Today, from Indian Linux Users Group, Chennai, we conducted a mini hackathon on Wikipedia.
We asked for ideas to the Tamil wiki community.
Collected the ideas here -
https://ta.wikipedia.org/s/6t7wWe got 7 people. Balaji is a second year CS student. Syed Abuthahir is joining his first company as Python programmer tomorrow. His college senior Ajees is working. Neechalkaran is a well known contributor for wikipedia for his bots. Padmakumar is a C/C++ expert. Sankar is a full stack programmer. Myself a python kid.
With this energetic team with various skillsets, today's hackathon got some interesting contributions.
Balaji hacked the UI of Tamil wikisource to show the wiki editing tools to left side bar. He is exploring on adding Tamil typewriting keyboard to Jquery.ime of "Universal Language Selector" extension of mediaiwki.
Padma Kumar explored the process of installing Tamil Text to speech system provided by IIT Madras. With very less and confusing documentation, he was downloading huge amount of software stack and compiling them for the entire day. Found that they had many hardcoded paths for various files in the code. Have to find and fix them manually. He will be exploring on this, further.
Syed Abuthahir explored the features of wikitools, a python library. He started to build a reporting tool to list out the contributions by all the TamilNadu School Teachers. The tool is still backing. He will complete it soon.
Neechalkaran explained and demonstrated his bots using Google Script Engine. He explained how mediawiki api works. He learned working with wikitools and python.
Sankar started to explore wikipedia as he is very new to it. Myself was helping the participants to understand the requirements and to get into hacking easily.
Will followup with the team to get the repo links and documentation.
Thanks for Raja Manohar for providing the venue. Thanks for Sankar and Vasanth for nice hospitality.
Thanks for all the participants. Hoping to see them all as great contributors to wikipedia. Let us conduct such events often. Meet you all soon.
Photos are here -
https://photos.app.goo.gl/SEjPkJUvF30qGUWg2
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