[Wikisource-l] Zürich Hackathon report (Wikisource perspective)

This year in the Hackathon we were two Wikisource volunteers, Tpt and me, although I must say that the number of supporters is growing. I went there on Friday night, and left on Sunday morning, so initially I didn't expect to accomplish much other than to catch up with new developments and follow-up general standing issues. One of those issues was the RFC on associated namespaces [1], it needed more developers to comment on its general terms and on the database schema, and I am glad that it inched forward. It is important to get this solved because it was one of the main blockers of the GSoC last year for a customized book uploading interface in the Upload Wizard. It also blocks other important stuff relevant for all projects. During the conference Max Klein and Daniel Mietchen showcased me their Wikiproject to import Open Access papers from PubMed Central into Wikisource [2] using an automated tool (still under development). These imported papers later on can be cited in Wikipedia articles. I think it is an amazing concept which revives the Wikisource aspect of supporting Wikipedia references with current sources, and that might attract even more positive attention to our project. This fits perfectly with the strategy started last year of synchronizing bibliographic metadata through Wikidata, which of course will be more feasible once arbitrary item access is possible [3]. Daniel also has informed me that, regarding PDF import, Peter Murray-Rust has started a project to mine scientific literature. It will be interesting to take a closer look into their contentMine [4] and see if there are points of intersection. He will give a keynote during Wikimania. Matt Flaschen taught me with great patience how to set up Vagrant [5] and what you can do with it. It is basically a virtual machine with mediawiki installed and configured, so you have your own instance running in just a few minutes (well, in my little 2gb-ram laptop it took much longer because to run smoothly it needs about 8gb ram and a few cores). It is really wonderful to have your own development mediawiki so easily installed and accessible normally from the browser. Then there are the so called "roles" that install some extensions automatically [6], like "visualeditor" or "proofreadpage". I also got the opportunity to thank Nemo personally for helping me to learn how to use the totally user-unfriendly tool from the Internet Archive to upload images and convert them automatically into OCR'ed djvu files. Something important for our mission, which I hope the GSoC of this year will make easier. In the afternoon there was the presentation of the new Executive Director, Lila Tretikov [7]. She gave a short talk and spent most of her session answering diverse questions from the audience, the most important for us perhaps being "what about sister projects?" (thanks Cristian Consonni!). Her answer was in the lines of "there are projects more aligned with our movement vision than others, and we might want to support those". We will have to wait and see into which actions that statement will transform. I hope wikisourcerors can be thankful to the new ED. For now I can say that she transmits a positive attitude. deployed as a beta feature [8] and on the Guided Tours for Proofread Page extension. Amazing stuff. I really hope that his Wikimania scholarship gets approved! Cheers, Micru PS: mentioned people have been BCC'ed just for information, no action required from them [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Associated_namespaces [2] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:WikiProject_Open_Access [3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47930 [4] https://github.com/petermr/contentMine [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki-Vagrant [6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki-Vagrant/Roles [7] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/05/01/wmf_announces_new_ed_lila_tretikov/ [8] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Beta_Features/Other_projects_sidebar