Jan Ainali

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Tag: wikimedia nederland

2025 Dutch mini hackathon

Posted on by Jan Ainali

Last Saturday, there was a one-day mini hackathon at the Wikimedia Nederland office in Utrecht. Just like the last time I went to one of these, I wanted to summarize the things I hacked on. As before, the atmosphere was great: relaxed and inspiring. The event space they have is working great, and in true Dutch style, the logistics worked great. I basically completed four tasks of various sizes and starting points. Completed may also be generous, that nothing is thoroughly tested and there is likely bugs to fix as soon as they get used. Thanks to User:TheDJ who helped me several times when I felt I was stuck.

Migrating to Codeberg

Last year I made a small animation for the Wikidata 12th birthday. As this have small and simple repository, I felt like a good starting task of the day was to migrate it to Codeberg. This was straightforward and just needed some minor adjustments in the README. The new thing for me was to learn how the concept of hosted “pages” works on Codeberg, and I got it working after just a few struggles. Feeling good from getting some administrative tasks that is a part of some overarching goals for me, I went on to a slightly more challenging task.

Adapting the animation for MediaWiki

A static HTML is nice, but what if I could get the animation onto a wiki? I lately learned about TemplateStyles, so this was a way to test my skills. After some struggle with changing ContentModels of a page on the wiki and sanitizing the CSS, my templatestyle showed up nicely on a test page.

Making and showing slides onwiki

This was my big goal for the day. I have enjoyed the reveal.js project and the way one can make very simple but still beautiful slides. What if I could do something similar, even if it is a lot simpler in turns of functionality, using user scripts and template styles to make it possible to create the slides onwiki and then show them in-place. No need for other presentation software or “uploading” slides. Easy to share and in a true wiki spirit also possible to collaborate or improve upon.

This turned out to be more difficult, mostly because I am not great at Javascript, but after some headbutting and repeated trial and error testing to see what was working or not I got something that has the basic functionality. With this I was positively surprised, because I wasn’t convinced that it would be possible at all when the day started (or when I failed to make progress in the middle too).

With a userscript, a templatestyle and some special html elements in the wiki page syntax it can be used. Just press the Play slideshow button and navigate with left and right arrow keys. I also spent too much time to get the previous animation to show up on a slide. It’s not a great solution but I think it fits a hackathon (see slide 6) and it is not really the part of the framework I will start using in the future so see that as a fun bonus.

Making SPARQL queries smaller

This project was almost done when I arrived and my original plan was just to get it deployed on toolforge. My initial driver to start this was just to make a tool to convert a query to a one-line query, as some other tools are requiring it and fixing them manually (even with good find and replace tools) were getting tedious. Once started, it was impossible to unsee other things that could also be cleaned up. So there I was with a tool working fairly good locally. And I am pretty sure I was this far when Albin shared a similar tool that he already had deployed, so I stopped working on it. But with some time over at the hackathon, and unable to find his tool at the moment, I added a few more options to my tool and then got it deployed at sparql-minimizer.toolforge.org.

WikiConNL 2022

Posted on by Jan Ainali

I had the joy to participate in my first ever WikiConNL two weeks ago. It was a really good day and I turned out to be more busy than I initially anticipated. The conference was fairly well attended and had four parallel tracks so it almost felt like a mini Wikimania. Luckily for me, only one track was in English so when I wasn’t part of something myself, I wasn’t paralyzed by Fear Of Missing Out.

Wikipedia and sustainability, how to increase knowledge on climate change?

This was the main reason I attended, a long session that targeted newcomers and external organizations. I based it on a previous session I had made with Alex Stinson, and also borrowed a few slides from one of Daniel Mietchen’s presentations. Besides the introductory presentation to get the participants up to speed, we had a discussion and then an entirely new exercise. This was a novel thing that I recently came up with (inspired by the ever so thought-provoking Michael Peter Edson).

The exercise works like this, everyone pairs up and then in turn tell the other person what issue in sustainability they are most passionate about. When both have had the chance to share, it is up to each to find an article on Wikipedia that best matches that interest. Lastly, both persons add both the found articles to their watch list.

The idea is that this is a low stake, low friction action that can start their journey into the Wikimedia movement. They get something concrete to act on, without the risk of messing up some of the policies, and also makes a mental commitment by putting something on their list.

WikiSpeedRuns

WikiSpeedRuns is a fun game format where the idea is to, as quickly as possible, navigate between two articles. After a qualification round, I made it to the semi-final, but ended on a shared third place.

At least I enjoyed the game I lost. Photo by: Sebastiaan ter Burg from Utrecht, The Netherlands, CC BY 2.0,

Wikimedia NL signs the Wikimedia Affiliates Environmental Sustainability Covenant‎

With the signing, I was invited on stage to briefly explain what it was about. I think this was my entire speech:

In a nutshell, the Sustainability Covenant is like the Paris Agreement for the Wikimedia movement. With this signing, we agree towards each other to take actions. The actions are in broad strokes; drastically reduce our emissions, improving the coverage of the climate crisis on Wikimedia projects and to share our learnings on this journey with each other.

Me giving my speech, photo by: Sebastiaan ter Burg from Utrecht, The Netherlands, CC BY 2.0,

I am thrilled about Wikimedia Nederland signing this, and I would like that more affiliates signed it too. I am a bit ashamed that Wikimedia Sverige hasn’t done this yet. Perhaps I need to make a motion for the general assembly…

Govdirectory poster

Our first poster session. While I am happy with the design, only when I saw it on the wall I noticed that I forgot the link to govdirectory.org. Unfortunately, during the day the poster session was placed a bit off the main action, but later it was moved nearer to where the crowd gathered.

Hackathon showcase

As I mentioned earlier I had created my first user script on the mini hackathon and got to show it in the showcase. It seemed to get a good reception, and the nested query got on “Ooh!” from the audience. There were also other great tools in the showcase.

Other sessions

I also had the chance to participate in the audience in some sessions.

How the Ukrainian Wikimedia community is thinking about the future amidst the war

This session was really moving. It was humbling to hear how the Wikimedians in Ukraine continued to edit through all their hardships.

Wikimedia Europe

This was an unscheduled short talk that was taking the place when a remote speaker had problem with the internet. I was a bit surprised they are going for a system with the office in Brussels and the general assemblies in Prague. After working in the European Parliament, I have seen the downsides of having to travel for the voting sessions first hand.

Wikimedia’s role in the climate crisis

This was a great short talk by Lukas Mezger. Lukas has mastered the skill of creating a sense of urgency and have spent a long time finding the facts about our movement. This meant that this was the perfect talk to have just before the signing of the Covenant.