This month, we kicked off two summer development projects that I’m very excited about. Outreachy intern Urvashi Verma is improving the Dashboard’s support for viewing, evaluating and curating photo and multimedia contributions, and Google Summer of Code student Pratyush Singhal is building Article Finder, a tool for exploring topic areas on Wikipedia and picking relevant, in-need-of-improvent articles for an individual or class to work on. These projects are off to a great start.
Urvashi just finished her second year studying Computer Science at Delhi Technological University. In addition to software and design, Urvashi has a talent for visual art.
Several of Urvashi’s incremental improvements have already been deployed. Check out the Uploads tab of an active course to see the new ‘justified’ layout for images that makes the most of the screen for showing off image contributions. In the coming weeks, Urvashi will be working on pagination — so that we can handle projects that have hundreds or even thousands of images — and adding integration with Structured Data on Commons — so that users can edit multilingual captions (and later other data) right from the Dashboard.
Pratyush just finished his second year at Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, studying Electronics and Communication Engineering. He’s an avid anime fan — “Otaku & proud” — and enjoys reading fiction.
For the Article Finder project, Pratyush’s tool is pulling together data from a bevy of different Wikipedia APIs to make it easier to identify and collect the articles in a given topic area that, for example, are ‘Start’ class or lower but get more than 50 views per day. He’s already got a working prototype, and within the next few weeks I expect we’ll be able to enable it for testing on the Wiki Education Dashboard.
With design and user research advice from co-mentor Jonathan Morgan, product management and technical mentorship from myself, and the amount of talent and grit I’ve already seen from Urvashi and Pratyush, I’m delighted to find out what we can accomplish together. They’ll be blogging their experiences — here’s Urvashi’s first post, and here’s Pratyush’s — so check their blogs over the summer to see how these projects progress!
