Hi again. I'm glad to hear that the Berlin Lectures will be uploaded at higher quality and that Asheesh Loria will be assisting in this years wikimania's Hakcathon and material development. As per your questions - I have revisited last year's lectures a couple of times. I tend to maximize the social aspects of hackathon and review the technical materials at my leisure and with the attention to detail that they require. I reviewed almost all of Wikimania during Jan-March. For examples I revisited Andrew West's Lecture on ant vandalism where he mentioned using Amazon Mechanical Turk to create an anti-vandalism corpus. He also described in verbatim how anti-vandalism robots are designed. This is not mentioned AFIK in any academic journals - only the results of anti-vandalism are. The reason why this work was interesting for me was that it applies to the area of Quality Assessment - where being able to draw the fine line between good will edits and bad will ones boils down to keeping or loosing new editors. Another example is review of the materials about gadgets and extensions. This work comes with a steep learning curve and again the lectures fill the void created by a lack of hands on training course. Regarding your questions slides are useful but to a limited degree. They are supposed to help support a lecture visually and help a good speaker keep his place in the talk. In the case of the Lua slides - they really help to structure a tutorial but the lecture has almost all the important details. About transcripts - these are best if added to the lectures - both to remedy low quality vocals and to help users with accessibility problems but are not a high priority for me. I do use them when available. Finally my own experience with lectures from Google etc is that they combine in their technical podcasts camtasia type screen captures. These allow the viewers a glimpse of the instructor's screen. Seeing the screen captures - even in slides is next to impossible and so getting videos with screen captures of this type integrated would be Ideal. Having slides and transcripts is definitely a productivity booster too. P.S. regarding the link at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:OrenBochman/Lessons This is part of a pilot to expand the activities of Wikipedia's adoption program. Currently only the Adoption school and the Lua Module development contain useful content. The Lua Module has added new info on String processing. If there is interest in additional courses/lessons please let me know and they will be added in due course. -----Original Message----- From: Sumana Harihareswara [mailto:sumanah@wikimedia.org] Sent: Monday, June 25, 2012 10:42 AM To: Wikitext-l Cc: Oren Bochman; Asheesh Laroia Subject: Re: [Wikitext-l] filming the hackathon for experts AND newbies: Washington, DC, USA July 10-11 Thanks for the heads-up, Oren. I'll talk with OpenHatch and other WMF folks about the possible filming of the Wikimania hackathon. Can you specifically say what is most valuable about having lectures videotaped and available online for you? Would transcripts and slides be sufficient substitutes? The few Berlin hackathon videos that you see online at http://vimeo.com/user7709672/videos are provisional and fairly temporary; professionally edited videos will be up at commons.wikimedia.org by or on July 9th. People who want to look at Oren's lessons can find them at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:OrenBochman/Lessons . -- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation On 06/25/2012 01:31 AM, Oren Bochman wrote: that the quality. many hosted hackathon. everyone tell