The School of Engineering to host Barcelona's Hackathon

Inauguració de la Wikimedia Hackathon a la UAB.

From 18 to 20 May, three hundred developers will meet at the School of Engineering to participate in the Wikimedia Hackathon, the largest event of its kind. Different projects and an automatic learning system adapted to Wikipedia will be presented.

15/05/2018

The Wikimedia Hackathon will take place from 18 to 20 May at the UAB School of Engineering. This important event will bring together developers from around the world aiming to improve the technological infrastructure of Wikipedia and other sister projects. This is the first time that a Wikimedia Hackathon will be held in a city of Southern Europe. A total of 300 participants have signed up for this year's edition.

On 17 May, participants will be arriving to Barcelona and will attend a series of pre-events. On Friday at 10 a.m., an institutional event will officially give way to the hackathon at the Auditorium of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, with representatives of Amical Wikimedia, the UAB and the Wikimedia Foundation. The event's activities will then continue uninterruptedly until the end of the hackathon on Sunday at 4 p.m.

Different projects will be presented on databases, mobile editing, digital humanities, design, automatic translation and visual collaboration. The ORES project will also be presented, which is a machine learning system recently adapted to the Catalan version of Wikipedia which helps fight against digital vandalism. It works with a prediction model based on previous acts of vandalism.

To prepare the subjects of the event, meetings were held in Olot in February, in Barcelona's Casa Orlandai in March, at the PRBB in Barcelona and in Montpellier in April and in the Netherlands in May.

The hackathons attracts developers from several different countries who present new tools and work jointly to improve Wikimedia's projects. Previous editions of the hackathon have been held in Berlin (2011 and 2012), Amsterdam (2013), Zurich (2014), Lyon (2015) and Jerusalem (2016). In the 2017 edition alone, held in Vienna, over 250 participants attended from around the world. The event will coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Amical Wikimedia association, officially recognised in 2013 by the Wikimedia Foundation.

More information: Wikimedia Hackathon 2018