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.

During the Wikimedia Conference on April 3. to 5., MediaWiki developers and other technologically inclined people met at the c-base in Berlin. The idea was to meet people and get new (and old) projects moving. And I think it worked!

The biggest topic was probably the Integration of OpenStreetMap into Wikipedia (notes). This project should soon provide us with automatic maps for places, rivers, countries, etc. It will also provide interactive maps which can be panned and zoomed, similar to Google Maps. Highlighting places and objects and integrating sattelite images is being worked on. Wikimedia Germany is supporting the project by providing servers.

Another prominent topic was the Usability Initiative (notes) which has the goal of improving the user interface. Recently, the interaction of new users with the Wikipedia website has been studies in order to identify the things people have most problems with. The results should be available soon and will be used right away to improve the site. Meanwhile, Wikia is working on a WYSIWYG-Editor which greatly simplifies not only editing text but also makes the creation of tables and infoboxes much easier. Better methods for uploading and embedding images and other media are also being researched.

We talked about a lot of other things too, liked a system for systematically testing extensions, improving the handling of reports in Bugzilla, and the WikiTrust system, which can identify and highlight dubious changes in article text. The improved search was also discussed – some of the improvements can already be seen across Wikimedia sites, like the type-ahead suggestions when typing in the search box; others, like result from sister projects, are still limited to the English language Wikipedia, but should be available to all soon.

In the course of the event, I also presented WikiWord (Notes), which is the basis for the impending multi-lingual image search for Commons. The idea is to list the articles a word could refer to in a given language, find the corresponding pages or categories on commons, and present images from them. A prototype is available on the toolserver, but it has no images yet.

I found the meet-up very exciting and I hope that all participants has at least as much fun as I did. I would like to thank again all the people who made this event possible: Sebastian and Guillom, who organized the Wikimedia Conference as a whole, Henriette, Thomas and the rest of the Wikimedia Germany team, who managed all the things big and small that make such an event work, from accomodation to city maps. I want to thank all the volunteers who contributed their time, and especially the kitchen crew, who provided us with such great meals. My special thanks go to  Lucas who helped me moderate the event and acted as my voice while I could hardly speak. Thanks also to the local folks of the c-base for their support and hospitality. And finally, I want to thank all the participants, who filled the event with life!

In conclusion I want to mention a few lessons learned: we need to have registrations much earlier, and have to make it clear that registrations are not definite until confirmed. We need to know how many people are coming before we decide on a venue, next time. The fact that we had to close registration early and even had to tell some people to stay home was really really sad. It really shouldn’t happen again.

Another point is that a schedule of prepared presentations might have helped giving an overview of topics and people. On the other hand, the flexible OpenSpace approach worked nicely to bundle topics and get people to sit down and talk. Perhaps next time we will do it like this: have a schedule of presentations ready for the first day, and leave the second day for more spontaneous discussions and demos. That way, we keep the creative chaos alive.

Indeed, next time… I’m sure that there will be a next time, hopefully next year already. Until then, we have Wikimania!

Pictures: Raymond

We have been completely overrun by registrations for the developer meet-up in Berlin. That’s exhilarating, but forces on me the sad duty to tell you: we are out of room, we are closing registration early.

So: if you have not yet send a registration mail, you will not be able to attend! Sorry. We may even have to reject some registrations we have already received.

There’s some good news too, though: anyone interested my join us at the c-base for the party on saturday April 4., starting 8pm. The developers will be there and people from the chapter and board meeting will also come. This will be a good opportunity for getting to know Wikimedians from all over the world.