Hi Daniel, thank you for your interest in contributing to Wikimedia.
On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 11:52 PM, Daniel Moisset dmoisset@machinalis.com wrote:
Hi, I'm one of the developers of thewalnut.io, a platform for authoring and sharing algorithm visualizations. While working on a visualization of Langton's ant, I ran into the WikiWidget at https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormiga_de_Langton and started looking at how you guys are doing these, given that it has some similarities to our work.
My idea is that by creating a wikiwidget that can somehow integrate the content built in the walnut, assuming it gets incorporated into Wikipedia, it would allow many people to easily create and add interactive visualizations for algorithms into wikipedia articles with much less work than now where each wikiwidget for each algorithm needs to be created from scratch[1].
Sounds like a sensible idea that fits in our long term plan for promoting alternative content formats supplementing text and images. Conceptually, it also looks like a neighbor of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph
A MediaWiki extension is probably the best approach for this, not only technically but also socially. This is how the steps could look like:
1. Develop a prototype extension that works with the latest MediaWiki stable version. 2. As soon as you have a minimally functional extension, share it here, all the better if supported by a documentation page in mediawiki.org, code published in Wikimedia's Gerrit, and a test instance in Wikimedia Labs. 3. From there you will need users, feedback, and most probably bugfixes. You might want to have your project in Wikimedia Phabricator. With a bit of luck you will get contributors as well, for code and translations. 4. At some point you should feel ready for being deployed to Wikimedia servers -- we have a process for that.
In more detail: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker
Bringing a whole new feature to one of the most visited and most creative websites is not a simple task, but it is possible, and we have many precedents of volunteer developers who made it with skill and perseverance. I hope this effort fits in your personal and walnut's interests.