Hello world, and welcome to my corner of the web. This is where I write words about what I'm working on, and post photographs of things I've seen.
I'm a software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and so of course my personal website is a wiki (running on MediaWiki). In my spare time I volunteer with WikiClubWest to work on Wikimedia projects, mostly around my family's genealogy and local Western Australian history (especially to do with Fremantle). I try to keep up with issues on all the things I maintain (but usually fail), as well as listing the software that I use.
I try to find time to work in my workshop on various woodworking projects. Recently, that's been focused on building a metalworking bench, and will soon be about a set campaign-style drawers that's in the works. I've a good-sized workshop because I don't have a car.
Travel features in my life, not because I really hugely want to go elsewhere but because I just do — and also because then I can do some interesting mapping on OpenStreetMap, and take photos for Wikimedia Commons. Sometimes I ride my bike to get there, or walk, but more often it's planes, trains and ferries.
I'm currently reading the following books: Canadian Short Stories (Robert Weaver, 1960), and Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollop), and England, Their England (A. G. Macdonell, 1933), and The Ante-Room (Lovat Dickson, 1959), and The Countryside Companion (Tom Stephenson), and The Factory Floor (Carolyn Polizzotto), and The Oatmeal Ark (Rory Maclean), and Vesper Flights (Anon).
To contact me, you can email me, find me on Matrix as '@samwilson:matrix.org' or Telegram as @freosam.
This site is on webring.wiki; explore other sites: [ ←previous | next→ ]
Below are my recent blog posts, and you can jump to the bottom to navigate to other posts from earlier times.
Fremantle
· copyright · metadata · British Library ·
Sharing British Library open metadata with our communities, August 2026:
This policy reaffirms the British Library’s commitment to making metadata as open as possible, and confirms the terms of licence, limitations and exceptions for sharing the British Library's open metadata.
The default licence offered is Creative Commons (CC0). This is in line with comparable open metadata services such as Europeana and research infrastructure such as the Barcelona Declaration and the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure.
Fremantle
· AI · programming ·
It's becoming more and more common for people to leave AI-generated comments during code reviews. This is to be expected I guess, as more and more people are using AI to write the code, it makes sense that they also use it for the discussion part. It's sometimes incredibly obvious when they do, and sometimes less so. I'm also starting to wonder if people are intentionally using AI-style language though, even when they write things themselves! Like always re-phrasing what they're replying to, being overly grateful, and using the name of the person they're replying to.
I wish people would just go back to being themselves.
Fremantle
· 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.
Fremantle
· websites · blogging ·
Little Websites Everywhere, by Michelle Barker, 18 August 2026:
Building a website feels old-fashioned these days. How many more websites do I have left in me before the old fire flickers and dies? Is snuffed out. Before making websites is no longer a viable way to earn a living? The web will change drastically within my lifetime, maybe someday soon, indeed it already has. Maybe it really will fizzle out, a graveyard haunted only by bots and crawlers. But I have a hunch that there will be a long tail. Amid the dying embers, a resilient cohort of indie web bloggers, artists and creators will keep going, keep on talking to each other through their blogs, without tracking, pop-ups or invasive ads.
Fremantle
· Fremantle Maritime Museum · Fremantle · H.M. Wilson Archives ·
I dropped in to the maritime museum this morning to get a photo of Shakespeare Hall's diving trunk that's on display on the deck of Trixen, and also noticed that there's a document of his on display in the same location.
Crawley
· UWA · books · Save the Children ·
The UWA book sale is on this weekend, and today I went up to see what I could find; I bought ten books. There's a definite feeling of competition along some of the trestle tables, people slowly moving along and pretending to not focus on each other, but fiercely guarding their spot — and look out should they eye a volume they want that happens to be in front of you! Politeness disappears fairly quickly, or maybe that's just around the nerdy history tables.
I got a few more Fremantle-related books, and will add them to my new list at freo:User:Samwilson (that way they're catalogued in the normal Freopedia list of works).
Fremantle
· Fremantle ·
I wandered through Freo to the pub, getting some piccies for the wikis:
And then on to the PSAS gallery:
Fremantle
· Leake Street · Fremantle ·
Leake Street has been changing lately, with new pavements, the Terminus renovations, and soon the cops will move from here.
Fremantle
· Fremantle · Bathers Beach ·
A few pics taken while walking the long way around to the railway station.
Fremantle
· MediaWiki · military · history ·
I'm glad that the WA Military Digital Library (wamdl.com.au) uses MediaWiki. For example, a recently modified page of theirs is for Leslie Harry Hoddy (aka John Leslie Harris) who enlisted aged only 16, in 1916. I wonder what their backup regime is, and how they plan for the future running of the site. I always imagine that military history types are good at planning.
Fremantle
· Fremantle ·
"Brad's Barber'" is the new name of what was Princess Hairdressing Salon, on the corner of Leake and Market streets (part of Princess Chambers).
Fremantle
· Buffalo Club · Fremantle ·
The speakers for the upstairs stage fell off the wall. (Well, that's the story.) They're being reattached with much longer anchors:
Fremantle
· Fremantle ·
The circus tent (CircusWA) has gone, leaving only the frame of the old outdoor cinema (Bohemia Outdoor Cinema). The circus hasn't gone far, just around the corner.
Fremantle
· newspapers · Freopedia · Fremantle ·
It seems that The West Australian has been doing something weird with its article dates and times. This article says it was published at 5:59AM on 23 January, but it was archived on 6 December 2025 and at that time it said it was published at 9:59PM on 22 January.
Those times are 8 hours apart, and so it would seem that they are storing the times in local Perth time (UTC+8) and they used to know this and displayed them correctly, but sometime recently they've starting assuming that their stored times are UTC and so are adding 8 hours when they display them.
Or some other timezone stupidity or other, of course (there are many ways to stuff it all up). But yeah, I'm not going to trust the dates on their articles any more!
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