Google Summer of Code 2011 Organization Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia Foundation

Web Page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2011

Mailing List: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

The MediaWiki open source project powers some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, the fourth most visited website in the world. This is our sixth year participating in Google Summer of Code.

If you want to massively enhance Wikipedia (example project idea), this project's for you!

You'll be able to view a portfolio of 2011 students' work here this fall, or you can visit the code links in this blog entry.

Projects

Account Creation, Login Screens and AJAX-ification of everything My project consists of segregating the backend & UI logic for Login/Account Creation, tracking the "source avenue" for account creation & suggesting "exit activities" & enhancing the usability of forms. The main purpose of this project is to ensure that the process of account creation (or login) does not wildly interrupt the user's task flow. This will help Wikipedia (& other Wikis) in offering a better user experience & thus increase the number of 'converted' users.
AMICUS: Awesome Monolithic Infrastructure for Customization of User Scripts MediaWiki allows registered users to personalize the aspect of its user interface by the insertion of personal user script (in JavaScript language, on a per-user basis) or by enabling “gadgets” managed by sysops (on a site-wide basis). This project aims to build a framework to make those user scripts configurable in an easy way.
Improving Semantic Search/Semantic Query usability issues in SMW My proposal is to build a better and easier class of Semantic Query UI's for the Semantic MediaWiki extension, by splitting the Semantic Search page into two modules. The former will work as the UI for Special:Ask (with better usability and auto-complete than its current avatar). The latter would run underneath this UI and also serve as an interface to easily build other query generation and data exploration user interfaces (such as interactive graphs) created by others in the future.
Making Offline WIkipedia Article Selection Easier with Mediawiki Extensions Selecting articles (and sane revIDs) for offline distribution is mostly a manual process right now. This project aims to automate that process as much as possible - doable by anyone over a web interface hosted on the wiki itself as an extension.
MediaWiki Extension: SocialProfile - UserStatus feature The aim of the project is to create UserStatus feature for SocialProfile Extension. It will allow users to post short "status updates" on user profile page.
Semantic Schemas extension Short summary: Semantic Schemas a proposed extension , that would let users and admins define everything about the wiki's data structure via XML contained within wiki pages. That XML in turn would be used to generate all the other relevant pages: templates, properties, forms, etc. And the XML would be editable via a helper form, so that ideally users would never have to do direct XML editing. Also, the XML could theoretically be imported from, and exported to, other data-structure formats.
Working Archival for Web Ciations Web Citations are currently the most popular form of citation on the Wikipedia project for inline references. They have the common of "dieing" when the URLs either change or the servers that they are hosted on go down. Given the nature of wikipedia and the need for verifiability this creates a significant content problem when sources that are used in articles are no longer available.