Contributing to Wikipedia
Why to Report Bugs
A blog post They Might Never Tell You It’s Broken triggered me to report a problem in one of Inkscape’s installation script, which I wrote briefly about in this previous post. The author says, “It’s a horrifying thought, but it could be that for every one person who opens an issue on GitHub, 100 or more people have already tried your project, run into that same bug, and simply moved on”, and I noticed that it just happened to me a few weeks ago. I just found a way out and moved on, and I felt it is the same thing. It is not easy to find out if the bug is critical for many users, especially if you do not know much about the project. However, just reporting a bug could be a huge contribution if many users are experiencing the same issue.
Talk by Kevin Fleming
For this week, we had a guest speaker, Kevin Fleming, who works at Bloomberg to help produce and support its open-source software. Thanks again for spending time on this. I had watched his presentation at CppCon 2015 beforehand, which he focused on what open source software is, its ecosystem, and proper licensing. This time, it was more about how Bloomberg has been contributing to open-source projects. The primary learning for me was that there are many ways for companies to be profitable by providing open source communities. I only had some random guess on how companies become profitable by contributing to open source projects. For example, Google created Android from scratch (not accurate, but they named it at least). For this kind of contribution, I can see it benefits the company directly. As the user increase, their profit on platform-dependent stuff or service might increase as well or gaining more power by branding things, etc. On the other hand, Bloomberg contributes to several projects that have already existed, but it is hard for them to use the project as is, so they usually need to make some enhancement on those and make it open and free. In this way, the company can grow with the project, which is not fully controlled by an organization.
Inkscape
As I stated above, I posted a bug report on Inkscape’s mailing list and got a kind response with some instructions stating what I’m encouraged to do, which says:
- Open a bug report on what I had experienced on GitLab
- Forking
inkscape-ci-dockerproject - Fix the problem
- Propose a merge request
I followed the first two parts, for now, opening an issue and forking the repo.
As for the work on the team, we were discussing if we should work on their website project since some of the issues are more beginner-friendly than the ones their core project has. I voted for working on the site, but I still don’t know which direction we are going. I found an issue with the beginner tag, so I will probably work on it this week.
Completed:
- Read the instructions on how to report bugs.
- Made a post to Inkscape’s mailing list about a problem I had.
- Opened a bug report
- Discussed how we are going forward with the project.
- Built
inkscape-webon my machine
Todos:
- Fix the derived distribution issue on
inkscape-ci-docker- (hopefully, make a merge request)
- Working on this issue
Wikipedia Edit
I continued editing the page about my favorite band. I am slowly getting used
to using Wikitext syntax. The grammar for the heading is somewhat similar to
Markdown. I can create a heading by surrounding a target by = where the number
of the expression corresponds to the rank of that heading, such as <h1> or
<h2> in HTML. Another leaning on this was how to use a flatlist,
which is just a horizontal list separated by dots. It looks like:
Item1•Item2•Item3•Item4
I only need the flatlist flag and the template syntax to
achieve this:
Outside Activity
Completed:
- OSM:
- Added my favorite restaurant in my hometown
- Wikipedia:
- Added and modified genre in info section on a band page
- Added past members on the same page
Todos:
- Blog Editing
- Working more on the same Wikipedia page because the page is still marked as a stub
- Adding more stuff around my hometown on OSM