Google Summer of Code/2012

Google Summer of Code 2012 was announced on February 4th, 2012. MediaWiki will apply to participate, but will not officially know whether we are participating until 16 March 2012.

Read the GSoC FAQ.

Relevant dates

 * Organisation applications begin February 27.


 * Organisation applications deadline March 9.


 * Student applications begin March 26.


 * Student application deadline is April 6.

Timeline for reference.

Student signup
We'll open student signup if and when we get accepted to participate in GSoC 2012. In the meantime, the best way to increase your chances of being accepted is to start going through the intro steps to learn MediaWiki. You should also do the diff and patch, git, and Subversion training missions. If you have any trouble at all, please talk with us on IRC. If you're a bit shy and don't want to ask your question of the whole room, look for sumanah.

We suggest that you start following the steps in How to become a MediaWiki hacker now, and see if you can start contributing by fixing an annoying little bug. This experience will help you write a good proposal, and improve your credibility as an applicant.

Spread the word
Please also help us publicize GSoC at your school!


 * A leaflet about student MediaWiki contribution to print out and hang on the wall
 * A quarter-page flyer about MediaWiki contribution, to hand out
 * A leaflet about GSoC to hang up or pass out

Project ideas
Applicants will need to write good proposals either based on their own ideas or expanding thoughtfully on the ideas below.


 * Search should index transcluded text — This is sorely wanted for Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource and the like that depend heavily on template expansion.
 * Create a way to have “books” for wikisource/wikibooks — This would mean you could “watch” books (sets of pages, watch a category) instead of just single pages. Might be able to do by extending the Extension:Collection or improving Extension:BookManager.
 * Upload to Commons plugins for common photo management apps (iPhoto, Aperture, Lightroom, Picasa, Shotwell, F-spot, etc.) similar to existing plugins that allow synchronization with sites like flickr, facebook.
 * Implement pre- or post-commit checks in our code repositories that automatically look for security vulnerabilities, broken coding conventions, broken code, etc, perhaps with a web interface to facilitate the process, or using our Jenkins continuous integration setup. Help MediaWiki developers save time in code review, and make our code more secure.
 * This should be done via Jenkins for sure. We already have a build project for it, but we haven't taken the time to actually write our coding conventions down in this format--that could make a good summer project!
 * Improve our Android application -- integrate with SuggestBot to suggest a mobile task to a user.
 * Give editors a way to slice and dice their watchlists with groups (perhaps group similar pages in their watchlists).
 * Improve volunteer-written mass upload tools to make them more robust, especially for use by museums, galleries, libraries and archives. Use Python, PHP, or jQuery with the MediaWiki API and help thousands of people share free culture.
 * I wonder about whether there are things we could do wrt Wikibooks and Wikiversity to improve their reuse/integrability (q: is that a word? a: yes) in terms of our web API. Or something. Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Volunteer Development Coordinator 05:21, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
 * MediaWiki/Moodle or MediaWiki/Sakai or MediaWiki/Blackboard or MediaWiki/Desire2Learn integration.

Also look at the ideas of 2011 and past projects.