Earlier this month, Wikimedia staff and volunteers got together in
Mumbai, India to work on mobile, offline, and
internationalisation/localisation.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011
Photos are up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Victorgrigas#Hackathon_Mumbai_2011
Some notes on our outcomes, which included many new localisations for
Kiwix and new input methods for MediaWiki, readying Narayam for
Wikimedia Incubator, a prototype onscreen keyboard built in Narayam,
Wikimedia Mobile ready for translation, new UI prototypes for language
selection, and more:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011/Schedule_notes#Day_1_ou…
And I haven't even touched on mobile! An update specifically on mobile
progress at the hackathon:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mobile-l/2011-November/005200.html
-- Summary from Phil Chang:
In summary, over one weekend more than 50 volunteers
from many parts of
India added their hard work and insights to the technical foundation of
Wikipedia. In the mobile area alone, volunteers contributed to 17 features,
as listed here (features that were worked on are marked with an "H"):
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Projects/features#India_Hackathon
We also got support and input from most of the major mobile operators in
India about how to make our user experience better. Free access to
Wikipedia is moving forward on a number of fronts, as we identified several
forms of collaboration, not just in the form of Wikipedia Zero. For
example, there seems to be widespread interest in using an RSS feed of the
Article of the Day, and the top 5 languages in India are important.
I'm asking Emmanuel to send an offline-related summary to
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l . And I'm
predicting the localization folks will have a summary in their next
showcase; watch
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n .
This was the largest Wikimedia tech outreach event I've been a part of,
with 80 or so new folks learning and becoming contributors. Thanks to
the Wikimedia staffers who came, for -- as Alolita put it -- "leading
project teams to do some nice development, UI design, testing and
accomplishing a lot in a short blip of time." Thanks to the local
community and chapter for putting on Wiki Conference India, which
happened at the same time:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011
Sorry to be brief; more details are at the links provided. I know that
the i18n team also led a translation sprint and an intro to MediaWiki
hacking in Pune after the Mumbai hackathon, but I'll leave it to them in
case they want to report about that.
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
