Grants:TPS/Isarra/Wikimania/2016/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2016!

Participant

Isarra

MediaWiki

Outcome

Option 1: Shared Experience: What is one way you shared something from your experience with your community (either locally or globally), after the event?

I just talk to people, but something unusual about this one is that a lot of wikimedians I've met up with afer have actually asked about it. They wanted to know how this one in particular went, because it was different, it tried new things. And I was able to tell them that yes, it mostly worked out quite well. Felt a bit smaller than previous ones, some things didn't work (as always), but overall, the unusual approach did still work.

Option 3: New Creation: What was one useful outcome that was created at the event for the Wikimedia movement?

Hackathons produce things both immediately and after. After the Jerusalem hackathon, I began work on a ridiculous project to completely reimplement a somewhat popular mw skin, BlueSky ([[phabricator:T132236|T132236). BlueSky begain as a fork of wikiHow's skin, which Jack Phoenix initially created and released in 2014. Normally, we recommend against this sort of ham-fisted solution to buggy and messy source, but BlueSky is a bit of a special case, in that it was created and maintained by wikiHow for years on mw1.12, and support for many custom wikiHow features was built into it over the years, diverging it even more for the upstream norm. Jack Phoenix did a lot of work to make the skin a modern, usable version with current mediawiki, as well as adding a few new things, but it was still a bit of a mess. Even he had given up on it.

So after talks and whatnot at the last hackathon, I decided to just start over - take the design and source that was there, and reimplement the same, salvaging both logic and styles to speed it along. But other things came up and I kind of lost my momentum, until wikimania - people were interested. People wanted to see something come of it. So I started again, and the reimplementation of the skin started to actually look like the skin. I'm still working on it, so I can't really show much for it, but that's how the big crazy projects go, I suppose. They don't just finish right off. They don't even necessarily go anywhere the first time. But maybe this time will do it, and we'll have something to release which will properly support current mediawiki, and fully demonstrate just what modern mediawiki skins can be.

Current progress can be seen, or even installed from, here: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/283859/

Connections

The format with the random lunches was very nice for meeting people, along with just running into people wherever en route to things and after. Some folks I interacted with include:

• Fundraising Tech - they have some very interesting problems they need to resolve, far more complicated than a lot of the community (or even other wmf teams) give them credit for. Money stuff is very complicated, which is amusing to note in a report relating to what some of the money they made possible for the movement to get and provess went into.
• Various other community and wmf developers. Lots of problems. Lots of other things. Notes on the importance of metrics. Commiserating that resourceloader keeps changing. Some people rescued me from my own bad code.
• Other grantees: IEG, PEG, Scholarships. Ideas bounced around. We got a lot of feedback on our own grant progress on WikiProject X.
• English Wikipedian powerusers. I have been told (apparently again?) that I should run for arbcom, and take it seriously this time. Previously I ran saying that pie is great and we (wikipedia) need more pie. Or something along those lines. Needless to say, that wasn't very effective, but if I remember, I will try put in a serious candidacy this year. They were somewhat convincing.
• So many other people. So much random mixing. I don't even remember it all on hand, though some of the things discussed have come up randomly from time to time regardless. Impact can be significant from even the smallest interactions.

Anything else

It was lovely.