User:Peter17

Presentation
Hello! I am a 22-year-old French student from École centrale de Lille. Currently, I am carrying out an 8-month internship as a researcher in a nanotechnologies institute in Shanghai, China.

General interests
I have been contributing to Wikipedia since May 2005 and made ~12,000 edits on the French language Wikipedia. I also contribute on Commons and translateWiki (1000+ strings translated so far on this project and 4 .po files for the French-translation KDE team).

In my free time, I practice photography, genealogy, social actions and, of course, a lot of computer-related stuff (and only free software)! I also like traveling (in France and Europe) and living abroad (2 months in Texas, 8 months in China). I am interested in sciences, electronics and nanotechnologies.

Programming skills
I have been studying computer sciences for about 10 years and learned a lot of programming languages such as C, Caml, Java and Ruby. I have also begun programming in PHP in 2003 and Object-Oriented PHP in 2007 and I'm used to MySQL and SQLite databases (but not really to performance issues). The personal website I developed (lesitemai.free.fr, ~100 articles, 1600 photos) uses those technologies.

Last summer, I worked for 3 months as a software developer at the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company. For this task, was programming in Java EE in Eclipse.

Although I am fond of free software, I have never contributing at a big scale to a development project. I think it needs a lot of energy at the beginning to get to know the code and become part of a development team. That's why GSoC would be a great opportunity for me to start collaborating to this software.

Working info
Time zone: GMT+8 (China) until the end of June. Then, GMT+1 (France).

Typical working/geeking hours: 8:00 – 11:30 & 13:30 – 23:30

Projects summary for GSoC 2010
What I would most like to do is the 1st project in this list. I'm currently thinking about listing other projects I would like to carry out.

Project 1
This project is related to bug 1126, bug 4547 and bug 9890.

In short: the aim is to be able to include templates from another wiki on WMF wikis. This functionality has been requested since 2004 (!) and has already been added to MediaWiki but is *not* enabled on WMF wikis because of performance problems. Bug 9890 (opened in 2007) describes a solution to those problems, but it needs "a substantial amount of code" and someone doing it.

Interest
Right now, each wiki project of WMF is creating its own infoboxes to store the same kind of information (about cities, movies, molecules, animals...). This requires quite a lot of works, especially on small wikis with few contributors. Moreover, when an information has to be updated (let's say the population of a city, for instance), the change has to be made on every wiki, which is a big loss in terms of efficiency.

Activating cross-wiki template inclusion would allow to store infoboxes on Wikimedia Commons (as it is currently done for images) and include each of them in all the wikis that need them. If some data has to be updated, the change is to be made only once, which is far more efficient and guarantees that the data is up-to-date even on very small wikis. Of course, those templates would be translated in all those languages, as it is done for.

This could also be applied to a lot of data tables, such as this one, weather data, climate and population charts, license templates and a lot of other. A possible use for listing interwiki links has also be mentioned.

Deliverable
A source code validated by MediaWiki developers that would allow, after intensive testing, to close bugs 1126, 4547 and 9890.

Project 2
This would be about solving bug 1066: "Add cross-wiki talk page notification."

In short: currently, when someone edits your talk page on a wiki, then, when you browse this wiki, a text will be displayed to inform you that you got a new message (typically, it is an orange box on the top of the articles you browse, like: File:Newmessage.png). However, if someone edits your talk page on another wiki, you will not be warned if you don't browse that wiki (unless you have activated email notifications). This is about displaying the orange message in a cross-wiki way.

This bug has been open since 2004. As the bug report page suggests, solving this bug is more simple now, since SUL has been successfully deployed. The presence of a new message is currently stored on each wiki (in table user_newtalk), but this information could be updated globally using that unified authentication.