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:

MediaWiki is participating in Google Summer of Code 2011.

• 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

This is a reminder to anyone who might have been considering coming to the Hack-A-Ton in DC. If you haven’t been following page on MediaWiki.org, we’ve recently updated it with additional information, including the venue.

This year, we will be meeting at the Embassy Suites in Tyson’s Corner, just outside of the city itself. By the end of this week we will have a breakdown of what to expect and when.

We’ve already got a fair number of people coming so far, and I’d love to see more there. So if you’ve been thinking about coming but haven’t said anything or know of someone who would want to come, please get in touch with either myself or Danese for more information.

Greetings MediaWiki hackers!

I am pleased to announce the upcoming MediaWiki Hack-A-Ton in Washington, DC.

As you are all aware, every year in April our good friends at Wikimedia Deutschland host the annual “MediaWiki Developers Meetup” in Berlin. At that event, the program is focused on demonstrations, workshops and small group discussions. To complement this, we’re planning the DC meetup to be focused solely on hacking, bugfixing and getting down and dirty with the
code.

We’re scheduling this for October 22nd-24th in Washington, DC. Some of the details haven’t been ironed out yet, but will be announced over the coming days as it is. So clear your calendars, and keep your eyes on MediaWiki.org and the mailing lists for more information.

Some travel assistance may be available for those coming a long way. I’ve also been told there will be swag of some sort for attendees :)

Chad Horohoe
Contractor, Wikimedia Foundation

And one more thing: I forgot to mention Bugzilla. To help track the event, we’ve added a new keyword, “bugsmash.” Prior to the Hack-A-Ton, we’d like people to start tagging bugs that should be tackled during the event. It will help the participants get started finding bugs, as well as bump the priority on a bug you’ve been wanting to see fixed.