User:MarkAHershberger/Weekly reports/2010-W27

This past week, I spent at WikiSym and WikiMania.

WikiSym

A couple of highlights from WikiSym.

Increasing Wikipedia Interaction

WikiSym turned out to be much better than I expected. The highlight for me was the open session convened by Hampton Catlin in which he talked about using game design to increase involvement in Wikipedia. People often don't realize they can contribute to WikiPedia and, when they do, feel like they don't have anything to offer.

After Hampton's presentation and a bit of brainstorming, we finally landed on the idea of adding "Ask a Question" functionality to wiki pages.

This would enable people to provide quick feedback and information even if they weren't familiar with Wikipedia's arcane rules of editing but were familiar with the subject matter. (The PhD case)

Others who've read the article and have a question about some of the information would have an easily accessible way to ask questions. Others could use this feedback to create new articles or improve existing ones.

This idea had its detractors later (for example, someone claimed PhDs would never ask questions) but I still think it significantly lowers the bar for interacting with Wikipedia.

PlanetMath.org and MediaWiki

At lunch on the first day, I met Joe Corneli, (one of) the force(s) behind PlanetMath.org. After listening to his complaints about the daunting task of maintaining and even setting up a test environment for his code base, I asked what feature he would most need to be able to use MediaWiki as his replacement. He had two needs: the ability to parse La-TeX and what he called "auto linking". Other math-academic types seemed thrilled by the idea of having a Wiki that parsed La-TeX and pointed out that this might make a good way to get math content for WikiBooks.

I plan on working with him to help Joe bring PlanetMath.org into the community of sites that run MediaWiki. While he has some programming ability, he is primarily a math academic. Moving to PlanetMath.org to MediaWiki (and incorporating things like La-TeX-to-MathML output into MediaWiki as extensions) would dramatically increase the availability of mathematical knowledge available online.

Etc

Of course, there were several other people I met and other interesting projects and papers. I was especially surprised at how well the open session format worked out. The ad hoc meetings often hosted great discussions among people who shared interests that might not otherwise have met. These sessions were like a slightly more formal hall track and seemed to have the best mix of information and synergy that you expect from any conference.

WikiMania

Where WikiSym offered a good mix of academics and WMF staff and, for me, mostly focused on Wikipedia, WikiMania is where I was exposed to the broad community that thrives around Wikipedia and MediaWiki.

Code Review

It also helped me to realize one of the most urgent needs that I could help fill.

Code Review is too dependent on a single person. Up until now, I've been intimidated by the technical demands of that job, but after meeting with extension and core developers, it is clear that more hands are needed. While I dread a second trial by fire, the pain must be endured in order to (hopefully) provide a much needed second set of eyes in the end.

Related, Trevor Parscal brought up the possibility of including user testing into Code Review where new features are implemented.

Testing

Another good conversation, I had was with Trevor and Roan on the last day, They're both interested in code quality and I was a ble to talk about my (slowly progressing) Continuum installation and the needs it could fill. Roan pointed out that it would make it possible to benefit the profiling and code coverage that XDebug offered without actually installing XDebug.

Configuration

Related to the discussion about Testing was another pain point: configuration. The plethora of global variables makes testing multiple configurations difficult. After poking around a bit, I discovered the previously unknown-to-me SiteConfiguration class. If we can transition the core code to use this while providing a fallback for extensions, I think it would provide a path to sanity.

Bug Reporting

Finally, I talked briefly with Siebrand about bug reporting. He has some great ideas for increasing the quality of bug reports including adding the ability to allow end users to provide test cases. This crowd-sourcing of bug triaging would (ideally) help increase the quality and timeliness of the developer's response.

Conclusion

The most important part of a conference is the “Hall Track”. WikiSym and WikiMania are no different. This is doubly true for someone, like myself, who works remotely from the other WikiMedia staff because not only is it a good time to meet people in the broader community, the face-to-face time with other people working on the MediaWiki codebase, to trade ideas and share what we've been working on, is invaluable.