User:Florianschmidtwelzow/Wikimania 2018

This little blog post is my report from the Wikimania 2018, where I'd the possibility to take part in (including an awesome pre-conference hackathon). As a little foreword: This was my first Wikimania in my lifetime and it's something I'm happy to do again at some time in some extend.

Pre-Wikimania
This Wikimania was the second one, where I applied for a scholarship, it was, however, not my plan from the beginning. I'd already some events and trips I wanted to do in the mid of the year, so I first decided to not apply for a scholarship and had no plan to attend the Wikimania this year. However, a lovely Wikimedian from Wikimedia Deutschland asked me, if I would be interested to apply for a scholarship, as this year WMDE has the ability to provide some special scholarships for the technical community and she thought about me (thanks to her and as well as the work at the Israel hackathon (was it the Israel one?) with the ArticlePlaceholder, which opened the door for this, I think). As I can't say no when someone asks me so friendly, I applied and finally was selected as one of the scholarship receipients: *yay* moths of (positive) stress organising this with my other trips to other countries this year! :D

Journey to and first day in Cape Town
The Wikimania 2018 was my first time in South Africa and in Cape Town and it's most likely the longest trip I ever took. My flight from Germany to SA goes over Dubai (my first time in Dubai, too, however, I was only in the airport and had no time to visit some spots), all in all the journey from airport to airport took roughly 18 hours (also the longest trip I'd so far). At the airport I again had the chance to take the shuttle organized by Wikimedia/Wikimania, however, as usually at hackathons, I prefer to take the local public transportation, as along as it does not take too much more time and is "reasonably safe". So I took the MyCiTI bus, however (and that's the reason why I wrote it here), because of the traffic in and around Cape town, the bus had a huge delay. This resulted in me arriving at the final bus station (Civic Centre) way too late and at the beginning of the night. So, now there I was, a lonely european looking guy who obviously came directly from the airport with his luggage in the night (remember what you may've read in the internet about Cape town, it's reasonably safe as long as you're not going out in the night alone and not into specific areas of the city).

So I started my tour by feet from the Civic Centre to the hotel and, looking back, it wasn't that bad, there were some bad looking guys here and there, but I felt as safe as in other big cities at night: +1!

After finally arriving at the hotel (and had a short talk with Dan, who arrived from grabbing food somewhere outside of the hotel) and checking in, I got to the welcome party with some free snacks and soft drinks: Let's grab a coke! I also met the first people I already knew (mostly from prior hackathons) and some more I didn't see before. All in all a nice first evening in Cape town, but I got to bed a bit early as I needed to sleep in a "real" bed after having such a journey :P

Pre-Conference: Hackathon
As a pre-conference activity, I choosed to attend the hackathon, which is reasonable I think. As at the Barcelona hackathon this year, where I also had the possibility to attend, I joined the friendly space team, which tries to ensure, that all hackathon aprticipants are feeling welcome at the hackathon. I was also working at the helpdesk this year, so people could approach me when having questions or problems (more on that later).

After meeting with we talked about a problem/feature in the Newsletter extension and in Maps (I think it was in maps, I don't find the task anymore, however, it was about getting a marked zone inside of a map more rounded, I'm not quite sure how I should express that in english :. However, I don't think that I was that helpful at this topic, though. However, at the hackathon I had the chance to achieve some things again (also a big thanks to  for working with me merging some things, see below, it seems we mostly meet at hackathons and at any other time just don't get to meet :P):


 * Finally some stuff of the ConfigRegistry is reworked and merged: The ConfigRegistry is a backend-only thing which allows to get a list of configuration options and the provider of them. This could (in my opinion: is) one step of getting a more reliable way of configuring MediaWiki into place. I started with working on that 2 years ago, I think, at a Wikimedia Developer Summit in San Francisco I think, so I'm really really happy that we finally get it half finished and merged :D
 * Merging fixes and improvements to the extension registration system making it more reliable
 * A big rewrite of the CookieWarning extension including improvements to the maintainability and adding a lot of new tests for the logic I refactored
 * Some improvements to the GoogleLogin extension I created:
 * Removed the profile permission from the Google authentication request, making the requested scope of data available to the extension smaller (this will hopefully harden the trust of the users into the extension)
 * Getting GoogleLogin to automatically take precedence over the username and password fields (a user wish, see )
 * Some refactoring of the extension to allow to match users not only by their Google account ID
 * Match users by their e-mail-address without requiring them to connect their user with their MediaWiki account (see, *yay* the 200.000 task in Phabricator! ;D)

(You can see changes I did during the hackathon in gerrit, as long as I didn't mess up the search query)

An also very cool moment during the hackathon was, that I was hopefully a bit helpful for a new MediaWiki developer, who started to convert a little user script to rewrite into an actual MediaWiki extension. I unfortunately does not remember the name anymore, however, it was a pleasure to me to answer questions, connecting him with other developers at the hackathon and thinking about some problems together with him!

Other Wikimania activities
Apart from attending the hackathon (the hotel provided a room which was available the whole day and night for the hackathon during the time of the Wikimania, which resulted in me hanging around a long time there) I'd some interesting talks about technical stuff in the Wikipedias (especially user scripts) and, which I really need to mention here, is a talk about the Wikidata infoboxes.

I already saw a talk about a similar topic at the Barcelona hackathon, and my own wiki is already using some templates that auto-generate an infobox based on Wikibase entries. However, I wasn't sure, that the Wikidata-infoboxes are already so widely used in Wikipedias (some language versions use them more, some less, and some don't use them at all, but compared with what I expected it's already a lot of them using it!). The talk explaining the background idea of Wikidata infoboxes was awesome. Combined with the talk about how to get these auto-generated infoboxes to your own wiki, was most likely very beneficial to a lot of the attendees. However, there was one big thing that I'm struggling with since then:

Currently, the Wikipedias needs to _copy_ the Lua modules, as well as the templates, that generate the infoboxes from one wiki to the next. For me, as a programmer, duplicated code is the hell: It's nearly impossible to maintain it in the long term, it's not benefical for understanding the code, if there're thousands of alternative versions of the same code everywhere.

This was my learing from this session, which I need to mention here (I'd some insights in other sessions, too, however, they're mostly personal and I don't think I need to mention that here), however, I've no solution in mind for that, so far. I already found with a pretty short search time, there're most likely being more somewhere in phabricator, however. I'm very ineterested in what the solution to this problem (which obviously is something the community is looking for, too) will be.

Conclusion
There were a lot of side and social events, which I didn't mention here, however, they made this Wikimania (again, my first one) a very nice place, a very nice event and even if I was, compared with other sessions, a long time in the hacking space, I found it really productive. I want to thank Wikimedia Deutschland for giving me the possibility to attend this years Wikimania!