Sam Wilson

About me

Hello, world! This is my website, where I explain a bit of what I do and think.

I'm a computer programmer by trade, working for the Wikimedia Foundation. Sometimes I find time to build bits of wooden furniture by hand. I also like mapping.

I've been keeping some sort of personal website since 1997, and some of it is still here. The most recent posts are as follows:

2023-09-17: Family archives in WeAre.xyz
2023-06-30: Swandocks' luffing cranes
2023-01-07: Delayed publication of blog posts
2020-06-11: Homebrew Website Club West Coast meetup
2020-06-04: Anxiety at putting files in their right places
2020-06-02: Pruning find
2020-06-01: HMW Folder 1 almost done
2020-06-01: Discourse in MediaWiki
2020-05-30: Breaking the indieweb
2020-05-28: Traditionalism on the wikis

Tags:
· Flickr · Libraries · genealogy · Fremantle, Western Australia · Woodworking · Websites · Ubuntu · Wikimedia · Mapping · Addressbook (WordPress plugin) ·

Contact

You can email me at sam@samwilson.id.au, or find me (most days) on IRC in #wikisource (and other channels) on Freenode.

I use Fastmail for email, and think they're pretty good. If you want 10% off, here's a referral link. They're a good, open, honest (and even Australian) company.

I'm also on Mastodon:

Toots

by @samwilson

Boosted

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No more strict order here now, we're in liberty hall.

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samwilson

2026/2/26 6:45

@kgoetz @WestFox35 I think I'd been presuming that I do, but that's just a vibe I reckon. So no, probably not!

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samwilson

2026/2/26 6:38

@bekopharm hehe no, but I was finding it speedy to have the server in the same region as the storage. But probably that's not *really* necessary.

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samwilson

2026/2/26 5:58

@WestFox35 It's the shell access that I notice most! Which isn't really important, but being able to actually type smoothly is pretty fun. :) But yeah, maybe I should just jump to Falkenstein.

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samwilson

2026/2/26 5:46

@WestFox35 Yeah I think if I give up on something local (to Western Australia) then I've got far more options, and they're often cheaper too! So I might just have to go back to 300ms latency. It'll be familiar enough. :(

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samwilson

2026/2/26 5:31

I nearly started moving the wikis I host to #Hetzner, but at the last minute realised that there's no object storage in their Singapore datacentre. So I guess I'm sticking with #DigitalOcean (in Sydney) for now.

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samwilson

2026/2/26 4:52

@rubenerd 😊 (I hope no one from the bus company sees this! They weren't supposed to let me drive the train. I'm very glad they did though!)

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@samwilson@wikis.world

ORCID 0000-0003-4308-3443

Genealogy

My family history research is slowly being collated in the following two places, according to my system of genealogical record-keeping.

C.F. Barker Archives

H.M. Wilson Archives

Mapping

I've been contributing to OpenStreetMap since 29 April 2008; my username is Sam Wilson. I occasionally add an entry to my mapping diary. I'm currently living somewhere here:

Reading

I read mainly on my Kobo ereader, Wikisource are my digital libraries of choice, because I can fix problems when I find them and add new books as well.

I record much of what I read (and what's on my bookshelves) in my catalogue on LibraryThing.

Code

All of my public code is on GitHub (as well as this website itself). I try to add what I can to Stackoverflow, Wikibooks, and other collaborative learning/teaching websites. Apart from that, I dip my toes into a bunch of different open source projects.