One of the strategic directions of Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB) seeks to collaborate within the Wikimedia Movement and with external agents for the development of open technologies that act on the broader strategic direction of knowledge as a service. In 2024, WMB is developing Wiki Infographics, a tool that will leverage structured data from Wikimedia projects to create informative, interactive, and visually engaging infographics. These infographics will present themselves as different ways of visualizing Wikimedia’s quality content and have great potential for engagement. Our goal is to create an efficient and modular platform that allows the production of quality infographics, encouraging the use of educational materials.
We kicked off this project in May of this year through a partnership with Outreachy. This initiative, to which WMB has been contributing for some years now, offers mentorship for developers from underrepresented communities in the world of technology to be introduced to the practice of developing open-source tools. WMB proposed Wiki Infographics as a mentoring project for Outreachy this year, and was accepted!
The Outreachy intern chosen for the project is James Okolie, a Nigerian Civil Engineering graduate and Software developer, qualified in several programming languages and stacks, such as C, Ruby, Python, MERN, and AWS. James values Compassion, Friendships, and Loyalty in his interactions and this is the first real in-depth journey into open source.
In the first month of the project, which started on May 27, James has been deepening his knowledge of Wiki Movimento Brazil’s development process, and identifying and learning the essential infrastructure tech of this project in particular. One of those topics James has learned in this period is SPARQL queries. He shared in his blog his experience learning SPARQL through the Wikidata Query Service Tutorial, developed by Wikimedia Israel. You can check that post here. Flask is another technology James has become familiar with; He has worked with Django before, but not Flask.
Another milestone of this project, with a great contribution from James, is the creation and publication of the Technical Plan for Wiki Infographics. Technical plans are an essential part of the development process; They guide us through the necessary steps, set a feasible timeline, and provide a risk assessment for the project at hand. This document has twenty-four pages and nine sections, touching from documentation, and technical stack to the deployment plan and beyond.
The next steps are the implementation of the prototype and gathering community feedback. We will have an update on how everything is going by next month, but in the meantime, you can check James’ blog posts here, and follow the updates of the project on its ticket on Phabricator.
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