That's a lot! :) I wonder how many of them will proceed to code something useful and submit it. And how good will it be.
I wonder that too. :)
An issue I see with the challenge is that it encourages the cathedral model,* so we lose the opportunity of training them as they go (eg. point out how we do i18n).
Maybe Greg's mail should suggest them to ask for a quick review on #mediawiki (specially for projects which aren't completely independent). I pondered about the fairness of "helping" projects, but a) they could ask for help anyway in those channels, b) if the suggestion is broadcasted to all of them, they are in equal terms.
We do have the option of sending reminder emails to the entire set of contestants, so we can certainly re-emphasize the call to show up on IRC+mailinglist for help. My guess is that in many cases, contestants won't even know the right questions to ask -- if you don't even know you should be thinking about i18n/l10n, you won't think to ask if you're doing it right or wrong.
*This is common to (almost?) every competition, but I assume that the goal isn't as much getting the best cathedral by each one but engaging developers able to contribute to MediaWiki.
And this is a key difference. It's why we were very careful in our legal language to clarify that winners would be determined at WMF's sole discretion. Able participation is part of that discretion, and it's not a checkbox/scoreboard kind of thing; you know it when you see it. (Which points out a bit of a bug, actually: may not be trivial to relate the IRC nick back to the project. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess.)
--g