April 17, 2012
This is the first in set of the delayed blog posts that I wanted to write since long but somehow did not. After the awesome December dedicated to Python and Mozilla, and with Mozilla’s AMO project being the first open source project that I contributed to, I easily understood the joy and learning that comes through contributing to an awesome open source project. And with that motivation, and mostly with a desire of contributing to another open source project I turned to MediaWiki. I was definitely not here for PHP parts of it but still to get a hang of the software I developed a small experimental extension for it. It was a smooth run, so I continued to discover more until I discovered the project that I was maybe looking for, that is, the Visual Editor project. This looked to be a really cool project at first, because I’ve had some tough time editing wiki pages for the first time using the wiki markup text. But the Visual Editor project simply appeared to solve the wiki editing problems for ever and everyone, and so was it. Mostly with the desire to make some good amount of contribution to MediaWiki through GSoC, I started hacking on the Visual Editor project with an aim of prototyping the collaborative editing feature on Visual Editor. With hacking came the learning, mainly on numerous pro JS practices, so I was enjoying it! I talked to alot of devs mainly those onboard the VE team. They told me what made sense and what not in what I was aiming.
By this time, I really wished to be the part of this community. I attended a hackathon in Pune in February which happened to be a great event where I worked on Wikipedia’s official mobile app and met some awesome people from Wikimedia Foundation. And this is when I realized how awesome the Wiki community is and felt the desire to make some considerable contribution to it.
A unique thing about contributing to Wikimedia projects is, your work reaches people who use so many different languages which is achieved better in no other open source project. And that is the joy a developer seeks while contributing to any open source project.