===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. It would be great to have 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 4 to May 30|**Community bonding period**. Comparison study for ViewData page with the UI from phpMyAdmin and Semantic MediaWiki. Create Mockups in Axure. |
|May 30 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 26| 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 26 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 31|Reiterate over the design. Add more features if necessary.|
|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 [[ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:AnkitaMandal | 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