User:Enow97/Blog 2:My Project at Wikimedia Commons

Hello everyone! Welcome back to another blog!

My Outreachy internship is in its fifth week, and everything is going swimmingly! This week's blog will be about the organization where I'm interning and the project I'm working on. I am pretty sure you will be amazed to discover about the work that Wikimedia Commons performs, and the apps developed by them. So let’s get right in!

What is Wikimedia Commons?

Wikimedia Commons or simply Commons is a media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The repository contains over 87 million free-to-use media files, managed and editable by registered volunteers.

About my project at Wikimedia Commons

The media files at Wikimedia Commons are often downloaded and used across all of the Wikimedia projects in all community languages. So to increase the ease of use by these communities for the download of media files, Wikimedia Commons created a tool called Imagebulk.

Imagebulk is a tool that allows users to download Wikimedia Commons files in bulk as a single ZIP file. Imagebulk is developed to provide technical support to the Indic community in order to save community members' time, for example, when trying to download a Wikimedia's events photos. This tool, allows users to download media files in a single zip file by providing just the URL list of the file's page or category. As of right now, the tool allows users to download only 50 files at once, which is where my work comes in.

I'm interning at Wikimedia Commons to first to improve the download experience by allowing users to download an unlimited number of files and to provide a new User Interface(UI) for the tool.

What I learnt in the past month

I have learned so many new stuff and gained a lot of new information while contributing at Wikimedia Commons. Before working on the project, I never had any experience using Docker Containers, and Asynchronous programming with Flask. I had about Docker before, but thought of it as mere fancy tech term and never cared to read in detail about it. After I started the internship, and I thoroughly started researching on these topics, that's when I came to know about the importance of these technologies in medium or large scale software development.