Re: [Wikitech-l] Guidance for the Project Idea for GSOC 2014

Hello, Devender, and thank you for being interested in open source and in Wikimedia! Are you proposing to do this for *Wikipedia* specifically, or just as a MediaWiki extension that any MediaWiki installation might choose to install? If you want to do this to Wikipedia, then I think you haven't thought enough about this: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013#Your_project "MediaWiki != Wikipedia: YES to generic MediaWiki projects. YES to projects already backed by a Wikimedia community. NO to projects requiring Wikipedia to be convinced." What you are proposing would require that you persuade the Wikipedia community that it is a good idea. In our experience, one summer is not long enough for you to do that and build it as well. If you want to change the experience for ALL of the users of all the Wikimedia sites, you need a lot of time for community discussion and design. Let me give you some examples. Good: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2014#UniversalLanguageSelecto… see that this is an idea for an improvement to the software that simply improves an existing experience. So that's fine. Bad: "my idea is to change English Wikipedia so that instead of a main page full of text, the main page is an interactive video/animation that autoplays." (I, Sumana, made this up.) That idea is a bad fit for several reasons, but the thing I would want to concentrate on here, Devender, is that this video idea would require that the proposer negotiate with the English Wikipedia community to get them to accept her idea and change the way they do things. For Google Summer of Code/OPW projects, it just seems like a bad idea -- it doesn't seem like there would be enough time for that kind of consultation and negotiation. It's reasonable for large, long-term projects (like the VisualEditor or Flow or mobile editing/uploading) to have these kinds of conversations, to work with the wiki communities to rearrange workflow, or the basic way edits are displayed, or something like that. For Google Summer of Code/OPW projects, it just seems like a bad idea -- it doesn't seem like there would be enough time for that kind of consultation and negotiation. So, how can you get an idea that's good, and that makes it easier for people to understand the quality of Wikipedia edits and Wikipedia edit history, but that you can do in three months? If you are interested in that, I suggest that you take a look at the existing projects at WMF analytics https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics , and the existing work by researchers who care about this topic. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research That should give you some ideas. Thanks again! Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 3:02 AM, Devender <dev.iitkgp.cse(a)gmail.com> wrote: