Wikimedia Hackathon Athens 2023

Published by Taavi Väänänen on June 1, 2023.

I attended my first in-person technical event last month: the 2023 Wikimedia Hackathon in Athens, Greece! After initially getting involved just before certain major world events it was really nice to finally get an opportunity to meet both people I'd consider friends and that I've never worked with before.1

Me hacking at the hackathon

I'm the one in the middle here, with a green t-shirt and a hat. Image credit: CC BY 4.0 by Tiago Lubiana.

Back in February I predicted that I'd be working on "Likely something WMCS related? Or MW auth stuff (CA/OATHAuth)". In the end I ended up hopping between multiple projects. To summarize:

I got a "I broke Wikipedia and then I fixed it" sticker. Apparently this was one of only three given out this event so I've been really good at breaking (and then fixing) stuff. I think my go-to story for this is the time when I broke the ability to be logged in, including the possibility to log in or out for anyone with an existing session. Unfortunately they don't hand out t-shirts for breaking stuff anymore.

I ended up attending a couple of sessions that I found interesting. I wish I could've attended more, but as expected I couldn't consentrate on the presentations anymore after attending a couple, and I slept over one that I really wanted to attend :(. I still managed to have very interesting conversations with lots of different people.

Thank you to the WMF for providing me a scholarship to attend the event.

About the travel experience itself:

I can't wait to meet everyone again, whether that's at Wikimania in Singapore later this year, next year's hackathon or something else.


  1. Although most of the attendees had at least heard of my name, which made this a really weird experience meeting new people. ↩︎

  2. We did undeploy an another extension just before deploying this one, so technically we didn't change anything. ↩︎

This article is tagged as: wikimedia

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