Notes : Mediawiki Hackathon 2017 – Day 3

Today is the the last day of the mediawiki hackthon.

An email from Pablo woke me up. He said that he added a docker container with all the software I asked for like python2.7, wikitools, poster etc. Was waiting for this setup, to build a connector for Lingua-Libre, a web based audio recording tool and to commons, wiktionary.

Rushed to him, to set them all. He is a super cool guy with so much of patience. He answered me for all my small questions. Wow. Now, its my game to write a connector. Python is an awesome language, which has libraries for most of the stuff we need. wikitools is a simple python library to interact with any mediawiki server. We can automate all the stuff that we do manually with mediawiki.

Learned the difference between wav,ogg and oga formats. Commons supports only oga, ogv files. Not plain old ogg files.

Connector is ready. Now, the audio files are uploaded to commons and relevant wiktionary page is updated to show the audio file. Pushed all my changes to Pablo’s repo.

Here is the sourcecode – https://github.com/wiese/Lingua-Libre/tree/python-backend

Its time for the showcase time. We got 46 presentations. Each one got 3 min to demonstrate what they did on the hackathon. Myself and Hugo were preparing for the demo.

Here is the big list of all the hacks showcased with the links for the sourcecode. There were many demos, which made the crowd to shout “Wow. Cooool. Awesome”. etc.

Its our showtime. Hugo introduced our team and the project. I connected the laptop to the projector. Errrr. It is not showing my laptop. Switched the cables from HDMI to VGA and reverted. No luck. “Press it again, strongly” someone suggested. Now, it showed my screen. I started to speak. “Hello everyone. This is the demo on Connector for Lingua-Libre and wikipedia.”

“Time UP…..”. The timekeeper announced. And we had to stop there. The shortest demo I did is this. 🙂

Fine. There were so many wonderful projects created by awesome people, here.

Listing here a few, which I like.

Telegram bot to translate strings from http://translatewiki.net
Games on wikipedia commons
Improvements on Android app for commons to show nearby places which need photos.
Sentiment Analysis of Talk Pages as a Service
An on-wiki map editor to build rich interactive maps for Kartographer
Real-time collaborative editing in VisualEditor like etherpad, inside wiki
Wikireaper – Reporting notable deaths
Visual diffs of edits just made in the visual editor
Massmail – Tool for sending multiple wikimails at once

The telegram bot idea, gave me lot of new ideas. We can create a telegram bot to translate the strings for OpenStreetMaps in Tamil or any other language easily. People can do the translations on the go, using the mobiles. No need of fancy translation systems.

Another bot can be written to show a word, record its sound, upload to commons and connect to wiktionary. We can even use it to create crowd sourced audio books by recording paragraphs.

Will explore on them and come up with new bots soon.

Wikidata is a hot-cake nowadays. Lot of magic is happening around wikidata. Explored about SPARQL, Quarry, Quickstatements etc.

Our team planned for the further activities to do.

Add english translation to master branch
Improve the connector to use it with any wiktionary, any wiki user.
Install it on a server, so that public can start using it.

Will continue work on these, once I am back to chennai.

That all. The end of the hacking celebrations in Vienna.

Its time for a City Tour with friends. Roamed around the city. Vienna, is a heritage rich city with many good monuments. Went to a big church, crossed nice parks, parliment building, mayer office etc. Found a good restaurant and had dinner.

Had fun discussions on Indian people nodding head for everything, English accent on various languages, songs/music/dance on various countries, Vienna history, Food culture in Europe/India, The issues Internet Explorer gives to the designers, Study options in Austria and more.

At 11.00 pm we returned to the event venue. Still there are so many monks, staring the laptops, hacking somethings for the benefit of human kind. Long live monks. This world owe you a lot.

Will be spending tomorrow, exploring the Vienna city tomorrow.

Are you interested in what we did for the hackathon? Do you feel sad for my laptop not connected with projector on time? I know, there are few of you are eagerly waiting for it. Here is a youtube video on our works, this weekend.

Thanks for all the team of Wikimedia Austria, for the wonderful event. It will be memorable event for me to work with the people, from various countries, speaking various languages. We all are passionate about contributing to wikipedia, making the world even better, by one line of edit/code per time.

World is so small. Hoping to meet you all sometime, sooner.