Wednesday 31 July 2013

Annotator- The Journey So Far

Annotator, that is the name of the extension which i am working on as a part of my GSoC project. The project aims at making an inline commenting system where a user after landing on a wiki article makes a comment on some useful parts of the text. I would like to thank Matthew and Tyler (my mentors) for helping me out with their expert knowledge and indepth insight into the concept. Their hand of help is really something to be grateful for.

Coming to the project now, the OKFN library is very useful and the people in that community have been very active in clearing things. It’s about one and a half months since i have started working on the extension and the basic features for the project have been completed. Currently, the extension is called only when the user is logged in. The annotations can be created by selecting some particular text on a wiki page. They are loaded on a page with the quotes being highlighted and the user can destroy and update it.

The permissions plugin is in progress which handles the user aspect of the things, displaying the user who created the annotation so that the update and delete can be restricted only to the owner of the annotation. The next step would be to provide support for the logged out users (at least to view the annotations first) and possibly to provide them with the history of the annotations. This might need certain investigation about how the core mediawiki handles it.

Well, this project is endless and a lot many features could be added, with each new feature being a feather in the already illustrious wiki space.It was a really good experience so far working around with lots of knowledgeable minds. 

I feel very fortunate just being a part of this prestigious project and hope that every day that I spend working on it would be a learning experience in itself.
Looking forward to more insightful days ahead.

5 comments:

  1. Thumbs up Richa.. Way to go.

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  2. Can't wait for that Richa !! Is everything ok with the dev ?
    All the best !

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  3. Your extension is wonderful. I love it. Keep the work going! Make it better than Google Doc's one ;)

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  4. I gave annotator a try in wiki. Seems to be a great extension, but how can I annotate text? There is no help page about this.

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