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Wikimedia Students Share their Knowledge this Summer

Friday, November 16, 2012





This year the Wikimedia Foundation selected nine students to work on new features and specific improvements to the software for Google Summer of Code. The students were mentored by experienced developers who helped them become part of the development community and helped guide their code development.

Congratulations to the eight students who made it through the summer of 2012, our seventh year participating in Google Summer of Code. The students all accomplished a great deal, and many of them are working to improve their projects to benefit the Wikimedia community beyond the initial goals of their summer project.



  • Ankur Anand worked on integrating Flickr upload and geolocation into UploadWizard. Ankur made it easier for Wikimedia contributors to contribute media files and metadata. You can read his wrap-up as we anticipate the merge of his code into the main UploadWizard codebase.
  • Harry Burt worked on TranslateSvg (“Bringing the translation revolution to Wikimedia Commons”). When his work is complete and deployed, we will more easily be able to use a single picture or animation in different language wikis. See this image of the anatomy of a human kidney, for example; it has a description in eight languages, so it benefits multiple language Wikipedias (e.g., Spanish and Russian). Harry aims to allow contributors to localize the text embedded within vector files (SVGs); you can watch a demo video, try out the test site, or just read Harry’s wrap-up post
  • Akshay Chugh worked on a convention/conference extension for MediaWiki. Wikimedia conferences like Wikimania often use MediaWiki to help organize their conferences, but it takes a lot of custom programming. Akshay created the beta of an extension that a webmaster could install to provide conference-related features automatically. See his wrap-up post.
  • Ashish Dubey worked on real time collaboration in the upcoming Visual Editor (you may have seen “real-time collaborative editing” in tools like Etherpad and Google Docs). Ashish has implemented a collaboration server and other features (see his wrap-up post) and has achieved real-time “spectation,” in which readers can see an editor’s changes in real time. 

Ashish is working on the architecture that will support real-time collaboration.

As further progress happens, we’ll update our page about past Google Summer of Code students. Congratulations again to the students and their mentors. And thanks to volunteer Greg Varnum, who helped me administer this year’s Google Summer of Code, and to all the staffers and volunteers who helped students learn our ways.

By Sumana Harihareswara, Engineering Community Manager and Organization Administrator for Wikimedia Foundation

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