Yesterday, the selection of GSoC projects was officially announced. For MediaWiki, the following projects have been accepted:
* Niklas Laxström (Nikerabbit), mentored by Siebrand, will be working on improving localization and internationalization in MediaWiki, as well as improving the Translate extension used on translatewiki.net * Zhe Wu, mentored by Aryeh Gregor (Simetrical), will be building a thumbnailing daemon, so image manipulation won't have to happen on the Apache servers any more * Jeroen de Dauw, mentored by Yaron Koren, will be improving the Semantic Layers extension and merging it into the Semantic Google Maps extension * Gerardo Antonio Cabero, mentored by Michael Dale (mdale), will be improving the Cortado applet for video playback (I'm a bit fuzzy on the details for this one)
The official list with links to (parts of) the proposals can be found at the Google website [1]; lists for other organizations can be reached through the list of participating organizations [2].
The next event on the GSoC timeline [3] is the community bonding period [4], during which the students are supposed to get to know their mentors and the community. This period lasts until May 23rd, when the students actually begin coding.
Starting now and continuing at least until the end of GSoC in August, you will probably see and hear from the students on IRC and the mailing lists and hear about the projects they're working on. To repeat the crux of an earlier thread on this list [5]: be nice to these special newcomers, make them feel welcome and comfortable, and try not to bite them :)
To the mentors and students: have fun!
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
[1] http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/wikimedia [2] http://socghop.appspot.com/program/accepted_orgs/google/gsoc2009 [3] http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/program/google/gsoc2009/timeline [4] http://googlesummerofcode.blogspot.com/2007/04/so-what-is-this-community-bon... [5] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-March/041964.html