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

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking into the option of expanding into a new datacenter.  Currently the plans are tentative, but are expected to become much firmer once discussions with various Datacenter Providers takes place.

Currently, the servers for the projects reside in Tampa, Florida, USA, and in Amsterdam, Netherlands.  We actually have moved the servers recently in Amsterdam.  Now the time has come to move/expand in the US.  We are looking at moving to an area OUTSIDE of Florida, where every single hurricane season is not the cause of distress.

We are currently looking in the Virginia and DC areas, but are not adverse to other areas given the space/power/transit issues.  I have already been in contact with a number of vendors, but that doesn’t mean I do not want more options.

Things we require:

• We are looking for Datacenters that offer co-location services with 24/7 access.
• We also require racks have both primary and redundant power drops, from different feeds and circuits.
• The drops also need to be 3phase 208V power.
• Offers a low cost out of band access for our mangement network ONLY (no production traffic.)
• Some kind of NOC in residence in the event of ‘horrible end of the world’ happenings and we need remote hands.  (We have LOM and remote reboot capabilities, but having a NOC is never horrible.)

Any interested sales folks at a datacenter can email me rob at wikimedia dot org.  Put ‘Datacenter Relocation Project’ in the subject so I am sure I see it!

Also, any folks out there who have decent recommendations, let me have em!