How I met our Algorithm!

So I have successfully completed the community bonding period 😀 and it was 23, May 2016 when Davide, Alessandro and me decided to dig deeper into our Google Summer of Code project WikiToLearn:Ratings.

The best thing about this project is that we will be developing a piece of technology from scratch. Well, that excites me. Not only because this job is challenging but because when you have the liberty to build something starting from its very roots ,  when you have the opportunity to think about the whole architecture you feel really connected to your job.(Some Job Satisfaction here 😛 ).

Therefore we decided to begin the project by laying down the procedures and equations for computing the Rating of the pages. Basically the entire algorithm starting from a user voting for a page to the final display of the results.It took us 3 days to design the initial draft.The procedures defined here are quite rigorous but ultimately we were able to get a clear picture of what is supposed to be done and how.

The next step was to map the proposed mathematical model to code. That is to think of ways to access the database of WikiToLearn to get the desired information.
Now WikiToLearn uses MediaWiki so the next step was to get familiar with this platform and to find out how things work here. Sooner I found myself playing with the MediaWiki API. This was a necessary step as we will be using the API to fetch the data that will be needed by the algorithm. So after some PHP scripting sessions I finally managed to understand what all information we can directly get from the API and what other things we needed to cook ourselves. So this was the proceedings of my first week of GSoC.

Therefore now when we have listed down all the items that we need to fetch we will be starting by writing down a service to fetch the data from the database via the MediaWiki API. So let’s begin the quest.

Gotta fetch ’em all !

😎