Grants:Project/DannyS712/Create a global watchlist extension/Midpoint

This project is funded by a Project Grant

proposal

people

timeline & progress

finances

midpoint report

final report

Report under review

This Project Grant midpoint report has been submitted by the grantee, and is currently being reviewed by WMF staff. You may add comments, responses, or questions to this report's discussion page.

• To read the approved grant submission for this project, please visit Grants:Project/DannyS712/Create a global watchlist extension.

• Review the reporting requirements to better understand the reporting process.
• Review all Project Grant reports under review.
• Please Email projectgrantswikimedia.org if you have additional questions.

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learning from the grantee's first 3 months.

Summary

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

• Extension framework created based on existing JavaScript code
• Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings converted to rendering in PHP via FormSpecialPage
• Vue version of the display added for Special:GlobalWatchlist
• Extension submitted for security review and performance review, beginning the deployment process

Methods and activities

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

• I have set up a local installation of MediaWiki using MediaWiki Vagrant
• I created the basic GlobalWatchlist extension, based on the JavaScript user script I previously developed, and developed it from there. A specific breakdown of the progress and process can be found at Grants:Project/DannyS712/Create a global watchlist extension/Timeline.
• I submitted the code for security and performance reviews, beginning the process towards deploying the extension to WMF wikis

Midpoint outcomes

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

• As noted above, I have created a functional extension. It is hosted on Gerrit, and available at git:mediawiki/extensions/GlobalWatchlist.

Finances

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

• I purchased a new computer, in part financed using money from the grant, as I had planned to do. The computer was more than the $1,000 budgeted, and the remaining cost was covered by personal funds separate from the grant.
• By the end of August, I spent 167 hours working on the grant, out of a total of 250 budgeted.
• I do not anticipate any changes to the budget being necessary.

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

• So far I have not yet been assigned the technical advisor that the WMF wanted me to have, which means that some of the requirements of the grant (specifically the site limit at phab:T258935) cannot yet be addressed pending clarification
• I had trouble getting Wikibase to run locally on my MediaWiki installation, but have managed to get it working, and it shouldn't be an issue going forward

What is working well

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

• Learning patterns/Writing a new MediaWiki extension for deployment on a Wikimedia project
• Learning patterns/Git repository for software

Next steps and opportunities

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points.

• Finish security review
• Deploy to beta cluster
• Performance review
• Deploy to production
• Post deployment support

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an grantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

I've enjoyed being able to set my own schedule for this work. Sometimes I get an itch to program, and spend all day on a feature, and other times I have a busy few days and hardly think about it. Unlike in a traditional workplace, I can set my own hours, as long as I deliver on the end product.