MediaWiki Training 2017

Posted by Tito Dutta and Ananth Subray at Mar 01, 2017 12:00 AM |
MediaWiki Training 2017 conducted in Bangalore

The third iteration of the MediaWiki Training was conducted on 24-26 February at Bangalore, India (the first and second iterations of MWT was conducted in 2015 and 2016). 16  participants from 9 Indic Wikimedia communities attended the workshop. The following graph shows the participation from different Indic Wikimedia communities.

chart1.png

Malayalam Wikimedian User:Viswaprabha attended the workshop as a resource person. On behalf of the Centre for Internet and Society, User:Titodutta and User:Ananth_subray were the resource persons.

 

== Sessions ==

 

On the first day, the following topics were discussed

 

=== First day: technical audit ===

 

Introduction to MediaWiki Training: The first session of the day started with introducing the aims of objectives of MediaWiki Training 2017.

 

Introduction to MediaWiki software and platform: Following this User:Titodutta and User:Viswaprabha discused the MediaWiki software, different extensions, LocalSettings.php and some other important configurations related to MediaWiki.

 

Wikipedia technical audit: Wikipedia technical audit was the central theme of the day, and the phrase “Wikipedia technical audit” was coined by Rahul Desmukh of IIT Bombay. He suggested that once in a year a Wikimedia community should do its technical audit, when the community would solve issues like deadend pages, orphan pages, uncategorized pages, script errors, infobox errors, reference errors, and other errors and issues related to a Wikimedia project.

On the first day of the MWT workshop we discussed these issues and errors and how to solve these.

 

== Second day ==

On the second day of third iteration of MWT, we began with problems faced in different languages with respect to Templates and Imfoboxes. And continued with teaching how to create the basic info boxes. Each participant were thought how to add two digits in a single template and creation of LUA templates. Later we had thought them how to create a basic template by adding a label and data, and even localizing of some templates were also done.

 

After this use of Wikidata was thought and INfoboxes using wikidata.

 

Post lunch some of the tools and their uses and applications were thought Copyvio, Duplication detector, Google books citation, Citation generator and Hay's tool directory

 

 

== Third day ==

On the third day of MWT 2017, the first session started with a session where User:Viswaprabha discussed Wikimedia Labs Quarry (https://quarry.wmflabs.org/)

 

The major points of the session were:

  • Introduction to Quarry.

  • Importance of Quarry

  • Coding simple quarry.

User:Viswaprabha also showed how to integrate Google spreadsheet with Quarry. He showed a couple of examples where he had the most of it using the tricks.