During my graduation, I got interested in open source, it’s immense contribution and possibilities. I got selected for the Google Summer of Code 2012 to work for The Wikimedia Foundation as an open source contract developer.

Google Summer of Code certificate

About the project

The project was about integration of Flickr and Geolocation in UploadWizard ( the image upload tool used by Wikimedia Commons).

LINK TO THE APPLICATION

  • Flickr Integration Providing an interface which allows the user to transfer images from Flickr where the UploadWizard extracts license and metadata from the images, converts the license into a Commons License Template and passes on metadata to the next step to generate corresponding WikiText.

  • Improving the Geolocation support Implementing a JavaScript jQuery plugin which presents a map interface that can be manipulated to select a particular location and report that location in code, preferably as WikiText containing a Location template. The plugin would make use of EXIF data contained in the media file or location data retrieved from Flickr to suggest an appropriate location and could also be manipulated to mark a new location for the media.

  • Improving the design Implement HTML5 drag and drop support for the files. Moreover i would also work on enhancing the interface and design of the extension according to the Design Recommendations and MediaWiki style guide.

Working in a community

This was my first experience in working with an open source community, and it was quite a wonderful one. The community was wonderful, led by Sumana Harihareswara ( Volunteered Co-ordinator at that time ) at that time.

While getting bashed in the IRC to getting english language punctuation classes from the mentor - it was a new learning everyday.

And boi, did it take so many commit and iterations to get the first pull request merged - It almost felt like I don’t know anything.

The Berlin Hackathon

One of the best things was the amazing food

An incredibly diverse community of 104 people from 30 countries, all lovely nerds and smart individuals with a heart of pure gold (in short: Wikipedians) came together to hack on all parts of technology behind Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Team I was part of

This was my first time meeting the community members, and to be honest I was quite nervous. Meeting the people there in person really made me feel as to how wonderful the community is, and how motivated they are towards running Wikipedia.

The entire ambience was amazing

Good thing about being part of an open source community is that you can contribute in whatever way you can. I was beginning to learn graphic designing at that point, and while I had designed a few of posters and material for my college open source conferences, I never really made one for such an event. When there was an opportunity that we needed to design badges for the event, I figured I should give it a try, and I ended up making these set of badges for the event.

Badges made at the hackathon

Photos by Victorgrigas (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons