Group photo of participants at Wikimedia Conference 2012

Wikimedia Conference 2012 – the annual gathering of the various organizations of the global Wikimedia movement – took place in Berlin recently, hosted by the German Wikimedia chapter. The conference produced several important milestones in the continuing maturing process of the Wikimedia movement on its path towards a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

There were approximately 120 participants, including representatives for Wikimedia chapters around the world, the Board of Trustees, various employees of the Wikimedia Foundation, and several working groups (such as organizers of the annual photo contest “Wiki Loves Monuments”). Check out the “state of the chapters” presentations on Commons, Meta-Wiki (I, II, III) and YouTube, where each chapter gave a summary of its activities during the past year.

In an important step, 25 chapters have signed the Berlin Agreement declaring their intention to join the “Wikimedia Chapters Association” (WCA), formally initiating the founding of this new body (with seven other chapters expressing their support). The WCA will be an umbrella organization for chapters that articulates their common interests, facilitates knowledge exchange and chapters’ organizational development, and promotes standards of accountability and participation among its members. Work is still in progress for selecting a Secretary-General for the new body and choosing its place of registration, preparing for the association’s first meeting at July’s Wikimania conference in Washington D.C. But hopes are high that the WCA will make a huge contribution to help chapters develop, and lift the relationship between WMF and chapters to a new level. The Foundation congratulates the chapters and looks forward to working with the new organization.

Also in Berlin, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees passed several resolutions on fundraising, funds dissemination, and models of affiliation with the Wikimedia movement (“movement roles”), recognizing the increasing diversity of groups contributing to the movement.

Tilman Bayer, Movement Communications

after the slush, the flush

When new code does not find its way into production for quite some time, it tends to pile up. It is like with snow and when the time comes when it starts to thaw, it starts with a trickle, the trickles become a stream and all the streams rush down the mountain.

For the WMF Localisation team we worked on our documentation, our help system and our tests. We went to conferences in Belgium and India. And we worked on many small iterative improvements. We rolled out webfonts to more wikis. Input methods were improved and deployed as per requests. We have had our translation memory working on translatewiki.net for ages and now it is configured for use on the WMF wikis who use the Translate extension. Actually, we did experiment first with a new algorithm and we did configure one of the labs systems as a host for the memory of all the fine work we did and do.

Over time a lot of work went into things like plural rules. As the number of languages increase and as we support not only PHP but now also JavaScript, we are optimising our code and we are checking it again. We frequently find that a re-factoring is in order. It makes the code more elegant and easier to maintain. With added documentation and tests we ensure that we know it will work well.

Another fine project waiting to get to the stage where it will flow into our codebase is an updated Easy Timeline. The functionality has always been broken when used in many of  the “other” languages, languages written in a different direction, a different script.  The updated Easy Timeline has been given a revamp; it uses SVG to create the image and you can test it at translatewiki sandbox. Amir welcomes bug reports and LOVES to hear your comments

As you know, we use mingle for our project management (user guest, password guest). In it we have stories that explain the functionality that we are going to develop. Story 532 is one such:

As a potential translator, I want to be able to tell translation administrators in a structured way that I am interested in translating to one or more languages and at the same time provide them with some data about me and preferences on how and how often I would like to be contacted, so that translation administrators can more effectively and efficiently target translators.

Together with the acceptance criteria a narrative like this enables the developer to develop and the finished product to be accepted by our product manager. A story comes with tasks and once you have read the stories and the tasks you have a clue of what goes into getting you new functionality.

The conferences were great, we learn a lot from meeting so many wonderful people. Many tests are deployed and they run regularly. The documentation, including user documentation is written and we love you to translate many of them in your language. We feel really pumped up to get cracking and provide you with more functionality in the next sprint.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

At the same time as the #WCI11 or the Wikiconference India, there will be a genuine MediaWiki hackathon. The focus of this event will be to crush the technical obstacles that prevent Wikipedia and its sister projects to thrive in India.

This hackathon will be the first held in Asia. Many seasoned developers will be coming to Mumbai to learn first hand what can be done and see what can be done there and then.

To make it a success, there is a Wiki page with our current ideas for the hackathon. The premisses will have rooms for break-out sessions, there will be plenty space, power, internet connectivity, coffee, tea and munchies.

Most important will be that we will be there to learn from you and to show you what we are working on. The Localisation team will be there, the off-line people will be there and the mobile team will be there. We need to meet the many people working on Open Source in India because we want to make sure that whatever we will do fits in with what is already there.

We hope to see you in Mumbai.

Thanks,

Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

On May 24th and 25th, the Wikimedia Foundation hosted a CiviCRM coding sprint in our San Francisco office. CiviCRM is the premier open source constituent relationship manager; WMF uses it to store donor and contribution information. Our CiviCRM database contains more than a million contact records and a million contribution records.

CiviCRM, The Free and Open Source Solution for the Civic Sector

The sprint was a terrific success. The eight participants squashed many CiviCRM bugs — and the Foundation directly benefited, as they improved CiviCRM contact/contribution search performance by 15 to 25 times! Formerly, it could take more than two minutes for someone to search among the contribution records. The developers’ tweaks, hacks and patches whittled that down to about 4-6 seconds per search. This will save innumerable hours for WMF administrators and fundraisers.

The Foundation’s Arthur Richards, a fundraising engineer, enthused: “Any software tool, open source or not, comes with headaches; the beauty of tools like CiviCRM is that we can solve our own problems. Thanks to having some great hackers in one place, we managed to mitigate one of our biggest CiviCRM pain points in a matter of hours.”

You can read more details about the sprint on Donald Lobo’s CiviCRM blog.

Richards was especially excited to “highlight how awesome it is working with other open source projects and using other open source tools. We get to scratch each other’s backs, which helps support a sustainable, healthy ecosystem of software/communities. Also, using open source tools like CiviCRM – while not without their (often big) pain points – is great because we can fix the software ourselves. While the tools are free to use, with a little bit of elbow grease and some resources, they can be molded and fixed to meet our needs much easier (and likely much cheaper) than relying on proprietary tools. Plus, the CiviCRM community has been instrumental in helping us troubleshoot, solve problems and add new features to meet our usage requirements.”

The CiviCRM community is planning to run another code sprint in the fall in Northern California; please contact them if you’d like to participate or even host it. In the meantime, Wikimedia and thousands of other nonprofits will enjoy the CiviCRM improvements developed in May.

-Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

While GLAMCamp NYC finished on Sunday (Signpost coverage), the work initiated there will continue throughout the GLAM community.  Representatives from cultural institutions and Wikimedia chapters, as well as individuals, are working on several projects.  The projects concerning web badges for free culture allies, a metadata standard for use in the mass uploader/data ingestion tool, and the web analytics proposal are in particular seeking contributors and project managers; please comment at the coordination page to signal your interest.

Also available: the collaborative notes from Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and specifically for discussion of the Ambassadors program, the Point Of Entry project, the data ingestion tool, and the metrics/analytics proposal.

Thanks to the organizers and participants for a productive and illuminating weekend.

-Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

Today, several Wikimedians and representatives from galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM institutions) met in New York City to kick off GLAMCampNYC.  New York City’s public Science, Industry, and Business Library is hosting the event.

Liam Wyatt, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Cultural Partnerships Fellow (aka GLAM fellow), introduced two keynoters: Meg Bellinger, discussing open access at Yale, and Maarten Zeinstra, presenting the Europeana public domain calculator.  The conference continues through Sunday.  Participants are discussing and building the GLAM outreach wiki, writing documentation, sharing best practices, and building tools.

Developers at GLAMCamp are developing a data-munging tool, based on pywikipediabot, to aid in mass uploads (more details).  According to Wyatt, the most common requests from GLAM institutions are (1) mass upload of audiovisual media and (2) metrics, “easily exportable statistics based on analytics on a GLAM’s relationship with Wikimedia.”  The data-munging or data ingestion tool will aid in the import of metadata from large sets of files, thus speeding the difficult part of mass uploads.  Attendees will be hacking on it in sprints this weekend, starting 3pm-4:30pm UTC time tomorrow, Saturday the 21st. Join them in person (11am local time), or in #glamwiki on Freenode.

See notes from today’s general talks and discussion and from the discussion of the GLAM Ambassadors program, or follow #glamwiki and #glamcamp on Twitter and Identi.ca.

-Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

This is a reminder to anyone who might have been considering coming to the Hack-A-Ton in DC. If you haven’t been following page on MediaWiki.org, we’ve recently updated it with additional information, including the venue.

This year, we will be meeting at the Embassy Suites in Tyson’s Corner, just outside of the city itself. By the end of this week we will have a breakdown of what to expect and when.

We’ve already got a fair number of people coming so far, and I’d love to see more there. So if you’ve been thinking about coming but haven’t said anything or know of someone who would want to come, please get in touch with either myself or Danese for more information.

Greetings MediaWiki hackers!

I am pleased to announce the upcoming MediaWiki Hack-A-Ton in Washington, DC.

As you are all aware, every year in April our good friends at Wikimedia Deutschland host the annual “MediaWiki Developers Meetup” in Berlin. At that event, the program is focused on demonstrations, workshops and small group discussions. To complement this, we’re planning the DC meetup to be focused solely on hacking, bugfixing and getting down and dirty with the
code.

We’re scheduling this for October 22nd-24th in Washington, DC. Some of the details haven’t been ironed out yet, but will be announced over the coming days as it is. So clear your calendars, and keep your eyes on MediaWiki.org and the mailing lists for more information.

Some travel assistance may be available for those coming a long way. I’ve also been told there will be swag of some sort for attendees :)

Chad Horohoe
Contractor, Wikimedia Foundation

And one more thing: I forgot to mention Bugzilla. To help track the event, we’ve added a new keyword, “bugsmash.” Prior to the Hack-A-Ton, we’d like people to start tagging bugs that should be tackled during the event. It will help the participants get started finding bugs, as well as bump the priority on a bug you’ve been wanting to see fixed.

Many folks do not know, but we actually try to upload and make available all our presentations.  Presently, you can see a list of them on our Wikitech wiki.  You can follow this link to see them all.

Keep checking back, because the conference isn’t finished!!

We have been completely overrun by registrations for the developer meet-up in Berlin. That’s exhilarating, but forces on me the sad duty to tell you: we are out of room, we are closing registration early.

So: if you have not yet send a registration mail, you will not be able to attend! Sorry. We may even have to reject some registrations we have already received.

There’s some good news too, though: anyone interested my join us at the c-base for the party on saturday April 4., starting 8pm. The developers will be there and people from the chapter and board meeting will also come. This will be a good opportunity for getting to know Wikimedians from all over the world.