From Intimidated to Empowered: My Wikimania Hackathon Experience

Since I’m not a programmer, I used to feel intimidated by Wikimedia hackathons. However, my experience at Wikimania 2025 in Nairobi completely changed my perspective. I volunteered as a room manager during Wikimania 2025 Hackathon Pre-Conference, where my responsibilities included ensuring the session ran smoothly and taking notes on Etherpad.

I found the session not only engaging but surprisingly accessible. The participants’ extensive knowledge of engineering and programming led to 18 pitches on various projects they were working on. As I took notes, I realized that many of these projects aimed to address important issues, such as a tool to unwatch multiple pages at once, a tool to monitor and annotate edit counts on wikis, and a project called Wikinews Pulse, which seeks to reimagine WikiNews as a data-enabled multilingual service. I found these projects, many of which I hadn’t heard about before, fascinating.

The hackathon also proved to be a place where issues could be resolved instantly, something that might otherwise take a long time to figure out on your own. For example, I was struggling to translate two commands on the Uzbek Wikipedia interface that were still in English. I approached a participant named Rae, who kindly not only showed me how to find the two untranslated phrases on Translatewiki but also taught me how to search for such untranslated text in the future. Armed with this new knowledge, I was able to immediately translate several more untranslated messages into Uzbek.

I was also struggling to find the source of a command on the main page of the Uzbek Wiktionary that appeared in English in red and was not performing any useful function. I approached a participant named Jon, who quickly helped me identify the gadget causing the issue. This allowed me to contact the user who had created the gadget and ask them to look into the matter. These two examples highlight the value of in-person events, a point I emphasized in a Diff post I wrote about Wikimedia conferences.

Not only did I learn from other users during the hackathon, but I was also able to share my knowledge with others. During the hackathon preconference, there was a session on language tools, including Translatewiki. Since I have been contibuting to the project since 2012, I am quite familiar with it. I was assigned to help other users seated at my table to get started on contributing to Translatewiki. I helped two users register and make their first edits on the project, and helped another user who had previously registered to rediscover the project. All three of them got quite excited about the project, which makes translating from one language into another fun like a game (rather like Duolingo, if you will).

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the hackathon experience. It was not only an opportunity to make new connections, but also a chance to develop new skills and share my knowledge with others. As Otto Nyongole, a member of the tech support and online participation team, put it, the hackathon provided a great space for “collaboration, problem-solving, and creativity.” I look forward to attending more hackathons in the future, where I hope to deepen my understanding of technical issues and learn how to effectively collaborate with other Wikimedians on platforms like Phabricator.