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.”
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  "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

On May 24th and 25th, the Wikimedia Foundation hosted a CiviCRM coding sprint in our San Francisco office. CiviCRM is the premier open source constituent relationship manager; WMF uses it to store donor and contribution information. Our CiviCRM database contains more than a million contact records and a million contribution records.

CiviCRM, The Free and Open Source Solution for the Civic Sector

The sprint was a terrific success. The eight participants squashed many CiviCRM bugs — and the Foundation directly benefited, as they improved CiviCRM contact/contribution search performance by 15 to 25 times! Formerly, it could take more than two minutes for someone to search among the contribution records. The developers’ tweaks, hacks and patches whittled that down to about 4-6 seconds per search. This will save innumerable hours for WMF administrators and fundraisers.

The Foundation’s Arthur Richards, a fundraising engineer, enthused: “Any software tool, open source or not, comes with headaches; the beauty of tools like CiviCRM is that we can solve our own problems. Thanks to having some great hackers in one place, we managed to mitigate one of our biggest CiviCRM pain points in a matter of hours.”

You can read more details about the sprint on Donald Lobo’s CiviCRM blog.

Richards was especially excited to “highlight how awesome it is working with other open source projects and using other open source tools. We get to scratch each other’s backs, which helps support a sustainable, healthy ecosystem of software/communities. Also, using open source tools like CiviCRM – while not without their (often big) pain points – is great because we can fix the software ourselves. While the tools are free to use, with a little bit of elbow grease and some resources, they can be molded and fixed to meet our needs much easier (and likely much cheaper) than relying on proprietary tools. Plus, the CiviCRM community has been instrumental in helping us troubleshoot, solve problems and add new features to meet our usage requirements.”

The CiviCRM community is planning to run another code sprint in the fall in Northern California; please contact them if you’d like to participate or even host it. In the meantime, Wikimedia and thousands of other nonprofits will enjoy the CiviCRM improvements developed in May.

-Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

While GLAMCamp NYC finished on Sunday (Signpost coverage), the work initiated there will continue throughout the GLAM community.  Representatives from cultural institutions and Wikimedia chapters, as well as individuals, are working on several projects.  The projects concerning web badges for free culture allies, a metadata standard for use in the mass uploader/data ingestion tool, and the web analytics proposal are in particular seeking contributors and project managers; please comment at the coordination page to signal your interest.

Also available: the collaborative notes from Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and specifically for discussion of the Ambassadors program, the Point Of Entry project, the data ingestion tool, and the metrics/analytics proposal.

Thanks to the organizers and participants for a productive and illuminating weekend.

-Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

Today, several Wikimedians and representatives from galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM institutions) met in New York City to kick off GLAMCampNYC.  New York City’s public Science, Industry, and Business Library is hosting the event.

Liam Wyatt, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Cultural Partnerships Fellow (aka GLAM fellow), introduced two keynoters: Meg Bellinger, discussing open access at Yale, and Maarten Zeinstra, presenting the Europeana public domain calculator.  The conference continues through Sunday.  Participants are discussing and building the GLAM outreach wiki, writing documentation, sharing best practices, and building tools.

Developers at GLAMCamp are developing a data-munging tool, based on pywikipediabot, to aid in mass uploads (more details).  According to Wyatt, the most common requests from GLAM institutions are (1) mass upload of audiovisual media and (2) metrics, “easily exportable statistics based on analytics on a GLAM’s relationship with Wikimedia.”  The data-munging or data ingestion tool will aid in the import of metadata from large sets of files, thus speeding the difficult part of mass uploads.  Attendees will be hacking on it in sprints this weekend, starting 3pm-4:30pm UTC time tomorrow, Saturday the 21st. Join them in person (11am local time), or in #glamwiki on Freenode.

See notes from today’s general talks and discussion and from the discussion of the GLAM Ambassadors program, or follow #glamwiki and #glamcamp on Twitter and Identi.ca.

-Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

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

Today the Ada Initiative announced the appointment of Sue Gardner, ED of the Wikimedia Foundation, to its first advisory board. The Ada Initiative launched just a few weeks ago, and has the aim of promoting the visibility and participation of women in open-source culture. The group, founded by Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner, will undertake unique research in the field of women in open-source culture, provide consultative services to organizations and businesses, and develop training and education services.

The Initiative‘s namesake, Countess Ada Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), was considered one of the world’s first computer programmers, and was almost certainly the first woman in computer programming. She collaborated with Charles Babbage, the creator of one of the first mechanical computers, the analytical engine, writing what is generally considered the first code instructions for a computer.

From Wikipedia,

She was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron (with Anne Isabella Milbanke), but had no relationship with her father, who died when she was nine. As a young adult she took an interest in mathematics, and in particular Babbage’s work on the analytical engine. Between 1842 and 1843 she translated an article by Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea on the engine, which she supplemented with a set of notes of her own. These notes contain what is considered the first computer program—that is, an algorithm encoded for processing by a machine. Though Babbage’s engine was never built, Lovelace’s notes are important in the early history of computers. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities. [1]

Wikipedia has been in the news recently following a New York Times story highlighting the lack of women participating in the project, based on researched gathered by the United Nations University Study.  Interest in the topic has brought new thinkers to the Wikimedia community, which also recently resulted in the creation of a Wikimedia gender gap mailing list, which is open to the public.

Congratulations, Sue, and good luck to everyone involved in the Ada Initiative!

Jay Walsh, Communications

[1] Ada Lovelace. (2011, February 24). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:03, February 24, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ada_Lovelace&oldid=415671634

Folks over at Microsoft Research have been thinking about ways to improve content translation between instances of Wikipedia.  For example, today the largest collection of articles is at English Wikipedia (more than 3,000,000).  Compare that number with the collection at Hindi Wikipedia (which as of July 31 of this year had 55716).  One proven way to increase the articles in Hindi is machine translation, but such translations still need human review and often subtle editing to make them elegantly readable.

Enter WikiBhasha, formerly known as WikiBABEL, which launches today as both a MediaWiki extension project and a bookmarklet.  WikiBhasha takes content from a targeted Wikipedia page and displays a machine translation to a second language side-by-side.  Users can edit, add to or delete the translated content, preview their work and then submit it to the second language Wikipedia.

What’s especially interesting to me about this project is the fact that its author, researcher A. Kumaran, has tirelessly persuaded Microsoft to allow him to open source the client.  The code has been checked into the MediaWiki code tree under the Apache License 2.0, which means that the powerful side-by-side editing tools developed by Mr. Kumaran can potentially be used in other MediaWiki projects.  I’m very pleased to see Microsoft take this step, and I hope you will join me in welcoming WikiBhasha.

Danese Cooper, Chief Technical Officer

Universal Subtitles synchronisation interface gives subtitle authors fine grained control over subtitle timing.

For the past 6 months the Participatory Culture Foundation has been hard at work on their latest open web video mission to make captioning, subtitling, and translating video publicly accessible in a way that’s free and open. Part of the Mozilla Drum Beat campaign for a better web, Universal Subtitles is a tool and platform to help bring an open solution to subtitling web video. Commons has supported timed text via the mwEmbed gadget for some time, but up until today it has been very difficult to create the initial subtitle track. I have been watching the development of the universal subtitles efforts, and while at the subtitle summit and open video conference we were finally able to hack on bringing the Universal Subtitles widget to Wikimedia Commons.

Today, I am happy to share our first pass at integrating our open subtitle efforts. Please keep in mind this integration is still very early on in development, but the basic milestone of being able to use the tool on commons to create and sync up subtitle tracks is an important first step. Even without helpful tools in place, the Wikimedia community has been creating subtitles and translations. We hope this new subtitle edit tools will broaden the number of participants and enable the Wikimedia community to set a new standard for high quality multilingual accessibility in online video content.

If you have a moment, feel free to check out the widget and provide some feedback. If you are looking for a video to subtitle, check out the recently created needs subtitling category.

Michael Dale, Open Source Video Collaboration Technology

As Wikimedia and the community embark on campaigns and programs to increase video contribution and usage on the site, we are starting to see video usage on Wikimedia sites grow and we hope for it to grow a great deal more. One potential problem with increased video usage on the Wikimedia sites is that video is many times more costly to distribute than text and images that make up Wikipedia articles today. Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs. For this reason it is important to start exploring and experimenting with future content distribution platforms and partnerships.

The P2P-Next consortium is an EU-funded project exploring the future of Internet video distribution. Their aims are to dramatically reduce the costs of video distribution through community CDNs and P2P technology. They recently presented at Gdansk Wikimania 2010, and today I am happy to invite the Wikimedia community to try out their latest experimental efforts to greatly reduce video distribution costs. Swarmplayer V2.0 is being released today for Firefox (an Internet Explorer plugin is in testing). The Swamplayer enables visitors to easily share their upload bandwidth to help distribute video. The add-on works with the Kaltura HTML5 library ( aka mwEmbed ) and url2torrent.net, to enable visitors to help offset distribute costs of any Ogg Theora video embed in any web page.

Swarmplayer next design overview, learn more on swarmplayer.p2p-next.org

We have enabled this for Wikimedia video via the multimedia beta. Once you installed the add-on any video you view on Wikimedia sites with the multimedia beta enabled will be transparently streamed via bittorrent. The add-on includes simple tools to configure how much bandwidth you use to upload. Even if you upload nothing, using the add-on helps distribute load by playing the video from the P2P network and the local cache on subsequent views. The Swarmplayer has clever performance tuning which downloads high priority pieces over http while getting low priority bits of the video from the bittorrent swarm. This ensures a smooth playback experience while maximizing use of the P2P network. You can learn more about the technology on the Swam player add-on site

The P2P Next Team from Delft University of Technology will be presenting the P2P-Next project at the Open Video Conference on October 2nd.

Michael Dale, Open Source Video Collaboration Technology