Jakoblog — Das Weblog von Jakob Voß

Wikidata documentation on the 2017 Hackathon in Vienna

At Wikimedia Hackathon 2017, a couple of volunteers sat together to work on the help pages of Wikidata. As part of that Wikidata documentation sprint. Ziko and me took a look at the Wikidata glossary. We identified several shortcomings and made a list of rules how the glossary should look like. The result are the glossary guidelines. Where the old glossary partly replicated Wikidata:Introduction, the new version aims to allow quick lookup of concepts. We already rewrote some entries of the glossary according to these guidelines but several entries are outdated and need to be improved still. We changed the structure of the glossary into a sortable table so it can be displayed as alphabetical list in all languages. The entries can still be translated with the translation system (it took some time to get familiar with this feature).

We also created some missing help pages such as Help:Wikimedia and Help:Wikibase to explain general concepts with regard to Wikidata. Some of these concepts are already explained elsewhere but Wikidata needs at least short introductions especially written for Wikidata users.

Image taken by Andrew Lih (CC-BY-SA)

Introduction to Phabricator at Wikimedia Hackathon

This weekend I participate at Wikimedia Hackathon in Vienna. I mostly contribute to Wikidata related events and practice the phrase "long time no see", but I also look into some introductionary talks.

In the late afternoon of day one I attended an introduction to Phabricator project management tool given by André Klapper. Phabricator was introduced in Wikimedia Foundation about three years ago to replace and unify Bugzilla and several other management tools.

Phabricator is much more than an issue tracker for software projects (although it is mainly used for this purpose by Wikimedia developers). In summary there are tasks, projects, and teams. Tasks can be tagged, assigned, followed,discussed, and organized with milestones and workboards. The latter are Kanban-boards like those I know from Trello, waffle, and GitHub project boards.

Phabricator is Open Source so you can self-host it and add your own user management without having to pay for each new user and feature (I am looking at you, JIRA). Internally I would like to use Phabricator but for fully open projects I don’t see enough benefit compared to using GitHub.

P.S.: Wikimedia Hackathon is also organized with Phabricator. There is also a task for blogging about the event.