Zürich Hackathon 2014/Topics

Add a topic you want to work on at the next Wikimedia Hackathon!

Template:

Galleries for topic pages
Create the concept of a gallery for any type of topic page (Article, User, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage) where a user can search and contribute images from commons.

Interested persons:

= Sprints =

Regular contributors plus some newcomers hack together with a shared goal.

Production-like Vagrant
Our goal is to make a handful of high-priority puppet roles available to MediaWiki-Vagrant to make developer instances of Vagrant closer to a production-like environment. The ultimate idea is to provide a uniform developer-focussed instance to Mediawiki engineers to facilitate better testing of new and existing code, while also making it easy for new engineers to get started hacking on Mediawiki and Mediawiki with minimal friction for bringing new features to production. The first hurdle will be to provide some crucial production services in MediaWiki-Vagrant, which will be our focus for the Hackathon. Possible services to focus on include For more information, view our notes from initial conversations about this project.
 * Varnish
 * SSL
 * MariaDB
 * Memcache/Redis
 * CentralAuth

Interested persons:
 * 1) Arthur Richards
 * 2) Yuvi Panda
 * 3) Ori Livneh
 * 4) Matt Flaschen
 * 5) Bryan Davis
 * 6) Andrew Otto
 * 7) QChris (talk)
 * 8) CSteipp

Maps integration
The idea is to bring pin map templates, geohack, wikiminiatlas, openstreetmap, Extension:Maps, Special:NearBy, mobile, coordinates extension etc etc etc, more together in a way that works for mobile, desktop, micro and macro contributions. It would be handy if before hand we can do some exploratory work to create a more focused effort during the hackathon: Zürich_Hackathon_2014/Geo_Namespace.

Interested persons:
 * Jdlrobson
 * TheDJ
 * MaxSem (Did i remember that correctly sam ? )

TheDJ (talk) 22:14, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

= Workshops =

Experts meet novices to share knowledge in hands-on tasks.

mobile walk-in and talk-in
Is mobile a mystery to you? Can't get MobileFrontend setup? Don't understand why your favourite desktop features don't work on mobile? Want to know how to work on the latest Wikipedia apps? Do you want to make mobile things and don't know how? Does one of your projects look great on a desktop and terrible on a mobile device?

This workshop will be an unstructured session where you can ask all these questions and get some answers. Members of the mobile team will be available to answer your questions and give you hands on help on anything you need.

Interested persons:

mediawiki.ui for developers


implements the evolving "Agora" visual style for buttons and forms in MediaWiki software. Learn how to apply it in your extensions and gadgets to deliver attractive consistent appearance. Actual real-life visual designers will be on-hand to give you advice and get feedback about what controls would be useful.

Interested persons:
 * 1) S Page (WMF) (talk)
 * 2) May Galloway
 * 3) Shahyar Ghobadpour
 * 4) Tpt (talk)

Flow for bot and tool developers
Flow is a modern discussion and collaboration system for WMF wikis. However, Flow pages aren't talk pages, so bots and semi-automated editing tools (e.g., Huggle, Twinkle) will have to adapt to handle them. Come explore the new Flow API and help us make improvements that will support some of the most important processes on our projects!

Interested persons:


 * 1) S Page (WMF) (talk)
 * 2) Benny Situ
 * 3) Mlitn
 * 4) Shahyar Ghobadpour
 * 5) Maryana (WMF) (talk)
 * 6) Ladsgroup (talk) 17:37, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

MediaWiki-Vagrant Bootcamp
Introduction to using MediaWiki-Vagrant to manage a development environment for hacking on MediaWiki. We'll do a really quick high level look at what Vagrant is and how MediaWiki-Vagrant uses and extends it. Then we'll learn just enough Puppet to understand what "roles" are and how to use them to configure your MediaWiki-Vagrant instance. Participants will then get hands on by creating roles to install and configure extensions used on Commons that are not yet available in MediaWiki-Vagrant.

Interested persons:
 * 1) Bryan Davis
 * 2) Greg Grossmeier
 * 3) Andrew Otto

Learn to work with Zuul and Jenkins Job Builder
A tutorial with User:Hashar and User:MarkTraceur about how to add and maintain jobs in Jenkins on the WMF infrastructure.

Interested persons:
 * 1) QChris (talk)
 * 2) Greg (WMF) (talk)
 * 3) Andrew Otto
 * 4) Nikerabbit

Tool Labs workshop
An event-long workshop with Coren; hands-on migration, debugging and creation of tools on the Tool Labs. Join in and leave at any time; there will be impromptu and planned breakaway tutorials on various related topics as interest demands (planned: using gridengine tutorial, database query optimization (including federated tables), how to deploy web services).

OAuth Workshop
Tutorial and opportunity to pair with CSteipp to get your tools/bots using OAuth for authentication and/or authorized access into MediaWiki.

How to help pywikibot
Pywikibot is the most popular framework for running bots but how we can help improving pywikibot? There are several ways to help including solving and reporting bugs, wrangling bugs, bug triage and areas of developing including support of Wikibase and Wikidata, porting functionality from compat to core, and or network optimization (in order to reduce pressure on WMF servers)

Interested persons:
 * 1) Ladsgroup (talk) 17:34, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Translate extension workshop
Nikerabbit is there to explain how the Translate extension works. Let's fix your most wanted (or hated) Translate bugs together or work on new features.

Possible bigger topics to work on, depending on the interest:
 * Repository management. Translatewiki.net is using a collection of shell scripts to manage all repositories where translations are exported to and imported from. Lack of better repository management is blocking further progress on areas like automation of imports and exports.
 * How will page translation work with Parsoid and VisualEditor.
 * Let's provide more useful statistics about translation activity in nicer format.
 * Translation memory improvements.

Translate extension provides an translation editor, support for many different types of content, translation memory, statistics ad lots more. It is also very old and big extension, while also adopting new technologies like composer and CSS grid based interface.

Interested persons:
 * 1) Nikerabbit
 * 2) Nemo
 * 3) Siebrand

= Meetings =

Complex questions are discussed in depth until reaching a decision.

Future of version control, bug reporting and other developer tools

 * ''See also Project management tools/Review.

It's been 2 years since we setup the current infrastructure around developer tools with Gerrit and Jenkins. Not everyone's happy and things break more often than we like. Additionally there's been rumblings for years about getting rid of Bugzilla. I think it's high time we have a discussion about what we envision our ideal development environment to be and figure out what it would take to get us there. Are there any tools (hint hint: Phabricator) that can help get us most of the way there?

Interested persons:
 * 1) Chad
 * 2) AKlapper
 * 3) guillom
 * 4) S Page (WMF) (talk)
 * 5) Isarra
 * 6) QChris (talk)
 * 7) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk)
 * 8) Greg (WMF) (talk)
 * 9) Maryana (WMF) (talk)

Architecture discussion
A continuation of our past architecture meetings where we discuss the future of MediaWiki's internal design.

Interested persons:
 * 1) RobLa-WMF (talk)
 * 2) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk)
 * 3) Hoo man
 * 4) Nikerabbit (depends on the topics)

Tech People meeting Regular Users
A workshop (preferably in the early evening) to invite local users, beginners but also power users, who want to learn more about MediaWiki, our infrastructure and more. Kind of a "Ask the Developers" session but more informal.

Invite the local Wikipedia meet-up.


 * 1) --Manuel Schneider(bla) (+/-) 21:17, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
 * 2) Hoo man (talk) 23:17, 4 March 2014 (UTC) Did similar things before, also am de-n
 * 3) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk)

Improve MediaWiki's skin support
Discuss how to make the skinning system more flexible and maintainable, both for core skins and such that things in general might be made more reasonable for third-party users. This could include sorting out what modules/classes/functions should be in core so that individual skins don't need to reinvent things, modernising the core skins, improving the documentation, etc. Or something.

Interested persons:
 * 1) Isarra

OpenPGP/GnuPG key signing party
A OpenPGP/GnuPG key signing party to strengthen the Web of Trust. There is no central key registry for this key signing party. Instead it will simply be a paper slip exchange. Bring
 * paper slips with your key id, fingerprint, name & emails, and
 * something to identify yourself (usually a government-issued identification, such as a passport).

If you need to make paper slips, you can for example use generators, or print copies of the output of

Interested persons:
 * 1) QChris (talk) 09:03, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
 * 2) Why not. Nemo 09:25, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

= Unclear =

Proposals that seem to need clarification. Feel free moving them in any of the categories above.

Local Wikipedia forks
"Semi-autonomous instances of localized Wikipedia". Expand on the work of SOS Children, the Rachel Project to create packaged snapshots of wikipedia contents that can be deployed on local storage e.g. SD cards in a tablet computer, 3G WiFi router, etc. and on a Raspberry Pi, etc. Ideally there'll be bi-directional updates from the local instance to wikipedia and from wikipedia to the local instance - asynchronous synchronization. People using one of these snapshot instances would be able to create new content and revise existing contents. One of the main goals is to help extend the reach locality and relevance of wikipedia for people throughout the world.

I've been doing some work in this area already and will bring hardware, etc. to demo and test our work.

There's lots of known-unknowns for this project. With your help I hope we'll be able to

Interested persons:
 * 1) Julian Harty

Possibly interested:
 * Not interested if it's yet another offline Wikipedia work, but I'd be interested if this was focused on Kiwix/ZIM incremental updates + the ability to edit locally (and then submit changes). --Nemo 14:29, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Except for the "edit feature", what you mean seems to exist already. At least two Kiwix developers will be there during the 3 days. 188.61.123.117 09:11, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Interested persons:

Extend VisualEditor
VisualEditor has been around for quite a while. As an extension developer, it's time to think about how you can integrate your extension. There are several topics that we'll need to talk about: We as a developer communtiy need to explore the workings of the VE, this session is intended to be a starter.
 * How can my extension make use of / add to the VE?
 * Does my code survive the round trip?
 * How is my extension's code displayed in the VE?
 * How can I write dialoges that allow the user to easily edit my tags?
 * How can I add functionality to the VE in general?

Interested persons:
 * 1) Mglaser

Possibly interested:

The new face of MediaWiki.org
There's an initiative to rework MediaWiki.org. We should discuss the plans and outcomes in order to make MediaWiki.org a site that is easy to use and valuable to all of us, be it users, site maintainers, core and extension developers and any other intersted parties. Let's go over the new design and make this a state-of-the-art site a so wide spread software like MediaWiki deserves!

Interested persons:
 * 1) Mglaser

Possibly interested: