DougRM

Wikimania 2014 Report from Doug

This is my report for the WikimediaUK scholarship to Wikania 2014 in London. The reports from other recipients can be found here. Read them, they are good.

Hack-a-thon

I think the other reports did a good job of reporting on different parts of Wikimania, like the village. So I am going to concentrate on the hack-a-thon leading up to Wikimania.

Day 1

The first day was very interesting. Everyone gathered together in a single room and then listened to pitches from people who had projects that they wanted to get help with. It was a very diverse group of projects from language to how to improve retention of new users. After, the projects were announced people broke off into the different groups and heading out to different rooms and tables to work on the projects. I spent most of the first day floating around the groups and looking at the different projects. There was a very diverse set of projects:

pywikibot

Sprints
WikiAtlas
GWToolset
Wikidata Reference Bot
Citoid
Wikidata Game
Core search
Mobile
Mobile Apps: Going Native
My First Tool
Wiki research hackathon
Translathon
MediaWiki-Vagrant Install Party

And so much more...

It all worked a bit like an un-conference. People came with ideas and worked on whatever they wanted to.

Day 2

The second day is when I sat down and started working on a project. Not actually one of the group ones but tours. Someone showed me the tours feature of Wikipedia and I was intrigued. If you didn't know you can have a javascript led tour to help you learn how to edit wikipedia. It is what makes the Wikipedia Adventure so great. I basically spent most of the second day learning how to use tours.

While I didn't have the chance to make my own tour I learned a lot. Moreover, I hope to work with Tours in the future to build some for Wikipidia. Overall it was a great time and I recommend people attend Wikimania 2015!