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Software tools for wikis beyond MediaWiki and its extensions

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Software tools for wikis beyond MediaWiki and its extensions
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A showcase of software implemented outside of the MediaWiki and MediaWiki extensions code repositories. Wikimedia's communities have diverse interests, use cases and technical needs. Volunteer developers experiment with new ideas, build solutions and bridge workflow gaps across our software stack. This session is a showcase of a variety of impressive software solutions implemented outside of the MediaWiki and MediaWiki extensions code repositories.
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
and he will talk about some cool tools related to Wikimedia stuff that you, as maybe Wikimedia users, could use and do good stuff. So let's have some applause for André, please.
André Batorin. Oh, it works. Right? Perfect. Sorry for that. Thanks for coming. I'm André. 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. And the 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 beforehand there were a few people who came together and tried to find categories and the 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 media wiki installation on your server, some stuff might be to 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 might be on separate wikis.
So the first category 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 has 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 the session. Sorry for that. I'll go back to this screenshot, where you can hopefully imagine how things should look like. The next one would be Hotcat, which is a pretty tiny code base 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? 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, 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're 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 the 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 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 edit, a totally random one on English Wikipedia, and you can see here that this is the history of that article, called Gilberto Hernandez Ortega.
And this is the last edit that Internet Archive Bots 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 ten.
That's page views, by Music Animal, Kaldari, Marcelo Rifons. 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 you want to have statistics. Maybe not necessarily about, well also, some people want to find out which articles are the most popular ones on some Wikipedia. Some people want to find that out. But for me, for example, it's pretty useful when there are,
when it comes to technical documentation on MediaWiki.org, and I wonder, okay, 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 yeah, in life, these are two pages I'm comparing on meta.wikimedia.org. You can see that I'm looking at the daily statistics
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 Request for New Languages. And so here you can see on which day, how many times those two pages were accessed.
Then there's Quick Statements by Magnus.
Yeah, 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 run several commands in a row, batch edits basically, semi-automatically. And there's also other tools like OpenRefine or the Disambiguator, 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 Leggo KTM because once upon a time, there was, for example, a service by Google to search explicitly like public codes,
source code repositories. And we wanted to have that, especially for Wikimedia code, so everything that's in Wikimedia Git, Garrett. I don't think it supports stuff that
or 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.
Yeah, Garrett, 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 great use case we actually have is when some function gets deprecated
or then 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 grab and try to find that. But this makes it especially for most people, I guess, who don't have a complete checkout 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 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, Juvi, Nischlihan, Vivek.
It allows you to upload photos to Wikimedia Commons directly from your mobile phone or from your smartphone. You can also, of course, add categories, view nearby missing images.
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. 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. I don't think I'm going to play that YouTube video for you now,
plus I haven't sorted out the sound beforehand, I realize. 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 filtered 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 Hape J. Sohman.
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.
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 teaching parts or running workshops 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 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 Agbeta doesn't tell you anything. That was the logo we chose for the awards 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 and this is 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, and constructive 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 custom gadgets enabled on the 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 at the end of an 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 act beaters. And what 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 you just expect like okay 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 Wikipedia.org on the page coolest tool award. If you're generally interested in the technical parts of it
not necessarily only as a user using these tools I would recommend how to contribute on MediaWikiorg which both covers how to get technically involved but also other areas for example of course editing but also design, local user groups, outreach, other things.
So these are probably only the credits so I'm done. Thank you.
Hello hello. 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. 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 these tools or anything
but I can try to find out. Hi there, thank you for your speech. Do you have a favorite tool for locations of articles? How to add them or edit them? A favorite tool for locations of articles?
How to edit them? 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 okay it's there.
Maybe it's existing. That is a good question. 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 add it 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. Any other questions? I don't think I see any but so then again thank you.
Have some applause for Henry please.