Developer Meet-Up (by Raymond, CC-BY-SA)

Wikimedia Germany invites all MediaWiki developers, Toolserver users, Gadget hackers, and other people interested in the technical side of Wikimedia projects to come to Berlin for a Developer Meet-Up on April 14.-16. Last year’s meet-up in Berlin was a great success, and we hope to make it even better this time! This year we want to focus on structured (meta) data, search, and community building. The future of the Toolserver will also be a subject.

The dates are set, but it’s not clear yet if we start full throttle on Wednesday the 14th or if we have just an arrival event on that date and a full day on Friday the 16th instead – this depends on venue arrangements that are not sorted out yet. Note that registration in advance will be required – a website will be set up for this soon, we will announce it on blogs and mailing lists.

On that Friday, April 16., the Wikimedia Chapters and Board start their convention in Berlin. This will be a great opportunity to meet, to discuss interesting topics, to network and to exchange ideas and thoughts! Wikimedia Germany will host the event, so we will organize the venue, the hotel(s), some fun things to do in Berlin, food & drinks and lots of other things – and there might even be a party at the c-base again…

See you in Berlin!

Daniel Kinzler, Wikidata Software Achitect

Update: Registration is now open!

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

During the Wikimedia Conference on April 3. to 5., MediaWiki developers and other technologically inclined people met at the c-base in Berlin. The idea was to meet people and get new (and old) projects moving. And I think it worked!

The biggest topic was probably the Integration of OpenStreetMap into Wikipedia (notes). This project should soon provide us with automatic maps for places, rivers, countries, etc. It will also provide interactive maps which can be panned and zoomed, similar to Google Maps. Highlighting places and objects and integrating sattelite images is being worked on. Wikimedia Germany is supporting the project by providing servers.

Another prominent topic was the Usability Initiative (notes) which has the goal of improving the user interface. Recently, the interaction of new users with the Wikipedia website has been studies in order to identify the things people have most problems with. The results should be available soon and will be used right away to improve the site. Meanwhile, Wikia is working on a WYSIWYG-Editor which greatly simplifies not only editing text but also makes the creation of tables and infoboxes much easier. Better methods for uploading and embedding images and other media are also being researched.

We talked about a lot of other things too, liked a system for systematically testing extensions, improving the handling of reports in Bugzilla, and the WikiTrust system, which can identify and highlight dubious changes in article text. The improved search was also discussed – some of the improvements can already be seen across Wikimedia sites, like the type-ahead suggestions when typing in the search box; others, like result from sister projects, are still limited to the English language Wikipedia, but should be available to all soon.

In the course of the event, I also presented WikiWord (Notes), which is the basis for the impending multi-lingual image search for Commons. The idea is to list the articles a word could refer to in a given language, find the corresponding pages or categories on commons, and present images from them. A prototype is available on the toolserver, but it has no images yet.

I found the meet-up very exciting and I hope that all participants has at least as much fun as I did. I would like to thank again all the people who made this event possible: Sebastian and Guillom, who organized the Wikimedia Conference as a whole, Henriette, Thomas and the rest of the Wikimedia Germany team, who managed all the things big and small that make such an event work, from accomodation to city maps. I want to thank all the volunteers who contributed their time, and especially the kitchen crew, who provided us with such great meals. My special thanks go to  Lucas who helped me moderate the event and acted as my voice while I could hardly speak. Thanks also to the local folks of the c-base for their support and hospitality. And finally, I want to thank all the participants, who filled the event with life!

In conclusion I want to mention a few lessons learned: we need to have registrations much earlier, and have to make it clear that registrations are not definite until confirmed. We need to know how many people are coming before we decide on a venue, next time. The fact that we had to close registration early and even had to tell some people to stay home was really really sad. It really shouldn’t happen again.

Another point is that a schedule of prepared presentations might have helped giving an overview of topics and people. On the other hand, the flexible OpenSpace approach worked nicely to bundle topics and get people to sit down and talk. Perhaps next time we will do it like this: have a schedule of presentations ready for the first day, and leave the second day for more spontaneous discussions and demos. That way, we keep the creative chaos alive.

Indeed, next time… I’m sure that there will be a next time, hopefully next year already. Until then, we have Wikimania!

Pictures: Raymond

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.