Between the Brackets: a MediaWiki Podcast: Recent Episodes
Yaron Koren
A podcast about the people and ideas behind the MediaWiki software. Interviews with developers and users of MediaWiki, both for Wikimedia sites (Wikipedia, Wikidata, etc.) and the many uses of MediaWiki in companies, organizations, government agencies, etc.
🕑 1 hour 9 minutes
Bertrand Gorge is the co-founder of Triple Performance, a (currently) French-language-only wiki that holds resources for farmers. He also co-runs the company Neayi, which manages Triple Performance.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Triple Performance
- Neayi
- "Rotations en grandes cultures" (Triple Performance article about crop rotation)
- Neayi GitHub account
- Triple Performance Google Spreadsheets add-on
- Triple Performance Docker image
🕑 1 hour 10 minutes
Asaf Bartov is the lead program officer for the Emerging Wikimedia Communities project of the Community Development Team at the Wikimedia Foundation. He also runs Project Ben-Yehuda, which has been putting Hebrew-language texts online since 1999, and the Nemala project, which publishes Hebrew translations of Ukrainian-language works.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- "Wikimania 2019 - Asaf Bartov" (episode of the podcast Scuola di Pensiero)
- Project Ben-Yehuda
- Nemala initiative
- WMF Community Development Team
- WikiLearn
- Wikimania 2023 program
- "Defending our wikis against weaponized generative AI" (talk by Asaf at Wikimania CEE Meeting 2024)
🕑 1 hour 42 minutes
Valerio Bozzolan is a software developer and Linux adminstrator as well as the president of the Italian Linux Society, the founder and head of Wikimedians for Software Freedom, a member of the volunteer technical commission of Wikimedia Italy, and an open source consultant for Wikimedia Switzerland.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Istituto tecnico industriale statale Amedeo Avogadro (Italian Wikipedia article)
- Chiedi il rimborso del sistemo (in)operativo! ("Ask for a refund for the (non-)operating system!")
- PeerTube
- Wikimedians for software freedom
- "2021:Present and future" page
- "2022:Present and future" page
- FLOSS-Exchange listing
- video.linux.it (powered by PeerTube)
- Phorge homepage
🕑 1 hour 7 minutes
Paul Cereghino is a restoration ecologist for the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service. He also supports the development and adminstration of the Salish Sea Restoration wiki.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Salish Sea Restoration wiki
- National Marine Fisheries Service Wikipedia article
- Salish Sea Wikipedia article
- "Do you love seafood? Here's how to eat it responsibly" (NPR article, September 2024)
- "I Want To Eat Fish Responsibly. But The Seafood Guides Are So Confusing!" (NPR article, March 2017)
🕑 23 minutes
It's another BTB Digest, with highlights from five recent episodes. Jeffrey Wang discusses competing for European users, Taavi Väänänen describes the RealMe extension, Megan Cutrofello defends video game wikis with "spoilers", Moritz Schubotz analyzes MediaWiki as a math publishing tool, Viktor Schelling reminisces on the early days of a consulting company, and more!
🕑 2 hours
Alex Stinson is Lead Program Strategist for the Campaigns Team at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikimedia Foundation Campaigns Team
- WikiProjects Campaign
- PetScan
- List-Building Tool
- Research on Language-Agnostic Topic Classification
- Esperanza (2005-2006 project on Wikipedia)
- CampaignEvents MediaWiki extension
- Programs & Events Dashboard description
- Programs & Events Dashboard
🕑 1 hour 35 minutes
Brent Laabs (user name Labster) is chair of the board and acting president of the WikiTide Foundation, the nonprofit foundation that runs the wiki farm Miraheze.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Miraheze
- WikiTide Foundation
- Between the Brackets Episode 31: John Lewis
- All The Tropes wiki
- Miraheze-WikiTide merger FAQ
- Requests for Comment/Reorganization of Miraheze (December 2023)
- Requests for Comment/Miraheze's name and branding (April 2024)
- WikiForge
- DynamicPageList3 MediaWiki extension
- Miraheze finance page
- Miraheze donation page
🕑 1 hour 3 minutes
Viktor Schelling is the Senior Principal MediaWiki Developer at Pegasystems.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Pegasystems Wikipedia article
- Wikibase Solutions
- FlexForm MediaWiki extension
- Open CSP
🕑 1 hour 28 minutes
Dr. Moritz Schubotz (developer username Physikerwelt) is head of research at the mathematics department at FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure. He is the author or co-author of the MediaWiki extensions Math and MathSearch, and the Mathoid application, among others.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Dr. Moritz Schubotz CV and publications
- Math MediaWiki extension
- MathSearch MediaWiki extension
- MathML Wikipedia article
- MathJax Wikipedia article
- Mathoid
- The MaRDI (Mathematical Research Data Initiative) Portal (Wikibase instance)
- zbMATH Open
- Wikimedia Community User Group Math
🕑 1 hour 43 minutes
Megan Cutrofello, better known as River, returns to the podcast. She is a freelance wiki developer who has worked with Gamepedia, Fandom and wiki.gg, among others.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- wiki.gg
- "What's going on with gaming communities moving from Fandom to Wiki.gg?" (2023 Reddit thread)
- River Writes blog
- The Sea of Thieves Wiki
- DRUID (Data Representation Ultra Infobox Design) infoboxes
🕑 21 minutes
It's a BTB Digest episode! Hear clips from five recent episodes. Steve Schneider describes his remarkably AI-centered approach to teaching, Birgit Müller boasts about her team's success in improving code review, Srishti Sethi considers the usefulness of developer outreach programs, Alan Ang lists the steps in getting a knowledge base onto Wikidata, Guillaume Coulombe compares MediaWiki expertise to martial arts, and more!
🕑 38 minutes
Taavi Väänänen is a site reliability engineer in the Wikimedia Cloud Services team at the Wikimedia Foundation. In 2022, when he was still just a volunteer contributor, he was named Tech Contributor of the Year by Jimmy Wales.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Taavi Väänänen homepage
- Wikimedia Toolforge
- CentralAuth MediaWiki extension
- RealMe MediaWiki extension
- "Fediverse" Wikipedia article
🕑 1 hour 28 minutes
Jeffrey Wang returns to the podcast to talk about his new-ish job at Microsoft, his much older job as head of MyWikis, the upcoming MediaWiki conference, AI, and various other things.
Some of the topics discussed:
- MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference 2024
- MyWikis
- MyWikis Europe
- "Why People Don't Like Fandom Wikis" (2022 blog post)
- "Microsoft Azure is a ~$56 billion business" (Runtime article)
- "MediaWiki @ Microsoft" (talk by Jeffrey at EMWCon Spring 2023)
- Canasta
- GitHub Copilot
🕑 1 hour 9 minutes
Guillaume Coulombe is the head of Procédurable, a process consulting company with a focus on open source software and open data, and an even more specific focus on MediaWiki.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Procédurable
- Arbre-Évolution Coop
- "Understanding wiki collaboration in Quebec healthcare organizations" (2012 paper by Régis Barondeau)
- Wiki maraîcher
- "Autoconstruction" (DIY) portal
- Fab Labs Québec
- Le violon de Jos
- Collection of songs
🕑 1 hour 13 minutes
Alan Ang and Kris Litson (pictured, left to right) are both employees at Wikimedia Deutschland, the German Wikimedia chapter: Alan is a partner manager for Wikidata, while Kris is head of software communications. The two are both involved in evangelism for both Wikidata and its backend software, Wikibase.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikidata
- Wikibase
- "Linked open data" on Wikipedia
- Wikidata REST API
- Wikibase Cloud
- Wikimedia Deutschland data partnerships (includes contact email address)
- List of some current partners
- Wikidata entries tagged as "big city"
- Wikidata Mismatch Finder
🕑 52 minutes
Srishti Sethi (also known as SrishAkaTux) is a developer advocate in the Language Team at the Wikimedia Foundation. Prior to the mass reorganization at the Wikimedia Foundation in summer 2023, she was part of the Technical Engagement team.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikimedia outreach programs
- Outreach programs success stories
- "Introducing Wishathon for Wikimedia’s Community Wishlist!" (December 2023 blog post)
- March 2024 online Wishathon event
- Language Team Phabricator workboard
- Wikimedia MinT (Machine in Translation) service
- "MinT: Supporting underserved languages with open machine translation" (June 2023 blog post)
🕑 23 minutes
It's another BTB Digest! Highlights from five recent episodes. Bryan Hilderbrand considers the future of scientific publishing, Jan Ainali thinks about solutions for Wikidata's messiness, Tricia Burmeister recounts the challenges of changing a wiki's front page, Ilias Sarantopoulos praises the new Lift Wing software, Alissa Stern explains how her wiki became a communications hub for the people of Bali, and more!
🕑 1 hour 8 minutes
It's not quite a holiday episode, but it is an end-of-year wrapup, featuring William Beutler, strategic marketing consultant and author of the blog The Wikipedian, which went on hiatus in 2020 and is now thankfully back. William shares some of the stories that he's working on for his "Top 10 Wikipedia Stories of 2023" feature (his first year-in-review in three years!), and we reminisce on the past year, in both the Wikimedia universe and the tech world in general.
🕑 55 minutes
Birgit Müller is the Director of Product for MediaWiki and Developer Experiences at the Wikimedia Foundation. Before that, she was Director of Technical Engagement. From 2014 to 2019, she worked at Wikimedia Deutschland.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Birgit's user page on mediawiki.org
- MediaWiki Product Insights
- Monthly MediaWiki Insights reports
- November 2023 report - includes statistics about review time improvements
🕑 1 hour 52 minutes
Steve Schneider is a professor of information design at the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly). He currently teaches a class, Digital Media and Information in Society, whose coursework is managed via Wikiversity and Wiki Edu, and also involves the use of ChatGPT by both teacher and students.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- "Mid-semester rookie report: Starting a wikiversity project & teaching a class with wikiedu assignments" (WikiConference North America 2023 talk)
- Digital Media and Information in Society course on Wikiversity
- Wiki Edu assignments for Digital Media and Information in Society
- WikimediaCourse on Wikiversity
- ChatGPT session that led to the Wikimedia course
- ChatGPT session to create a Wikidata SPARQL query
- "TiddlyWiki" Wikipedia article
- SUNY Wikimedia Project
- "Monorail" Wikipedia article (has included a "possibly generated by LLM" warning since July 2023)
🕑 1 hour 5 minutes
Alissa Stern founded the organization BASAbali (later renamed BASAibu) in 2011, and the BASAbali Wiki in 2014. The BASAbali Wiki was originally intended to serve only as a dictionary for the Balinese language, but it has since grown to become a general communication hub for the Balinese community.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- BASAbali Wiki
- BASAsulsel Wiki
- BASAibu
- Indonesian Superhero Luh Ayu
- Balinese-language Wikipedia
- "BASAbali Wiki Recognized by US Consulate" (February 2023 blog post, Bali Discovery)
🕑 1 hour 4 minutes
Ilias Sarantopoulos is a Senior Machine Learning Operations Engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been at the WMF since 2022.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikimedia Foundation Machine Learning team
- WMF machine learning modernization plan
- WMF machine learning model cards
- "Wikipedia's Moment of Truth" (The New York Times Magazine article, July 2023)
- Meta's No Language Left Behind (NLLB) project
- Model Drift & Decay
🕑 1 hour 23 minutes
Tricia Burmeister is a senior technical writer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and part of the (relatively new) WMF Technical Documentation Team.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team
- Wikitech wiki main page restructuring diff
- Phabricator ticket that relates to this change
- MediaWiki Product Insights page
- Toolhub
- MintyDocs MediaWiki extension
- Documentation > Toolkit
- Documentation > Patterns > Landing page
- Huggle documentation page
- Wikifunctions site
🕑 21 minutes
Clips from five recent episodes! Danielle Batson thinks about the future of genealogy, Ike Hecht considers the effect of AI on software, Tom Harriman describes the contents of Nuclepedia, Rita Ho praises the Content Translation tool, Allan Lim talks about becoming an amateur archaelogist, and more!
🕑 60 minutes
Jan Ainali is a codebase steward for the Foundation for Public Code. On the side, he's an all-around Wikimedia editor, enthusiast and evangelist, with a special focus on Wikidata. He co-founded the Wikimedia Sverige chapter, co-created the Wikidata-based online resource Govdirectory, and co-hosts the (mostly Swedish-language) podcast WikipediaPodden, and that's not even everything!
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikimedia Sverige
- WikipediaPodden
- Wikipedia Weekly live Wikidata editing playlist
- Foundation for Public Code
- Govdirectory
- Semantic Web Wikipedia article (with Tim Berners-Lee quote)
- Wikimedians for Sustainable Development
- OpenRefine
- Foundation for Public Code's Standard for Public Code
🕑 1 hour 16 minutes
Bryan Hilderbrand, MediaWiki consultant of TeGnosis and WikiWorks fame, is back on the podcast to talk about weighty matters like the future of science, the nature of truth, and whether periods need one or two spaces after them.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- SMWCon Spring 2023
- Abstract Wikipedia > Google.org Fellows evaluation answer > Scribunto
- "What is Wikiask?" (WikiConference North America 2022 talk)
- Twitter/X Note ranking algorithm
- "No, California wildfires aren’t caused by space lasers, and experts want people to stop asking about it" (2021 San Francisco Chronicle article)
- Mike Hughes (daredevil) Wikipedia article
- WikiJournal User Group
- Trofim Lysenko Wikipedia article
- "It's on Meta, but discoverable – organizational knowledge in a structured form" (Wikimania 2023 talk)
🕑 1 hour 14 minutes
Allan Lim is the co-creator of the wiki Beyond Angkor, which maps the locations of temples and other sites from the Khmer Empire, in modern-day Cambodia and surrounding countries.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Beyond Angkor
- Beyond Angkor Facebook group
- Khmer Empire Wikipedia article
- Douglas Latchford Wikipedia article
- "Unveiling the ancient Khmer world: Beyond Angkor mapping out over 13K SEA temples" (June 2023 article in The Phnom Penh Post)
🕑 1 hour 12 minutes
Rita Ho is the senior groups design manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. She was formerly a member of the Growth Team, and is still actively involved in growth-related projects.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Growth team - feature summary (slideshow)
- Graph of active editors over time for the English-language Wikipedia
- Suggested edits feature
- Growth team newsletter #26 (May 2023; includes analysis of Suggested edits)
- Content translation tool
- Article creation for new editors
- Translation task for homepage project
- GrowthExperiments MediaWiki extension
- Welcome survey project
🕑 1 hour 17 minutes
Tom Harriman is a senior learning project manager at the technical training center of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). He runs the NRC's wiki, Nuclepedia.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Nuclear Regulatory Commission Wikipedia article
- "Nuclepedia: Sharing Knowledge One Page At A Time" (EMWCon Spring 2020 talk, YouTube)
- Moodle Wikipedia article
🕑23 minutes
It's a BTB Digest episode! Anton Krom thinks back to abandoning SharePoint in favor of MediaWiki, Bryan Hilderbrand finds a role for wikis in a world of AI, Ed Sanders reminisces on the early days of VisualEditor, Sanjay Thiyagarajan explains going without sleep at hackathons, and Sam Wilson describes the Phonos extension.
🕑 1 hour 15 minutes
Ike Hecht, founder of the consulting company WikiTeq, is back to talk about weighty matters like AI, religion, and the singularity. Plus some pre-singularity thoughts on project management software and marketing.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- ELIZA Wikipedia article
- "Other Than In Computers, Civilization Basically Stopped Progressing In The 1960s" (2012 Business Insider article)
- Technological singularity Wikipedia article
- Zero to One Wikipedia article
- Blue Ocean Strategy Wikipedia article
🕑 58 minutes
Danielle Batson is the wiki community manager for the non-profit organization FamilySearch, which is run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- FamilySearch
- FamilySearch Wikipedia article
- FamilySearch Research Wiki
- Family History Research Wiki Wikipedia article
- GoogleTranslator MediaWiki extension
- Replace Text MediaWiki extension
- Free online genealogy consultation from FamilySearch
🕑 1 hour 18 minutes
Sam Wilson is a senior software engineer in the Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation. This is his second time on Between the Brackets.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Community Tech team
- Phonos MediaWiki extension
- WikiEditor Realtime Preview feature
- UnlinkedWikibase extension
- UnlinkedWikibase 1-indexed array bug
- Wikispore
- Module:ExtensionJson on mediawiki.org
- "State of Canasta" - EMWCon 2023 talk by Jeffrey Wang
🕑 1 hour 2 minutes
Sanjay Thiyagarajan (username: Techwizzie) is a full-stack developer at JP Morgan Chase who has also done a significant amount of MediaWiki extension development as an intern and consultant at WikiWorks, my MediaWiki consulting company.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Sanjay's mediawiki.org user page
- GoogleDocCreator MediaWiki extension
- RegularTooltips extension
- PagePermissions extension
- WatchAnalytics extension
- AWS Graviton Hackathon project gallery
- GenieNet
🕑 1 hour 23 minutes
Ed Sanders is a Principal Software Engineer, as well as the tech lead, in the Editing Team at the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been involved with developing the VisualEditor extension since 2013. He has also helped with developing other applications, like the DiscussionTools extension.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikimedia Foundation Editing Team
- VisualEditor
- VisualEditor on mobile
- Edit check project
- DiscussionTools
- Convenient Discussions JavaScript tool
- reply-link JavaScript tool
- Patch demo
🕑 22 minutes
Have you missed any recent episodes? Well, here are some clips for you. Hear Eric Gardner defending Vue.js, Nathan Brewer praising computer scientists of the past, Simon Stier considering the complexities of nested data structures, Ariel Gutman advocating for one language for WikiFunctions, Waldir Pimenta recounting his adventures in translation, and more!
🕑 1 hour 42 minutes
WikiWorks/TeGnosis consultant Bryan Hilderbrand returns to the podcast, to talk about the upcoming Enterprise MediaWiki Conference (April 19-21 in Austin, Texas), as well as a variety of other topics.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- EMWCon Spring 2023
- ChatGPT Wikipedia article
- WolframAlpha Wikipedia article
- Deep Thinking, 2017 book by Garry Kasparov
- EPIC 2014 (2004 video) Wikipedia article
- Abstract Wikipedia project page
- "The 20th anniversary of the rediscovery of calculus" (2014 blog post)
- Morton Effect (PDF file)
- WikiJournal User Group
🕑 1 hour 17 minutes
Anton Krom is a longtime MediaWiki administrator and consultant.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- WikiTeq
- Wikiask
- Canasta
- Anton on Upwork
🕑 1 hour 44 minutes
Waldir Pimenta is the co-founder of Wikimedia Portugal, and an active translator of core MediaWiki and extensions. He has also been involved in developing various Wikimedia-related tools.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikimedia Portugal
- Timeline of founding
- Cape Verdean Creole ("kea") translation statistics
- Unicode CLDR Project
- "Geeks and Nerds" xkcd comic
- tldr pages application
- Community roles document
- Indeed's FOSS Contributor Fund guidebook
- Emma Irwin and [Microsoft's] FOSS Fund Program (Sustain OSS podcast)
- GitHub Accelerator
- GiveDirectly Wikipedia article
- The Giving Pledge Wikipedia article
- Open Collective Foundation
- Toolforge abandoned tool policy
- Wikimate MediaWiki API wrapper
- "Non-Hierarchical Management", Aaron Swartz, 2009
- Guido van Rossum on stepping down as Python's BDFL (YouTube video)
- DoOcracy (CommunityWiki)
- Teal organisation Wikipedia article
- Sortition Wikipedia article
🕑 1 hour 31 minutes
Ariel Gutman is a senior software engineer at Google, as well as a linguist. From May to October 2022, he was one of a group of Fellows, supported by Google.org, who assisted in the design and development of Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia. Several months after that, he co-authored an "evaluation" that was somewhat critical of the project.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Attributive constructions in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic, Ariel Gutman, 2018
- Google.org fellowship announcement, April 2022
- "Ariel's goodbye letter", December 2022
- Rendering of curated Abstract Content (demo)
- Source data for rendering
- Abstract Wikipedia/Google.org Fellows evaluation, December 2022
- Abstract Wikipedia/Google.org Fellows evaluation - Answer, December 2022
- Grammatical Framework
- Functional programming Wikipedia article
- "One Ring, or a thousand flowers?" - essay by Denny Vrandečić, November 2022
🕑 1 hour 28 minutes
Simon Stier is a researcher at Fraunhofer ISC in Germany, as well as a freelance software developer and consultant. He is the developer of the MediaWiki- and Semantic MediaWiki-based Open Semantic Lab platform.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research (ISC)
- Open Semantic Lab on GitHub
- OpenSemanticLab MediaWiki extension
- "OpenSemanticLab - SMW for Science and R&D" talk by Simon at SMWCon 2022, YouTube
- Multi-Content Revisions in MediaWiki
- JSON Editor tool
It's another BTB Digest! Hear highlights from five recent episodes. Lawrence McCray and Dave Anderson discuss some tradeoffs in data structuring, Cindy Cicalese shares developments in authentication, Marc Laporte promotes the use of structured data (in Tiki), Jacqueline Wong describes the difficulties in running a video game wiki, William Beutler ponders whether people should donate to the Wikimedia Foundation, and more!
🕑 48 minutes
It's the 2022 holiday special! Featuring an all-star guest panel (Daisy Chen, Richard Knipel, Trevor Parscal and Denny Vrandečić) weighing in on the current Wikimedia sound logo competition. Hear their informed opinions! And if that wasn't enough, you can then listen to Lex Sulzer reminisce about jumping into snowy lakes.
🕑 36 minutes
Nathan Brewer is the archival and digital content manager at the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) History Center. He manages the IEEE's Engineering and Technology History Wiki.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- IEEE Wikipedia article
- Engineering and Technology History Wiki (ETHW)
- ETHW Innovation Map
- ETHW Timeline
- IEEE Milestones Wiki
- List of IEEE Milestones
- Public Demonstration of Online Systems and Personal Computing, 1968 ("Mother of All Demos")
- Milestones selfies
🕑 1 hour 8 minutes
Eric Gardner is a senior software engineer on the Design Systems team at the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been heavily involved in the introduction of the Vue.js library into MediaWiki, and the creation of the related Codex library.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Eric Gardner WMF page
- Eric's homepage
- WMF Design Systems Team
- Jekyll Wikipedia article
- 11ty (Eleventy) JS library
- RFC: Adopt a modern JavaScript framework for use with MediaWiki (2019)
- "Second-guessing the modern web" (Tom MacWright blog post)
- "Islands Architecture" (Jason Miller blog post)
- Astro web framework
- Wikimedia Commons Media Search
-
Codex JS library
- Codex documentation
🕑 1 hour 24 minutes
William Beutler is the founder and president of the creative agency Beutler Ink, which, among other services, assists clients with their presence on Wikipedia and Wikidata. Previously, he ran the longtime blog The Wikipedian, and he has co-hosted several film podcasts.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Beutler Ink
- William Beutler's personal Wikipedia account
- William's paid editing Wikipedia account
- Enter the Void podcast
- Primer episode
- Upstream Color episode
- The Wikipedian blog
- "Year in Review" category
- "Montgomerology" category
- "Wikipedia has Cancer" (essay by Guy Macon)
- Wikipedia and the Communications Professional: A primer
- "comprised of" (essay by Giraffedata)
🕑 55 minutes
Jacqueline Wong is a software developer who, in her free time, helps to host and maintain various video game-related wikis.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Another Eden Wiki
- Another Eden Wiki:Discussion on Potential Fork
- "The online ad market is in decline and it’s dragging down tech giants with it" (CNN article, July 2022)
- Tears of Themis Wiki
- Dragalia Lost Wiki
- Mr. Love Wiki
- NIWA - Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance
🕑 1 hour 5 minutes
Marc Laporte is a longtime administrator of the Tiki application, the open source project also known as TikiWiki and Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. He also runs the related WikiSuite project, and the consulting company EvoluData.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Marc Laporte homepage
- Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware
- Tiki Admin Group
- Tiki Trackers
- WikiSuite
- EvoluData
🕑 26 minutes
It's another BTB Digest! Clips from five recent episodes. Matthew Westerby explains the challenges of storing dates, Lionel Scheepmans extols Wikiversity, Adam Baso and Julia Kieserman ponder the future of Wikipedia in a mechanized world, Brian Wolff shares his thoughts on Asana, and Jake Orlowitz recounts the highs and (somewhat) lows of working on The Wikipedia Adventure.
🕑 1 hour 9 minutes
Cindy Cicalese is a principal engineer for the Platform Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as the general chair for the upcoming Semantic MediaWiki Conference, to be held October 26-28 in Breda, the Netherlands. She was the first-ever guest on this program, and now she's back for an all-new conversation.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- SMWCon Fall 2022
- Wikimedia Foundation Platform Engineering Team
- PluggableAuth extension
- "Adding Multiple Identity Providers to PluggableAuth" initiative
- MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group
- WMF Inclusive Product Development initiative
- MediaWiki Cli (command-line interface)
- Keycloak Wikipedia article
- Network MediaWiki extension
🕑 53 minutes
Lawrence McCray and Dave Anderson (left to right) are the founder and lead developer, respectively, of the site Protoball, a wiki about the prehistory and early history of baseball.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Protoball
- "Doubleday myth" Wikipedia article
- List of Diggers
- Enhanced search page
🕑 1 hour 22 minutes
Jake Orlowitz is the lead of the management consulting company WikiBlueprint. Before founding WikiBlueprint, he worked at the Wikimedia Foundation, where his projects included The Wikipedia Library and The Wikipedia Adventure. He has been open about his former struggles with mental health, and Wikipedia's role in helping him overcome them. He can be reached at jorlowitzATgmailDOTcom.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Jake Orlowitz homepage
- "How Wikipedia Drove Professors Crazy, Made Me Sane, and Almost Saved the Internet" (Jake's chapter of Wikipedia@20, 2019)
- Welcome to the Circle: the Mental Health Book (Jake Orlowitz, 2019)
- The Wikipedia Library
- Page on Wikipedia
- WikiBlueprint
- The Wikipedia Adventure
- GuidedTour MediaWiki extension
- "The Wikipedia Adventure: Field Evaluation of an Interactive Tutorial for New Users" (2017 conference paper, Jake Orlowitz et al.)
🕑 1 hour 7 minutes
Brian Wolff is back on the program - he was a longtime member of the Security team at the Wikimedia Foundation, then worked at Asana, and is now temporarily unemployed. He is still thankfully involved with MediaWiki as a volunteer developer.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Asana Wikipedia article
- Abstract Wikipedia Wikipedia article
- Filecoin Wikipedia article
- "Blockchain: A game changer for audit processes" (Deloitte article)
- Vector 2022 MediaWiki skin
- Code review statistics for core MediaWiki
🕑 1 hour 14 minutes
Adam Baso and Julia Kieserman are both developers in the Abstract Wikipedia group at the Wikimedia Foundation; Adam is the director of engineering, while Julia is a senior software engineer.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Abstract Wikipedia page on Meta-Wiki
- Wikifunctions Wikipedia article
- WikiLambda MediaWiki extension
- Not Wikilambda - Wikifunctions test site
- Abstract Wikipedia natural language generation proposal by Ariel Gutman
- July 2021 mailing list post by Dan Brickley about Cyc, the Semantic Web and Wikidata
🕑 30 minutes
It's another BTB Digest episode! Mike Cariaso explains why you should use SQLite, Tyler Cipriani talks about teaching deployment to volunteers, Dror Snir-Haim compares translation options, Alex Hollender defends sticky headers, Kunal Mehta criticizes Bitcoin miners, and more!
🕑 1 hour 38 minutes
Lionel Scheepmans is a co-founder of the Wikimedia Belgium chapter, an open source and open knowledge activist, and a PhD student at the University of Louvain. He is also currently running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Lionel Scheepmans page on Meta-Wiki
- Imagine un monde ("Imagine a world") - Lionel's PhD thesis
- PDF version
- Lionel's 2022 WMF elections candidacy page
- Rainbow Gathering Wikipedia article
- Universal basic income Wikipedia article
🕑 1 hour 11 minutes
Matthew Westerby is the Robert H. Smith Postdoctoral Research Associate for Digital Projects at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, a national art museum of the United States. He has been heavily involved in the creation of the wiki History of Early American Landscape Design.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- History of Early American Landscape Design
- National Gallery of Art Wikipedia article
- Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
- Keywords in American Landscape Design by Therese O'Malley
- HEALD Image Collection page
- HEALD People category
- National Gallery of Art GitHub repository
- StickyTOC MediaWiki extension
- Dates page package
- Geolocation page package
- HEALD Fence page
- HEALD sample RDF export
🕑 57 minutes
Kunal Mehta is back for a second appearance! Last time he was here, he was working for the Wikimedia Foundation; but now he is a Senior Software Engineer at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. (Though he is still a volunteer MediaWiki developer.)
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Freedom of the Press Foundation
- Freedom of the Press Foundation > Kunal Mehta
- Freedom of the Press Foundation > Erik Moeller
- SecureDrop Wikipedia article
- XKCD "free speech" comic
- Mastodon Wikipedia article
- "Edward Snowden NFT sells for more than $5.4 million" (The Verge 2021 article)
- The NFT artwork
- Wikimedia RfC: Stop accepting cryptocurrency donations
- "How DevOps Sites Are Battling Cryptocurrency Miners" (The New Stack 2021 article)
- Kunal's email on "Uplifting the multimedia stack" mailing list thread
🕑 2 hours 18 minutes
Alex Hollender is a product designer on the Reading Web team at the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been with the WMF since 2018.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Create Build Destroy (fashion label)
- AltSchool Wikipedia article
- VideoWiki (now-archived MediaWiki extension)
- Desktop Improvements project
- Desktop Improvements talk page (comments welcome!)
- Vector 2022 skin
- "Blue whale" article on Vector skin upcoming features demo site
- The Humane Interface (UI book by Jef Raskin)
- Proposal for changing logo of MediaWiki, 2020/Round 1
- Sharon Park Wikipedia Identity System (2019)
🕑 1 hour 20 minutes
Dror Snir-Haim, or Dror Snir, also known as FreedomFighterSparrow, is the main developer of Kol-Zchut, a wiki (run by a nonprofit organization of the same name) dedicated to enumerating the rights and entitlements of citizens of Israel.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Kol Zchut (כל-זכות)
- English-language site
- Arabic-language site
- Kolbotek Wikipedia article
- Kol Zchut Cargo tables
- Kol Zchut GitHub repository
- ArticleRanking MediaWiki extension
🕑 29 minutes
Clips from five recent episodes: Marshall Miller talks about gamification of Wikipedia editing, Jared Olson describes the U.S. Space Force wiki, Wolfgang Fahl mentions the three Cambridges, Florian Schmidt praises weekly software upgrades, Jay Prakash wishes for more hackathons, and more!
🕑 1 hour 13 minutes
Tyler Cipriani is the engineering manager for release engineering at the Wikimedia Foundation. He has worked at the WMF since 2015.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Public Domain Day 2022
- "How we deploy code" (2021 blog post by Tyler)
- Trainsperiment week
- "Diving Into Our Deployment Data: Deploy trainbows; not painbows" (2021 blog post by Tyler)
- Release engineering yak shaving
- Deployment training
- GitLab page on mediawiki.org
- Gerrit to GitLab
- Phorge (Phabricator fork)
- "Job Interviews By Zombies" (2022 blog post by Tyler)
- Release Engineering job opening
- Tyler Cipriani > Brewing
🕑 1 hour 33 minutes
Mike Cariaso is back, as the first-ever repeat guest on Between the Brackets! Mike is the co-creator (with Greg Lennon) of the wiki SNPedia, and the associated software Promethease, which matches an individual human genome sequence against the data in SNPedia. In 2019, Mike and Greg sold SNPedia and Promethease to the Israeli genealogy company MyHeritage.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- SNPedia
- SNPedia Wikipedia article
- "MyHeritage Acquires Promethease and SNPedia" (2019 press release)
- Cost per human genome graph
- MediaWiki SQLite support
- Rust (programming language) Wikipedia article
- Raku (programming language) Wikipedia article
- G-code Wikipedia article
- Fsn (file manager) Wikipedia article
🕑 1 hour 24 minutes
Jay Prakash is the co-founder of both the Indic MediaWiki Developers User Group and Indic-TechCom. At the 2021 Wikimania, he was named one of five Wikimedians of the Year, in the category of "Tech Innovator". He is also a college student and part-time MediaWiki consultant.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- "Meet Jay Prakash: Wikimedian of the Year 2021 Tech Innovator winner" (2012 Wikimedia Foundation blog post)
- Jay's 2019 Google Summer of Code project
- CountDownClock MediaWiki extension
- Indic MediaWiki Developers User Group
- Indic-TechCom
- Indic-OCR
- "Uplifting the multimedia stack" (wikitech-l mailing list thread)
🕑 1 hour 53 minutes
Florian Schmidt has been a volunteer MediaWiki developer since 2014, and has run the wiki Android Wiki since 2012.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- MobileFrontend extension
- Android Wiki
- English-language version
- Android operating system Wikipedia article
- AcceleratedMobilePages extension
- CookieWarning extension
🕑 1 hour 35 minutes
Wolfgang Fahl is the director and founder of the software training and consulting company BITPlan, and a research assistant at RWTH Aachen University (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule) in Germany.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- BITPlan
- BITPlan Wiki
- SMWCon list of attendees
- Test-driven development
- ConfIDent
- Openresearch
- ConferenceCorpus project
- WikiCFP
- geograpy
- Cynefin framework
- Blazegraph
- wikidata-taxonomy tool
- SPARQL
- Gremlin query language
🕑 30 minutes
It's another BTB Digest! Clips from Between the Brackets episodes from last year, including: Igor Absorto talking about open source development, Bill Pirkle explaining the WMF's API Platform initiative; Ziko van Dijk defining "wiki"; Bryan Hilderbrand learning lessons from Dilbert; and Jonathan Wilson praising the benefits of DIY.
🕑 1 hour 1 minute
Jared Olson is a senior consultant at the military consulting firm DSoft, who is currently working with the United States Space Force. Before that he worked for NASA.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- DSoft
- U.S. Space Force Wikipedia article
- Platform One, Air Force
- "USSF Tactical Doctrine Wiki" (YouTube video), EMWCon Spring 2021
- Meza
🕑 38 minutes
It's the holiday special! End-of-the-year recap, seasonal public domain music, and we discover the true meaning of Christmas.
🕑 2 hours 2 minutes
After 100 episodes, it's finally my turn to be on the show! I (Yaron) am a MediaWiki - and more specifically "Enterprise MediaWiki" - developer, consultant, author, evangelist and of course podcaster. My interviewer, Ike Hecht, is a fellow MediaWiki consultant and developer who was himself on episode 79.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- WikiWorks
- Discourse DB
- Working with MediaWiki
- SMWCon
- EMWCon
- Docker
- Cargo
- Semantic Drilldown
- Miga
- "'Data is data' and the future of data browsing" (SMWCon Spring 2013 talk)
- Approved Revs
🕑 1 hour 13 minutes
Marshall Miller is the product manager for the Growth team at the Wikimedia Foundation. Ankan Ghosh Dastider is a community ambassador with the Growth team for the Bengali-language Wikipedia.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikimedia Foundation Growth team
- Growth features
- Metrics for usage and impact of Growth features
- Growth team talk page (comments welcome)
- ORES
🕑 1 hour 25 minutes
Jonathan Wilson is a British solicitor who runs the wiki Mental Health Law Online.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Mental Health Law Online
- MHLO Cargo tables
- BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute)
- BAILII Case Law Search
- MHLO CPD scheme
- MHLO Forum
🕑 1 hour 11 minutes
Bryan Hilderbrand runs the wiki consulting company TeGnosis, and is also a project manager for the wiki consulting company WikiWorks. Before becoming a consultant, he was a mechanical engineer (and MediaWiki maintainer) at Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) and Atlas Copco Mafi-Trench.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- TeGnosis
- WikiWorks
- Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1940) - Wikipedia article
- Page Exchange MediaWiki extension
- WatchAnalytics MediaWiki extension
- Who Wrote That? browser extension
- Grapevine winery wiki
🕑 1 hour 16 minutes
Ziko van Dijk is a historian and wiki expert and consultant. From 2011 to 2014 he served as president of the Wikimedia Netherlands chapter, and is the co-founder of the German online children's encyclopedia Klexikon. He is the author of several books, most recently the 2021 book Wikis und die Wikipedia verstehen: Eine Einführung.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Ziko van Dijk homepage
- Ziko van Dijk user page on Meta-Wiki
- Ziko van Dijk YouTube channel
- Klexikon
- Children's Wikipedia (list of previous proposals)
- Wikis und die Wikipedia verstehen
- Free PDF of the book
🕑 24 minutes
It's another BTB Digest! Robert Heine lays out his data structures, Nischay Nahata discusses his approach to in-wiki emailing, Ilana Fried talks about new features on Wikisource, Peter Meyer wishes for a general U.S. government wiki, Daisy Chen discusses WMF user research, and more.
🕑 1 hour 3 minutes
Bill Pirkle is a Senior Software Engineer on the Platform Engineering Team at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Platform Engineering Team
- API Platform initiative
- "Add an image" feature
- Apache Kafka Wikipedia article
🕑 53 minutes
Igor Absorto is a freelance developer and consultant, with a focus on MediaWiki.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Igor Absorto homepage
- Tor Wikipedia article
- Aran Dunkley user page on mediawiki.org (includes list of extensions)
- AjaxComments extension
🕑 47 minutes
Daisy Chen is a senior UX (user experience) researcher at the Wikimedia Foundation. She has been at the WMF since 2012.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Daisy Chen user page on mediawiki.org
- User experience Wikipedia article
- Wikimedia research/Usability testing
🕑 1 hour 12 minutes
Peter Meyer is a research economist at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Wikimedia DC chapter. He is also one of the organizers of the upcoming WikiConference North America 2021.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- "Statipedia: A wiki platform for collaboration across agencies" (2013 EMWCon presentation)
- Inventing Aviation wiki
- Homebrew Computer Club Wikipedia article
- "Episodes of Collective Invention" (2003 paper by Peter Meyer)
- "Network of Tinkerers: A Model of Open‐Source Technology Innovation" (2007 paper by Peter Meyer)
- Wikimedia DC
- WikiConference North America 2021
🕑 1 hour 5 minutes
Ilana Fried is the product manager for the Campaigns team at the Wikimedia Foundation. Before that, she was the product manager for the Community Tech team at the WMF. She is also the founder of Gynopedia, a wiki for women's health information around the world.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Gynopedia
- Gynopedia Wikipedia article
- WMF Community Tech team
- Community Wishlist Survey
- Watchlist expiry MediaWiki feature
- Who Wrote That? Wikipedia tool
- WMF Campaigns team
🕑 21 minutes
It's another BTB Digest! Alexander Mashin attempts to add read-access control to MediaWiki, Jeffrey Wang recalls bailing out Wikispaces users, Liam Wyatt talks about the WMF struggling not to make too much money, Lars Dalgaard extols institutional memory, Jon Robson praises getting rid of institutional debt, and more.
🕑 1 hour 7 minutes
Nischay Nahata is the co-founder of Truww, a home interior company based in Bangalore, India. He is also a consultant for my MediaWiki consulting company, WikiWorks.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Truww
- WikiWorks
- UploadWizard
- DocBookExport MediaWiki extension
- SketchUp Wikipedia article
🕑 54 minutes
Robert Heine is the founder and CEO of the MediaWiki-based site energypedia, and the consulting company energypedia consult GmbH.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- energypedia
- energypedia consult
- WebMo
🕑 1 hour 23 minutes
Jon Robson is a developer in the Readers Web Team at the Wikimedia Foundation. He has worked for the Wikimedia Foundation since 2012.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikimedia Skins Lab
- Star Citizen Wiki
- Wikimedia Desktop Improvements project
- Jon's listing of user scripts with client errors
- Wikimedia Vue UI (WVUI) library
- "Migrating code from MediaWiki's ResourceLoader to Webpack" (2019 blog post)
- "I believe strongly that in a decade from now..." (2019 Twitter post)
- Wikimedia Commons "Search media" feature
🕑 1 hour 5 minutes
Lars Dalgaard is the geocoordinator for the Ballerup Municipality (or Ballerup Kommune), an area near Copenhagen. He maintains the municipality's internal wiki.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Ballerup Municipality Wikipedia article
- Microsoft Power BI Wikipedia article
- Mapillary Wikipedia article
- Lars Dalgaard LinkedIn page
🕑 1 hour 39 minutes
Liam Wyatt is a community liaison for the new Wikimedia Enterprise project, as well as a program officer for the WikiCite initiative. He was the first-ever Wikipedian in Residence, in 2010 at the British Museum, and organized the first three GLAM-Wiki conferences. He was also the co-host of the Wikipedia Weekly podcast from 2007 to 2009.
Links for some of the topics discussed
- Wikipedia Weekly podcast
- Older episodes repository on archive.org
- Wikimedia Enterprise on Meta-Wiki
- Wikimedia Enterprise API FAQ
- Wikimedia Enterprise homepage
- Wikimedia, LLC
- Mozilla Corporation
- WikiCite on Meta-Wiki
🕑 34 minutes
It's another BTB Digest! Clips from five recent episodes. Larry Sanger pitches the encyclosphere, Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner consider oral citations, Kate Chapman talks about decision-making, Ike Hecht praises small consulting companies, Adam Shorland discusses cleaning up Wikidata, and more.
🕑 1 hour 5 minutes
Jeffrey Wang is the founder and CEO of the MediaWiki hosting site MyWikis.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- MyWikis
- "An entrepreneur since age 11, Jeffrey Wang looks to combine business and tech after graduating from UNT TAMS", Denton Record-Chronicle, 2018
- MyWikis GitHub account
- EmailLogger MediaWiki extension
- TopLink MediaWiki extension
- MyWikis Hosted Parsoid
- EMWCon Spring 2021
🕑 1 hour 31 minutes
Alexander Mashin is the administrator of the Russian wiki Traditio. He is also an SAP consultant, and has contributed to a number of MediaWiki extensions, including External Data.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Traditio (Традиция)
- Alexander Mashin user page on Traditio
- External Data MediaWiki extension
- Alexander Mashin GitHub repository
- Forked LuaSandbox extension
🕑 1 hour 11 minutes
Adam Shorland (also known as Addshore) is the Wikidata and Wikibase tech lead at Wikimedia Deutschland.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- MediaWiki-Docker-Dev
- Wikidata
- "Inside the Alexa-Friendly World of Wikidata" (Wired magazine article, March 2019)
- Wikidata Walkabout
- Wikibase
- WBStack
- Wikibase installations:
- Wikibase Registry
- Rhizome's ArtBase
- Cradle Wikidata tool
- "Toward an Abstract Wikipedia" (proposal for Wikilambda/Wikifunctions)
🕑 1 hour 29 minutes
Ike Hecht is the founder and CTO of the MediaWiki consulting company WikiTeq, as well as the CTO of the MediaWiki consulting company WikiWorks. He has been doing MediaWiki consulting since 2008.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- WikiWorks
- WikiTeq
- Project Canasta
- "Extensions by WikiTeq" category
- UserProtect MediaWiki extension
- SaveSpinner MediaWiki extension
- Depth of Simplicity (Ike's 2012 book)
- "It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it" (taken from Pirkei Avot)
🕑 39 minutes
Kate Chapman is the Director of Architecture of the Wikimedia Foundation. She has been at the WMF since 2018.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- OpenStreetMap Wikipedia article
- Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT)
- Cadasta Foundation
- Wikimedia Architecture Team
- "Proposal for a Technical Decision Making Process"
- Vue.js MediaWiki adoption RFC
🕑 26 minutes
It's another BTB Digest! Hear highlights from five recent episodes. Nikki Nikkhoui plugs a book, Vivian Epiney talks about assigning wiki editing as homework, Richard Heigl and Markus Glaser market BlueSpice, Grant Ingersoll defends Wikimedia Foundation technical strategy, Laurent Alquier discusses data management, and more!
🕑 27 minutes
It's the end of the year! A special episode featuring reminiscences, special guests, and music.
🕑 1 hour 3 minutes
Joseph Reagle (left) and Jackie Koerner (right) are the editors of the new book Wikipedia @ 20: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution. Dr. Reagle is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, as well as the author of the books Good Faith Collaboration, Reading the Comments, and Hacking Life. Dr. Koerner is a qualitiative research analyst for online communities, and has also been a visiting scholar for the Wiki Education Foundation.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikipedia @ 20 website
- Wikipedia @ 20 on PubPub
- "Trusting Everybody to Work Together", essay by Pete Forsyth on The Wikipedia Signpost
- "Wikipedia:Systemic bias" (Wikipedia essay)
- Quicksilver (AI tool for automatically generating Wikipedia articles)
🕑 2 hours 8 minutes
Larry Sanger is best known as the co-founder of Wikipedia, but he is also an internet entrepreneur, philosopher, and the founder of other sites including Citizendium. He is the author of the new book Essays on Free Knowledge: The Origins of Wikipedia and the New Politics of Knowledge.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Larry Sanger homepage
- Essays on Free Knowledge on Amazon and Gumroad
- Citizendium
- Encyclosphere website
- Everipedia
- "Wikipedia founder calls for social media strike", BBC News, July 1, 2019
🕑 1 hour 27 minutes
Laurent Alquier is a manager in the Emerging Technologies Partnerships team at Johnson & Johnson Technology Services. He has been making use of MediaWiki at Johnson & Johnson since 2006.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Johnson & Johnson Wikipedia article
- Neo4j Wikipedia article
- Virtuoso Universal Server Wikipedia article
- KnowIt Semantic MediaWiki "wiki of the month" page, August 2011
- Knowledge graph Wikipedia article
🕑 1 hour 5 minutes
Grant Ingersoll has been the Chief Technical Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation since 2019. Before then he was CTO of Lucidworks, a company he also co-founded. He also hosts the podcast Develomentor.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Taming Text
- Lucidworks
- Develomentor podcast
- Grant's email about the proposed GitLab transition
- Abstract Wikipedia Wikipedia article
🕑 2 hours 14 minutes
Richard Heigl (left) and Markus Glaser (right) are two of the founders of the German technology company Hallo Welt! GmbH. Hallo Welt! does MediaWiki consulting and development, and is best known for producing the MediaWiki distribution BlueSpice.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Hallo Welt!
- BlueSpice
- Wiki: Web Collaboration (2005 book by Richard, Markus and Anja Ebersbach)
- BlueSpice on mediawiki.org
- MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group
- MediaWiki Experts Blog
- SMWCon Fall 2020
🕑 28 minutes
Highlights from recent episodes! Sarah Rodlund and Alexandra Paskulin talk about creating a process for good documentation, Tom O'Neill makes the case for MediaWiki in government, Richard Knipel looks forward to reclaiming a spirit of innovation, Raimond Spekking dismisses the need for access control, and Albert Kettner talks about how science has become (in part) an IT job.
You can now find Between the Brackets on YouTube! Thanks to the efforts of Canadian listener (and MediaWiki enthusiast) Julien Tremblay McLellan, every episode is now additionally on YouTube - and he's planning to keep uploading new episodes. If you like getting your audio/video content on YouTube, you can find the whole playlist here.
🕑 1 hour 2 minutes
Vivian Epiney is a teacher as well as the creator and main administrator of Le Dico des Ados ("dictionary of adolescents"), a French-language wiki dictionary intended for 8 to 13-year-olds.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Le Dico des Ados
- "Le Dico des ados : petit frère du Wiktionnaire" (video demonstration and interview with Vivian, in French)
- English-language Vikidia
- Simple English Wikipedia
- "Wikikids" proposal on Meta-Wiki
- List of wikis for children on Meta-Wiki
- Drilldown page on Le Dico des Ados (uses Cargo)
- Foreground skin for MediaWiki
🕑 51 minutes
Nikki Nikkhoui is a software engineer in the Platform team at the Wikimedia Foundation. She has been a MediaWiki developer since 2019.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- FutureMe: Write a Letter to your Future Self
- Wikimedia Platform Team
- MediaWiki REST API
- Test-driven development Wikipedia article
- The Phoenix Project (2013 business novel)
🕑 1 hour 3 minutes
Albert Kettner is a research professor at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado, and the main administrator of the wiki of the Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System (CSDMS).
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research Wikipedia article
- Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System Wikipedia article
- CSDMS GitHub page
- Project Jupyter Wikipedia article
- CSDMS homepage/wiki
- CSDMS model repository
- Jobs board
- Labs portal
🕑 50 minutes
Raimond Spekking is a longtime MediaWiki developer and consultant. Since 2003 he has also contributed to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, most notably tens of thousands of freely-licensed photos.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- MediaWiki Translate extension
- MediaWiki Beratung
- User:Raymond on Wikimedia Commons
- "Koelner Dom - Bayernfenster 02.jpg" (list of known uses)
- "Bulletproof glass window after a burglary attempt.jpg" (2008 photo)
🕑 1 hour 25 minutes
Richard Knipel is a Wikimedian-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is also the co-founder and former president of Wikimedia New York City, a board member of the Wiki Education Foundation and the Internet Society New York, and the founder of Wikispore.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikimedia New York City
- "Wiki Loves X"
- Guinness World Records: Largest photography competition
- Wikipedian in residence Wikipedia article
- Public Domain Characters List (Note: I got the question about Mary Poppins wrong, so Richard actually got a perfect score on this! -Yaron)
- Wikispore
- Event Spore
- Art Spore
- Wikispore Wikimedia project proposal
- Wikispore Day
- Wikispore Day mini-conference, YouTube
🕑 25 minutes
Clips from some recent episodes. Ad Strack van Schijndel recounts how running for office led him to discover MediaWiki, Evita Hollis talks about MediaWiki and Microsoft SharePoint coexisting, Duncan Crane talks about making government work easier, Amir Aharoni shares his impractical idea for replacing links in Wikipedia, Will Kavanagh gives advice on how to reward wiki editors, and more!
🕑 1 hour 20 minutes
Tom O'Neill is the Federal Domain Manager at the U.S. Department of Energy. He is the Lead Curator and Ambassador of the Department of Energy wiki Powerpedia. He also runs the U.S. government's "MediaWiki in Government" group.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- "Powerpedia at Two" (PDF file for 2012 slide presentation)
- Tom's Powerpedia presentation, EMWCon 2017 (YouTube video)
- Notes for the presentation
- Federal Government Use of MediaWiki Panel, EMWCon 2017 (YouTube video)
- HitCounters MediaWiki extension
- MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group
- "Powerpedia Interns" GitHub account
🕑 53 minutes
Sarah Rodlund (left) and Alexandra Paskulin (right) are both technical writers at the Wikimedia Foundation. Sarah is in the Developer Advocacy group while Alex is in the Core Platform Team. Sarah additionally helps to run some of the WMF's outward communication, such as the Wikimedia Technical Blog.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Working with MediaWiki (by Yaron; new version just released)
- Documentation page on mediawiki.org
- Guide for new technical writers on mediawiki.org
- Wikimedia technical documentation: friends of the docs (working group)
- "Any friend of the docs is a friend of mine: Cultivating a community of documentation advocates" (2019 Write the Docs talk by Heather Stenson)
- "Fixing The Docs is a Group Effort" (2020 blog post by Sarah Rodlund and Srishti Sethi)
- "Documenting Wikimedia Technical Projects" (2019 Wikimedia Tech Talk by Sarah Rodlund)
- Google Season of Docs at mediawiki.org
🕑 1 hour 11 minutes
Will Kavanagh, also known as MisterWoodhouse, is the Global Community Lead for the company Fandom, previously known as Wikia. From 2017 to 2019, he was the Community Manager for Gamepedia.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- "Can 'World of Warcraft' Game Skills Help Land a Job?" - Wall Street Journal article, August 12, 2014
- "People are using Red Dead Redemption 2 to hold conference calls" - Rock Paper Shotgun article, May 19, 2020
- Animal Crossing Wikipedia article
- Fallout 76 Wikipedia article
- "Fandom Acquires Curse Media, Gamepedia and D&D Beyond From Twitch", GameRevolution article, December 14, 2018
- MisterWoodhouse blog, Fandom
- "Unified Community Platform: The Vision, Purpose, and Process", MisterWoodhouse blog, February 20, 2020
- Help:Message Wall, Fandom Community Central
- Hey Fandom! AMA with Ben Schwartz, May 20, 2020
- Extensions by Wikia, Inc. category on mediawiki.org
🕑 22 minutes
Talking with the "most people don't know English" guy in Hebrew. No politics, (mostly) no tech stuff, just some Hebrew, if that's your thing.
🕑 1 hour 42 minutes
Amir Aharoni is a strategist in the Product department in the Language team at the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been working at the WMF since 2011.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- WikiJabber podcast episode with Amir, October 2017
- "Interview with Wikimedia’s Amir Aharoni", Wikimedia blog, October 2011
- Languages of Africa Wikipedia article
- Content Translation tool
- "Let's completely change how wiki links work" (Wikimania 2019 talk by Amir)
- Wikilambda proposal
- Global templates proposal
🕑 1 hour 17 minutes
Duncan Crane is a risk advisor for the UK's Financial Conduct Authority. He is also the main developer of the TinyMCE MediaWiki extension.
Links for some the topics discussed:
- Financial Conduct Authority Wikipedia article
- "US States Need COBOL Programmers to Help Them Handle Aging Systems", PC Magazine, April 10, 2020
- TinyMCE MediaWiki extension
- TinyMCE JavaScript library
- BlueSpice VisualEditor extension
- Phoenix Marine Model Club wiki
🕑 29 minutes
Highlights from five recent episodes. Gergő Tisza analyzes threats to developer productivity, Richard Evans reveals how he created a file directory within MediaWiki, Trevor Parscal explains why "not invented here" gets a bad rap, Andrew Kuntz and Valerio Pelliccioni talk about the popularity of their music wiki, Erik Bernhardson describes how to search in a language with no spaces, and more!
🕑 50 minutes
Evita Hollis is a Technical Project Manager at General Electric, where she manages the GE Wiki. Before GE, she managed the wiki at ConocoPhillips. (Both MediaWiki-based.) She is also the treasurer of the MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- EMWCon Spring 2020
- General Electric Wikipedia page
- ConocoPhillips Wikipedia page
- "General Electric's Approach to Putting Knowledge Into Context Using MediaWiki" (Evita Hollis talk at EMWCon Spring 2019, YouTube)
- MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group
🕑 1 hour 14 minutes
Ad Strack van Schijndel is the founder and CEO of the Dutch MediaWiki consulting company Wikibase Solutions.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikibase Solutions
- Capgemini Wikipedia article
- Extensions by Wikibase Solutions category on mediawiki.org
- "SimpleGov" (presentation by Ad at EMWCon 2018, includes the WSForm extension)
🕑 1 hour 26 minutes
Erik Bernhardson is the tech lead for the Search Platform team at the Wikimedia Foundation. He has worked for the WMF since 2013.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikimedia Search Platform team
- WMF Knowledge Engine Wikipedia article
- StructuredDiscussions extension (formerly Flow)
- CirrusSearch extension
- Elastica extension
- Apache Lucene Wikipedia article
- Scriptio continua (writing without spaces)
- "Search company Elastic nearly doubles on first trading day", CNBC, October 5, 2018
- "Testing Search" page
- Learning to rank Wikipedia article
- MjoLniR
- ElasticSearch Learning to Rank plugin
🕑 44 minutes
Andrew Kuntz and Valerio Pelliccioni have run the wiki Traditional Tune Archive since 2010, with Andrew handling most of the content and Valerio handling the technical aspects.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Fiddler magazine "Fiddle Tune History" column, May 2012 (Andrew Kuntz)
- Irish traditional music session Wikipedia article
- Traditional Tune Archive search query form
- abcjs JavaScript library
- Sample tune page and annotation page
🕑 1 hour 59 minutes
Trevor Parscal is a software developer who worked at the Wikimedia Foundation from 2008 to 2017, and has worked at wikiHow since 2017.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Trevor Parscal homepage
- Vector skin
- Wikipedia Usability Initiative
- VisualEditor extension
- WikiEditor extension
- ResourceLoader
- Free State Project Wikipedia article
- "Hayek and Wikipedia" (2007 blog post)
- "Why didn’t Wikipedia have an article on Donna Strickland, winner of a Nobel Prize?" (2018 WMF blog post)
- wikiHow
- Disney Vacation (satirical Reddit subreddit)
- FreeRoss.org
- Mark Zuckerberg 2018 congressional testimony
- Trevor Parscal - Music
- Western Galaxy
🕑 27 minutes
Highlights of episodes from late 2019. Olga Vasileva recommends some changes for the Wikipedia interface, Felipe Schenone plugs an extension, Clément Flipo explains his marketing approach, Jeroen De Dauw compares Semantic MediaWiki and Wikibase, Jan Höffler talks about the future of open science, and more!
🕑 58 minutes
Richard Evans is an electronics engineer at the NASA Glenn Research Center. He has been using MediaWiki since 2008.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Glenn Research Center Wikipedia article
- Artemis program Wikipedia article
- Orion (spacecraft) Wikipedia article
- "Document Control With Multiple Digital Signatures Using MediaWiki+Extensions" (EMWCon presentation video)
- Internet of things Wikipedia article
- EMWCon Spring 2020 (April 1-3)
🕑 27 minutes
It's a holiday special! Featuring reminiscences on the year (and decade), music from consultant (and guitarist) Bernhard Krabina, surprise guests, and more!
🕑 1 hour 9 minutes
Gergő Tisza is a senior software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, working in the Growth team. Before that, he worked in the Multimedia and Reading Infrastructure teams. He has been with the WMF since 2013.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikimedia Foundation Growth team
- GrowthExperiments MediaWiki extension
- Multi-Content Revisions
- OAuth MediaWiki extension
- "Media Viewer—Wikimedia's emotional roller-coaster" (Wikipedia Signpost, 2014)
- Wikimedia Technical Conference 2019
- "Federated MediaWiki" discussion
- "JS Framework Experience Sharing" discussion
- "Make MediaWiki Commercially Viable" essay
- Enterprise MediaWiki Conference (EMWCon)
🕑 43 minutes
Our first-ever live interview! Jan H. Höffler is an economist who runs ReplicationWiki, a MediaWiki-based wiki that holds information about replications and other empirical studies in the fields of social science.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- ReplicationWiki
- PsychFileDrawer.org
- Open Science Framework
- Center for Open Science
- ReplicationWiki statistics
- Research Papers in Economics (RePEc)
- ReplicationWiki in the news and in the literature
- Replication crisis Wikipedia article
- "The Truth Wears Off" (2010 article in The New Yorker)
- Diederik Stapel Wikipedia article
- "Just Post It: The Lesson From Two Cases of Fabricated Data Detected by Statistics Alone" (2013 paper by Uri Simonsohn)
- Brian Wansink Wikipedia article
- "The Grad Student Who Never Said 'No'" (2016 Brian Wansink blog post)
- Testing hypotheses suggested by the data Wikipedia article (related to "HARKing")
- American Statistical Association statement on p-values
- Stanford prison experiment Wikipedia article
- Rosenhan experiment Wikipedia article
- Stanford marshmallow experiment Wikipedia article
- Faking Science: A True Story of Academic Fraud (free English translation of 2014 book by Diederik Stapel)
- "When contact changes minds" (2014 experiment): Wikipedia article, ReplicationWiki article
- cascad
- American Journal of Political Science (journal that requires replication instructions)
- WikiJournal proposal
- science-fraud.org
🕑 1 hour 11 minutes
Jeroen De Dauw has been doing MediaWiki-related development since 2009. He has been a core developer of Semantic MediaWiki, was one of the original developers of the Wikibase/Wikidata software, and has done work for the Wikimedia Foundation and others. He is a co-founder of the MediaWiki consulting company Professional.Wiki.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Jeroen De Dauw homepage
- Maps extension
- Plans for "Distribution" extension (attempted 2010 Google Summer of Code project)
- Jeroen's Wikidata/Wikibase page
-
FundraisingFrontend application
- Wikimedia Deutschland donations page - uses FundraisingFrontend
- "Implementing the Clean Architecture" - Jeroen's blog post about the design of FundraisingFrontend
- Jeroen's answer on Quora to a "Wikibase or Semantic MediaWiki?" question
- Professional.Wiki
🕑 1 hour 8 minutes
Clément Flipo is the co-founder, along with Pierre Boutet, of the DIY tutorial site Wikifab and the MediaWiki hosting/consulting company Dokit. He lives in Paris.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Recommerce
- Wikifab
- Turn signal biking jacket tutorial
- Low-Tech Lab Wiki
- Behance
- Dokit
- VEForAll MediaWiki extension
- VEForPageForm MediaWiki extension
- ImageAnnotator MediaWiki extension
🕑 25 minutes
Interesting clips from five previous episodes! Airy Magnien recounts how an ontology could have prevented a misunderstanding, Bryan Davis makes the case for librarization, Yotam HaCohen recalls impressing a government agency, Lucas Billett talks about how managing his Friends library got him on the path toward enterprise integration, Derk-Jan Hartman explains how a weekend project turned into a four-year-long effort, and more.
🕑 53 minutes
Felipe Schenone (also known as Sophivorus) is a freelance MediaWiki developer and consultant based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Sophivorus.com
- ProveIt gadget
- Wikidebate project on Wikiversity
- DebateTree extension
- Wikiversity
- Isaac Asimov on the future of education (from a 1988 interview with Bill Moyers)
- "The Fun They Had" (1951 Isaac Asimov short story)
- WikipediaExtracts extension
- Wikiar (Wiki Argentina)
- Poncho skin
- Metadata extension
- TimeMachine extension
- WikiProject WikiWidgets
- "Juego de la vida" article on Spanish-language Wikipedia (uses the "Vivarium" WikiWidget)
- "Asimov's Prophecy" short essay
🕑 53 minutes
Olga Vasileva is a product manager in the Readers Web Team of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Readers Web team
- Reading/Readers (??) Web team
- Current and past team projects
- "Technology for growth: The future of mobile editing" Wikimania presentation slides
- Advanced Mode project page
- MobileFrontend extension
- Minerva Neue/Minerva skin
- "Improving the Wikipedia desktop experience" Wikimania presentation slides
- Desktop improvements project page
- Talk page for feedback on desktop improvements
- "Dwelling on Wikipedia: Investigating time spent by global encyclopedia readers" Wikimania presentation
- Noisage podcast
🕑 1 hour 9 minutes
Derk-Jan Hartman is a volunteer MediaWiki developer in the Netherlands. He has been doing core MediaWiki development since 2010.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- User:TheDJ on mediawiki.org
- VLC Media Player
- TimedMediaHandler MediaWiki extension
- TimedMediaHandler/VideoJS Player
- Common.js page on English-language Wikipedia
- "Dwelling on Wikipedia" Wikimania 2019 talk
- "Characterizing Reader Behavior on Wikipedia" Wikimania 2019 talk
🕑 1 hour 16 minutes
Lucas Billett is a capital project manager at the company Ingredion. He has been using MediaWiki at his job since 2009.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Ingredion Wikipedia article
- "KMS in Industry" slideshow by Lucas
- W. Edwards Deming Wikipedia article
- Adam Smith Wikipedia article
- Adam Smith on Wikiquote (see first quote)
- Mermaid.js
🕑 6 minutes
Yotam and I talk briefly in Hebrew. No tech stuff, no politics, just some chit-chat.
🕑 1 hour 7 minutes
Yotam HaCohen is the co-founder and head of the consulting companies DoAlogue and OpenFox.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- OpenFox homepage (in Hebrew)
- DoAlogue homepage (in Hebrew)
- DoAlogue wiki (in Hebrew)
- Fennec (in Hebrew)
- The Hedgehog and the Fox Wikipedia article
🕑 19 minutes
Highlights from five recent episodes! John Lewis describes the custom software powering the wiki farm Miraheze, Lex Sulzer breaks down how he can create a working system for clients in a few hours, Andre Klapper explains the recent redesign of the MediaWiki homepage, Alex Tanchoco recounts how their wiki went from a text store to a database, and Derick Alangi talks about how he got started as a MediaWiki developer.
🕑 1 hour 10 minutes
Bryan Davis is a principal software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, where he heads up the Cloud Services team, and is also part of the Developer Advocacy team; both teams are part of the Technical Engagement group.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Bryan Davis homepage
- Bryan Davis MediaWiki user page
- Wikimedia Cloud Services team
- Library infrastructure for MediaWiki ("librarization" project)
- Upstream projects
- Structured logging (PSR-3 project)
- Wikimedia Technology Goals
- "Build Technical Community" goal
- Wikimedia Technical Spaces Code of Conduct
- Moving Parsoid into Core
🕑 1 hour 29 minutes
Airy Magnien is the Digital Modeling Leader at the UIC, or the International Union of Railways. He heads the project to create Ontorail, a MediaWiki-based site that is planned to serve as a global ontology/dictionary for railway-related terms. He is also the general chair of the upcoming SMWCon, or Semantic MediaWiki Conference, which will be held September 25-27 in Paris.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- International Union of Railways (UIC)
- Ontorail
- EDIFACT
- RailTopoModel
- RailLexic
- Lemon (The Lexicon Model for Ontologies)
- BuildingSMART
- Building information modeling (BIM)
- WorldCat
- HO (or H0) scale
- Rome2rio
- SMWCon Fall 2019
- OTL Spoor page on SpoorData.nl
🕑 1 hour 14 minutes
Derick Alangi is a software developer who currently works for the Wikimedia Foundation Learning & Evaluation Team. He is also a co-founder of the Wikimedians of Cameroon User Group, and a member of the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- IFTTT API for Wikimedia wikis
- Google Code-in
- Angolophone Crisis of Cameroon
- Wikimedians of Cameroon User Group
- Silicon Mountain
- Wikimedia Foundation Learning & Evaluation Team
- Millionaire Success Habits
- No Excuses!
🕑 1 hour 2 minutes
Alex Tanchoco is the Manager of Advanced Technologies at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), where he has worked since 1986. He created the internal wiki used at MSK, Datapedia, in 2011, and has helped to run it since then.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Wikipedia article
- Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School
- "Ikigai and dimensions for a balanced life", by Alex Tanchoco
- Triumph Bonneville Bobber Wikipedia article
- ICD9 and ICD10
- Tableau Software
- D3 JavaScript library
- MSK About Herbs App
- 3D Printing and Makerspace at MSK
- REDCap Research and Data Capture
🕑 1 hour 1 minute
Andre Klapper works for the Wikimedia Foundation as the official bugwrangler, as well as as a developer advocate in the Technical Engagement group. He has been involved with the Wikimedia Foundation, and MediaWiki, since 2012.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Andre Klapper user page on mediawiki.org
- "Bugwrangler" page
- Open Advice
- Developer Advocacy group
- mediawiki.org front page
- Previous appearance of the front page
- Wikimedia Hackathon 2019, Prague
🕑 24 minutes
BTB Digest #5: highlights of January to March! Denny Vrandečić defends Wikibase, Megan Cutrofello resigns herself to never being done working on her wiki, Barry Grenon talks about MediaWiki as a "headless CMS", Sam Wilson has advice for Wikimedia Foundation developers, Jens Steckhans explains how he got the people of SAP to use SAPedia, and more.
🕑 54 minutes
Lex Sulzer runs the consulting company dataspects. He has been doing MediaWiki consulting since 2015.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- dataspects
- FindAndLearn (the dataspects search system)
- FindAndLearn — Search (demo)
- Elasticsearch Wikipedia article
- dataspects repository page on Docker Hub
🕑 1 hour 6 minutes
John Lewis is the co-founder of the wiki farm Miraheze, as well as one of its main maintainers and developers.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Miraheze
- All the Tropes
- The Multilingual Encylopedia
- Miraheze finance page
- Miraheze donation page
- Miraheze Vacancies
- "Extensions by Miraheze" category on mediawki.org
🕑 1 hour 4 minutes
Jens Steckhan is a developer at SAP who runs the company's internal wiki, SAPedia.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
- SAP
- VisualEditor
🕑 1 hour 5 minutes
Sam Wilson is a software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, working in the Community Tech team. He has been using MediaWiki since 2011, and has worked for the Wikimedia Foundation since 2016.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Sam Wilson user page on mediawiki.org
- Sam Wilson homepage (and wiki)
- Fremantle, Australia Wikipedia article
- OpenStreetMap project
- Wikimedia Australia wiki
- TemplateWizard extension
- ArchivesWiki
- "Consolidate the many tech events calendars in Phabricator's calendar" (Wikimedia task from 2014)
- EMWCon Spring 2019
🕑 1 hour 5 minutes
Barry Grenon is Senior Manager of the Information Experience team at Genesys, and my boss.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Genesys Wikipedia article
- Genesys Documentation wiki
- PonyDocs MediaWiki extension
- MintyDocs MediaWiki extension
- Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)
- Headless CMS
- Single source of truth
- Docs as code
- Every Page is Page One by Mark Baker
- Write the Docs meetup, San Francisco Bay Area chapter (the April meetup at Genesys does not yet have a page)
- Enterprise MediaWiki Conference Spring 2019, April 3-5
🕑 24 minutes
It's another BTB (Between the Brackets) Digest. Sabine Melnicki talks about pitching MediaWiki by not pitching it, Pau Giner plugs the MediaWiki mobile interface, Håkon Wium Lie tells an amusing anecdote about Tim Berners-Lee, Corey Floyd discusses Conway's Law, Daniel Robbins compares Linux distributions and MediaWiki distributions, and more!
🕑 48 minutes
Megan Cutrofello, also known as "River", is the manager of Leaguepedia and other esports wikis at the website Gamepedia. She has been involved with esports wikis since 2014.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- League of Legends Wikipedia article
- League of Legends World Championship Wikipedia article
- Faker (LoL top player): Leaguepedia page, Wikipedia article
- Leaguepedia
- Gamepedia
- Set of templates on Leaguepedia
- Set of Scribunto modules on Leagupedia
- Sample Leaguepedia module that reads and writes Cargo data: Module:Infobox
🕑 1 hour 19 minutes
Denny Vrandečić is the co-creator of Semantic MediaWiki and the main creator of Wikidata. He also served on the Wikimedia Foundation board from 2015 to 2016. Since 2015, he has been an ontologist at Google, working on the Google Knowledge Graph, among other projects.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Serbo-Croatian consonants
- Markus Krötzsch Between the Brackets episode
- "My first encyclopedia" (2015 essay by Denny)
- Wikidata
- Wikidata statistics
- South Pole Telescope Wikipedia article (infobox populated via Wikidata)
- Denny's 2013 essay series on Wikidata design:
- "Restricting the World"
- "On truths and lies"
- "A categorical imperative?"
- "Toward an abstract Wikipedia" whitepaper
- "Capturing meaning: Toward an abstract Wikipedia" (condensed version)
- The Search for the Perfect Language by Umberto Eco
- Montague semantics
- Grammatical Framework project
- Sample Wikidata page (for MediaWiki)
- Wikidata Query Service
- Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL)
- Wikibase
- Wikimedia Foundation blog posts tagged with "Wikibase"
- Google Knowledge Graph
🕑 12 minutes
It's the holiday season, and the end of 2018! No guests this time, just some thoughts about the first year of the podcast. Plus sleigh bells.
🕑 1 hour 2 minutes
Daniel Robbins is the creator of the Linux distributions Gentoo Linux and Funtoo Linux; he remains in charge of Funtoo Linux. He also runs the consulting company BreezyOps, which does consulting on a wide variety of open-source software, including Linux and MediaWiki.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Daniel Robbins article on Wikipedia
- Working with MediaWiki foreword
- Gentoo Linux article on Wikipedia
- "Gentoo Linux derivatives" article on Wikipedia
- Gentoo wiki
- Funtoo Linux website (and wiki)
- Meza project
- BreezyOps
🕑 1 hour 6 minutes
Corey Floyd is the Director of Engineering for the Core Platform team at the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been at the Wikimedia Foundation since 2015.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Wikimedia Core Platform Team
- Wikimedia Apps
- Wikimedia Technical Conference 2018
- Wikimedia 2030 strategic direction (from 2017)
- "Process and Action" (opening talk by Corey Floyd at the Wikimedia Technical Conference)
- Slide 9: "Different Frustrations"
- Slide 22: "A common core"
- Moving Parsoid Into Core project page
🕑 47 minutes
Håkon Wium Lie is best known as the inventor of CSS. He also served as the CTO of Opera Software, makers of the Opera browser, and has been involved in a number of other ventures, web-related and otherwise. Since the beginning of 2018, he has served as the public face of the MediaWiki-based website Rettspraksis.no, which holds a directory of the rulings of the Supreme Court of Norway. Due to a lawsuit against Rettspraksis.no (recently concluded), he has become somewhat of an open-data activist as well.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Håkon Wium Lie article on Wikipedia
- Cascading Style Sheets
- "The World & CSS" (talk by Håkon Wium Lie at WeAreDevelopers Conference 2017)
- Rettspraksis.no
- Rettspraksis.no FAQ (in Norwegian)
- Supreme Court of Norway
- Lovdata
- "Rettspraksis.no returns" (blog post)
- Rettspraksis.no crowdfunding page
🕑 21 minutes
Highlights from episodes 12 to 17: it's another BTB Digest! Hear Stas Malyshev defending PHP, Remco de Boer talking about how his consulting practice has expanded, Dustin Phillips talking about the use of MediaWiki at ICANNWiki, Nikhil Kumar and Yashdeep Thorat sharing their thoughts about the Google Summer of Code, and Bartosz Dziewoński praising the OOjs and OOUI JavaScript libraries.
🕑 44 minutes
Pau Giner is a user experience (UX) designer who works for the Wikimedia Foundation in the Audiences Design group. He has worked for the WMF since 2012.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Pau Giner homepage
- MediaWiki Design page
- Current look of Special:RecentChanges
- Wikimedia Design Style Guide
- MediaWiki Beta Features
- MediaWiki Media Viewer
- UX Design for Mobile, by Pablo Perea and Pau Giner
- "The Braun Products That Inspired Apple’s Iconic Designs"
- Dieter Rams' 10 principles of good design
🕑 47 minutes
Sabine Melnicki is a MediaWiki and web consultant based in Vienna, Austria, who does consulting via the brands WikiAhoi and WebAhoi. She has been doing MediaWiki consulting since 2014.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- WikiAhoi
- WebAhoi
- TangoTunes
- MsUpload extension
- VEForAll extension
- Foswiki
- Datencockpit
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
- SMWCon Fall 2018
- EMWCon
- Bits & Pretzels conference
🕑 40 minutes
Bartosz Dziewoński, also known as Matma Rex, has been a developer with the Wikimedia Foundation since 2014, mostly working in the Editing team. He has been involved in projects including VisualEditor, OOjs and OOUI.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Bartosz Dziewoński user page
- "Separating skins from core MediaWiki" Google Summer of Code project
- Wikimedia Foundation editing team
- VisualEditor project
- VisualEditor extension
- TemplateData extension
- VisualEditor real-time collaboration project ("CollabPad")
- VE-based mobile editing project
- OOjs JavaScript library
- OOUI JS library
- jQuery, jQueryUI
- MediaWiki accessibility
- TemplateStyles extension
🕑 26 minutes
Nikhil Kumar and Yashdeep Thorat are the two students I mentored during the recently-concluded Google Summer of Code 2018. Nikhil (left) is a student at IIT Guwahati in Guwahati, Assam, India. He worked on a project to improve the interface and functionality of the Special:Drilldown page in the Cargo MediaWiki extension. Yashdeep (right) is a student at BITS Pilani in Hyderabad, Telangana, India. He worked on a project to add a new special page, Special:MultiPageEdit (which lets users edit multiple pages via a spreadsheet-like interface), to the Page Forms MediaWiki extension.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Google Summer of Code Wikipedia article
- Google Summer of Code past projects listing for the Wikimedia Foundation
- IIT Guwahati Wikipedia article
- BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus Wikipedia article
- Nikhil Kumar's final report for GSoC
- Yashdeep Thorat's final report for GSoC
🕑 56 minutes
Dustin Phillips is a co-executive director of ICANNWiki, the semi-official wiki of ICANN, the organization that maintains the internet's Domain Name System. He has been with ICANNWiki since 2015. He is also the Assistant Director of the Washington, D.C. Chapter of the Internet Society, and has helped introduce MediaWiki to that organization as well.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- ICANN Wikipedia article
- ".wiki" top-level domain
- ICANNWiki
- List of people pages on ICANNWiki (almost all pages include a caricature!)
- Internet Society
- Internet Communities Wiki
- IGF-USA (Internet Governance Forum USA) Wiki
🕑 25 minutes
Highlights from episodes 6-11! It's another BTB Digest. Hear Daren Welsh and James Montalvo on not starting a wiki from scratch, Dan Barrett on appointing "page curators", Kunal Mehta on the importance of Requests for Comment, Ben Fletcher on the "lightbulb moment" of Semantic MediaWiki, Markus Krötzsch on the very random origins of Semantic MediaWiki, and more!
🕑 52 minutes
Remco de Boer is a partner at ArchiXL, a MediaWiki-based enterprise architecture consulting company in the Netherlands. He is also the CTO of ArchiXL's subsidiary, XL&Knowledge, which also does MediaWiki-related consulting. He has been working at ArchiXL, and with MediaWiki, since 2009.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- ArchiXL
- Enterprise architecture
- WikiXL (demo site)
- ArchiMedes MediaWiki package
- ArchiXL Information Security Knowledge Base
- The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF)
- ArchiMate
- XL&Knowledge
- Crossing the Chasm
- SemanticDummyEditor MediaWiki extension
🕑 55 minutes
Stanislav "Stas" Malyshev is a developer who is currently part of the Wikimedia Search Platform team, working on search within both MediaWiki and Wikidata. He has worked for the Wikimedia Foundation since 2014. He previously worked on PHP as part of Zend Technologies, and remains involved with the development of PHP. He also worked at SugarCRM.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- PHP
- Zend Technologies
- SugarCRM
- SugarCRM announces an end to open-source releases, February 2014
- Lila Tretikov
- Search Platform team
- Wikidata Query Service
- Wikidata Query Service user manual
- Wikimedia's PHP port of TextCat language-detection library
- AdvancedSearch extension
- Structured data on Wikimedia Commons project
- SPARQL
🕑 38 minutes
Markus Krötzsch is the professor for Knowledge-Based Systems in the Computer Science department at the Technical University of Dresden, in Germany. In 2005 he co-created, with Denny Vrandečić, the Semantic MediaWiki extension, for which he served as the project lead for around the next seven years. He also founded, and is still the president of, the Open Semantic Data Association, a German non-profit which, among other things, provides funding support for the annual SMWCon. Markus also provided important early assistance with Wikidata, a site released in 2012.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Markus Krötzsch homepage
- Semantic MediaWiki
- Open Semantic Data Association
- "Semantic Wikipedia" (2006 paper)
- Wikidata
- Markus Krötzsch bibliography on dblp
- Wiki Workshop 2018
🕑 52 minutes
Ben Fletcher is a systems architect at the Information Systems and Services (ISS) cluster for the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD). He helped to select MediaWiki for use at the MoD in 2016, and currently does MediaWiki-related work full-time.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- UK Ministry of Defence Information Systems & Services cluster Wikipedia article
- Agile software development Wikipedia article
- Crossing the Chasm Wikipedia article
- NIST Special Publication 800-53 Wikipedia article
- Ben's MediaWiki tutorials on YouTube
- "Delivering ICT capability through a wiki policy" - Ben's talk at EMWCon in Houston, March 2018
- Ben Fletcher LinkedIn page
🕑 51 minutes
Kunal Mehta (also known as "legoktm") is a developer at the Wikimedia Foundation in the MediaWiki Platform team. He has been involved in MediaWiki development since 2010.
Links for some of the topics discussed:
- Legoktm user page on mediawiki.org
- Extension registration (extension.json) manual
- Firejail for MediaWiki
- "Running MediaWiki on Debian or Ubuntu" manual
- PHP CodeSniffer documentation
- Original extension registration RFC
- Free Software Foundation