< Google Summer of Code

This page tries to keep up with the current status of all past Google Summer of Code projects.

See also Outreachy/Past projects.

Quantitative summary of past Summer of Code projects

Completed Google Summer of Code projects since 2006:

  • See also: User:MaxSem/GSoC analysis (not up to date)

2022

Rewrite the Wikidata Infobox on Commons in Lua

Edit Request Wizard

Modernize JavaScript build process and dependencies for Wiki Education Dashboard

  • Student: Shashwat Khanna
  • Mentors: Sage Ross, Dhruvdutt Jadhav
  • Outcome: WikiEduDashboard now has a smaller bundle size(15%), a faster build time(under 60s) and faster refresh time because of Hot Module Replacement.

Improve the custom picture selector - Make it easier for contributors to choose pictures for upload on the Commons Android app

Create a Canasta CLI and Canasta Kubernetes template stack

Extending the WikidataComplete plugin for enabling data donations, recommendations, and gamification

Campaigns Retention Metrics Dashboard

2021

View bi-weekly reports of participants.

Web dashboard to help monitor Wikimedia database backups

Custom Picture Selector for Commons Android app

Gamified Knowledge Base Completion Plugin for Wikibase/Wikidata

MediaWiki user script/gadget tutorial

Develop a guided tour on mediawiki.org, using the GuidedTour extension, similar to Wikipedia's The Wikipedia Adventure, to teach new developers about user scripts and Gadgets.

Cypress tests for Wikipedia Preview

Autocompletion in Page Forms spreadsheet-style display

Add zoom and pan to the Wikisource Pagelist Widget

Upgrade WebdriverIO to version 7 for all repositories

  • Student: Sahil Grewal
  • Mentors: Vidhi Mody, Sohom Datta
  • Outcome: Upgraded WebdriverIO across all the repositories, additionally added video-recording support, removed chromedriver dependencies via a generic wdio-config across all the repositories.
  • Relevant links: Project task, Project proposal, Final report

Update the front page of Wikimedia projects

  • Student: Bhaarat Kumar Khatri
  • Mentors: Jan Drewniak
  • Outcome: Converted some sister portals' Lua templates to dynamic templates so that they can be updated easily and look attractive, in a manner similar to Wikipedia's.
  • Relevant links: Project task, Project proposal

Retrain models from ORES to be deployable on Lift Wing

  • Student: Anubhav Sharma
  • Mentors: Christopher Albon and Chaitanya Mittal
  • Outcome: This project consisted of a renewed attempt to retrain the existing ores architecture and build new deep learning based techniques and understand how it improved the performance. This was a pilot project and revealed a lot of flaws in the existing pipelines of the ORES architecture.
  • Relevant links: Project proposal

2020

Add leaderboard based on user's edits to the Commons Android app

Page-list editing widget for the ProofreadPage extension

Tool to correct false depicts claims manually on Wikimedia Commons

Tool to create overlays on pre-rendered offline maps for Internet In A Box

  • Student: Swapnil Sinha
  • Mentor: Tim Moody
  • Outcome: Developed SPARQL queries for overlays from Wikidata, wrote scripts to automate generation of GeoJSON files, developed a webpage for the Admin Console to install overlays directly from the web choosing coordinates from an embedded map.
  • Relevant links: project proposal, project repository, working repository, bi-weekly reports, final report

Detecting reverts and tagging reverted edits

Original project name: Add Reverted filter to RecentChanges Filters

  • Student: Ostrzyciel
  • Mentors: Kosta Harlan, Roan Kattouw
  • Outcome: Added the manual revert and reverted change tags to MediaWiki. Created a new interface for extensions to access data on reverts and improve the handling of some revert types in core. Helped the Product Analytics team gather more accurate data about reverts.
  • Relevant links: project task and proposal, user page with links to bi-weekly reports and all tasks

Mechanism to send Wikimedia-specific Zulip welcome messages

  • Student: QEDK
  • Mentors: Pavithra Eswaramoorthy, Derick Alangi, Medha Bansal
  • Outcome: A chatbot was built for newcomers to Wikimedia Zulipchat. Additionally, we also built a bridgebot between IRC and Zulip, a GitHub bot to upload pull requests on certain triggers and a web app for the tool that doubled as a landing page and provided an endpoint for receiving incoming webhooks for the final step in our CI/CD pipeline.
  • Relevant links: project task, project proposal, GitHub repository, web app

Evaluate replacements for existing browser automation framework

Implement articlequality and draftquality model for ptwiki and apply insights to models for bs, uk, hi wikis

Improve the framework to transfer files over the LAN

  • Student: Ajumal P A
  • Mentor: Jaime Crespo, Manuel Arostegui
  • Outcome: Improved the transferpy framework by incorporating parallelism.
  • Relevant links : Project proposal, Final Report

Improve Wiki Education Dashboard's error monitoring

Reduce bundle size of the Wiki Education Dashboard application

  • Student: Amit A Joki
  • Mentor: Sage Ross
  • Outcome: By removing use of the Gulp build system, the size of the bundle was reduced by 45%.
  • Relevant links: proposal, final report

Remove use of jQuery UI from Page Forms

  • Student: Amr M. El-Absy
  • Mentor: Yaron Koren, Priyanshu Varshney (unofficially)
  • Outcome: Various changes were made to the Page Forms extension in order to remove the use of the deprecated jQuery UI library: these included converting the "text with autocomplete" and "textarea with autocomplete" input types into aliases for the "tokens" and "combobox" input types, converting the "datepicker" and "datetimepicker" input types to use OOUI instead of jQuery UI, and replacing FancyTree with jsTree. There was also a task to replace the jsGrid library with jExcel, but this was only half-completed during GSoC; it was eventually completed several months later by Yaron.
  • Relevant links: project task, project proposal, final report

Supporting the 'maps' parameter in TemplateData editor (GUI)

  • Student: Adham Khatean
  • Mentors: Marielle Volz, Thalia Chan, Moriel Schottlender
  • Relevant links: proposal, patches, final report

Upgrade WebdriverIO to version 6 for all repositories

2019

Android app for Wiki Education Dashboard, and Programs & Events Dashboard

Code samples in JavaScript and PHP to demonstrate the use of MediaWiki Action API modules

  • Student: Jay Prakash
  • Mentors: Srishti Sethi
  • Outcome: For MediaWiki Action API documentation improvements, developed a tabbed window Gadget, built a code generator for auto-generating sample code in PHP & MediaWikiJS, wrote sample code from scratch for certain modules, and created a demo app.
  • Relevant links: project task, project proposal, code commits in Github, final report

Editable calendar interface for Page Forms

Add to the Page Forms extension the creation and editing of templates with one or more date/datetime fields through a calendar interface, using the FullCalendar JS library.

Hashtag search subpage for statistics and charts

Add a feature to display statistics for hashtag search so that user can dive into more details for campaigns such as 1lib1ref.

Improve article recommendation pipeline

Improve the interface of Special:ViewData in the Cargo extension

Integrate SVG Translate with ContentTranslation

Add to the ContentTranslation extension the ability to use the SVG Translate tool, to allow for translating images.

Make notification counts update without page reload

Add to the Echo extension automatic update of notification counts.

Multi-wiki support, article exclusion and namespace support for WikiEduDashboard

Structured Commons support in Commons Android app

Tool for event organizers to track developer activity

Tool to cut videos in Wikimedia Commons

2018

See GSoC 2018 Code analytics for statistics on code contributed by these projects and wrap-up blogpost.

Browse feature for Wikimedia Commons App

Create an Explore feature for the Wikimedia Commons App.

Emoji Twitter bot for Commons images from NYPL fork

Create a Twitter bot account that responds to mentions containing an emoji, and replies with an image from Wikimedia Commons; based on the New York Public Library Emoji Bot account.

Feedback on how pictures uploaded to Commons get used: statistics, barnstars, light gamification

Add to the Wikimedia Commons App features to encourage uploading, including feedback on usage of the images, and rewards.

  • Student: Tanvi Dadu
  • Mentors: Josephine Lim, Vivek Maskara
  • Outcome: Tanvi created two new modules, the Feedback Sharing Module to provide a brief feedback of the images uploaded, and the Quiz module for users who have a high percentage of their uploads deleted. Both modules were included in the v2.8 release of the Wikimedia Commons App. They can currently be accessed by going to the Settings and opting in as a Beta Tester of these new features.
  • Relevant links: project task, project proposal, code commits in Github, final report, bi-weekly blog posts

Improve the Cargo Special:Drilldown page

Improve the functionality and display of the Special:Drilldown page in the Cargo extension.

Improve Data Explorer on query.wikidata.org

Implement resizable and draggable windows for the Data Explorer, improve the Graph Explorer by adding support for incoming links, and give these explorers new look by adding toolbars for the Wikidata Query project.

Improvements for the Toolforge 'webservice' command

Enhance the Toolforge 'webservice' command.

Improvements to Wikistats 2.0 front-end

Improve the Wikistats 2.0 front-end, aesthetically and functionally.

OOUI Tutorial Migration

Started as a project to add a category filter to Special:RecentChanges. However, due to its complex nature and dependency issues, the initial idea was replaced by a project to create and improve tutorials for the OOUI JavaScript library.

  • Student: Hagar Shilo
  • Mentors: Moriel Schottlender, Roan Kattouw, Volker Eckl (informally)
  • Outcome: Created two tutorials demonstrating how to build a simple JavaScript ToDo list app, and added more advanced features to the ToDo list app by developing custom widgets for the OOUI library. OOUI tutorials were merged and included in OOUI v0.28.0. See the new OOUI tutorials.
  • Relevant links: project task, original project proposal, code commits in Gerrit (includes commits from original project), final report, bi-weekly reports, bi-weekly blog posts

Predict relevance of search results from historical clicks using a Neural Click Model

Starting from a small pre-existing patch, produce a proof of concept for predicting search result relevance from click data using neural networks.

  • Student: Karan Dhingra
  • Mentors: Erik Bernhardson, Trey Jones
  • Outcome: Test results board can be viewed here. Testing and evaluating this model is ongoing, to determine whether it provides any computational or prediction benefits over the current modeling.

Spreadsheet interface for modifying multiple pages to the Page Forms extension

Add a new special page to the Page Forms extension to let users edit infobox data in multiple pages at once using a spreadsheet interface.

WikiEdu Dashboard Article Finder Tool

Create an article finder tool to aid course instructors and students identifying the Wikipedia articles they would like to work on.

Worklist tool for campaigns and in-person editing events

Develop a worklist tool to help the #1Lib1Ref campaign.  

Other projects

Special mention should be made of two projects that were not done via the Wikimedia Foundation, but are still relevant to Wikimedia sites. The first was a GSoC project done with CiviCRM, instead of the WMF, as a mentoring organization. The student was Saurabh Batra, and the mentors were Adam Wight and Eileen McNaughton. Saurabh created a fraud-detection API for Wikimedia donations that could potentially save the WMF tens of thousands of dollars in the form of chargeback payments. See the main API code, sample pipeline code that calls the API, and the student's project summary.

The second project was done unsupervised and not as part of GSoC, though it was completed concurrently with GSoC. The student, Balaji Ramasubramanian, developed a Facebook chat bot for Wikipedia that users can subscribe to, to receive notifications for Article of the day, Picture of the day, Random article, Top read, etc. from Wikipedia. See a video of the bot in action, as well as the project task and code commits.

2017

Automatic editing suggestions and article feedback in Programs & Events Dashboard

Add to the Wiki Education Foundation Programs & Events Dashboard the ability to provide automatic suggestions to student editors about how to get started with improving their assigned Wikipedia articles.

  • Student: Keerthana S
  • Mentors: Sage Ross, Jonathan Morgan
  • Outcome: The automatic feedback feature is successfully included in the dashboard; it is shown in the MyArticles component that shows the articles edited by a particular user and also shows them in the Articles Edited Section for the suggestion to be reviewed by instructors.
  • Relevant links: project task, pull requests in Github, final report, weekly reports

Hierarchy support in Cargo

Add support for hierarchical data in the Cargo extension and, to a lesser extent, the Page Forms extension.

Glam2Commons

Develop a tool which allows any Wikimedia Commons user to import images to Commons from the online repositories of a number of GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) easily.

Improvements to Proofread Page and Wikisource

Improve and enhance the Proofread Page extension and Wikisource, through important bug fixes that are left as backlog and implementation of significant features that would make it more user-friendly. 

Enhanced usability for Wikimedia Programs & Events Dashboard

Make various enhancements to the Wiki Education Foundation Programs & Events Dashboard, including doing user testing and improving accessibility on mobile devices.

Thanks support in Pywikibot

A second attempt at a project originally attempted in 2016. Give Pywikibot bots the ability to use the Thanks extension on normal revisions and Flow posts, as well as work with Thanks log entries and generate reports for thankers and thankees on wikis.

  • Student: Alexander Jones
  • Mentors: John Vandenberg
  • Outcome: Pywikibot bots can now thank Flow posts and normal revisions. A script was written to generate reports compatible with Faebot's. Thanks log entries can now be used in Pywikibot. Progress was made on publicly logging Thanks notification changes and on Flow revision support in Pywikibot.
  • Relevant links: project task, code commits in Gerrit, weekly reports

Upgrade and improve the Quiz extension

Update and upgrade the Quiz extension, add new features, and remove legacy code.

  • Student: Harjot Singh Bhatia
  • Mentors: Marielle Volz
  • Outcome: The extension was successfully improved, including the addition of unit tests and new features like feedback behavior.
  • Relevant links: project task, code commits in Gerrit, weekly reports

2016

Accuracy review of Wikipedias

Create an accuracy review tool to make it easier for users to find and review inaccurate content in Wikipedia articles.

Contributors extension improvements

Original name "List of Contributors". Improve the Contributors extension.

  • Student: Devi Krishnan
  • Mentors: Addshore, Niharika Kohli
  • Outcome: The Contributors extension now has its own database table, which makes querying faster; and the display of the contributors list was improved.
  • Relevant links: project task

Extension for page creation/editing notifications

Create an extension to allow for notification of specific types of edits, making use of the Echo extension.

  • Student: Abhinand N
  • Mentors: Yaron Koren, Ike Hecht
  • Outcome: The EditNotify extension was created; it is currently at "beta" status.
  • Relevant links: project task

HTML email support in MediaWiki

  • Student: Smriti Singh
  • Mentors: Tyler Romeo, Tony Thomas
  • Outcome: Project was not successful.
  • Relevant links: project task

Improving static analysis tools for MediaWiki

Improve the MediaWiki-CodeSniffer linting tool.

  • Student: Lethe Xie
  • Mentors: EBernardson, Kunal Mehta
  • Outcome: Many changes were merged in to the CodeSniffer tool.
  • Relevant links: project task, commits, final report

Pywikibot categorisation of Commons media using computer vision

  • Student: AbdealiJK
  • Mentors: John Mark Vandenberg, DrTrigon
  • Outcome: The catimages.py Pywikibot script was rewritten to become a generic Python library. The bot script still requires fixing some minor bugs, refactoring, and then getting a bot request approved on Commons.
  • Relevant links: project task, project proposal, final report

Pywikibot Support for Thanks

Add handling of the Thanks extension to Pywikibot.

  • Student: Sriharsh Bhyravajjula
  • Mentors: John Mark Vandenberg, Kunal Mehta
  • Outcome: Project was not successful.
  • Relevant links: project task

Wikidata support for IFTTT

Improve the Wikimedia web app that provides an API for IFTTT to also provide triggers for Wikidata events.

  • Student: Derick N. Alangi
  • Mentors: Stephen Laporte, Benedikt Seidl, Marius Hoch, Lydia Pintscher
  • Outcome: Triggers were successfully added.
  • Relevant links: project task, commits

WikiToLearn projects

Special mention should also be made of the participation of the WikiToLearn organization in GSoC 2016; many of their projects involved MediaWiki-related development. The relevant WikiToLearn projects were:

2015

Allow contributors to update their own details in tech metrics

  • Student: Sarvesh Gupta
  • Mentors: Alvaro, Dicortazar
  • Outcome: Failed in mid-term due to absence of substantial work
  • Relevant links: project task

Enhanced cross-wiki watchlist

  • Student: Jan Lebert
  • Mentors: Yuvi Panda and Kunal Mehta
  • Outcome: The crosswatch tool was created. It was available for a while on Wikimedia Labs, here, but no longer seems to be installed.
  • Relevant links: project task

Extension to identify and delete spam pages

Graph editing in VisualEditor

Modify the Graph extension to allow for editing graphs within VisualEditor.

  • Student: Frédéric Bolduc
  • Mentors: Moriel Schottlender, Marielle Volz
  • Outcome: Basic functionality was added to the Graph extension to allow for displaying graphs, and editing basic data, in VisualEditor. There has not yet been significant usage of this feature.
  • Relevant links: project task

Implement Flow support in Pywikibot

  • Student: Alexander Jones
  • Mentors: John Mark Vandenberg, Matthew Flaschen
  • Outcome: Loading content, creating topics, replying to posts, locking and unlocking topics, and fetching post and topic revision history were all implemented; further progress was stalled by unforeseen bugs in existing code.
  • Relevant links: project task

Implement OAuth support in Pywikibot

  • Student: Jiarong Wei
  • Mentors: John Mark Vandenberg, Aaron Halfaker
  • Outcome: OAuth support was successfully added to Pywikibot (see documentation).
  • Relevant links: project task

Newsletter extension for MediaWiki

Rewrite the Newsletter extension to be more comprehensive, allowing publishers to create newsletter and announce new issues and allowing users to browse and subscribe to newsletters.

  • Student: Tina Johnson
  • Mentors: Tony Thomas and Quim Gil
  • Outcome: All tasks listed on the project board were completed. It was finally deployed on mediawiki.org in 2017.
  • Relevant links: project task

Unified Language Proofing tools integration framework

Add language proofing support for VisualEditor.

  • Student: Ankita Kumari
  • Mentors: Amir Aharoni, Eran Rosenthal
  • Outcome: The LanguageTool extension was created, currently at "experimental" status and not used by any wiki.
  • Relevant links: project task

Wikidata Page Banner Extension For Wikivoyage

Create an extension which displays page banners that can be based on data in Wikidata.

  • Student: Sumit Asthana
  • Mentors: Jon Robson and Nicolas Raoul
  • Outcome: The WikidataPageBanner extension was created and enabled on Wikivoyage with significant push from the mentor. The function is used for about 14k distinct banners in 3 Wikivoyage languages.
  • Relevant links: project task

2014

Add proper email bounce handling to MediaWiki

Add VERP, or Variable Envelope Return Path, to MediaWiki mailing, so that bounced messages can be handled better.

Automatic cross-language screenshots for user documentation

Automate the process of creating screenshots of MediaWiki software, across many different languages.

  • Student: Vikas S Yaligar
  • Mentors: Amir Aharoni, James Forrester and the Quality Assurance team
  • Outcome: The Language Screenshots project was completed successfully. It has been used to create screenshots for VisualEditor; see, for example, the VE user guide in English, Hebrew and Dutch.

Book management in Wikibooks/Wikisource

Modify the BookManagerv2 extension in order to improve its user interface and allow it to handle books not created with that extension.

  • Student: Deepali Jain
  • Mentors: Raylton P. Sousa and Tpt
  • Outcome: One change was merged in, though another was later abandoned. The extension itself was archived several years later.

Catalogue for MediaWiki extensions

Enable ratings and potentially other ways for users to judge the quality of different MediaWiki extensions.

  • Student: Aditya Chaturvedi
  • Mentors: Markus Glaser and Mark Hershberger
  • Outcome: A rating system was successfully added to the site WikiApiary; see here, for example. There has been no consensus yet to display these ratings directly in mediawiki.org.

Chemical Markup support for Wikimedia Commons

Add the ability to display chemistry information from within wikitext in Wikimedia Commons.

  • Student: Rillke
  • Mentors: Gilles Dubuc, Brian Wolff and Bryan Davis
  • Outcome: The MolHandler extension was created, which allows for displaying chemical table files in wiki pages. It was at "experimental" status, and was then archived.

Generic, efficient localisation update service

Improve on the LocalisationUpdate extension to make the delivery of new translations, such as from translatewiki.net to Wikimedia wikis, more efficient.

  • Student: Kondi
  • Mentors: Kartik Mistry, with assistance by Niklas Laxström
  • Outcome: Code for the LUv2 Server was created and was formerly viewable here, though it is no longer viewable. Such a server would also require a MediaWiki extension to interact with it, which was never created.

Google Books to Internet Archive to Commons upload automation tool

A tool to automatically import the contents of a book stored in Google Books to both the Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons.

  • Student: Rohit Dua
  • Mentors: Aubrey, Yann and Tpt
  • Outcome: The BUB, or Book Uploader Bot, was created. Rohit continued to maintain it after the end of GSoC. The Book Uploader Bot was used to upload over 300K books as of 2017. In 2019 it was replaced by BUB v2.0.
  • Relevant links: GitHub repository

MassMessage page input list improvements

Modify the MassMessage extension to be able to use JSON, instead of parser functions, to define delivery lists.

  • Student: wctaiwan
  • Mentors: Kunal Mehta and Prateek Saxena
  • Outcome: Modification was successful. wctaiwan is now listed as a co-author of the extension.

A modern, scalable and attractive skin for MediaWiki

Create a new and modern-looking MediaWiki skin.

  • Student: Jack Phoenix
  • Mentors: Isarra, Emufarmers
  • Outcome: Project created the BlueSky skin, which worked with MediaWiki until version 1.27. Jack was an active MediaWiki contributor before GSoC, and remains so afterwards.

Parsoid-based online detection of broken wikitext

Modify the Parsoid service to be able to report all instances of incorrect wikitext to a central location.

  • Student: Hardik Juneja
  • Mentors: C. Scott Ananian and Subramanya Sastry
  • Outcome: A variety of changes were merged in to Parsoid.

Separating skins from core MediaWiki

A high-impact project to make skins in MediaWiki more modular, akin to extensions.

  • Student: Bartosz Dziewoński
  • Mentors: Jon Robson, Ori Livneh
  • Outcome: Code was successfully merged in to MediaWiki, resulting in skin handling changing significantly in MediaWiki version 1.24, including skins no longer being included directly in core. Bartosz was an active MediaWiki contributor before GSoC, and remains so afterwards.

Switching Semantic Forms autocompletion to Select2

Add a new input type, "tokens", and modify another, "combobox", in the Semantic Forms extension, both using the Select2 JavaScript library.

  • Student: Jatin Mehta
  • Mentors: Yaron Koren and Stephan Gambke
  • Outcome: Select2-based input types were successfully added, and released in SF version 2.8.

Tools for mass migration of legacy translated wiki content

Add to the Translate extension the ability to automatically "prepare" a page for translation by adding the necessary tags and to import old translations in the system.

  • Student: Pratik Lahoti
  • Mentors: Niklas Laxström and Federico Leva
  • Outcome: The pages Special:PageMigration and Special:PagePreparation were added to the Translate extension and have been used for thousands of edits on Wikimedia projects; see documentation on this feature.

UniversalLanguageSelector fonts for Chinese wikis

Modify the UniversalLanguageSelector extension to create font files for Chinese-language pages that only contain the characters necessary for each page, instead of all 80,000+.

  • Student: Aaron Xiao
  • Mentors: Liangent and DChan (WMF)
  • Outcome: The code had unresolved bugs, and was never put into production. A demo was formerly viewable here, but is no longer viewable.

Usability improvements for the Translate extension

A project to make a variety of improvements to the Translate extension, including a clearer user interface, more features, and bug fixes.

  • Student: Kunal Grover
  • Mentors: Robin and Siebrand Mazeland
  • Outcome: Kunal created many changes and fixes to MediaWiki core, the Translate extension, and a few other extensions. Most were merged in, though some are still under review. The main change was ready for deployment but got stuck for 2 years waiting for a database schema change.

Wikidata-based book annotation tool

Enable annotation of book contents in order for facts from those books to get imported into Wikidata.

2013

Android app for MediaWiki translation

An Android app to translate in a MediaWiki site that has the Translate extension installed, such as translatewiki.net or meta.wikimedia.org.

  • Student: Or Sagi
  • Mentors: Niklas Laxström and Yuvaraj Pandian
  • Outcome: The app was successfully created, and has gotten good reviews.

Bayesian spam filter extension

Create an extension to detect spam edits using Bayesian techniques.

  • Student: Anubhav Agarwal
  • Mentors: Platonides and Chris Steipp
  • Outcome: The BayesianFilter extension was created, and was at status "beta" before being abandoned. It is not known to have ever been used.
  • Relevant links: project proposal

Improve support for book structures

Modify the BookManager extension to provide a user-friendly form to organize individual pages and subpages into a single book structure, for use on sites such as Wikisource and Wikibooks.

  • Student: Molly White
  • Mentors: Raylton P. Sousa and Mwalker
  • Outcome: The BookManagerv2 extension was created. It had some bugs and missing features, some of which were fixed or implemented in Deepali Jain's 2014 GSoC project. Both the BookManager and BookManagerv2 extensions were later abandoned.

Improvement of glossary tools

Improve the functionality of the two MediaWiki glossary extensions: Lingo and Semantic Glossary.

  • Student: Yevheniy Vlasenko
  • Mentors: Yury Katkov and Stephan Gambke
  • Outcome: Various features were added to one or both extensions, including a <noglossary> tag, integration with the Approved Revs extension, and customizing the tooltip display using templates.
  • Relevant links: project task

Incremental data dumps

Create a system for MediaWiki data dumps that only show the differences from the previous dump, enabling much faster transfer.

  • Student: Petr Onderka
  • Mentors: Ariel Glenn and Tyler Romeo
  • Outcome: Code was mostly finished (though file compression was not done), but it was never integrated or used.
  • Relevant links: project proposal, project task

jQuery.IME extensions for Firefox and Chrome

Create Firefox and Chrome browser plugins/extensions that make use of the jQuery Input Method Editor (jQuery.IME) library for providing input methods across different languages.

Language Coverage Matrix dashboard

Create an interactive tool for viewing MediaWiki's current language support.

  • Student: Harsh Kothari
  • Mentors: Runa Bhattacharjee and Alolita Sharma
  • Outcome: The tool was created, and the code is available here. A demo was previously viewable here.
  • Relevant links: project proposal

Mobilize Wikidata

Create a mobile-friendly display for the contents of Wikidata.

  • Student: Pragun Bhutani
  • Mentors: Katie Filbert and Jon Robson
  • Outcome: A number of changes were made to the Wikibase extension to support this feature, but the project was not completed. Additional work to make Wikidata mobile-friendly was done over the next few years.

Moodle extension

Create an extension to display information from the learning-management system Moodle.

  • Student: Rohan Verma
  • Mentors: Jan Luca Naumann and Brian Wolff
  • Outcome: The Moodle extension was created and partially completed; it has since been abandoned.

Pronunciation Recording Tool

Create a user-friendly tool for uploading audio files showing the pronunciation of words, in Wiktionary.

  • Student: Rahul Maliakkal
  • Mentors: Michael Dale and Matt Flaschen
  • Outcome: The PronunciationRecording extension was created, which was only partially completed and is currently unmaintained. A demo of the tool was formerly viewable here.

Prototyping inline comments

Create a prototype for letting users add inline comments within wiki pages, to allow for discussions on the content, using the OKFN Annotator JavaScript library.

  • Student: Richa Jain
  • Mentors: Matthew Flaschen and Tyler Romeo
  • Outcome: The Annotator extension was created, which was at "unstable" status before being abandoned.

Refactoring of ProofreadPage extension

Modify the ProofreadPage extension for general improvements, as well as to allow integration with the VisualEditor extension.

  • Student: Aarti Dwivedi
  • Mentors: Tpt and Zaran
  • Outcome: Extension was successfully modified. Several bugs were later found after a deployment to WMF sites, and fixed by Tpt; a testing suite for ProofreadPage would be helpful.

Section handling in Semantic Forms

Add the ability to edit/handle page sections to both the Semantic Forms and Page Schemas extensions.

  • Student: Himeshi De Silva
  • Mentor: Yaron Koren
  • Outcome: This capability was added to both extensions, and was released in version 2.6 of Semantic Forms and version 0.4 of Page Schemas.

UploadWizard: Book upload customization

Modify the Extension:UploadWizard extension to allow for uploading books, and book metadata, for use on Wikisource.

VisualEditor Mathematical Equations Plugin

Create a plugin for the VisualEditor extension to allow for viewing and editing mathematical equations.

  • Student: Jiabao Wu
  • Mentors: Peter Krautzberger and Roan Kattouw
  • Outcome: Project was not completed.

VisualEditor plugin for source code editing (SyntaxHighlight GeSHi support)

Create a plugin for the VisualEditor extension to allow for editing source code, based on the formatting done by the SyntaxHighlight GeSHi extension.

  • Student: Tongbo Sui
  • Mentors: Trevor Parscal and James Forrester
  • Outcome: A new "syntaxhighlight" module was successfully added to the VisualEditor extension.
  • Relevant links: project proposal

VisualEditor RTL support

Improve support in the VisualEditor extension for right-to-left languages.

  • Student: Moriel Schottlender
  • Mentors: Amir E. Aharoni and Inez Korczynski
  • Status: A large number of RTL-related bugs were fixed. A VisualEditor language selector/inspector was created. An RTL-capable TemplateData editor was created as both a gadget on the Hebrew Wikipedia and a patch to the TemplateData extension, which was merged a few months later.
  • Relevant links: project task

Wikidata Entity Suggester

Allow for suggesting new properties, as well as values for properties, to editors on Wikidata.

  • Student: Nilesh Chakraborty
  • Mentors: Daniel Kinzler, Denny Vrandečić
  • Status: The WikidataEntitySuggester extension was created; it became unmaintained and was eventually replaced by the PropertySuggester extension.

Wikidata language fallback and conversion

Add language fallback handling (in case data isn't available in the user's own language) to the Wikibase extension, for use on Wikidata.

  • Student: Liangent
  • Mentors: Denny Vrandečić and Katie Filbert
  • Outcome: A large number of changes were made to Wikibase and over 30 merged. The overall project was not completed at the time; it was finally completed in 2014.

ZIM incremental updates for Kiwix

Allow for incremental updates of Wikipedia's content, in ZIM format, to enable much faster transfer to the Kiwix offline reader.

  • Student: Kiran Mathew Koshy
  • Mentors: Emmanuel Engelhart and Tommi Mäkitalo
  • Status: Two scripts, zimdiff and zimpatch, were added to the OpenZIM code and are in use by Kiwix devs. Integration into Kiwix was not completed.
  • Relevant links: project task, main commit

2012

Of about 41 applications that were worth considering;[1] the following were accepted:

Convention Extension

Create an extension, ConventionExtension, to enable MediaWiki to serve as a conference management system.

  • Student: Akshay Chugh
  • Mentor: Jure Kajzer
  • Outcome: ConventionExtension was at "beta" status, then later was abandoned.

Green SMW

Make changes to the Semantic MediaWiki extension's storage and caching system to make it more efficient, and thus more "green".

  • Student: Nischay Nahata
  • Mentors: Jeroen De Dauw and Markus Krötzsch
  • Outcome: This project formed the basis of the new database structure for Semantic MediaWiki, SMWSQLStore3, which first appeared in SMW 1.8, released in December 2012. Nischay remains an active SMW contributor, and also does code review and bug fixing for the WMF.

Improvements to OpenStackManager

Upgrade the OpenStackManager extension to support the new OpenStack API.

  • Student: Suhas Rao
  • Mentor: Ryan Lane
  • Outcome: Project failed and did not produce any code.

Incubator improvements and language support

Improve the usability, performance and language coverage of the WikimediaIncubator extension, used on the site Wikimedia Incubator.

  • Student: Robin Pepermans
  • Mentor: Niklas Laxström
  • Outcome: Project was partly completed. Robin was already a MediaWiki contributor before the project (he is the author of WikimediaIncubator).

Integration of Flickr and Geolocation in Upload Wizard

Improve the UploadWizard extension in two ways: allow for easy transfer of images from the website Flickr, and allow users to select a coordinate location for photos using a clickable map interface.

  • Student: Ankur Anand
  • Mentor: Ryan Kaldari
  • Outcome: Code was created for the two new features, and put into two Git branches: flickr (which was merged into UploadWizard trunk and deployed), and geo (which was not merged).

Realtime collaboration on VisualEditor

Enable the VisualEditor extension to be used for realtime collaboration, where users' edits propagate immediately to other users' screens, in the manner of Etherpad and Google Docs.

  • Student: Ashish Dubey
  • Mentor: Trevor Parscal
  • Outcome: A basic version of this feature was created, which allows for a single editor to make changes, which other users can then see immediately. This functionality was not integrated into VisualEditor.

TranslateSvg

Original name: "TranslateSvg: Bringing the translation revolution to Wikimedia Commons". Create the TranslateSvg extension, which will allow users to translate the text within uploaded SVG files into different languages, via the wiki.

  • Student: Harry Burt
  • Mentor: Max Semenik (Niklas Laxström helped out unofficially)
  • Outcome: Extension was created but not completed.

Watchlist grouping and workflow improvements

Create a system for grouping pages, so that users can watch all the pages within a single group without having to add each one individually to their watchlist.

  • Student: Aaron Pramana
  • Mentor: Alex Emsenhuber
  • Outcome: Only the back end of the system was finished.

Wikimedia Commons mass upload tool

Original name: "Application for mass uploading files to Wikimedia Commons on upload campaigns". A desktop application for doing mass uploads of photos.

  • Student: Platonides
  • Mentor: Sumana Harihareswara
  • Outcome: Student did not have enough time, due to his other MediaWiki development-related work, and the project was not completed beyond a prototype.

2011

Approximately 24 serious proposals were submitted,[1] out of which the following were accepted:

Archival for Web References/Citations

Facilitate the archival of external links used as references in the English Wikipedia, to prevent "link rot" for pages that go offline. This was implemented as the ArchiveLinks extension.

  • Student: Kevin Brown
  • Mentor: Neil Kandalgaonkar
  • Outcome: A working interface, and a protocol for feeding new links to partners like the Internet Archive, were created, but the extension was not completed. The ArchiveLinks extension was at "experimental" status, then abandoned.
  • Relevant links: work log

Customization of Gadgets

Original name: "AMICUS: Awesome Monolithic Infrastructure for Customization of User Scripts". Allow gadgets, defined within the Gadgets extension, to be made customizable per wiki using settings variables.

  • Student: Salvatore Ingala
  • Mentors: Brion Vibber and Max Semenik
  • Outcome: Code remained in a separate branch, and was never merged into the Gadgets extension.
  • Relevant links: project notes

Extension Release Management

Implement an extension management platform for MediaWiki, based on the first half of the 2010 GSoC project "Extension management platform", i.e. the Distribution extension.

  • Student: Aigerim Karabekova
  • Mentors: Sam Reed, Priyanka Dhanda, and Chad Horohoe
  • Outcome: Cancelled due to student's personal problems, including health issues.

Original title: "Improving Semantic Search/Semantic Query usability issues in SMW". Project to make the "Special:Ask" page in Semantic MediaWiki more user-friendly.

  • Student: Devayon Das
  • Mentor: Markus Krötzsch
  • Outcome: The code was created and added to Semantic MediaWiki as an optional feature that can be enabled by a configuration setting. Issues remained with the code, however, and the feature was later removed.

Offline article selection

Original title: "Making Offline Wikipedia Article Selection Easier with MediaWiki Extensions". Create an extension to allow export of Wikipedia articles into offline collections, meant to replace the WP 1.0 bot.

  • Student: Yuvi Panda
  • Mentor: Arthur Richards
  • Outcome: The SelectionSifter extension was created, but went unused and was abandoned. However, Yuvi Panda later worked as a contractor for the Wikimedia Foundation, working mostly on mobile development.

Page Schemas

Original title: "Semantic Schemas extension". Project to create the Page Schemas extension, to define data structure for wiki pages, mostly meant to be used with the Semantic MediaWiki extension.

  • Student: Ankit Garg
  • Mentor: Yaron Koren
  • Outcome: A preliminary version of Page Schemas was created successfully; it was later modified significantly by Yaron. The extension is currently in active use.

Signup API

Original name: "Account Creation, Login Screens and AJAX-ification of everything". Implement the Account creation proposal, which would allow for Ajax-based login. This was implemented as the SignupAPI extension.

  • Student: Akshay Agarwal
  • Mentor: Brandon Harris
  • Outcome: The SignupAPI extension was at "experimental" status, and was then abandoned. Some of Akshay's commits received code critique and required improvements (more information). The Editor Engagement team was at one point interested in reusing some of SignupAPI in a new project, though this did not occur.

SocialProfile extension – UserStatus feature

Add the ability for users to set their current status, and track each others' statuses, in the SocialProfile extension.

  • Student: Yevheniy Vlasenko
  • Mentor: Jack Phoenix
  • Outcome: Feature was added successfully, but was then removed in 2013.

2010

For the official list with links to the proposals, go here.

Extension management platform

"Creating an awesome extension management platform for MediaWiki, facilitating the installation, updating, removal and configuration of extensions."

See Deployment for overview - project resulted in two new extensions, Distribution and Deployment.

  • Student: Jeroen De Dauw
  • Mentor: Brion Vibber
  • Outcome: Extensions took longer than expected, and remained uncompleted at the end of the term. The WMF decided not to fund additional development on these extensions, but there is still interest within the WMF to get this functionality working.

Improve metadata support

Improve metadata support for uploaded media in MediaWiki by displaying embedded IPTC and XMP metadata.

  • Student: Brian Wolff
  • Mentor: Chad Horohoe
  • Outcome: Code was initially added to the img_metadata branch, and then merged into trunk in r86169, which became part of MediaWiki 1.18. Brian has continued to work actively on MediaWiki, on core and extensions.

Interwiki template transclusion

The aim is to allow MediaWiki users to insert (transclude) templates from one wiki to another on Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) wikis (Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, etc.). (See feature proposal.)

  • Student: Peter Potrowl
  • Mentor: Roan Kattouw
  • Outcome: Code was initially added to the iwtransclusion branch, and a prototype was created. Branch was merged into trunk in r95396 and then demerged. There was a plan to re-merge the code into trunk in March 2012, but this was abandoned in April 2012.

Javascript overhaul of Semantic MediaWiki

"Improve and extend the Javascript for Semantic MediaWiki and some of its spinoff extensions, most notably Semantic Forms - this would include transferring over much of the Javascript to use the jQuery library, which is now becoming a MediaWiki standard."

  • Student: Sanyam Goyal
  • Mentor: Yaron Koren
  • Outcome: Work was completed as specified, and five extensions (Semantic MediaWiki, Semantic Forms, Semantic Forms Inputs, Semantic Drilldown, Semantic Result Formats) had their Javascript improved, and modified to use jQuery where appropriate.

RDFIO

Project to create the RDFIO extension. (Original project name: "General RDF export/import in Semantic MediaWiki").

  • Student: Samuel Lampa
  • Mentor: Denny Vrandečić
  • Outcome: The RDFIO extension was in active use for around a year, then stopped being maintained in 2011, then became maintained again in 2012. It is currently at "beta" status.

Create a tool to format judicial decisions, legal scholarship, and statutes for Wikisource.

  • Student: Stephen Laporte
  • Mentor: Ariel Glenn
  • Outcome: Formatted U.S. Supreme Court opinions are being imported to Wikisource by BenchBot. Stephen Laporte currently works for the Wikimedia Foundation as a lawyer.

2009

For the official list with links to the proposals, go here.

Maps and Semantic Maps

Project to create the Maps and Semantic Maps extensions (original project name: "Semantic Layers Extension").

  • Student: Jeroen De Dauw
  • Mentor: Yaron Koren
  • Outcome: In 2017 Semantic Maps was made obsolete, and its features were merged into the Maps extension. The Maps extension is in use on over 1,000 sites, and remains under active development. Jeroen is still very active in the community, and has been a contractor for the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland.

MwEmbed

"Doog - The New Cortado Applet" - improvements to MwEmbed.

  • Student: Gerardo Cabero
  • Mentor: Michael Dale
  • Outcome: Applet was not successfully implemented.

Translation

"Turning MediaWiki into an efficient localization platform" - improvements to the Translate extension.

See Nikerabbit's GSoC 2009 wrapup blog post.

  • Student: Niklas Laxström (Nikerabbit)
  • Mentor: Siebrand Mazeland
  • Outcome: In active use on translatewiki.net and dozens other wikis. Niklas Laxström was active in the community before and after this project, and currently works for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Image rendering daemon

Was written in Python and designed to handle asynchronous image rendering requests.

"This is a proposal to fix the MediaWiki bug #4854, implementing a daemon program to render and resize images uploaded by Wikipedia users. Separating the image manipulating work from the MediaWiki application will greatly alleviate application server's load, thus improve the overall performance. The API will be designed as general as possible to accommodate the needs of other applications that also render and resize images in large quantity."
  • Student: Zhe Wu
  • Mentor: Aryeh Gregor (Simetrical)
  • Notes: Proposal was very well written, programmer obviously knew what he was doing. Major issues:
    • Was being developed on another repository. Should have been in SVN with everything else.
    • Mentored by an accomplished developer, but someone who had little interest in the subject matter
    • While the proposal was very well written, it wasn't developed with Wikimedia operations in mind. Their wants/needs should've been solicited and probably consulted during the process as well.
  • Outcome: Final status email. Since it was developed off-site, it never really received much input. It appears that none of the code was ever looked at by anyone in operations for potential deployment on WMF.

2008

WebDAV

"I am working on an extension which provides a WebDAV / DeltaV / Subversion interface to MediaWiki articles: WebDAV"

"The extension enables articles to be browsed and edited with WebDAV or Subversion clients. When complete, it will support editing articles offline, using for example the Subclipse Eclipse IDE plugin or Emacs VC mode."

  • Student: Jack Bates
  • Mentor: ?
  • Outcome: The WebDAV extension became unmaintained soon after its creation, but was then resurrected in 2019.

Visual Diff

Visual diffs/2008 project - A system to provide more visually intuitive diffs, rather than lines added/removed.

  • Student: Guy Van den Broeck
  • Mentor: Brion Vibber
  • Notes: Brion was always busy, so Guy asked a lot of questions in #mediawiki.
  • Outcome: Had lots of outstanding issues - i18n, style, etc. Was a part of two releases, 1.14 and 1.15, in which it was disabled by default. Removed from trunk in r58267, and was not in 1.16 or subsequent releases. The code was used, however, as the basis for htmldiff, a non-MediaWiki PHP library that displays diffs of HTML snippets.



Special mention should also be made of another MediaWiki-related project done in 2008, but by Creative Commons and not the Wikimedia Foundation: a project to add RDFa support to Semantic MediaWiki. David McCabe was the student and Nathan Kinkade was the mentor. The code created is no longer in use.

2007

Audio/video file recoding

The proposal: "Audio and video can instruct and inform in ways unattainable by words and still images. Currently, audio and video have only limited support and are often cumbersome to access in MediaWiki and the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. This project seeks to allow Wikimedia's sites to more effectively leverage the power of audio and video resources. To achieve this, a reliable and expandable system is proposed to automatically recode contributions from numerous digital a/v formats to a single, royalty and patent free compression standard. With the ability to generate such a library, Wikimedia would be poised to easily present a vast range of audio and video to their visitors using an in-browser streaming player."

Project blog: http://mikeswikidev.wordpress.com/

  • Student: Mike Baynton
  • Mentor: Brion Vibber
  • Outcome: Code appears to have been unused by the WMF.

2006

LiquidThreads

"Add support for structured discussion pages. Option for discussion pages to be more like message boards with threads. Current discussion format is less than ideal (can modify others' comments, cluttered editing window, etc). This could also include support for embedding polls in discussion pages, voting on proposals, etc. Basically, create a minimal message board system that is tailored for use in a wiki environment (see LiquidThreads [this is a link to the page as it existed then] for some ideas in that direction)."

  • Student: David McCabe
  • Mentor: Erik Möller (?)
  • Outcome: This project created the first version of the LiquidThreads extension. David was temporarily re-hired by the WMF in 2008 to maintain and improve the extension. LiquidThreads was almost entirely rewritten (by Andrew Garrett) in 2010, before being abandoned in 2013.
  • Relevant links: project blog

Video display

No-install, in-browser display of video (and audio?) clips for Wikimedia Commons, using reasonably common Java and/or Flash components. Needs to be able to 1) play or transparently pre-convert Ogg Theora videos, 2) avoid use of patent-encumbered formats. Consider integration of Fluendo's Cortado player applet as a starting point.

Brion's talk suggested that this project would also involve creating thumbnails for video clips.

  • Student: Michael Dale
  • Mentor: Brion Vibber
  • Outcome: Michael Dale went on to work on other MediaWiki video efforts (metavid, which eventually turned into mwEmbed and finally into TimedMediaHandler, which is in testing and review before WMF deployment). Tim Starling did the final integration of the Cortado applet and Ogg parsing as part of the OggHandler extension, which currently supports video functionality on Wikimedia Commons. Michael Dale came back to work with the Foundation in late 2008 on a few different projects with support from Kaltura, mentored a student in 2009, and is still active in developing Wikimedia technologies.

Footnote

  1. 1 2 "Worth considering" here means excluding the proposals that were spam, very very vague, or directly copied and pasted from our onwiki ideas list.
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