Srishti Sethi SrishAkaTux

Wikimedia work (2016–Present)

In my role as a Senior Developer Advocate at the Wikimedia Foundation, I contribute to the organization’s efforts to engage volunteer developers in Wikimedia projects and to grow the technical community.

Contents

This work involves:
  • Participation in outreach programs and events to onboard and mentor new volunteers to contribute to Wikimedia technical projects.
  • Researching the needs and requirements of technical contributors and experimenting with new ways to onboard and retain them.
  • Developing sample code to demonstrate best practices, tutorials to help explain technical concepts and tools to improve processes and workflows around developer support.
  • Collaborating with external organizations to engage technical contributors in free and open-source software projects.
    • Virtual party organized for Wikimedia Outreachy interns

    Virtual party organized for Outreachy Round 21 interns

    Srishti Sethi, Amy, Rupika Sharma & Who, Asian Wikimedians meetup at Wikimania 2018 (01)

    Asian Wikimedians meetup at Wikimania 2018, Cape Town

    Mentoring and Outreach

    Programs

  • Coordinated Wikimedia’s participation in 5 rounds of Google Summer of Code and 10 of Outreachy. Some of the roles and responsibilities were:
    • Recruit mentors, curate beginner-friendly projects, and promote them to prospective candidates through various channels.
    • Provide a group communication tool to interns and mentors and answer their queries.
    • Facilitate project selection and evaluation process with mentors.
    • Develop strategies for engaging interns before, during and after the program. For example, conduct an online information session for prospective candidates and showcase on completed projects.
    • Collect changes for improvements throughout the program, document lessons learned, and revise the resources on the Outreach Programs hub.
  • Collaborated with two initiatives: Mozilla’s OSSN and Teaching OpenSource’s POSSE to engage more university students in contributing to open source projects and support professors in their efforts of teaching open source through Wikimedia projects Blog post
  • Mentored 4 interns via Google Summer of Code and Outreachy on a) a MediaWiki API code documentation project b) development of WikiContrib, a tool for community members to visualize their technical contributions within a specified time range.
  • Led the Small wiki toolkits initiative that focuses on developing technical capacity in smaller wiki communities by organizing workshops, developing resources, and running ideation sessions to understand smaller wikis' technical challenges and gather solutions to address those.

    Events

  • Delivered several versions of the talk Sharing opportunities for new developers in the Wikipedia community at LibrePlanet 2019, FOSSASIA 2017 and University of Berkeley's Coding Bootcamp.
  • Organized a workshop for undergraduate student attendees around the use of Wikipedia API at the Stanford University’s TreeHacks event.
  • Oriented new developers to Wikimedia technical spaces and projects, reviewed scholarship applications, and supported event organizers in six international Wikimedia Hackathons Blog post
  • Organized a two-day workshop for high-school students of the ChickTech organization to work on coding and non-coding Wikimedia tasks as part of the Google Code-in contest Curriculum
  • Organized one of the Write the Docs San Francisco meetup at Wikimedia Foundation headquarters and writing day for MediaWiki project at Write the Docs Portland conference.
  • Co-organized unconference and remote participation in Wikimedia Developer Summit 2017 Blog post

    • A mentoring program session at the Wikimedia Hackathon 2018, Barcelona

    Wikipedia API workshop at Stanford University's Treehacks 2019, Palo Alto

    Newcomers at Wikimedia Hackathon 2017

    Newcomers setting up MediaWiki development environment at Wikimedia Hackathon 2017, Vienna

    Wikimedia at ChickTech's High School Kick-off 2017 (2)

    Wikimedia crew at ChickTech workshop 2017, San Francisco

    Development

    Contributed to the design and/or development of the following tools, resources and code samples:

    Tools

  • Toolhub, a community-authored catalog that aims to make the software tools used in the Wikimedia movement discoverable to everyone.
  • WMCS Edits Dashboard, a visualization tool that shows edits made to 870 Wikimedia wikis by tools or bots that leverages Wikimedia's cloud infrastructure.
  • Newcomer bot for Wikimedia Foundation’s code collaboration tool Gerrit that welcomes newcomers and tracks their code contributions.
  • WikiContrib, a tool for community members to visualize their technical contributions within a specified time range.
  • Showcase of demo apps, built using the MediaWiki Action API.
  • User feedback gadget for technical documentation on-wiki.
  • Tabbed window gadget for embedding code samples in different programming languages on wiki pages.

    • Code samples

  • Code snippets and demo apps in different programming languages demonstrating the use of MediaWiki API.

    • Resources

  • Starter kit consisting of resources, tools, and recommendations in technical areas relevant to smaller wikis just getting started.
  • Workshop toolkits for potential trainers to introduce user scripts and gadgets and Wikimedia APIs.
  • An introductory course for high-school students to learn about Web APIs with Wikipedia API as an example use case.
  • A tutorial to show how to search for wiki pages near a location using the MediaWiki API.
  • A tutorial on hosting a hello world nodejs app with oauth on Wikimedia Toolforge.

    • Screenshot of Toolhub's home page

    Screenshot of a users' contributions generated by the WikiContrib tool

    Project Showcase at Wikimedia Hackathon 2019, Prague

    Research

  • Designed and piloted a program to achieve a sustained increase in new developers contributing to Wikimedia projects, which also included a research study to understand why new developers start contributing and stay or leave Blog post
  • Researched the needs of technical contributors of smaller wikis Notes
  • Contributed to the scoping phase of the Wikimedia's 2030 movement strategy. Helped the team members of the technology group understand our technical engagement ecosystem Notes

    • Group photo of the Wikimedia Summit 2019, Berlin

    Copyright © SrishAkaTux 2023