I'm trying to organize a hack the wiki corner at the upcoming 26th Chaos Communication Congress (Berlin, Dec 27-30). The idea is to have a place where people interested in contributing to the Wikipedia/MediaWiki user experience on the technical level can discuss their ideas and get help implementing them - be it by writing extensions, toolserver tools, javasacript gadgets, api-based bots, or whatever.

I'm looking for people interested in being available for questions and discussions about any aspect of interacting with Wikipedia and/or MediaWiki in code. There has been some criticism from the German hacker community of the "wiki 2000" experience Wikipedia supposedly offers. There's quite a bit of energy directed at hacking up alternative ways to access and use Wikipedia content there. I'd like to channel some of that drive into improvements usable directly in medaiwiki or on the wikimedia sites.

Note that this my personal pet project, nothing official by WMDE. At least, not yet. If there are enough people interested, I hope we can get support for things like travel cost from WMDE. So please mail me (daniel dot kinzler at wikimedia dot de) if you are interested, so I can get things organized.

Oh, and: that congress is great fun, with tons of cool blinking stuff and

thousands of geeks - well worth going to in any case!