Hi! I'm a student currently pursuing a MSc in Data Science and I've been thinking of applying to GSoC with Wikimedia this year. For over a year now I've been a system admin of a medium-sized wiki, I wrote a couple extensions (you can find them here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Ostrzyciel) and some patches to core. By being a sysadmin of a wiki I watch its performance closely and over time I've discovered the single thing that slowed down the wiki the most was InstantCommons. It turns out the ForeignApiRepo code is fine for a few pages with little images, but once your wiki starts using Commons imagery a lot, things get ugly, quick. Like parsing-a-page-takes-2-minutes-ugly. Or the whole wiki can collapse if Commons isn't responding for some reason. I think improving this would kind of correlate with Wikimedia's mission of hosting the most accessible free media repository in the world :) I really wish more people could use Commons extensively, and that would certainly help it. I did some research into that topic and came up with a few solutions, but I am by no means an expert in MW architecture, I would be grateful if I received some help from people familiar with Parsoid and the action API. You can find a more detailed explanation here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T247406 I am also looking for mentors for this project :)
Thank you! Ostrzyciel