Wikipedia contribution & project progress

Comments on “Open Source is Not About You”

These are the comments that people wrote under the post that I liked the most:

>>  "Open source is about trust, and perhaps that feeling of trust fools people into thinking they have been granted a free leash to act on a sense of entitlement"
>>  "we're actually not customers in that we didn't pay a penny"
>>  "there are plenty of ways to contribute and help improve the things you want to improve in Clojure, and it's a matter of picking something and doing it"
>>  "open source projects have no obligation to anyone"

People are different, so they will have different opinions and expectations. An open source project doesn’t belong to a particular person, so it shouldn’t follow only one person’s guideline or advice. No one is perfect, so no project is perfect either. It’s relatively common for users to not be satisfied on certain features or functions of a project. The maintainers are trying their best to resolve those issues through the cooperation of contributors. However, incorrectly formatted issues, unclear issue descriptions, negative attitudes, or untested results can be extremely difficult and stressful to deal with whilst trying to maintain a project. Every contribution can take up to days, weeks, even months to work on. All contributions, modifications, changes, and improvements should be respected.

Wikipedia

Making Contributions to Wikipedia: After reading “Wikipedia: Contributing to Wikipedia”, I have some general ideas on how to edit a Wikipedia article, such as fixing the format/layout, inserting images/sounds/videos, posting a message to a noticeboard, and etc. Since I’m a virtual learner, I also watched How to Edit Wikipedia - a 2018 tutorial on YouTube. In this video, it mentioned a couple of reliable sources that can be included in Wikipedia and it also demonstrated how to add a citation in a paragraph, how to create a sandbox, etc. I learned that whenever you insert an image, you have to make sure it’s “free”, which means it has open license such as “Creative Commons” license. You can also upload the image which you own the copyright. Wikipedia is an open source project, and I tend to forget that things that were included in this project should also be “free”. One advice that the video gave is to save work regularly with short edit summary. It makes it easier for the community to check and debug your contributions.

Difficulties I May Face: After looking at couple Wikipedia articles, I found it hard to find a section to edit the article other than just adding new images on it. Every fact or statement should be cited correctly. It’s very different than the Open Street Map. There’s always something that can be added or removed on the map since it’s big. You might make some minor errors on the map, and it won’t affect the whole map majorly. For the most of the time you can also use your own knowledge of the area to edit the map without referring back to any news article for accuracy. Wikipedia is a source that people use to do research or to look answers for, so it requires more responsibility and it’s more stressful to edit it. Many statements were already added with citations, so it’s hard to think of something to add right away. It requires extra time to do research and to verify its accuracy. However, there’s a talk page for contributors discuss new improvements. It’s similar to an issue tracker.

Project: Next.js

[March 12, 2020] – I started the tutorial on Next.js main page, and it’s about building a simple react application and run it on the server side using next.js. Since it’s my first time creating a react application, it took me couple hours to follow the instructions step by step. The instructions are self-explanatory and easy to follow, but when it skips certain step, I got lost immediately and ran into some error messages. I figured some of them out by myself. For those that I can’t solve, asked my teammates for help because they all have some prior web development experiences. Chishing suggested me to follow the Crash Course for Next.js that I found last week because they are pretty much the same. Since I’m a virtual learner, watching a video is definitely more helpful than reading a set of instructions. The Youtuber used Visual Studio Code to create his application, so I downloaded it, too. It’s also my first time using it because I normally run my code on cygwin. The video was relatively easy to follow. It had great explanations on setup, installation, link module, creating components, and working with API. After I’m done watching the video it’s already midnight. I guess I will resume the tutorial on the website next time, so I’ll become more familiar with the project and react application.

I also looked at the issues in the afternoon. I found one that I think is relatively easy, which is to ask user more questions/options when a project template is created, such as “Do you want to add an AP?”. It’s also a good first issue. However, the issue description is vague, so I have to figure out how and where exactly I can add new feature. Our team also think it’s a good issue to work on. Shania also suggested another issue as our other choice, which is More inclusive documentation for next.js.

Contributions

I think the safest way to contribute to Wikipedia is to insert an image. I searched Fuzhou on Wikipedia, and I added an image of the platform of Fuzhou Railway Station under the Metro section. Since I grew up in Fuzhou, and I went back to China couple years ago, I recognized the photo and was thus confident in inserting this image.