Google Summer of Code/2008

Mentors needed
The last couple of years we’ve had limited success with the SoC, in part because we’ve been so shorthanded on mentors that we can’t support more than one or two students. I’m looking for a few MediaWiki hackers who’d like to help out this time around…

You’ll need to be reasonably available by e-mail and IRC, and able to help answer the student’s questions and review their progress.

Part of the fun of Summer of Code projects is that we can get somebody excited and involved by working on something that’s big enough that it hasn’t got done yet, but small enough that they can make real progress and hopefully get something in production over the course of a couple months.

The real important part is making sure they feel welcome, and are excited about continuing their involvement in MediaWiki development after they’re done… so let’s make everybody feel at home!

Mentor signup

 * brion 21:55, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Catrope 22:04, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Turnstep 00:18, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Mdale 19:14, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
 * GregWilson 16:35, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
 * MasterChes, from the haitian Creole Wikipedia (ht:user:masterches)
 * Bryan if necessary 09:13, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
 * this could be you!

Projects!

 * Category renaming
 * The WikiStats project (built by Jon Pipitone, co-supervised by GregWilson and Michael Terry) has built a statistical query plugin for MediaWiki. We'd like to replace the charting engine with Flare, firm up the sanitization of queries, and generally extend it so that anyone who wants to can easily embed statistical query/visualization capability in web pages.
 * improving video support:
 * metavid related stuff? improving mediaWiki media integration, scalability etc
 * check out oggPusher, would be good to have mediaWiki support it... so that users could directly transcode from high quality sources and can hide some of the complexity of transcodeing, save server side resources, avoid multiple-pass transcodes prevalent in online video, and have a path for simplifying configuration of "live" broadcasts in the future.
 * Develop a general transcoding infrastructure. Needs cooperation with sysadmins.
 * most voted not assigned bugs
 * 82 votes - Support collation by a certain locale (sorting order of characters)
 * 49 votes - Interwikies sort in phonetic, site defined order (w/ patch)
 * 39 votes - gallery of images uploaded by a user
 * 38 votes - Record "new" pages on User contributions
 * Commons wishlist. Especially multilingual categories (OmegaWiki?).
 * Wikibooks technical wishlist (less discussion more summary of the same stuff is here)
 * Add code highlighting for wikicode
 * Special pages improvements and standardization (6220, 10049, 12925, 12942, 12984, etc)
 * Gender switch in user preferences (13040)
 * Commons bugs (commons:Commons:Bugs)
 * Wikiversity:Technical needs
 * Federated WM Foundation project search: A way is needed to search across multiple WikiMedia Foundation wiki projects. It is inefficient and time consuming to search separately on the different domains. See also March, 2008 discussion about this on wikiversity-l Jtneill 02:56, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Conversions to mediawiki syntax:
 * Bulk convert html files to MW syntax text: OO Writer can do this one file at a time. A script or macro is needed to bulk convert html files. -- Jtneill - Talk 03:11, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Message about this idea posted to the OO Writer forum
 * Convert .odp (slide presentation) files to mediawiki syntax. For an example of manual steps involved, which need to be automated/replicated, see Wikiversity:User:Jtneill. -- Jtneill - Talk 11:04, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Wysiwyg editor like http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TracWysiwygPlugin.
 * Mediawiki research support (Christian Wong).
 * With this project, I will introduce some features to make MediaWiki more research-friendly. These include Latex-2-Wiki and Bibtex-2-Wiki converters in order to import research papers and others latex documents into MW, but also improvements for exporting a Wiki-page into Latex files.
 * See the Synopsis, Project, Profit for Wikimedia, Success Criteria, Roadmap and Biography here:
 * Extend the wiki series with a new concept: Multimedia Wiki. It would be very nice to join the idea of getting the information from actual text and also multimedia content(movies, photo galleries, audio files). Many people would enjoy this way of improving their knowledge. Browsing an article should include visualizing video content, listening to audio samples(if necessary) and also watching photo galleries. Also all these things must be editable by any registered user.
 * Add support for open 3D vector file formats and 3D viewer. Obvious application - chemistry molecular structures.
 * Write a PNG resizer that does not need to load the entire file in memory and as such can be used to resize large files.

Old stuff

 * Summer of Code 2006 and 2007 notes.