New Developers

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This page is a simple and guided landing page for new Wikimedia developers. It is part of the Onboarding new developers initiative.

For other options to get involved, see How to contribute .

Welcome!

Participants of the Wikimedia Hackathon 2019

You want to work on Wikimedia code and need ideas where to start?

Wikimedia's technical community always welcomes new contributors to our projects.

Become part of a global community and help make access to free knowledge easier for everyone!

Contributing to Wikimedia is a four-step process:

  1. Choose a software project
  2. Set up your development environment
  3. Choose and solve a task (write and test your code)
  4. Submit your code changes

Some basics to know

You can skip this section if you are already used to free and open source software culture.

Wikimedia has hundreds of software projects in many different areas. Check these slides if you want to get an overview.

The maintainers of each software project are pretty free to choose the infrastructure they prefer. In general, basically all software projects have

  • a task tracking tool where software bugs and enhancement requests are reported, managed and discussed. Examples are Wikimedia Phabricator, GitHub, or Sourceforge.
  • a code repository where the source code can be "checked out" to everybody. Examples are Wikimedia Git/Gerrit, GitHub, or Sourceforge.
  • a code review tool where proposed code changes (so-called patches) get discussed and improved. Examples are Wikimedia Git/Gerrit, GitHub, or Sourceforge. Once your proposed patch is good and is merged into the code repository, your code changes will become available to everybody. (You could read more about good practices for code review here.)
  • general places for discussion of the software project and/or for receiving help and support. Those places can be mailing lists or IRC chat channels or wiki pages or other places. The exact places depend on each project. You could also contact specific mentors via "Email this user" on their user pages, but note that "questions asked in private don't help others".

At any point, if you run into problems or need help, please ask. If you want to ask good questions in the right places, we recommend you read the section "Feedback, questions and support".

Choose a software project

This is the recommended way to start. Choose one of the following projects and follow the project's documentation to set up your development environment, choose a task to work on, solve the task, and submit your code changes for review:

Huggle

Screenshot

An anti-vandalism desktop application for Wikimedia projects

Kiwix

Screenshot

An offline reader for Wikipedia web content

Commons App for Android

Screenshot

An app for Android devices to upload your pictures to Wikimedia Commons

Wiki Education Dashboard

Screenshot

A web application that supports Wikipedia education assignments, provides data and course management for instructors and students

ORES logo ORES

ORES highlights problematic edits

A web service and API that provides machine learning as a service for Wikimedia projects. Machine predictions are used to catch vandalism, measure article quality, and support other wiki work.

Library Card platform

Screenshot

A tool allowing Wikimedia contributors to apply for free access to paywalled resources.

Logo Pywikibot

Terminal

A Python library and collection of scripts that automate work on MediaWiki sites.

Are you a maintainer and want your project to be included in the list of software projects above? Find out more and join!

Outreach programs and single tasks

Apart from the recommended software projects above, there are more ways to choose a project or task to work on:

Logo Outreach programs

Wikimedia offers internships in programs such as Google Summer of Code and Outreachy.
And if you are a high school student, you can participate in Google Code-in.

Logo Good first tasks

There are many single tasks (across many software projects) which are suitable for newcomers.
However, you are more on your own here: We cannot guarantee that mentors are available or that your proposed patches will receive fast reviews.

Looking for additional resources?

Want to contribute something else?