Summary of week 10
We started looking at ways to contribute to Wikipedia pages, and this started as being a little difficult due to there being so much content on Wikipedia that I did not know where I should start contributing. I had trouble looking for pages that might need editing because the few that I did look at, all looked very well crafted. I then started looking at pages that were generated under ‘Random Article’ and many of these were lacking information or they had many issues. I put the ones that interested me on my Watchlist to be able to go back and add information to them.

This week I looked for issues that I could resolve in the freeCodeCamp GitHub page. After being unsuccessful in looking for already proposed issues that I could solve, I began looking at the descriptions to actual coding challenges and seeing some things that could use some changes. On 11/4, I created my own issue to explain a piece of code in one of the challenges of their basic JavaScript curriculum. This same day, I created a pull request to explain a while loop in the challenge. I felt that the code needed some sort of explanation because it is to be read by someone with either no background knowledge of programming or a beginner. My PR did not pass the first round of checks but within a couple of hours, one of the maintainers reached out and suggested changes for it. After making the requested changes, all the checks were passed and two maintainers approved it. I am now waiting on the PR to be merged as of 11/5. I looked at other PRs that were approved but many of them have not been merged after a long time. This is kind of concerning but if my PR does not get merged by 11/6, I will follow-up with the maintainers.

Update: As of 11/6, my pull request was merged!

Thoughts on “Makers and Takers” by Dries Buytaert
A point that Buytaert made that grabbed my attention was “[I]n many countries, public transport, water utilities and parks are maintained better than volunteer contributors would have on their own. I certainly value that I don’t have to help maintain the train tracks before my daily commute to work, or that I don’t have to help mow the lawn in our public park before I can play soccer with my kids.” I found this interesting because I think that this kind of behavior is very prevalent in the recent decades where people will go to a restaurant rather than cooking in their homes because they would rather pay for the service. I agree with the statement from Buytaert because I think that many people would rather just pay for something to be done for them and not have to worry about the process. This is where Open Source might be at a disadvantage because privatized and centralized common goods are expected to be taken care of since they are exclusive.

Buytaert brought up another point, that most companies will contribute to Open Source if they know that other companies will also contribute. I thought this was interesting because this puts a lot of emphasize on knowing what another company is doing. This ends up not always benefitting Open Source in general because many companies will take a safe route and not contribute to Open Source.