Grants:TPS/Petrb/Wikimania/2017/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2017!

Participant

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Petrb

en.wikipedia.org

Outcome

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Please note that as a tech person, I attended mostly hackathon / technical part of Wikimania and therefore the description of outcome will be highly technical, or harder to understand by non-tech people.

I worked mostly on Huggle and with ORES:

  • Huggle is a diff browser desktop application intended for dealing with vandalism and other unconstructive edits on Wikimedia projects, written in C++ using the Qt framework. Anyone can download Huggle, but rollback permission is required to use it on the English Wikipedia. The principal idea of Huggle as an anti-vandalism tool is to make it possible for Wikipedia to stay as open and free as possible (allowing everyone to edit without any restrictions), while keeping it clean of any vandalism.
  • ORES (Objective Revision Evaluation Service) is a web service and API that provides machine learning as a service for Wikimedia projects maintained by the Scoring Platform team. The system is designed to help automate critical wiki-work -- for example: vandalism detection and removal. Currently, the two general types of scores that ORES generates are in the context of "edit quality" and "article quality".


New Creation: Implemented new scoring models of ORES into Huggle, fixed tons of issues and submitted lots of contribution into core code. Also found at least 1 more member for the core development team.

Connections

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  • Met lot of people from tech community that I work with on a daily basis as an open source developer. I met some of these for a first time in person.
  • Gathered lots of feedback and input from Huggle users who participated on Wikimania, such as User:MusikAnimal, long-term Huggle user, or Joe Matazzoni, WMF product manager.

Anything else

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I consider these events also as a form of team building where I can finally meet up with people from tech community that I work with over the year and we can finally see each other in person, which is great for team spirit and encourages the contribution of volunteer developers, who otherwise work completely for free with little motivation, other than "doing a good thing".