Thank you to Sumana for all your hard work, including GSoC administration and much, much more -- and obviously for starting this thread. This is exactly the kind of positive community spirit we need!
Also thanks to the admin tools development team (Chris Steipp, Tim Starling, James Alexander, Guillaume Paumier) for all writing much needed new tools and making sure that they work and that communication between the team and the rest of the world happens. :-) Also thanks to Rob Lanphier for giving me the opportunity to act as the Product Manager for the admin tools development project, despite the fact that I lacked previous experience in the field.
MZMcBride definitely deserves to be thanked for saying out loud a lot of difficult and potentially controversial things, on-wiki as well as on various different mailing lists. It's important that the community has critical members who dare to question the current state of things, as well as the future direction of things and the reasoning behind those.
The above names are in no particular order and a lot of people who have worked on, are working on and plan to work on MediaWiki deserve a lot more praise than what they've gotten so far. So, thanks to everyone who ever has worked with MediaWiki in some way (not necessarily in software development) -- you folks make the Internet not suck.
Thanks and regards, -- Jack Phoenix MediaWiki developer