Wikimedia Foundation selects nine students for summer software projects
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:
All nine of these students are working on MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikimedia sites.
- 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
Google Summer of Code 2012
wow this is nice
I’ve created several processors that process XWiki Code (MediaWiki raw format). One converts it to plain text, another gets the links (I discovered the api call that gets the interwiki links (action=query&list=links) later on, which is different anyways because order is important, alphabetical order has no semantics and as thus information entropy is reduced when using the api call).
Anyways, this comment is to communicate a frustration: WHY is the WORLD’s ENCYPLODIA uses a format that is messy like XWiki Raw Code? This is not acceptable. A better method should be researched that works with the nature of public editing.
A major disadvantage with XWiki raw format (append ?action=raw to any Wikipedia url to see it) is that it doesn’t separate information and layout. We should be past that point. Further more, information is unstructured. It’s worse than a messy library, programmatically speaking.
I wish I can come up with a solution. HELP!
Mazin, we’re working on the structured data side of it with Wikidata and on reducing the need to use wikitext markup with the visual editor. If you need more help, I encourage you to visit our mailing lists and chat channels to talk with the Wikimedia technical community to help you find solutions!
Sumana, this is the first time I hear of Wikidata! Thank you so much for the heads up and the links! It seems very exciting and it thrills me. I hope I can contribute to such amazing project.