How to contribute/2013 Presentation

This presentation serves as basic introduction to different types of tasks available to technical contributors of MediaWiki and Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia. The PDF includes some links, but more details and sources are offered below (work in progress).

This presentation has been done at FOSDEM 2013.

You can use these slides to run a presentation on your own at public events. You only need to request authorization in the Discussion page - because the slides contain logos copyrighted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

How to hack on Wikipedia
The title refers to Wikipedia since this is the project everybody knows but the content is valid for Wikimedia and MediaWiki projects in general.

One way of breaking the ice and knowing more about the audience is to ask to raise hands:
 * Who has used Wikipedia?
 * Who has edited Wikipedia, or other Wikimedia projects?
 * Who has done technical contributions to MediaWiki or other Wikimedia projects?

The difference between users and technical contributors is probably very big: a good reason to have this presentation and help balancing the proportion. :)

Wiki Media Wiki
Home sweet home. This is the spirit that inspired the selection of this beautiful picture.

Wikipedia is part of Wikimedia, a collection of projects aiming to bring free knowledge to the World. MediaWiki is the technology used by these projects. Like everything we do, it has a free license and it is being used by many others out of the Wikimedia movement. Your technical contributions may benefit this wide community of communites, not just Wikipedia.


 * Wikimedia projects
 * Sites using MediaWiki
 * Logos sources: [[file:Wikimedia_logo_text_RGB.svg|Wikimedia|x20px]] [[file:MediaWiki logo reworked 2.svg|MediaWiki|x20px]] [[file:OptiWiktionary-logo.svg|Wiktionary|x20px]] [[file:Wikiquote-logo.svg|Wikiquote|x20px]] [[file:Wikibooks-logo.svg|Wikibooks|x20px]] [[file:Wikisource-logo.svg|Wikisource|x20px]] [[file:Wikispecies-logo.svg|Wikispecies|x20px]] [[file:Wikinews-logo.svg|Wikinews|x20px]] [[file:Wikiversity-logo.svg|Wikiversity|x20px]] [[file:Wikivoyage-Logo-v3-icon.svg|Wikivoyage|x20px]] [[file:Commons-logo.svg|Commons|x20px]] [[file:Wikidata-logo.svg|Wikidata|x20px]] [[file:Wikia_Logo.svg|Wikia|40px]] [[file:WikiHow_logo.png|WikiHow|40px]] [[file:Openstreetmap_logo.svg|OpenStreetMap|x20px]] [[file:SMW_Logo.SVG|SMW|x20px]] [[file:WebPlatform Logo.svg|Web Platform|x20px]]

API

 * The ultimate hack: take our data and build the rest as you please.
 * API documentation.
 * Number of Wikimedia media files.
 * Total number of articles: 25 millions on Wikipedias, 16 Wiktionaries, 4 Wikisources etc.
 * Estimated total size of Wikimedia data.

See also Is it worth starting a list of standalone projects using the MediaWiki API?

Test

 * QA
 * QA weekly goals
 * Features testing
 * Browser testing
 * Bug management
 * Total amount of open bugs
 * More bug statistics can be found in the Community metrics reports.

Translate
All text string can be translated and improved (in English too!).


 * Localisation
 * Language portal
 * http://translatewiki.net
 * Total amount of languages. Their % of completion differs a lot.

Design

 * Design

Gadgets

 * Gadget kitchen
 * User scripts at Wikipedia

Mobile

 * Mobile projects
 * Apps

Bots

 * Manual:Bots
 * Bots
 * Total amount of bots approved - not all of them necessarily active.

Extensions

 * Manual:Extensions