Profile Information
Name: Ankita Mandal
IRC nickname: anki221
Web Profile:
Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankita-mandal-71493640/
Location: Germany
Typical working hours: 05 PM to 01AM (UTC +1)
Synopsis
The Cargo extension (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cargo) defines a page, Special:ViewData, that serves two purposes: (1) to display additional query results when a user clicks on "More results" from within a main set of query results; and (2) to provide a user interface - if a user goes directly there - to run any Cargo query. For this 2nd use, the interface could be improved quite a bit: right now the UI is just some text inputs, with no autocompletion, no validation, no additional, format-based inputs, and in general no help to the user. This project aims to provide a much more user-friendly interface, using autocompletion, dropdowns, and/or other form elements, so that users didn't have to, for example, guess what tables and fields exist on the wiki.
Mentors: @Yaron_Koren, @Nikhil-nk
| Period | Task |
|---|---|
| May 6 to May 27 | Community bonding period. Comparison study for ViewData page with the UI from phpMyAdmin and Semantic MediaWiki. Create Mockups in Axure. |
| May 28 to June 12 | Improve designs. Add Autocompletion and Dropdown features for input fields. |
| June 13 to June 19 | Add validation and tooltips for the fields in ViewData Special Page. Add a static Help Section with brief examples on how to use the new ViewData UI. |
| June 20 to June 24 | Announce feature in mailing lists or through other channels to the community. Create a usability study to gather feedback from MediaWiki community (needs more investigation). |
| June 24 to June 28 | Phase I evaluation |
| June 30 to July 7 | Improve features based on usability study results. |
| July 8 to July 14 | Testing the new UI and fix bugs. |
| July 15 to July 22 | Reiterate over the design. Add more features if necessary. |
| July 22 to July 26 | Phase II evaluation |
| July 27 to August 16 | Work on the final touches. Testing and documentation of the whole project. Improvements based on suggestions from mentors and Usability study. |
| August 16 to August 25 | Bug fixes, Writing documentation and Updating appropriate guides. Code cleanup for submission. |
| August 26 to September 2 | Mentors submit final student evaluations |
| September 3 | Final results of Google Summer of Code 2019 announced |
Deliverables
- Comparison study with Similar pages like SemanticWiki and phpMyAdmin
- Mockups for the new ViewData UI
- Code for new ViewData UI. Integration with existing Cargo code bundle.
- Testing of the new UI to guarantee seamless functionality.
- Conduct Usability study across the MediaWiki community and improve the UI further.
- Write documentation and update guides.
Participation
- Work on a separate branch on git and uploading code to the forked repo almost on a daily basis. Creating pull requests as and when a complete feature is done.
- Online on IRC in my working hours (05 PM to 01AM (UTC +1))
- Communication on tasks will be through commenting on subtasks to the project created on Phabricator.
- Weekly reports will be published in my meta wiki user page
- Publishing on my blog the summary of a task at the end of a task period as above in the timeline( https://wordpress.com/view/ankitamandal.wordpress.com)
About me
I am a second-year master’s degree student pursuing Masters in Computer Engineering (Specialization: Intelligent Networked Systems). I have already completed most of the credits in my curriculum (with a grade of 1.6 in German scale), leaving enough time and scope for participating in GSOC 2019. I shall be able to work approximately 40 hours per week and can put in more hours if necessary.
I am a firm believer in open educational resources and the work the Wikimedia Foundation is doing. In a country like India, where I come from, there is still an illiteracy rate of 20.69%. It may not be a huge number, but considering the overall population of the country, it is still quite a lot. I believe that by making MediaWiki slightly better, even if it’s just an improvement to the Cargo extension interface, we are doing something for the underprivileged sections of the society.
Past Experience
At present I am pursuing M.Sc. Computer Engineering (Intelligent Networked Systems) at University of Duisburg Essen where I have been exposed directly to research work. I have also been working at the Learning Technologies for the Centre for Information and Media Services at the University where I work as a full stack developer for e-learning applications and I have also contributed to Wikimedia Foundation while working.
Here are some of the work I have done:
A portal for vocabulary mastery intended for German high school students:
https://www.wortschatzwissen.de/demo/
Interactive Slides Ebook Project:
https://iseb.uni-due.de/
A MediaWiki extension that allows admins to change the passwords of users at a single go:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ChangeUserPasswords
Technology Stack: PHP, JavaScript, AJAX, MySQL
I have a Bachelor of Technology degree from West Bengal University of Technology (Specialization: Information Technology)
I have also previously worked for 2.5 years as a Software Test Engineer at Accenture India and Mercedes Benz India.
Technologies: Java and Selenium
Microtasks completed
- Cargo: Restore full-text search for MW 1.30 and lower - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T217529