Sam Wilson's Website

June 2021

  1. The World According to Wikipedia

    Sourcing a Community

    In this episode we talk to Gavin Willshaw about using WikiSource in the Library of Scotland.

    Rebecca explains the Pokemon test and the hero of the Episode are the organisers behind the Arctic Knot conference.

  3. I’m at Roasting Warehouse, with a vast coffee and a small lamington. There’s lots to be said for being alone at a long table in a nice café, especially on a chilly morning like this (although, the sun has come out now). I’m working on the OCR widget for Wikisource.

    https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/OCR_Improvements

  4. Platinum Blonde Nocoiner (@peced)

  6. In reply to this post by Sam Wilson.

    Yeah, that does seem to work. Some rough edges to be figured out with the flow, to get the right URLs at the right time.

  7. I’ve been ignoring Twitter for a long time now, but I sometimes wonder if I should be cross-posting from my own site.

  8. Pagination for Twyne dates

    I’ve added better pagination to Twyne post lists now. Dates were showing everything for a given month, but now if there’s more than ten there’s a link to page two and so on. It’s the same as was already working for tags.

    Now I can get back to adding 2FA support, and then fix up the editing form’s display on small screens (it’s been broken since I added the Select2 auto-completion for tags).

  10. Linking tags to Wikidata

    I’ve recently added support to my website for linking posts’ tags to Wikidata entities. This means that each tag (which has it’s own URL at samwilson.id.au/Tnn where nn is the tag ID) can be linked to a Wikidata ID, and have a little table of facts displayed. This means that tags are no longer just strings, but are firmly linked to a meaningful concept — a tag such as ‘York’ is definitely the town in Western Australia and not the one in Yorkshire. No two tags are allowed to be linked to the same Wikidata item.

    The other part of this work was adding a lookup widget to the tag entry form field. Before, it was just a text box and tags had to be entered with semicolons separating them. Now, you start typing and a dropdown appears with suggestions firstly from existing tags on the site and then below them with labels and descriptions of Wikidata items. It makes entering new tags much easier.

    It’s great fun going back through my archives and linking all the tags, although it’s also highlighting the fact that I often create duplicate tags (e.g. misspellings, or Fremantle Railway Station vs Fremantle Train Station). To add a tag-merging system I first need to add a system of tracking and redirecting old URLs (something I should’ve added ages ago when I added the ability to delete duplicate posts).