CIS-A2K/Events/MediaWiki Training/2015

MediaWiki Training
MediaWiki Training (MWT) is a residential training workshop to groom technical leadership skills among the Indian Wikimedia community members.

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Etherpad

Check the Etherpad page

MediaWiki Train the Trainer 2015 (MWTTT2015) intends to bridge this gap by creating and grooming 'tech' leaders in the MediaWiki sphere from the existing Indian language Wikipedians. It aims to facilitate discussions around nurturing leadership regarding technical issues, filing bugs that hinder the growth of Indian language Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects, active contribution towards improving the existing MediaWiki software and understanding the importance of mediating technology for outreach activities. The four day invite-only residential event will be happening June 24-27 at Jayamahal Palace, Bangalore.

Agenda and venue

Agenda

23 June evening - Arriving, Checking-in, installation of Mediawiki & other tools

Date	7:30-8:45	9:00-11:00	11:00-13:00	13:00-14:00	14:00-15:00	15:00-19:00
June 24	Breakfast	Bugs -presentation, demo & case study	Hands-on	Lunch	Crisp talks	Peer discussions and hands-on
June 25	Breakfast	Bots - Pywiki & AWB	Hands-on	Lunch	Crisp talks	Peer discussions and hands-on
June 26	Breakfast	MediaWiki tools	Hands-on	Lunch	Crisp talks	Peer discussions and hands-on
June 27	Breakfast	Translation	Hands-on	Lunch	Crisp talks	Peer discussions and hands-on

Crisp talk topics

Quality metrics
Mobile apps
Mediawiki installation
Maps & geocoding
GLAM Wiki toolset
Etherpad
Flow
Content translation
Guided tour (ex. TWA)
Quarry
Metrics
Image manipulation
Customise Wikimedia logos into your language
APIs
Wikipedia Stack

Venue

The venue of the event was:

Jayamahal Palace,
1, Jayamahal Road,
Near Cantonment Railway Station,
Bangalore, Karnataka 560046
Phone: (080) 4058 0444
Location : http://jayamahalpalace.in/location/

Resource persons

The resource persons of this event were:

Supporter

The event was supported by:

Wikimedia India (Ravishankar.A, Program Director)
Dineshkumar Ponnusamy (Tamil Wikimedia community)

Report

23 June

Participants of the workshop gathered at Jayamahal Palace hotel in the evening of 23 June. The participants were asked to introduce themselves and tell about their works on the Wikimedia projects and other interests. After that they were told, a free and open source operating system will be required for the workshop, and they were requested to install Ubuntu on their computer. The CIS-A2K resource persons Dr. Pavanaja and Rahim helped the participants to install Ubuntu and other required softwares.

However, this day's evening session was not a part of the actual event, the participants got an opportunity to know each other and the resource people. They were also briefed about the event's aims and objectives.

24 June

Date topic: Bugs

Resource person Rahim started the day's event by discussing objective, scope, theme and the schedule of the event. After that CIS-A2K programme officer Tanveer also shared his views on the scope, aims and objectives of the event.

First session: Bugs on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects

The first session of the day on tracking, reporting and dealing with bugs and technical problematics issues on Wikipedia and other sister projects. In the session participants were told/taught about Phabricator (and Bugzilla). They were taught how to deal with a bug, what should be the procedures to get help on solving an issue. In a demonstration Rahim showed how to register (or sign in) at Phabricator and create or participate in the existing discussions. Participants were asked to—

Report bugs (if they find any)
Subscribe to other open threads.

More than 20 bugs were reported during the training. Some of those are:

Last session: Crisp talk

In the last session of the day all the participants were asked to prepare a chart with a list of the things they wish to learn or discuss in the coming three days of the event.

Crisp talks

The day's event was ended with a demonstration and discussion on using Wikipedia mobile apps. Participants were asked to check if they can see the home page and other pages and other pages of their local Wikis (eg. Kannada, Telugu, Bengali) in the Wikipedia mobile app, or if they are facing any issue to use the app in the mother-tongue.

25 June

Date topic: Bots

Today's topic of discussion and exercise was "bots". Participants were taught about bots and semi-bots used on Wikipedia (and other sister Wikimedia Foundation project) such as PyWikibot and AutoWikiBrowser.

PyWikiBot session

The first session was on PyWikibot. Rahim conducted this session. Firstly he asked to install required softwares including Drupal 7, those were needed to run PyWikibot on Ubuntu. After successful installation of the softwares, Rahim asked to sign in to Wikipedia using PyWikibot login page. After that he showed to make edits using PyWikibot. He also showed how to add and replace text using the bot.

AutoWikiBroswer session

Pavanaja was the trainer in this session. He started his speech by explaining what the AutoWikiBrowser is and how does it help in Wikipedia editing. He also briefly discussed about the scope of semi-automated edits performed by AutoWikiBrowser. as Dr. Pavanaja was (is) a Kannada Wikipedia admin, he used the Kannada Wikipedia to demonstrate and explain

Introduction to TWA, Quarry, Flow

In the last session, participants were introduced about The Wikipedia adventure and Quarry. TWA is a portal where editors can learn about basic Wikipedia editing skills. This include introduction to Wikipedia, making minor changes, core policies of Wikipedia, communicating with others, process of getting help etc.

Quarry is a public querying interface, where users can get statistics related to Wikipedia editing, using simple SQL queries. Participants were showed how to use queries to get result from the tool. Sundar talked on some of the works he and his community are doing.

Rahim also discussed the Flow discussion system, which was recently introduced by the Wikimedia Foundation in some Wikis. A "test" flow discussion thread was created and the participants were asked to post in it.

Wikimedia India session

Ravi and Sundar, from Wikimedia India and Tamil Wikimedia community talked in the last session of the day. Ravi discussed the works Wikimedia India has been doing in India, he also shared his views on using bots in the Wikimedia projects.

26 June

Harsh's session

This was the third day of the training sessions. Harsh Kothari, an invited Wikipedian was the main resource person of the day. He started his long but interesting session by talking on HTML, Javascript and WikiCreole. He asked the partipants if they were familiar with basic HTML and Javascript. Then he explained the "inspect element" property of browsers (he mainly demonstrated it using Mozilla Firefox). He explained in details, how some CSS and other properties can be changed/revised from this section.

Then Harsh talked on user subpages and sandbox. He asked to open user JS and user CSS page. In the user CSS page, he asked to add a few simple lines of CSS codes to make design-related changes on the Wikipedia interface. He also showed how to import and use userscripts in a user's personal script pages. Then he taught using MediaWiki Loader to use interwiki scripts (scripts from other wikis).

A few scripts he discussed:

HotCat
Twinkle
Reference Tooltip
Edit count scripts (including a userscript created by him)

Hands on session on InkScape and GIMP

Rahim conduced sessions on InkScape and GIMP after that. The participants were given a couple of tasks (such as creating photo collpase/montage).

27 June

It was the last day of the workshop and the topic of the day was Translate Wiki and translation in the Wikimedia projects. Translate Wiki is a platform powered by MediaWiki. At the end of the third day's session, participants, who did not have a Translate Wiki account already, were asked to register an account, and to make a few edits, so that they could- a) become familiar about the tools and b) get "confirmed" user right before the actual day's workshop.

Translation Wiki

The participants were asked to open the Translate Wiki website. It was found that despite yesterday's request to try to get auto-confirmed right, a few users did not follow it. The resource person Rahim explained in brief the idea of Translation Wiki, and how the platform can be used to translate content and pages of MediaWiki, Meta and other Wikimedia projects. The participants were also taught how to translate on that website.

After that, they were asked to make at least 50 translations from English to their mother-tongue (here "50 translations" mean translating 50 phrases). It was found that due to poor internet connection issue, a good number of people were facing difficulties to connect, reload or save their edits. For this reason the process was slightly delayed. Finally most of the participants were able to complete their tasks. The person who made highest number of translation made 122 edits in the given time.

Learning experiences

The Translation Wiki was the last session of the workshop. After that the participants were asked to narrate their experiences of these 4 days and what they think that they have learned in these 4 days.

Photo session

After the formal ending of the workshop the participants gathered for a photo session, where a few group photos were taken.

Gallery

Please see images on Wikimedia Commons.

Feedback

After the completion of the event, the participants were sent a feedback form and were asked to answer a few questions such as:

An overall feedback about the program;
Rating the sessions: Bug triaging, Bots (AWB, PyWikibot), MediaWiki tools and extensions, Translation;
What is your takeaway from the sessions, rate accordingly
What could have been improved?
What would you expect from the next MWTTT, if organized at the end of 2015 or later?

While providing an over-all feedback of the program— User:Csyogi told—

Program was great and being first of its kind, it offered good technical opportunity to get started with Mediawiki in general and specifically few tools like PWB, translatewiki, etc.

User:Jnanaranjan_sahu told—

The program was excellent. All of us got technical ideas about the basic stuffs that need to be done.

User:Praveen_Illa told that he found Bug triaging, and the bot session helpful. User:Manojk appreciated the effort, but also felt that the overall package of the program could be improved.

CIS-A2K team has studied all the feedbacks and suggestions and we'll try to make positive changes based upon these feedback in our upcoming events and workshop.