This week, I had the opportunity to learn more about Wikipedia and its purpose as an open encylopedia, listen to the contributions and progress of other group projects, and most importantly, make our first pull request to OpenFoodFacts!

Wikipedia - An Open Encyclopedia

Wikipedia is one of the largest open source projects, amassing millions of contributions from around the world. It’s a collective effort to make information accessible to all and serves as a reference for anything. However, because of the crowd-sourced nature of the platform, wikipedia (to some) can be viewed as a source of misinformation. From my experience, wikipedia is one of the resources we weren’t allowed to use for academic writing because anyone can edit the page and embed/spread misinformation. But in this week’s class, I learned that Wiki has safeguards in place in case something goes wrong. For instance, a controversial edit on a prominent figure’s page was reverted quickly (in a matter of minutes) due to a dedicated group of contributors monitoring changes. In this case, they were able to reject the edits and prevent defamation.

Although wikipedia isn’t viewed highly in academia, it helps a lot of students like myself understand topics by providing a general overview of it. I still haven’t contributed to wikipedia because of how huge the platform is in regards to content and user base. If I were to make an edit to a page, I’d have to make it fast as someone else might beat me to it (especially for famous wiki’s). But for my next contribution, I will definitely be making an edit to a wiki page.

Stand-up Reports

During stand-ups, each group presented the project they were working on, the interactions they’ve had with the community, and what they’ve contributed so far/hope to contribute in the coming weeks. One of the projects that stuck with me was Oppia, an online learning platform where students “…learn anything they want in an effective and enjoyable way.” The group has been in touch with ~4 members of the community and has been working with them in designing wireframes for new web pages. I got the impression that Oppia is a good open source project to work on and I will most likely contribute to the project in the future.

Our First Pull Request

Last week, my group and I opened our first issue for OpenFoodFacts regarding the placement of installation guides. We wanted to make it easier for new contributors to install the development environment to begin doing their own contributions by placing necessary documentation in one place. We were assigned the issue and today, we made our first pull request to the project! Now, we’re waiting on approval and eyeballing our next open issue-implementing a dark mode feature for the site.