San Francisco Wikipedia hackathon, Jan. 20-22, and Wikimedia integration ideas for DW

[brainwane]

I'm helping run a hackathon in San Francisco in two months, and wanted to let Dreamwidth developers know about it in case you want to come!

Developers in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, you can create cool hacks with and on Wikipedia. Our first San Francisco hackathon is happening Jan. 20-22, and we'll be there teaching you about MediaWiki (our software), about our API and about our framework for JavaScript feature development. Learn to reuse Wikipedia content in your own apps, create new functionality for every Wikipedia user around the world, or just tailor your own experience.

We're going to create a registration form really soon but I wanted to tell you about this so you can put it on your calendar.

I figure you folks have better ideas for Wikipedia integration than I do (I didn't see any in Bugzilla but maybe they aren't there yet?). I know there's a WordPress plugin, PhotoCommons, that makes it easy for bloggers to browse Wikimedia Commons for freely licensed images to dress up their posts. Maybe replicating that functionality in Dreamwidth would be cool? I've added it to the Suggestions queue.

Of course you don't need to come to the event to work on MediaWiki or on integration with Wikimedia sites -- our site has an intro tutorial and we are on IRC at #mediawiki on FreeNode and so on. But if you came to the event, that would be cool too. Open data!

Comments

[pauamma]

Kinda related: http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3707

[azurelunatic]

This sounds like fun!

I'm not much of a dev myself, but I am both one of the mobile units in the SF Bay Area, and one of the regulars in the suggestions queue, so I may show up to see what's possible, and then let my imagination run wild. Could be there are some things that would also go nicely with some of the planned things.

You know what might be interesting, freely licensed and topical images for people who need to snag a little 100x100 something for an entry that doesn't quite match any of their existing icons. *ponders*

[brainwane]

Images for icons -- that sounds mighty cool! And to sort of reverse that, "you made a really nice icon -- wanna upload it to Commons so others can share? Here's the button that'll upload it while adding all the relevant metadata for attribution."

I do hope you come. It's totally cool for people to either show up with projects in mind or to just turn up and let the wind blow them about. :-)