Google Summer of Code/Past projects

This page tries to keep up with the current status of all past Summer of Code projects. For some quantitative analysis, see User:MaxSem/GSoC analysis.

Archival for Web References/Citations
Facilitate the archival of external links used as references in the English Wikipedia, to prevent "link rot" for pages that go offline. This was implemented as the ArchiveLinks extension


 * Student: Kevin Brown
 * Mentor: Neil Kandalgaonkar
 * Status: ArchiveLinks is currently at "experimental" status. We have a working interface, and a protocol for feeding new links to partners like the Internet Archive. Next step: create a feed based on a real wiki (likely on a system like Toolserver) so a demo can go up and Wikimedia communities can see how it would work in action. Kevin is working on this.

Customization of Gadgets
Original name: "AMICUS: Awesome Monolithic Infrastructure for Customization of User Scripts". Allow gadgets, defined within the Gadgets extension, to be made customizable per wiki using settings variables.


 * Student: Salvatore Ingala
 * Mentors: Brion Vibber and Max Semenik
 * Status: Code is currently in a separate branch, and awaiting merge into the Gadgets extension. Roan Kattouw is working on merging this code as part of his ResourceLoader 2 work. See here for more information.

Extension Release Management
Implement an extension management platform for MediaWiki, based on the first half of the 2010 GSoC project "Extension management platform", i.e. the Distribution extension.


 * Student: Aigerim Karabekova
 * Mentors: Sam Reed, Priyanka Dhanda, and Chad Horohoe
 * Outcome: Cancelled due to student's personal problems, including health issues.

Improving Semantic MediaWiki search
Original title: “Improving Semantic Search/Semantic Query usability issues in SMW”. Project to make the "Special:Ask" page in Semantic MediaWiki more user-friendly.


 * Student: Devayon Das
 * Mentor: Markus Krötzsch
 * Status: Code has been created and added to Semantic MediaWiki as an optional feature that users can enable by a suitable configuration setting. The code runs and can be used to solve tasks. But there are remaining issues that need to be addressed to make this feature the standard implementation.

Offline article selection
Original title: "Making Offline Wikipedia Article Selection Easier with MediaWiki Extensions". Create an extension to allow export of Wikipedia articles into offline collections, meant to replace the WP 1.0 bot.


 * Student: Yuvi Panda
 * Mentor: Arthur Richards
 * Status: Extension was temporarily named the "GPoC" extension (for "GSoC Proof of Concept"), then renamed "SelectionSifter" in December 2011. (See code here.) Yuvi Panda is improving the code to get it to a deployable state. Also, he has now become a contractor for the Wikimedia Foundation & is currently working on developing the Android app for MediaWiki.

Page Schemas
Original title: "Semantic Schemas extension". Project to create the Page Schemas extension, to define data structure for wiki pages, mostly meant to be used with the Semantic MediaWiki extension.


 * Student: Ankit Garg
 * Mentor: Yaron Koren
 * Status: A preliminary version of the extension was created successfully. Page Schemas was later modified significantly by Yaron, and is currently at beta status.

Signup API
Original name: "Account Creation, Login Screens and AJAX-ification of everything". Implement the Account creation proposal, which would allow for Ajax-based login. This was implemented as the SignupAPI extension.


 * Student: Akshay Agarwal
 * Mentor: Brandon Harris
 * Status: The SignupAPI extension is currently at "experimental" status. Some of Akshay Agarwal's commits have received code critique and await improvement.  Akshay is responding to those critiques and working towards the goal of deploying the extension on WMF wikis.

SocialProfile extension – UserStatus feature
Add the ability for users to set their current status, and track each other's statuses, in the SocialProfile extension.


 * Student: Zhenya Vlasyenko
 * Mentor: Jack Phoenix
 * Outcome: Feature was added successfully. See here for more information.

2010
For the official list with links to the proposals, go here.

Extension management platform
"Creating an awesome extension management platform for MediaWiki, facilitating the installation, updating, removal and configuration of extensions."

See Deployment for overview - project resulted in two new extensions, Distribution and Deployment.


 * Student: Jeroen De Dauw
 * Mentor: Brion Vibber
 * Outcome: Extensions took longer than expected, and remained uncompleted at the end of the term. The WMF decided not to fund additional development on these extensions due to concerns about the security of the overall system.

Improve metadata support
Improve metadata support for uploaded media in MediaWiki by displaying embedded IPTC and XMP metadata.


 * Student: Brian Wolff
 * Mentor: Chad Horohoe
 * Outcome: Code was initially added to the img_metadata branch, and then merged into trunk in r86169, which became part of MediaWiki 1.18. Brian has continued to work actively on MediaWiki and is a core committer.

Interwiki template transclusion
The aim is to allow MediaWiki users to insert (transclude) templates from one wiki to another on Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) wikis (Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, etc.). (See feature proposal.)


 * Student: Peter Potrowl
 * Mentor: Roan Kattouw
 * Status as of 2012: Code was initially added to the iwtransclusion branch, and a prototype was created. Branch was merged into trunk in r95396 and then demerged. There was a plan by Sam Reed to re-merge the code into trunk in March 2012, but this was abandoned in April 2012.

Javascript overhaul of Semantic MediaWiki
"Improve and extend the Javascript for Semantic MediaWiki and some of its spinoff extensions, most notably Semantic Forms - this would include transferring over much of the Javascript to use the jQuery library, which is now becoming a MediaWiki standard."


 * Student: Sanyam Goyal
 * Mentor: Yaron Koren
 * Outcome: Work was completed as specified, and five extensions (Semantic MediaWiki, Semantic Forms, Semantic Forms Inputs, Semantic Drilldown, Semantic Result Formats) had their Javascript improved, and modified to use jQuery where appropriate.

RDFIO
Project to create the RDFIO extension. (Original project name: "General RDF export/import in Semantic MediaWiki").


 * Student: Samuel Lampa
 * Mentor: Denny Vrandecic
 * Status as of 2012: The RDFIO extension was in active use for around a year, but stopped being maintained, and became incompatible with Semantic MediaWiki in 2011. It is currently at "unstable" status.

Wikisource Legal Tool
Create a tool to format judicial decisions, legal scholarship, and statutes for Wikisource.


 * Student: Stephen Laporte
 * Mentor: Ariel Glenn
 * Outcome: Formatted U.S. Supreme Court opinions are being imported to Wikisource by BenchBot. Stephen Laporte currently works for the Wikimedia Foundation as a lawyer.

2009
For the official list with links to the proposals, go here.

Maps and Semantic Maps
Project to create the Maps and Semantic Maps extensions (original project name: "Semantic Layers Extension").


 * Student: Jeroen De Dauw
 * Mentor: Yaron Koren
 * Outcome: Both extensions are in use on dozens of sites, and still under active development. Jeroen is still very active in the community, and is currently a contractor for the Wikimedia Foundation.

MwEmbed
"Doog - The New Cortado Applet" - improvements to MwEmbed.


 * Student: Gerardo Cabero
 * Mentor: Michael Dale
 * Outcome: Applet was not successfully implemented.

Translation
"Turning MediaWiki into an efficient localization platform" - improvements to the Translate extension.

See Nikerabbit's GSoC 2009 wrapup blog post.


 * Student: Niklas Laxström (Nikerabbit)
 * Mentor: Siebrand Mazeland
 * Outcome: In active use on TranslateWiki. Niklas Laxström was active in the community before and after this project, and currently works for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Image rendering daemon
Was written in Python and designed to handle asynchronous image rendering requests.
 * "This is a proposal to fix the MediaWiki bug #4854, implementing a daemon program to render and resize images uploaded by Wikipedia users. Separating the image manipulating work from the MediaWiki application will greatly alleviate application server's load, thus improve the overall performance. The API will be designed as general as possible to accommodate the needs of other applications that also render and resize images in large quantity."


 * Student: Zhe Wu
 * Mentor: Aryeh Gregor (Simetrical)
 * Notes: Proposal was very well written, programmer obviously knew what he was doing. Major issues:
 * Was being developed on another repository. Should have been in SVN with everything else.
 * Mentored by an accomplished developer, but someone who had little interest in the subject matter
 * While the proposal was very well written, it wasn't developed with Wikimedia operations in mind. Their wants/needs should've been solicited and probably consulted during the process as well.


 * Outcome: Final status email. Since it was developed off-site, it never really received much input. It appears that none of the code was ever looked at by anyone in operations for potential deployment on WMF.

WebDAV
"I am working on an extension which provides a WebDAV / DeltaV / Subversion interface to MediaWiki articles: WebDAV"

"The extension enables articles to be browsed and edited with WebDAV or Subversion clients. When complete, it will support editing articles offline, using for example the Subclipse Eclipse IDE plugin or Emacs VC mode."


 * Student: Jack Bates
 * Mentor: ?
 * Outcome: WebDAV extension exists, but appears to be unusable.

Visual Diff
Visual Diff - A system to provide more visually intuitive diffs, rather than lines added/removed.


 * Student: Guy Van den Broeck
 * Mentor: Brion Vibber
 * Notes: Brion was always busy, so Guy asked a lot of questions in #mediawiki.
 * Outcome: Had lots of outstanding issues - i18n, style, etc. Was a part of two releases, 1.14 and 1.15, in which it was disabled by default. Removed from trunk in r58267, and was not in 1.16 or subsequent releases.

Special mention should also be made of another MediaWiki-related project done in 2008, but by Creative Commons and not the Wikimedia Foundation: a project to add RDFa support to Semantic MediaWiki. David McCabe was the student and Nathan Kinkade was the mentor. The code created is no longer in use; there is now a separate RDFa extension being used.

Audio/video file recoding
The proposal: "Audio and video can instruct and inform in ways unattainable by words and still images. Currently, audio and video have only limited support and are often cumbersome to access in MediaWiki and the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. This project seeks to allow Wikimedia's sites to more effectively leverage the power of audio and video resources. To achieve this, a reliable and expandable system is proposed to automatically recode contributions from numerous digital a/v formats to a single, royalty and patent free compression standard. With the ability to generate such a library, Wikimedia would be poised to easily present a vast range of audio and video to their visitors using an in-browser streaming player."

Project blog: http://mikeswikidev.wordpress.com/


 * Student: Mike Baynton
 * Mentor: Brion Vibber
 * Outcome: Code appears to have been unused by the WMF.

LiquidThreads
"Add support for structured discussion pages. Option for discussion pages to be more like message boards with threads.  Current discussion format is less than ideal (can modify others' comments, cluttered editing window, etc).  This could also include support for embedding polls in discussion pages, voting on proposals, etc.  Basically, create a minimal message board system that is tailored for use in a wiki environment (see LiquidThreads [this is a link to the page as it existed then] for some ideas in that direction)."


 * Student: David McCabe
 * Mentor: Erik Möller (?)
 * Notes: This project created the LiquidThreads extension, which had previously been only a proposal written by Erik Möller and others. David was later temporarily re-hired by the WMF in 2008 to maintain and improve the extension. See also David's GSoC project blog.


 * Outcome: Andrew Garrett, working on contract from the Foundation, spent several months in 2010 overhauling LiquidThreads entirely; almost none of the old code was kept. A project to overhaul it again was begun in 2011. Still, this could be considered a successful project: it worked, and it developed some concrete ideas that were later expanded upon in the overhaul.

Video display
No-install, in-browser display of video (and audio?) clips for Wikimedia Commons, using reasonably common Java and/or Flash components. Needs to be able to 1) play or transparently pre-convert Ogg Theora videos, 2) avoid use of patent-encumbered formats. Consider integration of Fluendo's Cortado player applet as a starting point.

Brion's talk suggested that this project would also involve creating thumbnails for video clips.


 * Student: Michael Dale
 * Mentor: Brion Vibber
 * Outcome: Michael Dale went on to work on other MediaWiki video efforts (metavid, which eventually turned into mwEmbed and finally into TimedMediaHandler, which is in testing and review before WMF deployment). Tim Starling did the final integration of the Cortado applet and Ogg parsing as part of the OggHandler extension, which currently supports video functionality on Wikimedia Commons. Michael Dale came back to work with the Foundation in late 2008 on a few different projects with support from Kaltura, mentored a student in 2009, and is still active in developing Wikimedia technologies.