Catalogue for MediaWiki extensions

Catalogue for Mediawiki extensions
 Public URL:  https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:adi.iiita/Gsoc2014

 Bugzilla report: Bug 61974

 Announcement: 

Name and contact information
 Name: Aditya Chaturvedi  Email: aditya.iiita102@gmail.com IRC:  zeek on freenode, channels: #mediawiki and #wikimedia-dev
 * Web Page / Blog / Microblog / Portfolio:Mediawiki User Profile: Adi.iiita
 * My Blog: https://apexkid1.wordpress.com
 * Linkedin: Aditya

Location: Allahabad, India (UTC+05:30) Typical working hours:  11 am - 5 pm (IST) and 10 pm - 2 am (IST)

Synopsis
Extensions form a core component of mediawiki which allow it to be enhanced by addition of functionality. There are currently about 2000 extensions available on MediaWiki.org. However, for users of wiki, it is hard to identify and assess which extension fits a particular need. Moreover, for developers, there is no place to highlight their creations among the wiki users.

Currently, a third party site Wikiapiary.com maintains data on extensions in a structured manner and and is tracking MediaWiki use in the wild. The idea is to make this process more intuitive and ensure good browsing experience, by making enhancements to Wikiapiary to accommodate more information about extensions in a structured manner and integrate some form of user feedback system while also improving the overall user interface to enrich user experience. Along with this, the plan is that this extended information gained on WikiApiary will be syndicated back to MediaWiki.org. .

Possible mentors

 * Markus Glaser, Mark Hershberger

Different phases of the project
Phase I: This phase will be mainly targeted at integrating a user rating system for the extension catalog so that users may able to rate the extensions individually and independently.The overall rating of an extension shall be calculated based on multiple metrics such as user rating and count of wiki's using the extension.

Phase II: In this phase of the development, the aim is to feed the information gained on WikiApiary about extensions back to MediaWiki.org. This will include ratings and website count. This will involve creating a bot which will excess the API to extract information and perform updates. The bot will be placed in the cluster of Wikiapiary bots to run periodically.

Phase III: This part of development aims to enhance the presentation layer of WikiApiary to make it more intuitive and fun to browse around for users.

Phase IV: This phase shall be community driven and experimental to extend the amount of information stored about each extension on wikiapiary. Technically this will include increasing and modifying the attributes for extensions. Some new proposed attributes are: Category, Size, Release date, Screenshot image.