New Developers

Welcome to MWiki!
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 making access to free knowledge easier for everybody!

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. 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".