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Hacking days

Wikimania 2007 Taipei :: a Globe in Accord
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Hacking days is now on in room 333


Hacking Days are a small, informal event for MediaWiki developers to get together, hang out, and hack a bit on planned new technologies.

The plan of Hacking Days

A 2-day event on 8/1 and 8/2, 2007.

To prove the concept of Planning/Hacking days, Mike "b6s" Tian-Jian Jiang is also organizing a local code jam a.k.a. hackathon at April 12th and 13th, 2007. The code jam is followed closely by OSDC.tw on April 14th and 15th, 2007. That is, the situation will be very similar to Wikimania 2007 main conference and hacking days.

Adivses are always welcome, please leave messages on the Hacking days planning talk pages, or just contact the organizer directly via mail: barabbas_AT_gmail_DOT_com, thank you!

To fulfill needs of both MediaWiki core developers and related side projects, the Hacking days will be organized in mainly two parallel tracks: MediaWiki Hackathon and Planning/Hacking Days Extra 2007.

Hacking Days Extra

To answer interests of side-project developers and sponsors, we have to have a little more developments beyond MediaWiki itself. Please refer to Planning/Hacking Days Extra 2007 and consider submit a proposal to the organizer, Mike Jiang, by following the guideline on Planning/Hacking_Days_Extra_2007#Call_for_Proposal.

Logistics of Hacking Days

Suggestions

From Nick Jenkins

Take the following physical equipment :

  • Some rolls of butchers paper. [Large bits of paper to draw screen mock-ups, schematics, etc].
  • Some pads of A4 paper.
  • Some pencils.
  • Some erasers.
  • A whiteboard.
  • Some whiteboard markers.
  • A printout (in large font) of the top 100 bugs, as voted by our users in bugzilla.
  • A printout of some potentially strategically important stuff (e.g. SUL, stable versions, etc etc), in large font.
  • Some blutak, in case things need to be stuck on the walls.
  • Food + drinks + snacks.

Then put it in a room with the following:

  • A door that can be locked, securely.
  • Lots of powerboards.
  • _Maybe_ some power inverters (so that people who don't use Taiwan's 110V / 60 Hz power supply can get power for their gear to work)
  • _Maybe_ some desktop computers, but with big monitors (big enough so that several people can see what's going on, and point at the screen whilst saying: "No, you fool!! You've done it wrong!")
  • Wireless internet access.
  • Some tables, some chairs, maybe a sofa or bean bags.
  • Some big yellow foam nerf bats (very useful in bringing people around to your point of view).
  • Some packs of playing cards (useful for when people want to take a break).

Place

Project Management

  • For MediaWiki Hackathon, it should be arranged by core developers with their convenient SVN and bugzilla directly.
  • For Hacking Days Extra, an issue tracking system by Trac with a subversion repository will be hosted and sustained to next year at least.

Foods and Drinks

  • Free drinks, deserts and lunches for all attendees.
  • Free dinners and beers for MediaWiki core developers and invited speakers.

Who turned up

(please correct any typos and omisions!)

  • Brion Vibber
  • Tim Starling
  • Nick Jenkins
  • david strauss
  • michael Dale (metavid)
  • Brandon Sanders (aboutus)
  • Emil (wikia)
  • Yuri (API )
  • Finne/henna
  • Rob Halsell (server side)
  • Jens (jeluf - wiki maps / GIS)
  • Shaun (Answers.com, and wiki.answers.com)
  • Cary Bass
  • Evan P (wikitravel; RDF)
  • Elis (Wikia)
  • Mark Bergsma
  • Mike (organiser)
  • Denny Vrandecic
  • Domas
  • Kim Bruning.
  • Markus Krötzsch
  • Nef (API stuff)

Wednesday Attendees (alpha by first)

Discussion

State of things at the moment:

  • Incremental improvements.
  • More AJAX.
  • Refactoring of image system.
  • Minor bug fixes.
  • Search - using Java now, it's being actively developed.

What will be working on for the next year?

  • Improving SSL interface (rather than http://secure.wikimedia.org/stuff/stuff/etc). Have one IP address which send out one wildcard for *.wikipedia.org ; *.wikimedia.org ; Want a "just works" solution. Want a good price on SSL certs.
  • Possibility of searching in history.
  • Suggestion searching (see below)


Title search / Opensearch / Suggestion searching

  • can we integrate this?
    • julien maynard (?)
    • basic version available in default would be very nice!
      • so far we have the backend for that without normalization
        • with normalization and weighting might be neat
    • maybe rebuild trie from the lucene index (every day?). This way we don't duplicate link analysis and need to worry only about keeping the main index up-to-date. One would iterate over all documents and use title boost as article rank. (--robert)

Toolserver / pywikipedia

  • A little support for a local mediawiki install on toolserver to read the local copy might be interesting.


Video

  • Tim
    • OGG info decoding
    • integrating greg's work on the in-browser display
  • etc


SSL

Interested parties: Brion

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo etc
    • Would allow more convenient and warm-fuzzy-feeling enabling of SSL on login
    • Need one IP per top-level domain, plus wildcard certificates
      • We just got our new IP assignments from ARIN, will be able to set up as many as we need
        • not immediately, but soon :)
        • need to do IP planning to assign a space for it first :D
    • Currently using Apache 2 as an SSL proxy for secure.wikimedia.org
      • could put these on LVS as we do squid for the non-SSL proxying
      • [or squid]
        • mark will take a peek at how to configure that when we have time
      • stunnel is a possibility
        • loses client ip, so probably not super good
  • Login-only or after-login mode -- with a per-user switch?
    • branch for canonical & secure links available

Watchlist RSS

  • Recommend moving this from API to Special:Watchlist like everything else that does RSS/Atom generation

Fundraising

Interested parties: David

  • Current fundraising portal
  • Wishlist
    • Integrate sign-on with single username system.
    • Put donation pages on the CORE site.
    • Backend -- tracking, statistics

Testing

We currently have four test suites:

  • Parser test
  • PHPUnit-based tests
  • t/ directory tests
  • fuzz testing

.. plus possibility of a new testing system for Wikidata.

It would be good to integrate some of these better and add testing for the API system.

Need a sample database to work from:

  • Temporary tables & setup/teardown exist in the parser tests, start from that
  • Filling the table
    • XML import?
    • Manual functions?
  • User activity simulation?

JavaScript

  • Standardize AJAXishy thingies

Interested parties: Emil (wikia is using YUI)

    • AJAX framework -> API
      • SAJAX -- current. Very lightweight, just does function calls.

WYSIWYG

Interested parties: Emil, Evan

  • fckeditor work

Formal grammer

  • this is hard :D
  • :(

Wiki ohana

Extensions

Interested parties: Evan, Emil

  • Management
  • installation
  • blacklist
  • captchas
    • LocalSettings codegen
  • DB changes per ext
    • existing hooks in trunk for 1.11
  • static metadata, enumeration

Captcha vs machine editing

  • some detail
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