Foundation successful in bid for larger Google subsidy

WMF to get up to 21 students under Summer of Code scheme

Analysis

Harry Burt

"Managing a body of 21 students represents an unprecedented challenge for the WMF, who have struggled to help previous students get their work deployed.

Nevertheless, if all the WMF achieves is that it retains half of the 21 students as volunteer developers, few will be disappointed with the final outcome. The Foundation, and the community at large, has very little to lose in that regard."

Harry (User:Jarry1250) has been the lead writer of the "Technology Report" since May 2011.

The Wikimedia Foundation will be receiving more than $100,000 worth of free developer time courtesy of internet giant Google, it was announced this week. The funds, allocated as part of Google's Summer of Code programme, will support up to 21 student developers through three months of coding time.

As long-time readers of the Signpost will recognise, the figure of 21 is considerably greater than the number of placements Google has offered to fund in previous years (one to eight seats in each of the seven past years participating) and it is not entirely clear why it has now decided to allocate the Wikimedia Foundation the full number of slots it requested. Students are being paired up with (normally but not exclusively staff) "mentors" to guide them through a development project related to MediaWiki and their proposals are being rated by those mentors. WMF will turn in the final selection to Google on May 24, and Google will announce student acceptances on May 27. At time of writing, 47 applications from a total of 69 originally received from students are thought to still be in the running for the 21 places available, although MediaWiki may choose to accept fewer than 21 students depending on the strength of their applications.

"And now, if you don't mind, I'll go get some sophisticated alcohol-free drink to celebrate", wrote Quim Gil, the Foundation's Technical Contributor Coordinator and primary liaison for the programme, thanking everyone involved for their efforts so far.

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.

Fallout continues following Echo deployment: The fallout from last week's deployment of the Echo notifications system to the English Wikipedia continued this week as a Request for Comment (RFC) asking for the orange "You have new messages" bar to be restored at least temporarily hit 125 supports. Despite only 29 opposes, the RFC has not received an official response, with the perceived inflexibility of the WMF management on the issue drawing angry responses from some commentators. At the end of the day, however, most editors who voiced an opinion suggested that the extension represented a "net positive" for WMF wikis despite its baptism of fire. Last week's change to the placement of the section [edit] links has also proved controversial, albeit to a lesser extent.

Foundation gains UX chief: The Wikimedia Foundation has hired a Director of User Experience ("UX"), it was announced this week. Following a five month search, it settled on Jared Zimmerman, formerly Autodesk's Principal Interaction Designer, to lead one of the Foundation's most rapidly expanding teams (wikitech-l mailing list).

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6 May 2013 (all comments)

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Hi all. I'm trialling a "Comment" box this week. It's been a running complaint for some time now (and not without merit) that I intermingle my thoughts and the "facts" of the situation too greatly, even without thinking about it. Given that (a) this tends to manifests itself when I have little time to write the report more carefully (b) I have a decreasing amount of time to write the report and (c) I'm going to be missing or contributing only minorly to significant numbers of issues in the near future due to RL changes, I thought it was high time I did something about this. My exact proposed solution is based on that employed by the BBC. I quite like it, but YMMV. Thoughts? - Jarry1250 ^{[Vacation needed]} 22:21, 7 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not bad, not bad at all. Getting other people (users, developers) to comment on the stories would be nice too for different issues. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 20:33, 8 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The title of the report kind of made me think that wmf was getting 100 grand towards its general engineering budget, which would be a bit different. Bawolff (talk) 18:06, 10 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It's more akin to, say, Google's contribution to the Wikidata project, but even more tied than that I guess. Still a whopping amount though! - Jarry1250 ^{[Vacation needed]} 20:52, 10 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

About "(normally but not exclusively staff)", the count of users mentors in GSoC 2013 shows 18 WMF employees, 3 WMDE and 16 "other" (Wikimedia / MediaWiki independent volunteers, WikiWorks, Wikia, Kiwix...) Let's see what the % will be once we know the projects approved. And I guess Google gave us the slots we requested because we all deserve their trust? I am impressed by the average quality of the project proposals as much as by the great response we have got from volunteering mentors. Thank you for reporting!--Qgil (talk) 22:11, 10 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Somebody PLEASE leave a link to the rfc for the orange bar, because I REALLY want to leave a piece of mind with the people who removed it (for all the good it won't do, I know, but it will make me feel better). TomStar81 (Talk) 06:45, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Never mind, I found it. Left a piece of my mind too :) TomStar81 (Talk) 06:51, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What a joke. $100K from Google, who are now making it look like Wikipedia article content is being served by their search engine. Should be $100M. Bloody thieves. --Surturz (talk) 00:41, 13 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

RfC for new-messages orange bar: The opinion poll about restoring the orange bar, for Have-new-messages, is under WT:Notifications, as thread:
WT:Notifications#Do_we_want_the_orange_bar?, most replied under WT:Notifications#Yes

The count on 21 May 2013, was: Yes 147 (80%), No 36 (20%), growing at the rate of 5 "yes" to each "no". -Wikid77 19:06, 21 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Notify urgency by color of message-bar: Another suggested design was to highlight ANI notices or important posts, such as by bar-color for URGENT, which might be a tag placed into a user-talk page, under each urgent message. Many people noted seeing a red number at username, but not on all old browsers. -Wikid77 19:06, 21 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps Google students could write software to spot important features to add: Many people complained that the orange-bar fiasco was due to out-of-touch decisions, about what features would really help writing the encyclopedia. For example, suppressing the orange-bar message, such as by customizing a tiny-font message style, might have been the total work needed about messages. Meanwhile, the remaining Edit-conflicts should be auto-corrected, such as simply append a 2nd reply after the 1st at the same line number, rather than enter "edit-conflict" mode. Edit-preview would be much easier if a 2nd <Show_Preview> button was also above the edit-buffer area. In fact, the edit-buffer could auto-shrink to a few lines when editing a short page, so editors would have less scrolling around short pages. Anyway, perhaps ask the Summer of Code students to prioritize valuable improvements to Wikipedia, and they might have some good ideas. -Wikid77 19:06, 21 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]