Grants:IEG/Replay Edits/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.

• Coding a prototype , some work left.
• Spent time looking at the option/features that can be given to the user.

Methodology

How have you setup your project so far?

Describe the different parts of your experimental or pilot process, anything you decided was extra important to focus on, and any key concepts that are useful for understanding your work. Please also use this space to point to any background research or past learnings that have guided you in your decision-making process.

• Wikitext parser in javascript , to convert the wikitext to html.
• In page diff in javascript.

Most of the processing is done in the browser , templates such as infoboxes etc are expanded by the server by passing rvexpand to the api .

Activities

What work has been completed so far?

Please list all activities you’ve undertaken as part of your project to this point, and provide a description for each activity.

• Looked at ways to convert wikitext into html in the browser. Decided to expand templates into its corresponding wikitext on the server as the templates vary widely .For example, there are a multitude of infoboxes which are all different. They have slightly different layouts and different data in them.
• Explored different ways to generate revision diffs in javascript.
• Looked at patterns to make a large javascript application.

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.

Investigated different ways to convert wikitext into html and show the changes happening in a wiki page. I have written the code using the components mentioned above, but it has a few kinks and I'm working on it.

Working Replay Edits demo

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 service of a UI/UX designer has not yet been sought , the funds have not yet been spent.

Learnings

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 is working well

What has been successful so far? What will you do more of? Please list these as short bullet points.

• I have been able to integrate the different components of the project together.

What are the challenges

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

• The biggest challenege and the most crucial part was showing the html of a page from its wikitext on the browser. It has to be done this way to ensure the user gets to see the changes quickly without burdening wikipedia's server with very expensive requests. This has been quite tricky and a few cases are yet to be fixed .
• Balancing the project with my day job has been interesting .

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.

• Working on a robust and easy to use UI for the application.
• A youtube like slider letting the user select major changes vs minor changes.

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?

Being officially part of a project has made it eaiser for me to interact with a lot of wikipedia users.