Wikimedia Technical Talks

Tech talks are short presentations with community question and answer sessions. They are usually under an hour in length and focus on a specific technical topic.

For information on setting up a Tech talk, see Project:Calendar/How to schedule an event

We usually present tech talks using Google Hangouts On Air, which makes them available on YouTube. There is a concurrent IRC office hour for questions on IRC, so the talks also appear there.

Upcoming tech talks 2019 season

 * March 27 2019 at 19:00 UTC, 45 Min
 * Join Google Hangout Meet Live:TBA
 * Video posted at: TBA
 * Speaker: TBA
 * Topic area: TBA
 * Description: TBA

The Long And Winding Road To Making Parsoid The Default MediaWiki Parser

 * February 27 2019 at 19:00 UTC, 45 Min
 * Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQGfuLP9MqA
 * Slides: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Long_And_Winding_Road_To_Making_Parsoid_The_Default_MediaWiki_Parser.pdf
 * Speaker: Subbu Sastry, Principal Software Engineer
 * Topic area: Parsoid, Wikitext Parsing
 * Description:
 * This will be a talk in two parts: The first part will provide a bunch of background to make sense of the roadmap presented in part 2. The second part will have 3 components: (a) Parsoid history (b) Porting Parsoid to PHP: the whys and wherefores (c) From here to Parsoid as the default.
 * Parsoid started in 2012 as a project to support Visual Editing and since then has gone on to support a number of products (Flow, Content Translation, Kiwix, and Android app). Given that (a) Parsoid's annotated HTML output enables clients to infer things about wikitext without having to parse wikitext, (b) the PHP parser cannot support Visual Editor and other products, and (c) we cannot continue to have two parsers, it is inevitable that Parsoid will be the default parser for MediaWiki. This has been known since at least 2015 but while we are nearer to that goalpost, we are still not quite there yet. In this talk, we'll talk about what else needs to be completed, and what the porting of Parsoid to PHP means for this goal.

Older tech talks
You can browse through past tech talk recordings in the Commons category and on the MediaWiki YouTube channel.


 * 31 October 2017 - Selenium tests in Node.js, by Željko Filipin (Selenium/Node.js/Write, T173488)
 * 9 February 2017 - A Gentle Introduction to Wikidata for Absolute Beginners (including non-techies!)
 * 15 November 2016 - Using Kibana4 to read logs at Wikimedia - Bryan Davis
 * 31 May 2016 - Integrating user behavior to design better products
 * 18 April 2016 - UX Prototype Labs: Understanding Wikipedia Readers
 * 22 March 2016 - Reflections on WMF: Community Dynamics
 * 18 March 2016 - New readership data. Some things we've been learning recently about how Wikipedia is read (video, slides)
 * 29 February 2016 - Automated citations in Wikipedia: Citoid and the technology behind it (YouTube)
 * 8 February 2016 - Tech Law Training: Privacy, Security, Licensing, & Beyond (private event)
 * 8 February 2016 - A Hands-on Estimation Exercise
 * 14 January 2016 - Creating Useful Dashboards with Grafana(abstract)
 * 15 December 2015 - The creation of Histography, from concept to design
 * 9 December 2015 - Secure Coding For MediaWiki Developers
 * 3 November 2015 - The making of a MediaWiki skin(abstract)
 * 2 November 2015 - Nothing Left but Always Right: The Twisted Road to RTL Support (YouTube, slides)
 * 23 October, 2015 - Introduction to Free and Open Source Licensing at Wikimedia - Stephen LaPorte
 * 20 August, 2015 - ELK: Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana at Wikimedia (WebM format on Commons, also on YouTube) - Bryan Davis (slides)
 * 18 August, 2015 - Let's talk about web performance - Peter Hedenskog
 * 15 June, 2015 - Kanban: An alternative to Scrum? - Kevin Smith (slides)
 * 14 May, 2015 - Graphs! Visualize maps and data graphs live on Wikipedia - Yuri Astrakhan and Dan Andreescu
 * 14 April, 2015 - The state of Team Health across Wikimedia Engineering - Kristen Lans
 * 4 March, 2015 - Hack - An Evolution of PHP - Josh Watzman from Facebook
 * 6 January, 2015 - A developer's-eye view of API client libraries - Frances Hocutt
 * 11 December, 2014 - Phabricator for Wikimedia Projects - Quim Gil and Andre Klapper
 * 25 November, 2014 - MediaWiki-Vagrant What is New With MediaWiki Vagrant with Bryan Davis and Dan Duvall (slides, video)
 * 03 November, 2014 - Language Engineering: Content Translation Tool - Joel Sahleen
 * 22 October, 2014 - Design Research in Product Development - Abbey Ripstra
 * 06 October, 2014 - The Dashboarding Problem - Dan Andreescu and Nuria Ruiz
 * 24 September, 2014 - The Very Basics of Phabricator - Andre Klapper
 * 29 July, 2014 - HHVM in production: what that means for Wikimedia developers - Paul Tarjan
 * 15 July, 2014 - Hadoop and Beyond. An overview of Analytics infrastructure - Andrew Otto
 * 11 June, 2014 - How, What, Why of WikiFont - May Galloway and Monte Hurd
 * 15 May, 2014 - Elasticsearch - Nik Everett
 * 15 April, 2014 - A preliminary look at Parsoid internals - Subramanya Sastry and Gabriel Wicke

Nominations/Ideas for future tech talks

 * The work Analytics engineering are doing and how we could help
 * An understanding of Flow, where it's at and where it's going
 * on the new visual design for MediaWiki/mediawiki.ui or whatever that library is called these days.
 * QA (Zeljiko? Chris?) about browser testing
 * Daniel Kinzler on core refactoring of Title and other classes.
 * Pau Giner on dos and don'ts in user testing
 * Niklas Laxström on conversing with robots that know Wikipedia (part of his Phd research)
 * Antoine Musso on Jenkins - status: emailed Antoine/Antoine on paternity leave. hold.
 * Moriel Schottlender on right-to-left support (adapting her blog post into a talk)
 * Wikidata - Lydia/Community member - open to all
 * Tony Tomasz -
 * Webinar on Zotero translator coding
 * Aaron Halfaker on machine learning support for wiki-workflows.
 * C. Scott Ananian on using Parsoid output to implement bots/scrapers/offline readers