My Outreachy Project So Far

Before this internship, I didn’t know much about Wikimedia’s internal tools, and I had never built something at this scale. Now, I’m creating something that could make it easier for other newcomers like me to participate.

What Wikimedia’s technical community is like

The Wikimedia technical community is made up of developers, designers, volunteers, staff, and newcomers all working together to support the infrastructure behind Wikipedia and its sister projects. People contribute in many ways: fixing bugs, writing documentation or translations, improving tools, or building entirely new ones. From what I’ve seen, there’s a strong culture of collaboration, open discussion, and making knowledge more accessible.

The problem my project is trying to solve

Wikimedia runs CentralNotice banners to share announcements across projects. These banners are powerful but require technical proficiency to create. They rely on custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That means people who don’t know how to code are automatically excluded from creating banners.

My project solves that by creating a visual banner editor, kind of like Canva or Figma, but for banners. The goal is to make it easier for contributors to design and generate banners without touching code, using a friendly interface that still outputs the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript needed by the existing CentralNotice extension.

How it fits into the bigger picture

This project is part of a larger push to make Wikimedia’s tools more accessible and reduce the technical barriers that limit participation. With a no-code solution, more people will be able to create banners for events, campaigns, and announcements.

Why this tool is useful

It makes banner creation easier, faster, and more intuitive. Instead of copying code from past banners or relying on others to help, users can select from prepopulated templates, tweak layout and design settings, and copy the final code for use in CentralNotice, all from one interface.

What excites me the most

I’m building something real that people could use. It’s exciting to imagine someone with no coding background designing a banner for their event and sharing it across the platform. I’m also excited about how much I’m learning along the way.

What I have learned so far

So much! I’ve improved my UI planning skills, learned how to think through validation and design edge cases, and figured out how to set up and document an open-source tool, from metadata to repository creation. I’ve also learned about licensing, accessibility and gained a much better understanding of how the CentralNotice extension works.

To prepare for development, I’ve started learning Vue, Pinia, and exploring Codex, Wikimedia’s official design system.

I’ve also discovered a bunch of new platforms and tools, like:

• Phabricator – For task tracking and project management

• Toolforge – A hosting platform for developer-built tools

• Toolhub – A directory for Wikimedia tools

• GitLab – For code hosting and collaboration

• PAWS – A Jupyter notebook environment for working with Wikimedia data

• Gerrit – A code review tool for managing contributions

What’s been confusing

Tooling! Figuring out how different platforms and tools work can be a lot at first. My mentor has been super supportive and patient, walking me through anything I’m unclear on. It was also a bit tricky trying to navigate the CentralNotice ecosystem at first. I needed to understand how it worked so I could figure out what features to build into the banner editor.

I can’t wait to see what more I’ll learn in the coming weeks. It might be a little confusing at times, but so far, it’s 100% worth it.

For Newcomers

More than 1,300 people had perished in the crossing of that stretch of the Sahara in previous years. Often, drifting sands had obliterated the track across the desert, and the travelers had gotten lost in the night, never to be found again alive. To counter the lack of features in the terrain, the French had marked the track with black, fifty-five-gallon oil drums every five kilometers, which was exactly the distance to the horizon, formed by the curvature of the earth. Because of this, in the daytime, we could always see two oil barrels—the one we had just passed and the one five kilometers ahead of it. And that was exactly what we needed to stay on course. All we had to do was to steer for the next oil barrel. As a result, we were able to cross the biggest desert in the world by simply taking it 'one oil barrel at a time.

— from Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy

No matter how big your goal is or how overwhelming your task list feels, focus on what’s in front of you. Break it down, take it one step at a time, and you’ll make it through. That mindset has helped me navigate this internship so far.