Hi again.

I'm glad to hear that the Berlin Lectures will be uploaded at higher quality and that Asheesh Loria will be assisting in this years wikimania's Hakcathon and material development.

As per your questions - I have revisited last year's lectures a couple of times. I tend to maximize the social aspects of hackathon and review the technical materials at my leisure and with the attention to detail that they require.

I reviewed almost all of Wikimania during Jan-March. For examples I revisited Andrew West's Lecture on ant vandalism where he mentioned using Amazon Mechanical Turk to create an anti-vandalism corpus. He also described in verbatim how anti-vandalism robots are designed. This is not mentioned AFIK in any academic journals - only the results of anti-vandalism are. The reason why this work was interesting for me was that it applies to the area of Quality Assessment - where being able to draw the fine line between good will edits and bad will ones boils down to keeping or loosing new editors.

Another example is review of the materials about gadgets and extensions. This work comes with a steep learning curve and again the lectures fill the void created by a lack of hands on training course.

Regarding your questions slides are useful but to a limited degree. They are supposed to help support a lecture visually and help a good speaker keep his place in the talk. In the case of the Lua slides - they really help to structure a tutorial but the lecture has almost all the important details. About transcripts - these are best if added to the lectures - both to remedy low quality vocals and to help users with accessibility problems but are not a high priority for me. I do use them when available. Finally my own experience with lectures from Google etc is that they combine in their technical podcasts camtasia type screen captures. These allow the viewers a glimpse of the instructor's screen.

Seeing the screen captures - even in slides is next to impossible and so getting videos with screen captures of this type integrated would be Ideal. Having slides and transcripts is definitely a productivity booster too.

P.S. regarding the link at:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:OrenBochman/Lessons

This is part of a pilot to expand the activities of Wikipedia's adoption program. Currently only the Adoption school and the Lua Module development contain useful content. The Lua Module has added new info on String processing. If there is interest in additional courses/lessons please let me know and they will be added in due course.

-----Original Message----- From: Sumana Harihareswara [mailto:sumanah@wikimedia.org] Sent: Monday, June 25, 2012 10:42 AM To: Wikitext-l Cc: Oren Bochman; Asheesh Laroia Subject: Re: [Wikitext-l] filming the hackathon for experts AND newbies: Washington, DC, USA July 10-11

Thanks for the heads-up, Oren. I'll talk with OpenHatch and other WMF folks about the possible filming of the Wikimania hackathon. Can you specifically say what is most valuable about having lectures videotaped and available online for you? Would transcripts and slides be sufficient substitutes?

The few Berlin hackathon videos that you see online at http://vimeo.com/user7709672/videos are provisional and fairly temporary; professionally edited videos will be up at commons.wikimedia.org by or on July 9th.

People who want to look at Oren's lessons can find them at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:OrenBochman/Lessons .

-- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation

On 06/25/2012 01:31 AM, Oren Bochman wrote:

Hi

I have learned from one of the organizers of Wikimania that they are not planning to film the Hackathon sessions. Furthermore, it was suggested

that

the WMF orgenisers take care of this issue if though consider it a high priority!

I fear that not putting these materials online will be a major setback for the developer community. I, and other refer to these lectures throughout

the

year. They also contain much information not available online.

Also some of the recent coverage from Berlin - is of rather dubious

quality.

(Not the lecture - the video coverage) I have reviewed the lua lectures

many

time while I converting them into a MediaWiki Lua tutorial (currently

hosted

on meta within the scope of a larger educational project). I can say that in this case there is about 5 to 10 times more (MediaWiki) specific materials in the lecture than there is online elsewhere but that it difficult to understand due to sound issues.

I hope this matter can be resolved in time for the sake of the numerous volunteer developers who will not be able to attend this event.

Thanks!

Oren Bochman Mediawiki Lead of Search

-----Original Message----- From: wikitext-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitext-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Sumana Harihareswara Sent: Friday, June 22, 2012 6:51 AM To: labs-l@lists.wikimedia.org; analytics@lists.wikimedia.org; toolserver-l@lists.wikimedia.org; MediaWiki announcements and site admin list; mediawiki-api@lists.wikimedia.org; Wikitext-l; wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org; events@lists.openhatch.org; (Public) People co-organizing OpenHatch+Wikimiedia outreach Subject: Re: [Wikitext-l] Upcoming hackathon for experts AND newbies: Washington, DC, USA July 10-11

On 06/19/2012 03:41 AM, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:

...

This is a reminder that you're invited to the pre-Wikimania hackathon, 10-11 July in Washington, DC, USA:

https://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon

In order to come, you have to register for the Wikimania conference:

https://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration

(Unfortunately, the period for requesting scholarships is now over.)

At the hackathon, we'll have trainings and projects for novices, and we welcome creators of all Wikimedia technologies -- MediaWiki, gadgets, bots, mobile apps, you name it -- to hack on stuff together and teach each other.

Hope to see you!

Actually, you don't have to register for Wikimania to come to the

hackathon.

The registration fee is only required for the main conference days;

everyone

is welcome to come to the hackathon days and unconference for free. So

tell

your DC friends to sign up at https://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon and come!

-- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation

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