On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 11:50 AM, Nadeem, IIT Kgp nadeem.anjum@cse.iitkgp.ernet.in wrote:

Hello,

I am Nadeem Anjum, a third year bachelor's student of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kharagpur.

I am really interested in becoming a part of MediaWiki for GSoC 2013. I have browsed through the project ideas and got interested in Automatic Category Redirects.

As far my skill set, I am well versed in PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, CSS, Java, C, C++ and Python.

I have been an active contributor to numerous development and open-source projects: http://cse.iitkgp.ac.in/~nanjum/OpenSourceProjects.html

Please guide me on how I should proceed towards my proposal for GSoC.

Thanking you, Nadeem Anjum. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Awesome.

Some things you could do would be read up on the area that your project would be on. I'm not sure how familiar you are with MediaWiki, but if you're not too familiar, as a first step start playing with categories in MediaWiki (Both the normal web interface and the list=categorymembers api module) just to get an idea of how categories work in MediaWiki. Once you got the basic idea, read about how categories are stored ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Categorylinks_table ). See if you can figure out what type of queries are used to get lists of categories, etc. You could also try skimming through some of the relevant php files (In this case, CategoryViewer.php would be a good place to start. Title.php is another good thing to skim regardless of the chosen project). Some of these php files will be confusing at first, so don't worry if you don't understand, the point is more to just explore MediaWiki so you're exposed to the code.

Other things you can do, is follow the instructions on How to become a hacker page, get a labs account, make a git clone, Install a copy of MediaWiki locally, etc. If you can manage to find a simple bug to fix (Try looking from the list https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=easy&keywords_type=a... ), and submit a patch for it, that will probably give you major bonus points on your gsoc proposal.

So basically, try reading docs and code, see how far you get. Its not expected that you will just be able to start reading the php code and everything will make sense instantly, so if you read some of the php code and nothing makes sense, don't be discouraged, but seeing how much of it you can make sense of, can be quite beneficial.

Last of all, don't be afraid to ask questions. There's lots of people on irc who can probably answer any questions you may have.

-- -Bawolff (Brian Wolff)