toolforge

Cloudflare workers for wikibase.cloud uptime & status

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Recently I wanted to create a live status page for wikibase.cloud, that also tracking the status of the various services and response times, so that people in the Telegram group might be able to try and correlate their experiences (possibly slow behaviour) with what was seen by others in other locations on other sites, without needing to message in the Telegram group.

In a way, this could be seen as an iteration on the current status page for the service, which is maintained as a static site on Github, making use of cState, a static status page.

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Screenshot of the current status page

I initially chose to experiment with Cloudflare Workers to do the minutely checks, after looking around at the current offerings for free online code running (thinking Heroku style etc).

Why Workers?

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A first look at WikiCrowd

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I have quite enjoyed the odd contribution to an app by Google called Crowdsource. You can find it either on the web, or also as an app.

Crowdsource allows people to throw data at Google in controlled ways to add to the massive pile of data that Google uses to improve its services and at the end of the day beat its competition.

It does this by providing a collection of micro contribution tasks in a marginally gamified way, similar to how Google Maps contributions get you Local Guide points etc. In Crowdsource you get a contribution count, a level, and a metric for agreements.

While I enjoy making the odd contribution when bored out of my mind and enjoy looking at the new challenges (currently at 2625 contributions), I always think that data like this should just be going out into the world under a free licence to benefit everyone.

So finally, introducing WikiCrowd, an interface, and soon to be app, that I developed over the new year period.

WikiCrowd Overview

WikiCrowd is hosted on toolforge and can be found at https://wikicrowd.toolforge.org/ (Source code on Github)

In order to contribute, you need some knowledge of the world, a Wikimedia account and that’s it!

Screenshot showing the wikicrowd application, listing various groups of questions users can contribute to

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