One of the most common requests I’ve heard from the Wikimedia program leaders who use Programs & Events Dashboard is to enable automatic edits, which is one of the core features of the Wiki Education Dashboard. The automatic edits — on-wiki program pages, and userpage and article talk templates that link to them — let other editors easily figure out where new editors are coming from, which editors are working together, and who is leading the project.
This summer, Outreachy intern Medha Bansal has been working on making the Dashboard’s automatic edit capabilities more flexible and general so that we can roll out editing for Programs & Events Dashboard one wiki at a time. As of mid-August, Medha’s work is live on Programs & Events Dashboard, and we’re testing it out on Portuguese Wikipedia. She’s also documented how the communities of other wikis can get these features enabled.
Medha is a software engineer from New Delhi. She had been working as a Ruby on Rails developer, but — as she explained in her first Outreachy blog post — she had reached a point where she wasn’t learning anything new. The Dashboard has been giving her a chance to explore some new technologies — the latest version of Ruby on Rails, our React front-end, testing with RSpec — but I’ve also been learning a lot from her when it comes to Rails and the patterns and anti-patterns we find in the Dashboard codebase. I’m looking forward to learning more in the final stretch of Medha’s internship!
