Wikipedia Hackathon

The Indian Linux Users Group, Chennai conducted the mini Hackathon on Wikipedia on last Sunday (July 23, 2017 ). As all know Wikimedia is an open source organization, which helps all of the people to enrich their knowledge.

The venue is at a cool start up in Chennai. You can see in the photos here

Yeah the drawing is so cool (Kudos to the Designer). Coming back the Hack ideas was  collected by the Shrini anna. So as per the requirements, we need to hack or develop it.Each of them assigned to the seperate tasks. Among all I was the only one student all others are working as a Software Developers.

I  hacked the UI of Tamil wikisource. Since the writers want to scroll down and select the wiki editing tools every time, thats made them a little frustrate. So I completly shifted the wiki editing tools the left side bar. And I made them appear in that position only when the writers gone to the editing section.

I done that and reported to the shrini anna. Then he told that, I can improve it by adding the toggling feature in it. So the writer or an user can hide it or show it whenever they need. So I started working on that feature.

In that mean time the we all had a great session on bots using Google Script Engine by Neechalkaran. He explained and demonstrated the bots he created and explained about working process of the Media Wiki API. You can see the click on while explanation here

After that I am back to improve that feature. I was successfully able to complete it and showed it to shrini anna. He was happy with my work. You can see his blog post here.

After that I networked with the other developers who came there and learnt about what they did and understand their work. All of them are very friendly to explain the process and then we talked about the random tech related stuffs and Shrini anna clearly explained the process in Git.This

Now I am exploring on adding Tamil typewriting keyboard to Jquery.ime of “Universal Language Selector” extension of mediaiwiki. Soon I will finish this work too.

From this I learned so many things. And lot more to learn from this Awesome community and contribute to Media Wiki.I would really like to thank the Shrini anna for his motivational words  and the encouragement.