= Project Title =
Wikimedia Emoji Bot for Commons Images
= Personal Information =
Name: **Alangi Derick Ndimnain**
Email: **alangiderick@gmail.com**
IRC Nick: **d3r1ck**
Github: **[[ https://github.com/ch3nkula | Github Profile Page ]]**
= Background Information =
- I'm an active member and an organiser for the Google Developer Group in our community (Buea) and have participated in various GSoC(Google Summer of Code) meet-ups organised in our community to sensitise and mentor young, talented and motivated students to contribute to Open Source movements.
- Elite Programmers Club is a club that was founded in our University to teach, enhance and empower programming skills to interested students, and I am an administrator and mentor in the club. [[ https://www.facebook.com/groups/eliteprogrammingclub/ | Here ]] is the link on Facebook.
- #ublab is an IRC channel on Freenode that we use for the above mentioned club (EPC) and we also use it for communication and I am a channel operator in this channel. Basically, this channel is used to bring together students and interested persons in our community to mentor them how to be good software engineers and programmers in the nearest future.
- Holder of a Computer Engineering degree (BEng), specialising in Software Engineering from the University Of Buea and currently and Masters student in Software Engineering.
- I have been contributing to WMF for about over 1.5 years now and here are my [[ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/owner:D3r1ck01+status:merged,n,z | contributions ]], where I have contributed patches across many different extensions.
- Was a GSoC participant for 2016 where I worked on a project to connect IFTTT API and the Wikidata APIs. The project was successfully completed and here is the project: T118463 and also, here is my proposal: T129016. I am so happy and thankful to my mentors (@Slaporte, @Lydia_Pintscher, @hoo and @Bene) for their great efforts they put in so I could realise this project in the end of GSoC 2016. From time to time, I still do some work on the project (improving it and adding more features and documentation).
- Opportune to obtain a full scholarship to attend a **Wikimedia Conference (WikiIndaba 2017)** this year (2017) in Ghana where all Wikimedians are brought to share ideas and discuss about the future of Wikimedia projects. I was opportune to meet most WMF staffs and other great Wikimedians. We share our experiences and ideas and after the conference, I found myself in an a better path as a Wikimedian.
= Other works =
- I am a big fan of Github and most of my codes lives there. Below is a list of projects I have built and deployed which are running live;
-- [[ http://tools.wmflabs.org/ifttt-testing/ifttt/v1/rss-feeds | Wikipedia RSS Feeds ]]: Part of my GSoC 2016 project to list RSS feeds for various Wikipedia triggers which can then be used in an RSS feed reader for information update.
-- [[ http://tools.wmflabs.org/durl-shortener/shortener.php | URL Shortener ]]: A PHP version of a simple URL shortener that is deployed on labs and can be used to shorten URL. Check it out.
-- [[ https://efarm.cm | eFarm ]]: An agricultural platform for buying and selling of agricultural products. Currently in a beta version.
- This a web version of phone book that also implements some search algorithms using SQL and was built also using the Bootstrap Framework and PHP. Link [[ https://github.com/ch3nkula/Living-WebSite-Application | here ]].
- Worked on an Eggdrop bot for our channel #ublab and customised it to suite our needs, adding Tcl Scripts to add more features to the bot. [[ https://github.com/EliteProgrammersClub/ublab_bot | Here ]] are the codes and Documentation on how to run, use and customise the bot was done by me.
- This is an Inventory Management System project that is aimed at evaluating us for the completion of CEF415 course in the University of Buea(my institution) and [[ https://github.com/ch3nkula/IMS_Soft400 | here]] is the link.
- Worked on a project in fulfilment of our Second semester course(CEF308) while I was in the second year in the department of computer engineering(level 300). It was named the living website, and [[ | here ]] is the link.
= Programming Background =
- Technical Skills
-- **Programming Languages**: PHP (Excellent), Python(Intermediate), JSON (Excellent), JavaScript (Intermediate), CSS (Excellent), SQL (Proficient), HTML (Excellent), GoLang (beginner).
-- **Software Tools**: Secure Shell, Git/Github, Gerrit, IFTTT, Linux OS (Ubuntu) and derivatives, Subversion, Vagrant, Composer, Wikimedia Tool Labs & Phabricator, .
-- **Frameworks**: Flask (A Python Micro-framework), Laravel (PHP Framework)
- Hour of Code Certified, view certificate [[ https://www.dropbox.com/s/jln2859uzmqczqa/f4463ce46303f4ed61de066d35cdfd5b.jpg?dl=0 | here ]].
- Participated in the ACM ICPC contest in 2014, and [[ https://www.dropbox.com/s/0z33i12ik1ms014/ACM_Membership_Card.pdf?dl=0 | here ]] is my membership card.
- Google Code-In 2015 Mentor under Wikimedia, view certificate [[ https://www.dropbox.com/s/6v0z7tplnc2kxu0/Alangi%20Derick%20-%20GCI%20Certificate%202015.pdf?dl=0 | here ]]
- Google Code-In 2016 Mentor under Wikimedia, view certificate [[ https://www.dropbox.com/s/7spzji3c8mvuafy/Alangi%20Derick%20-%20GCI%20Certificate%202016.pdf?dl=0 | here ]]
- Google Summer of Code student participant under Wikimedia, view certificate [[ https://www.dropbox.com/s/93d0vlees0txtjx/gsoc_student%20for%20Alangi%20Derick.pdf?dl=0 | here ]]
= Project Mentors =
Primary mentor: @Dereckson and @ArielGlenn
Co-mentor: we may add a co-mentor, tbd, @MelodyKramer expressed interest
Support: @Yurik for JavaScript/Node-specific issues
= Synopsis / Project summary =
Wikimedia Emoji Bot project is a project meant to provide access to Twitter users to get Commons images counterparts of tweeted emojis. So basically, when a Twitter user tweets a valid emoji ( say: Smile Emoji :) ), the bot should reply the user's tweet with a Wikimedia Commons image (randomly selected from a smile domain space of images) corresponding to someone smiling. In addition, the bot should also be able to interpret text based emojis like this ( ^-^ ), then match it to a corresponding commons image.
**Project repository**
* Github link to the project (as at now): [[https://github.com/ch3nkula/Wikimedia-Emoji-Bot | Wikimedia Emoji Bot]] project on Github.
* So far, some pre-requisite work has been done on the project such as; configs, documentation and basic setup has been tackled on the repo.
* The project has been hooked up for Continuous Integration (CI) testing on Travis and builds are passing. :)
= Detailed project description =
== Introduction ==
This application seeks to solve a problem of getting corresponding **Wikimedia Commons** images when its emoji counter-parts are tweeted on **Twitter**. Below we will briefly see the meaning of the following bolded words;
* Wikimedia Commons is one of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects that focus on hosting multimedia files such as pictures, audios, videos etc... This acts as a repository of files that can be accessed all over the world and these files are all licensed using various versions of the `Creative Commons` license.
* Twitter is a social media platform for sharing of information (about the happening) world wide using **tweets**. With this platform, information can rapidly spread by people seeing your tweets, and your followers retweeting your tweets etc...
In this project, I am expected to build an application that receives an emoji based tweet on Twitter to a bot that will be called: **Wikimedia Emoji Bot**. The bot will respond or reply to the senders tweet with an image that matches the properties of the emoji. So for example, if the emoji of the sender is a **smile**, the response of the bot will be some image with the person having a smiling property. Another example can be an **angry** and the response would be an image of a person having an angry face. So, they key here is that the image in response should have the properties of the senders emoji. Also, another key part is that the image in response **must** come from Wikimedia commons.
== Algorithm ==
Below is the pseudocode that will be a basic algorithm for the functionality of the application with 3 components; Twitter, Commons and the application (middle man) itself (assuming the application is working correctly);
```
Twitter user sends a tweet to the Wikimedia Emoji Bot
if emoji is not image format
No response
else if emoji is image format
Response should be image from commons with properties of emoji
else
No response
```
Above is the algorithm basically but there are a few improvements to be made. If possible, there should be the following feature(s) that is lacking in the NYPL Emoji bot;
* If 2 emojis (smile and angry) are sent, I think it should be implemented in such a way that the application will respond by looping through the emojis and replying. Meaning since there are 2 emojis, the application will send 2 replies which will be pictures from commons with human that is smiling and angry respectively, in order of the emojis.
== Implementation Approach ==
===== Creating a Twitter developer app =====
Before creating a Twitter bot, we need to use the Twitter developer website to create an application instance that will the bot will connect to before processing the request and responding to Twitter. The developer Twitter app has various credentials that the bot will use to connect to (which will be configs constants taken from the Twitter app backend).
Example credentials configs are; `TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY`, `TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET`, `TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN` etc..
===== Internal structure of the emoji to image data set =====
The implementation approach that will be used in this project is **crowd-working** in which pictures will be selected and loaded up to a JSON file which are mapped to emojis. To visualise the idea, have a look at the code snippet below;
```
{
"emoji-1": [
"image-1"
],
"emoji-2": [
"image-1"
],
"emoji-3": [
"image-1"
]
}
```
This is in a case where there is just one image in the emoji's picture space (mapping from emoji to image) but we can always have one emoji to multiple images mapped to it, we will have a slightly modified JSON such has;
```
{
"emoji-1": [
"image-1",
"image-2",
"image-3"
],
"..."
}
```
We would want to have many images mapped to one emoji to make it more fun and for users to have different images when a particular emoji is tweeted so that the application response all of a sudden won't easily be predictable at different instances.
The key of the JSON structure will be the various emojis and the value will be an array of images which would range from at least 1 image to **n** images where (n >=1). Images will be collected from [[https://commons.wikimedia.org|Wikmedia Commons]] to fill up the image space of an emoji.
===== Flow of the application =====
When a Twitter user makes a tweet to the bot (assuming the bot is alive), the bot will start a process of trying to connect and authenticate to Twitter via the credentials of the Twitter application (created on the developer site) first. This is to make sure that the app doesn't do work (by processing and getting the image in response) before connecting to Twitter and making a response that won't go through thus wasting time. Once there is a connection to Twitter before doing any processing, we are guaranteed that the application will do its process and respond to the tweet with an image.
The essence of the connection and authentication is to make sure the bot is using a valid account and valid credentials to perform the operations and make use of the Twitter API. These credentials created and keys generated from the developer website are unique.
Once the connection is established, the bot will then read the emoji that is sent by the user and parse the file checking to find a match a JSON file of emojis mapping to images and also making sure that the emoji in concerned is not in the list of blocked emojis. Once the emoji is acceptable and there is a match in the JSON file, there will be a `getRandom()` method in the `Image` class to return a random image (image url to be specific) from the image space and store in a variable.
The bot then make a response by replying to the senders tweet with an image that was randomly returned after processing the request. So this image URL will be seen under the tweet of the user, then the user can click on the image and he/she is taken to commons to view the image.
===== Characteristics of Images =====
* The images that are returned as response should have properties of their emoji counterparts.
<more content to be added>
= Testing and Verification =
== Testing ==
Mostly, testing will be done via unit automated tests. The application will have automated unit tests to test all functionality of the application and in addition to that, manual testing can be done by the users of the application online when its launched (to give feedback for improvements etc...). Also, there will is already continuous integration testing that run an entire build of the application on a container Github infrastructure when there is a commit on the build branch. Together with all these testing mechanism put in place, there will be a very small window for any issue to be in the application and not found.
== Verification ==
One of the most common way to verify that the application is working as expected is for it to do what its build for. As an example, when a user tweets an emoji, the bot should respond to the sender's tweet with an image from Wikimedia Commons. This is a manual way of verification and another way of verification is getting passed results of the automated tests that have been written to be tested against the application. Once the tests are passing and seeing the results, then the bot is verified as working.
= Development Schedule / Timeline =
This is a plan that will be used during the GSoC period but can be slightly modified as GSoC proceeds
- May 4 - May 17 (2 weeks)
-- Analysis on which approach to use in the implementation of the bot, as there are several approaches to be used but at the end of the project, the most important in terms of time and space (with greater advantages) should be used.
-- Develop a report on the analysis as part of the projects report.
-- Searching APIs and/or libraries that might be useful for this project completion and what they are used for. Also, similar bot and see how they are implemented.
- May 18 - May 30 (1.6 weeks)
-- Discuss with mentors on development strategies of the project and the approach to use in implementing the Wikimedia Emoji bot.
-- Read docs related to Twitter API in relation to Node JS and understand the NYPL Emoji bot application implementation (code base).
- June 1 - June 10 (1.3 weeks)
- June 11 - June 25 (1.1 weeks)
- June 26 - June 30 (5 days)
-- First Evaluations
- June 30 - July 13 (2 weeks)
- July 14 - July 23 (1.3 week)
- June 24 - July 28 (5 days)
-- Second Evaluations
- July 28 - August 10 (2 weeks)
- August 11 - August 20 (1.4 weeks)
- August 21 - August 29 (1.1 week)
-- Pencils Down, Code clean up.
-- Improve and review documentation.
-- Final evaluation, Submission of code to Google.
= Time Availability =
I would be able to offer 45 hours per week on the project. Also, to meet up with the demands of the project, I will be coding during weekends (occasionally) and regularly informing my mentors on my progress on the project and regularly updating my wiki report page or phabricator ticket of the project. I will mostly be programming in the evenings due to school during the day but if working on Saturdays and/or Sundays, I will probably be programming through out (day and night). Of course, this will be adjusted based on the time-zones of the mentors and mine.
= Why Wikimedia Foundation (WMF)? =
Wikimedia Foundation is an organisation which focuses on encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. This is an organisation worth working with to make my continent (Africa) especially Cameroon to be sensitised about such opportunity of the sum of all free knowledge. This will go a long way to improve my community and Africa including the world as a whole in terms of education and academics "for free". Since the African community is somewhat lacking in the global movement, this is the reason why I decided to forge into the movement, hence filling the gaps.
= Why this project and why me for the project? =
Wikimedia Commons usually have very beautiful pictures that people might want to see all over the world, with this project, text/gif based communication with a bot like this can reveal some very beautiful pictures on Commons making people aware of a platform like this, hence, increasing Wikimedia Common users so they can also add more pictures to the platform. In addition, with this project and Twitter as a platform that powers many users, this is an opportunity to increase awareness of Twitter users to know about the Wikimedia movement and its projects (and how they can use it to impact themselves and their community), hence, fulfilling the goal of the movement.
= Work after GSoC 2017 on the project =
This is a long term project and will need to be improved after the GSoC period as more and more images on Commons keep adding (matching emojis) and also more and more emojis keep coming up every single day. So as work after GSoC, emojis (new or old) that don't yet have a commons picture counterpart will be filled up and new features will be added to the bot. And maybe in the future, some AI algorithms will be used to populate the JSON file of emojis to commons images.
= My Contributions =
- Since I joined the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) around September 2015 till now, I have contributed in several ways in the improvement of this organisation both in coding, mentoring outreach programs and also in community perspective by being one of the leaders of a Wikimedia User Group in my country.
- In terms of coding and submission of patch sets (PS), I have dozens of cycles of merged PSs. Are you interested in checking it out? Here: [[ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/owner:D3r1ck01+status:merged,n,z | here ]] and more are still to come :).
- Also in terms of Mentoring, like I mentioned above in my Programming Background section, I mentored the Google Code-In 2015 program and also Google Code-In 2016 under Wikimedia. Currently, I am coaching a team of female developers hoping to participate in the RGSoC program under Wikimedia (as mentoring org).
- My Contributions to WMF Code base - Extensions Worked on
-- Echo Extension
-- Gather Extension
-- Graph Extension
-- Mailgun Extension (co-authoring)
-- MobileFrontend Extension
-- Newsletter Extension
-- Semantic Forms Extension
-- Thanks Extension
-- Wikibase Extension
-- WikibaseJavaScripAPI Extension
- Also worked on OOJs/UI and MediaWiki Core.