*36c3 preroll music*
Herald: So now we present our next speaker, who is Andre, and he will talk
about some cool tools related to the Wikimedia stuff that you, as, maybe,
Wikimedia users could use and do cool stuff with it. So let's have some applause
for Andre, please.
Andre: Batterien? Oh, it works, right? Perfect. Sorry for that. Thanks for
coming. I'm Andre. I work for Wikimedia. I was even wondering whether I should put
the logo here, because this actually has nothing to do with the Wikimedia
Foundation itself. So this is all about volunteer work, volunteer software,
because it's always a mix between several entities like Wikimedia Deutschland,
Wikimedia Foundation, Sweden, also lots of other companies, for example.
And I decided to give this talk because there is if you are on a Wikimedia website, for
example, Wikipedia, there is some obvious software there. Of course, the wiki
software itself, which allows you to view and edit pages. There are a lot of
extensions, about 130 deployed on Wikimedia servers, but there's also lots
of software around, which pretty often isn't very visible.
Wikimedia Tech world is pretty complex, it's all free and open source software, and some areas are
actually fully covered by volunteers, and especially I'm going to be in the bots,
gadgets, user scripts, tools, and, a bit, mobile apps area today. We have many
communities, many languages, for example, there's already more than 300 Wikipedias
when it comes to different languages. So there's a lot of diverse interests, use
cases, technical needs. You can probably imagine a few things technically already
when it comes to different scripts used in different cultures or right-to-left, left-
to-right. Many other examples like this. And as everything is Free and Open Source,
a lot of volunteers experiment with new ideas they have and also bridge some
workflow gaps that might exist for these communities and maybe other communities
are not even aware of that. So pretty often it happens, that some
community members come up with some ideas and over time they evolve. Sometimes they
even become a code repository or a gadget that also gets copied to another Wikimedia
site like a different language Wikipedia. These kinds of things. And earlier this
year, some people decided that it would be beautiful to appreciate the work and
create a showcase of the most impressive software solutions which were implemented
outside of the Wikimedia Core Code repository and the extensions.
Both to celebrate the software solutions and also the people behind the tools. Because this
is a lot about ideas, about passion, about skills. Pretty often also finding maybe
somebody who has more experience or knowledge in a certain culture. If you
cannot create something yourself, and teaming up. So, early this year, the idea
came up to celebrate such great pieces of software by creating an award. And there
was a Wikimedia conference, I think, in August in Stockholm, it's called
Wikimania, which is not only about technical aspects, it's really about
everything related to the Wikimedia communities. And we, beforehand, there was
there were a few people who came together and tried to find categories and, for
tools to give an award to in these categories. So I'm basically remixing this
award session from earlier this year here without giving out awards. And my hope is
that you might see some great stuff, might find some stuff interesting.
It's not necessarily if you run your own Mediawiki installation on your server,
some stuff might be too Wikimedia-specific use cases, but maybe you might get some
ideas or also stuff you weren't aware of and might want to use. Because there are a
lot of tools out there, as I said, and sometimes it's really hard to discover
them because they're. *soundproblems* Oh, thank you, because they might be on on separate
wikis. All right, so the first category was or is experience, and it was won by
the locator tool by Simon04. It's a tool that helps you adding the geocode, the
exact position to existing images, especially on Wikimedia Commons, which is
the place to share free media images, videos, things like this. And why it
received this prize is because it's really intuitive and easy to use. You can add
coordinates to one or more files. You can find it in user preferences. So it's a bit
easier to discover. It's available in many languages, it had great tutorials.
Actively maintained and it's been used already a lot. So this is the tool.
I wonder if I should zoom in a bit. It's called locator tool and you can enter a
category name here. For example, I have one hand less than usual I realize.
"Coolest tool award"… In theory it should also autocomplete. Let's try. Showcases.
Maybe if I… let's try something else, then, I mean, that's what
autocomplete is for. And let's load. So in theory, you get the map here with a
pointer on it. Or pointers of the files in this category. In practice, I probably
chose a bad example, and the Wi-Fi isn't that fast. Or maybe none of the images in
that category already has a location. That might also be the case here. It's not the
category I tried beforehand when I tried to prepare this session. Sorry for that.
I'll go back to the screenshot, where you can hopefully imagine how things
should look like. The next one would be HotCat, which is a pretty tiny
codebase, actually, but used a lot. And "cat" in this case stands for
Categories, because that is one way to organize, for example, files on Wikimedia
Commons, but also articles on Wikipedias. So this is a screenshot
from a file on Wikimedia Commons. And at the bottom you can see the categories,
and you can easily add categories via this tool and also remove, change, add
categories. And it's also pretty discoverable via the user preferences. So
to compare this, how much should I zoom in? This here, down here you can see the
categories, how it usually looks. Basically just the names, and you can
click the categories to get to the overview page. If you've enabled the
gadgets, you see a few more buttons here, which are added by JavaScript so you can
easily remove a category or add a category by clicking the plus at the very end.
And then you could also type-ahead and add a new category. It works on almost all
wikis, it actually has the highest number when it comes to users. And yeah, as
usual, code is public. Several people contributed.
"Impact". There is Internet Archive Bot by cyberpower, you probably can guess a little bit from the
name what it's supposed to do. We are not running an archive service. We're not
archive.org. But pretty often, Internet websites or pages go down or get
removed or get moved. And as especially Wikipedia articles have a lot of
references, then suddenly you cannot check for references anymore. Or if that
statement is actually true because that website got down. But there is the
Internet Archive and they archive regularly websites and Web pages by
crawling the Internet. And then this little Bot replaces those links and, or
references in, for example, Wikipedia articles at the bottom by the link to
Internet Archive. So you can still actually reach the Page, that was
referenced a while ago when that page still existed. And the great thing about
this is that it automates work that usually would be very cumbersome and very
tiresome to do, and the configuration also depends on local wiki needs. As an example
I won't show you now running Internet Archive Bot on some page,
but you can see here, I basically took the last edits, a totally random one on English
Wikipedia. And you can see here that this is a history of that article called
Gilberto Hernandez Ortega. And this is the last edit that Internet Archive Bot made
on English Wikipedia by replacing this obviously dead link here that you can see
on the left by a link to web.archive.org. So if you go to that article on English
Wikipedia and you want to go to that reference, you actually see the reference
and not a dead link, that's what it does. Then we had a "reusable" category.
If you wonder where we are, if you get tired, this is the fourth out of 10. That's page
views by MusicAnimal, Kaldari, Marcel Ruiz Forns. It does what it says.
It's basically getting an idea how often does a certain page on one of the Wikimedia sites
get accessed. So it's a pretty simple graph, but that can be pretty useful when
when you want to have statistics, maybe not necessarily about… well, also, some
people want to find out if… which articles are the most popular ones on some
Wikipedias. Some people want to find that out. But for me, for example, it's pretty
useful when when there are, when it comes to technical documentation on
mediawiki.org and I wonder, OK, these two pages kind of overlap when it comes to
their content and I would like to merge them. But which one is more popular and
which way should I merge it. So these things can be pretty useful.
You can include all wikis. You can also change the time frame. You can get statistics
over a year now, that was recently implemented. Before, it was per month.
And in life this, these are two pages I'm comparing on meta.wikimedia.org.
You can see that I'm looking at the daily statistics and in a certain time frame,
which you can change here, and I'm comparing these two pages called the
Coolest Tool Award page and a page called Requests for New Languages. And so here
you can see like on which day, how many times those two pages were accessed.
Then there is quick statements by Magnus. That's true, that's true. I tried to
access that earlier, and it somehow didn't work for me when preparing this. So in
theory, it's a powerful editor for Wikidata. You can use statements,
labels, descriptions and aliases to add and remove them, via rather simple
text commands and you can see simply by the numbers on Wikidata that it's
pretty popular. As I said, I wasn't able to play with that yet myself. So I can
only read this text for you right now. So, you can prepare things already in a
spreadsheet or a text editor to to run several commands in a row.
Batch edits, basically, semi-automatically. And there's also other tools like OpenRefine, the
Disambiguater, which also use this tool. So as it was down, I could only go to its
help page and looked a little bit at the statements down here. I hope that one
day I'm going to find time to try this myself. Let's see.
Then, for developers, an award was given to MediaWiki Code Search by Legoktm. Because, once upon a
time, there were, there was, for example, a service by Google to do search
explicitly, like, public code, source code repositories, and we wanted to have that,
especially for Wikimedia code. So everything that's in WikiMedia git,
Gerrit, I don't think it supports stuff that… all our Wikimedia code repositories
that are in GitHub or somewhere else. It's a pretty simple interface. You can see on
the top you can filter by categories, in which code bases you're looking for a
certain expression. Gerrit, it says here at the bottom. And this is super easy
to use. Well, at least, if you know a little bit of regular expressions or if
you just want to enter the name of a function, for example, because one very
or, a great use case we actually have is, when some function gets deprecated or even
later on even removed in the MediaWiki core code base. Of course, somebody needs
to find and update all the extensions out there, which might rely on that very
function in the MediaWiki core code base. And this makes it way easier.
Of course you could also locally check out all the extension repositories and then grep and
try to find that. But this makes it especially, for those, or most people,
I guess, who don't have a complete check out of all extensions and code repositories on
their own computer, to quickly use it on the Internet online. I guess I don't need
to show you how to enter a search string here. Still, if I, for example, enter,
getText, which would be a function name, you'd then get the results listed by
repository. And then you could filter on the top. If the server or the Internet is
fast enough. I might get back to you later.
Seventh one out of ten we awarded is the "Mobile" area, there is a Commons mobile app which is also entirely
run, managed, worked on by volunteers like Josephine, Yuvi, Neshlihan, Vivek.
It allows you to upload photos to Wikimedia Commons directly from your mobile phone or
from your smartphone, and you can also, of course, add categories, or view
nearby missing images. So if you use your GPS, if you know your location, that can
be helpful to find out which articles, for example, on Wikipedia, still lack
images and view your contributions to Commons in its own gallery. Those numbers
are probably now outdated. But what is impressive to me is simply the large
number of different people who have already contributed to the code base.
Still no results. OK. I don't think I'm going to play that YouTube video for
for you now. Plus, I haven't sorted out the sound beforehand, I realize. But you
can… oh, this just shows some of the images uploaded via it, but it's a pretty
intuitive user interface. It's also interesting to see that of course, it
also makes uploading content a bit easier that might not be suitable for Wikimedia
Commons, like, for example, your selfies of you and your friends.
But I think that's also being worked on and better filter nowadays, for example, by
categorizing if this is a completely new user and these kinds of things on Commons.
Then the category "Newcomer" is called NOA Upload Tool by HappeJ, Sohmen. So this
takes scientific Open Access articles out there, and fetches the images included in
them, and then anybody can help deciding if this is suitable when it comes to the
content of, I mean, the license is already pretty clear. But the content, if this
could be helpful on Wikimedia Commons. So you go to the website, basically you get a
random image and you can help. Could or should this be uploaded to Wikimedia
Commons to make it broader available to make it more discoverable? It's beautiful
because it also gets a bit more into Open Science. It's probably the most simple
user interface in this collection here, and it does the attribution correctly.
Randomized. That's probably also something. So I went to that tool.
And as you can see, you get a random image. So the caption would be taken over and you
can click "Mark for upload" or "next image". To actually upload it, you will…
It's probably a bit small… you would have to log in, of course, first and authenticate.
Then when it comes to outreach, more to social activities, there
is a programs and events dashboard by Sage and others. So this is a bit more when it
comes to the teaching part or running workshops for, for example, editors,
writers, uploading media. Or, for example, Wikiversity, which is another Wikimedia
site which has courses. And this helps you to get an idea how much outcome, how much
effect your program has. And it's pretty useful and actually used by quite some
event organizers out there, for example, by the Wikimedia chapters in quite some
countries. You can create and manage education programs, you, as I said, track
some metrics and it's been used for more than 100, or, with more than 100 000
students and editors, over a million articles since 2010.
So this is the default view you would end up with on the programs and event dashboard.
And you can see here the campaigns on the left, for example, this was the Art and Feminism
2018 campaign. Related programs that were run. And, for example, the number of
articles created, edited, and the number of editors here, in the very end.
So you get an idea how much, actually, outcome you have.
And, last but not least, probably Eggbeater doesn't tell you anything. That was the logo we chose for
the award, and it's basically the special or lifetime award or something
like that. That's probably how you would translate it. Twinkle. It's also a
JavaScript gadget by AzaToth, Ioeth, Amathea, atlight, MusikAnimal, AmoryMeltzer.
And this is when, when you're a bit more of an experienced,
for example, Wikipedia user, it helps you a lot with maintenance tasks like dealing
reverting vandalism, unscontract– unconstructive edits. Which makes
administrative tasks way easier. It's been around for 15 years, it has pretty
good help. And to give you a simple idea, this would be the normal or nearly normal
view, I think I also have some some custom gadgets enabled, on on a Wikipedia page
when you're logged in and you can see up here, read, edit, view history.
The watch list, star button. When I enable Twinkle, you see there's another drop
down, which leads to, for example, the first link request, speedy deletion.
According to CSD, I should probably know what that means. Speedy deletion?
And a few other options like "show most recent diff", "unlink backlinks", a lot of
functionality that is way easier to access and more common, especially if you try to
revert vandalism and watch pages.
This is a photo of, at the end of that actual award ceremony, of all the people being around. There were also definitely a few
maintainers, developers, stewards of these code bases around. So not everybody was
present at that conference, but we could actually hand out some awards which were eggbeaters.
And what was this was basically about was, as I said earlier,
appreciating, all the code in between, that might not be obvious to you.
Sometimes, it might not even be obvious to you that this is custom code or a gadget,
not in the core functionality, added by a volunteer, because it is enabled by
default. And you just expect like, OK, this is probably part of the core
software, but it's actually not. And, of course, also, thanks a lot to all the
users of these tools. So if anything was interesting here or if you have more
curiosity, you will find links on meta.wikimedia.org, on the page
Coolest Tool Award. If you are generally interested in the technical parts of it,
not necessarily only as a user using these tools, I would recommend how to contribute
on mediawiki.org, which both covers how to get technically involved, but also other areas.
For example, of course, editing, but also, design, local user
groups, outreach or other things. So these are probably only the credits.
So I'm done. Thank you.
*applause*
Herald: Hello, hello? Yeah. Thank you, Andre! So do we have any questions in the
audience? If you do raise your hands and I will hand you my microphone?
Andre: Basically, I would even say feel free to ask anything. I mean, I might not
know the answer. It's not that I'm actively working in all of these tools or
anything, but I can try to find out. Q: I thank you for your speech.
Do you have a favorite tool for locations of articles, how to add them, or edit them?
Andre: A favorite tool for locations of articles, how to edit them?
Q: You can have locations for the images, but also add locations to articles on the
other side? And I find it unhandy to always copy paste a code with geolocation
and all that stuff. And I would also prefer there to have a tool where I could
click on a map and say, OK, it's there. Maybe it's existing.
Andre: That that is a good question. So, yeah, so you basically go to an article
and you hope for some button, which probably opens a map and then you say it's
here on this map. And then you edit with one click the coordinates to the article,
I guess. Right? I'm not sure myself. I would have to try to find out. Let me come
back to you later, please. Herald: Any other questions? I don't think
I see any, but so then again, thank you, have some applause for Andre please!
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