If you want to help us grow the MediaWiki developer community, there's a quick thing you can do today. You can give feedback to one of these three proposals:
* Automatic Taxobox Usability and Feature Enhancements - Have the automatic taxobox's main and most used features exposed as a GUI https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Baconprime/GSoC2012
* Grouping, a new UI for the watchlist page, and modifying the raw watchlist page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Blackjack48/GSOC_proposal_for_watchlist_...
* Revamping the watchlist structure to incorporate groups and shared watchlists https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Bagariavivek/GSoC_Application
Right now, none of these students has found a mentor who's enthusiastic about the proposal, so they're unlikely to be accepted into the summer program (Google Summer of Code). But if they improve their proposals by tomorrow (deadline) and can appeal to some mentors by the end of next week, their chances go up.
And maybe you can suggest to the two students who are interested in watchlists how they could decrease the overlap in their proposals.