The WS Contest tool was breaking on Index pages that don’t yet have any (existing) pages. The problem was in the usage of the dflydev/dot-access-data, which is a thing for pulling values out of deep arrays. It’s sort of useful, but not widely used so does feel a bit weird. Maybe we should remove it from wikisource/api.

Actually, scratch that: I just went to look, and it’s got eighty-three million installs on Packagist. So I guess it’s more widely used than I’d thought. I’ll leave it in for now.

I’ve been working on linking Commons items to Trove. It’s not complicated, on the surface, but of course once you get into it things get more annoying. I’m trying to just figure out the basics, and not get too deep into the weeds.

Basically what we want is for every file on Commons, that has been sourced from an institution that’s aggregated in Trove, to have a P10044 statement (‘Trove Work ID’), and for that to be displayed in the |source= parameter of the Information template. But we also want to say which library (etc.) it came from, and to link to that library’s catalogue (because that’s where the actual image file is stored). This means, I think, that we’ll want to stick to the SLQ, SLWA, SLSA, AWM-image, etc. templates that have institution-specific information and links, and just add a simple line to those that explains that the file’s metadata is also on trove and what its ID there is.

The Community Wishlist Survey starts today. This is an annual survey that my team at the Wikimedia Foundation runs, to figure out what we should work on for the following year. It’s always so interesting to see what features and bugs are felt to be the most important. Quite often I agree, and get excited about working on them; sometimes I’ve never even heard of the software components in question! The Wikimedia universe is wide and varied.

So if anyone Wikimedians out there have ideas, please come and propose them!

The (fairly terrific) locator-tool now has aerial imagery available as a map layer, making geolocating photos even more fun.

A new extension this week: CopyCreds

The CopyCreds extension registers two new tags <pw> and <un>, which make the text inside them visually distinctive, and allows for click-to-copy. The goal is to make life easier for those who document usernames and passwords in MediaWiki.

I like the idea of a simple click-to-copy system for a wiki, but I’m not sure it warrants two new tags. Personally I’d prefer something like <copy class='pwd'>foo</copy> or something like that, with a means to customize the colour etc. of the displayed value. Actually, maybe that’s what CopyLink does. There used to be one called CopyToClipboard which also did something similar.

Maybe someone should write the Copyencabulator 2000, to unite them all…

I can’t believe there’s no ‘Ghost signs in Western Australia’ category on Commons!

I added a newly-scanned photo to ArchivesWiki yesterday, and none of its images were loading (via InstantCommons). I think I was probably a bit tired, because I immediately assumed that I’m a crap sysadmin who has no business trying to run a wiki.

Coming back to it this morning, it turns out that it was some transient issue with retrieving info from Commons, and it’s now resolved and everything’s working normally again. Like it has for a decade or so. I’ll guess I’ll put off Giving Up till tomorrow.

In two places yesterday I noticed MediaWiki wikis with slightly odd phrasing relating to their site names:

• under the login form a button that says “Join Join the Fediverse” (message userlogin-joinproject) which has a repeated word; and
• in the sidebar of Vector-2022 a box with “On this Example Inc. the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title.” (message vector-language-redirect-to-top) which makes the assumption that there are more wikis with this name (which is true for wiki-per-language setups such as Wikipedia).

There are many other uses of the site name in messages, and of course any wiki with a site name that makes these messages sound funny should probably be overriding the messages locally (as we did on the WMAU wiki where ‘Join Wikimedia Australia’ has a different meaning to ‘Create an account’).

‘WikiWays: a Wikimedia poem’ is a poem by Matt Harvey about contributing to Wikimedia.

Toolforge Bundle version 1.4.6 is released.