Wikimedia Hackathon
Amsterdam 2013

Set up your development environment for MediaWiki

Presenters: Sumana Harihareswara, Mark Holmquist

We explained how to get set up so each participant can work on code and suggest her or his improvements to the MediaWiki maintainers -- including using Git, Gerrit and coverage for Mac, Linux, and Windows. All instructions provided were in Gerrit/Getting started (that page and its links are the slides).

NOTE: This workshop previously included a tutorial on getting a Vagrant instance set up. Our feeble conference wifi couldn't handle 25 simultaneous attempts to download a 300 megabyte file, and most of the workarounds we tried were insufficient, so we've decided to be more thorough about getting Git set up. If you want to set up Vagrant and are having issues following the instructions on mediawiki.org, you should contact User:MarkTraceur.

Thanks to Max Semenik, Jens Ohlig, Sam Reed, and Brad Jorsch for assisting participants.

• Question: How can you set up the Eclipse plugin for review? Answer.

Wikidata

Presenter: TBD

Workshop description to be determined.

Interface design solutions for 5 problems in one hour

Presenters: Pau Giner, Trevor Parscal, Arun Ganesh

In this session, designers and user interaction experts helped each participant solve 5 interface design problems for their code in one hour. The session started with a 10 minute introduction of the methodology (view slides), and then, at a rapid pace, each person contributed to solving five interaction and design problems in 10 minutes each.

Lua in MediaWiki with Scribunto

Slides of the Lua presentation

Presenter: Brad Jorsch

This session featured a short introduction (with hands-on code examples) to MediaWiki's Scribunto extension—why we created it and how it works—followed by discussion on actually converting those pesky expensive templates to use Lua, and make your wiki faster.

• Slides: File:Wikimedia Hackathon 2013 - Scribunto presentation slides.pdf
• Scribunto Lua reference manual: mw:Extension:Scribunto/Lua reference manual
• Standard Lua 5.1 reference manual: http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html
• Programming in Lua: (Covers Lua 5.0, but much is still relevant) http://www.lua.org/pil/
• Lua users wiki: (sadly, not running MediaWiki) http://lua-users.org/wiki/

How to get your code deployed on Wikimedia

Slides from the Security portion of the talk

Presenters: Chris Steipp, Tim Starling

• Chris Steipp shows you how to prevent falling into often-seen security holes and improve your skill level (slides).
• Tim Starling explains why caring about performance of your code is important if 23 billion pages per month have to be served by a website, and where to look to improve the performance of your code (slides).

Using Wikimedia Labs, migrating from Toolserver

Slides from Tool Labs presentation

Presenters: Ryan Lane and Marc-Andre Pelletier

• Wikimedia Labs - In this part of the session, we guided participants through setting up a first Labs project.
• Labs and Toolserver - In this part of the session, we informed participants about the latest on migrating Toolserver projects to Labs, and on what changes one might need to make in a bot or web tool to take advantage of the Tool Labs environment.

Wikibots (pywikipedia and others)

Slides of the presentation

Presenters: Merlijn van Deen, Maarten Dammers

The Python Wikipediabot Framework is a collection of tools that automate work on MediaWiki sites. How can you use pywikipedia to write a simple bot? And how can you help improve pywikipedia and its documentation to help make bots better?

The goal of this workshop was to get you started, by installing and configuring pywikibot and its prerequisites. After explaining the basic principles, the presenters showed three example bots: two Wikidata bots and one GLAM bot. After this, the presenters answered questions on running and writing bots.

• Links used in the presentation