04 may 2026
This weekend (May 1st-3rd) I've attended the yearly Wikimedia Hackathon. It was a great experience. At first I signed up only for the free food (registration was 3€ but that's only to avoid spam, the previous years it didn't even have that), which was great but when I got there and started doing stuff I started enjoying the event itself a lot more!
On friday I arrived late, pretty much at the end of the opening ceremony, last 20 minutes or so, after that I had to find what to work on. I didn't have time to build and bring up a mediawiki instance during the week, and trying to learn the codebase in a day wasn't feasable, or so I think. Instead I looked at the various open tasks on phabricator, this is wikimedia's own issue tracker, that were related to third party tools that I could work on, of course these are usually a lot smaller in scope. I landed on Curator, a tool to fetch images from Mapillary and reupload them on wikimedia commons. If you're thinking about any possible issues regarding licensing don't worry, everything on Mapillary has to be released with CC-BY-SA. So i spent half of the first day just getting to know the codebase.
The tasks I worked on during this weekend were:
- Resolving Mapillary URLs so that users wouldn't have to manually search for Sequence IDs
- Converting timezones instead of showing everything in UTC
Now, these tasks weren't anything difficult, but I wasn't familiar with the codebase, so that's where most of the effort went into.
The food for breakfast and breaks was pretty good. Outside the mainhall we had access to snaks in a buffet style, for breakfast we were served conchiglie by Tre Marie, a well known croissant supplier for caffés here in Italy.
While for breaks in the afternoon they served various pastries and some doughnuts.
For lunches and dinners the hotel provided the catering, standard 4 star hotel food, it was good.
On day 1 at 9PM we had our tombola night. Didn't win but was fun. It was interesting trying to explain to non-italians what the various words associated to the various numbers were.
Apart from coding, the organized social events (of which I only partecipated to the tombola night, wanted to get on the special tram visit where Wikimedia Italia rented a tram, yes this is a service that ATM provides) and unconference talks, I got to talk a bunch of interesting people. Got to know some of the members of Wikimedia Italia, some of the people that work at the Wikimedia Foundation and curiously enough, the girlfriend of the president of the Italian Linux Society. Despite her not being a techie (she's an anthropologist/urbanistics researcher), she's really vocal for open source and open data. Talked about various things related to her field and what she thought about various licenses. It was a stimulating conversation.
On the 3rd day we had to wrap up everything by 2PM, this is because the closing showcase started at 2PM. It went on for 1 hour and 45 minutes, after that there were the closing remarks.
Before leaving the hotel I even got a leftover YubiKey (yes, they were giving them away for free 🤯).
At 5:30PM the Wikimedia Foundation provided shuttles for downtown Milan for a visit (self organized). I was too tired so after 15 minutes of getting off the shuttle I said my goodbyes and headed home, would've loved to stay for dinner with everyone and stuff, but I also had to go to the bathroom and I can't really go for #2 if there's no bidet.
This was my experience of the Wikimedia Hackathon, it is by no means an exhaustive (or well written) retelling but I hope you got the gist.