Wikimedia Technical Talks

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Overview[edit]

Technical talks are presentations created by and for members of the Wikimedia technical community. Technical talks cover technical concepts and ideas that make it easier for others to contribute to Wikimedia projects. Formal technical talks are typically broadcast live, recorded and posted publicly for others view.

This page contains information about Wikimedia technical talks and how to view or contribute to them. You will also find links to additional information about setting up and creating technical talks.

Technical talks basics[edit]

Who can give a technical talk?[edit]

Short answer: You!

Long answer: Technical talks are open to anyone who wants to share what they know about the technology we use on Wikimedia projects.

Why give a technical talk?[edit]

Technical talks are a good way to share information with other people who are working in technical spaces on Wikimedia projects. We all benefit from each other's knowledge, and we all benefit from having different ways to learn.

When you produce a technical talk, you build your skills as a public speaker, story teller, trainer, and teacher. You become more visible to others in the community, and you contribute valuable knowledge to the Wikimedia movement.

Who watches technical talks?[edit]

Technical talks are broadcast live and archived for anyone to view in the future. Most people in your audience will be technical contributors just like you.

Technical talks formats[edit]

Wikimedia monthly technical talk[edit]

The Wikimedia Foundation currently supports a monthly technical talk with A/V support and hosting for speakers. This talk is generally 45 min in length with a live question and answer session at the end. These talks are broadcast using Google Hangouts On Air, and are immediately available on the MediaWiki Youtube channel. Viewers can ask questions through Youtube or on the #wikimedia-office IRC channel , which is reserved for the talk.

Wikimedia monthly technical talks are announced via email lists and social media. Speakers are encouraged to upload supporting material, including slideshows and videos to Wikimedia Commons following their talk.

Propose a Wikimedia monthly technical talk[edit]

Monthly technical talks can be scheduled up to 6 months ahead of time. Learn how to propose a Wikimedia monthly technical talk

Other technical talk opportunities[edit]

The Wikimedia monthly technical talk is only one forum for sharing technical information with others. Some potential speakers may want to start with a shorter talk, or they may want to record their own talk or video to share.

Learn more about recording technical talks and video tutorials.

Tips for successful tech talks[edit]

Need some guidance to help you get started with you talk? See these tips!

Upcoming Wikimedia monthly technical talks 2019 season[edit]

Episode 6: A Deployment Pipeline Overview[edit]

July 10, 2019, 4PM UTC, 45 Min

Join Youtube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0FTcG7PxzI

Slides: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMF_Tech_Talk_Deployment_Pipeline.pdf

Speaker: Alexandros Kosiaris

Topic Areas: Technology, Deployment, Mediawiki

Description:

The deployment pipeline project has been ongoing for a while, sometimes with more resources poured into it, sometimes less, but it's finally in a state that is ready to be used (it's already being used!). This tech talk is about a presentation to wider technical audiences, discussing the goals of the project, the implementation decisions and how it's meant to be used and adopted by the deployers of services (and eventually MediaWiki) in the coming months.

Past Wikimedia monthly tech talks 2019 season[edit]

Episode 5: Just what is Analytics doing back there?[edit]

June 25, 2019, 6 PM UTC, 45 Min

Join Youtube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD0PEDFysfM

Slides: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Just_What_is_Analytics_doing_back_there.pdf

Speaker: Dan Andreescu

Topic Area: Data flow, Analytics Infrastructure

Description:

We take care of twelve systems.  Data flows through them to answer the many questions that our community and staff have about our piece of the open knowledge movement.  Let's take a look at how these systems fit together to answer questions. Let's also look at an example trick we use to join big data in a distributed world.

Episode 4: Wikimedia and W3C[edit]

May 23, 2019, 3 PM UTC, 45 Min

Join Youtube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pZrLwC5to4

Slides: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMF_and_W3C.pdf

Speaker: Evan Prodromou and Gilles Dubuc

Topic Area: Standards

Description:

The Wikimedia Foundation is now a member of the W3C, as of April. We will walk you through how you can join working groups, what to expect of W3C participation, what we hope Wikimedia staff can achieve through W3C and we will share our own experiences as W3C members.

Episode 3: Sharing global opportunities for new developers in the Wikipedia community[edit]

April 24, 2019 at 18:00 UTC, 45 Min

Join Youtube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXyeRujCrAs

Slides: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Slides_from_Wikipedia_session_at_LibrePlanet_2019.pdf

Speaker: Srishti Sethi, Developer Advocate, Wikimedia Foundation

Topic Area: Developer Advocacy, onboarding new technical contributors

Description:

Wikimedia offers a plethora of opportunities for newcomers to get involved; however, as with many other free software projects, getting involved with the Wikimedia technical community can be a daunting prospect for newcomers. This talk is a gentle introduction to the Wikimedia ecosystem, and gives pointers on how to get involved as a volunteer. I will delve into the various ways newcomers can make successful contributions in areas ranging from design to documentation, from programming to testing, and much more.

Episode 2: Ouch, I have an OOUI: using OOUI without pain[edit]

March 27 2019 at 18:00 UTC, 45 Min
Join Google Hangout Meet Live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_CUN2o4faw
Slides: TBA
Speaker: Moriel Shottlender
Topic area: OOUI
Description: OOUI is the interface widget library we are using for UI in the Wikimedia projects. The library is meant to allow implementers to create useful interfaces that automatically answer internationalized needs that are unique to the global nature of our projects. Right-to-left support, supporting old browsers, accessibility, etc, are things that OOUI is doing in the background for you.This tech talk will present OOUI’s history, basic and advanced usage, and demonstrate how to create great interfaces without (much) pain within our wiki ecosystem.
Links mentioned in the talk:

Episode 1: The long and winding road to making Parsoid the default mediaWiki parser[edit]

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[edit]

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

Nominations/Ideas for future tech talks[edit]

  • The work Analytics engineering are doing and how we could help
  • An understanding of Flow, where it's at and where it's going
  • <someone> 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

See also[edit]

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