Grants:IEG/Enhance the ProveIt gadget/Midpoint

This project is funded by an Individual Engagement Grant

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's first 3 months.

Summary

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

• Migrated all code, documentation and issues from GitHub and the English Wikipedia to Gerrit, Phabricator and Commons
• Fixed many bugs and made several enhancements
• Adopted by the French Wikipedia, Russian and German underway.
• Greatly polished the localization process

Methods and activities

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

• Got a global-edit-interface permission so that I can easily enable and update the gadget on all Wikipedias that decide to adopt it
• Got added to the Project-Admins group in Phabricator and created a project for ProveIt
• Closed around 100 GitHub issues, fixed many bugs and made several enhancements, some requested by the community, some not. The most significant are:
  • Restored automatic edit summaries
  • Restored the functionality to cite references
  • ProveIt now remembers the last template used
  • ProveIt can now be resized and moved around
  • Values are now preserved when you switch from template to template
  • References without template can now also be edited from the interface
  • References with a template and with content before and/or after are now sensibly managed
  • Added a Remove button to delete the selected reference and all its citations
  • Further internationalized the gadget so that it allows local configurations (for stuff like the edit summary, the revision tag, and the supported template names)
  • Improved the gadgets' internal architecture and inline documentation
  • Generalized the gadget functionality so that it can now be used on any MediaWiki wiki, not just Wikipedia
• Migrated all remaining bug reports and feature requests from GitHub to Phabricator
• Migrated all documentation from GitHub and the English Wikipedia to Commons

Midpoint outcomes

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

• Created the new central documentation page at Commons, see here.
• Created the new central project at Phabricator, see here.
• Created the new central repository at Gerrit, see here.
• Created pages at Commons for hosting and serving the code to all Wikipedias, see here and here.
• Got revision tags created for tracking the gadget usage at the Spanish and English Wikipedias, see here and here.
• Started a collaboration relation with Iniquity from the Russian Wikipedia and Bastenbas from the French Wikipedia.

Finances

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

The budget I requested was to cover my salary as a part-time developer, and I have accordingly devoted around half of my working time to this project, mixing it with my other freelance jobs. I believe I have done about half of the job already and I expect to do the other half in the remaining time and for the originally requested budget. I'm happy with the progress so far and I need no changes to the budget.

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

• The English community is hard to satisfy. They continue using the old version of ProveIt, despite it being 4 years old and lacking all the new features. I'll continue attending their requests until they are satisfied.
• I'm a bit behind in the spread of the gadget. This is because I wanted to centralize all code and documentation before starting the spread campaign, to avoid the code getting fragmented and making it easy for communities to understand and adopt the gadget. All this required many changes to the code, as well as some permissions and help that took some time to obtain. However, it's all done now, so I expect the spread to speed up considerably, as I'm already finding out with the French and Russian communities.
• I hadn't anticipated the interface difficulties that right-to-left languages may introduce. I'm not sure if I will be able to adapt the gadget for right-to-left languages within time and budget.

What is working well

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

• Grants:Learning patterns/Developing a fully internationalized and centralized gadget

Next steps and opportunities

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points. If you're considering applying for a 6-month renewal of this IEG at the end of your project, please also mention this here.

• During the rest of October, I will focus on getting the gadget accepted by the English Wikipedia and spreading it to the remaining top Wikipedias. The French Wikipedia has already enabled it, Russian and German communities are underway, and spreading it to others will be easy, as the gadget is already well polished and very easy to localize.
• During November I will focus on the Wikidata integration and attend any critical issues that the communities may request after adopting the gadget.
• During December I will finish and polish the Wikidata integration and any other remaining bugs.
• I have also managed to generalize the gadget enough so that it can be now easily adopted by any MediaWiki wiki, not just Wikipedia, so I want to spread it to the Spanish and English Wikiversity too.

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an IEGrantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

One thing that surprised me was that when I tried to replace the old version of the gadget for the new, in the English Wikipedia, the community responded by pointing out many usability features that seemed mostly trivial to me, but that they cared about deeply. This has slowed the process of adoption of the new version considerably and is still testing the limits of my patience. On the other hand, one thing I'm particularly happy about is seeing how easy it has become for other communities to adopt the gadget, now that the centralization and localization process is complete and polished. I expect the gadget to spread like fire during the following weeks, yay!