Wikimedia Hackathon 2025 recap

A week ago, I took part in the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025, which took place on 2–4 May (Friday–Sunday) in Istanbul, Turkey. Just like last year and the year before, I want to write a bit about the experience.

I had come into the hackathon with two vague project ideas: work on the migration of m3api to Wikimedia GitLab (T392290), especially the documentation (T392716), and continue making local language names translatable on translatewiki.net (T231755). But as sometimes happens at such events, things turned out otherwise.

During the travel to the hackathon (i.e. at the airport) and on Thursday evening, I got a decent amount of work on m3api in: I mostly managed to port the documentation-building release CI to GitLab actions (though I’ll still need to get access to push it to doc.wikimedia.org). However, also during that evening, in a dinner conversatiaon with Haley Nordeen, we came across the idea of “Redactle for Wikidata” on the venerable building more games using Wikidata’s data task. During the game ideas session the next morning, I decided to try this out, and it ended up becoming my main project of the hackathon. (I didn’t end up working on the local language names at all in the end.)

What I had by the time of the showcase on Sunday was not a finished product, but at least a playable version of the game, called WDactle (source code). There’s no “puzzle of the day” yet (like in Wordle or Redactle), just a random puzzle each time you load the page (cached for five minutes). And despite the missing features, the game seems to be feasible in principle, and more fun than I expected, both according to my own experience and what I’m hearing from others 🙂 so I’ll definitely continue working on it. (Special thanks to Sarai Sánchez for talking through the design with me on Saturday evening!)

Of course, the hackathon isn’t just about hacking on your own projects. I don’t think I directly worked on anyone else’s project, but I was at least able to give some useful pointers and advice to several people. I had also announced in the opening session that I could hand out some invite codes to Wikis World, and I’m happy to report that one invite code was successfully exchanged and used! And I joined some sessions on the program, including several related to Wikimedia Toolforge and tool development, and one on the future of the MediaWiki Action API.

On the more social side, I talked to or hung out with a fair amount of people, ranging from an impromptu meeting of the Toolforge Standards Committee to a spontaneous magic show (yes!). The “juggling + rubik’s cubes” session from the last two years didn’t really happen again, but we still had some social time before the Kahoot session on Saturday afternoon. I also restocked the sweets table with chocolate several times. Sadly, although Taavi and I brought our blåhajar, we didn’t have a proper Wikimedia Cuteness Association meetup this year 😔

As usual, I posted about my hackathon experience on Mastodon, this time with separate threads for Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. As you can see there, I traveled to and from the hackathon by plane this year; I looked into other options (ever heard of this thing called the “orient express”??), but didn’t think that any of them looked feasible to me. (Clearly I should’ve coordinated with Pintoch, who apparently found a way after all!) I hope next year will be a little bit closer to Berlin again 🙂