User:01tonythomas/Wikimania 2018

Summary

I could take part in the 2018 edition of Wikimania 2018[1] in Cape Town, July 18-22 including the first 3 days of productive Hackathon. This is my second Wikimania, and probably 6th Wikimedia/Wikimania HackathonUser:01tonythomas/Hackathons. Some of the notable achievements I can talk about are:

1. Long awaited patch set for https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T155273 - to introduce subscription logging to Extension:Newsletter. You can see the patchset here: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/extensions/Newsletter/+/447087/ I thank all the developers who were there to help me push that one through.
2. Another minor patch for https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T174664 - to support inter-wiki links.
3. Productive discussions afterr Wikimania Asian meetup to form a developer community in India. We are having follow-ups, which is nice.

I thank Wikimedia DE [2] for the scholarship for the same, and the foundation for pulling the right string to provide me the right travel documents on time.

Preparation

Work to prepare documentations started early February 2018, and luckily ended up with me acquiring the visa 3 days before Wikimania - hence things were a little bit of sped up, but matured. I thank the South African mission in Stockholm for processing the same on time and WMDE for bearing the last day ticketing consequences. Things went pretty well after that.

On the evening of 18th, we had a meeting with the whole WMDE team and luckily - things were in English. Sometimes I feel sorry for making the whole team switch from DE to EN, but I really appreciate when they do that. I ended up discussing my plans, and what I do etc with members there in my team - and this was good to meet+greet the DE team.

Outcome

I would list down the outcome of the 5 days of Wikimania as the following:

1. Importantly, work on the urgent requirement of logging newsletter activity for the Newsletter Extension (links above). Florian, Legoktm, Adshore - I thank them for quick and consistent inputs for the same. The patch is still under code review, but I hope this one gets through.
2. We had a pretty productive Wikimedia South East Asia meetup with few members from the foundation and other volunteers. This turned out to be starting step for a MediaWiki developers group in India. We are following up with 2 meetings a month, and already went through 2 at this point (20th August, 2018). I thank Srishti, Satdeep and others for the same.
3. Getting to know Wikidata more - specially with couple of training sessions. Also to add - knowing the German community more as well. These were quite rewarding.

Other activities

Cape Town was a beautiful pick, and I get to know couple of places there as well. We did a walking trek all the way up/down the Table Mountain on the 21st - which was a great one. Also, I visited the Jewish History Museum and the District 6 Museum which was amazing as well.

Conclusion

In general, I enjoyed and found this edition of Wikimania very productive. Probably I was hanging out more with the Wikimedia DE team, and they were very inclusive - which set the mood for the whole week event. I thank Wikimedia DE, and the foundation again for the opportunity.