Wikimania

DanielRenfro

Joined 2 July 2012

My main profile can be found on Mediawiki.org at: User:DanielRenfro


Itinerary & Notes

Monday, July 9

Description: (No Description Available) 
Requisition Number or NA: 47470
Trip Record Locator: MPUMXJ Created on: 07/02/2012 at 1:47 PM
Passengers: Daniel Paul Renfro.
Boston, MA (BOS) to New York, NY (LGA)
Mon Jul 9	Delta  5879	Duration: 1 hour, 12 minutes Nonstop
Boston (BOS):11:00 AM - Terminal:A 
New York (LGA):12:12 PM - Terminal:A
Confirmation Number:HHRVA9	Status:Confirmed
Flight Information
Aircraft:E-175	Distance:184 miles
Connecting at New York, NY (LGA) to Washington, DC (DCA)
Mon Jul 9	Delta  5917	Duration: 1 hour, 20 minutes Nonstop
New York (LGA):1:59 PM - Terminal:A
Washington (DCA):3:19 PM - Terminal:B
Confirmation Number:HHRVA9	Status:Confirmed
Flight Information
Aircraft:Embraer 170	Distance:214 miles


Tuesday, July 10

  • 9 AM: Betts Theatre: Reception and opening ceremonies
  • 9:30 AM: Laptop setup and general hacking, in the Continental Ballroom.

git/gerrit

10:30 AM - 11:30 AM: Tutorial on Git/Gerrit

  • by Chad Horohoe. (Newcomers welcome!)
  • Git Tutorial
  • List configuration settings
git config -l
  • My Git/Gerrit info
  • Commit messages should have a first line that is very short and descriptive
    • Other info can be added after the first, short, line.
  • Gerrit allows anyone to view and comment on each commit (+1/-1) leave feedback
    • This is like adding feedback for the author and the project owner(s)
  • Gerrit project owners have the authority to do the merge (+2/-2)

rest of the day

  • Early afternoon: Lunch break, provided by Wikimania
  • 2 PM:
    • National Archives Tour
    • 2 PM - 3 PM: Tutorial on the lifecycle of a bug, and how the MediaWiki development community communicates, by Roan Kattouw (Newcomers welcome!) (Room 310)
  • 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM: Tentative: Tutorial on custom JavaScript and CSS within the wiki, through ResourceLoader and "Gadgets 2.0", by Krinkle. (Newcomers welcome!) (Room 310)
  • 5 PM: Recommended dinner break
  • 7 PM: (If possible; awaiting confirmation from organizers) Return to the Hackathom rooms for further hacking.

Wednesday, July 11

  • 9 AM: Hacking begins, primarily in the Continental Ballroom
  • 10 AM - 11 AM: Templates and advanced wiki formatting tutorial, by Yaron Koren. (Part of the Intro track) (Room 310)
  • Early afternoon: Lunch break, provided by Wikimania
  • 2 PM - 3 PM: Tentative: Introduction to translation tools within MediaWiki, by Siebrand (Part of the Intro track) (Room 310)
  • 5 PM: Go home and drop off your laptop; change into nicer clothes, then go to...
  • 7 PM: Dinner at Google Reception
    • If you wish to drink alcohol, be sure to bring an ID.
    • See the Google Reception page's discussion of "Dress and attire"
    • Be sure to bring your Wikimania badge -- it serves as your admission ticket!
    • We strongly encourage you to leave your laptop at the hotel/hostel to make socializing easier.


Thursday, July 12

Submissions/Engaging the Community: What We've Tried and Where We're Going

  • Howie, Fabrice[1], Brandon, Oliver
  • editor engagement - features that help attract and retain the right kind of editor
  • lots of new users/editors, lots of people need help
    • for example: w:Wikipedia:GBD
    • "Articles for Creation" has a backlog.
    • Creating articles is a hard process/confusing, especially for anonymous users.
    • the Help: namespace is confusing and unorganized ( like Help:Tables )
  • There are lots of heavy editors (1000+ edits) that are not involved in the community
    • They don't know of the village pump, they don't know of the policy pages, etc.
  • How can we engage with them?
    1. feedback tools
    2. new pages
    3. notifications
    4. messaging (user to user)
    5. profile (infoboxes, identity, etc.)
    6. affliliations
    7. sharing (social networks)
Take home ideas
  • Email users possibly useful pages to edit (pages related to pages they are
  • Have a look at Special:NewPagesFeed & Extension:Page Triage
    • This helps manual patrollers do curation of a list of pages
  • Talk pages suck — they are confusing
    • Wikia has a project to help with this....name?
    • Mediawiki has two projects: ( Athena )
      1. Echo
      2. Flow

Submissions/Engaging editors on Wikipedia: A roadmap of new features

  • There needs to be more transparency when new features are introduced.
  • Developers don't deal with the community well and the development workflow is confusing for both the community and the developers.
  • Problems:
    1. Communication
      • is usually on the village pump in en-wikipedia
      • talk pages (suck)
    2. Location
      • mediawiki.org vs. en-wikipedia
    3. Opaqueness
      • screenshots suck, working prototypes are better
  • Solutions:
    1. Article feedback/Version 5 -- better than the old feedback tool
    2. hold the entire discussion on en-wikipedia

Submissions/Life Without Brackets: Visual Editing for Wikitext

Trevor, Roan, et al.

  • The visual editor is trying to lower the barrier to entry
  • Don't take wikitext away completely, just enhance the current editor
  • Easier and faster editing = more conflicts
    • conflicts right now suck — what we need is a smarter merge functionality
    • working on a collaborative editor (like Google Docs), but this is hard
  • the representation of the wikitext can be an array of items/tokens
    • arbitrary operations like insertion and deletion are easy
    • an HTML token stream is easier to do this
  • the transactional engine will break apart complex actions into more simpler ones
    • this leads to more intellegent merging/conflict-resolution
  • can represent this a node tree (with the syncronizer)
  • syntax highlighting would be cool
  1. standalone HTML demo
  2. Mediawiki extension

Submissions/The purpose-driven social network: Supporting WikiProjects with technology

  • w:WikiProject has grown organically from nothing
  • it is very decentralized and complex because it has grown organically
  • currently there is no special software or tools for helping manage wiki-projects
  • there are lots of options for improvements
    1. communication
    2. organization, lists of pages
    3. identity

Friday, July 13

Submissions/Efficient and flexible text manipulation, spelling correction and page collections with Pywikibot

Bin%C3%A1ris

Manual:Pywikipediabot is a powerful tool, especially for search/replace functionality:

  • you can search/replace in one step or search then replace


WikiQueer/LGBT Meetup

Saturday, July 14

Sunday July 15

Washington, DC (DCA) to New York, NY (LGA)
Sun Jul 15	Delta  5918	Duration: 1 hour, 10 minutes Nonstop
Washington (DCA):3:00 PM - Terminal:B
New York (LGA):4:10 PM - Terminal:A
Confirmation Number:HHRVA9	Status:Confirmed
Flight Information
Aircraft:Embraer 170	Distance:214 miles
Connecting at New York, NY (LGA) to Boston, MA (BOS)
Sun Jul 15	Delta  5894	Duration: 1 hour, 13 minutes Nonstop
New York (LGA):7:00 PM - Terminal:A
Boston (BOS):8:13 PM - Terminal:A
Confirmation Number:HHRVA9	Status:Confirmed
Flight Information
Aircraft:E-175	Distance:184 miles

Goals

Take home

Involvement in the Mediawiki.org community

  • update the inline and online documentation
  • work on the de-global-variable-ization/contextualization
    • ask Chad for a new repository for new extensions
    • extensions are still getting integrated
  • Sign up for this: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CES (Community Engagement Strategy Project)
  • WikiProject Extensions -- Page_Drive
    • To Do:
      1. get setup with the labs 'extension-review' project
      2. edit the WikiProject Extensions page to display the labs account
      3. email ops/Ryan Lane and say that AndrewBogott did a good job helping me out
        • email the #mediawiki-labs list and say thanks

For Vistaprint

References

  1. ↑ Borrowed my VGA:mini-display dongle, gave me his business card.
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