Heading to the hackathon

Wikimedian Brodie Hoare, Online Collections Data Analyst at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, recently attended the Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 in Milan and used this as an opportunity to develop and deploy a working prototype of the GLAM Tool Hospital, a Phabricator ticket creation tool.

This project was born out of a desire to explore how GLAM (gallery, library, archive, museum) users and technical contributors could communicate more effectively about tool bugs and feature requests: read more here.

The resulting prototype provides a friendly, stepped form that turns plain-language prompts into Phabricator tickets via a bot account, along with a simple board for tracking and filtering issues by tool. Next steps for Brodie include demonstrating the prototype at upcoming GLAM-Wiki meetings and inviting user testing to refine the tool further for GLAM community needs.

Brodie also attended workshops relating to Wikimedia Commons uploads, developer documentation, Wikibase, and Toolforge tool development; finding it a privilege and wonderful opportunity to be able to provide both a GLAM and Aotearoa New Zealand-specific perspective in these discussions.

Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 group photograph by Mike Peel, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons