149 participants from 31 countries came to Amsterdam in late May to teach each other and improve Wikimedia technology.

Developers work near sticky-notes representing topics and ideas at the Amsterdam hackathon in May 2013.

Technologists taught and attended sessions on how to write and run a bot, use the new Lua templating language, how to move from Toolserver to the new Wikimedia Labs, design, Wikidata, security, and the basics of Git and Gerrit. Check out the workshops page for slides, tutorials, and other reference material; videorecordings of sessions are due for uploading to Wikimedia Commons soon.

Wikimedia Netherlands, Wikimedia Germany, and the Wikimedia Foundation subsidized travel and accommodation for dozens of participants, enabling the highest participation in this event’s history. As one subsidized participant wrote, “One of the wonderful things about the Wikipedia world is the support given to the volunteers from the different chapters and the parent Wikimedia Foundation to promote community growth and building awesome stuff that the whole world can use….It’s such surprises that makes one love contributing to open source.” Organizers also put together a social events program that included a boat cruise of Amsterdam’s canals.

Participants are still listing what they accomplished or learned during the event, but here’s a sample:

• The Wikimaps project aims to present historical maps on Wikimedia sites, and to work together with OpenStreetMap Historic “to find a common way to model historical geodata” (more details). Maps aficionados discussed the project and made plans in Amsterdam. One volunteer, Arun Ganesh, wrote a prototype wiki atlas: an interactive SVG file that comes with automatic labelling (details).
• Moritz Schubotz, a volunteer, worked on improving search and math functionality in MediaWiki.
• The Foundation testing and quality assurance team improved test coverage and the test environment, and taught other participants how to do QA for Wikimedia.
• Pau Giner, a designer at the Foundation, wrote code to use an SVG for the collapsible section arrow in MediaWiki’s Vector skin. This will make the image less fuzzy-looking.
• 

  A WMF staffer holds a microphone to amplify a volunteer’s voice during the closing demo session at the Amsterdam hackathon.

  User:Ruud Koot wrote a Wikivoyage listing editor that will make it easier to improve the specific parts of a travel suggestion without having to load the whole page.

• Several volunteers worked on the account creation tool and process for English Wikipedia, to help the ACC team deal with prospective editors who have not been able to create an account via the web interface. The improved tool (code) streamlines the workflow, helping volunteers do their work faster.
• A group of staffers and volunteers interested in statistical data improved the User Metrics API‘s reliability and security. Another wrote a proof-of-concept MediaWiki extension enabling editors to embed Limn graphs in wiki pages via wikitext.

So far, 90 participants have submitted the post-event survey and results are largely positive, with (of course) several suggestions for improvements in the future. For instance, next year, organizers should help trainers prepare more, and help participants with common interests find and work with each other more easily.  We don’t yet know where or when next year’s developer meeting will be, but it’ll happen; subscribe to the low-traffic wikitech-announce mailing list to hear when it’s settled.

You may also wish to read the Wikipedia Signpost report on the event.

Thanks are due to staffers at the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Netherlands, and Wikimedia Germany who made the event possible, and to volunteers who ran the event, especially lead Maarten Dammers.  And thanks to all the participants who gave up their weekend to make our sites better.

Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

Susanna Mkrtchyan

Susanna Mkrtchyan is a grandmother on a mission: She’s working to give Armenian students the same educational opportunities as students who live in Europe and the United States. And she’s using Wikipedia to do it.

Myrtchyan is a professor of Technical Sciences in the field of database and system research. Two years ago, she started using the English she learned as a student to translate English Wikipedia into Armenian and Russian. On Armenian Wikipedia, she focuses on Armenian history and education.

“I want that our young people to have high education because after the collapse of Soviet Union, our education collapsed, too, a little. That’s why I want to take wiki projects into universities and schools,” says Mkrtchyan.

Mkrtchyan was busy in her field of governance of science when she realized Wikipedia could create an environment for scientists inside Armenia and abroad to collaborate and resolve problems. She attended Wikimania 2011 in Haifa and talked with Wikimedia Foundation representatives about starting a chapter in Armenia.

Soon after, Mkrtchyan began organizing activities to meet with Armenian Wikipedia administrators and editors. Not only did she help found the Wikipedia Armenia chapter, she is its first president. “Now we have a more or less active group and we all help each other to make Armenian Wikipedia better.”

From the capital city Yerevan, Mkrtchyan incorporates editing Wikipedia in her life, finding time between her professional life and taking care of her family. “When I’m not stirring the soup, I’m working on Wikipedia.” Her twin grandsons used to bring her articles about basketball to edit on Wikipedia, so she told them, “create an account and edit yourself.” And grandma was the perfect teacher to show them the ropes of editing.

“Wikipedia, editing in Wikipedia helps you to better organize your speech,” says Mkrtchyan. She also believes it teaches tolerance for other people.

At a time in life when many people start to slow down, Mkrtchyan has moved into overdrive. She hopes more people will consider offering their talents to Armenian Wikipedia.

“If grandmothers, mothers edit in Wikipedia, they feel how important the work they do is and how important it is to make a heritage for future generations,” she said.

Profile by Donna Peterson, Communications Volunteer, Wikimedia Foundation
Interview by Victor Grigas, Visual Storyteller, Wikimedia Foundation

In the recently concluded development sprint, the Wikimedia Language Engineering team fixed critical bugs for the Universal Language Selector, participated in several events around the world and also announced the release of the latest version of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle.

MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle and Updates to ULS

As the date for the first phase of deployment of Universal Language Selector (ULS) draws close, the team has been fixing critical bugs and testing the fixes. These included bugs related to the behavior of the ULS activation ‘cog’ icon. Significant design changes were also made on the input settings panel. Additionally, ULS has been hidden for users who do not use JavaScript on their browsers.

These updates are also part of the latest version of MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB). Besides ULS, miscellaneous maintenance bugs were fixed for the Translate extension editor. This further improves the stability of the Translation Editor – TUX. CLDR has been updated to version 23.1.

Amsterdam and Tel-Aviv Hackathons and Community Programs

Members of the Language Engineering team participated and also helped in organizing hackathons at Amsterdam and Tel Aviv. At the hackathon in Amsterdam, organized by Wikimedia Nederland, team members interacted with their peers. Besides attending the workshops, they also submitted and merged patches for various internationalization extensions. A session for automated browser testing with the Wikimedia QA team was particularly well-received in view of the upcoming ULS deployment.

At the hackathon organized by Wikimedia Israel, Amir Aharoni led the event and brought together more than thirty local participants to explore various aspects of contributing to MediaWiki projects. The full report of the accomplishments from the event has been documented by him.

Alolita Sharma presented a talk about Internationalization in Wikimedia projects at IMUG. The entire video of the talk and presentation slides are available online.

Google Summer of Code

The Language Engineering team also welcomed the 4 students who will be participating in Wikimedia’s Internationalization projects for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC). They will be contributing to the jQuery.ime project, Language Coverage dashboard, mobile app for Translate and right-to-left support on VisualEditor.

Coming up

Preparations for deployment of ULS and extending support to the GSoC candidates during the community bonding period are important focus areas during the next 2 weeks.

For information about the Language Engineering team and our projects, please write me at runa at wikimedia dot org or find team members on our IRC channel #mediawiki-i18n on Freenode.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

Vol: 3 • Issue: 5 • May 2013 [contribute] [archives]

Motivations on the Persian Wikipedia; is science eight times more popular on the Spanish Wikipedia than the English Wikipedia?

With contributions by: Piotr Konieczny, Aaron Halfaker, Taha Yasseri, Daniel Mietchen and Tilman Bayer.

Motivations to contribute to the Persian Wikipedia

A chart adapted for use in the Persian article on human evolution.

An article in Library Review titled “Motivating and Discouraging Factors for Wikipedians: the Case Study of Persian Wikipedia”^[1] offers a much needed comparison of data from a population of editors outside the English Wikipedia. Most findings related to reasons people start and continue contributing confirm previous studies – important reasons for contributing include the desire to share knowledge and gaining recognition, and are reinforced by friendly interactions.

The authors find that “content production and improvement of Wikipedia in local language” is a significant motivation too, something missing or seen as mostly irrelevant for contributors to the English Wikipedia. The authors also look at reasons for editors to become less active, an area that is not as well understood. Their findings confirm previous research – editors may leave because they find rules too confusing or other editors too unfriendly, or because they do not have enough time. They list some additional reasons not mentioned significantly in the existing literature, such as “issues with Persian script; sociocultural characteristics, e.g. lack of research-based teaching instruction and preference for ready-to-use information; strict rules against mass copying and copyright violation; small size of Persian Web content and a shortage of online Persian references.” The paper suffers from small sample size (interviews with 15 editors) and does not report statistics or rankings for some of the data, making it difficult, for example, to conclude or verify which motivations are more and less important. (Reviewer note: the reviewed pre-print copy did not include figures, which may contain the missing data.)

Science eight times more popular on the Spanish Wikipedia than on the English Wikipedia?

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This post is available in 4 languages:

English  • Svenska • Deutsch • 中文

English

I got an idea in May, 2012, as the Eurovision Song Contest was ending and Loreen had just been named the 2012 winner, with her song Euphoria. Because Loreen represented Sweden, the 2013 contest would be held in my country. This would create an exciting opportunity for me and Wikipedia, because my home is in Gothenburg, and I could take really good photos for the Wikimedia Commons database.

Loreen after she won in 2012.

Photo: Vugarİbadov

Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported.

Eurovision Song Contest is well documented on Wikipedia. The contest was started in 1956, and currently has Wikipedia articles in 91 languages^[1], many including information on artists and their songs, statistics, voting history, the rules and points awarded. My idea started here because there are not many photos and the quality varies; occasionally someone sitting in the audience at the show manages to take a photo with their phone, but there were not many quality images. Using the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license, anyone would be free to copy, distribute and edit my photos, as long as I am attributed and new versions of the photos have the same license.

The most common use of photos on Wikimedia Commons is in Wikipedia articles, and photos enhance the articles. My goal was to make it possible to have really good, professional photos of every artist in the Eurovision Song Contest 2013. Newspapers, magazines, websites and other media outlets that did not send a photographer to Malmö could also use my photos from the database.

I applied for photo accreditation and, at first, my application was denied because the Head of Delegation saw me as a fan and not as a serious photographer. Then some members of Wikimedia Sverige managed to explain my intentions and the purpose of my application. When I was finally approved, it meant that I had the same rights as all the other 1700 photographers and journalists at the contest.

Emmelie de Forest after winning the Eurovision Song Contest 2013.

Photo: Albin Olsson

License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported

It has been an amazing week, and a very successful project. I took thousands of photos and right now over 500 are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. They are categorized under: contestants, countries, rehearsals and/or press conferences. All of them are also under the category Photos taken by Albin Olsson during the Eurovision Song Contest 2013. There are close-ups of almost all of the artists, photos of the artists performing their songs on stage, and also videos I filmed.

The 2013 Eurovision Song contest winner was Emmelie de Forest, from Denmark, with her song “Only Teardrops.” My photograph of de Forest has already been used in 36 different languages on Wikipedia, including Japanese and Chinese.

Since non-freely licensed material is not permitted on Wikimedia Commons, I couldn’t upload the songs or videos containing the songs, but I filmed more than 32 clips where 12 of the artists present themselves. All in English, but 11 of them in at least one other language (you can find the videos in the commons category Videos from Eurovision Song Contest 2013 and I might add a few more). It feels really cool that the Wikipedia articles don’t just have a nice photo at the top of their infoboxes, but a short video too.

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This post is available in 2 languages:

На русском языке  • English

In English:

Logo of the “Association of Honorary Citizens, Mentors and Gifted Young People”

The Gallery of Honour of Southern Russia and Eastern Ukraine is a public organization that holds the Gallery of Honour competition, an important event for supporting youth talent and for strengthening connections between generations. The competition is dedicated to the people and history of Southern Russia (Southern and North Caucasian Federal Districts) and Eastern Ukraine (Lugansk oblast and Donetsk oblast). In the first two tours, the participants were expected to use sites like YouTube; the third and final tour will feature cooperation with Russian Wikipedia, the best way to accumulate and distribute the knowledge.

The first two tours attracted more than 600 people from Rostov oblast, Volgograd oblast, Astrahkan oblast, Krasnodarskiy kray, Stavropolskiy kray, Ingushetia, Dagestan, Northern Ossetia-Alania, Chechnya, Kabardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia, Adygea, Moscow and Ukraine.

The Gallery of Honour of Southern Russia and Eastern Ukraine and Wikimedia Russia (the official Wikimedia chapter here) hope that the final tour will be attended by even more people, as editing Wikipedia is open to everyone. The competition is unusual for Wikipedia; article writing competitions don’t usually yield such big prizes (250,000 rubles, or roughly $8000 US).

The competition is taking place from May to October 2013; scientists, artists and some of the best-known Russian Wikipedia article authors will be invited to enter the jury.

On June 3rd, 2013, at 14:00, Interfax (Rostov-on-Don, Budennovskiy 60Б, 11th floor) will hold a press-conference about the competition’s start. Full rules will be available at Википедия:Галерея Славы Юга России и Востока Украины soon. Webinars will be organized to make participation easier for those who haven’t edited Wikipedia before.

There will be several categories for competition: best articles about biographies, human settlements, and historical and cultural events. Authors and uploaders of the best images will be encouraged. There are also special prizes for teachers and mentors of younger Wikipedians. An odd prize, “The smartest,” will be awarded to the city that has the highest participation rate (per 1000 inhabitants).

Anastasia Lvova, Wikimedia Russia

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Last week-end, the Wikimedia Hackathon took place in Amsterdam, and we notably worked on the migration from the Wikimedia Toolserver to Tool Labs. According to the Roadmap, Tool Labs will have all the necessary features by the end of June 2013. As of then, tool maintainers will have one year to migrate their software. By the end of 2014, the Toolserver will be decommissioned.

What is working?

First of all: Tool maintainers do not have to care about virtual instances or other background stuff. You will develop on servers similar to the Toolserver, e.g. with the infrastructure for web services. The servers are running Ubuntu Precise. At the moment, there are replicas of six (out of seven) database clusters. The last one (with CentralAuth) is due in June. You can already work with all the big and many small Wikipedias, with Commons and Wikidata. You have access to all the data that is visible to registered users without special privileges in a wiki. You can create your own user databases. According to the first experiences, Tool Labs is fast.

In addition to home directories, you also have shared project storage. Tool Labs wants to make it as easy as possible to develop software together, which is why you can add others to your projects via the web interface. There is also a time travel feature! You can reset your files to the state of the last three hours, the last three days and the last two Sundays. The job system that is used in Tool Labs is OpenGridEngine. You can find an intro on the Tool Labs help page. Bugs can be reported in Wikimedia’s Bugzilla: Please use the product “Wikimedia Labs” and one of the components “Tools” or “Bots”. If you miss software in Tool Labs that could be of interest for others, too, please file a bug!

What about “Tools” versus “Bots”?

These are the names of the two projects Tool Labs consists of. The larger environment (Wikimedia Labs) is organized in projects, two of which form Tool Labs. They are an environment inside Labs that is customized for Toolserver users. The naming might be a bit misleading: The difference between “Tools” and “Bots” is not what you run in which project, but that you can run your tools in two different environments. The “Tools” project is a stable environment maintained by four admins (one of them a volunteer). There are no experiments with software versions here. In contrast to this, the “Bots” project is a more flexible environment in which you can play with changes in the environment itself, too. Here, it will be easier to get root access. (If you are interested, ask on the mailing list.)

Open tasks?

Apart from the open tasks on the roadmap, the documentation needs improvement. The pioneers among you can help others a lot by documenting experiences. Magnus Manske and Russell Blau have started to lead by example by adding a lot of documentation, and you can help as well! We are thinking about how to redirect deprecated links to migrated tools in the easiest way possible. The Tool Labs user interface also needs some love; feel free to come to us if you want to help here!

If you run into problems or have questions when migrating tools, be bold and ask! The best places are the labs-l mailing list or the IRC channel #wikimedia-labs ^connect. The admins’ nicks are Coren and petan. There is also a list of Frequently Asked Questions that you can expand. And finally: If you find that your tool needs more adaptation than you think you can manage on your own, talk to Johannes Kroll or myself at Wikimedia Deutschland for support!

Silke Meyer
Projektmanagerin für den Toolserver, Wikimedia Deutschland

Wikimedia sites are facing many technical changes, like VisualEditor, Wikidata, Flow and Echo, just to name a few. As an ordinary Wikipedian, I like it very much and I’m pretty excited, but sometimes change is scary, especially for people who are working on “small” wikis. People constantly ask “Is this feature localized for my wiki?” or “Will it work properly?” and if you’re using a right-to-left (RTL) language (like Persian, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.), an otherwise great feature can quickly become a nightmare.

Sadly, it is difficult to test these features in your language before they are enabled on Wikipedia. Even if you’re an experienced MediaWiki developer, and you can install a wiki on your own server and add these features to test them, reporting bugs is hard because a locally-hosted wiki isn’t accessible to the rest of the world.

This is why we’ve set up a public test wiki dedicated to RTL languages. Wikimedians can come and test upcoming features, and see which interface messages are translated incorrectly. They can report bugs easily, communicate with other Wikimedians who are working in RTL languages, and work with them on features. Maybe you want to be sure a feature works properly in your language, or maybe you’re just curious and you want to know what Wikipedia will look like in the future. In both cases, the RTL test wiki can help you.

You can visit the RTL test wiki at http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikitest-rtl/w/ ; we have already installed some upcoming features, but if you think something is missing, feel free to contact me or Amir Aharoni and ask us to add it. This wiki uses the Universal language selector, which means that when you open it, the language of the interface is automatically set to the one your browser requests, and you can easily change it.

We hope to see you soon on the RTL test wiki.

This post is available in 2 languages:

עברית • English

English

On Thursday, 23 May, just one day before the big Wikimedia hackathon in Amsterdam, Wikimedia Israel held its first hackathon in Tel-Aviv.

Israel has a thriving software industry, as well as a healthy Wikipedia editing community. Despite this, there are relatively few software developers in Israel who work on Wikimedia-related projects, so the primary purpose of this event was to show new people who are skilled in programming and web design how they can contribute their talents to our free knowledge projects.

Wikimedia Israel already organized a hackathon as part of the Wikimania 2011 conference, which was held in Haifa, but this was the first time that such an event was produced in Israel independently of other events.

Google Israel kindly gave us the venue – the hacking space in their Tel-Aviv Campus building, which is perfect for such events: cozy, simple, with comfortable tables, a lot of power strips and good wifi. About thirty people showed up for the event. Their skills were varied and quite surprising. There were not just PHP and JavaScript developers – these languages being the most important in MediaWiki – but also experts in DevOps, integration testing, Python scripting, data visualizations and design.

In the best hackathon style, the event focused less on talks and more on code, but I was very happy to host one guest talk by Mushon Zer-Aviv, a developer of the freely licensed Alef font, designed as a modern Hebrew and Latin typeface for the web.

So, most importantly, what did the event accomplish? Among other things: fixes for two MediaWiki bugs, both made by new developers; improved automatic tests for JavaScript components; a prototype for a script that enriches Wikipedia with data from Open Knesset, a database of information about the Israeli parliament based on open-source technology; and a new template in Lua, also made by a developer who is completely new to the language. I had the feeling that most of the participants became genuinely interested in joining the community of MediaWiki developers.

I want to use this opportunity to give my very sincere thanks to the people who helped me organize the event: Chen Davidi, Itzik Edri and Dorit Shafir-Diamant, who were instrumental in organizing the event’s logistics; Michal from Google Israel for providing the venue; and also to Yair Talmor, Chezi Reshef, Yael Meron, Elad Alfassa, Oren Held, Moshe Nachmias and Yair Podemasky, who very kindly volunteered to help with setting up the venue, handled the registration and cleaned up at the end of the day.

The event was very satisfying, and we hope to have another one soon!

Amir E. Aharoni, Wikimedia Israel

This post is available in 2 languages:

Español  • English

English

The Nearby feature in Vatican City

We are quick to use mobile applications to find places that fulfil our needs, whether it’s a place to grab a coffee that your friend recommends, where the nearest bus stop is, or where to go for a perfect first date.

But how hard have you thought about the history of your neighborhood, or the events that have shaped the place where you live? There is a wealth of information all around you as you read this blog post. There are historic sites, parks, museums, theatres, cafes and religious buildings. Thanks to the terrific work of our editor community, Wikipedia has accumulated a massive amount of location data associated with its millions of articles; until now we have not fully taken advantage of this information.

We are happy to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation mobile team has been working on a Nearby page to surface this information. Along with the goal of bringing awareness of the surrounding areas to our existing readers, we hope that this simple tool can attract new editors to these articles, whether it is to update the information on the exhibits in a local museum, or simply to add a photo of a nearby park that is in severe need of a properly licensed lead image.

Look out for the camera icon to show those articles that need your photos

As a first pass, the mobile team has focused on using the Nearby page to surfaces articles in close proximity that lack images, inviting users to add one. Upon visiting those pages, the user will be prompted to illustrate the article, which they can do quickly and easily if they’re on a mobile device that supports taking and uploading photos.

The Nearby feature, although designed with the Wikipedia mobile experience in mind, also works on the desktop version of Wikipedia. In the future, we envision this as a useful step in the editing onboarding process, helping new users learn about editing by encouraging them to improve an article on a topic nearby.

Help make Wikipedia more beautiful, vibrant and educational for all our readers! Explore your local area and find the pages near you that need a photo or updated information. Stay tuned to the Wikimedia blog for more opportunities to contribute via the mobile web, coming soon.

Jon Robson
Software Engineer, Mobile
Wikimedia Foundation

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