Hackathon

WikiCrowd for 2025

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I wrote the first version of WikiCrowd back in 2022 and haven’t really iterated on it much since, beyond adding the odd new set of image categories, and removing features that I decided were not optimum.

At the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon however, WikiCrowd came up as both an entertaining little game to show people during beers, and also a project similar (ish) to something Daanvr was working on (I think it was Suggestion-Engine-Commons-prototype ?)

Upgrades

During the hackathon, and in the weeks following, WikiCrowd went through quite a number of changes

  • The YAML config files for the pre-calculated depicts statements are now on Commons for all to edit
  • Generation of the questions has been spruced up to stop it breaking as it gets deeper into category trees
  • Generation can now be triggered in the UI, as can deleting pending questions
  • The old one by one image mode was removed, and instead replaced by a grid mode
  • More categories and depict options were added
  • A custom grid view was added, allowing users to specify their own category and or Wikidata item
  • Ability to zoom in on an image being displayed
  • Addition of “levels” of questions
  • Display of Wikidata labels and descriptions in the UI (Making use of the new REST API)

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2023 Year Review

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What a year, I spent most of my time on a sail boat, cruising around the Caribbean etc, and working part-time for Wikimedia on Wikibase.

WBStack became Wikibase.Cloud and the team now working behind it has continued to iterate on the platform, which finally made its way out of its early alpha state. That also came with a snazzy new landing page, and set of logos for Wikibase etc.

Infact, in the last few weeks I finally saw all of the old wbstack Github issues finally migrate onto Phabricator for the team to more easily view and work with.

I look forward to creating an overview of the things that have changed with Wikibase.Cloud year on year at some point, as an overview of the progression of the platform that I still believe is very important to the continued growth of Wikibase.

In the less digital world, I turned our many boaty blog posts and pictures into a book! No you can’t buy one (maybe if we made a 2nd edition. But can we consider ourselves published authors now? It has an ISBN on the back, after all?

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Verifying Wikimedia user page links on Mastodon

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While reviewing the ongoings of the 2023 Wikimedia hackathon, I learned about the RealMe MediaWiki extension, which is already deployed to Wikimedia sites and allows verification of URLs that appear on user pages within other software or platforms, such as Mastodon.

Link verification for dummies

Imagine you want to show that your online profiles, like on Mastodon, truly belong to you. One way to do this is by using a special code called “rel=me”. It’s like saying, “Hey, this link over here is connected to me.” However, there’s a catch: both the link and the page it points to need to say they’re connected.

On platforms like Mastodon, you can add links to your other profiles. The platform then checks if those profiles also point back to your original page using the same “rel=me” code. If they do, your link gets a stamp of approval, showing it’s really yours.

The RealMe extension allows you to configure a set of links on your user page that include this “rel=me” special code that other systems, such as Mastodon, can check.

Configuring it

This one took me a few minutes to get working after reading the instructions, but on meta.wikimedia.org I added a link to my Mastodon profile, enabled the setting on meta, headed over to my Mastodon profile to add the link, and tada, it is verified!

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mediawiki-docker-dev, a history

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MediaWiki-Docker-Dev (or MWDD) is a development environment for MediaWiki, based on Docker and docker-compose. It was created back in 2017 at the Wikimedia Hackathon in Vienna where it had a slightly difference feature set and focus. (Original Slides).

Since inception the git repo now has 180 commits from 20 authors over the course of 4 years, of which 7 have been WMF employees and 11 have been WMDE employees, though the project has had no “official” support from either organization. Counting forks we have 12 WMF employees and 16 WMDE employees.

Due to the nature of the project (being setup from a git clone), it is quite hard to figure out how many users it has. We can infer that in the last year, thanks to a custom image that has been required, it has been set up roughly 1200 times, by checking the pull stats of silvanwmde/nginx-proxy.

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Wikimedia Commons Android App Pre-Hackathon

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The Wikimedia Commons Android App allows users to upload photos to Commons directly from their phone. The website for the app details some of the features and the code can be found on GitHub. A hackathon was organized in Prague to work on the app in the run up to the yearly Wikimedia Hackathon which … Read more

Wikidata Map May 2016 (Belarus & Uganda)

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I originally posted about the Wikidata maps back in early 2015 and have followed up with a few posts since looking at interesting developments. This is another one of those posts covering the changes since the last post, so late 2015, to now, May 2016.

The new maps look very similar to the naked eye and the new ‘big’ map can be seen below.

So while at the 2016 Wikimedia Hackathon in Jerusalem I teamed up with @valhallasw to generate some diffs of these maps, in a slightly more programatic way to my posts following up the 2015 Wikimania!

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Wikimedia Hackathon 2015 (Lyon)

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By Jean-Philippe Kmiec & Sylvain Boissel (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
This years Wikimedia Hackathon was located in Lyon, France at Valpré-Lyon between the 23rd and 25th of May.

The hotel (Valpre-Lyon) was absolutely beautiful with large grass areas, great architecture and a place for you weather you wanted to have a large or small discussion, sit quietly or sit outside. As well as Pétanque, table tennis was also available as well as plenty of people to meet!

Valpré Castel
Some of the hackathon grounds. By Alex Cella (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
I planned on primarily hacking on my MassAction extension along with one of two others but as at any hackathon I got massively distracted talking to people and working on other projects.

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Wikimania

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Wikimania 2014 was a 2000+ person conference, festival, meetup, workshop, hackathon, and celebration, spread over five days in August 2014, preceded and followed by fringe events. Wikimania is the official annual event of the Wikimedia movement, where one can discover all kinds of projects that people are making with wikis and open content, as well … Read more