User:Florianschmidtwelzow/Wikimedia Hackathon 2017

Ook, second try with this page. What happened before? So, at the end of the hackathon, I started writing an awesome page about my experience of the hackathon on this page. In the night I just put my computer to battery-saving mode, like I do always when I do not want to keep it on. Ok, during the night, Windows thought it would be a great idea to give me the latest cool stuff and installed updates including the try of restarting my computer (which obviously does not work completely, as my computer is locked with Bitlocker). So, because I haven't saved my page, but kept it in the VisualEditor without saving it somewhere else, all my text was lost. What I did then, 2 days later, starting to remember what I wrote an wrote it again :P

However, this page should give a short info about my experience of this years hackathon in vienna!

Wikipedia app meets MediaWiki third-parties[edit]

A bit of background: For my own MediaWiki installation behind droidwiki.org I've customized the Wikipedia app a long time ago to work with my wiki, too. This unfortunetaly was really complex, and updating the app was a huge mess all over the time. I thought it would be a great idea to create a blog post about this. Because of this blog post, which obviously was read by some Wikimedia Foundation staff and mobile team members, too, Bernd (a former member of the mobile apps team, now somewhere in the services team) created a task (task T165495) in phabricator and starting with this things got serious! The task was proposed as a newcomer-friendly activity for the hackathon. Even if I'm probably not a newcomer in the technical community anymore, I would count myself as a newcomer in the Android development (even if I'd already some commits from time to time to different apps).

So, I joined a team of three (with me four) people decided to hack with the Wikipedia android app to make it more generic for other MediaWikis, too. Bernd and I met already before at several other events, and we got two amazing newcomers on our side, @Nark0: and @PurpleBasil: . And so we started with working on different tasks, discussed how we want to go forward, found more problems and more solutions and learned from each other. This task followed me all over the hackathon and was the one where I spent the most time on.

At the end, we'd an awesome, pretty well working prototype of a MediaWiki app (thanks for the new flavour @nark0!) which works with (in theory :P) all MediaWiki based websites! The showcase was pretty cool at the end of the hackathon, even if the only thing we showed was a working Android App, which looks like the Wikipedia app and displayed content from a non-Wikipedia wiki, but hey!

The RevisionSlider mobile web thing[edit]

Most of you should already know, that the RevisionSlider tool, developed by WIkimedia Deutschland, went live for all wikis just some weeks ago. At the hackathon, @Birgit Müller (WMDE): contacted me (we also already met at different events before) and asked me, in a more or less influenced way (:P) if I wouldn't like to take a look at the revision slider tool on the mobile web page, as it probably doesn't look pretty well and is probably not working correctly.

After I installed the slider in my local MediaWiki installation (I think at this point, it's clear, that I said: Yes, of course!) and created some revisions, I found out, that the slider isn't even visible on the mobile diff pages. After fixing this problem and doing some sort of design changes (just internal things, nothing changed in the UI) and disabled the jquery.ui.draggable plugin for mobile pages (this plugin requires a lot of other jquery.ui libs and would require the user to load a lot of data, which we try to avoid on mobile), @Christoph Jauera (WMDE): and I had an awesome revisionslider on a mobile diff page (later it will be a catastrophic showcase of this feature, as my local installation will simply refuse to load the mobile page, damn...).

The other things...[edit]

Apart from that, I'd a lot of small conversations and discussions with a lot of people, I even can't remind all of them anymore. I think, User:01tonythomas liked the extreme programming session with User:Bawolff and me (just kidding, it's always easy to say how things can be done better to another person, who has to do the things on the laptop, and I really appreciate that tony had fun, too, at least it seemed so :P).

I also had an interesting talk with User:Lydia Pintscher (WMDE), the Product owner of Wikidata, about the federated access to Wikidata items and properties and kindly placed my ideas about this for the future, which could help third-party installations of Wikibase (which... I... run... too, just a sidenote :P). I think Lydia will keep this in mind when thinking about the future of this feature, in combination with the requirements of Wikimedia usage of Wikidata and the federated access feature :)

CoC meeting[edit]

Also in the hackathon time, the Code of Conduct committee was formed and someone (I think it was User:01tonythomas?) asked if we would like to meet at the hackathon (as this is a technical focused event and at least some of the members should be there) and we had our first in-person meetup at the hackathon. We talked about some things and had, at least this was my impression, a good conclusion about some other things, like we want to communicate internally in the committee and with us Auxiliary members, *yay*

Links, links and links[edit]

Some links, which may or may not be interest you:

And now, of course, I'll save this page :P