Hi, long email but only for GSoC mentors and curious minds alike.
WARNING: GSoC & common sense requires absolute confidentiality about
discussions or resolutions of candidates. You can't share any
confidential information, no matter how evident it looks to you or how
well you get along with a student or anybody without mentor / org admin
access to Wikimedia GSoC. Google forbids explicitly any leakage of
information before they publish officially the results on May 27.
We can and we must discuss publicly our selection process, though.
Ideally GSoC mentors would have a private call and discuss until
deciding on a ranking of candidates. But with 38 people in different
timezones, 47 proposals and ? slots this clearly won't work.
Some organizations resolve this situation with votes, but I don't think
this is a good solution in our context and the Wikimedia community
favors consensus over voting anyway.
Your distributed feedback on essential/desirable features has been very
useful to make a first decision. Let's try a second round of distributed
feedback to solve the clear cases:
If you would be the only one deciding, how would you rank the proposals
received (see the list below)? Please send me a PRIVATE email (not to
this list!) with your ranking of features, ideally before the end of
tomorrow Tuesday.
* Read
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Selection_process
(just updated) and act accordingly.
* Rank at least the projects you would prioritize before the one(s) you
want to mentor. All the better if you rank more. Don't rank based on the
title alone. All proposals have mentors feedback by now.
* No need to decide on specific candidates for the features you are not
mentoring. It is enough to rank "Feature X", without you having to
decide which of the students proposing Feature X should be selected.
* But you do need to specify which student you select for the 1-2
projects you are co-mentoring. Agree the names with your co-mentors. You
can't be in more than 2 projects, and ideally in just one.
Mentors are free to skip the ranking game and go directly for the call.
In that case their proposals will be ranked based on the feedback from
the rest of us.
I will consolidate sensibly all this feedback on Wednesday, in a private
document shared with the mentors. Hopefully some proposals will be clear
candidates to be accepted or declined. Then we will also know how many
slots we are getting from Google, and we can focus the discussion in one
call or more with the mentors of the unclear cases.
Should work. We'll see.
The list of projects to rank:
* Android app for MediaWiki translation
* Auto suggestion of categories
* Automatic category redirects
* Bayesan Spam Filter
* Centralized Search Engine
* Contribute to Wikimedia
* Curriculum Wiki
* Entity Suggester for Wikidata
* Improve support for book structures
* Improvement of glossary tools
* Incremental data dumps
* Incremental updates for Kiwix
* Internationalization and Right-To-Left Support in VisualEditor
* jQuery.IME extensions for Firefox and Chrome
* jQuery.IME next big release improvements
* Language Coverage Matrix Dashboard
* MediaWiki API 2.0
* MediaWiki-Moodle extension
* Mobilize Wikidata
* Pronunciation Recording Extension
* Prototyping inline comments
* Refactoring of Proofread Page extension
* Section handling in Semantic Forms
* UploadWizard: Book upload customization
* VisualEditor Math Equation Plugin
* VisualEditor plugin for source code editing
* VisualEditor plugins
* Wikidata features
* Wikidata language fallback and conversion
* Wikipedia - My Encyclopedia
--
Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil