Wikimedia Hackathon 2019 Prague experiences

Listen to internet radio with Raspberry Pi and the Wikimedia Nederland soundbox

These are the summary minutes about the experiences of Geertivp at the m:Wikimedia Hackathon 2019 in Prague from 17-19 May 2019.

This conference is mostly for software developers, wanting to learn to program software modules that interact with MediaWiki platforms.

Some proactive advice

• Plan your travel, and foresee contingency (in my case due to an ATC strike in Brussels it took me 16 hours to arrive in Prague)
• Try to have a hotel in the neighbourhood of the event
• You need to learn mw:Phabricator first before arriving at the hackathon
• Preferably have a laptop running Linux (Ubuntu, Mint, Chromebook) -- possibly on an Oracle VM VirtualBox (Windows, Mac) or Windows Subsystem for Linux
• Do not forget a powercable, micro-USB for your mobile, wireless mouse
• Identify a list of projects and tasks that you want to work on, or information/training/advice/skill that you would need to acquire
• Make a list of persons that you would like to see/talk to/brainstorm
• Keep online notes (preparation for an event report like this)
• Be prepared to meet a lot of friends

Focus Areas

1. New editor experiences:
   • Newcomers that don't edit on the first day are unlikely to come back.
   • Requesting the reason for creating account.
   • Most new accounts click edit on the first day.
   • Many new accounts click on things that are not helpful.
   • Clicking on user page, that does not bring anything useful.
   • Or they are lost in help pages.
   • Not saving edits.
2. Commons for mobile devices
3. Education tool: WikiEdu Dashboard
   • you submit a Wikipedia classroom assignment or make edits to your course page
   • you add or remove someone from a course
   • you assign articles to students
   • you send public messages to students
   • All course content you contribute to to this website will be freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (the same one used by Wikipedia).

Useful Tools

• Pattypan is a mass image upload tool for Commons (replaced by OpenRefine)

Presentations

Alicia Fagereving was presenting the "monumental tool" developed in Sweden.

Problem: No clear copyright regulation.

If you are interested in Wikidocumentaries, see http://wikidocumentaries-demo.wmflabs.org/, a Wikibase platform for citizen historians to transform cultural heritage into structured data; join us on https://t.me/wikidocshack

Tool to use Wikidata to make an inventory and document museum collections:

• FindindGLAMs/GLAM datasets
• https://tools.wmflabs.org/monumental-glam/#/
• https://tools.wmflabs.org/monumental-glam/#/list/31?c=50.5695:4.4853:8
• Wikidata: the largest databasee of GLAMs in the world

Ideas for the Movement

We should spend more activities for seniors, kids, education in general, universities, government, GLAMs. Those people have time/are motivated.

We should implement Template:Wikidata Infobox on Wikipedia the way it is done on Wikimedia Commons Categories.

Software development

The source of many disagreements

• How to become a MediaWiki hacker

(marketing) Weaknesses of the MediaWiki platform:

• What about the MediaWiki future for external instances?
• We do not know the external userbase...

• mw:MediaWiki testimonials (not really kept up-to-date)

• The involvement of consultants is not tracked.
• We do not systematically gather new requirements from external "customers"
• We do not know the environments and incompatibilities for external "customers"

Wikidata

Wikibase is a MediaWiki extension, also programmed in PHP. So you might become a Mediawiki and/or a Wikidata developer.

• d:Wikidata:Development plan (2019)

Could we possibly know the potential (marketing potential, business plan) for private Wikibase instances?

• How to setup the SDE
• Setting up Wikibase Wikidata Query and Quickstatements on a Linux Mint laptop

Product and Technology

• Product & Technology Movement Strategy 2030 https://bit.ly/wmhack19-strat (Google docs)
• metawiki:Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20
• metawiki:Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Working Groups/Product & Technology
• metawiki:Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/2019 Community Conversations/Product & Technology

Key questions

• How can we better match resources to needs and expectations?
• How can we make decision making more inclusive (while keeping it functional)?
• How can we better attract, support and retain diverse technical contributors particularly: building and supporting local developer communities and prioritizing projects which will engage technical contributors?

Quick Takeaways

MediaWiki

• Structured data on commons

Phabricator

• Allow a MediaWiki user to choose for default desktop interface on a tablet
• Finding the right Wikidata Object sharing its Label (name) with another data instance having a huge occurrence
• Use Wikidata statements to build infoboxes
• Wikimedia Hackathon 2019 volunteer group: Blog
• Wikimedia hackathon 2019

Showcase

It all ended with 30 teams presenting their results on Wikimedia hackathon showcase 2019.

Thanks to all to make this possible. See you next year.