User:Grv99/Wikicards

Hi!

My name is Gaurav Chawla. I am an undergraduate student at IIT Roorkee, India. I am a social, eager kind of student, who loves to keep things as simple as possible. <he dislikes exaggeration> I code in my free time. That was a short intro for myself. Contact information at the end of this page.

Now coming to the point... I want to apply at Wikimedia this summer under Google Summer of Code 2013. And this is my proposal for the same:

A request : Please read it full.

Introduction

Reading articles is good. But, sometimes (actually, manytimes) we just need to know a small description or an exact definition about something (or sb), just to know, like, who he/she is? or what is this famous for? or what is it commonly called? For these kind of questions, full descriptive long articles on the subject are not as essential, hence loading a full page will be a burden for both users and Wikimedia. I am not saying that these long articles are bad or inappropriate, I am saying that sometimes even after reading the whole pages, we are unable to get an exact one-line definition of the subject.

Keeping this in mind, I would like to propose a new project WikIcards (pronounced as wikicards or wik-i-cards).

Note: If you are aware of Navigation popups, then you might think that WikIcards are similar to Navigation popups, but actually, they are very much different. Please read this till the end and also my discussion page, where I have given some points of dissimilarities.

I have filed this project as an extension request at Bugzilla:46970.

Description

What are WikIcards?

These are like identity cards... small, information cards (containing that exact definition) about everything that comes under the category of proper nouns. Ex : personality, landmark, place, company, crop, body part, celestial body, likewise...

An example of a wikIcard is shown on the right (you may need to open it in full size for a more clearer look).

Structure

The different parts:

WikIcard-explained — Structure of WikIcard - Explained

1. Title and subtitles

These will be the first two/three lines of the card. They will contain basic information, such as,

For landmarks, it can be,

- First line : Name

- Second line : State, Country

- Third line : Coordinates

For personalities, it can be,

- First line : Name

- Second line : Nationality <space> Profession

- Third line : Birthdate (or Birthdate - Deathdate)

For Chemicals,

- First line : Name

- Second line : Also known as / scientific name

and likewise...

The title will link to its Wikipedia page and all the subtitles will be enclosed in brackets as shown in the picture.

2. The photo

A clearly visible relevant photo.
Fixed size
Can't be left blank! Every WikIcard must contain a photo.

3. Description (definition)

Maximum length is fixed (200 suggested).
Publicly editable ie. any user can suggest a change.
If a change is to be suggested first it will be put up on the card's main page, where the changes can be voted by the public and/or community members(do we need a separate page for each card? Please Suggest something for this). The most voted description will be the part of the Icard. This will increase the quality, as the most voted one ie. the one which is widely accepted by public will be used.

Q: Is voting viable?
A: Yes, because the text is so small that it can be reviewed easily and it will increase the participation of wiki users. It will make the description better and better over time as more and more users vote for it.

4. Links

The links at the bottom will be directly exposed (ie. more visible, because the ratio of the area that links use, to the area of card, is higher)
These will be displayed and arranged according to the topic of Icard. (surely we don't want the Icards to display links that lead to a search returning "nothing found!")
If these will be static like always the same sequence, for example...Wikipedia then, Wikibooks then, Wikiquotes, Wikisources, likewise..., it will make it look as non-living (like some template), and the user will likely not consider these as part of information. Hence, the sequence must be according to the no. of matched documents. Leftmost will have highest no. of related documents/pages.
These will be much helpful in situations where there's nothing much on a wiki page, but a whole pile of information (more relevant) is on wikinews (for example) for that topic but, unfortunately the user doesn't know about it in any way! Even if he tries to do so, by going to different project sites and searching about the topic, he will end up wasting much of his time in searching and filtering still not being sure whether he will get the information or not, which is not what our motive is. Its rather "We will give it, if we have it".
In my honest opinion, these links will definitely increase the user involvement in other Wikimedia projects too.(by other, I mean other than Wikipedia).

Why WikIcards?

Small summarized data cards.
Will contain a standardized and widely accepted and precise definition of the subject(ie. topic).
The space is limited, so the quality (as relevance) of the information/definition (small description) will be at its best.
Will increase user involvement on other Wikimedia projects as well (via links on footer).
Less bandwidth used and fast to load and access.
Will help Wikidata in building and refining its database (since these are editable and anyone can make one).
The existing Wikimedia content can be reused, wherever possible.

How can I use them?

Dedicated page

They can be searched and read via their dedicated page on Wikimedia servers. Each WikIcard has its own page where discussion, suggestion and voting takes place.

As popup balloons

This is specifically for desktop browsers.

WikIcards can be brought up anytime and from anywhere across the web. They will be displayed as popup balloons through browser extension, as shown in the first image of this article. The task of the browser extension will be that, when a user double-clicks (or ctrl+shift+select or any other key/click combination can be bound) the name of something/somebody/someplace/somesome , it will fetch and display the WikIcard as popup.

As flip cards

This is specifically for Wikimedia Mobile.

The users can access the WikIcards using a mobile application.
Initially, the user can search for something and its card will be displayed.
The user can flip the card and a new card will be displayed related to the previous one. And now the page will contain the new card and some description of the relation between this card and the previous (flipped) card and again this can be flipped to get a new related card.
The user can select whether to stay in the same category (maybe like politics) or can go across the different categories.
This way it will be story telling kind of experience where everything unfolds one after other. Though this is not necessary!
It can be an exploration drive too (when going across categories).

APIs

APIs will be provided for any other use.

My part

What will I do?

Create the server side scripts for WikIcards.: Using: PHP, mysql, HTML, CSS

Frontend - page for WikIcard, that will contain:

the Card,
the suggestions + voting section

The suggestion + voting back-end (handling the inputs)
Will be using the existing search module to search through the database.

Create browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer: Using: javascript, jQuery, AJAX, XML

A small script that uses the APIs to request the search.
The request will be made using AJAX.
Data will be received as XML.

PS: I have excluded the mobile part to make it an approachable target for the GSOC and also to give myself ample time to check, test, and debug the scripts I will make. But, I will surely do it once I complete these targets, maybe after the GSOC.

Create documentation for the whole code.

Timeline

(These are the days I will need)

For investigation, 10 days.
For server-side code and APIs, 30 days.
For browser extensions, 15 days.
For documentation, 5 days.

PS: I have a good experience in making extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Internet Explorer will be new to me. So, these 15 days will be divided as : Chrome - 2 days, Firefox - 2 days, IE - 10 days, Watching TV - 1 day :P

Note: My holidays are beginning from 15th May, so I will start the work that time itself. So that, for the midterm evaluation (on 28th July), I can give full server-side codes and APIs. And rest all (browser ext. and documentation) will be for the second phase.

Why this project be considered?

It fulfills three of the five mentioned "strategic priorities over next five years" on Wikimedia movement page, viz.

Increase participation (through voting)

Increase reach (because browser extensions are available and hence WikIcards can be accessed from anywhere any-site)

Encourage innovation

It will give a database of community edited-and-selected definitions (we have nice and awesome articles on each topic, but sometimes, they lack a proper and exact definition).

Note: Also see my discussion page to know how WikIcards are different from Navigation popups.

That's it. That was my proposal to enhance (even more), the information we have. Thankyou for your time. :)
I am too excited to make it and make my contribution to Wikimedia. Please suggest any amendments required in the proposal.

The chrome extension for wikicards is now available at https://github.com/grv99/wikicards.

Discussions

These are the discussion threads about wikicards:

Wikitech-l - http://markmail.org/message/zwmmk6p5ljdo5iyv
Bugzilla report - https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46970
Discussion page.

Suggestions

Please add any suggestion/feedback about the project and/or proposal. Please sign it with a -~~~~.