The 2025 edition of the Wikimedia Hackathon was the second time I was awestruck by the extent of work and fun that everyone gathered at the event experiences over three days. During my first ever Wikimedia Hackathon, at Tallinn, I was bowled over by the number of things to be done—work, ideation, food, local sightseeing and what not! Three days of frenzied work ended with the improvement of the Year In Review tool, but left me confused about how I would have coped with figuring out what to do without Gopa Vasanth to show me the ropes.
Much like last year, I came into the 2025 hackathon without a specific project in mind, although I did plan to do some work on moving a tool to Toolforge (which, unfortunately, was barely started by the third day). However, I was pleasantly surprised by the ideation and conversations that I got involved in this time around.
Conversations and ideation—it’s hack time!
Even before the hackathon started, at the welcome dinner with other scholars, I had in-depth discussions with Ranjith Siji about the specifics involved in rebuilding the WSContest tool, some nitty gritties of Wikisource, and debated ideas about gamification of contributions which I later found to be already mentioned in the WMF’s annual plan for 2025-26. Although I have never forayed into Wikidata, I finally got a peek at how things work, thanks to conversations with Jinoy Jacob and Akbar Ali. I found it interesting how they planned to implement certain scripts to make things easier for contributors to add information to Wikidata.
Barely a few hours after I had landed in Istanbul, I was already immersed in the Wikiverse!
After the official project pitches, another round of conversations followed. From learning how ML was to be incorporated into the VisualEditor experience to understanding how contributions were handled for Codex (there are now issues tagged with the good-first-issue tag!)—it was an insightful first day of the hack.
After some intense hacking sessions on the second day, I took a bit of time off to explore some parts of the city. From the captivating streets of Istiklal to bustling corridors of the Spice Bazaar and the stunning mosques in Sultanahmet, Istanbul truly is the Queen of Cities. Exploring a new city and country altogether with newly made friends is what makes these hackathons an enriching experience.
On the final day of the hack, we forsake some sleep, trying to make up for lost hacking time. Punith Nayak and I successfully put together a REST API Sandbox prototyped in Codex, as proposed by Halley Coplin during the initial project pitches. The idea was to have an exemplary page showcasing how the API sandbox can be moved away from Swagger to be built entirely with Codex components. We managed to build a working VueJS app for the purposes of the hack and deployed it on Toolforge. While creating the OpenAPI parser was tricky and porting things to Codex was interesting, we definitely learned a thing or two about deploying things on Toolforge while we were at it!
Wikimedia Hackathons—much more than code
Attending these events lets you gauge the intensity of passion, knowledge, and tireless dedication that goes into making the Wikimedia movement successful. Tallinn and Istanbul have been a lot more than just writing good code or making something work correctly in production.
The more conversations you have, the better you realize that it is not just about the developers, the editors, or even the various members of the community. It is about the undying spirit of collaboration between these different facets, as was on full display during the days of the hackathon, that keeps the ball rolling.
I believe, now, that getting involved with the event does not necessitate technical knowledge of any degree. If you are passionate about interacting with like-minded individuals in the open source and free knowledge space, jump right in—the clock for the 2026 edition of the hack is already ticking.
A week or so later, I am still going through the bits and pieces of work leftover after the hackathon. From writing this very blog post to wrapping up the deployment of my tool to sorting out my photos from the trip—this was definitely a hack to remember!
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