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 The Romance of a Shop (Anon), 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.
Engineering Heritage Australia wiki
Fremantle
· wikis ·
Found another wiki today (or at least, I don't think I've seen it before, although I might well've): https://heritage.engineersaustralia.org.au/wiki/Special:RecentChanges
They have a page about some walking tours of engineering landmarks in Fremantle: https://heritage.engineersaustralia.org.au/wiki/WA_Tour_Fremantle_Tour_A
Removing more grooves
Fremantle
Costa Deliziosa leaving
Fremantle
· Fremantle · ships ·
Not that I'm particularly fond of cruise ships, but they do make a bit of a spectacle when they're in port.
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Earlier in the day, from Canonment Hill.
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Then leaving, at 5PM.
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Balcony beers
Fremantle
Beers on Barney's Balcony.
By the river
Fremantle
· cafes · Swan River ·
I'm down at Beach Street, because I wanted to take some photos of the bridge progress. But first I'm encaffienating at a caffe. It has a bit of a view, of which I have taken a bad photo.
This non-content post is just me trying more to treat my blog like social media. Share whatever, whenever. No one reads it, so I'm not too worried. But it is useful to keep all things together — as much as I like the ideals of Mastodon, and wikis.world, things like that are still someone else's server and if I've got my own why do I need that?
Querying Wikimedia Commons
Fremantle
· Wikimedia Commons ·
Exploring structured data on commons, by Bawolff, 28 February 2025:
Copious use of named subqueries (due to them being isolated by the optimizer) can really help here.
If you are fetching distinct terms (or counts of distinct terms) ensuring that blazegraph can use the distinct term optimization is very helpful. It seems like the blazegraph query optimizer isn't very good and often cannot use this optimization even when it should. Making the group by very simple and putting it into a named subquery can help with this.
An interesting post about Structured Data on Commons, and how to query with it. Reminds me that I have been meaning to add support for it to UnlinkedWikibase (although the weird authentication system is perhaps why I haven't bothered so far).
Rain in Princess May Park
Fremantle
There's weird cold wet stuff falling from the sky. Perhaps the scaffolders have hit something? Or is summer over?
_Radar_Loop.png)
I'm looking out over Princess May Park (named after the school that was named after the lady who named it), at a long string of about a hundred teenagers hurrumphing their way across in damp hoodies. Where are they coming from ? To where are they going? Are they on day release? Heading to mass? Hard to know.
And in usual Perth fashion, the rain seems to have already stopped.
(I've just noticed the copyright notice on the above radar image. Do they claim copyright on the rain?! 
)
Typos on heavy paper
Fremantle
· reading ·
I'm reading a book from Black Apollo Press, with heavy smooth floppy paper (it's a paperback); almost too glossy. But it's very nice to read. Stays open well enough. The typos are slightly annoying, but they seem to be getting more widely spaced and who knows, maybe the author wanted an element of the rough and ready? (Probably not.)
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