Priyanka Nag

I am Priyanka Nag, a post graduate student from Pune. A woman in Open Source community, keen about development oriented work. Wikipedia editing is more of a hobby and passion for me than any responsibility. Presently am perusing my Masters in Computer Applications from Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, an institute under Symbiosis International University.

About Me

I am involved with a few Open Source Community as well like Mozilla and Drupal. Though am a developer, am more passionate towards technical documentation and Software Architecture Designing than pure hard code coding. Am a blogger by hobby and writing is my passion. Being a Wikipedia editor is also to quench my thirst of writing. Presently I am a MediaWiki intern under Outreach Program for Women.

I have chosen to work on a project with Wikimedia. The name of the project is Documenting noteworthy local templates in which I am being mentored by Amir E. Aharoni. As a small contribution to the project, I have done a documentation on how to import a feature present in Russian Wikipedia page into other Wikipedia page. It was a great learning, as being a first timer, I wasn't very perfect in the first go. Amir is very helpful as a mentor and I am hoping to learn a lot more working under him.

I have made small contribution in several FOSS projects like editing,creating and translating Wikipedia pages in English and Bengali. I have also worked on several Mozilla tools like Thimble, Webmaker etc. Presently I am also involved in some translation work for Firefox OS.

Other than that, I was also a participant in The Great Mind Challenge 2011 which was organised by IBM.

All these projects are fun to work on. Mainly working on any FOSS project is great experience because at any moment if I am stuck, I always end up finding several people all ready to help and I end up learning so much new stuff and also making new friends through these communications.

My current project in MediaWiki

My current project with MediaWiki is a project that deals with the fact that each Wikipedia has its own CSS styles, JS gadgets, and templates. It's most a good thing, because it gives each language community the freedom to customize and innovate. But there's also a problem: these things may be useful in other languages, too, and it's hard to port them. Most MediaWiki developers are aware of the customization in the language they speak - mostly English, and to a lesser extent German, Dutch, Russian and French. And they aren't even aware of the useful developments in other languages. And they may not be aware that a customization that works in their language is not available in other languages. I will help Amir in achieving this goal of documenting some local templates so that irrespective of language, MediaWiki platform remains the same. This will help all developers as well as contributors by making their work easier.

My contributions to MediaWiki

Before applying for OPW, the few work I have done for MediaWiki under the guidance of my mentor are:
1) There are small blue buttons that allow adding of useful edit summaries. There are similar tools in Polish, Hebrew, and maybe a couple of other languages. And it can be useful to all languages.So I have written a few pages that describes how is it implemented now, how is it useful, and what should be done to make this localizable and portable.
The documentation can be found here: media:Documenting noteworthy local templates.pdf

2) On the English Wikipedia there's a useful "Cite toolbar", which appears when you are editing an article. My task was to:

• Describe how this toolbar works at the English Wikipedia.
• Make a list of English strings that will have to be translated to other languages to make this toolbar fully translated to any language.
• Describe which templates does this extension insert.

These above stated tasks have been successfully completed by me till date.
The documentation can be found here: media:Assignment2 Wikipedia.pdf

3) On a clean Wiki, how to include the necessary extensions and then get the 'Cite' option on Wiki Editor along with the Citation Template. Also trying to modify the citation template's options. Generally these opions are hard coded and making modifications in the appropriate files does give us the customized Citation toolbar. The documentation can be found here: media:Extension cite.pdf

4) Once we have the 'Cite' option in place, we might want to customize the template. If I want to get the 'Cite' option for my own language's Wikipedia, I will definitely want to have the template in my own language. To make such modifications, we have to work on a few JavaScript files like:

* RefToolbarConfig.js
* RefToolbarLegacy.js
* RefToolbarMessages-en.js

By editing these files, I have tried customizing the citation option for my own wiki. This can actually be done for any wikipedia. Hopefully, now all wikipedia can have their own customized citation option. The documentation against this can be found here: Customizing your citation template

Contact Information

Contact Information:
website: priyankaivy.blogspot.in
Twitter Handle: priynag
IRC nickname: priyanka_nag