Google Summer of Code/Administrators/Organization Application

Wikimedia mentoring organization application for Google Summer of Code 2019:

Organization profile

Public profile

1. Name - Wikimedia Foundation
2. Website URL - http://wikimediafoundation.org/
3. Tagline - Global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world
4. Logo - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Brand
5. Primary Open Source License - GPL 2.0
6. Organization Category - Web
7. Technology Tags - PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python
8. Topic Tags - Wikipedia, Wikimedia, MediaWiki, Semantic Web, i18n
9. Ideas List - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2019

Descriptions

1. Short Description - Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world through its various projects, local chapters, and support structures.
2. Long Description - Wikimedia strives to bring about a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge; through various projects, chapters, and the support structure of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia officially supports 13 projects, including Wikipedia, the seventh most popular site on the internet. Wikipedia receives over 20 billion global page views every month and is available in over 300 languages. The tech behind it ensures that our projects are fast, reliable, and open to all. We design and build the open-source technology that powers Wikimedia projects from hosting Wikipedia to creating edit-checking artificial intelligence (AI). Community volunteers and Foundation technologists collaborate on MediaWiki, which makes sharing free knowledge possible. Read more about Wikimedia on our homepage.

Proposals

1. Application Instructions - See Step 9 here.
2. Proposal Tags - google-summer-code (2019), outreach-programs-projects

Contact Methods

1. Chat - https://wikimedia.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/180873-gsoc19-outreachy18

Links

1. Twitter URL (optional) - https://twitter.com/Wikimedia
2. Blog URL (optional) - https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/

Organization application

Why does your org want to participate in Google Summer of Code?

Wikipedia is well known as an encyclopedia, but Wikimedia is less known as a free software project. Through outreach programs like GSoC, we attract new contributors. It is a great mentoring opportunity for our experienced developers to introduce newcomers to open source through our projects, make progress on new ideas that otherwise may be of a less priority for them, and in the overall process improve their professional development skills. For participants, this is an opportunity to work on real-world projects, build a portfolio, and possibly land a job of their choice. A diverse pool of candidates that GSOC brings help support Wikimedia’s efforts in different communities. Our participation in GSoC also helps us understand new developers experiences and help make improvements to our contribution guidelines and processes around attracting and retaining developers. All this brings meaningful impact to our community.

What would your organization consider to be a successful GSoC program?

All contributors successfully complete their project. 10% stay involved in our community post GSoC.

How many potential mentors have agreed to mentor this year?

6-10

How will you keep mentors engaged with their GSoC contributors?

One of our requirements for a project to get featured in GSoC is to have two mentors, with at least one of them with prior experience. All our mentors use various communication mediums for weekly check-ins and project-related discussions with participants.  Org administrators host kick-off meetings in the beginning, and stay in touch with participants throughout the program via Zulip.

How will you keep your GSoC contributors stay on schedule to complete their projects?

We promote relationship building between participants and mentors. We encourage them to avoid working in isolation and push for all project management in Phabricator (a task management tool we use at Wikimedia). We also require bi-weekly reports that help organization administrators learn about participants' progress.

How will you get your GSoC contributors involved in your community during GSoC?

We share with GSoC contributors some recommendations to get involved in our community, such as Google Summer of Code/Participants#Accepted participants

How will you keep GSoC contributors involved with your community after GSoC?

We keep betting on establishing personal connections with and beyond the mentors. We invite former GSoC contributors to participate as mentors or administrators in the future rounds of Google Code-in and GSoC, encourage them to take part in our international community events such as the developer summit, hackathon, etc. and promote some of the success stories and blog posts around completed projects in our community.

Has your org been accepted as a mentoring org in Google Summer of Code before?

Yes

Which years did your org participate in GSoC?

2006-2018

For each year your organization has participated, provide the counts of successful and total students. (e.g. 2016: 3/4)

Past four years of data:

2020: 14/14

2019: 11/12

2018: 12/12

2017: 7/8

If your org has applied for GSoC before but not been accepted, select the years:

None

If you are a new organization to GSoC, is there a Google employee or previously participating organization who will vouch for you? If so, please enter their name, contact email, and relationship to your organization. (optional)

None

What year was your project started?

2001

Where does your source code live?

Most of our source code lives on Wikimedia Gerrit which is being mirrored to Github and also, some code repositories live on Github too.