Volunteer

CiteIt.net is an open-source project (MIT license) whose mission to create a higher standard of citation is accelerated through the help of volunteers.

Programmers:

If you know how to code (especially in Python) contact Tim to help out.

Top Tasks

Here are a few of the top-priority tasks you can help with. (The complete list is in Pivotal Tracker)

1. Create WordPress Gutenberg Block Editor to Replace old WordPress v4 plugin
   • Develop the ability to add metadata to quotes using custom Html attributes
2. Verify Quote before allowing Citation: Enforce Rules or Flag Suspicious Quotes that do not exactly match the original version, allowing for structured variation:
   • Modify Parsing to handle [C]apitalization:
     • “[T]his is a quote that was pulled from the middle of a sentence, but capitalized to fit with the new context”
   • Allow new [additional] words to be added if the word is surrounded by brackets.
   • Modify Parsing to handle Elipses ..
     • “The quote was pulled from a sentence .. and the middle was skipped. This was noted with an ellipse.” It would be nice if the middle of the quote could be expanded.
3. Create a script to “upgrade” existing Wikipedia quotes into Contextual Citations
4. Allow unique specification if phrase occurs multiple times in a document.
   • This could be done by specifiying enough of the “before” and “after” text to make the phrase unique.
5. Design an interface and Citation Structure for Nested Quotes:
   • How does CiteIt have to be modified to allow quotations of quotations, nested multiple levels deep?
6. Make YouTube (and other) transcripts highlight the current word/s while the recording plays. This will likely require creating a format for an intermediate data structure which stores the start and end times for each word/phrase in the transcript.  (example: YouTube Speech-Text API script)
7. Create a Standardized Text Version of Every Submitted page. The standardized text version is used to create the contextual JSON file containing the 500 characters before and after the quote
   • from HTML
   • from PDF
   • from Word Doc
   • from Open Ofice
   • from PowerPoint
   • from Image
8. Modify Document class to save a copy of the original file in its original encoding to S3-style storage
   • call archive.org API to archive the citing and cited pages if the page is new or the hash has changed
     • It would be nice if the archive process didn’t slow down the citation process. Perhaps this means that the archive process (which could take several seconds) should be done asynchronously.
9. Setup Tests to verify that changes to the web service do not break existing quotes.
   • Setup CI Server to run tests before Github commits code
10. Add Ability to Standardize Quotes on Canonical Sources
    • The Bible has multiple versions and translations. Can quotation be done in a way that quotes from different versions and different websites are standardized?
11. Create a streamlined process of uploading audio and creating transcripts from Google Speech-to-Text. See work already done in Git Repo. Example: Otto von Bismark biography. (Links)
12. Develop a web interface to crowdsource the process of cleaning up auto-generated transcripts. Would a wiki be of use here?

 

Interested?

• Contact Tim if you’re interested in helping.