on from 15 May to 6 June!

Each year librarians around the world (and anyone else with a passion for free knowledge) take a moment out of their day to add a missing reference to articles on Wikipedia or Wikidata to improve the quality of content of the Wikimedia platforms we all rely on.

This year for the first time, Wikimedia Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand are joining forces to offer librarians online support to add a reference. We are holding online drop-in sessions on Tuesdays from 10AM–12PM and Thursdays from 12PM-2PM AEST during the campaign where you can learn to add a reference and find out a bit more about how Wikipedia works! There’s no need to sign up, just drop in. The full details are here: https://wikimedia.org.au/wiki/1Lib1Ref

Hope you can join us!