Between the Brackets: a MediaWiki Podcast

A podcast about the people and ideas behind the MediaWiki software. Interviews with developers and users of MediaWiki, both for Wikimedia sites (Wikipedia, Wikidata, etc.) and the many uses of MediaWiki in companies, organizations, governments and personal uses. Credits: audio production done via the Audacity software; theme music performed by Victor Noriega.

Episode 176: Selena Deckelmann 02/11/2025

Episode 176: Selena Deckelmann 🕑 1 hour 11 minutes Selena Deckelmann has been the Chief Product and Technology Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation since 2022. Before that, she worked for around 10 years at the Mozilla Foundation, eventually reaching the position of Senior Vice President, Firefox. Links for some of the topics discussed: Wikipedia article (Wikimedia Commons talk page discussion) (July 2023 blog post by Selena) project page on Meta-Wiki /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/35247590

Episode 175: Trevor Parscal 01/28/2025

Episode 175: Trevor Parscal 🕑 1 hour 27 minutes Former Wikimedia Foundation developer Trevor Parscal returns to the podcast to talk about the happy (to many) news that Ross Ulbricht, who was serving a double life sentence for having created and run the "dark web" website Silk Road, was just released from prison. We also talk about the state of U.S. politics in general, and what it means for the tech world - and for Wikipedia. Links for some of the topics discussed: Wikipedia article "" (Meta blog post, January 2025) "" (Fast Company article, December 2024) "" (The Register article, January 2014) "" (Elon Musk X post, January 2025) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/35056095

Episode 174: Brian Wolff 01/15/2025

Episode 174: Brian Wolff 🕑 1 hour 15 minutes Brian Wolff returns for a third episode! The security expert and longtime MediaWiki developer does an in-person interview to talk about his latest development projects, and Wikimedia goings-on, past and present. Links for some of the topics discussed: (Wikipedia Signpost article by Brian Wolff, January 2025) on English-language Wikipedia online electricity simulator (New York Post article, April 2024) (City Journal article, April 2024) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/34859955

Episode 173: Adam Shorland, Tom Arrow and Ollie Hyde 12/31/2024

Episode 173: Adam Shorland, Tom Arrow and Ollie Hyde 🕑 1 hour 42 minutes Adam Shorland, Tom Arrow and Ollie Hyde (pictured, left to right) show up together for the final episode of 2024! Adam (username Addshore) returns for his second appearance; he has since left Wikimedia Deutschland and now works at Lightbug. Tom and Ollie remain at Wikimedia Deutschland, both working on Wikibase development, with a focus on Wikibase Cloud and the Wikibase API, respectively. Links for some of the topics discussed: Wikipedia article (October 2024 blog post by Adam) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/34673100

Episode 172: Richard Knipel 12/17/2024

Episode 172: Richard Knipel 🕑 1 hour 19 minutes Richard Knipel (username Pharos) returns, for a special holiday-esque episode! He talks about recent developments with Wikispore, the Wikimedia Movement Charter, and Wikimedia New York City; and then we listen to some freely-licensed music from Wikimedia Commons. Links for some of the topics discussed: proposal (Wikinews article mostly written by Richard) (December 31, 2024) The music: from the Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Robert Casadesus performed by Dominique Manzadi by NEFFEX by Waclaw of Szamotuly, performed by Collegium Vocale Bydgoszcz ("Dark Eyes") by Yevhen Hrebink and Florian Hermann, performed by Feodor Chaliapin from the clarinet quintet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, performed by Vlad Weverbergh and the Terra Nova Collective /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/34490250

Episode 171: BTB Digest 27 12/03/2024

Episode 171: BTB Digest 27 🕑 26 minutes It's another BTB Digest, with clips from five recent episodes! Brent Laabs recounts the abortive renaming of Miraheze, Alex Stinson considers the uniqueness of different language Wikipedias, Paul Cereghino notes the challenges of finding wiki editors in the government, Valerio Bozzolan argues for putting conference videos on PeerTube, Asaf Bartov warns about "weaponized AI" on Wikipedia, and more. /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/34272955

Episode 170: Stephen Harrison 11/19/2024

Episode 170: Stephen Harrison 🕑 1 hour Stephen Harrison is a tech lawyer and journalist who has been writing about Wikipedia since 2018, including dozens of articles for the online magazine Slate as part of his Source Notes column. He is the author of the 2024 novel The Editors, which is about a group of editors of the fictional user-editable online encyclopedia "Infopendium" who are drawn together by dramatic events. Links for some of the topics discussed: (my apologies for casting aspersions - it's not that political any more! It was more political during the recent U.S. presidential election.) (October 2024 blog post) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/34021252

Episode 169: Bertrand Gorge 11/05/2024

Episode 169: Bertrand Gorge 🕑 1 hour 9 minutes Bertrand Gorge is the co-founder of Triple Performance, a (currently) French-language-only wiki that holds resources for farmers. He also co-runs the company Neayi, which manages Triple Performance. Links for some of the topics discussed: (Triple Performance article about crop rotation) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/33807337

Episode 168: Asaf Bartov 10/22/2024

Episode 168: Asaf Bartov 🕑 1 hour 10 minutes Asaf Bartov is the lead program officer for the Emerging Wikimedia Communities project of the Community Development Team at the Wikimedia Foundation. He also runs Project Ben-Yehuda, which has been putting Hebrew-language texts online since 1999, and the Nemala project, which publishes Hebrew translations of Ukrainian-language works. Links for some of the topics discussed: (episode of the podcast Scuola di Pensiero) initiative (talk by Asaf at Wikimania CEE Meeting 2024) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/33576582

Episode 167: Valerio Bozzolan 10/08/2024

Episode 167: Valerio Bozzolan 🕑 1 hour 42 minutes Valerio Bozzolan is a software developer and Linux administrator, as well as the president of the Italian Linux Society, the founder and head of Wikimedians for Software Freedom, a member of the volunteer technical commission of Wikimedia Italy, and an open source consultant for Wikimedia Switzerland. Links for some of the topics discussed: (Italian Wikipedia article) ("Ask for a refund for the (non-)operating system!") "" page "" page (powered by PeerTube) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/33380962

Episode 166: Paul Cereghino 09/24/2024

Episode 166: Paul Cereghino 🕑 1 hour 7 minutes Paul Cereghino is a restoration ecologist for the U.S. federal government, where he also supports the development and adminstration of the Salish Sea Restoration wiki. Links for some of the topics discussed: Wikipedia article "" (NPR article, September 2024) "" (NPR article, March 2017) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/33195197

Episode 165: BTB Digest 26 09/10/2024

Episode 165: BTB Digest 26 🕑 23 minutes It's another BTB Digest, with highlights from five recent episodes. Jeffrey Wang discusses competing for European users, Taavi Väänänen describes the RealMe extension, Megan Cutrofello defends video game wikis with "spoilers", Moritz Schubotz analyzes MediaWiki as a math publishing tool, Viktor Schelling reminisces on the early days of a consulting company, and more! /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/33000742

Episode 164: Alex Stinson 08/27/2024

Episode 164: Alex Stinson 🕑 2 hours Alex Stinson is Lead Program Strategist for the Campaigns Team at the Wikimedia Foundation. Links for some of the topics discussed: (2005-2006 project on Wikipedia) MediaWiki extension /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/32765842

Episode 163: Brent Laabs 08/14/2024

Episode 163: Brent Laabs 🕑 1 hour 35 minutes Brent Laabs (user name Labster) is chair of the board and acting president of the WikiTide Foundation, the nonprofit foundation that runs the wiki farm Miraheze. Links for some of the topics discussed: wiki (December 2023) (April 2024) MediaWiki extension /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/32578917

Episode 162: Viktor Schelling 05/07/2024

Episode 162: Viktor Schelling 🕑 1 hour 3 minutes Viktor Schelling is the Senior Principal MediaWiki Developer at Pegasystems. Links for some of the topics discussed: Wikipedia article MediaWiki extension /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/31175482

Episode 161: Moritz Schubotz 04/25/2024

Episode 161: Moritz Schubotz 🕑 1 hour 28 minutes Dr. Moritz Schubotz (developer username Physikerwelt) is head of research at the mathematics department at FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure. He is the author or co-author of the MediaWiki extensions Math and MathSearch, and the Mathoid application, among others. Links for some of the topics discussed: MediaWiki extension MediaWiki extension Wikipedia article Wikipedia article (Wikibase instance) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/30983668

Episode 160: Megan Cutrofello 04/09/2024

Episode 160: Megan Cutrofello 🕑 1 hour 43 minutes Megan Cutrofello, better known as River, returns to the podcast. She is a freelance wiki developer who has worked with Gamepedia, Fandom and wiki.gg, among others. Links for some of the topics discussed: (2023 Reddit thread) blog /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/30753283

Episode 159: BTB Digest 25 03/26/2024

Episode 159: BTB Digest 25 🕑 21 minutes It's a BTB Digest episode! Hear clips from five recent episodes. Steve Schneider describes his remarkably AI-centered approach to teaching, Birgit Müller boasts about her team's success in improving code review, Srishti Sethi considers the usefulness of developer outreach programs, Alan Ang lists the steps in getting a knowledge base onto Wikidata, Guillaume Coulombe compares MediaWiki expertise to martial arts, and more! /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/30548783

Episode 158: Taavi Väänänen 03/12/2024

Episode 158: Taavi Väänänen 🕑 38 minutes Taavi Väänänen is a site reliability engineer in the Wikimedia Cloud Services team at the Wikimedia Foundation. In 2022, when he was still just a volunteer contributor, he was named Tech Contributor of the Year by Jimmy Wales. Links for some of the topics discussed: Wikipedia article /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/30340403

Episode 157: Jeffrey Wang 02/27/2024

Episode 157: Jeffrey Wang 🕑 1 hour 28 minutes Jeffrey Wang returns to the podcast to talk about his new-ish job at Microsoft, his much older job as head of MyWikis, the upcoming MediaWiki conference, AI, and various other things. Some of the topics discussed: (2022 blog post) (Runtime article) (talk by Jeffrey at EMWCon Spring 2023) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/30135938

Episode 156: Guillaume Coulombe 02/13/2024

Episode 156: Guillaume Coulombe 🕑 1 hour 9 minutes Guillaume Coulombe is the head of Procédurable, a process consulting company with a focus on open source software and open data, and an even more specific focus on MediaWiki. Links for some of the topics discussed: (2012 paper by Régis Barondeau) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/29936788

Episode 155: Alan Ang and Kris Litson 01/30/2024

Episode 155: Alan Ang and Kris Litson 🕑 1 hour 13 minutes Alan Ang and Kris Litson (pictured, left to right) are both employees at Wikimedia Deutschland, the German Wikimedia chapter: Alan is a partner manager for Wikidata, while Kris is head of software communications. The two are both involved in evangelism for both Wikidata and its backend software, Wikibase. Links for some of the topics discussed: on Wikipedia (includes contact email address) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/29717708

Episode 154: Srishti Sethi 01/16/2024

Episode 154: Srishti Sethi 🕑 52 minutes Srishti Sethi (also known as SrishAkaTux) is a developer advocate in the Language Team at the Wikimedia Foundation. Prior to the mass reorganization at the Wikimedia Foundation in summer 2023, she was part of the Technical Engagement team. Links for some of the topics discussed: (December 2023 blog post) (June 2023 blog post) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/29511118

Episode 153: BTB Digest 24 01/02/2024

Episode 153: BTB Digest 24 🕑 23 minutes It's another BTB Digest! Highlights from five recent episodes. Bryan Hilderbrand considers the future of scientific publishing, Jan Ainali thinks about solutions for Wikidata's messiness, Tricia Burmeister recounts the challenges of changing a wiki's front page, Ilias Sarantopoulos praises the new Lift Wing software, Alissa Stern explains how her wiki became a communications hub for the people of Bali, and more! /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/29309233

Episode 152: Year in review with William Beutler 12/19/2023

Episode 152: Year in review with William Beutler 🕑 1 hour 8 minutes It's not quite a holiday episode, but it is an end-of-year wrapup, featuring William Beutler, strategic marketing consultant and author of the blog , which went on hiatus in 2020 and is now thankfully back. William shares some of the stories that he's working on for his "Top 10 Wikipedia Stories of 2023" feature (his first year-in-review in three years!), and we reminisce on the past year, in both the Wikimedia universe and the tech world in general. /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/29148898

Episode 151: Birgit Müller 12/06/2023

Episode 151: Birgit Müller 🕑 55 minutes Birgit Müller is the Director of Product for MediaWiki and Developer Experiences at the Wikimedia Foundation. Before that, she was Director of Technical Engagement. From 2014 to 2019, she worked at Wikimedia Deutschland. Links for some of the topics discussed: on mediawiki.org - includes statistics about review time improvements /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/28961918

Episode 150: Steve Schneider 11/21/2023

Episode 150: Steve Schneider 🕑 1 hour 52 minutes Steve Schneider is a professor of information design at the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly). He currently teaches a class, Digital Media and Information in Society, whose coursework is managed via Wikiversity and Wiki Edu, and also involves the use of ChatGPT by both teacher and students. Links for some of the topics discussed: (WikiConference North America 2023 talk) course on Wikiversity on Wikiversity Wikipedia article Wikipedia article (has included a "possibly generated by LLM" warning since July 2023) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/28741143

Episode 149: Alissa Stern 11/08/2023

Episode 149: Alissa Stern 🕑 1 hour 5 minutes Alissa Stern founded the organization BASAbali (later renamed BASAibu) in 2011, and the BASAbali Wiki in 2014. The BASAbali Wiki was originally intended to serve only as a dictionary for the Balinese language, but it has since grown to become a general communication hub for the Balinese community. Links for some of the topics discussed: (February 2023 blog post, Bali Discovery) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/28550498

Episode 148: Ilias Sarantopoulos 10/24/2023

Episode 148: Ilias Sarantopoulos 🕑 1 hour 4 minutes Ilias Sarantopoulos is a Senior Machine Learning Operations Engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been at the WMF since 2022. Links for some of the topics discussed: (The New York Times Magazine article, July 2023) /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/28410251

Episode 147: Tricia Burmeister 09/26/2023

Episode 147: Tricia Burmeister 🕑 1 hour 23 minutes Tricia Burmeister is a senior technical writer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and part of the (relatively new) WMF Technical Documentation Team. Links for some of the topics discussed: /episode/index/show/betweenthebrackets/id/28149656

Between the Brackets: a MediaWiki Podcast

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