I've been mentoring Google Summer of Code projects for the Wikimedia Foundation for over 15 years now, and in all that time, I don't recall a technically viable project suggestion being rejected by the WMF. This year, six were. [1] Three were rejected for technical reasons (a few hours past the deadline, no microtasks yet) - which seems harsh, but those are the rules now, I suppose. That still leaves the following three rejected projects:
- Agentic editing capability for Wanda [2] - Improve Commons Android app using privacy-friendly edge AI [3] - Querying of structured data for Wanda extension [4] Wanda is a MediaWiki extension that provides an AI chatbot, so all of these are AI-related. I'm involved with the first and third one; the third one was a last-minute substitute after the first one was rejected - we thought that perhaps the issue with the first one was that it related specifically to AI *editing*, so we switched to just AI querying instead. To no avail, though. (And yes, the third one was ostensibly rejected not because it was AI but because I was a listed mentor for two different projects - but I offered to replace myself with someone else, both before [5] and after the rejection, and got no response, so I'm guessing that was not the real reason.) The Wikimedia Foundation is free to set any rules it wants about which projects to accept and reject. However, if the rule is now that no AI-based project will be accepted, I think that should be stated publicly, to avoid wasting potential mentors' time. And it should be clarified whether this policy applies just to the Google Summer of Code, or also to other mentorship programs, or even other things like development grants. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/8423/query/all/ [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T414281 [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T414881 [4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T415465 [5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T414617#11523658 -Yaron -- WikiWorks · MediaWiki Consulting · http://wikiworks.com
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