Outreachy Open Source Internship at WikiMedia

Outreachy Open Source Internship at WikiMedia

Introduction

Hello, my name is Onitcha Nyerhovwo. I am a DevOps Engineer, a Technical Writer, and an Outreachy Intern for the December 2024 Cohort.

I love music (mostly Afrobeats), sports (Football, Tennis, MMA), reading fictional historical novels and watching comic sitcoms.

I got accepted into the December 2024 Outreachy cohort, and this is the first of many blog posts that will detail my journey contributing to open source over the next three months. I promise it will be an exciting ride.

I was motivated to apply for Outreachy after I came across a blog by one of the past interns. I followed his blog and his Twitter handle and saw his growth over the three-month period of the internship. He also seemed to enjoy contributing to an open-source project, I wanted to experience that as well, so I applied and thankfully, got selected to contribute to the documentation of Quickstatements3.0, a Wikimedia project.

Contributing to open source has always been something I’ve wanted to do, so I’m excited about what the next three months hold.

I’ve always been curious, it’s arguably my best quality, I always try to actively pursue my curiosities as it tends to make one diverse. I don’t like to be pigeonholed into one definition; I enjoy learning about diverse topics across various fields. It just makes the world more interesting. Although I must admit that sometimes it can be tiring, and I get to appreciate why people say “ignorance is bliss.”

I believe my curiosity played a part into getting into Outreachy, I first got to know about Wikidata and Wikidata editing during the contribution phase and I just fully immerse myself into it, kind of like going down a rabbit hole to honest.

I learnt about the honourable mission of Wikidata and the reason for it’s existence and wrote a short article about it. I learned about making edits (I manually made edits to items), learned about Quickstatements and how it use Quickstatements to make edits.

It was like discovering a new world, and I was really just excited to digest it all. That’s why I’m certain the next 3 months will be exciting. I get to contribute to the documentation of Quickstatements3.0, and you get to enjoy the privilege of coming along on my journey.

Other qualities I possess are Integrity and Leadership. I value integrity a lot. I believe a person with integrity has honour, and many of the problems we face today as a global society would be non-existent if more people had integrity.

I enjoy the challenge of leading because I love uniting people to work towards a common goal and fostering a sense of community. A good leader makes the lives of people around them better and I love to see that.

This has gotten too long for an introduction, so I will stop here, if you read to this point, I promise the next blog post will be nothing about me and all about the challenges I’m facing trying to create a dope and user-friendly documentation for the Quickstatements3.0 tool.

See you next time.

Thank you.