Hi,
It's likely many of you have heard of or even participated in the Picture of the Year contest. Every year, the Wikimedia community votes for a picture of the year from the pool of images promoted to featured picture status in the previous year on the Wikimedia Commons. This typically occurs in late spring; last year's contest took place in May and was a huge success.
This year, we're looking to improve the operation of the contest. In the past, with the notable exception of a community-developed JavaScript interface, the galleries, voting, and counting has been done manually. This hurts the efficiency of the contest significantly, as these somewhat tedious tasks will be repeated year after year.
It would be really wonderful if we could get a couple of developers to put an extension together. I've searched fairly extensively for something that would be sufficient for our needs and I've come to the conclusion that building such an extension would be the most future-proof and efficient way to accomplish the task.
I considered using a Toolserver-based system, but authenticating users in a SecurePoll-like way on a large scale would be difficult. (It's possible that some parts of the SecurePoll code could be used for this.) The functionality needs for the extension include: *a front-end voting gallery where users can vote while logged in with a SUL account on Commons *an administration panel to manage the front-end galleries, including account verification requirements, dates, and statistics *a user right for committee members to access the interface
This is certainly a "project," but it could be used for every POTY contest, perhaps some other contests, and it doesn't have to be elaborate. However, as I said, it would be really great if we could get just a couple people who have some experience developing MediaWiki extensions to help program this in time for this year's contest.
If anyone is interested in helping out or would like some more information, please contact me as soon as possible - anything helps!
Thanks, User:Mono