User:Sucheta Ghoshal/OPW-EtherEditor

This is a proposal for an Outreach Program for Women (OPW) project to help to polish the MediaWiki-extension EtherEditor headed by Mark Holmquist.

About the Extension: EtherEditor

EtherEditor is an extension that allows a user collaboratively edit with all other users editing a page. It was developed by Mark Holmquist, who will mentor this project too.

Project overview

I have been a serious contributor in Wikipedia and have felt the serious necessity of collaborative editing. It has been a dream to work on such project lately. So, I am mostly looking forward to work on the extension EtherEditor (Listed as a possible project).

The basic things which I have planned with my mentor to do in the three months of internship period are: ( Estimated timeline for the project is also given, it can be adjusted as the project demands. I plan to give 5 hours a day to this project.)

Fix a few outstanding bugs

Consolidate collaborative editing into one session

Add a user preference for enabling the editor everywhere.

Expand test coverage for the extension.

Work on deployment of Etherpad Lite on WMF production servers

Maybe integrating the extension with Visual Editor

Plans and Estimated Timeline

Task	Description	Timeline	Comments
Fix a few outstanding bugs	Fixing bugs should be a great way to get acquainted with the source code and to overcome the initial glitches. So, will start with this, then it can go side by side with other tasks for the next four months. There are a few listed bugs on bugzilla. Let's get rid of them first!	January 2- January 17	Already working on a new bug ( Bug 39443). You can see the patches here! So, I hope this will not take much time and will try my level best to get this extension rid of annoying ( yet challenging ) bugs.
Consolidate collaborative editing into one session	After first the first month of fixing bugs, I can move to this particular topic. It involves stripping out code that won't be used anymore and simplifying the interface, so it shouldn't take more than 15 days.	January 18- February 2	I am very excited to work on this and to see this developed. This particular feature should be great help!
Add a user preference for enabling the editor	Again this will be very good feature if it works. 15 days, could be devoted to this feature.	February 2 - February 17	15 days should be enough.
Expand test coverage for the extension.	Should take 1 or 2 weeks	February 17- March 3	Should not take more than 2 weeks.
Work on deployment of Etherpad Lite on WMF production servers	17 days could be devoted to this.	March 3- March 20	This will be very useful an idea.
Integrating the extension with Visual Editor.	This may turn out to be a bit unrealistic, but it would be great if we could make this happen.	March 20- April 2	Visual Editor being not so matured a project till now, it could be a little difficult, could be impossible too, for now. But we can always try.

Applicant background

Hi, this is Sucheta! I would say I am a FOSS enthusiast just, if I had not almost taken it up as my Religion. :)

I am a FOSS user since 2008 and a contributor since 2011. I am a member of several Linux User Groups. And run one, in my college Netaji Subhash Engineering College. I actively contribute to various open source projects like Mozilla( Fennec Browser), Fedora Project ( Translator ), by both coding and organizing several outreach events. Also. I am an active Wikimedian from Kolkata chapter and a serious contributor to Wikipedia. I now look forward to contribute to MediaWiki.

Mozilla: Currently I am working on Fennec Mobile Browser in Java. My work so far is documented over here: http://mikipedian.blogspot.in/2012/10/mozilla-daysworking-with-fennec-mobile.html
Fedora Project: I am contributing to fedora project as a translator.

My WikiWork

Earlier Contributions and Attachment with the Organisation: I am an active Wikimedian from Kolkata chapter and a serious contributor to Wikipedia. I attended Wiki Conference 2011 as a speaker. My submission (on Expanding Bengali Wikipedia) for presenting in the conference was selected as a Talk. Moreover, I was a speaker at the Panel Discussion on Gender Gap:"Where are the Women?" moderated by Bishakha Datta, at Wiki Conference 2011. I had started working for Bengali Wikipedia and also organized the first Wiki Academy of Kolkata in my college with a great success of 100+ attendees, which turned out to be the biggest one in recent times! Here is my Wikipedia User Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sucheta_Ghoshal

Contribution to MediaWiki and Micro Task for the event : In order to apply for the internship I needed to do a small first contribution to the project EtherEditor, assigned by the project mentor, Mark Holmquist. I was asked to fix a small bug - https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39441. Here is the fix I did https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/36355/. It was a pleasure to work with my mentor, with all the lovely people in IRCs and touching the source code of the site was a great experience.

Why Collaborative Editing

I have been contributing to Wikipedia since last year. I have worked on translation based project with a few friends ( Self-planned and Self-motivated) using Google Translator Toolkit, which made me realize the value of collaborative editing. Few things I learned from that:

It had collaboration enabled.So, multiple people could work on the same article - implying that things will finish up soon.
One could finish up the translation of certain parts and the others will integrate it (edit it for form, spelling mistakes, make it better or remove the literal translation errors).
When one comes back for another session and find that certain progress has been already made by your fellow contributors, it motivates. The best Wikipedia articles present many challenges in terms of coverage, language and length when it comes to translation.

I was amazed by the idea of collaborative editing. And I am here, started to work on something so amazing! Yes, I couldn't have loved my work more. :)