During this week, the two classes focused on Wikipedia and the concept of Open Encyclopedia, and stand up reports which were updates from each group on how far they are in their projects. Additionally, it is the second week that we have been working on our final projects. First, let’s get into our discussion of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia

One of our classes was completely dedicated towards the discussion of Wikipedia, which is definitely one of the largest open source projects. It’s weird to think about how Wikipedia was not received well when it was first released. At the time, there were many critics who thought that Wikipedia wouldn’t make it because the principle of building an encyclopedia around anybody who wants to contribute information does not seem feasible. There could be a lot of misinformation and there is no incentive to contribute. However, nowadays it’s hard to think of a world without Wikipedia. Teachers used to always say to never use Wikipedia, but from my experience it has always been a very good resource for getting the gist of a particular topic.

So far, I have had a good experience contributing to Wikipedia. It’s a pretty easy interface and similar to markdown. I found it easy to make contributions that act as updates. For example, some of my contributions are simply just posting the newest single an artist just put out. Those do not require a lot of knowledge and it’s mostly just a race to see who can add it first. Contributions that require a lot of background knowledge are pretty intimidating because I usually think that the people that contribute to the page already know a lot more about the subject than I do.

Stand Up Reports

It was pretty cool to see what other groups have been working on because there is such a big variety of projects. There were a couple of things that stood out to me. The first was groups that had to spend time to set up their development environment. One group had to set up their own server to make it easier to make contributions and see those contributions live. I thought that the concept of setting up your own server was really cool and contrasted a lot to the p5.js web editor that I have been using to preview my code. The development environments really underscored the variety in the projects. Another thing that stood out to me was how some groups got in direct contact with direct contributers and maintainers. Some groups have long email chains with some of the maintainers so that they can directly ask them for good first issues and help guide them through the process. I think that can be an approach that my group takes since one of the big contributers is a professor at NYU so it would be easy to get in contact with him.

Contributions

This week I have been looking into contributing to inline documentation because there are a lot of typos and specifications that I think will be useful to include.