“If you want to go fast walk alone
If you want to go further walk together”
I have always seen computers as the portals to travel into the new era. To change things . Being a computer science student myself I am often faced by this question-“What can I do to bring a change?”. It was this question that introduced me to the open source culture. The idea of having a vibrant community, all sharing a common purpose to innovate is what makes open source development a noble and exciting pursuit at the same time. I started by developing some of my own small projects. I can tell you it feels really great to see your own idea take shape. It is like you grow with the product you are developing and it imparts a pleasant satisfaction. During my experiments with the open source community I came to know about Google Summer of Code program. When I researched more about it I found out it was a wonderful opportunity for any student like me to not only gain exposure and insights into real world programming paradigms but also to work with the top craftsmen of the open source community. So I started looking for the proposed projects under various organisations. And then I found this lovely organisation named WikiToLearn under the umbrella organisation of KDE which had a project named WikiToLearn Ratings(Click to view abstract!) that caught my attention.
WikiToLearn works on the ideology that “knowledge only grows if shared”. It provides a platform where learners and teachers can together complete, refine and re-assemble notes, lecture notes in order to create text books, tailored precisely to their needs, so that we can provide free, collaborative and accessible text books to the whole world.
Our project is basically aimed at ranking the content on wiki-style learning platforms. The content on such platforms is more or less of good quality but it still depends on various parameters like author’s credibility, interconnections between different pages and user votes. Also we will pay special attention on how different versions will stack on the top of old ones to change their cumulative ratings.
We will be developing a Rating Engine that will be used rate the the users based on their interactions with WikiToLearn platform and then using their votes as one of the indicators for the page quality.In fact through this approach we will further calculate the final rating of the whole course. This will give user a general assessment of the course quality even before taking the course.
Of course for doing great work you need a great team so I am being guided and helped by my mentor Davide Valsecchi along with helpful folks from my WikiToLearn family( Yes! I can proudly call it a family <3 <3 ). Davide really helped me in understanding the problem to the core and with the constant support and feedback from the community I was able to produce a fine proposal that got me selected!
So in a nutshell I feel really great to be a part of WikiToLearn family! We have a lot of fun at telegram channel(Sometimes we even discuss why spaghetti aren’t noodles :P ).People here are really amazing and always come forward to resolve even the slightest issues.It has been an exciting journey so far and I am sure it will only get better from here.Cheers!!!
Let the summer of code begins!
8-)