Thank You/Judy Tuan

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About a year ago, I was looking around on the Internet and I came across a ‘Wikipedia Hackathon’. I didn't know anything about the engineering behind Wikipedia, but I was curious.
When I showed up, there were all these programmers working for the Wikimedia Foundation alongside other volunteers. They were asking everyone to share their ideas about how to make Wikipedia better, and they were ready to build those tools right there.

At the time, I didn’t have a smartphone and I always wished I could look stuff up on Wikipedia when I wasn’t near a computer.

My idea was that you could SMS what you wanted to know to Wikipedia and then get a phone call back and a computer could read a Wikipedia article back to you.

We broke into teams and in two days we had a working prototype. It was mind-blowing.

The whole event was so fun and empowering.

 &mdash; Judy Tuan

Judy is a gamer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.

Video Attribution: by Victor Grigas, under [//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported], from Wikimedia Commons.

Image Attribution: by Victor Grigas, under [//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported], from Wikimedia Commons.