More Than Just Hacking: Learning and Building with WikiTechMa

I started my Wikimedia journey as an editor on Arabic Wikipedia and later moved into organizing Activities and events with Wikimedia Morocco User Group. I have a technical background, but for a long time, I wasn’t sure where it fit in or how to apply it. Our community in Morocco had clear technical needs—maintaining templates, supporting our underrepresented languages like Moroccan Arabic and Tamazight, And also Standard Arabic, and adding structured data—but we lacked a central team.

That all changed when I found the WikiTechMa – Wikimedia Morocco Technical Initiative, a new initiative to build a technical team in Morocco. I joined immediately, finally feeling I had found a “tech-home” where my skills could support our community’s goals. Our annual Mini-Hackathons have become the heart of this initiative, and my journey through them has been one of learning, building, and collaborating.

2024: Conversations, Ideation, and a Spark

Our first Mini-Hackathon in Tangier in 2024 was our first real chance to gather as a team. I found the most valuable part wasn’t just the hacking, but the conversations.

Being in the same room as the rest of the WikiTechMa team was an accelerator. I was surrounded by the impressive work of my peers. Problems that might have taken me days to solve alone were discussed and often solved in minutes.

I spent my “hacking” time working on SuggestBot, a tool to recommend articles to Arabic Wikipedia editors, updating its code and updating its core logic to support ORES v3, adding new features, and migrating it to the latest pywikibot version. I also stepped up to give my first technical presentation on the Lua language.

But the key moment for me was as an attendee. I sat in on a presentation by my colleague Mounir about a new, abstract project called Wikifunctions. It was a new and complex project, but seeing a teammate present it made it feel accessible and sparked my interest. I also learned about Translatewiki, and so many other tools I’d only ever heard of. I left Tangier not just with an updated bot, but with a new curiosity and a drive to learn more.

2025: Collaboration in Action

That spark from 2024 carried me through the year, and I began contributing to Wikifunctions. When our second Mini-Hackathon arrived in Fes in 2025, I came in with more confidence, ready to contribute back to the community that had taught me.

It was a rewarding, full-circle moment to be the one at the front of the room giving the presentation on Wikifunctions myself, sharing what I had learned with our new members. I also got to share my practical knowledge in a workshop on OpenRefine.

This spirit of collaboration fueled my own projects for the weekend.

My main goal was to help fulfill WikiTechMa’s mission of creating structured, local content. Using the OpenRefine and Python skills I’d been honing, I was able to clean and upload data for all public middle schools in Morocco to Wikidata.

And thanks to the team’s support, I was able to move SuggestBot from a personal script to its final stages of deployment, migrating it to LiftWing and building its Toolforge page.

More Than Just Hacking

Attending these events shows you the passion and dedication that goes into the movement. I’ve learned that these hackathons are about much more than just code.

It’s not just about developers or editors; it’s about the spirit of collaboration between us. WikiTechMa provides the space for that. It’s a place where you can learn about a new tool, get help with a bug, and then share what you learned with someone else. I’m proud to be part of a team that is building not just tools, but a sustainable technical community in Morocco.