User:Gabinaluz/My project
Wikimedia
[edit]First of all, let's talk about what Wikimedia is. Wikimedia is a worldwide movement dedicated to providing free educational content. It's a community that created a system that acknowledges every individual as a potential contributor that has something to add to the best collective construction of mankind: the knowledge. While we live in a world where everyone is able to create content and share it from an individual point, Wikimedia (across several projects) puts the focus on the collaboration and free discussion. Wikimedia builds a community.
My current work
[edit]Background
[edit]There are several different projects behind Wikimedia. Although Wikipedia is likely the most popular, it's not the only one! You can check the full list of projects on the Wikimedia site.
What do projects like Wikibook, Wikipedia, or Wiktionary have in common? Well.. they all are collaborative projects, where anyone can contribute and edit! Because of that, references (citations that identify a source of information) are pretty important in articles, and they are one of the most fundamental things when talking about quality of an article.
The problem
[edit]There are several Wikimedia campaigns to improve articles and add new collaborators, such as #1Lib1Ref. Some of these campaigns use the Wiki Edu Dashboard to organize and keep track of them.This tool calculates some statistics about the contributions of the participants. This involves a "references added" feature, which estimates how many references added a given participant. That feature is considered as a pretty valuable one, as it helps organizers bring life to this campaign with ethics and care: they can better monitor quality, encourage newcomers, praise champions, and so much more.
Right now, that "references added" feature works only for a handful of languages, because the current reference counting method is constrained by the availability of article quality machine learning models, which are not accessible for the majority of Wikipedia language editions.
The goal of my work
[edit]The main goal of my project is to develop a performant alternative implementation of counting references added that does not depend on article quality features data, and works for every language version of Wikipedia. One high priority is to enable reference counting for Spanish Wikipedia, in support of the Spanish #1Lib1Ref campaign.
In order to do that, I am working on the Wiki Edu Dashboard source code, which is a Ruby on Rails web application. My tasks involve two main things: 1) create a new API that returns number of references for a given revision id in a wiki, and 2) integrate this new API in the Ruby side of the dashboard.