Wrapping Up

Finally the three months of internship came to a successful end. After the basic features of the extension being finished, it is now implemented with permissions plugin handling the user aspect, allowing only the author of the annotation to update and destroy it. The next step planned was to support logged out users. Starting from the viewing first, the annotations could now be created by anons. This took quite some time since it required a schema change and some investigation as well. Then due to the huge demand of people of not wanting to see the annotations by default on a wiki page, I went forward towards implementing a toggle to switch to 'viewing annotations' mode and destroy all the annotations when clicked on any other tabs. The overall progress of the extension can be tested /http://annotator.wmflabs.org/

Since this was a prototype as part of a GSoC project, so the Wikimedia requirements for its deployment are out of scope. There are a lot more things to be done such as the history of annotations, integration with visual editor, internationalization support, etc. I would be glad to hear the future discussions on this project soon :) Once again, a great thanks to my mentors for their awesome mentorship and to the whole Wikimedia community for providing me a wonderful oppurtunity of learning this summer!

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.