2019/Hackathon

WikiConference North America 2019 • Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.

Registration • Travel Guide • Unconference

Throughout the duration of the conference, we are hosting a hackathon for attendees to work on developing solutions for problems in the credibility space (on Wikimedia platforms and beyond).

Thanks to our partner Credibility Coalition, we will also have funding available to provide microgrants for groups that seek to continue working on credibility-related projects coming out of the event.

Challenges

We've developed the following challenges for individuals or groups to rally around to ideate and/or create solutions for. These are simply ideas to help inspire you; by no means do you have to stick to one of these!

If you have your own challenge ideas, you are more than welcome to expand the list!

Challenge 1: Replacing unsuitable sources

The English Wikipedia maintains a list of perennial sources that are frequently discussed, and includes a list of sources that are deprecated and that editors are cautioned against using. Even so, many of these sources are still used in articles.

Can we develop a solution to make the replacement of some of these sources easier? If a statement is sourced to a deprecated source, how can we make it easier for editors to find suitable, more credible replacements?

Challenge 2: Making sites citation-friendly

This challenge ties into Andrew Lih's Monday session, Making sites citation-friendly for Wikimedia - discussion and recommendations; attendees interested in this challenge are encouraged to attend this session.

Wikipedia uses Citoid to automatically generate references from just a given URL. However, data extraction is not always successful; for example, of the top 90 most cited news sources, the date is extracted correctly only 60% of the time, and authors 35% of the time.

How can we increase the accuracy of Citoid? Can we build a standard or list of recommendations for news organizations to use to make metadata extraction easier?

Grants

With the support of Credibility Coalition, we will be offering microgrants for groups that seek to continue working on credibility-related projects coming out of the event. Grants will range from between $500 to $10,000, depending on the scope and nature of the project.

Applications will open near the end or after the conference.