User:Ganeshaditya1/$PROGRAM

GSoC: Prototyping inline comments

 * Public URL: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ganeshaditya1/$PROGRAM
 * Bugzilla report link: (Bug 46440) https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46440

Name and contact information
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Ganeshaditya1

Name: AV Aditya Sastry

Email:ganeshaditya1@gmail.com

IRC or IM networks/handle(s): ganeshaditya1@gmail.com

Location:Vishakhapatanam, Andhra Pradesh

Typical working hours: 2:00 PM to 12:30AM

Synopsis
Every MediaWiki article has a talk page. But the discussions here are very generic in nature and are concerned with the whole article rather than a part of it.

With Inline commenting, user could select a line of an article and write a comment for it, which could be viewed by other users and they can respond to the comment as well. This greatly helps engage the readers as well the editors in discussions about the articles and thus help make them better and accurate.

The project itself can be divided into two parts.

1) User Interface.

2) Database classes. Every article being displayed will have a tab in the top right corner linking it to this extension. Here the user can view the comments for the article as well as make comments. When the user clicks on the tab, the name of the article is communicated to the extension which is used to retrieve the comments from the database. Each comment is indexed with three entities the page name, starting and ending index and these are used to retrieve the associated comments from the database and display them. Displaying them is done using AJAX and JQuery. In the mockup I have provided I haven't used these two technologies as I was constrained by time.

Deliverables
1) Special page to view comments as well as make them

2) Database classes.

3) Sanitizer classes needed to sanitize the comments posted.

4) Parser functions(A special magic word will be created as { { getcomment Page title, Start index, ending index } } which will be converted to a link by this parsing function.)

5) AJAX, JQuery and any necessary JS functions to implement this functionality.

About you
I have been using Wikipedia since my 10th class. I owe my life to Wikipedia cause anything I have accomplished academically its owing to Wikipedia. I have only contributed to my university's Wikipage once. But mostly I have been a consumer.

How ever I feel ashamed in confessing that until I started working on MediaWiki I didn't know about the talk page and even when I came to know about it, I noticed that the talk pages of few articles that I frequently read are congested with discussions about the whole article rather than a sub part of it that I am concerned with. Hence I had to read the whole discussion to comprehend the context to be able to contribute to these discussions. I am sure other Wikipedia readers might have felt the same about it to.

Participation
I am a workaholic. I can't focus on anything else when I have some work pending. So I will be spending all my free time on this project and it is my first priority.

I will be communicating my progress on weekly basis and I plan on putting my extension in a github and I would be committing to it regularly on daily basis so that my mentor could track my progress.

Till the end of this month I wouldn't be available on IRC as am changing my ISP(My current ISP strangely blocks IRC, SSH, FTP and it is because of him that my bugfixes were so horrible initially). However I am still accessible on email, gmail, facebook and on phone if deemed necessary. Once I finish switching my ISP I will be available in Freenode.

Past open source experience
I have fixed three bugs in MediaWiki. Here's my github account https://github.com/ganeshaditya1. Here I am posting the gerrit links as they are shorter than the bug links in buzilla, these three have been merged, the insert http links is not working.


 * 1) https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/59822/


 * 1) https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/59395/ (This was my first bugfix to an opensource project and my first time with git and I had a pathetically slow (3kbps 2G internet connection), so I made a lot of mistakes and I admit occasionally loosing my cool too.


 * 1) https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/59393/

Bug fix stuck in a limbo:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/59390/ I submitted a fix to this but it was decided by chad that the bug is not necessary to fix. so it was abandoned.

Any other info
I have first prepared this mockup:

http://adityasastry.in.cp-2.webhostbox.net/index.php?title=Special:BlankPage

With both the views for viewing the comments as well submitting the comments implemented as movable popup's (Movable part is not yet implemented)

Then I saw that the postings in the bugzilla bug page and noticed that people are looking for something that looks like CO-ment. So I came up with this mockup:

http://adityasastry.in.cp-2.webhostbox.net/index.php?title=Special:Inline#

In this the comments are displayed in-line with the article. Instead of being displayed in the margin. I wouldn't mind putting it in the margin but as it was already pointed out margin space is way too small and the comments would look congested.

I personally prefer my first mockup as it doesn't effect the original wikipedia UI and doesn't harm the readability however I am open to suggestions and I keep an open mind when it comes to UI Design.