(Splitting this off from John's critique of ConventionExtension.)
Hi.
MediaWiki has participated in several (Google) Summer of Code iterations now
(<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code>) and I'm wondering how this
partnership program is evaluated.
Whenever this program wraps up at the end of the (Northern Hemisphere's)
summer, I always sense a worrying amount of frustration and annoyance from
all parties involved. The projects are usually overly large and complex and
from what I understand, nearly all of the projects from Google Summer of
Code don't end up in production environments. If the projects are lucky,
they end up in a MediaWiki extension; if they're unlucky, they rot away in a
code repo branch somewhere or behind a configuration variable set to false
by default. The end result being that:
* the people who worked on these projects are frustrated and annoyed because
they didn't get their code deployed [to Wikimedia wikis, a wide audience, or
anyone at all in some cases];
* the people who mentored these students are frustrated and annoyed for
similar reasons; and
* the people (end-users) who wanted to see these projects successfully
completed are frustrated and annoyed that these features still don't exist.
So I'm left wondering how the cost v. benefit equation works out for this
program. How do you evaluate the program and whether MediaWiki ought to
remain a continued participant?
And, of course, should MediaWiki decide not to participate in Google Summer
of Code in 2013, are there other [better] ideas for getting people involved
in MediaWiki development?
MZMcBride