The current round of Google Summer of Code and FLOSS Outreach Program for Women is about to end, and it’s time to start a new cycle of mentored projects in Wikimedia tech.

Check and contribute to the list of Possible Projects on mediawiki.org if you are:

• editors on a Wikimedia project awaiting a specific software feature;
• an organization with budget for tech activities looking for a short term goal;
• a tech contributor with a cool idea for Wikimedia projects or MediaWiki in general.

Even if software development is a prominent activity, we also encourage proposals focusing on other technical areas: quality assurance, design, sysadmin, promotion, etc.

Post your proposal soon, edit it often. By submitting a proposal to the Possible Projects page you get attention and help from the tech community in the form of reality checks and contacts with possible mentors, interested projects and funding sources. 21 projects were selected in our last round.

We keep searching for more opportunities to channel these projects, both within the Wikimedia movement (Individual Engagement Grants, chapters…) and out there (organizations encouraging free software and diversity in tech).

We want to hear your feedback! Use the Possible Projects discussion page or comment below.

Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator (IT Communications Manager), Wikimedia Foundation

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2013 is well underway on the coding phase. Four projects this year are related to various aspects of MediaWiki and Wikimedia internationalization initiatives. On completion of these 4 projects, we expect to present:

• an Android app for MediaWiki translation,
• browser extensions for the input methods in jQuery.ime (Project Milkshake),
• Right-to-Left language support in the VisualEditor, and
• a dashboard for Wikimedia language projects

These projects are being mentored by members of the Wikimedia Language Engineering team along with members from the WMF Mobile and VisualEditor teams. In this post, we touch base with each of the projects about the challenges that they have faced so far and on their accomplishments.

MediaWiki VisualEditor internationalization and right-to-left languages support

Moriel Schottlender is working on adding better support for non-English languages to the VisualEditor. Her project consists of two main parts. The first is triaging and fixing bugs in handling right-to-left text reported by volunteer editors who test the currently deployed version of the editor in languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. She has already fixed several bugs such as moving the cursor in the correct direction using the arrow keys and adapting the design of VisualEditor’s dialog boxes to right-to-left layout. The other part of the project is developing a “language inspector”–a tool for setting the language of a piece of text in an article. This is needed very frequently in Wikipedias in all languages to set properties such as font, size or direction of a foreign name or quotation. Nowadays it is done using a multitude of templates and HTML tags, and Moriel’s project will make it easy and unified.

jQuery.IME extensions for Firefox and Chrome

Part of Project Milkshake, jQuery.ime is an input method library. Making a good start, Praveen Singh has already implemented working jQuery.ime extensions for both Chrome and Firefox. Rather than loading all input methods at once, input method scripts are loaded only when the user selects a particular input method. The jQuery.ime and jQuery.uls upstream projects were added as git submodules in the extensions. This will provide a way to synchronize the extensions with the upstream projects in the future by simply updating the respective submodule. Universal Language Selector (ULS) has been successfully integrated in the extensions, thus providing the users with an easy way to choose among different languages. The extension remembers a user’s most recently selected languages and their corresponding input methods, and offers an easy way to choose among those languages.

Language Coverage Matrix Dashboard

The Language Coverage Matrix dashboard was a project conceived during the last Open Source Language Summit held in Pune, India earlier this year. The project began as a shared spreadsheet and over the next few months, the data was filtered to uniquely identify the internationalization support status for each language and its variants. The dashboard will provide an interface to search this data and present visual data representations. The test instance set up by Harsh Kothari on wmflabs, showcases the search features. The spreadsheet data has been ported to a MySQL database. Plans for the coming few weeks include additional query implementation, code refactoring and start of the visualization representations.

Phone app for MediaWiki translation

The Translate extension is used for translating MediaWiki content. This project will bring the convenience of this widely used extension as an Android app. The iPhone app created by the student Or Sagi, is already available for download and testing. The similarly designed Android app will provide features for translation and proofreading. Due to conflicts with examination schedules, major work on this project will effectively start from late July.

Getting more updates

More details about the progress of each of these projects can be found on the project home pages. The students and mentors also meet up every week for demos. Please let them know if you’d like to be part of any of these sessions.

Runa Bhattacharjee
Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation

In the recently concluded development sprint, the Wikimedia Language Engineering team fixed critical bugs for the Universal Language Selector, participated in several events around the world and also announced the release of the latest version of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle.

MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle and Updates to ULS

As the date for the first phase of deployment of Universal Language Selector (ULS) draws close, the team has been fixing critical bugs and testing the fixes. These included bugs related to the behavior of the ULS activation ‘cog’ icon. Significant design changes were also made on the input settings panel. Additionally, ULS has been hidden for users who do not use JavaScript on their browsers.

These updates are also part of the latest version of MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB). Besides ULS, miscellaneous maintenance bugs were fixed for the Translate extension editor. This further improves the stability of the Translation Editor – TUX. CLDR has been updated to version 23.1.

Amsterdam and Tel-Aviv Hackathons and Community Programs

Members of the Language Engineering team participated and also helped in organizing hackathons at Amsterdam and Tel Aviv. At the hackathon in Amsterdam, organized by Wikimedia Nederland, team members interacted with their peers. Besides attending the workshops, they also submitted and merged patches for various internationalization extensions. A session for automated browser testing with the Wikimedia QA team was particularly well-received in view of the upcoming ULS deployment.

At the hackathon organized by Wikimedia Israel, Amir Aharoni led the event and brought together more than thirty local participants to explore various aspects of contributing to MediaWiki projects. The full report of the accomplishments from the event has been documented by him.

Alolita Sharma presented a talk about Internationalization in Wikimedia projects at IMUG. The entire video of the talk and presentation slides are available online.

Google Summer of Code

The Language Engineering team also welcomed the 4 students who will be participating in Wikimedia’s Internationalization projects for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC). They will be contributing to the jQuery.ime project, Language Coverage dashboard, mobile app for Translate and right-to-left support on VisualEditor.

Coming up

Preparations for deployment of ULS and extending support to the GSoC candidates during the community bonding period are important focus areas during the next 2 weeks.

For information about the Language Engineering team and our projects, please write me at runa at wikimedia dot org or find team members on our IRC channel #mediawiki-i18n on Freenode.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

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

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

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)

This year, the MediaWiki community again participated in Google Summer of Code, in which we selected nine students to work on new features or specific improvements to the software. They were sponsored by Google and mentored by experienced developers, who helped them become part of the development community and guided their code development.

Congratulations to the eight students who have made it through the summer of 2012 (our seventh year participating in GSoC)! They all accomplished a great deal, and many of them are working to improve their projects to benefit the Wikimedia community even more.

• Ankur Anand worked on integrating Flickr upload and geolocation into UploadWizard. WMF engineer Ryan Kaldari mentored Ankur as they made it easier for Wikimedia contributors to contribute media files and metadata. Read his wrapup and anticipate the merge of his code into the main UploadWizard codebase.
• Harry Burt worked on TranslateSvg (“Bringing the translation revolution to Wikimedia Commons”). When his work is complete and deployed, we will more easily able to use a single picture or animation in different language wikis. See this image of the anatomy of a human kidney, for example; it has a description in eight languages, so it benefits multiple language Wikipedias (e.g., Spanish and Russian). Harry aims to allow contributors to localize the text embedded within vector files (SVGs), and you can watch a demo video, try out the test site, or just read Harry’s wrapup post. WMF engineer Max Semenik mentored this project.
• Akshay Chugh worked 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 created the beta of an extension that a webmaster could install to provide conference-related features automatically. See his wrapup post.
• 

  Ashish is working on the architecture that will support real-time collaboration.

  Ashish Dubey worked 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) has implemented a collaboration server and other features (see his wrapup post) and has achieved real-time “spectation,” in which readers can see an editor’s changes in realtime. Wikimedia Foundation engineers plan to integrate Ashish’s work into VisualEditor around April to June 2013.

• Nischay Nahata optimized the performance of the Semantic MediaWiki extension. In wikis with unusually large amounts of content, Semantic MediaWiki experiences performance degradation. With the mentorship of head Semantic MediaWiki developer Markus Krötzsch (a volunteer) and Wikidata developer Jeroen De Dauw, Nischay found and fixed many of these issues.  This also reduces SMW’s energy consumption, making it greener. Nischay’s work will be in Semantic MediaWiki 1.8.0, which is currently in beta and due to be released soon. Wikimedia Labs uses Semantic MediaWiki and will benefit from the performance improvements.
• 

  Arun Ganesh illustrated the watchlist redesign proposal with this mockup.

  Aaron Pramana worked on watchlist grouping and workflow improvements. Aaron wants 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 worked with volunteer developer Alex Emsenhuber. The back end of the system is done, but Aaron wants your input about the user interface. Folks on the English Wikipedia’s Village Pump have started discussing it.

• Robin Pepermans worked on Incubator improvements and language support, mentored by WMF engineer Niklas Laxström. If you’ve ever thought of using Wikimedia’s Incubator for new projects, it’s now easier to get started. Read Robin’s wrapup post for more.
• Platonides worked on a desktop application for mass-uploading files to Wikimedia Commons. The application will eventually 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 mentored Platonides, who delivered a beta version.

As further progress happens, we’ll update our page about past GSoC students. Congratulations again to the students and their mentors. And thanks to volunteer Greg Varnum, who helped me administer this year’s GSoC, and to all the staffers and volunteers who helped students learn our ways.

Sumana Harihareswara, Engineering Community 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:

• 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

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.

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

Earlier this month, about thirty MediaWiki developers and interested technologists gathered in New Orleans to learn and to work on Wikimedia’s technical infrastructure.  We made broad progress on the infrastructure of innovation at Wikimedia (notes).  Specifically:

• We are now much closer to officially opening the doors to Wikimedia Labs and giving far more people the ability to contribute to MediaWiki without having to set up and maintain their own development environments at home.  Wikimedia Labs will provide hosted, virtualized test and development sandboxes for new and experienced programmers and systems administrators.  Many developers got beta Labs accounts, we tested at a larger scale, and we fixed several bugs.
• Developers agreed to create a file backend abstraction layer to enable large-scale MediaWiki installations to use one of several storage systems to contain big collections of big media files.  (Wikimedia plans on using Swift, which is open source.) Microsoft’s Ben Lobaugh and SAIC’s DJ Bauch collaborated towards improving MediaWiki’s performance on Microsoft technologies as well.  Developers made architectural decisions, refactored some existing code, and improved documentation and tests for the SwiftMedia extension to MediaWiki.
• 

  Chad Horohoe teaching developers unit testing

  We now have a continuous integration server up and running.  This will continuously run tests checking on the latest new features and bugfixes that developers write, resulting in fewer bugs and faster development. Developers will need to write tests to reap the benefits, so Chad Horohoe taught a test-writing workshop.

• Max Semenik finished and demonstrated the first version of his API Query Sandbox.  This allows software developers anywhere to experiment with ways to automatically get data from Wikipedia or other sites that run MediaWiki, thus enabling wider and deeper reuse of Wikimedia content.
• Operations folks continued the Puppetization of our infrastructure: they completely reworked Varnish management in Puppet, and worked on Puppet configurations for SwiftMedia testing. This configuration management work will ensure that ops can move faster and more confidently in building and maintaining Wikimedia infrastructure. And Canonical’s Mark Mims and Kapil Thangavelu worked on improving methods for Wikimedia developers “to spin up stacks of services within the labs environment” using Juju (more details).
• 

  Brion Vibber leading developers into the "glorious Git future"

  Since the engineering department is planning a switch from Subversion to Git in the next few months, Brion taught nearly everyone there how Git works (slides, audio), and how we’ll be using Git in the future. This change in our source code repository and workflow will, we hope, enable more speed and flexibility in development, both for WMF developers and community contributors.
• We prioritized and addressed several open requests for the operations team and defect reports about the latest version of MediaWiki, 1.18, which had just been deployed across WMF sites.
• Roan found and fixed an issue that was spouting symbolic link errors into our Apache logs, so now it’ll be easier for us to see more dangerous errors in those logs.
• Google Summer of Code students Salvatore Ingala and Kevin Brown made progress on integrating their summers’ work into MediaWiki as used and deployed by others; Salvatore and WMF developer Roan Kattouw have a plan for getting his user scripts improvements reviewed and deployed, so they can benefit Wikimedia readers and editors.
• A volunteer came in on Friday night knowing nothing about developing for MediaWiki, and by the end of the weekend had a working development environment on her laptop and had some ideas about how to contribute.
• We had substantive conversations about the summer internship program and about third-party collaboration that will affect how we work in the future.

We also ate dinner together, walked Bourbon Street, and generally got to know colleagues we’d never met before.  I expect these relationships will bear fruit for years to come.

Thanks to Ryan Lane and Dana Isokawa for organizing the event with me, and thanks to Launch Pad New Orleans for providing the venue!

Our next developers’ event is a hackathon in Mumbai November 18-20 concentrating on internationalization, localization, and mobile work.  To find out about other upcoming Wikimedia technical events, check the meetings wiki page, and follow @MediaWikiMeet on Identi.ca or Twitter.

Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation

Congratulations to the seven Google Summer of Code students who made it through the summer of 2011! They all accomplished a great deal, but want to continue contributing to ensure their work maximally benefits Wikimedia.

Yuvi Panda‘s assessment parsing/aggregating extension aims “to make it easier to select and export article selections for various offline collections.” Yuvi needs some code review and suggestions on how to improve it to meet the Foundation’s quality standards for deployability, as he wrote the developers’ mailing list.

Salvatore Ingala worked on making gadgets customizable. As he elaborated, that means:

• “allowing gadgets to easily declare the list of configuration
  variables they have;
• allowing users to easily change those settings, with an easy-to-use
  UI integrated to the Special:Preferences page.”

The next step is merging his code into trunk, which Salvatore’s planning with other MediaWiki developers.

Kevin Brown created the ArchiveLinks project to address the problem of linkrot on Wikipedia:

In articles we often cite or link to external URLs, but anything could happen to content on other sites — if they move, change, or simply vanish, the value of the citation is lost. ArchiveLinks rewrites external links in Wikipedia articles, so there is a ‘[cached]‘ link immediately afterwards which points to the web archiving service of your choice. This can even preserve the exact time that the link was added, so for sites which archive multiple versions of content (such as the Internet Archive) it will even link to a copy of the page that was made around the time the article was written.

Kevin’s next step: getting a security review of his code, getting a starter feed set up so that the Internet Archive can start archiving it, and campaigning to interest Wikimedians and thus eventually get consensus to turn it on. At least one Wikimedian has already praised Kevin for his work.

Akshay Agarwal wrote a MediaWiki extension, SignupAPI, that makes it easier for a new user to create an account. “This extension creates a special page that cleans up SpecialUserLogin from signup related stuff, adds an API for signup, adds sourcetracking for account creation & provides Ajax-ified validation for signup form.” Akshay’s waiting for code review and discussion before the project can move forward further and benefit Wikimedia users.

Yuvi, Salvatore, Kevin, and Akshay all worked on features that they aim to get into Wikimedia Foundation-run wikis, such as Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikinews, etc., sooner rather than later. In contrast, three students worked on extensions that will primarily benefit the larger MediaWiki community. For example, Yevhenii Vlasenko‘s project was a “UserStatus” feature for SocialProfile. The SocialProfile extension is not currently deployed on any WMF wikis, but will benefit several other MediaWiki administrators and users. Zhenya finished his work but would like to continue by integrating better with social networks.

And two students worked on Semantic MediaWiki, which is also not currently deployed on any Wikimedia Foundation sites. Devayon Das made a “QueryCreator” and other improvements, and hopes to simplify its layout, make its interface easier to use, and add some features. And Ankit Garg worked on “Semantic Schemas”.

Congratulations to the students and their mentors.  Here’s hoping they’re all here to help out when next year’s interns roll in! :-)  And I’m looking forward to meeting Kevin and Salvatore, and introducing them to other Wikimedia & MediaWiki developers, at the New Orleans developers’ meetup next month.

Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation