No GSoC on Wagtail core in 2027

👋 we’ve decided we won’t take part in GSoC 2027 with Wagtail core. If you’re contributing to Wagtail with the view to take part in Google Summer of Code with us, please consider other projects.

What GSoC contributors can do

If you’re interested in GSoC with Wagtail in the future, register your interest with our form: wagtail.org/gsoc-apply. We’ll contact everyone once we have clearer plans. We don’t recommend contributing to projects until that point, as we can’t guarantee our participation in any shape or form until March 2027.

Any questions? Please head over to our discussion GSoC 2027: expression of interest.

Note ⚠️: we get a lot of requests from GSoC participants. If you want a chance to participate in the program with us, follow those instructions. It’s crucial for us to keep this manageable. If you don’t follow this guidance and cause extra work for us, you’ll get a warning, a ban, or just we won’t select you for participation. See our GSoC AI policy for more info.

Why we’re doing this

We’re seeing increasing volumes of low-quality contributions which are a waste of time for everyone involved. We very much want to keep our feature requests and pull requests opened for anyone and everyone, so instead we have to remove one of the incentives in contributing. It’s the motivation that we care about.

It’s definitely not a code quality problem, that’s always been hit-and-miss, which is completely normal for such a large project. What we’re struggling with is contributors who invest little to no time to check the overall suitability of their contribution. Put simply, we want to spend our precious code review time with people who have made a commensurate investment of their own.

Pretending to care

An example to illustrate. Wagtail has this very cool 'minimap' accessibility feature, which makes it much simpler to navigate through long pages, particularly for keyboard users. We get a bug report related to it. Someone makes a pull request. We ask how they tested their fix. They give us a screenshot that’s clearly not the Wagtail UI, and doesn’t even contain our minimap component 🤯

It’s ok to create UI tests in isolation. It’s ok to ask AI agents to do that too (but you have to tell us, per our generative AI guidelines). It’s not ok to pretend you’ve done testing yourself. This isn’t an one-off, we get PRs like this and have to ban people on a weekly basis if not daily.

The solution

We don’t want to close off contributions altogether, nor implement an exclusionary 'vouch' system. We don’t want to stop taking part in GSoC altogether either, we’ve had excellent contributors working with us over the years (four last year!). But we have to set boundaries to keep this sustainable for everyone. We may still take part in GSoC next year, but on other projects, like:

• Our Wagtail user guide, a much more approachable project to contribute to and maintain
• Made with Wagtail, which is also much simpler.
• More advanced projects (LLM translations? carbon.txt adoption? Web Sustainability Guidelines conformance?), but only with contributors who follow our guidelines.

In the meantime between now and the next GSoC, come say hi at our upcoming Wagtail Space 2026 event 🚀