Hi Wikitech!
I'm mvolz on IRC and mediawiki, and I'm applying to round 8 of the FOSS Outreach Program for Women.
I've been working as a web programmer for the last few years, but before that I was an academic. I've been an active Wikipedia editor mostly in the biological sciences since 2005. A frequent frustration of mine is the inadequacy of citations in Wikipedia articles and the tedium of including them, both on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
As part of the goal to make citing works easier, I'm proposing to make a backend to produce citations given a URL, and then working with the VisualEditor team to incorporate that into the VE "insert references" dialog.
My full project proposal can be found here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Mvolz/OPW_proposal_round_8
Thanks, and see you around!
-Marielle