Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 recap
Lucas Werkmeister, .The Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 took place from May 3 to 5 in Tallinn, Estonia, and like last year I was one of the participants and want to write a recap blog post.
Major projects
I came to the Hackathon with two “major” ideas for things to work on this year, and switched between both of them frequently (one on the work laptop, one on the private laptop). I think this worked well for me: if I got stuck on something in one project, or had to wait for someone else to react / respond, I could switch to the other project and continue working there.
The first project was T231755: Local language name should be translatable in translatewiki.net. The cldr extension contains many language names in PHP files, and while they’re theoretically open to contributions, it’s difficult for volunteers to suggest changes to those files (they have to find their way around Git and Gerrit). It would be much more convenient if they were defined as i18n messages that could be translated on translatewiki.net instead. Progress on this project mainly consisted of discussing things with other people; I also wrote some code to explore the existing data (which wasn’t merged), and uploaded or reviewed some adjacent cldr patches. I hope to be able to continue working on this project later.
The second project, T363626: Make Wikidata Image Positions tool translatable on translatewiki.net, saw more tangible progress (in fact it’s mostly done). I had already been working on extracting some i18n code from my Wikidata Lexeme Forms tool, which has been translatable for a while, into a library that other tools can use as well; during the Hackathon I made enough progress that the Wikidata Image Positions tool can now use this code as well. (It’s not a real library yet, I still need to finish that.) The first set of translations in about half a dozen languages was already exported from translatewiki.net and deployed on Toolforge during the Hackathon, which was great; since then, even more translations have come in.
Minor projects
I helped Amir Aharoni write two Wikidata Lexeme Forms templates for Hebrew verbs, and deployed them to the tool (pa'al, nif'al). Since then, we’ve brought the total number to seven, adding pi'el, pu'al, hif'il, huf'al, and hitpa'el.
I fulfilled two edit requests by other Hackathon participants for gadgets on Wikimedia Commons: one for Gadget-Stockphoto and one for Gadget-purgetab.
There were probably some other minor projects as well, but I don’t remember them anymore ^^
Social things
This is really the most important part of the hackathon – talking to people, meeting folks you’ve never seen in person before, hearing what’s going on in their lives, discussing upcoming projects, all sorts of fun stuff. I don’t really know what to write about it here, though.
One particular social event was the Wikimedia Cuteness Association meetup: several people who had brought plushies, cute companions or similar things to the Hackathon met up in one of the rooms and took some group photos (Commons category). It didn’t take very long, but I’m glad we did it :)
Another social event was Juggling, Rubik’s cubes and other physical fun, continuing a tradition from 2019 and 2023. I couldn’t really explain to you why juggling and cubing fits together, but it seems to work alright as a fun hour to hang out ^^
Travel
I’m very happy that this year I was able to travel to and from the Hackathon without flying; I took an overnight train from Berlin to Stockholm (fun fact: in 2019, for Wikimania, just getting to Stockholm by train took over 24 hours with six changeovers) and an overnight ferry from Stockholm to Tallinn (Tuesday evening to Thursday morning) and then the reverse on the way back (Monday evening to Wednesday morning). As usual, I wrote about my travel in a Mastodon thread (only one long thread for travel there + Hackathon + travel back this time).