pre-release: SMW meeting announcement

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Subject: 
ANN: SMW at B7141 Wed May 14, 9:30p


SMW
=========================
When: 9:30 AM Wednesday May 14, 2025
Where: B7141
The Spring 2025 MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop will be a three-day workshop featuring discussions of topics related to the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies, non-profits, governments, organizations, and communities, including the Semantic MediaWiki community.
https://meza.wiki/mwplus/MediaWiki_Users_and_Developers_Workshop_Spring_2025

Topics
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1. Making your wiki Parsoid-compatible with ArrayFunctions
Marijn van Wezel, Jimmy van Delft

Marijn will explain the need for ArrayFunctions to make your Wiki future proof and Parsoid compatible.
Jimmy will be showing real life examples using ArrayFunctions.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

2. New extension SlotWeaver
Charly Cobben

SlotWeaver is a new extension that allows for editing multiple pages in your wiki by defining a set of rules.
Think of it as ReplaceText on steroids, but not only for plain text, but also Templates; Full blown Regex; Slots; and a combination of it all.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

3. Updates from the Semantic MediaWiki community
Bernhard Krabina

The talk will give a short overview of some of the latest developments in the Semantic MediaWiki world. This includes
the version 5 release
accomplishments from the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025 in Istanbul
an outlook to the next MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2025 October 27-30 in Hannover, Germany.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

4. Keynote: Low-Entropy Knowledge Management
James Montalvo

(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

5. Dealing with AI web crawlers at the WMF
Giuseppe Lavagetto

A short talk on how the Wikimedia Foundation has been dealing with the problem of incoming traffic from AI companies' web crawlers.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

6. Creating an extension to defend against AI crawler bots
Jeffrey Wang

AI crawler bots are becoming ever more of a problem, but neither core MediaWiki nor its existing extensions are completely equipped to handle these bots. In this talk, I'll explain my idea for creating an extension to specifically combat AI crawler bots.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

7. Quality Work Instructions at NASA using MediaWiki
Richard Evans

This talk will introduce the concept of Quality Work Instructions as an essential part of an ISO compliant "quality program" for testing spacecraft at NASA's Neil A. Armstrong Test Facility (ATF) in Ohio. Once the concept of Quality Work Instructions is established, the talk will describe ATF's project to Digitally Transform its Quality Work Instruction process using MediaWiki, the progress that has already made, and what work still needs to be done.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

8. Distributed Knowledge Management Systems across NASA's Rocket Propulsion Test Portfolio
Aaron Head

An overview of the RPT Portfolio's use cases for a knowledge management system, a brief description of the recent past, current, and proposed alternative future states juxtaposed with the features of the MediaWiki system we intend to release imminently, and our plans for future development of the system.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

9. "Recommended revisions", present and future
Yaron Koren

The Recommended revisions project seeks to create, for each version of MediaWiki, a listing of the ideal repository/branch/revision to use for each recommended skin and extension. It started as an offshoot of Canasta, but has come to take on a life of its own, including a new MediaWiki extension, Springboard, that will hopefully fulfill a decades-long dream: to be able to install MediaWiki extensions and skins directly from the web interface. This talk will cover the philosophy and practice of "recommended revisions", as well as Canasta and Springboard, and will also discuss how the project can evolve going forward.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

10. Automating wiki tasks with ChatGPT
Tina Tenbergen

(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

11. Wikipedia Enterprise Technical Overview
Haroon Shaikh

(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

12. Vibecoding a MediaWiki extension
Jeffrey Wang

Is vibecoding the future? And if so, can it be used to create a functioning MediaWiki extension?
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

13. Managing the GRC Analytical Sciences Group Labs using the ATF Wiki
Laura Wilson

NASA GRC
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

14. Your rights as a MediaWiki user
Mark A. Hershberger

As a site owner, the licensing of MediaWiki gives you rights that are unusual for software and you really need to understand them.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

15. Welcome and opening remarks
Cindy Cicalese, Rich Evans, David L. Stringer, Dave E. Taylor

Welcome remarks and introductions made by:
Cindy Cicalese (general chair)
Rich Evans
General David L. Stringer, ATF Director
Dave E. Taylor, ATF Deputy Director
Dave Taylor will present an overview of NASA's Armstrong Test Facility, including its layout, its functions, and the benefits it provides.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

16. The case for a return to mildly dynamic websites
Rich Evans

This lightning talk presents an argument for a return to mildly dynamic websites. An optimistic response to web developer Hugo Landau's 2024 article titled, "The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website"
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

17. The first MediaWiki edit from Space - How NASA uses wikis to train Astronauts in space for EVAs
Richard Evans on behalf of Christina Koch

This lightning talk provides a quick look at what it takes to for NASA to extend the internet to space and concludes with the milestone of the first mediawiki edits from space in 2019 by NASA Astronaut Christina Koch. It concludes with a very short video made for the MediaWiki community back in 2020 by NASA Astronaut Christina Koch for a MediaWiki Users and Developers Event that was cancelled due to Covid and other factors. Christina's message to the group is just as meaningful and inspirational today as it was then and we are pleased to be able to present it to you now in 2025 with Christina's continued support and encouragement for the work you do.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

18. From Hooks to Events: evolving MediaWiki's extension interfaces
Daniel Kinzler

This presentation covers the concept of Domain Events which will be released with MediaWiki 1.45 (experimental in 1.44). Domain Events are intended to replace certain hooks, to make extension development easier and reduce the number of breaking changes.
Context:
WMF's MediaWiki Interfaces team has been working on improving the way that extensions interact with MediaWiki core. 
Last summer, we conducted an extensive survey of how extension use hooks. The survey indicated that there are certain hooks that are used to inform extensions about a change in state.
From that realization we arrived at the idea that this might be better modeled as events. The plan was to start by applying the observer pattern within MediaWiki core, then allow extensions to register listeners.
Eventually, this will hopefully enable MediaWiki to broadcast and receive events on a message bus.
I can do the presentation in 30 minutes or less, but I think it would be good to have room for questions and discussion.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

19. WikiStax - an introduction
Gary Foster

A couple of years ago I raised a suggestion about a MediaWiki manager similar how Wordpress operate. Cindy mentioned that if a tool were available it would be a useful tool, but if my memory serves me correctly it would need to be independent of MediaWiki.
Since then, I have developed WikiStax, based on mwadmin. I would like to introduce WikiStax to the community and ask for volunteers to help me get this project off the ground and help development where I am struggling.
At the moment it is primarily focused on Wiki farming, but I don't see why it wouldn't also work for single installs.
Gary
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

20. Introducing: Tech Partnerships @ Wikimedia Foundation
Liam Wyatt, Nicholas Perry

Introducing a new team at the Wikimedia Foundation: Tech Partnerships
Now that the infrastructure of the 'Wikimedia Enterprise' platform (of APIs and datasets) is in place, it is far more feasible to proactively offer support and advice to third party reusers of Wikimedia content – who previously would have had no one to turn to for advice or direction. Working closely with teams from across the Wikimedia Foundation, and in particular Regional Partnerships and Community Programs, the Technical Partnerships team enables the Wikimedia Foundation to provide a holistic response when supporting external organizations who wish to participate in any part of the “flywheel” of Wikimedia content — creation and ingestion, improvement and curation, and dissemination and access — and when appropriate to use the Wikimedia Enterprise platform to do so, either for free or at a significantly reduced cost.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

21. Juggel/MediaWiki as a GRC platform
Ad Strack van Schijndel

We are developing a GRC platform with Juggel. In this presentation Ad will explain what we think a GRC platform should offer. Flexibility in the platform, but also in using external services. Some MACH architecture with a BFF perhaps?
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

22. State of Canasta - Spring 2025
Jeffrey Wang

The latest updates regarding Canasta since November 2024. The main topics will be the base layer and the MediaWiki 1.43 upgrade. Some discussion about the future of Kubernetes will also be included.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

23. Fuzzing the MediaWiki REST API
Daniel Scherzer

In my reinforcement learning class this spring at Tufts, I came across the article https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/31995 where a tool for fuzzing a REST API was presented. I decided to apply that (open source) tool to MediaWiki's API to check for bugs, and in this talk I'll present the results as well as lessons learned along the way.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

24. Ballotpedia and MediaWiki
Matt Latourelle, Joseph Sanchez

Outline
What is Ballotpedia? Brief history and purpose, usage statistics and funding model
Ballotpedia's use of MediaWiki
Q&A
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

25. Collaborative Knowledge Creation: Lessons from Open Source Communities
Ike Hecht

This talk examines how the principles and practices of open-source communities can be adapted to enhance collaborative knowledge creation within business environments using platforms like MediaWiki. It focuses on how open-source methodologies—such as transparency, peer review, distributed contribution, and community governance—can be applied to corporate knowledge management systems to improve efficiency and innovation.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

26. Handling Database Updates
Daniel Scherzer

WikiTeq has recently onboarded multiple clients that were upgrading from a much older version of MediaWiki. Specifically, they were upgrading from a version more than 2 LTS releases previously, meaning that just running update.php was not going to be supported. In this talk, I'll lay out how we worked to update these databases, including lessons learned and pitfalls to watch out for.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

27. argmap & iargmap: avoid Extension:Loops in new and exciting ways
Megan Cutrofello

Extension:Loops has some truly confusing syntax, but looping over a set of parameters without needing Lua is really useful and awesome. We added a couple parser functions to ParserPower which will hopefully make this a more pleasant experience.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

28. The Future of Knowledge Management: Trends and Predictions
Ike Hecht

This talk explores the emerging trends and future directions in knowledge management, with a focus on how these developments can impact and be integrated into platforms like MediaWiki. It will cover advancements such as the integration of artificial intelligence for automated content curation and personalized knowledge delivery, the rise of semantic technologies for richer data connections, and the increasing importance of mobile and voice-activated interfaces for on-the-go access.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  

29. Fixing Wikimedia Commons
Yaron Koren

The site Wikimedia Commons is in a strange situation: it's a global repository for a massive amount of media files, intended for use by anyone in the world, but seemingly 99% of its text contents (including file names, descriptions and categories) are only in English. Tied in with that is that search is difficult to do: though it's ostensibly a database of images, there is no way to do a structured search, to find, say, all images that depict subject X, taken in year Y, with file size less than Z.
The way out of this is via the structured data within Commons, which allows for storing Wikidata-like information about each file, in a way that is language-neutral and queryable. Unfortunately, there have been few tools that support either usage or creating of Commons' structured data. I have been involved with the creation of three tools that help fill this gap:

Commons Walkabout, for browsing and searching the structured data
AutoCats, for inline display of quasi-categories based on the structured data
A planned script, which will hopefully be completed before this talk is given, that would auto-populate the structured data of files on Commons based on their categories
Together, these tools can hopefully help to "fix" Wikimedia Commons. This talk will cover these tools, and give some general thoughts on how these kinds of tools can improve the usability of Commons and other Wikimedia/MediaWiki sites.
 recording release: yes license: CC BY-SA  



Location
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B7141
Assembly Room of the Engineering Building (B7141) at NASA ATF

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=41.359556,-82.641434

About the group
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