Berlin hackathon continues with group coding, discussions and bug squashing

Translate This Post

With tired eyes, and fueled by ridiculously large amounts of coffee, Wikimedia developers and engineers are now starting their third and last day of collaborative coding at the Berlin “hackathon”.
The event, organized by Wikimedia Deutschland, has been going on since Friday. About a hundred participants are enjoying our third day at coworking / hackspace Betahaus.
Yesterday, more coding happened, and even more bugs were smashed: about 65 since we started on Friday. There remains plenty to work on during this hackathon, though, if you’d like to help.
Saturday afternoon was also devoted to the discussions about the possible evolutions of the MediaWiki parser (see notes), a step towards a visual editor for Wikipedia and other MediaWiki-powered sites. (“Visual editor” seems to have reached consensus as a more social class-neutral replacement for “rich text editor”.)
Yesterday, the hackathon also hosted a usability testing session on the Kiwix offline app, led by Ryan Kaldari. The ops team is continuing its ongoing work on HTTPS & IPv6, and Victor Vasiliev partially implemented a long-awaited feature for Wikimedia wikis: a global watchlist.
The day ended with a party (with free beer and food) organized by our friends from Wikia.
You can take a look at all the live notes taken yesterday. People are also taking photos, and more will follow.
Some talks that were originally scheduled for Saturday are happening today, including Brandon Harris’ short presentation on “identity”, Mark Bergsma’s on IPv6, and the discussions on performance and HipHop, with Domas Mituzas and Tim Starling.
You can participate remotely in real time by watching the live video stream (all talks are recorded), and participating in our live note-taking in Etherpad.
You can also join us on IRC in #mwhack11 or #mediawiki on Freenode, and follow our activity using the #mwhack11 hashtag on Twitter and Identi.ca.
This year’s motto is “talk less, code more”. Happy coding!

Guillaume Paumier

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

Can you help us translate this article?

In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out?

7 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Certainly, work at the hackathon was tiresome – but is a photo of the Holocaust Memorial really the best way to depict the mood?

Tim, don’t read too much in the picture. I just wanted to illustrate the post with a nice picture of Berlin, just like I did in the other post.

I don’t and neither assume any malice on your part, but many people would object to the use of the memorial for “a nice picture”, as they do to children using it as a playground.

Yeah, Guillaume, that picture is not a very good idea, especially with this caption. Sorry.

I never thought it could be controversial. I’ve removed it.

Thanks!

[…] and infrastructure; see the dedicated blog posts for more information (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday). A special effort was made on documentation and remote attendance: all the talks were […]