Quim Gil, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Technical Contributor Coordinator, recently wrote about internship programs that the Wikimedia tech community participates in. These programs provide a valuable platform for a diverse group of contributors and nurture deeper collaboration across open source communities. He also shared details about participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreach Program for Women (OPW) for Wikimedia projects.

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team welcomes students to participate in the projects listed for Google Summer of Code and those listed for the Outreach Program for Women. The projects listed aim to resolve shortcomings or enhance various language tools that the team maintains; they include:

• improving the jQuery.ime input method library;
• building browser extensions for stand-alone operation of input methods;
• creating a dashboard for language coverage information;
• converting legacy wiki content into translatable entries.

Providing support for nearly 300 languages is no easy feat. There is constant demand for enhancements of tools, and this demand is only expected to grow. The team constantly encourages volunteers including students, language community members and others, to work with them on internationalization challenges. This includes various components like Translate UX (TUX) and Project Milkshake, in which participants can:

• increase coverage of input methods and font library;
• improve language rules for the internationalization library;
• test and prepare validation tools;
• test and enhance the translation tool;
• write documents.

They can also contribute by building extensions like SpellingApi and LocalisationUpdate, or even creating usable multi-lingual CAPTCHAs.

Open projects are also added to the master list maintained for all mentorship programs. After ascertaining the availability of mentors, participants can collaborate on a project of interest. If no mentors are listed, students can ask the team on  #mediawiki-i18n (Freenode IRC) or write to me (runa at wikimedia dot org) for more information.

We look forward to all the exciting proposals for our projects for Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women. Student applications close on May 3rd and May 1st respectively.  Time is short — apply now!

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

These days we are welcoming a new wave of candidates for Google Summer of Code and FOSS Outreach Program for Women (OPW) internships. Interested? Stop reading and hurry up! Or keep reading to learn why these free software mentorship programs are doing so much good.

Since 2006, Wikimedia has mentored 32 GSoC students. From those, only one (3.13%) was a woman (accepted in 2011), and she didn’t stick around. This number is even lower than the general percentage of women accepted in GSoC 2012 (8.3%) although perhaps it is in line with the composition of our own tech community (data missing). Can we do better?

We think we can. This is why we joined OPW last November. It was the first round open to organizations other than the GNOME Foundation, founders of the initiative. After 5 rounds of OPW, GNOME women are not an exotic exception anymore. It is too soon to evaluate results in the Wikimedia tech community, but the six interns we got during the 5th round delivered their projects in the areas of software development, internationalization, UX design, quality assurance and product management, and so far they are sticking around. We also learned some lessons that we are applying to the next internship programs. As we speak, several women are applying for Wikimedia in the current GSoC edition. A promising trend!

But there is more positive change. Paid internships are like subcutaneous injections for a free software community: in just one shot you get a full time contributor dedicated to help you within a defined scope and amount of time, with the incentive of a stipend ($5,000). The lives of the injected contributors change in the new environment. They learn and they adapt to new situations. They acquire a valuable experience that will help them becoming experienced volunteers and better professionals. At least this is the goal. But the life of the community receiving the injection also should change for good with the arrival of these full time contributors. This is also the goal. So what has improved so far in our tech community?

Scaling up complex projects

Mentorship programs require a good alignment of project ideas supported by the community and by available mentors. Thanks to the efforts of many, we have now a list of possible projects, including a selection of featured project ideas ready to start. The list includes proposals coming from different Wikimedia projects, Wikimedia Foundation-driven initiatives and MediaWiki features for third parties.

These project ideas link to Bugzilla reports in order to keep track of the technical discussion, involving the candidates, the mentors and whoever else wants to join. Full transparency! We also provide basic guidelines for candidates willing to propose their own projects.

All this has been done for the current GSoC and OPW round, but is potentially also useful in the context of other initiatives like OpenHatch, SocialCoding4Good, or Wikimedia’s Individual Engagement Grants. If you want to propose a technical project that could keep a person or team busy for 3–4 months, now you know where to start.

Improving our Welcome carpet

Each mentorship program brings a wave of newcomers willing to get up to speed as soon as possible. We are betting on the “the medium is the message” approach, giving as much importance to the proposals as to the participation and collaboration of the candidate in our regular community channels. But all this requires better landing surfaces in mediawiki.org.

This pressure and the repetition of similar questions by newcomers have encouraged the creation or promotion of references such as Where to start, How to contribute and Annoying little bugs. We keep working on an easier introduction to our community through the fresh and work-in-progress Starter kit, a team of volunteer Greeters and other initiatives discussed at the new Project:New contributors. And you know what? Several former interns are involved!

Diversity enters our agenda

We believe that “a healthy mix of demographic and cultural characteristics everywhere throughout the movement is key to Wikimedia’s success.” Diversity is good for creativity and sustainability, which are primary goals of any free software community. Yet diversity in these communities tends to be quite limited, and our case is not an exception.

We have mentioned the problem of male predominance, but there are other biases and types of discrimination that we would like to help leveling. What about working on other barriers caused by abilities, age, language, or cultural, ethnic, or economic background? Just like we are doing with OPW, we can start with programs for specific audiences that we can sync with mainstream activities like GSoC, increasing their diversity. Ideas are welcome.

Quim Gil, Technical Contributor Coordinator (IT Communications Manager)

This year, the MediaWiki community again participated in Google Summer of Code, in which we selected nine students to work on new features or specific improvements to the software. They were sponsored by Google and mentored by experienced developers, who helped them become part of the development community and guided their code development.

Congratulations to the eight students who have made it through the summer of 2012 (our seventh year participating in GSoC)! They all accomplished a great deal, and many of them are working to improve their projects to benefit the Wikimedia community even more.

• Ankur Anand worked on integrating Flickr upload and geolocation into UploadWizard. WMF engineer Ryan Kaldari mentored Ankur as they made it easier for Wikimedia contributors to contribute media files and metadata. Read his wrapup and anticipate the merge of his code into the main UploadWizard codebase.
• Harry Burt worked on TranslateSvg (“Bringing the translation revolution to Wikimedia Commons”). When his work is complete and deployed, we will more easily able to use a single picture or animation in different language wikis. See this image of the anatomy of a human kidney, for example; it has a description in eight languages, so it benefits multiple language Wikipedias (e.g., Spanish and Russian). Harry aims to allow contributors to localize the text embedded within vector files (SVGs), and you can watch a demo video, try out the test site, or just read Harry’s wrapup post. WMF engineer Max Semenik mentored this project.
• Akshay Chugh worked on a convention/conference extension for MediaWiki. Wikimedia conferences like Wikimania often use MediaWiki to help organize their conferences, but it takes a lot of custom programming. Under the mentorship of volunteer developer Jure Kajzer, Akshay created the beta of an extension that a webmaster could install to provide conference-related features automatically. See his wrapup post.
• 

  Ashish is working on the architecture that will support real-time collaboration.

  Ashish Dubey worked on realtime collaboration in the upcoming Visual Editor (you may have seen “real-time collaborative editing” in tools like Etherpad and Google Docs). Ashish (with WMF engineer Trevor Parscal as mentor) has implemented a collaboration server and other features (see his wrapup post) and has achieved real-time “spectation,” in which readers can see an editor’s changes in realtime. Wikimedia Foundation engineers plan to integrate Ashish’s work into VisualEditor around April to June 2013.

• Nischay Nahata optimized the performance of the Semantic MediaWiki extension. In wikis with unusually large amounts of content, Semantic MediaWiki experiences performance degradation. With the mentorship of head Semantic MediaWiki developer Markus Krötzsch (a volunteer) and Wikidata developer Jeroen De Dauw, Nischay found and fixed many of these issues.  This also reduces SMW’s energy consumption, making it greener. Nischay’s work will be in Semantic MediaWiki 1.8.0, which is currently in beta and due to be released soon. Wikimedia Labs uses Semantic MediaWiki and will benefit from the performance improvements.
• 

  Arun Ganesh illustrated the watchlist redesign proposal with this mockup.

  Aaron Pramana worked on watchlist grouping and workflow improvements. Aaron wants to make it easier for wiki editors and readers to use watchlists, and to create and use groups of watched items to focus on or share. Aaron worked with volunteer developer Alex Emsenhuber. The back end of the system is done, but Aaron wants your input about the user interface. Folks on the English Wikipedia’s Village Pump have started discussing it.

• Robin Pepermans worked on Incubator improvements and language support, mentored by WMF engineer Niklas Laxström. If you’ve ever thought of using Wikimedia’s Incubator for new projects, it’s now easier to get started. Read Robin’s wrapup post for more.
• Platonides worked on a desktop application for mass-uploading files to Wikimedia Commons. The application will eventually make it much easier for participants in upload campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments to upload their photos (and it’ll work on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS). I mentored Platonides, who delivered a beta version.

As further progress happens, we’ll update our page about past GSoC students. Congratulations again to the students and their mentors. And thanks to volunteer Greg Varnum, who helped me administer this year’s GSoC, and to all the staffers and volunteers who helped students learn our ways.

Sumana Harihareswara, Engineering Community Manager

We received 63 proposals for this year’s Google Summer of Code, and several mentors put many hours into evaluating project ideas, discussing them with applicants and making the tough decisions. We’re happy to announce our final choices, the Google Summer of Code students for 2012:

• Ankur Anand, working on integrating Flickr upload and geolocation into UploadWizard. WMF engineer Ryan Kaldari is mentoring Ankur as they make it easier for Wikimedia contributors to contribute media files and metadata.
• Harry Burt, working on TranslateSvg (“Bringing the translation revolution to Wikimedia Commons”). All readers and editors benefit when we can use a single picture or animation in different language wikis (example, use). Harry aims to allow contributors to localize the text embedded within vector files (SVGs). WMF engineer Max Semenik is mentoring this project.
• Akshay Chugh, working on a convention/conference extension for MediaWiki. Wikimedia conferences like Wikimania often use MediaWiki to help organize their conferences, but it takes a lot of custom programming. Under the mentorship of volunteer developer Jure Kajzer, Akshay aims to create an extension that a webmaster could install to provide conference-related features automatically.
• Ashish Dubey, working on realtime collaboration in the upcoming visual editor.  You may have seen “real-time collaborative editing” in tools like Etherpad and Google Docs.  Ashish (with WMF engineer Trevor Parscal as mentor) will work to bring this functionality to MediaWiki.
• Suhas HS, working on improvements to the OpenStackManager extension. We use OpenStack in our new Wikimedia Labs infrastructure. Suhas, with the mentorship of WMF engineer Ryan Lane, aims to improve MediaWiki’s ability to support the new Openstack API, which provides an interface to manage the virtualized environments.
• Nischay Nahata, working on optimizing the performance of the Semantic MediaWiki extension. In wikis with unusually large amounts of content, Semantic MediaWiki experiences performance degradation. With the mentorship of volunteer developer Markus Krötzsch and Wikidata developer Jeroen De Dauw, Nischay aims to find and fix these issues; this will also reduce SMW’s energy consumption, making it greener.
• Aaron Pramana, working on watchlist grouping and workflow improvements. Aaron aims to make it easier for wiki editors and readers to use watchlists, and to create and use groups of watched items to focus on or share.  Aaron will be working with volunteer developer Alex Emsenhuber.
• Robin Pepermans, working on Incubator improvements and language support. This project aims to improve the usability, performance, and coverage of Wikimedia’s Incubator. WMF engineer Niklas Laxström will mentor Robin.
• Platonides, working on a desktop application for mass-uploading files to Wikimedia Commons.  The application will make it much easier for participants in upload campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments to upload their photos (and it’ll work on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS). I, Sumana Harihareswara, will be mentoring Platonides.

Congratulations to this year’s students, and thanks to all the applicants, as well as MediaWiki’s many mentors, developers who evaluated applications, and Google’s Open Source Programs Office. The accepted students now have a month to ramp up on MediaWiki’s processes and get to know their mentors (the Community Bonding Period) and will start coding their summer projects on or before May 21st. As the organizational administrator for MediaWiki’s GSoC participation, I’ll be keeping an eye on all nine students and helping them out.

Good luck!

Sumana Harihareswara, Volunteer Development Coordinator

For the seventh year in a row, Wikimedia Foundation is participating in the Google Summer of Code program. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program where Google pays summer students USD 5000 each to code for open source projects for three months (read more).

We hope 2012′s students will develop useful chunks of MediaWiki, help us get their code shipped, and fall in love with our community such that they stay with us for years to come.

This year’s project ideas include improvements to CentralNotice, taxobox editing, search, translation tools, and more.  Interested?

University, community college, and graduate students around the world are eligible to apply to Google Summer of Code. You don’t need to be a computer science or IT major, and you can work from home.

We are looking for students who already know some PHP. We also strongly prefer for you to have some experience working with Linux, Apache, and MySQL environments, and with the Git version control system. If you haven’t contributed to MediaWiki before, How to become a MediaWiki hacker is a good place to start; we will strongly prefer candidates who submit patches before the April 6th GSoC application deadline.

If you’d like to participate, check out the timeline. Make sure you are available full-time from 21 May till 20 August 2012, and have a little free time from 23 April till 20 May for ramp-up. Please read our wiki page and start talking with us on IRC in #mediawiki on Freenode about a possible project.  Then you’ll write a proposal and submit it via the official GSoC website. The deadline for you to submit a project proposal is April 6th, but we encourage you to start early and talk with us about your idea first.

We’re also seeking experienced MediaWiki developers anywhere in the world to help select and mentor student projects. We’ll take you even if you live in the southern hemisphere and it’s not summer for you. :-) You’ll need to be available online consistently so you can respond to student questions between now and late August. As Brion Vibber put it, if you “are knowledgeable about MediaWiki — not necessarily knowing every piece of it, but knowing where to look so you can help the students help themselves” then please consider helping out.

I’m administering our participation in GSoC. So I am encouraging students to apply, getting project ideas, and managing the application process overall. I look forward to seeing students discover the joy of collaborative work that improves the Wikimedia experience for millions of users. Help us spread the word.

Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation
MediaWiki Coordinator, GSoC 2012

Earlier this month, about thirty MediaWiki developers and interested technologists gathered in New Orleans to learn and to work on Wikimedia’s technical infrastructure.  We made broad progress on the infrastructure of innovation at Wikimedia (notes).  Specifically:

• We are now much closer to officially opening the doors to Wikimedia Labs and giving far more people the ability to contribute to MediaWiki without having to set up and maintain their own development environments at home.  Wikimedia Labs will provide hosted, virtualized test and development sandboxes for new and experienced programmers and systems administrators.  Many developers got beta Labs accounts, we tested at a larger scale, and we fixed several bugs.
• Developers agreed to create a file backend abstraction layer to enable large-scale MediaWiki installations to use one of several storage systems to contain big collections of big media files.  (Wikimedia plans on using Swift, which is open source.) Microsoft’s Ben Lobaugh and SAIC’s DJ Bauch collaborated towards improving MediaWiki’s performance on Microsoft technologies as well.  Developers made architectural decisions, refactored some existing code, and improved documentation and tests for the SwiftMedia extension to MediaWiki.
• 

  Chad Horohoe teaching developers unit testing

  We now have a continuous integration server up and running.  This will continuously run tests checking on the latest new features and bugfixes that developers write, resulting in fewer bugs and faster development. Developers will need to write tests to reap the benefits, so Chad Horohoe taught a test-writing workshop.

• Max Semenik finished and demonstrated the first version of his API Query Sandbox.  This allows software developers anywhere to experiment with ways to automatically get data from Wikipedia or other sites that run MediaWiki, thus enabling wider and deeper reuse of Wikimedia content.
• Operations folks continued the Puppetization of our infrastructure: they completely reworked Varnish management in Puppet, and worked on Puppet configurations for SwiftMedia testing. This configuration management work will ensure that ops can move faster and more confidently in building and maintaining Wikimedia infrastructure. And Canonical’s Mark Mims and Kapil Thangavelu worked on improving methods for Wikimedia developers “to spin up stacks of services within the labs environment” using Juju (more details).
• 

  Brion Vibber leading developers into the "glorious Git future"

  Since the engineering department is planning a switch from Subversion to Git in the next few months, Brion taught nearly everyone there how Git works (slides, audio), and how we’ll be using Git in the future. This change in our source code repository and workflow will, we hope, enable more speed and flexibility in development, both for WMF developers and community contributors.
• We prioritized and addressed several open requests for the operations team and defect reports about the latest version of MediaWiki, 1.18, which had just been deployed across WMF sites.
• Roan found and fixed an issue that was spouting symbolic link errors into our Apache logs, so now it’ll be easier for us to see more dangerous errors in those logs.
• Google Summer of Code students Salvatore Ingala and Kevin Brown made progress on integrating their summers’ work into MediaWiki as used and deployed by others; Salvatore and WMF developer Roan Kattouw have a plan for getting his user scripts improvements reviewed and deployed, so they can benefit Wikimedia readers and editors.
• A volunteer came in on Friday night knowing nothing about developing for MediaWiki, and by the end of the weekend had a working development environment on her laptop and had some ideas about how to contribute.
• We had substantive conversations about the summer internship program and about third-party collaboration that will affect how we work in the future.

We also ate dinner together, walked Bourbon Street, and generally got to know colleagues we’d never met before.  I expect these relationships will bear fruit for years to come.

Thanks to Ryan Lane and Dana Isokawa for organizing the event with me, and thanks to Launch Pad New Orleans for providing the venue!

Our next developers’ event is a hackathon in Mumbai November 18-20 concentrating on internationalization, localization, and mobile work.  To find out about other upcoming Wikimedia technical events, check the meetings wiki page, and follow @MediaWikiMeet on Identi.ca or Twitter.

Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation

Congratulations to the seven Google Summer of Code students who made it through the summer of 2011! They all accomplished a great deal, but want to continue contributing to ensure their work maximally benefits Wikimedia.

Yuvi Panda‘s assessment parsing/aggregating extension aims “to make it easier to select and export article selections for various offline collections.” Yuvi needs some code review and suggestions on how to improve it to meet the Foundation’s quality standards for deployability, as he wrote the developers’ mailing list.

Salvatore Ingala worked on making gadgets customizable. As he elaborated, that means:

• “allowing gadgets to easily declare the list of configuration
  variables they have;
• allowing users to easily change those settings, with an easy-to-use
  UI integrated to the Special:Preferences page.”

The next step is merging his code into trunk, which Salvatore’s planning with other MediaWiki developers.

Kevin Brown created the ArchiveLinks project to address the problem of linkrot on Wikipedia:

In articles we often cite or link to external URLs, but anything could happen to content on other sites — if they move, change, or simply vanish, the value of the citation is lost. ArchiveLinks rewrites external links in Wikipedia articles, so there is a ‘[cached]‘ link immediately afterwards which points to the web archiving service of your choice. This can even preserve the exact time that the link was added, so for sites which archive multiple versions of content (such as the Internet Archive) it will even link to a copy of the page that was made around the time the article was written.

Kevin’s next step: getting a security review of his code, getting a starter feed set up so that the Internet Archive can start archiving it, and campaigning to interest Wikimedians and thus eventually get consensus to turn it on. At least one Wikimedian has already praised Kevin for his work.

Akshay Agarwal wrote a MediaWiki extension, SignupAPI, that makes it easier for a new user to create an account. “This extension creates a special page that cleans up SpecialUserLogin from signup related stuff, adds an API for signup, adds sourcetracking for account creation & provides Ajax-ified validation for signup form.” Akshay’s waiting for code review and discussion before the project can move forward further and benefit Wikimedia users.

Yuvi, Salvatore, Kevin, and Akshay all worked on features that they aim to get into Wikimedia Foundation-run wikis, such as Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikinews, etc., sooner rather than later. In contrast, three students worked on extensions that will primarily benefit the larger MediaWiki community. For example, Yevhenii Vlasenko‘s project was a “UserStatus” feature for SocialProfile. The SocialProfile extension is not currently deployed on any WMF wikis, but will benefit several other MediaWiki administrators and users. Zhenya finished his work but would like to continue by integrating better with social networks.

And two students worked on Semantic MediaWiki, which is also not currently deployed on any Wikimedia Foundation sites. Devayon Das made a “QueryCreator” and other improvements, and hopes to simplify its layout, make its interface easier to use, and add some features. And Ankit Garg worked on “Semantic Schemas”.

Congratulations to the students and their mentors.  Here’s hoping they’re all here to help out when next year’s interns roll in! :-)  And I’m looking forward to meeting Kevin and Salvatore, and introducing them to other Wikimedia & MediaWiki developers, at the New Orleans developers’ meetup next month.

Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation

MediaWiki’s Google Summer of Code students have been busy! We’re more than halfway through the summer, so here’s what they’re up to:

• Akshay Agarwal’s “Account Creation, Login Screens and AJAX-ification of everything” (mentor: Brandon Harris). Code, project status.
  The last task I accomplished: “Added source tracking functionality in the account creation API that I am building.”
  Something I’ve learned: “True learning can happen only in an open environment & with a highly supportive community.”
• Kevin Brown’s “Working Archival for Web References/Citations,” “to facilitate the archival of external links used as references in the English Wikipedia” (mentor: Neil Kandalgaonkar). Code, project notes.
  The last task I accomplished: “Adding support for wget local archival, currently working on feed for external archival services.”
  Something I’ve learned: “Where do I start? A lot. I think the biggest thing is probably managing a large project and time management, which I still have a lot to learn on.”
• Devayon Das’s “Improving Semantic Search/Semantic Query usability issues in SMW” (mentor: Markus Krötzsch). Code, project notes.
  The last task I accomplished: “Added RSS links to the results generated by the Query Creator interface I’m building.”
  Something I’ve learned: “A 30 second chat with a community member can save you 30 minutes of scratching your head in frustration.”
• Ankit Garg’s “Semantic Schemas extension” (mentor: Yaron Koren). Code.
  The last task I accomplished: “I finished adding the inheritance support to the PageSchema XML structure.”
  Something I’ve learned: “I have a learned a great deal of PHP; also how to manage a huge project.”
• 

  "A 30 second chat with a community member can save you 30 minutes of scratching your head in frustration."

  
  Salvatore Ingala’s “AMICUS: Awesome Monolithic Infrastructure for Customization of User Scripts” (mentors: Max Semenik and Brion Vibber). Code, project notes.
  The last task I accomplished: “I made a prototypal user interface for editing preferences of an existing gadget, HotCat.”
  Something I’ve learned: “Unit testing is boooooring, but ends up saving you a lot of time!”
• Yuvi Panda’s “Making Offline Wikipedia Article Selection Easier with Mediawiki Extensions” (mentor: Arthur Richards). Code, project.
  The last task I accomplished: “Filter articles based on name, quality and importance.”
  Something I’ve learned: “That spending time talking to everyone involved in the process from start to finish (devs, community maintainers, etc.) saves a truckload of time later on.”
• Zhenya Vlasyenko’s “MediaWiki Extension: SocialProfile – UserStatus feature” (mentor: Jack Phoenix). Code.
  The last task I accomplished: “Internalization of the UserStatus feature with the help of the MakeGlobalVariablesScript hook.”
  Something I’ve learned: “I’ve found out for myself a new ways of data interaction between PHP and Javascript… Convinced that knowing some tricks and hooks can greatly save time.”

Aigerim Karabekova, who was working on extension release management, ran into several delays (including medical issues) and the project has been dropped. We’re glad she made the attempt and wish her the best.

Continued best wishes to Zhenya, Yuvi, Salvatore, Ankit, Devayon, Kevin, and Akshay as they work to make MediaWiki, and the Wikimedia experience, better.  We’re glad to be helping young developers learn how to contribute to our community.

Sumana Harihareswara
Wikimedia Foundation, Volunteer Development Coordinator

We received more than 25 proposals for this year’s Google Summer of Code, and several mentors put many hours into evaluating project ideas, discussing them with applicants, and making the tough decisions.  Our final choices, the Google Summer of Code students for MediaWiki for 2011:

• Akshay Agarwal‘s “Account Creation, Login Screens and AJAX-ification of everything” (mentor: Brandon Harris)
• Kevin Brown’s “Working Archival for Web References/Citations,” “to facilitate the archival of external links used as references in the English Wikipedia” (mentor: Neil Kandalgaonkar)
• Devayon Das‘s “Improving Semantic Search/Semantic Query usability issues in SMW” (mentor: Markus Krötzsch)
• Ankit Garg‘s “Semantic Schemas extension” (mentor: Yaron Koren)
• Salvatore Ingala‘s “AMICUS: Awesome Monolithic Infrastructure for Customization of User Scripts” (mentors: Brion Vibber and Max Semenik)
• Aigerim Karabekova‘s “Extension Release Management” (mentors: Sam Reed, Priyanka Dhanda, and Chad Horohoe)
• Yuvi Panda‘s “Making Offline Wikipedia Article Selection Easier with Mediawiki Extensions” (mentor: Arthur Richards)
• Zhenya Vlasyenko‘s “MediaWiki Extension: SocialProfile – UserStatus feature” (mentor: Jack Phoenix)

You’ll be hearing more about each of these projects in the next few weeks!

Congratulations to this year’s students, and thanks to all the applicants, as well as MediaWiki’s many mentors, developers who evaluated applications, and Google’s Open Source Programs Office.  The accepted students now have a month to ramp up on MediaWiki’s processes and get to know their mentors (the Community Bonding Period) and will start coding their summer projects on or before May 23rd.  As organizational administrator for MediaWiki’s GSoC participation, I’ll be keeping an eye on all eight students and helping them out.

Good luck!

For the sixth year in a row, Wikimedia is participating in the Google Summer of Code program. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program where Google pays summer students USD 5000 each to hack open source projects during the summer (read more).

Over time, MediaWiki has benefited from GSoC students and their projects. For example, Samuel Lampa’s 2010 RDF import/export extension in Semantic MediaWiki is in use. And Jeroen De Dauw, GSoC student in 2009 and 2010, is now a persistently contributing member of the MediaWiki community, as is Brian Wolff, 2010 GSoC student.

In the past, the administrative and management challenges of GSoC have been an extra task that take engineers’ time, and too often fell through the cracks. So this year, Rob Lanphier asked me to act as organizational administrator for MediaWiki’s involvement, via the Wikimedia Foundation.

I’m recruiting students to apply, getting project ideas, and managing the application process overall. Once we choose the students and they start ramping up and working, I will also help mentors manage their students and keep communication going, to make sure that every GSoC student’s project gets delivered and gets used!

We hope 2011′s students will develop useful chunks of MediaWiki (core, extensions, gadgets, scripts, or utilities), help us get their code shipped, and stay in the MediaWiki community afterwards.

This year’s ideas include writing and implementing cite templates in a PHP extension, improving the ImageTagging extension, XML dump work, pre-commit checks in our code repositories, and more. And of course we want to hear your own ideas, too! Interested?

University, community college, and graduate students around the world are eligible to apply to Google Summer of Code. You don’t need to be a computer science or IT major, and you can work from home.

We are looking for students who already know PHP. It’s also great if you have some experience with LAMP, MAMP, LAPP, or one of those kinds of stacks, and with the Subversion version control system. If you haven’t contributed to MediaWiki before, How to become a MediaWiki hacker is a good place to start.

If you’d like to participate, check out the timeline. Make sure you are available full-time from 23 May till 22 August this summer, and have a little free time from 25 April till 23 May for ramp-up.

If you’re interested, please sign up on our wiki page and start talking with us on IRC in #mediawiki on Freenode about a possible project! Then you can submit your proposal via the official GSoC website. The deadline for you to submit a project proposal is April 8th, but we encourage you to start early and talk with us about your idea first.

And, to repeat what Brion once said:

If you’re an experienced MediaWiki developer and would like to help out with selecting and mentoring student projects, please give us a shout! We’ll take you even if you live in the southern hemisphere. ;) We need folks who’ll be available online fairly regularly over the summer and are knowledgeable about MediaWiki — not necessarily knowing every piece of it, but knowing where to look so you can help the students help themselves.

We’re looking forward to hacking with you!

Sumana Harihareswara
MediaWiki Coordinator, GSoC 2011