Name and contact information
*Name: AV Aditya Sastry*
*Email:ganeshadit...@gmail.com*
*IRC or IM networks/handle(s): **ganeshadit...@gmail.com*
*Location:Vishakhapatanam, Andhra Pradesh*
*Typical working hours: 2:00 PM to 12:30AM*
Synopsis
Every MediaWiki article has a talk page. But the discussions here are very
generic in nature and are concerned with the whole article rather than a
part of it.
With Inline commenting, user could select a line of an article and write a
comment for it, which could be viewed by other users and they can respond
to the comment as well.
This greatly helps engage the readers as well the editors in discussions
about the articles and thus help make them better and accurate.
The project itself can be divided into two parts.
1) User Interface.
2) Database classes.
Every article being displayed will have a tab in the top right corner
linking it to this extension. Here the user can view the comments for the
article as well as make comments.
When the user clicks on the tab, the name of the article is communicated to
the extension which is used to retrieve the comments from the database.
Each comment is indexed with three entities the page name, starting and
ending index and these are used to retrieve the associated comments from
the database and display them. Displaying them is done using AJAX and
JQuery. In the mockup I have provided I haven't used these two technologies
as I was constrained by time.
Deliverables
1) Special page to view comments as well as make them
2) Database classes.
3) Sanitizer classes needed to sanitize the comments posted.
4) Parser functions(A special magic word will be created as {{Page title,
Start index, ending index}} which will be converted to a link by this
parsing function.)
5) AJAX, JQuery and any necessary JS functions to implement this
functionality.
Time frame:
1. pre 16th: Learning about JQuery specifically this functionality
http://www.w3schools.com/jquery/tryit.asp?filename=tryjquery_slide_down and
about the database classes helper functions(will be consulting my mentor
for the databases part).
2. 16th to 23rd june: Developing the Database classes and unit testing.
3. 23rd june to 30th june: Working with the sanitizer classes to
implement any additional functionalities needed to secure Database access
and unit testing it.
4. 30th june to 7th july: Developing the parser functions and unit
testing.
5. 7th july to 20th july: Smoke testing with these three components put
together.
6. 20th july to 31st july: Developing the User interface using JQuery,
AJAX and JS as well as writting the necessary CSS.
7. 31st july to 10th august: putting everything together and smoke
testing it.
8. 10th august to 20th august: Beta testing and using the feedback to
make modifications
9. 20th august to 16th September: Documenting the whole extension.
About you
I have been using Wikipedia since my 10th class. I owe my life to Wikipedia
cause anything I have accomplished academically its owing to Wikipedia. I
have only contributed to my university's Wikipage once. But mostly I have
been a consumer.
How ever I feel ashamed in confessing that until I started working on
MediaWiki I didn't know about the talk page and even when I came to know
about it, I noticed that the talk pages of few articles that I frequently
read are congested with discussions about the whole article rather than a
sub part of it that I am concerned with. Hence I had to read the whole
discussion to comprehend the context to be able to contribute to these
discussions. I am sure other Wikipedia readers might have felt the same
about it to.
Participation
I am a workaholic. I can't focus on anything else when I have some work
pending. So I will be spending all my free time on this project and it is
my first priority.
I will be communicating my progress on weekly basis and I plan on putting
my extension in a github and I would be committing to it regularly on daily
basis so that my mentor could track my progress.
Till the end of this month I wouldn't be available on IRC as am changing my
ISP(My current ISP strangely blocks IRC, SSH, FTP and it is because of him
that my bugfixes were so horrible initially). However I am still accessible
on email, gmail, facebook and on phone if deemed necessary. Once I finish
switching my ISP I will be available in Freenode.
Past open source experience
I have fixed three bugs in MediaWiki. Here's my github account
https://github.com/ganeshaditya1. Here I am posting the gerrit links as
they are shorter than the bug links in buzilla, these three have been
merged, the insert http links is not working.
- https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/59822/
- https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/59395/ (This was my first bugfix to
an opensource project and my first time with git and I had a pathetically
slow (3kbps 2G internet connection), so I made a lot of mistakes and
occasionally I admit loosing my cool too.
- https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/59393/
Bug fix stuck in a limbo:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/59390/ I submitted a fix to this but it
was decided by chad that the bug is not necessary to fix. so it was
abandoned.
Any other info
I have first prepared this mockup:
http://adityasastry.in.cp-2.webhostbox.net/index.php?title=Special:BlankPage
With both the views for viewing the comments as well submitting the
comments implemented as movable popup's (Movable part is not yet
implemented)
Then I saw that the postings in the bugzilla bug page and noticed that
people are looking for something that looks like CO-ment. So I came up with
this mockup:
http://adityasastry.in.cp-2.webhostbox.net/index.php?title=Special:Inline#<http://adityasastry.in.cp-2.webhostbox.net/index.php?title=Special:Inline>
In this the comments are displayed in-line with the article. Instead of
being displayed in the margin. I wouldn't mind putting it in the margin but
as it was already pointed out margin space is way too small and the
comments would look congested.
I personally prefer my first mockup as it doesn't effect the original
wikipedia UI and doesn't harm the readability however I am open to
suggestions and I keep an open mind when it comes to UI Design.
Regards,
Aditya
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