Topic on Talk:Amsterdam Hackathon 2013

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.