In a few weeks time, I’m going to be heading to the Wikimedia Hackathon in Zurich, Switzerland.

I’ve been granted a scholarship by Wikimedia UK to cover my travel costs and accommodation, so I can spend a long weekend hacking on code for Wikipedia-related things in the company of a hundred or so other developers from around the world.

I’m heading there to work on integrating the Account Creation tool with the Wikimedia login system so we can replace our broken welcome bot with posts from the creator an account. In the past we have faked it by making the bot sign as a different user, but we’re hoping to allow the bot to edit as other users using the new OAuth tools.

I’m also hoping to learn a lot more about the internals of MediaWiki, the software which powers sites like Wikipedia, in the hope that I can get a lot more involved in the development of this remarkable piece of software, both the core application itself, and extensions. I’ve already done a bit of work on extensions, but I’ve hardly done anything with core. I’d love to learn more to be able to get much more involved with it.

One of the other things I’m looking forward to is the OpenPGP/GnuPG key signing party that’s been suggested, where people can get together and verify each other’s identities, then go away and sign their keys as being valid. It’ll be the first time that I’ve ever been to something like this, and it will be good to get a few more signatures on my key!

It’s going to be really good to meet people, learn, and importantly hack on code to try and get something worthwhile done!