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Guergana Tzatchkova
Guergana Tzatchkova

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Writing Free and Open Source Software

It's been hectic times and I hadn't had much time to write. But here are some 2020/2021 updates:

Since June 2020 I have been working for Wikimedia Deutschland as a Fullstack Developer for the Wikidata / Wikibase team at first, and now at the Wikidata team after the team split It has been a crazy rollercoaster of learning. I had been wanting to become a Fullstack developer for a while and this has been a great opportunity to expand my knowledge on more backendy things (will see you later down the road beloved microservices), but also I've learned crazy lots about Open Source Software (everything we do is open source, even our sprint boards!), about Creative Commons Licensing, about the inner workings of Wikipedia and its community, about the nuances of working in non-profits and a whole lot about democracy (the good, the bad and the ugly).

We usually divide the work in feature development and maintenance. I have been mostly contributing in the development of features, some examples:

  • Simple Query Bilder. A visual interface that helps users make queries to Wikidata without the need to learn SPARQL.
  • The Wikidata Mismatch Finder. A tool to review mismatches between Wikidata and External Databases.
  • Wikit. A design system / component library for Wikibase.
  • Wikibase Reconcile Edit. An Api to reconciliate items from an external database to a Wikibase instance for Open!Next an Open Hardware project funded by the EU.

More features coming up. You can find me on Github , Gerrit and Phabricator.

Support open source!

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