User:Sohom Datta/Bi Weekly Report 1

Hi guys, I'm Sohom Datta. I'm from Kolkata, a pretty cool city in the banks of the Ganges (okay, Hooghly if you want to be really specific). I'm a B Tech first year student studying Computer Science at Manipal Institute of Technology. I do edit English Wikipedia from time to time on a wide range of topics starting from nerdy software internals to topics on Indian history. I'll be working on "Creating a page-list editing widget for the ProofreadPage extension" (T247157) where I'll be working on implementing a widget to make it easier to create and edit pagelists in the Index: namespace of Wikisource.

Work

Welcome party 🎉

The first week at Wikimedia was pretty fun. A welcome party was organized by Pavithraes and Srishti Sethi, the organization administrators for Google Summer of Code, Wikimedia as a part of the Remote Hackathon. Had a great time getting to know other interns and participating in the community bonding. I also got to know my mentors Sam Wilson and Satdeep Gill who have been really really helpful over the last few weeks and have guided me through figuring out various parts of Wikisource and MediaWiki.

The second week has been mainly occupied by me learning about the community, various nitty-gritty of the MediaWiki extension system and generally getting familiar with the tools/technologies I will be using. Personally, I have been a pretty avid reader of books, but I was pretty surprised to learn just how much complex page-numbers can get! I've also been looking up Selenium, a frontend testing framework that will form a major part of the tests for the widget. Besides this, I've been tinkering around with various parts of the wikisource API to identify which parts will be required by pagelist editing widget and making sure that they work as expected. During the course of this, I discovered a bug in the action=parse api (T252706) which then led me down a rabbit hole of how MediaWiki works and how it parses various types of content models.

The third week until now has included me joining the Wikisource telegram groups and mailing lists where I got to meet various members of the community. I've also looked up parts of the ResourceLoader module system that is used to add javascript code in extensions. I'll probably continue working on trying to figure out a fix for the action=parse api bug, do a deeper dive into ResourceLoader internals as well as look at and fiddle around with various portions of the Index pagelist system :) Stay Safe everyone!