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

OPW’s robocats happy to work on their first contributions.

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

We are still learning how to attract newcomers.

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)

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

Google Summer of Code 2012

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.

MediaWiki is the Wikimedia Foundation's key open source project, powering Wikipedia and our other sites.

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

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