· hackathons · Wikimedia · travel ·
This was my fourth Wikimedia Hackathon after Vienna, Barcelona, and Prague (and a Covid gap of four years). It was held in Tallinn, Estonia, on 3–5 May 2024.
Day 0
I arrived from Helsinki on the ferry, with couple of other hackathonarians, and we walked up from the port to the hotel (with OSM of course leading the way with a route that perhaps involved too many residents-only pathways past apartment buildings, but we figured they were student accommodation so we could be forgiven).
Later, I went for a short walk around the nearby streets, before returning to my room to warm up and get ready for the opening dinner.
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Disembarking in Tallinn
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Hilton sign
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New tram tracks
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Building on F.R. Kreutzwaldi street
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Ditto
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New Hilton hotel, with large cantilever structure
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Hilton entrance
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Weatherboard building in Tallinn (not many timber buildings it seems)
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Hilton from the back, and reflected sunshine
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Shiny hanging things
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Pudding
Day 1
The opening session on Friday morning was inspiring (despite me being awake a bit before 4AM). Estonia has largest number of Wikimedians per capita of any country in the world, and they welcomed us very warmly. About a hundred people filed up to the stage over the course of an hour, pitching their projects within 60 seconds each. I tried to take notes about the ones I was interested in, with with the exceptions of an idea to fork WikiShootMe and something about improving documentation I failed to actually remember much.
After the opening I spent a while talking to people about the work we're doing on redesigning the Wishlist Survey, and then got stuck into firstly some Wikisource code review and then some ideas about what to do next with UnlinkedWikibase.
Day 2
Woke up only slightly hungover (maybe I should just call it jetlag). An early breakfast (although they don't like anyone to turn up in the dining-room before 7AM) and a coffee to take down to the hacking ballroom. The first session was about the recent years' efforts to treat MediaWiki as a product in its own right, and what that means for developers and what areas of it are being focussed on. It's all great stuff to hear.
Day 3
Sunrise saw me awake and not hungover. I often find that the first thing I see of a morning becomes the code I work on for the first hours of the day, and this Sunday it was a backwards-compatibility bug in the Diagrams extension. I made a PR for that (including getting 1.35 running again locally because I've not touched it for a while and had deleted things), and heading down to do some more hacking while waiting for breakfast to open. Released version 0.13.2 of Diagrams, with that fix.
After breakfast, ended up at the Wikisource table, reviewing code for Wikisource OCR popup focus fixing, Special:PagesWithoutScans excluding, and then I switched the OCR toolbar loading to the new 'secondary' section.
Photos
A few random photos, still to be sorted:
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The view from my hotel room
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The Hilton corridor (they were all curved)
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Shiny thing again
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It's not only Perth that gets glass towers on top of old buildings
