Hey Sagie,
Indeed, thanks for your interest in doing a MediaWiki GSoC project!
Benedikt already said a bit about in-line editing for MW/SMW. It started out as a research project, but last months there has been some real progress to make it into a usable extension, eventually (hopefully ;)) to be deployed on major wikis. This has been done by myself in close collaboration with Greek researchers from GRNET, who are currently doing usability testing with the latest interface.
Next few months I'll be working for WMF as a contractor, which means that hopefully I can work a bit on the InlineEditor extension, but obviously other things have to be done too. Therefore, it would be cool to continue development of the extension as a GSoC project, and I'd be happy to mentor you if you'd choose this project.
One of the things that has to be done, is to make sure the editor works fine on the majority of pages: we can even set a quantitative metric for this (e.g. 99% or something). The long term approach for this is the development of a new parser, which is one of the things WMF will be working at. A more short term option is to develop a bit more along the lines of the matching framework currently used in the InlineEditor extension. This means you can work on "conservative" matching of wikitext structures, multi-language sentence boundary disambiguation, detection of incorrect matching of elements (e.g. by detecting misnesting); which all has to be done in a performant and secure matter. Seems like interesting stuff for a CS and linguistics student! :)
Other things might include building specialised interfaces for e.g. templates, media and references; calculating robustness metrics to see if we can make this 99%; and making the extension production-ready by integrating the current functions such as conflict resolving.
SMW is not really my expertise, so if you want to involve that in your project as well we should find another mentor who can assist in that matter.
I hope this gives you a good picture of what working on in-line editing might look like. Please ask if you want to know more about it!
Cheers, Jan Paul
On 25-Mar-2011, at 10:37, Sagie Maoz wrote:
Hi guys,
My name is Sagie, I'm a first-year CS and linguistics student at Tel-Aviv University. I'm applying for GSoC this summer and wanted to introduce myself. I actually talked with some of you on #mediawiki last night, under the handle "n0nick".
I've been a professional web developer for 6 years, mostly done PHP work. I'm fairly familiar with web & wiki frameworks in general, and have had some (short) experience with MediaWiki.
I'd like to read your thoughts on the following projects I had my eyes on:
- Inline Editing extension for MW/SMW
Sounds like a very interesting and useful project to work on, and seems to me it fits the timeframe. I saw that there's been a lot of work done already for this task by user janpaul123, and was wondering what's the status of this project and how I can help with making this a possible GSoC project.
- Sidebar/toolbar customization GUI
I understand there's overhaul work being done on element skin systems, but I talked with Dantman about the sidebar customization and from what I understand, it's possible to take this project as long as my work is abstract (and good) enough. Anyone has other thoughts on this? Should I perhaps avoid working on something that might interfere with current developers work?
- Email notifications
Again, I see in the wiki page that some work has been done on this, and testing and bugfixing is required. Do you think it could be a suitable summer project?
Would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks,
-- Your friend in time, Sagie Maoz sagie@maoz.info // +1 (347) 556.5044 // +972 (52) 834-3339 http://sagie.maoz.info/ http://n0nick.net/
/* simba says roar! */
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