Taavi Väänänen: Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026

Wikimedia Nederland organised a new type of event this year, the
Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026, which was held last
weekend in Arnhem, the Netherlands. And I’m very happy they did,
since unlike last years, I will unfortunately be missing from the
“main” Wikimedia Hackathon (which is happening in Milan at the start of
May).

I continue to believe the primary reason for these events existing is
the ability to connect with old and new friends in person. That being
said, I did get a bit of technical tinkering done during the weekend
as well. These include a dark mode fix to MediaWiki’s notification
interface, fixes to some visual bugs in MediaWiki’s two-factor
authentication and OAuth functionality. I did also get an older
patch of mine about disabling Composer’s new auditing functionality
merged. And, as usual, I spent a bunch of time helping various people
use with the various infrastructure pieces I’m familiar with (or at
least had to suddenly get familiar with) and approved a bunch of OAuth
consumers and other requests.

We also managed to continue the tradition from the past two Wikimedia
Hackathons of nominating more people to receive +2 access to
mediawiki/*. That request is still open as of writing, as those have
to run for at least a week, but looks very likely to pass at this
point.

Overall, the event was very well-organized: the venue was great, except
that the number of stairs was described in a rather misleading way,
food was great, and the atmosphere was amazing. The pressure that you
must Just Get Things Done to justify your attendance that the main
hackathon seems to have recently gained was clearly missing here which
was great. Also, I will clearly need to bring more Finnish chocolate
next time.

The timing of Friday and Saturday works great for us with other things
(like university for me) during the week, as it takes full advantage of
the weekend but still only eats workdays from a single calendar week.
My main gripe with the logistics was the focus on a single sketchy
non-free messaging platform for all event-related communications with
the IRC bridge used on the main hackathon channel notably missing.

ps. Like Lucas, I do have Opinions about so many proudly mentioning
they’ve used “vibe coding” tools during the introduction and showcase.
Those opinions are best left for an another time, but I do want to note
that all of my work and mistakes have still been lovingly handcrafted.