On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 11:50 AM, Nadeem, IIT Kgp
<nadeem.anjum(a)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.
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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=…
), 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)