How to contribute
Get involved
Do you love software freedom and open source communities? Do you like the MediaWiki software, Wikipedia, or any other Wikimedia sites?
Then, contribute your skills here and learn from other contributors. This page will help you get started by providing an overview of areas where you can get involved.
The content of all Wikimedia projects is released under free licenses. Write code to access, remix and grow this immense pool of free knowledge. Follow the tutorial to get started with the API, available on all MediaWiki wikis, and other APIs for content and Wikidata. Other open data sources, including XML and SQL dumps, are also available.
Our code is all free and open source. Choose a project, provide a patch, and fix a task!
Wikimedia projects use a variety of languages such as PHP and JavaScript in MediaWiki and its extensions, Lua (in Templates), CSS/LESS (in skins etc.), Objective-C, Swing and Java (in Mobile Apps and Kiwix), Python (in Pywikibot), C++ (in Huggle), or C# (in AWB).
Create bots to process content and host your tools on Toolforge. Hack on mobile apps or on desktop applications. Or help Site Reliability Engineering maintain the server configuration.
Testing
Help improve the quality of our projects through PHPUnit testing, automated browser testing via Selenium, and Continuous Integration. Report your first bug or help with existing bug reports.
As a Tech ambassador, help other Wikimedians with technical issues, relay Tech News to inform users about what is going to impact them, and join the ambassadors' group and the mailing list to act as a bridge between developers and your local wiki.
English writers can improve the MediaWiki documentation, other essential support pages and, in fact, any page of this website.
If you are fluent in a language other than English you can join the effort by translating this website and the MediaWiki software.
Help users and developers looking for answers at the support desk or the MediaWiki communication and social media channels.
More helpful information
Communication
There are several ways you can get into contact with the Wikimedia community.
- For real-time communication use #wikimedia-dev connect on IRC (Internet Relay Chat).
- There are also several email lists for discussion of Wikimedia software. A complete list is available.
- You can also follow and share Wikimedia news across your social network.
- You can also subscribe to Tech News to receive a weekly summary on your user talk page of recent software changes, without technical jargon.
Editing and discussing in MediaWiki
If you have not used MediaWiki before:
- Register your user account on mediawiki.org.
- Learn how to edit wiki pages with VisualEditor or editing the source.
- Feel free to edit your public user page. Introduce yourself. You may use the User Info Template. Learn more reading the Wikipedia instructions.
- Check Help:Navigation.
- You can discuss the content of each page in its related Discussion page. You can communicate with users by adding a public message in their discussion pages. Learn more at Help:Talk pages.