Istanbul
· WMHack · Wikimedia ·
My fifth Wikimedia Hackathon is over, and I think it was the best one yet. It was held at the Renaissance Polat Istanbul Hotel, on the shore of the Marmara Sea on the edge of Istanbul. A great venue, with nice views from the hacking rooms and the dining-room out over the sea with its dozens of cargo ships (and a powership, the likes of which I'd heard of but never seen).
I'm trying now to remember all the conversations I had, about various projects and ideas, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some. Mostly, they were focussed around two main areas: things to do with WikiEditor such as realtime preview and template-inserting; and 3rd party wikis, mostly in relation to local history wikis using Wikidata data, and also how to make wiki upgrades easier for history nerd sysadmins who aren't sysadmins.
My preparation for the hackathon was slightly fraught in parts, with various changes needed to my flights, and even just getting away from Perth started with reports of the terminal being evacuated just before I arrived there. Luckily order was restored and my flight was unaffected, and I got to Istanbul without mishap.
On the flights, and hours of waiting in Dubai, I managed to get started on some hacking projects, mainly T392553 Template discovery: browse templates by category to start with. That's shaping up well, although still needs a fair bit of work and the fundamental idea of it is not really tested yet so I don't know what will happen. I like the idea of being able to browse categories like that, and think it might also be a good additional way to insert categories while editing, but in my testing so far it feels like many categories have too many members for the column-based browsing to feel natural — it works better when categories either have subcategories or templates in them, but not both.
On the first evening and morning (as usual when I travel to Europe, I was dead to the world by 9PM and up raring to go at 4AM) I fixed a thing that's been bothering me for years: T393077 'Preview not loading' error shown when saving a page. So often when I save a page, I would see that error message flash up, and I knew it wasn't actually an error. Thanks to Taavi that's now merged. There is more to do with realtime preview though, and hopefully I'll carry on with the smaller tasks.
One I did want to do was T352504 Remember resized textbox and preview pane sizes, and thanks to MusikAnimal that was the 2nd (and last) of my patches merged during the Hackathon. I think the resizing ability of the edit and preview panes is something that people don't use all that much, and I think having them be sticky will maybe make it more popular. I like having a taller edit textarea for many pages. The sizes are stored in localStorage, so are kept per-device and so will only apply to an individual project and screen size.
A patch that I'd hoped to get merged but didn't was for T335986 Support suggestedvalues in TemplateWizard, but maybe I'll find someone to review that soon. I do want to go over it again though, because the way that TemplateWizard chooses widgets for a given parameter type should match VisualEditor's behaviour. Although, TemplateWizard is a bit more oppinionated in this regard, because it's not constrained by the VE fact of needed to be able to edit every possible value for a parameter (i.e. if you can't enter the value you want via TemplateWizard then you can just do it in wikitext, whereas in VE there's no other way). I think we can get more detailed with TemplateWizard's widgets (although I didn't want to touch the date handling, that's a long-standing discussion without obvious resolution as far as I can remember).
There were quite a few people at the hackathon who work on non-Wikimedia wikis (e.g. schoolwiki.in, fuerthwiki.de) and I had some great conversations about these. There are many wikis that are about topics that are well-represented on (and within scope of) Wikidata, and my UnlinkedWikibase extension seems sometimes useful for these. It needs to be better though, with things like caching, and also have better documentation. To help wikis get started, a couple of us thought it might be nice for it to come with an 'automatic infobox' sort of thing, so in a fit of coffee-powered enthusiasm I got started on T393298 Add generic infobox to UnlinkedWikibase. It may be more work than I thought, but I'll try to get it sorted in the next week or so.
One of the last things I tinkered with was a non-wiki bit of code to bring nicer typography to my Basildon static site generator: #12 Make compatible with the smart-punctuation extension. This is part of an experiment I've been doing into static HTML sites for small archives powered by Commons and Wikidata, e.g. cfbarker.archives.org.au/items/9. I'm not yet sure if this is going to go anywhere, because there are lots of benefits to an actual wiki, such as immediate editing, especially with VE, and being able to upload files that are not suitable for Commons. There's something very appealing about the simplicity and long-term stability of static sites though.
Anyway, all up it was a great weekend, and I'm again in awe of the many people who make these weekends possible. I spend most of my coding life on my own, not talking to all that many people, and so to be able to come together every year like this is very special, and more and more it feels like a really great way to progress things in good ways.
Photos
I'll get more photos uploaded to Commons soon. Most Wikimedia events are well-photographed by people with a better eye than me, so I don't worry too much any more about capturing anything beyond just what catches my eye. Some are useful additions to the general record of the weekend, but most are just visual notes for me.
Most are in a Flickr album: https://flickr.com/photos/freosam/albums/72177720325776072/
My main RSS news feed: https://samwilson.id.au/news.rss
(or Wikimedia.rss, Fremantle.rss, OpenStreetMap.rss, etc. for topic feeds).
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