GSoC/GCI Archive
GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2012

Wikimedia Foundation

Web Page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2012

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

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, the fifth most visited website in the world.


Please visit our ideas page and look at our application template.

Projects

  • Application for mass uploading files to Wikimedia Commons on upload campaigns Development of a desktop application for mass uploading files to Wikimedia Commons, suitable for use in the Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 competition by all types of users.
  • Convention Extension A mediawiki extension to help convert any wiki into a conference like website such as Wikimania.It would support features like submission, registration and event management.
  • Green SMW This project is about increasing the performance of Semantic MediaWiki -an Extension to MediaWiki which turns a wiki's information into a powerful database which can be processed and queried extensively. But when used with wikis with a lot of data it has a few performance degradation issues such as: 1. Frequent writes to the database (writes occur even if nothing has changed). 2. Some Special pages require expensive database queries, loading those takes lot of time. 3. RDF exports and RSS feeds (frequently generated by Users) require many string concatenations in PHP which are not efficient. 4. Pages that display large inline query results or use complex templates can lead to hundreds of database queries leading to slow performance. 5. SMW database was designed with an extendable storage abstraction layer in mind, but later the number of DataItems was fixed at 10, the database design thus needs a few refinements. My proposal is to improve the performance by making efficient use of the resources and implementing caching to reduce SMW's energy consumption.
  • Incubator improvements and language support This project is a follow-up to my ongoing work as a volunteer to improve the language support in MediaWiki and to improve the usability of the Wikimedia Incubator. I would like to include a default list of languages names in English, which is currently in Babel but can be useful in MediaWiki in general, and also for WikimediaIncubator specifically because the automatic info pages otherwise do not recognise language codes. I'd also improve the current automatic info page on Incubator and extend it to be used as a replacement for the test wiki template. This will include a special page that guides contributors in their first steps to start on Incubator and start a test wiki.
  • Integration of Flickr and Geolocation in Upload Wizard My goal is to provide an interface which allows the user to transfer images from Flickr where the Upload Wizard extracts license and metadata from the images, converts the license into a Commons License Template and passes on metadata to the next step to generate corresponding WikiText. Second part of my proposal aims at implementing a JavaScript jQuery plugin which presents a map interface that can be manipulated to select a particular location and report that location in code, preferably as WikiText containing a Location template.
  • Realtime Collaboration on Visual Editor Realtime collaboration on Visual Editor would allow Visual Editor to be used much like Etherpad, Google Wave, and similar other collaborative editors. This project aims at implementing Phase 1 of the Realtime Collaboration project whose features would be - (1) Allow single editor in an editing session, others can spectate changes made in realtime. (2) The editing control can be passed over to another client by the current editor. (3) Provide codebase for extending with Phase 2 features; Multiple editors, and concurrency control.
  • TranslateSvg: Bringing the translation revolution to Wikimedia Commons TranslateSvg has the potential to revolutionise the ability of Wikimedia's diverse groups of image maintainers to work together on the same communal set of SVG images. At the moment, providing alternative translations of SVG files typically requires "forking" the image. This drastically increases the image's maintenance burden and discourages image improvement. TranslateSvg would completely change this suboptimal workflow by allowing translations to be embedded within a single image file.
  • Watchlist grouping and workflow improvements This is a proposal to implement user-defined grouping in watchlists and consolidate the watchlist modification and watched changes pages. My full proposal is available here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Blackjack48/GSOC_proposal_for_watchlist_improvements