Sam Wilson: Wikimedia

OCR 1.10.2

Sam Wilson — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 07:41:00 GMT

Fremantle
2026 August 19 (Wednesday), 3:41PM
· Wikimedia · OCR · tools ·

The Wikimedia OCR tool is now at version 1.10.2. Nothing big in this change, I mainly made it because there were a bunch of localisation updates that had not yet been released, and lately there's been some TranslateWiki.net comments about how important it is to keep on top of these updates.

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Mediawiki-feeds revisited

Sam Wilson — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 06:18:00 GMT

Murdoch
2026 June 9 (Tuesday), 2:18PM
· mediawiki-feeds · RSS · Toolforge · Wikimedia ·

Yesterday someone messaged me about an issue with a wonky little tool I wrote ten years ago. I actually the thing, because it creates feeds for a couple of things I follow on wikis, but as is often the way with RSS-related code I'd forgotten all about it — it just keeps working and doesn't need any changes.

But I fixed it up a bit to sort out their issue, and in doing so also upgraded a few bits of it and moved the code to GitLab. It also seems that on 22 March this year it got popular for some reason: twenty-two thousand hits in a day. I guess it was stupid scrapers, but I'll look a bit closer and also try to sort out some more aggressive caching.

Traffic to the tool over the last 12 months. (I'm not quite sure how to make the toolviews tool show with more contrast; there are actually axes in this image!)

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OCR tool 1.10.0

Sam Wilson — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 11:45:00 GMT

Fremantle
2026 June 3 (Wednesday), 7:45PM
· Wikimedia · OCR · Toolforge ·

The Wikimedia OCR tool now supports rotating the image, thanks to mw:User:Okerekechinweotito.

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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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