Wiki Techstorm 2018/Reports/Arybolab

I attended the ‘all-inclusive’ Hackathon Wikimedia Hackathon in The Hague in October 2018 for participants of various backgrounds (technical and non-technical). It was my second Wikimedia Hackathon (the first was the women hackathon in May). The event was held in a friendly and considerate atmosphere, excellent organization and good food. The ideal setting to get some great things done 😊 and to meet nice and motivated people.

The event started with a tour on Thursday, the 25th October by Prodemos. We visited the Ridderzaal and the House of Representatives. The day ended in a pancake house with delicious varieties of pancake toppings.

The next 2 days were fully dedicated to the Hackathon part of the event and meeting all participants. The first day I attended two workshops, one about pywikibot and the other one about wikibase. In the we could do some hands-on exercise using the handy web tool PAWS. I managed to get my script successfully executing 4 times to write on my Dutch Wikimedia discussion page...

I was looking forward to attend the wikibase workshop as I am interested in data structures and storages. Wikibase turned out to be an interesting project that allows to store structured data. The data can then be queried with the semantic query language SPARQL. The wikibase data storage is already instantiated on various external projects - standalone or as extensions (such as in Open Street Map). I will have a closer look into that software and possibly consider it in the future.

The second Hackathon day (Saturday), I focused on learning about set of Wikimedia tools that I consider I would need to be able to work on my own projects independently. What I ended up with is a simplistic visual based on a script that programmatically queries wikidata and performs some minimal processing on the data in python. Not spectacular, actually pretty ugly, but I could achieve the goal I was hoping for. It was made possible by the amazing and competent tutors that were throughout the event available to help to do the next step on this little journey.

I am looking forward to further develop the exercise and to perform actual data analysis of some relevance. The only thing I regret is that I would have liked to have the time for more socializing with all the great participants. Overall it was an amazing event, I got a lot of valuable input, could develop my Wikimedia tooling skills and the community is a great place to be :-).