Sam Wilson: Wikimedia

Wikipedia doesn't include everything

Sam Wilson — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 01:46:00 GMT

Fremantle
2026 January 16 (Friday), 9:46AM
· Wikimedia · Wikipedia · research ·

There was an interesting thread this morning about reasons that people get annoyed at Wikipedia. There were some comments about how hard it can be to get even well-cited material into articles. Which is probably fairly true in many parts of Wikipedia. I don't really edit it very much; I spend most time on Commons and Wikidata, and I think that's because I'm more interested in archiving and documentation than the really quite tricky work of summarising existing research.

Dariusz Jemielniak put it well this week in saying that Wikipedia is "a systematic literature review that anyone can improve, based on a sophisticated system of peer review." Looking at it like that, it becomes clear that before you can edit you really should a) have a good general knowledge of the topic, so that you can evaluate sources appropriately and see how they fit into it in general; and b) have source literature to work from.

The thing that doesn't seem to get talked about all that much is the idea that, for all the — vastly more extensive — knowledge that doesn't belong in Wikipedia, people can set up their own 'pedia wikis. Just set up MediaWiki and start writing about the things you care about!

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Wikipedia 25

Sam Wilson — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:07:00 GMT

Fremantle
2026 January 15 (Thursday), 8:07AM
· Wikimedia · Wikipedia · birthdays ·

Wikipedia was launched 25 years ago today, at wikipedia.com. I think I first found it at the end of that year, and immediately ignored it and went off to play with UseModWiki. It wasn't until 2006 that I tried editing properly, and even then not very extensively because I was more interested in how to run MediaWiki. Maybe at some point my MediaWiki investigations will run their course and I'll get back to editing Wikipedia.

Australians are coordinating their Wikipedia25 celebrations at wikipedia:Event:Australia wishes Wikipedia a Happy 25th Birthday, and adding notes about what this milestone means to them. And in Fremantle this evening we're having a birthday meetup at the Buffalo Club.

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MediaWiki for everything

Sam Wilson — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 08:57:00 GMT

Perth
2025 December 10 (Wednesday), 4:57PM
· MediaWiki · Wikimedia · Markdown · websites ·

People say we shouldn't try to smush every feature possible into MediaWiki. That when we get to the point of integrating an email client (or some chat system, I guess, to modernise the cliche) then we'll have Gone Too Far. Not to mention that perhaps some people don't see a future for MediaWiki outside the Wikimedia movement (which I don't agree with at all).

But I don't know. I do still think that there's great power in the everything's-a-page model. It's what all the cool kids do with Obsidian or static Markdown-derived websites, and a wiki is just like that but packed up and run in one place—and old and uncool.

So I'll persist, I think, in adding things I want to MediaWiki. Maybe not a mail client, but definitely something to do with indieweb tools, possibly webmentions. But maybe a mail client.

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Setting white balance on a Sony RX100 mk.V

Sam Wilson — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 01:46:00 GMT

Fremantle
2025 September 27 (Saturday), 9:46AM
· photography · Wikimedia · archiving · Buffalo Club ·

When photographing documents (in the slightly slap-dash but productive way we've been doing it at the Buffalo Club) it's necessary to set the camera's white balance to match the day's lighting conditions. With the Sony RX100 mk.V it's a matter of:

Set up the camera with the lighting conditions for the session, with nothing but a large white piece of paper in the frame. (Some paper has whitening chemicals added, which can throw things out, but that's a topic for another day.)
Use the Fn key to enter the menu, then go to the 'White balance' submenu.
At the bottom is the item, which enters the set mode. The white object only needs to fill the central area.
Click the centre of the control wheel to set the white balance:
Choose one of the three custom registers in which to save it:

The new values are saved and selected. To view them, you can go into the custom register, and view the values:

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S1269

Sam Wilson — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 09:09:00 GMT

Fremantle
2025 August 12 (Tuesday), 5:09PM
· Wikimedia · Nairobi ·

Wikimania finished a couple of days ago, and it's nice to see that there are photos of the Nairobi Railway Museum starting to be uploaded!

Nairobi Railway Museum, 10 August 2025, by commons:User:Motoko C. K.

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InputBox parameters and form submission

Sam Wilson — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 05:34:00 GMT

Fremantle
2025 July 4 (Friday), 1:34PM
· Wikimedia · MediaWiki · searching · InputBox ·

Thanks to a recent wish I've been poking a bit at the InputBox extension lately, to make it work better with MediaSearch and CirrusSearch. This involves making it honour the user preference for Special:Search or Special:MediaSearch (if the extension for the latter is installed), and fixing up the way in which it passes its searchfilter parameter to the search page.

The fix for the first issue was to set the initial form action (which ends up in the parser cache and so can't be user-specific) to the site's default, and then have a front-end switch that dynamically changes it to whatever the current user has as their preference. Slightly clunkily, this involves sending both possible URLs to the front end and then choosing between them, because otherwise they wouldn't be localised.

The second issue came about because InputBox submits search and searchfilter values as separate GET parameters, and then on loading the special page it would changes the internal request object to have a unified value (i.e. these two values concatenated with a space between them). The trouble with that was that you'd end up at a URL like Special:Search?search=foo&searchfilter=insource:Bar and so anything that was accessing the search value directly would get it wrong. So the fix was to unify the values and then redirect to a new URL without searchfilter, and also to skip that redirect by doing the same sort of replacement in the front-end. So most people will not get the redirect, but we always aim to have a no-JS fallback. I did wonder about switching the input names around so that there's no visible change to the text input, which might be confusing to people who see it change but only after they've clicked submit and so there's no time to notice what it's doing.

I think there are similar improvements that could be made to other parts of InputBox, such as type=move with a prefix, but no one's complained about that not working so I don't think I'll bother digging any further for now.

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Pilbara station supplies (in the 1920s)

Sam Wilson — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 10:53:00 GMT

Fremantle
2025 June 2 (Monday), 6:53PM
· Pilbara · genealogy · Wikimedia ·

Today I uploaded a piece by my grandmother, about what food was like in the 1920s in the Pilbara.

Later we moved to a station on the edge of the "open country" as the unfenced land was known, and here Mother's problems became legion. We were the last station on the mail run, and how we came to welcome Bob Brooker and his old, battered, hoodless car, bringing us the mails, the butter done up in a billycan sewn in hessian and dipped in water occasionally, and all the gossip of the district. Our stores came by wagon twice a year, a wildly exciting event. Once it was the legendary Treacle Dick with his camel team, but the rest of the time it was in a wagon drawn by donkeys, with the spare animals and the foals trailing after.

She also mentions a few of the ships that were plying the coastal route at that time, including the SS Mindaroo. So I went looking, and uploaded a couple of photos of it to Commons:

1912
1935

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Wikimedia Hackathon 2025 (Istanbul)

Sam Wilson — Mon, 05 May 2025 09:00:00 GMT

Istanbul
2025 May 5 (Monday), 12:00PM
· WMHack · Wikimedia ·

My fifth Wikimedia Hackathon is over, and I think it was the best one yet. It was held at the Renaissance Polat Istanbul Hotel, on the shore of the Marmara Sea on the edge of Istanbul. A great venue, with nice views from the hacking rooms and the dining-room out over the sea with its dozens of cargo ships (and a powership, the likes of which I'd heard of but never seen).

I'm trying now to remember all the conversations I had, about various projects and ideas, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some. Mostly, they were focussed around two main areas: things to do with WikiEditor such as realtime preview and template-inserting; and 3rd party wikis, mostly in relation to local history wikis using Wikidata data, and also how to make wiki upgrades easier for history nerd sysadmins who aren't sysadmins.

My preparation for the hackathon was slightly fraught in parts, with various changes needed to my flights, and even just getting away from Perth started with reports of the terminal being evacuated just before I arrived there. Luckily order was restored and my flight was unaffected, and I got to Istanbul without mishap.

On the flights, and hours of waiting in Dubai, I managed to get started on some hacking projects, mainly T392553 Template discovery: browse templates by category to start with. That's shaping up well, although still needs a fair bit of work and the fundamental idea of it is not really tested yet so I don't know what will happen. I like the idea of being able to browse categories like that, and think it might also be a good additional way to insert categories while editing, but in my testing so far it feels like many categories have too many members for the column-based browsing to feel natural — it works better when categories either have subcategories or templates in them, but not both.

Early on Sunday in the hacking ballroom.

On the first evening and morning (as usual when I travel to Europe, I was dead to the world by 9PM and up raring to go at 4AM) I fixed a thing that's been bothering me for years: T393077 'Preview not loading' error shown when saving a page. So often when I save a page, I would see that error message flash up, and I knew it wasn't actually an error. Thanks to Taavi that's now merged. There is more to do with realtime preview though, and hopefully I'll carry on with the smaller tasks.

One I did want to do was T352504 Remember resized textbox and preview pane sizes, and thanks to MusikAnimal that was the 2nd (and last) of my patches merged during the Hackathon. I think the resizing ability of the edit and preview panes is something that people don't use all that much, and I think having them be sticky will maybe make it more popular. I like having a taller edit textarea for many pages. The sizes are stored in localStorage, so are kept per-device and so will only apply to an individual project and screen size.

A patch that I'd hoped to get merged but didn't was for T335986 Support suggestedvalues in TemplateWizard, but maybe I'll find someone to review that soon. I do want to go over it again though, because the way that TemplateWizard chooses widgets for a given parameter type should match VisualEditor's behaviour. Although, TemplateWizard is a bit more oppinionated in this regard, because it's not constrained by the VE fact of needed to be able to edit every possible value for a parameter (i.e. if you can't enter the value you want via TemplateWizard then you can just do it in wikitext, whereas in VE there's no other way). I think we can get more detailed with TemplateWizard's widgets (although I didn't want to touch the date handling, that's a long-standing discussion without obvious resolution as far as I can remember).

There were quite a few people at the hackathon who work on non-Wikimedia wikis (e.g. schoolwiki.in, fuerthwiki.de) and I had some great conversations about these. There are many wikis that are about topics that are well-represented on (and within scope of) Wikidata, and my UnlinkedWikibase extension seems sometimes useful for these. It needs to be better though, with things like caching, and also have better documentation. To help wikis get started, a couple of us thought it might be nice for it to come with an 'automatic infobox' sort of thing, so in a fit of coffee-powered enthusiasm I got started on T393298 Add generic infobox to UnlinkedWikibase. It may be more work than I thought, but I'll try to get it sorted in the next week or so.

One of the last things I tinkered with was a non-wiki bit of code to bring nicer typography to my Basildon static site generator: #12 Make compatible with the smart-punctuation extension. This is part of an experiment I've been doing into static HTML sites for small archives powered by Commons and Wikidata, e.g. cfbarker.archives.org.au/items/9. I'm not yet sure if this is going to go anywhere, because there are lots of benefits to an actual wiki, such as immediate editing, especially with VE, and being able to upload files that are not suitable for Commons. There's something very appealing about the simplicity and long-term stability of static sites though.

Anyway, all up it was a great weekend, and I'm again in awe of the many people who make these weekends possible. I spend most of my coding life on my own, not talking to all that many people, and so to be able to come together every year like this is very special, and more and more it feels like a really great way to progress things in good ways.

Photos

I'll get more photos uploaded to Commons soon. Most Wikimedia events are well-photographed by people with a better eye than me, so I don't worry too much any more about capturing anything beyond just what catches my eye. Some are useful additions to the general record of the weekend, but most are just visual notes for me.

Most are in a Flickr album: https://flickr.com/photos/freosam/albums/72177720325776072/

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Wiki Day at SA Museum

Sam Wilson — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 02:11:00 GMT

Fremantle
2025 April 7 (Monday), 10:11AM
· Wikimedia · WMAU ·

I won't be going to it, but this weekend's meetup at the South Australian Museum sounds like it'll be good:

We’d love for you to join us at the SA Museum for A Wiki Day at SA Museum: From Photos to Facts. We will explore the Wiki Commons workflow - transforming a collection of photos into meaningful contributions across Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikipedia. This will be a practical day of discovery and collaboration, working through the full process:

Organising and uploading images to Wikimedia Commons

Structuring and enhancing entries in Wikidata

Using these assets to improve and illustrate Wikipedia articles

I've been helping a bit with the Gawler History wiki lately, which makes me feel slightly more connected to SA goings-on.

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Conference stickers

Sam Wilson — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 04:24:00 GMT

Fremantle
2025 February 18 (Tuesday), 12:24PM
· Wikisource · Wikisource Conference 2025 · Wikimedia ·

Home again now, and trying to figure out what to stick my new stickers on. The {{page break}} one is my favourite, because I use that a lot on ArchivesWiki when transcribing.

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