On 28 April 2013 13:04, Moriel Schottlender <mor...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello everyone, > > This is my second attempt for a proposal, but I think this is a project > that is *much* better than my previous one, and has a much bigger demand. > I'd love to work on this as a GSoC project! > > Before I submit this as an official proposal, I'd like to ask for your > thoughts about this. The proposal concentrates on adding RTL support to > VisualEditor, especially based on this requirements/spec page: > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Bidirectional_text_requirements > Hebrew is my maiden language, and I'm familiar with a lot of the problems > that are raised when using RTL, especially when using it alongside a mix of > LTR and RTL languages. > > A first draft of this proposal is available here: > http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Mooeypoo/GSOC_2013_Proposal:_RTL_Support_in_VisualEditor > > I have experience with Javascript and jQuery, and I'm working on some > Windows8 Metro apps as side projects, which rely heavily on javascript and > html5. However, this is my first time applying for GSoC and it's my first > time contributing to such a big project as MediaWiki and VisualEditor :) > > I'd love to hear your thoughts, ideas and feedback! > Thank you again, > > Moriel Schottlender
Moriel, Thank you for your proposal. It's a hugely-important area for us, and having someone come forward to work on it is very welcome. (As Amir puts it, "getting [RTL support] done by a person who knows an RTL language is obviously preferable".) It would be really excellent to have you work on this. That said, I worry that this wouldn't be an ideal fit for Google Summer of Code. The project as a project is as "stand-alone" as they recommend, and would involve getting very deep into the intricacies of how the "ContentEditable" area of VisualEditor works. This would be a huge amount for you to learn - less a learning hill and more a cliff, and right now this area of the code is changing quite a lot so it would be difficult to work in RTL changes. Inez (copied), who's one of our "ContentEditable" leads, has said he'd be keen to mentor you on this, and I'd love to co-mentor. There's also the issue that this is frankly stuff we should be getting right already. :-) It would be hard for you to "own" the result as much, and it would be difficult to schedule the work into a timetable as Google suggests - as we added new features, we would no-doubt extend your work on indefinitely, and it would be hard to find the point where you were "done". If you're worried about ownership and lack of scope, improving language support in the VisualEditor starts but does not end with the core RTL support outlined in that document. There are a number of things that you might wish to also do, like add a "language inspector" that would let a user tag a section of the page they're editing as in a language (for multi-lingual wikis). Just as a reminder, you should put this forward into the GSoC system (at https://google-melange.appspot.com/gsoc/dashboard/google/gsoc2013 ) as soon as possible. Happy to answer any questions you have! Yours, -- James D. Forrester Product Manager, VisualEditor Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
