Thanks Sumana for posting the summary voluntarily, was good to read them. At the risk of sounding foolish comparing content creation and software development, I have few questions. Feel free to ignore them if they are foolish ones :)

1. Do students come up with own project proposals / take up community's ideas and work on them. Whats the level of motivation / ownership between the two. I am asking this just to compare GEP's model of asking students to write on designated topics and if it has an impact on motivation.

2. What factors do you think make students to continue contributing to the opensource community?

3. How crucial is the role of mentors in it. Who are the mentors usually(WMF staff / community members?), how do they join as mentors?. I am asking this particularly since I see mentors' involvement among reasons for failure.

You need not restrict to mediawiki as org, can you share your experiences from opensource world too.