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

Reposting the announce from Roan’s wikitech-l mailing list post:

Yesterday, the selection of GSoC projects was officially announced. For MediaWiki, the following projects have been accepted:

• Niklas Laxström (Nikerabbit), mentored by Siebrand, will be working on improving localization and internationalization in MediaWiki, as well as improving the Translate extension used on translatewiki.net
• Zhe Wu, mentored by Aryeh Gregor (Simetrical), will be building a thumbnailing daemon, so image manipulation won’t have to happen on the Apache servers any more
• Jeroen de Dauw, mentored by Yaron Koren, will be improving the Semantic Layers extension and merging it into the Semantic Google Maps extension
• Gerardo Antonio Cabero, mentored by Michael Dale (mdale), will be improving the Cortado applet for video playback (I’m a bit fuzzy on the details for this one)

The official list with links to (parts of) the proposals can be found at the Google website; lists for other organizations can be reached through the list of participating organizations.

The next event on the GSoC timeline is the community bonding period, during which the students are supposed to get to know their mentors and the community. This period lasts until May 23rd, when the students actually begin coding.

Starting now and continuing at least until the end of GSoC in August, you will probably see and hear from the students on IRC and the mailing lists and hear about the projects they’re working on. To repeat the crux of an earlier thread on this list: be nice to these special newcomers, make them feel welcome and comfortable, and try not to bite them :)

To the mentors and students: have fun!

Roan Kattouw (Catrope)