Hey all wikitech peeps,
In helping organize the upcoming Wikimania DC Hackathon, I wanted to ask if there are particular categories of work that people with fairly limited experience could do that would have a meaningful impact.
For example:
* Updating extensions to work with the latest version of MediaWiki
* Testing extensions so that we can update mediawiki.org pages about the extension's compatibility with different MediaWiki revisions
* Converting user scripts into Gadgets
* Convert templates into Lua (but seems lower-impact than some of the above because Lua scripts aren't deployed very many places yet)
* (Only applicable to attendees who mntain an extension) Teaching maintainers how to move extensions from the wiki into things that live in Git and are updated through Gerrit
I'm especially interested in tasks where there's a lot of work to do -- that way, people can be given lots of hands-on things to do that can provide practice to help people be more comfortable with tools like git and gerrit, or more comfortable with the MediaWiki hooks, or where the task gives people a reason to install MediaWiki on their own machine. Additionally, it's important the task meaningfully contributes to the project, so people feel the value of what they're doing.
I expect that we'll get a lot of people with some PHP experience but who have little experience with, say, Git and Gerrit.
Also, if you'll be at the Wikimania DC 2012 Hackathon and want to help mentor people through any of these, reply as well.
Other ideas welcome. I'll be collating these over the next few days, and then trying to pick the ones with the highest probable impact based on the attendees. One warning: this is intended just as a research question for now. I can't promise that I'll focus a portion of the hackathon on your particular suggestion. But I do aim to stay in touch as the planning progresses.
-- Asheesh.
On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 2:13 AM, Asheesh Laroia lists@asheesh.org wrote:
Hey all wikitech peeps,
In helping organize the upcoming Wikimania DC Hackathon, I wanted to ask if there are particular categories of work that people with fairly limited experience could do that would have a meaningful impact.
For example:
Updating extensions to work with the latest version of MediaWiki
Testing extensions so that we can update mediawiki.org pages about
the extension's compatibility with different MediaWiki revisions
Converting user scripts into Gadgets
Convert templates into Lua (but seems lower-impact than some of
the above because Lua scripts aren't deployed very many places yet)
- (Only applicable to attendees who mntain an extension) Teaching
maintainers how to move extensions from the wiki into things that live in Git and are updated through Gerrit
I'm especially interested in tasks where there's a lot of work to do -- that way, people can be given lots of hands-on things to do that can provide practice to help people be more comfortable with tools like git and gerrit, or more comfortable with the MediaWiki hooks, or where the task gives people a reason to install MediaWiki on their own machine. Additionally, it's important the task meaningfully contributes to the project, so people feel the value of what they're doing.
I expect that we'll get a lot of people with some PHP experience but who have little experience with, say, Git and Gerrit.
Also, if you'll be at the Wikimania DC 2012 Hackathon and want to help mentor people through any of these, reply as well.
Other ideas welcome. I'll be collating these over the next few days, and then trying to pick the ones with the highest probable impact based on the attendees. One warning: this is intended just as a research question for now. I can't promise that I'll focus a portion of the hackathon on your particular suggestion. But I do aim to stay in touch as the planning progresses.
-- Asheesh.
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Since you mentioned "Updating extensions to work with the latest version of MediaWiki " I think writing unit tests for extensions could be very useful and fairly easy to learn.
On the QA front, this came up in a WMF discussion recently, and I proposed it as a Weekend Testing Americas session, but it would work equally well at Wikimania, and it fits our goal of bringing in more community testing nicely:
---- Wikipedia has a large number of open bug reports, like around 8000 right now, and that number is growing by approximately 3000/year last I looked. It is probable that many of those open bugs should be marked RESOLVED or possibly UNCONFIRMED, but our triaging resources are scarce right now.
So what I'm proposing is a session to take a manageable number of open bug reports for a particular "extension" or two, read them, try to reproduce them, and then either a) mark them RESOLVED or else b) mark them UNCONFIRMED and/or c) leave a helpful comment on the open bug describing what the tester found when trying to reproduce the issue. An example would be https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?resolution=---&query_format=a... ----
Our community testing session with Openhatch on June 9 was pretty successful and a lot of fun, this might be a nice way to get people familiar with how we manage issues in Bugzilla, which can be pretty daunting for newcomers. And of course it is a repeatable exercise, so doing it at Wikimania does not prevent doing it again with WTA or anywhere else. -Chris
On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 7:44 AM, Chris McMahon cmcmahon@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On the QA front, this came up in a WMF discussion recently, and I proposed it as a Weekend Testing Americas session, but it would work equally well at Wikimania, and it fits our goal of bringing in more community testing nicely:
Speaking of QA, I'd love to participate in a test-writing-a-thon. Currently I have no idea how to write tests for my code. It would be awesome if I could learn that at Wikimania.
—Andrew
On 06/22/2012 10:53 PM, Andrew Garrett wrote:
On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 7:44 AM, Chris McMahon cmcmahon@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On the QA front, this came up in a WMF discussion recently, and I proposed it as a Weekend Testing Americas session, but it would work equally well at Wikimania, and it fits our goal of bringing in more community testing nicely:
Speaking of QA, I'd love to participate in a test-writing-a-thon. Currently I have no idea how to write tests for my code. It would be awesome if I could learn that at Wikimania.
—Andrew
This might indeed be a good training session/topic for the pre-Wikimania hackathon. We might be able to repurpose Chad Horohoe's testing training from the fall of 2011 - a lecture on how to write tests, walking attendees through the documentation and teaching them how to run tests. Notes and audio are available:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/NOLA_Hackathon/Sunday#Chad.27s_test_training
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Git_notes_-_NOLA_Hackathon_2011.oga
"I'll find a simple function we still need a test for, and use it as an example. I'll briefly touch on setting up PHPUnit (with the caveat that *sometimes* it's harder than it should be, so ask if you need extra help). Then dive into how to write the test."
You might also like skimming this category and re-filing/moving/creating pages as relevant: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Tutorials
On Jun 23, 2012, at 10:28 AM, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
On 06/22/2012 10:53 PM, Andrew Garrett wrote:
On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 7:44 AM, Chris McMahon cmcmahon@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On the QA front, this came up in a WMF discussion recently, and I proposed it as a Weekend Testing Americas session, but it would work equally well at Wikimania, and it fits our goal of bringing in more community testing nicely:
Speaking of QA, I'd love to participate in a test-writing-a-thon. Currently I have no idea how to write tests for my code. It would be awesome if I could learn that at Wikimania.
—Andrew
This might indeed be a good training session/topic for the pre-Wikimania hackathon. We might be able to repurpose Chad Horohoe's testing training from the fall of 2011 - a lecture on how to write tests, walking attendees through the documentation and teaching them how to run tests. Notes and audio are available:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/NOLA_Hackathon/Sunday#Chad.27s_test_training
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Git_notes_-_NOLA_Hackathon_2011.oga
"I'll find a simple function we still need a test for, and use it as an example. I'll briefly touch on setting up PHPUnit (with the caveat that *sometimes* it's harder than it should be, so ask if you need extra help). Then dive into how to write the test."
You might also like skimming this category and re-filing/moving/creating pages as relevant: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Tutorials
I could also (co-)host that or another session regarding front-end unit testing.
-- Krinkle
I'm especially interested in tasks where there's a lot of work to do -- that way, people can be given lots of hands-on things to do that can provide practice to help people be more comfortable with tools like git and gerrit, or more comfortable with the MediaWiki hooks, or where the task gives people a reason to install MediaWiki on their own machine. Additionally, it's important the task meaningfully contributes to the project, so people feel the value of what they're doing.
It's also a good opportunity for people to get familiar with Labs, and maybe help out with a current project that does something MediaWiki related.
I expect that we'll get a lot of people with some PHP experience but who have little experience with, say, Git and Gerrit.
Getting enough of the basics of Git/Gerrit to push in code is easy enough that people can really focus more on coding.
Also, if you'll be at the Wikimania DC 2012 Hackathon and want to help mentor people through any of these, reply as well.
Other ideas welcome. I'll be collating these over the next few days, and then trying to pick the ones with the highest probable impact based on the attendees. One warning: this is intended just as a research question for now. I can't promise that I'll focus a portion of the hackathon on your particular suggestion. But I do aim to stay in touch as the planning progresses.
Don't forget about opportunities for volunteer operations work as well. People don't necessarily need to hack on MediaWiki. If they want to fix operations things, that's doable as well.
- Ryan
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org