WikiPatrika/2011-06/Tech News

4 Indian selected for Google Summer of Code 2011 to work on the Mediawiki project

Out of the 8 students selected for Google Summer of Code 2011 for the Mediawiki project, 4 students are from India. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that matches students up with open source, free software and technology-related organizations to write code and get paid to do it. The organizations provide mentors who act as guides through the entire process, from learning about the community to contributing code. The idea is to get students involved in and familiar with the open source community and help them to put their summer break to good use. These are the Mediawiki projects chosen:

• Akshay Agarwal‘s “Account Creation, Login Screens and AJAX-ification of everything” (mentor: Brandon Harris)
• Kevin Brown’s “Working Archival for Web References/Citations,” “to facilitate the archival of external links used as references in the English Wikipedia” (mentor: Neil Kandalgaonkar)
• Devayon Das‘s “Improving Semantic Search/Semantic Query usability issues in SMW” (mentor: Markus Krötzsch)
• Ankit Garg‘s “Semantic Schemas extension” (mentor: Yaron Koren)
• Salvatore Ingala‘s “AMICUS: Awesome Monolithic Infrastructure for Customization of User Scripts” (mentors: Brion Vibber and Max Semenik)
• Aigerim Karabekova‘s “Extension Release Management” (mentors: Sam Reed, Priyanka Dhanda, and Chad Horohoe)
• Yuvi Panda‘s “Making Offline Wikipedia Article Selection Easier with Mediawiki Extensions” (mentor: Arthur Richards)
• Zhenya Vlasyenko‘s “MediaWiki Extension: SocialProfile – UserStatus feature” (mentor: Jack Phoenix)

Mediawiki Berlin Hackathon

For the third time, Wikimedia Deutschland organized a “hackathon”, a coding event where developers work together to improve MediaWiki software and the technological platform for Wikipedia. The event happened between May 13 and 15th at the Betahaus, a coworking and social space in Berlin. Two other groups of Wikimedians met in parallel with the event : Wiki loves Monuments enthusiasts, and the Language Committee. Work at the hackathon focused on improvements in MediaWiki’s text editor, development tools, improvements in the parser, mobile apps, and bug fixing.

Wikimedia Commons crosses 1 Crore (10 million) media files

Wikimedia Commons – the library of images, sound files, and videos that constitutes an integral component of Wikipedia’s user experience – has logged its 10,000,000th file. All files on Wikimedia Commons can be used for any purpose, including commercial use, under terms consistent with the Definition of Free Cultural Works. This, together with its educational focus, makes Wikimedia Commons a media repository unlike any other.

UploadWizard becomes the default upload tool

UploadWizard is an extension that provides a multi-file, step-by-step JavaScript wizard to upload multimedia files to a MediaWiki website. It was designed by Guillaume Paumier as part of the Multimedia usability project. The upload wizard offers a configurable & localizable license picker; it is also possible to abort uploads, and recover from errors. A built-in feedback form allows users to report bugs and issues directly.