Thought this would be interesting to wikitech-l.
-- Forwarded message --
From: Yuvi Panda
Date: Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 1:47 PM
Subject: Chennai Unofficial Wikimedia Hackathon Report
To: "Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia."
The Chennai Unofficial Wikimedia Hackathon Report
TL;DR: 13 completed hacks, including 2 core mediawiki patches, 3
tawiki userscript updates and 2 new deployed tools. It was super
awesome and super productive!
The 'Unofficial' Chennai Wikimedia
Hackathon(http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Chennai_Hackathon_March_2012)
happened on Saturday, March 17 2012 at the Thoughtworks office in
Chennai. It was a one day, 8 hour event focusing on getting people
together to hack on stuff related to all Wikimedia projects - not just
Mediawiki patches.
The event started with us sailing past security reasonably easily, and
getting setup with internet without a glitch. People trickled in and
soon enough we had 21 people in there. Since this was a pure
hackathon, there were no explicit tutorials or presentations. As
people came in, we asked them what technologies/fields they are
familiar with, and picked out an idea for them to work on from the
Ideas List (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Chennai_Hackathon_March_2012/Ideas).
This took care of the biggest problem with hackathons with new people
- half the day spent on figuring out what to work on, and when found,
it is completely outside the domain of expertise of the people hacking
on the idea. Talking together with them fast to pick an idea within 5
minutes that they can complete in the day fixed this problem and made
sure people can concentrate on coding for the rest of the day.
People started hacking, and just before lunch we made people come up
and tell us what they were working on. We then broke for lunch and
usual socialization happened over McDonalds burgers and Saravana
Bhavan dosas. Hacking started soon after, and people were
concentrating on getting their hacks done before the demo time. And we
did have quite a few demos!
Demos
=
Here's a short description of each of the demos, written purely in the
order in which they were presented:
1. Wikiquotes via SMS
By: @MadhuVishy and @YesKarthik
What it does:
Send a person name to a particular number, and you'll keep getting
back quotes from that person. Works in similar semi-automated fashion
as the DYKBot. Built on AppEngine + Python.
Status:
Deployed live! Send SMS '@wikiquote Gandhi' to 9243342000 to test it
out! Has limited data right now, however.
---
2. API to Rotate Images (Mediawiki Core Patch)
By: Vivek
What it does:
Adds an API method that can arbitrarily rotate images. Think of this
as first step towards being able to rotate any image in commons with a
single button instantly, without having to wait for a bot. Patch was
attached to https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33186.
Status:
It was reviewed on that day itself (Thanks Reedy!). Vivek is now
figuring out how to modify his patch so that it would be accepted into
Mediawiki core. Vivek is also applying to work with Mediawiki for
GSoC, so we will hopefully get a long term contributor :)
---
3. Find list of unique Tamil words in tawiki
By: Shrinivasan T
What it does:
It took the entire tamil wikipedia dump and extracted all unique words
out of it. About 1.3 million unique tamil words were extracted. Has
multiple applications, including a tamil spell checker.
Status:
Code and the dataset live on github:
https://github.com/tshrinivasan/tamil-wikipedia-word-list
---
4. Program to help record pronunciations for words in tawikt
What it does:
Simple python program that gives you a word, asks you to pronounce it
and then uploads it to commons for being used in Wiktionary. Makes the
process much more streamlined and faster.
Status:
Code available at:
https://github.com/tshrinivasan/voice-recorder-for-tawictionary.
Preliminary testing with his friends shows that easy to record 500
words in half an hour. Is currently blocked on figuring out a way to
properly upload to commons
---
5. Translation of Gadgets/UserScripts to tawiki
By: SuryaPrakash [[:ta:பயனர்:Surya_Prakash.S.A.]]
What he did:
Surya spent the day translating two gadgets into Tamil, so they can be
used on tawiki. First is the 'Prove It' Reference addition tool
(http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediawiki:Gadget-ProveIt.js). The second
one was the 'Speed Reader' extension that formats content into
multiple columns for faster scanning
(http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediawiki:Gadget-TwoColumn.js). Last I
checked, these are available for anyone with only tamil knowledge to
use, so yay!
(He also tried to localize Twinkle for Tamil, couldn't because of
issues with the laptop he was using.
---
6. Structured database search over Wikipedia
By: Ashwanth
What it does:
Built a tool that combined DBPedia and Wikipedia to allow you to
search in a semantic way. We almost descended into madness with people
searching for movies with Kamal and movies with
