But you just said you were virtually present?⌗

Well, let me educate you a bit. So Wikimedia Foundation organizes various events every year, one of them being the Hackathon, and thats called Wikimedia Hackathon.

Well whats Wikimania then?⌗

Quoting from Wikimania official page itself:

Wikimania is the annual conference celebrating all the free knowledge projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation - Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, MediaWiki, Wikibooks …etc with days of conferences, discussions, meetups, training, and workshops. Hundreds of volunteers and Free Knowledge leaders from around the world gather to discuss issues, report on new projects and approaches, and exchange ideas.

Anyways so every year, they host two events (that I know of currently), one being Wikimedia Hackathon, and the other being Wikimania. This year (2023) the Wikimania conference (which also hosted the Wikimania Hackathon for its developers) was held in Singapore, meanwhile Wikimedia Hackathon was held in Athens, Greece, around 19-20 May 2023 (which I couldn’t attend due to lack of awareness about the hackathon, back then).

So Whats the Indic Wikimedia Hackathon?⌗

Indic Wikimedia Hackathon is a hackathon organized by the Indic Wikimedia community, which is a community of Wikimedians from India primarily. This year it was held in Chennai, India, on 16-17 December 2023. More about it here

My Experience⌗

So I was really excited about this one, because this was my first physical hackathon, and I was really looking forward to it. I was really excited to meet my mentors, and other contributors, and also to learn from them. For the hackathon, I was working on the project ToolWatch which I had started working on during the Wikimania Hackathon.

Day 1⌗

So the first day started with me reaching Chennai the night before lol, after which I went to the hotel, and slept. The next day I woke up early, and went to the venue. The venue was really nice, and the organizers were really helpful. We had a small introduction session, where everyone introduced themselves, and their projects, followed by the hackathon itself.

I won’t go into the details of the hackathon, but I’ll just say that it was really fun. I got to meet a lot of new people, and also got to learn a lot from them.

Day 2⌗

The second day was more of a fun day, where we had a lot of fun activities. We had people from Wikimedia pay a visit and educate about the current projects and the future of Wikimedia.

This was also the day when we had to present our projects. It went well, and I got a lot of feedback from the mentors, and other contributors (really liked this part).

Following up on our Toolwatch project⌗

So during the hackathon we (Gopa, Punith, a new joinee Rudraksh and I) were working on Toolwatch (you should be familiar with this by now, if not you can refer my previous blog here).

We updated the designs and stylings of the tool, added pagination and improved the search bar functionality.

We also planned to add a new feature where if the tool goes down (or is not responding), we’ll send a mail to the tool owner, notifying them about the same, but this turned out to be a little bit complicated than we thought. We had a long discussion about this (Sohom joined virtually), and we were able to come up with a solution, but we couldn’t implement it due to lack of time.

So what was the issue?⌗

The issue was, initially we planned to send the email on the moment itself the tool goes unavailable, but this doesn’t seem right now does it? What if the tool is down for a few seconds, and then it comes back up, and we send the mail to the owner, this would be a false alarm, and would be annoying for the owner.

So we came up with a solution, where we’ll send the mail only if the tool is down for a certain amount of time (say a week). But for this we may need to store the history of the tool status (like it should have 7 days worth of data, saying the tool was available/unavailable on this day), and then we send the email. Also we planned to make a graph out of the data fetched, so that the owner can see the status of the tool over the past week.

But here’s the tricky part. The database we were using was SQLlite, which is a SQL based database (duh), and has data types like INTEGER, TEXT, REAL, BLOB. Now we can’t really store the data as ARRAY or OBJECT here, which turned out to be a problem for us. Now I know, I know some of you will say Why not store the data in String format? Well we thought about it, but we never wanted to take the pain to parse the data from the string, and then use it.

So now we’ve planned to first migrate the database from SQLlite to some other database, and then first try to generate a day vs status graph of the same, and then we’ll move forward with the email part.

Conclusion⌗

So that was about it. I really enjoyed the hackathon, and I’m really looking forward to the next one. I’m really thankful to the organizers for organizing such a great event, and also to everyone for helping me out throughout the hackathon.

Here’s a picture of us during the hackathon: