Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-06-04/Technology report

Technology report

Report from the Berlin Hackathon

Developers descend on Berlin

Over 100 Wikimedians from more than 30 countries made the trip to Berlin this week to attend the 2012 Berlin Hackathon. A joint enterprise of the German chapter Wikimedia Deutschland and the Wikimedia Foundation, the event was held over three days from June 1 to 3 for those interested in all things MediaWiki.

Though most of the conference hours were set aside for working on specific coding projects ("hacking"), there were a number of presentations during the three days on topics such as Wikidata; scripting in the new prototype template programming language Lua; and the ResourceLoader 2.0 project, which will see per-wiki gadgets standardised and in many cases centralised. There were talks on optimising SQL queries and writing code with security in mind, a nod to recent concerns that security review has become bottlenecked. An additional general session targeted the many users who are unfamiliar with the new Git-Gerrit review system.

Attendance figures were boosted by a strong promotional effort for the event, backed by WMF scholarships. Seasoned hackers, including many of the "big names" of WMF engineering, worked alongside coders for whom the hackathon was their first Wikimedia tech event. The mood at the end of the three days was buoyant, with many developers seemingly more optimistic about future development potential than they were before the event. It is hoped that the event will encourage greater levels of volunteer development; it may also serve to ease previously-aired concerns among volunteer developers that their projects were not being as well resourced by the WMF as those of their staff developer counterparts.

In brief

Signpost poll

Developer divide

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You can now give your opinion now on next week's poll: Have you been to a Wikimedia Tech event? Are you interested in going to one?

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

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AnomieBOT's 64th BRFA, creating monthly and daily cleanup and maintenence categories;
At the time of writing, 20 BRFAs are active. As usual, community input is encouraged.

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4 June 2012 (all comments)

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Howdy. Just a thought, but you might want to consider including the number of people that submitted survey responses to your results image in the future.--Rockfang (talk) 10:55, 5 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- My current feeling is the survey size is clutter for most people; however, if you are interested, do click through to get the exact figures and hence a sense of the possible error. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 14:17, 5 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  - It's on the image description, which is not obvious. Never thought of looking before and I'm surprised by how small the sample sizes can be: 28 'users' and 12 developers for this one. —innotata 19:43, 5 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    - Yes, well, I'd like to improve the sample size too. But I'm not sure publishing the figures on the article is the best way to do that. Making polls fortnightly might, though - it's something I'm considering. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 12:48, 15 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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