Wikimedia Hackathon Amrita University 2016/Report

Goals

MediaWikiToLearn Hackathon was organised to bring more new students into the field of Open Source Contribution, thereby giving them a chance to interact with developers online. Also to provide an opportunity to learn the workflow of bug fixing and patch submission in MediaWiki.

Outcome

The pywikibot session was a great success as students could grasp the fundamentals well and catch up with their tasks. Though it was a bit hard for participants to get started with their first bug fix. By the end of second day of MediaWiki Hackathon, we could get more than 5 patches uploaded to gerrit.

WikiToLearn Editathon was concluded with a commendable 1000 edits made by 25 professors on subjects varying from Biotechnology, Business, Physics, and Mathematics.

Program	Duration
Pywiki-bot session	1 day
WikiToLearn Editathon	Half a day
MediaWiki Hackathon	2 days

Learning

On the first day, the Pywikibot session by Abdeali Kothari was conducted in parallel with WikiToLearn editathon for the teachers. The students were motivated to get their tasks done even though the pywikibot session seemed complex.

The pywikibot session aimed at writing scripts using pywikibot and python which will upload some data from 2011 India census to wiki data. Even though the session being very complex, the students were motivated to get their tasks done. By the end of the day we could get more than half of the students to complete the tasks assigned to them. The lightning talks in between gave an introduction to the Wikimedia Community and it’s different sister organizations.

WikiToLearn session was hosted for the faculties of Amrita School of Engineering, to render them an exposure to the world of free and collaborative text books. The session was a success with more than 1000 edits by 25 professors who registered. The teachers found it exciting to have WikiToLearn as a tool in teaching curriculum and wished to continue building courses in this platform.

On the second day of the hackathon, participants were given guidance and opportunity to contribute to Mediawiki code base by setting up the local wiki, finding bugs using the bug tracker Phabricator and start with their first contribution to the MediaWiki software. Participants were able to work on bugs that dealt with documentation, User Interface etc. It took longer time than we expected for the students to understand the bugs and start sending patches.

With an active IRC channel at #mwtlhack we could help them get online guidance via the help of developers from MediaWiki.

Finances

Food and drink = $881.69
T-shirts = $219.93
Stickers = $28.43
Books & Pen = $64.35
Banners & Postures = $13.91
Lanyards and ID cards = $54.76
Miscellaneous = $10.47

The total amount spent = $1,369.63 USD

We had a balance of $21.77 remaining, after covering all our expenses from the Generous Wikimedia Foundation Grant.