Wikimedia Hackathon 2019 Prague experiences

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

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

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.