Three weeks ago, I wrote a the post Rescuing Scholia: will we make it in time?, where I sketched a future without Scholia. Scholia, started almost 10 years ago and I think it is worth keeping around longer.

Fortunately, it looks like we will have a working replacement in time before the WDQS instance with all the Wikidata triples in a single SPARQL endpoint goes down, likely in a week or so (even tho we may be behind the citation peak).

The work of the past year helped, for exampe, making it easier to configure Scholia for a different endpoint and the asynchronous loading of panels (reducing the stress on the SPARQL end point). Already in September, Prof. Hannah Bast started a branch for the transition and various hackathons this autumn, and the work by Konrad Linded who explored and addressed some of the hurdles to take. The tips and suggestions from Hannah and RobinTF really made a difference. And also a huge thanks to Daniel who kept relentlessly pushing this forward.

When I posted my will we make it post, there was a demo instance and a spreadsheet showing the state of each query. The instance showed no human-readable labels. This was because the WDQS wikibase:label service was used a lot, and there is no replacement for that. Getting labels for all relevant items is possible, but makes the queries a lot heavier and made even more queries run out of memory. Various solutions were discussed, Finn indicated he preferred a macro solution, which Lars implemented, and saw some tweaks after that. Then followed a long series of patches by particularly Peter to update all the SPARQL queries to have them use the new labels macro. But plenty of other things were fixed or newly implemented, such as Wolfgang’s /backend page.

So, with one week to go, we need your help: as the weekly Wikidata Status Update already indicated:

this month’s Scholia hackathon has moved Scholia closer to its planned switch to a QLever backend. Beta testers can assist by exploring the interim QLever-backed Scholia instance and reporting any issues.

And thanks to Adriano and others who already have!

Now, we are not done yet. The real instance at scholia.toolforge.org has seen ridiculous abuse by scrapers (and the main instance is regularly unusable, to be honest), and we have no idea the new setup is powerful enough. And we need to point to the new servers anyway. So, plenty of work is left to be done in the next few days.

But we are getting close. So, please give qlever.scholia.wiki a go, and let us know your observations. As Linus’s law writes:

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.