This year, MediaWiki Training 2018 was held at Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore. It was a 2-day event. We call it MWT2018. People from different communities arrived including people from English Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia etc.
It was an invite-only workshop held under the A2K programme of CIS. Our mentor for the workshop was Tony Thomas. He is a past GSoCer and GSoC mentor for Wikimedia Foundation. He proved to be a great resource person for the event. Since it was a 2-day event, I will give a brief overview on what we did each day with respect to MediaWiki.
DAY 1
We started off with setting up MediaWiki and Gerrit in all systems. Then, we learnt on how to submit patch to Gerrit. Then, we continued it with building our own extension using the BoilerPlate extension. Tony taught us different methods that is provided to us by mediawiki-core and how can we use them to build our own extensions.
Later, we started hacking our own extension that sends us a Echo notification whenever we edit a page. With a good amount of hard work, we were finally able to build one. It really paid off.
DAY 2
Our day 2 started with understanding the extension structure, the use of extension.json file, i18n and l10n. This was led by Mr. Jay Prakash from Hindi Wikipedia. Then, there was a live hangout scheduled with Quim Gill for discussing the Indian MediaWiki Developer Community. There was an unexpected entry from Srishti Sethi who also works at WMF. The hangout was pretty good and resourceful.
After that, I started working on the Book Uploader Bot (BUB) as it was reported by Bodhisattwa Mandal from Bengali Wikipedia that the tool is broken. Apparently, I will soon fix it or make it from scratch.
Learning Outcomes
- Understanding of various core functions and their use cases.
- Understanding the extension structure, l10n, i18n etc.
- Using Echo extension to send notifications.
- Submission of patches, review process etc.
- Building our own extension from scratch.
Resourceful outcomes
- Really great connections.
- Set up of Indian Developer Community for MediaWiki.
- Getting the support from WMF.
- Working on projects that are worth it.
In the end, I would like to extend the thanks to CIS team for setting up this really great event for all of us. It was very well managed and executed. I hope to see and visit similar events in future. Till then, happy hacking!
