Talk:Amsterdam Hackathon 2013

Previous page history was archived for backup purposes at Talk:Amsterdam Hackathon 2013/LQT Archive 1 on 2015-07-10.

I think someone (Sumana?) asked us to post here with the stuff we did so people could follow-up, etc., so I'm kicking it off with this thread.

As I mentioned in the 30 second intro, I am interested in investigating ways to get the skin system in the path towards becoming a saner and more easily understandable component of mediawiki. I teamed with Felipe Schenone and Michael Rubio and we collected what we hope to be the full set of documentation resources related to skins into a shared google doc. I proceeded to read up the pages and write summaries so the relevant ones can be then used to write a hopefully complete, coherent and readable description of the skinning system to be placed here on mw.org; this is still a work in progress, but the document is freely editable, so any comments, corrections or additions are welcome.

Felipe preferred a more hands-on approach, and worked on the changes that were eventually submitted to Gerrit, proposing a way to make the core skins more modular. That sparked an interesting discussion, and at the moment it seems what is needed is some general agreement within the dev community on what the goal for skins should be (e.g. making them into extensions?) so that steps to get to that could be taken towards that, with discussion focusing more on implementation details than on the merits of the changes' rationales. I will probably start a thread on the mediawiki-l to discuss this after I finish reading the documentation we collected.

Apart from that, I mostly did small changes, which I submitted to gerrit:

• Rename $usableSkins to $allowedSkins (already merged)
• skin: Remove the id "anonlogin" and merge pt-anonlogin with pt-login
• Rename Skin::getUsableSkins() to Skin::getAllowedSkins()
• Rename variable _AdminPassword2 to _AdminPasswordConfirm for clarity
• Several tweaks to the install.php script

Finally, I did some edits to mediawiki.org as I browsed around reading about the stuff I worked on.

Great hackathon. I am very happy I was able to attend. I learned a lot and appreciate all of the interesting conversations. Great group of people. Special thanks to Mark for mentioning Gadgets.

During the hackathon, I was able to repackage the extension called the SignWriting MediaWiki Plugin as a user script. I put a copy of the user script on the English Wikipedia and on Incubator.

After the hackathon, I found out that MF-Warburg created a Gadget based on my script and enabled it by default on incubator. Now everyone can see the SignWriting script on Incubator. This was my primary goal for the hackathon and I'm thrilled to see it become a reality. Now we can move the ASL Wikipedia project from Labs to Incubator.

My secondary goal was to enable SignWriting on the English Wikipedia. I have proposed the user script as a gadget for the English Wikipedia, but regardless of the outcome, the user script can be enabled by any user who is interested using the instructions on my English Wikipedia user account page.

Thanks to everyone involved in the hackathon. It was a wonderful event.

It was great to meet you and I'm pleased that my little bit of help was so useful!

Gerard Meijssen's blog entry about the signwriting work.

To continue on, everyone with an interest can follow my progress with my TranslateSvg extension at http://translatesvg.wmflabs.org -- and in particular, see (select your own language in the top right). The hackathon was particularly focussed on making it play nice with "TUX", the recent overhaul of the Translate extension's visuals.

Chris wrote in detail what the two of us did at the hackathon. You can read the report at the QA list archive: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/qa/2013-May/000002.html

This post was posted by ZFilipin (WMF), but signed as Zeljko.filipin(WMF).

Hi! Evan Rosen, David Schoonover, Andrew Otto, Jean-Frédéric Berthelot, and Dan Andreescu worked on re-platforming the user metrics API. The work is being done in a temporary repository and will be migrated to the main repository when it's ready: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=analytics/user-metrics-2.git;a=tree

The focus of our effort:

• improve reliability of the job queue using Celery
• improve security using SQL Alchemy
• improve accuracy and maintainability by unit testing as much as possible (using Nose)
• improve readability by asking for code review as much as possible

Right now, we're cleaning up some initial building blocks (the queue, database, and testing). We'll focus on the last two bullet points as soon as that's ready.

This post was posted by Milimetric (WMF), but signed as DAndreescu.

In addition to helping with UserMetrics2 as DAndreescu said above, I hammered out a MediaWiki extension enabling Limn graphs to be embedded via wikitext:

https://github.com/dsc/limn-mediawiki-ext

The embedding API is provided via a tag and a parser function which have identical functionality:

• Function: {{#graph:<GRAPH_ID>|<OPTION_KEY>=<OPTION_VAL>|...}}
• Tag: <graph graph-id="<GRAPH_ID>" <OPTION_KEY>="<OPTION_VAL>" ... />

The graph definition and data will be pulled from an existing Limn server, configured via mw-config:

require_once( "$IP/extensions/Limn/Limn.php" );
$wgLimnServerBase = 'http://dev-reportcard.wmflabs.org/';
$wgLimnServerRemoteMode = 'proxy';

This is mostly a proof of concept, but I'm pretty excited about the future -- another step toward democratizing data exploration and visualization!

Hi, as I said in my 30 second intro, my primary goal was integrating Moodle with a media wiki.

To do this I have to create a Media wiki complaint skin based on the Bootstrap skinning frame work. In this regard I was very luck since a number of hackers including Walid and my roommate Micheal were collaborating on improving Wikipedia skins and they showed me a prototype bootstrap skin for Mediawiki.

I mention in passing that although an update to Wikipedia skin called Agora was deployed recently it is poorly documented only speaking on the philosophical level but silent when detailed information is required by developers such as: Exact colors of different elements such as link, button, base sizes of font in titles and in the body text, gradients in bitmaps used, size and distance between tabs and so on. This means that developing skins for new devices or other projects is basically reverse engineering.

My second task was to create a feedback system. I originally decided to use pywikipedia bot for this. However following the tool labs session I revised my design to a web service based solution based on the new infrastructure. I was also luck in this regard to have met Evan Rosen of the Analytics team who gave me a little SQL script which can be used to create a Gephi graph of user interaction in an article. Once I hack it some more I expect it will become a stand alone tool for the Mentoring program.

My third task involved extending media wiki SUL mechanism to Moodle. However OATH and OpenID are not yet available in labs. But they will be next month. I have found that Moodle implementation is also broken so this will take more work to get done.

My next three task were unplanned.

The fourth item was designing a review mode widget for inserting inline tags into article drafts in the AFC project. The design was completed successfully with the help of several hackers including to exceptional contributions from Felipe Schenone and Arun Ganesh. At this time we are looking at implementing this with the help of two other hackers with more Javascript background. We hope this will also be included in the visual editor.

The fifth task is fixing a bug in the translate wiki search. It is about 50% done and need a bit more time to yet. It will normalize search for wikitext.

MY final task is an animated Svg comic gadget. This is a new media for disseminating history and other boring content in a more engaging fashion. Arun Ganesh has provided some interesting directions and I'll be implementing them as soon as we can get in touch.

Finally I had no time to work on search for WLM for WikiData. However these projects will have to be done in the coming months.

This was a great Hackathon and I my only disappointment was that I missed the Tel-Aviv hackathon which took place a day before the Amsterdam Hackathon.

Created a Lua unit test framework and a module to try it out (enwiki has a test framework already but it has some issues). Also finally got my Labs account fixed (thx Ryan!)

Hey,

Among other things, some of what I got out of the Hackathon

• Finished a GLAM batch upload and updated my code to pull out categorisation statistics ;
• Together with Cristian (and with guidance from Lodewijk), we transformed unstructured monuments lists into structured lists for Tunisia in preparation for WLM 2013. Started with Search and Replace using regexes, ended up hacking a quick Python script.
• Got introduced to UMAPI 2 codebase and architecture by Evan & Dan. Did not have the time to follow up on this, unfortunately.
• Had a grand tour With Antoine “hashar” Musso of Wikimedia continuous integration system (including Zuul and JJB).
• Got started with Tool Labs, created the heritage project there with other folks from the WLM team and Marc-André.
• Attended some workshops and learnt a lot on Lua, Vagrant and PyWikipedia for Wikidata.

This is only what I recall on top of my head ; and I do not include the numerous super-interesting conversations I had with folks there :)

Hi,

Mostly I discovered useful things through workshop, but didn't produce many interesting code like other above. Still during a design workshop we were able to come with a good proposl for the Knowledge requirements template, but more comments would be appreciate.

More information: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/design/2013-May/000605.html

Thank you, I didn't think to add this link, nor copy this report here.

Arun Ganesh (User:Planemad) wrote a prototype wiki atlas: an interactive SVG file that comes with automatic labelling (details). For more, see:

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiProject_India_State_Locator_Maps

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Planemad/hacks/d3maps.js

Some more links:

Jonathan Carter's mobile-related tech: http://push2press.com/

• Carter's Europeana work: https://github.com/jonathanrcarter/europeana-open-culture-app

Physikerwelt (Moritz Schubotz, User:Schubi87) was working on improving math support:

• http://math-test.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page
• http://math-test.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:MathSearch?pattern=x&searchx=Search

Maarten Dammers enjoyed the speed of a Tool Labs query.

User:Ruud Koot worked on a Wikivoyage listing editor.

Pau Giner wrote a patchset to "Use SVG for Vector collapsible section arrow".

The people who worked on the Account Creation tool and process included DeltaQuad, Simon, and a few others.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Request_an_account
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ACCEmpty.PNG
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ACCZoom.PNG
• https://github.com/enwikipedia-acc/waca
• https://toolserver.org/~acc/acc.php
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ACC/G

We are a group of 7 students who are studying in a French engineering school (Ecole Centrale de Lille).

We are working on a project which consists in creating an application for Smartphones. This application would create touristic routes which are completed with articles from Wikipedia. We came in order to get some advice and help to develop our project, and we also wanted to meet the community after talking to it thanks to the Internet.

The hackathon helped us to meet specialized developers who were interested into our project. Moreover, thanks to the hackathon, we have forged real bonds with the community : we could not have established this kind and this number of links with online discussions and so it really speeds up our project, giving us answers to most of our technical issues.

This trip was very useful and enriching. We were very pleased by the welcome and everybody was really nice during the Hackathon. People were very concerned about our project and tried to help us as much as possible.

We hope that we would be able to give them what they have helped us for and We would like to thank them very much.

We will be doing a presentation about our project the 20th of June at 15h45 (GMT+1). We would enjoy to invite you to participate to it by an Internet broadcast. Please contact us to let us know if you are interested.

7 Students from France.

Hi! Is there a public page about your project, preferably with the code in a repository we could look at? Could you link? Thanks!

Here it is !

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:FatJagm/WanderWiki

We will a presentation of our project in our school the 20th of June at 3:45pm (GMT+1) and we would like you to participate to it via Skype or Google Hangout. We should also record it and we will give you the link to watch it if you are interesterd !

Hi everyone,

We will do a presentation of our project the 20th of June at 3:45pm. This presentation will be in French and will be display on Youtube via Hangout on air. If you want to watch it or to participate to it by being a member of the jury, contact us asap !

• I collaborated with Lyhana8 to get the BAG database extracted :).
• I got the MIP database SQL file from Akoopal
• Attended the pywikibot workshop
• Helped Pigsonthewing repaire the keyboard on his laptop.

Some additional links, from GLAM contributors: André Costa's work, Andy Mabbett's work.

Some people asked me explicitly for this picture.

Stitch of all proposed projects

This is indeed a nice picture! (and useful, the resolution is so good that it is possible to read the notes). I'll try to find an excuse to use it somewhere. Thank you!

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

The "get your development environment set up" session used to include MediaWiki setup with Vagrant. Our conference wifi couldn't handle 25 simultaneous attempts to download a 300-megabyte file, and most of the workarounds we tried were insufficient, so we've decided to instead be more thorough about getting Git set up. If you want to set up Vagrant and MediaWiki, and are having issues, and the instructions on mediawiki.org are not helping, you should contact User:MarkTraceur, who is at the event. Ori Livneh, who is also at the hackathon, can also help you.

Can we do a mirror on the local network or something? (For next time...)

I agree - a local mirror, or something like it, would be better for next time.

Hand out CDs! :D

Yes, these are all good suggestions. We should look into adding programmatic support for pulling boxes from a local mirror, if it isn't in Vagrant already. CDs / USB sticks would be nice too. I filed bug 49057 and will follow up with something. Sorry to have not been more responsive on this thread until now.

This post was posted by Ori Livneh, but signed as Ori.livneh.

USB sticks are way easier... especially for those of us without CD-ROM drives. ;)

I'd like to give a very brief introduction to Meteorjs and on how to build stuff related to MediaWiki with it such as wikifarmchanges, manywiki and even how to build android apps such as this one for hitchwiki.

Hi Guaka! I'm sorry I missed this post during the hackathon but I'm also a meteorjs fan. I work for WMF on the analytics team and you can find me in IRC, #wikimedia-analytics as milimetric. Look forward to speaking with you.

This post was posted by Milimetric (WMF), but signed as DAndreescu.

I live in the Netherlands near Amsterdam, so I would not need travel or accomodation. I read the page to find either

• text specifying what the conference fee is, or
• text confirming that there is no conference fee.

I could find neither. Perhaps the page could clarify what the conference fee is, c.q. that there is no conference fee? Or, possibly, that there is a conference fee that will be announced at a later date?

No fees. Free as in beer!

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Free as in beer indeed, I've updated the information on the page.

I just reverted the last changes in order to bring back the font color sanity. Having +5 font colors in an informative text is just not normal.

I'm not sure about the 2 column layout at the top of the page, at least in the way it is presented now. Looks ugly both in regular desktop screens (right column bigger height forces plenty of empty space in the left column) and in mobile (both content columns + the MediaWiki left navigation bar get squeezed making the page barely readable). Why not converting the content in the right column in a first horizontal block with extra design, and then have all the rest of information in mostly plain text + pictures? Or at least make the right column a proper floating box letting content around it flow and behave well in mobile (like infoboxes do).

Also, do we need to have all the past events listed at the top? Looks more of a "See also" type of content, and in fact there are past events already listed there.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Still working on it, continue tonight.

It was left with various sections unreadable (black on grey). You may want to copy it to a sandbox next time (e.g. copy/paste to User:Henna/Amsterdam_Hackathon_2013 and then copy back once done).

I've polished it up a bit so that it is at least as readable as the old version.

Not only that, please also check the diff before saving, as you might be undoing legitimate edits (such as here, where typos and spacing issues previously fixed were reintroduced)

Visited links on dark gray are still unreadable, but maybe this only happens in the "See also" section?

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Trying to add under the accomodation section but failing so far to get more then one line of text next to it :(

Like this?

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

yes :) I just figured it out myself (about 5 minutes aftery ou fixed it) d'oh thx

Hi, today I got the talk to propose a name and a logo for the event. After the discussion about naming of events and some additional thoughts, the proposal is simply:

MediaWiki Hackathon

It is a usual practice in conferences and events to have a name detached from location, year, edition, etc. Now the MediaWiki Hackathon is in Amsterdam, in the future it might be again there or somewhere else, but it will be our beloved MediaWiki Hackathon anyway.

Back to Amsterdam, the web page and other materials could use a standard formula like:

MediaWiki Hackathon

Amsterdam 24–26 May 2013

The logo proposed is also tied to the "MediaWiki Hackathon" and detached from a specific location, year or edition. It can be used in the future as such, unless we want to evolve it. There is also a version without text.

The logo combines the sunflower (a reference to the technologies powering Wikimedia projects) inside the circle made out of 3 segments (representing the Wikimedia community). It follows the Wikimedia visual identity guidelines and you can find the sources at media:MediaWiki Hackathon UNOFFICIAL DRAFT.svg.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Thanks Quim, I like the idea of having a standardised name, logo and design for all MediaWiki events. As for the logo itself, I prefer the more "techy" style that was for example used in Berlin in 2011 or in Brighton (as long as they follow the visual guidelines). Best,

I'm happy to see that you agree with the naming.

About the logo, I think it is better not to increase the iconic soup we already have at http://wikimedia.org - which is more than enough to confuse anybody out our communities (and many inside). The origin of those logos was the Toolserver logo. That type of logo hasn't been used in past events and I would let it rest unless we really really want to push it forward.

The sunflower has been our identity for tech since basically the beginning, and it is being used from https://mediawiki.org to https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/ . I think using the sunflower is the best that we can do to help strengthening the identity of our tech community at large and also to help keeping the soup of Wikimedia logos under control.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

The WMF hackathon in Bangalore last year was called the Wikipedia DevCamp. It was decided to use the already recognized wikipedia branding and call it 'Dev' because in India thee word 'hack' has a negative connotation .

Wearing a t shirt with 'Wikipedia' increases the value of it so much more than 'mediawiki' :)

Hi Arun! Is there an original SVG version of File:DevCamp Bangalore header.png available?

Erik also thinks that promoting "Wikipedia" for outreach events is better. I don't know if the Amsterdam organizers have any designer around but in any case your logo could be tweaked to satisfy a "Wikipedia Hackathon" or "Wikipedia DevCamp" in Amsterdam as well. Even that orange would fit, if needed.  :)

Erik is proposing to keep relying on media:Hackathon_Logo_Shiny.svg as basic identity for these outreach events. As you can see above, I really think we should limit the amount of visual elements we play with, and the hexagons + puzzle piece imho don't help. This is why I think Arun's design is a better starting point: the hexagons are there but almost gone and "Wikipedia" is spelled out. I would still remove the puzzle piece shape, leaving the "W". As soon as we have an SVG we can play with it.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

How was the Tool server logo developed?

Hi Quim, you're calling this the MediaWiki hackathon, but that's too narrow. In the past it was always the Wikimedia developer meeting. Primary product of course MediaWiki, but not only that.

If you look the last posts here, I'm in fact leaning towards "Wikipedia Something", since it's an out reach activity and that is the brand everybody knows. This naming is not to please you or me or anybody already in the Wikimedia / MediaWiki communities. This is about a name appealing for all the developers out there. In this context "Wikimedia" is even a worse choice than "MediaWiki" because there is even less developers that have heard this before.

From a consistency point of view we could go for "Wikipedia DevCamp" or "Wikipedia Hackathon" and use a logo derived from media:DevCamp Bangalore header.png.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Can't believe I had not already done it, you can now find the original pdf of the DevCamp and associated events here. Let me know if you need it in svg.

Is it possible to edit graphics in a PDF file? Are they in vector format still? I dont know enough. SVG is pretty standard for this kind of job. If you originally did it in something else please share anyway. The idea is to have the sources so someone else can do the adaptation for the Amsterdam event. Unless you volunteer... ;)

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

I made a svg from that pdf file: File:Bangalore DevCamp registration banner.svg. I hand-edited the code to remove cruft from the conversion and group elements together appropriately, so it should be easy to adapt this for other events.

Can we reach to a conclusion? Please have a say. Or am I worrying too much / too soon about our lack of agreed name and logo? If so let me know as well, I don't want to be annoying.

Summary of the proposal so far:

Wikipedia Hackathon

Logo derived from File:DevCamp_Bangalore_header.png

Reasoning:

• Wikipedia is the brand everybody knows. It is inaccurate but "MediaWiki" and "Wikimedia" are in comparison really weak for outreach, and they are not perfect denominations either. Using this name here helps us also identifying Wikipedia as a software project, contributing to solve an identified problem.

• Hackathon is the term used in Europe for the past years. There would be a value in consolidating a global name: "Wikipedia DevCamp". But being the event so close and having talkedso much about the "Amsterdam Hackathon" a change like this would be confusing.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Fine with me. :)

My 2 cents:

• Visual identity: +1 for the Puzzle theme and Tech and everything but not the sunflower. The sunflower doesn't seem at all related to technology, especially when pulling it out of the "[[ bracket ]]" context. I'd say either use the MediaWiki logo as part of it, or not at all (but not just the sunflower). Actually, though it may have been a good logo for MediaWiki (though maybe not even that), remember that in MediaWiki the logo is for users, not developers.
• Naming: Using the Wikipedia brand does sound better, though Wikimedia is getting more known in the public and probably good enough for this purpose. I wouldn't recommend calling it "MediaWiki Hackathon" since that's both too narrow and too unknown a term. +1 for Wikimedia as part of the name (be it Wikimedia Hackathon, Wikimedia developer meeting or something else entirely).

Also, if we call it "Wikimedia (something)" we might want to consider not creating a separate logo but putting it in the Wikimedia family (like chapters and various other initiatives).

Hackathon

See my last proposal. There is no sunflower at File:DevCamp Bangalore header.png so we can end that discussion.

I really think that "Wikimedia" name and logo are no match for "Wikipedia" brand as shown at File:DevCamp Bangalore header.png.

"Wikimedia is getting more known in the public"? Well, maybe around our circles but I can check anytime with actual developers out there and do the test: all of them know Wikipedia, almost all of them need a 3 minute explanation to understand what is "Wikimedia".

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

I'm with Krinkle on this one. Wikipedia might be a strong brand, but that doesn't mean we have to use it.

Just thought I would upload this. I worked on this last year and never did anything with it. I've updated it for this year. It's obviously got a bit of focus on how these are done in different cities all over the world - not sure if that's a theme worth emphasizing.

By the way - the MediaWiki logo being used is this one - it could be changed to the official logo of course.

This post was posted by Trevor Parscal (WMF), but signed as Trevor Parscal.

I like em... good solid lines and colors suitable for tshirts. :)

+1 (though of course the use of wikitext in them will rapidly become anachronistic, given the VisualEditor… ;-))

After discussing with Sumana we agreed that this event is more of a Wikimedia-wide gathering than a real outreach event where we put a lot effort bringing newcomers.

Hence this would work:

Wikimedia Hackathon

Please let's keep the city and year out of event name.

Do you agree?

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

[[Amsterdam Hackathon 2013]] = new(Wikimedia Hackathon) ;-) Fine with me.

This is an SVG with outlined text. I've also sent a set of SVGs and PDFs, along with original artwork and the needed font (so this can be edited in Inkscape on Linux) to Rachael (who is handling the printing).

This post was posted by Trevor Parscal (WMF), but signed as Trevor Parscal.

Thank you very much, Trevor!

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

In case you are interested in Wikipedia over SMS & USSD, Judytuna did a Vumi walkthrough with Jeremy Thurgood at the hackathon. The repository is at git://github.com/praekelt/vumi-wikipedia.git .

Judytuna took these notes on the impromptu browser testing session. They cover using the beta cluster, page objects, Cucumber, Cloudbees, and other Quality Assurance topics.