Wikimania 2005 hacking days

from the Hacking days schedule on the Wikimania wiki

There were 4 days of hacking, starting on July 31 and continuing until August 3rd. The number of people in attendance grew as the days passed, and just about everyone stayed through the end of the main conference. Hacking was often done outside in the paved courtyard; occasionally inside one of the conference rooms.

Day 1 - Feature feast

The first hacking day is dedicated to MediaWiki and site feature framework and extensions. It may involve:

• Wikitext talks, standards, visions, rants, overviews of other Wiki packages.
• Integration needs and generic suitability, possibilities to embed MediaWiki into other software and vice versa.
• In-depth analysis and guidelines on extension writing. Current extensions, hooks and insights.
• Various data models for various data.
• Interfaces: making external ones (like DHTML-enabled wikibrowser), extending internal one (MonoBook isn't The End ;-)

Day 2 - Sysadmin marathon

Second day is all about site operation and administrivia. All (really all) of it is just about how servers work, how they should work, how cluster should be managed and should it be managed. Our major task is about making cluster more manageable, document pet projects and just make everything function properly.

Day 3 - Oversized talks

Here we'd talk about growing pains. Real, accute PITAs and headaches:

• How to scale our data (Terabytes soon, eh, maybe even now! :)
• How to scale various processes (editing, fighting vandals, ...)
• Serving more and more of visitors and pageview
• how should that be done with internal cluster network
• ... and how to have more people working on all that...

Day 4 - Exploded wiki

Our fourth day is for crunching distribution troubles and more global-visions. How should we work with multiple datacenters, how should we distribute multiple wikis across multiple oceans, how should communication be done there, nice cache strategies for that; how can we interface with other wiki platforms and tools. Some devs from other wikis will talk about their ideas. And if we have time, sure, we will talk about total world domination, bittorrent for your wiki (wiki@home project) and other crazy stuff, as 4 days of such hacking talks are quite a lot ;-)

Day 4 also included a roundtable discussion with representatives from a half-dozen wiki projects, after the other Exploded wiki talks.