What I’ve Done

So far I’ve made a number of small contributions (which you can find my clicking the “Contributions” tab at the top of this page!). Many of my contributions— especially when I was first starting— were Wikipedia edits or OpenStreetMap contributions. I found OSM contributions in particular to be pretty fun. It’s satisfying scrolling around neighborhoods I’m familiar with and dropping pins to fill out the map.

Some Challenges

OSM contributions are pretty straightforward. They don’t require any kind of citation to be posted, unlike Wikipedia, where I ran into some trouble with my citations and their quality.

I drafted an article on an event from my hometown, the Rotary Auction and Rummage sale. This is a charity sale that happens every summer on Bainbridge Island, and it raises $700k-$800k every year. Writing the article, I was careful to include citations for all my claims, and I submitted the draft for review after getting the basic facts down. A few days later, though, my draft was rejected due to the subject not being “notable” by Wikipedia standards. Most of my sources were from local news sources, which, apparently, doesn’t demonstrate a level of significance required for a topic to have its own Wikipedia article.

The community was friendly about it, though, and invited me to edit my draft and resubmit after it meets the specified criteria. Since then I have looked for an added a few more sources to my draft, and I plan to submit it again for review. I hope that they are enough to get it published, but it might just be that this event (even though I really like it) just isn’t Wikipedia article material. In any case, it has been a good lesson in how Wikipedia works and the open source contribution pipeline in general.

My “Best” Contribution

Since my Wikipedia adventure, I started making some contributions on GitHub. I started out by creating some issues to report functionality issues on some other students’ blogs, but I eventually worked my way up to a code contribution.

One of the browser extensions presented in class recently was a “screen pet” that you feed to keep happy. They mentioned in their presentation that they want to add a setting to modify how long it takes for the pet to get hungry, and I thought that sounded like a task I could tackle. The stakes were a little lower than they would be when contributing to a stranger’s open source project, but I still found this to be good practice for contributing to an unfamiliar project: I had to read the contribution guidelines, create a fork of the repository, parse the important parts of the codebase for my purposes, and write a signficant amount of code to implement a completely new feature on an existing project I was completely unfamiliar with. I submitted a pull request, and the group accepted my contribution!

I am quite happy with this contribution, and the whole process made me excited to contribute to other projects in the future.

Project Evaluations (Again!)

Our homework this week was to make two open source project evaluations. The first project I looked at was Luma3DS, a custom firmware for the 3DS console. My full evaluation can be found here. I was excited to check out this project, since it is something I have actually used myself to mod my 3DS. To summarize my findings, though, this project does not appear very beginner friendly. It requires a lot of technical knowledge, and has virtually no resources to ease in new contributors.

The next project I looked at is called “Noodle” (my evaluation). It is a social good project focused on streamlining student workflows. It has notetaking, scheduling, and grade tracking capabilities. It seemed to be a pretty cool project to me, so I was disappointed when I discovered that Noodle is in very early stages of development and essentially has one person running the whole thing. If you want to jump in on the ground floor of a project it might be a good choice, but I wouldn’t expect a lot of support. The one contributor’s activity is a bit unpredictable, and you might not have a lot to show for your work when you’re done.