GSoC'18 with Wikimedia Foundation - Inception

20 May 2018

Open source community is fascinating, it had always captivated me. It was like the grand line from the one piece universe for me (Sorry for the Anime reference!), daunting and full of opportunities. You always hear from other contributors, that once you start things will fall into place. Starting with open source contributions is a challenging task. I myself stumbled upon several different projects from different organizations. Then finally, I found WikiEducation Dashboard, a project from WikiEducation Foundation which is a sister organization to Wikimedia. Mentors were quite active and provided a comfortable environment for new contributors. In no time, I was quite familiar with projects and was on spree of solving bugs and issues.

GSoC kick-off

I was familiar with GSoC program and was planning to apply to Wikimedia Foundation. I had made enough contributions and was confident with my familiarity with the project. Proposal drafting phase was one of the toughest times. I have to thank the mentors especially to Sage Ross who was always there to help with all the questions I had regarding the proposal and project. I submitted my proposal and was waiting eagerly for the results. It was 23rd April and the mail was here bearing good news! All the hard work had finally paid off!

GSoC’18 Project: Article Finder for WikiEducation Dashboard

For GSoC’18 and Wikimedia, I am working on Article Finder for WikiEducation Dashboard. The Wiki Education Dashboard/ Programs & Events Dashboard is a Web Application that helps people organize groups of newcomers to contribute to Wikipedia. The initial steps towards successful Wikipedia authorship are finding and selection of appropriate content to work on. An Article Finder tool will help instructor and students to search and select articles in need of contribution and editing. Our aim is to help users in looking up an article of his/her expertise which is in need of editing.

The project can be broken down into following goals:

• Integrate several different Wikimedia APIs to obtain search results
• Filtering the results as per user’s requirement(For example, based on the Page Assessment Grade of the articles)
• Implement a User-friendly UI/UX for the dashboard
• Integrate the tool with the current dashboard
• Provide webhooks for adding the articles to a course on the dashboard
• Improve performance of the tool for better user experience

You can find my proposal here.

What’s next?

With a discussion with my mentors based on my proposal, I have concrete plan and timeline for the project. I hope to keep you all updated on my progress through this blog series. I will try to keep them technical so that reader can learn something.

I am excited to spend my time working with Wikimedia and grateful for the mentors for their constant support.

In the next series, we will be talking about the API integration for different Wikimedia APIs which I am currently working on. Stay tuned!