Episode 189: BTB Digest 30

🕑 1 hour 34 minutes Thomas Chin is a software engineer in the Data Platform Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation. Links for some of the topics discussed: Tea Time with Thomas & Ty podcast Wikimedia Foundation Data Engineering Team Thomas Chin user page on mediawiki.org Dependency injection in MediaWiki code (provided by the MediaWikiServices class) "embarassment" (2009 blog post by Domas Mituzas about Michael Jackson-related Wikipedia crash) "After using ChatGPT, man swaps his salt for sodium bromide—and suffers psychosis" (August 2025 article) "Sealed, sold, delivered: How blind boxes like Labubu became a viral obsession" (June 2025 article) Jesse's Teahouse > Pu'er Tea Oranges

🕑 28 minutes A new BTB Digest! Cindy Cicalese is surprised about the popularity of her PluggableAuth extension, Luca Mauri extols the benefits of Federation, Edward Chernenko laments the difficulties in running a humor wiki, Marijn van Wezel discusses GDPR compliance, Markus Glaser offers a solution for collaborative editing in MediaWiki, and more!

🕑 56 minutes Wojciech Pędzich (roughly pronounced "VOY-chek PEND-zhik") is a longtime Wikimedia volunteer, having served as an administrator on the Polish Wikipedia, a Wikimedia Steward, a member of the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee, a board member of Wikimedia Polska, an organizer of the Wikimedia Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) meeting, and an organizer of Wikimania, among other things. He is currently one of six candidates for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Links for some of the topics discussed: 2025 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election Candidates Wojciech Pędzich candidate statement Playboy Carti English Wikipedia article Wikimedia Sound Logo announcement, July 2023 Project Rewrite, launched March 2021 Guinness World Record for longest Wikipedia editathon (100 hours, September 26–30, 2023, Warsaw) (Photograph by Robert Drózd, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.)

🕑 1 hour 33 minutes Dan Andreescu (user name Milimetric) is a staff software engineer in the Data Platform Engineering team, and an interim manager in the Experiment Platform team, both in The Wikimedia Foundation. Links for some of the topics discussed: Data Platform Engineering Team Experiment Platform Team Wikimedia Statistics (Wikistats) Wikimedia Experimentation Lab Edge Uniques project

🕑 2 hours 6 minutes Richard Heigl and Markus Glaser (pictured, left to right) are two of the three founders and heads of the German consulting Hallo Welt!, along with Anja Ebersbach. Hallo Welt! is best known for producing the MediaWiki-based software BlueSpice. Links for some of the topics discussed: BlueSpice BlueSpice 5.0 announcement, April 2025 BlueSpice release history BlueSpice Docker installation guide Cognitive Process Designer MediaWiki extension Checklists MediaWiki extension Checklist (or BlueSpiceChecklist) MediaWiki extension AboutBlueSpice MediaWiki extension CollabPads MediaWiki extension "Warum Barrierefreiheit so viel kostet" ("Why accessibility costs so much"), July 2025 article in Linux Magazin that quotes Richard and Markus Open HTML to PDF library

🕑 55 minutes Marijn van Wezel is a part-time developer at the MediaWiki consulting company Wikibase Solutions. He is also working on a master's degree in computer science at Radboud University Nijmegen. Links for some of the topics discussed: Marijn's user page on mediawiki.org Wikibase Solutions WSSlots MediaWiki extension CookieConsent MediaWiki extension CookieWarning MediaWiki extension WikiGuard MediaWiki extension ArrayFunctions MediaWiki extension "Making your wiki Parsoid-compatible with ArrayFunctions" (talk by Marijn van Wezel and Jimmy van Delft at MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop Spring 2025) WSSpaces MediaWiki extension MWUnit MediaWiki extension

🕑 50 minutes Edward Chernenko is a software developer, with extensive experience in MediaWiki development and consulting. He is also the administrator of Absurdopedia, a Russian-language humor wiki that is part of the loosely-affiliated Uncyclopedia family. Links for some of the topics discussed: Абсурдопедия (Absurdopedia) Uncyclopedia Edward Chernenko user page on mediawiki.org Moderation MediaWiki extension AWS MediaWiki extension CreatePageUw MediaWiki extension

🕑 31 minutes (Star-studded) highlights from five recent episodes! Trevor Parscal says the Wikimedia Foundation has become political, Selena Deckelmann sheds light on her management approach, Jonathan Lee complains about Fandom's tactics, Denny Vrandečić disputes the idea that Abstract Wikipedia could replace regular Wikipedia, Ward Cunningham recounts coming up with the name "wiki", and more!

🕑 1 hour 21 minutes Luca Mauri is an IT manager who in his free time runs the Italian-language Star Trek wiki WikiTrek - which in turn gets much of its data from another wiki, DataTrek, which runs on MediaWiki in conjunction with Wikibase. Links for some of the topics discussed: Luca Mauri homepage WikiTrek DataTrek "Star Trek" article on English Wikipedia PageToGitHub MediaWiki extension RecentActivity MediaWiki extension Wiki2Ban MediaWiki extension

🕑 1 hour 21 minutes Cindy Cicalese is a principal engineer for the Developer Experience Group at the Wikimedia Foundation - but not for long, because she is leaving soon to go work at the startup Selfii, as their MediaWiki architect. Although not before serving as the general chair for the upcoming MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop (May 14-16 in Sandusky, Ohio, USA!). Links for some of the topics discussed: MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop Spring 2025 Selfii PluggableAuth MediaWiki extension