User:Mvolz/OPW proposal round 8

Improving URL citations on WikiMedia

 * Public URL: Improving URL citations on WikiMedia (OPW Project)
 * Bugzilla report: 57804
 * Announcement: (link to the announcement of your proposal at the wikitech-l mailing list.

Name and contact information

 * Name: Marielle Volz
 * Email: marielle.volz@gmail.com
 * IRC: mvolz
 * Web Page / Blog / Microblog / Portfolio:
 * Location: London, England U.K.
 * Typical working hours: 9-5 UTC -0 3 weekdays per week & 10-6 UTC- 0 on Sat/Sun

Synopsis
Incomplete and missing citations of web resources using the tag are a relatively endemic problem on Wikipedia and other WikiMedia installations. There are two major problems to be addressed:


 * The relative difficulty and tedium of including citations provides a barrier to editors properly citing works.
 * As a consequence, there are many existing citations which are currently incomplete.

I propose to address the first issue and to improve the process of including citations, by automating citations given a user-submitted URL on WikiMedia.

Such a feature has already been planned; it is currently part of the Visual Editor roadmap to add references to the transclusion dialog, and there are currently mock-ups demonstrating the process of adding references. However, there is currently no back-end to supply a wiki formatted citation in response to a user-entered URL.

I propose a media wiki extension, CiteURLEngine, to return wiki mark-up citations in response to a submitted URL. The goal is to eventually produce a fully-featured extension that could potentially return citations both to the VisualEditor extension as well as the | RefToolbar in the WikiEditor extension.


 * Possible mentors: James Forrester, Trevor Parscal

Deliverables
Please describe the details and the timeline of the work you plan to accomplish on the project you are most interested in (discuss these first with the mentor of the project):


 * Get familiar with wikimedia code base and commit Hello World version of extension.
 * Simple extension that accepts a URL and scrapes the Title to return a citation.
 * Work with VisualEditor team/Trevor Parscal to incorporate it into the translocution dialog and make sure they can interact appropriately.
 * Potentially do the same with RefToolbar/ no mentor on this one so may have to table this?
 * Improve functionality of extension to provide better citations with more fields populated.
 * Investigate possibility of saving citations to a database instead of scraping in realtime to improve scalability?

About you

 * Education completed or in progress:
 * B.A. Biological Sciences Cornell University, 2008
 * M.S. Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, 2009

DevChix mailing list
 * How did you hear about this program?


 * Will you have any other time commitments, such as school work, another job, planned vacation, etc., during the duration of the program?


 * We advise all candidates eligible to Google Summer of Code and FOSS Outreach Program for Women to apply for both programs. Are you planning to apply to both programs and, if so, with what organization(s)?

I'm only applying to OPW: WikiMedia and CPython.

Past experience

 * Please describe your experience with any other FOSS projects as a user and as a contributor:


 * Please describe any relevant projects that you have worked on previously and what knowledge you gained from working on them (include links):


 * What project(s) are you interested in (these can be in the same or different organizations)?