Jamie Thingelstad

Gorgeous Minnesota summer evening.

Neighborhood Badminton. 🏸

Awesome, and true.

If you're too busy to have a weekly review, you really need to have a weekly review.

— John Arundel (@bitfield) May 23, 2014

Tried to get the new WikiApiary Celery bots live tonight but “daemonizing” celeryd got the best of me for tonight.

New Glarus’ Wisconsin Belgian Red is so good. 🍺

Want to live down the street from me? Nice S Mpls home for sale!

Started day with CaringBridge board meeting. Great organization and great people! Thanks Sona Mehring and team!

Looking forward to CIO luncheon today hosted by Genesys Works Twin Cities

Forgot my iPad at home today. Feel like I forgot to put on pants before I came to work.

The Oatmeal did a great two-piece part on What it’s like to own a Tesla Model-S (and part 2).

☕️ Delightful afternoon espresso.

Spent most of evening after kids were in bed doing digital weeding.

I have my profile setup on Keybase.io. Keybase is an interesting product using public key cryptography in a decentralized way to allow identities to be known without having to meet people in person, but instead through public proof.

I’m really intrigued by what Keybase.io is doing with identity. The ability to cryptographically prove your identity on the web without a centralized party like Twitter or Facebook owning the approval process is a needed function. I setup my profile and you can now prove on your own that I am who I say I am on Twitter, Github and five of my domains.

I’m trying to figure out how this could be extended to MediaWiki. I would love to be able to prove that my user account is me at:

• <wikiapiary.com/wiki/User…>
• <www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User…>
• <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User…>

This seems really hard. The method used on Github is to public a Gist, and you could certainly have a wiki user publish something on their user page, but that can also be edited by anybody.

But if we could do this, it would be a great way to allow Wikipedia editors to claim ownership with proof of their identities (if they wish) and would benefit thousands of self-hosted MediaWiki websites.

I think something more like the Twitter proof could work. How?

1. Have the user in question edit their User page. The contents of the edit don’t matter, the Summary field is what will be looked at. (Limited to 255 characters)
2. MediaWiki websites have a permanent revision history attached to each page. (This would be like a Tweet, see my change on May 11 2014)
3. This information is accessible via the MediaWiki API, and there is a revid attached to each revision.
4. This revision ID can be used to pull the proof forward for keybase.io.

Here are the last 5 revisions for my User page on WikiApiary (API call).

{
  "query": {
    "pages": {
      "43": {
        "ns": 2,
        "pageid": 43,
        "revisions": [
          {
            "comment": "This is my message for keybase.io to prove I am who I am!",
            "parentid": 884728,
            "revid": 904406,
            "timestamp": "2014-05-11T13:10:17Z",
            "user": "Thingles"
          },
          {
            "comment": "remove gittip button",
            "parentid": 569866,
            "revid": 884728,
            "timestamp": "2014-04-30T02:55:26Z",
            "user": "Thingles"
          },
          {
            "comment": "",
            "parentid": 569864,
            "revid": 569866,
            "timestamp": "2014-02-21T01:56:28Z",
            "user": "Thingles"
          },
          {
            "comment": "added badge",
            "parentid": 552628,
            "revid": 569864,
            "timestamp": "2014-02-21T01:54:59Z",
            "user": "Thingles"
          },
          {
            "comment": "add babel box (needs templates and styles)",
            "parentid": 528928,
            "revid": 552628,
            "timestamp": "2014-02-15T19:36:51Z",
            "user": "Thingles"
          }
        ],
        "title": "User:Thingles"
      }
    }
  },
  "query-continue": {
    "revisions": {
      "rvcontinue": 528928
    }
  }
}

Now that we have the revid we can find the information for this revision to continue to claim proof (API call). The key is that the title of the page “User:Thingles” matches with the user that made the change “Thingles”.

{
  "query": {
    "pages": {
      "43": {
        "ns": 2,
        "pageid": 43,
        "revisions": [
          {
            "comment": "This is my message for keybase.io to prove I am who I am!",
            "parentid": 884728,
            "revid": 904406,
            "timestamp": "2014-05-11T13:10:17Z",
            "user": "Thingles"
          }
        ],
        "title": "User:Thingles"
      }
    }
  },
  "query-continue": {
    "revisions": {
      "rvcontinue": 884728
    }
  }
}

And now I’ve proven my identity. The only trick is that the comment must contain all the data, and that should be easy since keybase already does something similar for Twitter.

And here is another example of me making a proven comment on my user page on Wikipedia (en) (API call).

{
  "query": {
    "pages": {
      "14604697": {
        "ns": 2,
        "pageid": 14604697,
        "revisions": [
          {
            "comment": "Here is my message for Keybase from Wikipedia.",
            "parentid": 551074105,
            "revid": 608054849,
            "timestamp": "2014-05-11T13:56:25Z",
            "user": "Thingles"
          }
        ],
        "title": "User:Thingles"
      }
    }
  },
  "query-continue": {
    "revisions": {
      "rvcontinue": 551074105
    }
  }
}

So impressed with Anders Noren Hemingway theme. Clean, fast, elegant. Making me like WordPress again.

Weird request: does anyone know where in Minneapolis you can get Pretzel Flipz? No knock offs. The real thing.

If you login to Twitter and go to your Direct Messages you press a button to mark all as read, and then you have to confirm. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a “Mark all as read” button that looks so foreboding.

That looks like a “Watch out what you push because everything will be deleted” red button that you need to be very, very careful with. Terrible for this function.