Report ThessHack – Wikimedia hackathon

For the Greek version read here.

The Wikimedia Community User Group Greece in cooperation with SheSharp Greece, the Greek section of the Open Knowledge Foundation and the official student branch of the ACM at Aristotle University, along with the support of Wikimedia Österreich, organised a code editing marathon (hackathon) on Saturday, October 15 in Thessaloniki.

The event was entitled ThessHack - Wikimedia Hackathon. ThessHack aimed to improve the functioning of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia and its related sites that support it, to correct problems and to create new tools that will make more content available or make contribution easier.

The event was divided into two parts.

In the first part, through lectures with slides, the attendees were given the ability and opportunity to learn about the technical aspects of Wikipedia from developers, to take a deep dive into related technologies (Mediawiki API, python, etc.) and generally into Open Source philosophy and Open Knowledge.

In the second part, participants in groups had the opportunity, with help and guidance, to try out these technical aspects and develop their skills that could be useful in other fields. Even participants without programming knowledge could help in areas such as translation and adaptation of the Wikipedia software. Participation was great considering the fact that the topic was very specialized. Approximately 100 people attended the talks and participated in the hackathon. The results were very satisfactory and encouraging as developers without any particular exposure to Wikipedia apps were able to understand how they work and correct small errors, showing abilities to contribute in collaboration with others. Also many began to create new features or developed ideas that may be implemented in the future. The two programmers with the most significant contributions that showed skills at reading and fixing code that until that moment was unfamiliar to them, were given scholarships to participate in the international developers’ conference Wikimedia Hackathon 2017 in Vienna in May 2017. Two students won free tickets to the tech conference Voxxed Days in Thessaloniki. T-shirts were given to other participants.

Scholarships for participation in Wikimedia Hackathon 2017 in Vienna were won by:

• Krystalakos Odyssefs
• Tsalampounis Fotios

Free participation in Voxxed Days in Thessaloniki was won by:

• Karatakis Panagiotis
• Pierros Ioannis

The participants mainly developed code for Android and pywikibot, while some groups of programmers were involved with the translation of tools into Greek. We thank all the organizers, the Aristotle University Research Dissemination Centre for providing us its Amphitheater 2 Centre and e-FOOD.gr for food sponsorship.

We note that this was the first wiki hackathon organized in Greece ,and internationally the first local hackathon connected with the annual international Wikimedia Hackathon. The success of this event prepares us for significant contributions by Greeks developers and also spurs us to organise even bigger events in this field in the future.