Yesterday’s tech talks from Wikimania are online at our temporary video file staging location (Ogg Theora format). They should appear on Commons soon. :)

Update: Some of the movies have encoding problems; reencoded versions should be reposted within a couple days. Sorry!

Hacking was cut short a bit on our first day at Wikimania yesterday due to troubles with the conference facility network :( but we did get a lot done:

• Some basic specs and programming interface for a configuration database have been hashed out — once implemented, this’ll give us infrastructure to start phasing out the more fragile parts of LocalSettings.php editing and making it much easier to manage both multi-wiki sites and one-off installs!
• Bunch of folks hashed out some details on getting our mapping servers set up and online
• Lots of general code review and poking!

Feel free to join us during the day — project page on Wikimania wiki and #wikimania-codeathon on IRC!

The fun is starting! Get your code on…

• Wikimania_Codeathon/Projects
• #wikimania-codeathon on irc.freenode.net

Wikimania starts this week!  Today we reminded everyone about this year’s Wikimania here in Buenos Aires.  Most of the staff and Board are here in the city, as well as hundreds of project volunteers and stakeholders.  The local organizing crew and Wikimedia Argentina are doing a great job.

Follow the events of the conference on twitter and identi.ca, and keep an eye on the Wikipedia Weekly podcasts.  Hopefully we’ll have time to blog about events as they unfold at Wikimania.

We also want to thank all of our sponsors this year.  Without them we couldn’t pull events like this together: Telefonica, Terra, Speedy, The Richard Lounsbery Foundation, Answers.com, Kaltura, Wikimedia Deutschland, The Government of the City of Buenos Aires, Open Society Institute, wikiHow, Wikia, and Banco Credicoop.  Thank you!

More as the event unfolds…

Jay Walsh, Communications

What happened?

A few highlights from the last week…

• The first version of Wikimedia’s official Wikipedia Mobile app for iPhone has hit the iTunes app store (free download). As with all Wikimedia software, it’s open source and we welcome patches and bug reports! (Unfortunately there’s a known problem with this release which prevents installation on first-gen iPod Touches — just use the mobile web site for now, which shares the same backend.)
• Test wikis with Flagged Revisions and ReaderFeedback configurations have been set up to shake down UI and workflow before we prepare to deploy these extensions on English Wikipedia in the coming weeks. The test sites have been populated with featured articles, and should be getting some decent front pages soon. ;)
• A push of new donation buttons to English Wikipedia to test response rates has been delayed until we’ve got more of our techs in one place again.
• Mark is completing performance testing of SSD-based Squid proxy servers.
• We encountered failures on ms2, one of our text storage servers, which has required some behind-the-scenes running about.
• Ariel and River are bringing media storage replication between our Tampa master and Amsterdam off-site copy back up to date after cleaning up most of the base configuration.
• There’s been a lot of talk on-list in the last couple weeks about testing infrastructure, with various people poking at the parser tests and the other half-done test suites. This is a happy thing and I hope to see more solid tests going — and more automated reports into CodeReview like the parser tests!

The week ahead…

Come with us if you want to code!

It’s Wikimania week in Buenos Aires, and the Wikimania Codeathon starts this Tuesday at 10am (15:00 UTC). If you can’t be there in person, join us online in #wikimania-codeathon on FreeNode.

What’s going to happen? We can’t say for sure ahead of time, but here’s a few of my favorites I hope to work on:

• Deploying updated MediaWiki code to Wikimedia sites!
• Exploring the power of jQuery and Michael Dale’s advanced media features in JS2 mode!
• Pushing LocalisationUpdate to fast-track the work of our tireless translators!
• Driving plans for the Usability Initiative’s new UI work!
• Bringing forth the power of Flagged Revisions!
• Awesome times with OpenStreetMap testing!
• Hashing out plans for a MediaWiki configuration database… down with LocalSettings.php once and for all!
• Figuring out how to start Selenium-based MediaWiki testing!
• …YOUR project?

Now put on yer codin’ legs and get typing!

Wikimania’s classic “Hacking Days” event is back, and better than ever as the Wikimania Codeathon will be open throughout the entire conference this year.

Based on the success of April’s Developer Meet-up in Berlin, we’re starting with an “unconference”-style planning session to let attendees break out into common working groups 10am Tuesday, August 25 (note — this is the day before the main conference begins). The coding room will remain open throughout the rest of the conference, so folks can pop in and out between other sessions.

We’ll be in Room F at the Centro Cultural, which should be nicely spacious. Non-developers are welcome during the conference if you just need a quiet place to sit and check on your sockpuppet accounts. ;)

There’ll be a wrap-up presentation in Room 3 at 14:00 Friday, August 28 to give folks a chance to do mini-talks on what they’ve been working on.

If you’re planning to attend, either in person or virtually via IRC, please add yourself to the list.

Brion Vibber, Lead Software Architect

Wikimania is an annual event devoted to Wikimedia projects around the globe. The conference is a community gathering, giving the editors and users an opportunity to meet each other, exchange ideas, and collaborate on the future of the Wikimedia projects. The conference is open to the public
and is a chance for educators, researchers, programmers, and free culture activists who are interested in the Foundation’s projects to learn more and share ideas about the Wikimedia projects.

This year’s conference will be held from August 26-28 in Buenos Aires, Argentina at San Martín Cultural Center.

We are accepting submissions for presentations, workshops, panels, posters, open space discussions, and artistic works related to the Wikimedia projects or free content topics in general. Without submissions from people like you, Wikimania wouldn’t be nearly as fun!

Submissions are due April 15, see the Call for Participation for more information.

For further information on Wikimania, please visit the official Wikimania 2009 site at wikimania2009.wikimedia.org.

I am very much looking forward to seeing your presentation at Wikimania! :-)

Cary Bass, VOLCO

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WikiSym 2009 has pushed back the deadline on their call for papers by a few more days — get your paper or workshop submissions in by April 2!

This year’s WikiSym will be in Orlando, Florida in October. WikiSym usually has a slightly more ‘academic’ feel than Wikimania, which tends to be more community-oriented (and of course more Wikimedia-specific), but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the ones I’ve been to (San Diego 2005 and Odense 2006).

Of course, the Wikimania 2009 deadlines are also coming up! Workshops and presentations are due April 15… just like my taxes. :P

What a week it’s been in Alexandria.  Yesterday Wikimania 2008 officially wrapped up after 84 speaking events, as well as lightening talks and poster sessions.  The organizers handled up to 650 registered participants (with an excellent presence from the local Egyptian community), as well as a broad range of local and international media.

You can find pictures from the event on WIkimedia Commons and on the Wikimania site – though expect more to appear as participants complete their travel and get the real uploading underway.

This year Wikinews also released some stories on-the-spot , and as in previous years the Wikipedia Weekly crew were live podcasting from the depths of the conference center (see the Wikimania 2008 main page for the recent list).

But that’s not all.  The webcast team from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has uploaded (and offered for live webstream) select videos from the conference, including the opening and closing ceremonies.

I’ll post more as we find it – but for now here’s your chance to get a glimpse of the event if you weren’t able to make it to Alexandria.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Yesterday we issued a slightly more detailed press release about next week’s Wikimania conference in Alexandria.  We discuss a few more details and provide some further quotes and schedule details.

And on that note, next week we hope to be blogging fairly regularly about activities taking place in this beautiful Egyptian city.  Many of the Foundation staff will be working at the conference on the ground, joining the hundreds of volunteers and enthusiasts at the New Library.

Jay Walsh
Head of Communications<