Wikimedia Hackathon 2022/How to/Newcomers

What to do if you're new
Welcome to the Wikimedia technical community! We're so glad you're here.

There are several ways to participate in the Hackathon as a newcomer.

Attend the newcomers social session
This will be held on Friday, May 20, in the Hackathon event space.

Attend sessions marked as good for newcomers
All sessions list whether or not they are good for newcomers. Here are a few we strongly recommend:


 * Overview of technical areas and projects in the Wikimedia ecosystem
 * Ask anything about Phabricator
 * Discussion about writing technical documentation: what helps and what gets in the way?
 * Scribe: Open-source Language Keyboards Based on Wikidata Lexicographical Data

Join a project
Explore the Hackathon workboard in Phabricator, where people are tracking projects and sessions.

There are many resources to learn about Phabricator, if you're unfamiliar with the platform.

Ask questions
Stop by the Help Desk or the Newcomers room in the event space (these will be right near the entrance).

Introduce yourself to others
This is a great chance to meet people


 * Add yourself and your interests to the participants page.
 * Attend a local meetup.
 * Check out other communication spaces.

Explore resources for newcomers

 * Check out the New Developers page for project ideas.
 * Basic skills needed to contribute to development of MediaWiki core and MediaWiki extensions
 * An overview of the MediaWiki Action API
 * About the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) provides a way for tools to access Wikidata data
 * About Gerrit, the tool we use to handle code reviews
 * Wikibase
 * An introduction to Wikimedia Cloud Services (i.e., Toolforge, PAWS)
 * An overview about Structured Data
 * A basic overview of the implementation of Lua on Wikimedia projects