Recent Posts – [[WM:TECHBLOG]]

Computational knowledge: Wikidata, Wikidata query Service, and women who are mayors!

One of the main aims of Wikidata is to represent knowledge in a way that is computable—that is, amenable to automatic processing. Wikipedia already contains a lot of information; much of it is reasonably easy for a human to understand—though some of the more esoteric bits are decidedly not—but it’s not at all readily crunchable by a computer.

Parsoid in PHP, or There and Back Again

In December 2019, we replaced the original version of Parsoid, written in the JavaScript programming language, with a version written in PHP, which is the primary programming language of MediaWiki. This new version, which we call Parsoid/PHP, is roughly twice as fast on most requests as the original version (retroactively renamed Parsoid/JS). Parsoid/PHP also brings us one step closer to integrating Parsoid and other MediaWiki wikitext-handling code into a single system, which will be easier to maintain and extend.