Google Summer of Code/2009

Google Summer of Code for detailed information.

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

 * Catrope
 * —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 11:41, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Yaron Koren
 * siebrand
 * this could be you!

Student info
Student applications closed April 2; see the timeline on Google's FAQ.

'''Submitted application are being reviewed and students being asked for further feedback on their proposals. Selection should be complete between April 15 and final assignments will be announced April 21.'''

Here's our /Application template.

Students expressing interest
 * Jeroen De Dauw (bn2vs)
 * User:Michael180
 * Mvchandler
 * Hendrik van Antwerpen
 * User:Nikerabbit
 * Nimal / Talkout

Projects ideas!
'''These are suggestions that people have come up with. Some awesome ideas won't be on this list, and some on this list won't be awesome. :)'''

MediaWiki core and new extensions

 * Support for Chemical Markup Language and Jmol viewer . See 16491. Also more general 17598
 * Special pages improvements. See 6220 13702, 10049, 12925, 12942, 12984, 18151 etc.
 * Upload log improvements. See 14171, 14417.
 * Tiff file format support.
 * Uploading works, if enabled. Thumbnailing could work, but not on our setup - dunno how much work that needs (ask brion).
 * Wikimedia Deutschland is offering a contract for implementing full TIFF support, including multipage features.
 * Bot for automation interwikis adding for categories by countries, albums by artist, interwikis for categories based on interwikis for articles. See http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikibots-l/2008-July/thread.html.
 * Special page to change wiki configuration variables via the web with built in validation before changes are made permanent.
 * Isn't this partially done with Configure?


 * Special page to automatically upgrade/downgrade the database between versions of MediaWiki (which could be hooked into by extensions).
 * Upgrade the installer to allow for automatic download, installation, and configuration of extensions. Include a special page to do live updates of extensions
 * Image rendering and resizing daemon
 * Proper geocoding extension for Wikipedia. This extension would include the coordinates into the articles, have keywords and formatting functions for coordinate output, have a coordinates editor/viewer, allow queries, and possibly generate geotags and geo (microformat). There is already much code for this (e. g. Category:GIS_extensions, map extensions), but the idea would be to combine everything into an extension that would be suitable for deployment on Wikipedia.
 * Coordinate entry interface (optional)
 * Simple coordinate entry format in wikitext (replacing various template based methods)
 * Coordinate handling, validation, conversion and display formatting without the use of templates such as en:Template:Coord
 * Support for links to external services by using a wiki-editable page with extension specific magic words on the coordinates and their metadata, offering various conversions. Currently done with GeoHack and en:Template:GeoTemplate (documentation) Note: geohack is also an extension already!
 * Separate database table for coordinates to allow quick queries for tools that use the live database, and a specific database dump for those that need the bulk of the coordinate data without massive parsing (Google among others could then improve on the bi-yearly updates)
 * API integration to allow replacing tools currently hacked over database dumps or the externallinks table, such as bounding box based queries as a list or map type, list of coordinates failing validation criteria, exporting coordinates from a page or category as used on en:Template:GeoGroupTemplate. That is, coordinate queries based on their content and/or source, and output formatting in API or some external tool that could then use the API. This could possibly replace some of the coordinate database functionality in WikiMiniAtlas.
 * Share geo information for multiple wikis in single wiki to avoid jobs duplication across all Wikipedias/Commons/other projects. See m:Talk:A newer look at the interlanguage link.
 * A micro format parser that eventually replaces DBpedia (geographical parsing, infobox parsing, possibly easier to work with than Semantic MediaWiki).
 * RDFa support is probably even better than Microformats - it'll really replace DBpedia and work with Yahoo! Search Monkey. Note: there was a project last summer to add RDFa support to Semantic MediaWiki.
 * User-configurable cookie-ified date format—even for anonymous users—to properly support an international audience.
 * User-configurable cookie-ified image thumbnail size preference for anonymous users—to support a variety of browsing and communications technology from iPhones to Crays, high speed to pathetic link speeds. Other means of reducing/optimizing bandwidth like a "more" function, or preferred article sections by user preference (lead only, first image only, omit see also, references, etc.)
 * Easy integration of OpenStreetMap maps in articles, preferably by only using coordinates and of course, no images but fully usable Javascript-enabled maps, pref. based on something like OpenLayers - Husky 12:06, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * There is already Extension:SlippyMap.
 * There is an ongoing project for this, see Project:OpenStreetMap
 * Making Wikiportrait into an extension that supports automatic uploads to Commons and easy OTRS integration. - Husky 12:06, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Improve Visual Diff, a GSoC 2008 project
 * MediaWiki to slideshow --Currently at an exploratory stage of development. Uncertain of mentor organisation.
 * Watchlist upgrade, i.e. multiple watchlists on the same project, a global watchlist for SUL, etc. See w:Wikipedia:PERSISTENT, etc.
 * Improve spherical, panorama, and 360 viewers with ability to mark items on photos. Toolserver Java demo, papervision has flash code.
 * Interface for adding interwikis with drag'n'drop. See bugzilla:18072.
 * Better support remote archives for video in mediawiki as to support projects like globalLives
 * Create a reply of en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates and WikiMiniAtlas for Mars, Moon, and sky bodies, using the English templates Sky, Moon and Coor Mars. Databases created with this templates could let external projects like Google Sky to link Wikipedia articles.

Existing extensions

 * MetavidWiki ! summer of code page here
 * Add support for additional mapping services, such as OpenLayers and Google Earth, to Semantic MediaWiki (currently only Google Maps is fully supported and OpenLayers partially supported) Yaron Koren 16:12, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Extension talk:OggHandler in addition to the already existing Java player.
 * Create a special page to handle additions, removals, changes and logging of spam blacklist entries - could be a rewritten version of SpamBlacklist or maybe AbuseFilter needs work. Probably the former is best. See Regex-based blacklist and comment 12.

Services and other outside technology

 * Make Translation platform more efficient in terms of speed and tools for translators and administrators
 * Particularly automate collection of identical messages when original English message changed/updated. Also automate draft translation of untranslated messages for particular language.
 * Also will be good idea to have tools to check consistency of such messages translations. At least showing them all in table.
 * Wikipedia widget for easy inclusion on other websites that display articles and images based on the content of that page - Husky 12:06, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * A huge problem in Wikipedia is getting editors to add complete, properly formatted citations in their footnotes. A large part of the solution would be to have a browser add-in that:
 * Has the simplicity of WP:CITE, which requires only a right-click and menu selection to generate the wikitext for a citation
 * Can generate cites for the wide range of pages that Zotero can, and more (ISBNs, PubMed, Google Scholar, etc. - see the list here of tools that can be used in various places and ways to generate citations).
 * Zotero is produced by a university, and none of the other tools are proprietary or commercial, so all of the code is (theoretically) available; what would be nice would be an API into Zotero so that as its translators expand, this (proposed) tool would automatically have more capabilities. John Broughton 15:31, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Accepted Projects
Projects will be selected after the student application period closes (March 20-April 1).

Previous Years

 * Summer of Code: 2006, 2007 and 2008 notes.