User:Coder555

Report of my impressions of MediaWiki

About me

I’m a 17 year old boy from Germany who is interested in computer science. I write my own little programs in PHP, Python or Java and have even produced some Android-Apps. I managed it to finish a Python course(http://cscircles.cemc.uwaterloo.ca/) in three days, today I’m using Python only for solving mathematic problems at www.euler.net. I have heart from Google Code-in at the German site http://www.einstieg-informatik.de/ where the news for young people who are interested in computer science is appearing.

December 20, 2013

First of all, I began to read the instructions for GCI students. The instructions have been easy to read so that everybody understands them even if he or she is not so good in English. After that, I have created an account on mediawiki.org. The registration formular looked modern. I first wanted to take the Username ‘Coder55’ which was already taken so an account creation error was displayed. The words I typed in for password and email have been deleted, a aspect that should be removed. Maybe the typed in words could be saved in a Session-Variable and written in the textfields via Javascript. To see how many people are active at Mediawiki at the registration site gave me a good feeling, because I now knew that I wouldn’t be the only contributor. Now I have been registered and logged in and in the top line I saw many different options. It was easy to change the language and to read my welcome message. Maybe the Button with the text ‘log out’ could be removed by a logout button with a little picture. This would make the top line smaller and even easier to understand. After that I changed the language to German and Spanish because I wanted to see how much of the site has been translated. I was quite disappointed that only the top menu was translated completely. Even the left menu was not completely translated although many important links can be found there (e.g. link to Main Page). There I have found a fatal bug: If I change the language, the site I’m already at isn’t changing. That means if I’m at the Main Site and I change the language to German, I still see the Main Site although the left menu has partially changed to German. This aspect addled me until I found out I have to click on ‘Hauptseite’, ‘Página principal’ etc. to see the Main Site in another language.

I am really interested in Developing, so the next thing I did was visiting the ‘how to become a MediaWiki hacker’ site. On this website I found interesting tutorials that explained me how to develop something on the platform MediaWiki. The site is clearly arranged and I really like it. It clearly separated the required abilities (PHP, Mysql e.g.) and made it easy to see where I have to learn something and where I already know enough. Especially the ‘Get started’ part was helpful (I could start quite fast extending MediaWiki). But one thing was missing for someone like me: A example code of a really easy extension. Although all the aspects of developing have been explained in detail on the Developing manual(https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Developing_extensions), the easy extensions could only be viewn by going to several links; it would be really helpful for beginners to include and explain one or two of these examples in the manual. I already had been programming some little programs(chatserver, forum etc.) in PHP so the next thing I did was to study which Coding Conventions exist on MediaWiki. These conventions were explained short clearly and I immediately understood them. Especially the part ‘C borrowings’ was really interesting. I have been also visiting the API of MediaWiki. The video on this site is unfortunately not really helpful. The pictures are blinking and the voices are hard to understand. But the rest of the API site was really informative and I easily understood it. After that I was looking to the developing part in the left main menu. First I visited the bugzilla-overview site. I really like the idea of Bugzilla, every developer can everytime see where help is needed. But at the search function on Bugzilla the user has to type in a word to find the bug he searches for. That means that some bugs can’t be detected. Now I clicked on the link ‘browse repository’. I was extremely positively surprised how the site behind the link(https://git.wikimedia.org/) looked like. Especially the possibility to see which parts of MediaWiki have been just updated and in which parts of MediaWiki the development is fast was interesting. After a short break I wanted to discover the technical world of Wikitech(https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). The Main Page looked really similar to Wikipedia and MediaWiki, that made it easy for me to navigate.

December 21, 2013

On the next day I was discovering the possibilities of installing and configuring MediaWiki. The pieces of information were clearly and easy to read, but I haven’t understood everything of it. That’s not the fault of the site, I’m more interested in developing than in hosting. Following thing(that needed most of the time) I did on MediaWiki was to discover and to study the details about developing at the developer hub(https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_hub ). The day before I had already studied the coding conventions, on this day I started reading the Pre-Commit Checklist. This checklist contained many questions, but for someone like me who hasn’t already uploaded a program there they are partially not understandable. But the part ‘Testing’ was clear for me because it was explained a little bit more. Maybe the questions should be written more in detail or some of the difficult words should be converted into links. I liked to have an overview over all conventions at the part ‘Reference’. I could easily navigate to another convention list, first to the coding conventions of JavaScript. These conventions were explained in detail and with demonstrative example. I especially liked the part ‘Whitespace’ where many rules have been written clearly without too many words. On that site I found some interesting pieces of information, e.g. Quotation-, Naming- or Declaration rules.

Result

MediaWiki is a very interesting platform and although some things are not perfect (e.g. translation or registering formular) it is easy to join the community. Everyone of the most active persons is accessible over his or her own IRC channel so an easy communication is possible. After discovering the technical world of MediaWiki and Wikitech I’m really interested in engaging me in the community. But this surely won’t happen before May because I have to learn for my diploma from German secondary school qualifying for university admission or matriculation. I’m living in Bavaria where the tests are harder than in every other federal state of Germany so I don’t have much time at the moment.