Outreach programs/Success stories

Read on to learn more about some of the Wikimedia's former GSoC and Outreachy students success stories:

Derick Alangi


Derick as a Google Summer of Code student in 2016 with Wikimedia developed an RSS frontend, wrote Python unit tests and refactored code for Wikimedia IFTTT application. Since 2015, Derick has participated in the Google Code-in, Google Summer of Code, and Outreachy program with Wikimedia as a mentor several times. Derick has been an active MediaWiki developer and maintainer on extensions such as SendGrid, Mailgun, etc and serves as a Technical Lead and Trainer for the Africa Wikimedia Developers project. Derick was hired as an intern in 2018 by the Wikimedia Foundation to work on improving the Wikimedia Resource Center and the Affiliate Reporting Portal.

Moriel Schottlender


Moriel as a Google Summer of Code 2013 student with Wikimedia made improvements to the Visual Editor by adding support for Right to Left languages like Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, and Pashto. Soon, after Moriel finished her internship, she was hired part-time and later became a full-time employee at the Wikimedia Foundation. Currently, Moriel is the Tech Lead for Community Tech and Anti Harassment Tools teams. She also mentors students in Wikimedia's outreach programs.

Niharika Kohli
Niharika as an Outreachy intern in 2014 with Wikimedia worked on compacting the list of language links on Wikipedia based on user location and reading preferences. Soon, after Niharika finished her internship, she was hired part-time and later became a full-time employee at the Wikimedia Foundation. Currently, Niharika is a Product Manager in the Community Tech team. She also mentors students in Wikimedia’s outreach programs

Sucheta Ghoshal
Sucheta as an Outreachy intern in 2012 with Wikimedia made improvements to Extension:EtherEditor. Soon after that, she started volunteering for the Language Engineering team of the Wikimedia Foundation, and eventually joined the Foundation as a Software Engineer in 2013. In 2016, She moved on to pursue PhD in Human-Centered Computing at Georgia Tech. In her current research, she studies how grassroots social movements use technology. She also makes technology for and with them. In work and in life, she remains an advocate for the movement of free and open knowledge.

Marielle Volz


Marielle as a 2014 Outreachy intern with Wikimedia, created citoid, a service that helps add citations to English Wikipedia articles automatically in Visual Editor. Soon after she completed her internship she was hired as a contractor to help integrate citoid with Visual Editor across many Wikimedia projects including non-English Wikipedias. She's currently working on integrating citoid with Wikidata. She also mentors students in Google Code-In.

Josephine Lim


Josephine as an Outreachy Round 11 intern with Wikimedia in 2015, worked on the Wikimedia Commons Android app (then known as the Upload to Commons app) to allow easier categorization of pictures. After completing her internship, she applied and was approved for an individual engagement grant to carry on working on the app, with the hopes of making it a valuable tool for people to upload images to Commons without needing to use a PC or browser. In September 2016, she became the project maintainer of the app, and now leads a team of Android developers working on the app via grant funding. She also participated in a few Wikimedia events, and was a mentor in GSoC 2018.

Tony Thomas
Tony as a Google Summer of Code student in 2014 with Wikimedia developed Extension:BounceHandler that allows wikis to handle bounce emails efficiently. In 2015 Tony mentored a project around Extension:Newsletter that enables users to create, publish and subscribe to newsletters on different topics. Since 2015 Tony has been a maintainer on the Newsletter extension. Tony is an active Wikimedia volunteer, mentors new developers in Wikimedia’s annual events and outreach programs and promotes developer outreach in India.

Brian Wolff


Brian Wolff as a Google Summer of Code student in 2010, worked on improving the display of image metadata (e.g. Exif) on file description pages. Brian later became a contractor on the multimedia team at the Wikimedia Foundation, working on improving support for streaming videos and other projects. In 2015 Brian joined the Wikimedia Security team where he works today to keep the Wikimedia websites safe and secure.

Sumit Asthana


Sumit as a Google Summer of Code student with Wikimedia in 2015, worked on the Extension:WikidataPageBanner with the Wikimedia Mobile Team. In 2016, he mentored high school students in the Google Code-In program for Wikimedia and later served as one of the Wikimedia organization administrators in GSoC/Outreachy. In 2017, he contributed to the Scoring Platform Team and built the drafttopic API that predicts high-level topics for articles on Wikipedia to improve the new draft review. This work got published at ACM CSCW 18'. Currently, he's a Research Fellow in the Applied Sciences Group at Microsoft Research, India.

Sejal Khatri


Sejal as an Outreachy intern in 2016 designed and developed the user profile pages for the Programs and Events Dashboard, a tool which assists the management of wiki programs and events. Soon after, she started volunteering for the same project, and in 2017, she got selected as a Google Summer of Code intern, wherein, she redesigned the dashboard layout to make it responsive and also improved its usability by understanding the requirements of multiple wiki communities. She continued to make voluntary contributions to the project and mentored students in Google Code-In. She is currently a masters student at the University of Washington specializing in User Experience research and design.

Esther Akinloose
Esther interned with Wikimedia during the Outreachy's end-of-year round in 2019. She wrote integration tests for Mediawiki Action API during the internship, saw the beauty in open source, and learned the importance of code reviews, walkthroughs, and software testing. She had the best mentors, who made learning easier, and as a result, she decided to stick around to learn and contribute more. Today, Esther is a Test Engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation. So far, it has been the people and the culture here that she loves the most.

Aisha Khatun
Aisha joined Wikimedia in December 2020 as an Outreachy intern and worked with the Abstract Wikipedia team to develop a method to determine important Wikifunctions and group similar ones. She created a data pipeline to extract the functions, performed data analysis, and used unsupervised machine learning to find similar functions. Throughout her internship, she got to work with amazing, friendly, and diverse people from different corners of the world, which made her feel at home and continue her work. Soon after her internship ended in April 2021, she joined the search team at Wikimedia foundation as a Contract Data Analyst. She is now analyzing the Wikidata SPARQL queries and Wikidata itself to help scale Wikidata Query Service.