Starter kit

Do you love software freedom and open source communities? Do you like MediaWiki, Wikipedia, or any other Wikimedia projects? Then, contribute your skills here and learn from other contributors. This page will help you getting started.

==You are here== https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Starter_kit&action=edit&section=1 mediawiki.org is the home of the developers of MediaWiki and related open source software projects.

If you want to contribute technical help to Wikimedia projects, check Tech Ambassadors.

Learn the differences between Wikipedia, Wikimedia, MediaWiki, and wiki. Project:Help contains other basic links.

Get started
Register to mediawiki.org and subscribe to the wikitech-announce mailing list. Now you are connected.

Check the areas to contribute and choose one.

Communication
There are several ways you can get into contact with MediaWiki, and other contributors.

Real-time chats
The best place for real-time communication for discussing or asking questions about MediaWiki is #mediawiki IRC (Internet Relay Chat). You can use this web page to connect.

Mailing lists
There are several e-mail lists that exist for discussion of the MediaWiki software. The complete list is on Meta.

Social media
It is always better to follow and share the news of MediaWiki across your social network.

Wiki collaboration
New MediaWiki users can:
 * Check Help:Navigation
 * Learn how to use the software at User hub.

Editing

 * How to Edit with VisualEditor or editing the source.
 * How to use images.

Discussing
You can discuss the content of each page in its related Discussion page. If you want to communicate with users, you can add a public message in their discussion pages. Learn more at Help:Talk pages.

User page and preferences
After registering, you get a user page that is 100% public. Introduce yourself. Suggested fields: real name, location, interests, languages, and motivation to be here.

You may also use the User Info Template. Minimal or no design is recommended. Learn more reading the Wikipedia instructions.

Hacking
Code is the center of software. Learn how to become a MediaWiki hacker and find first tasks in our list of annoying little bugs.

Wikimedia projects offer a variety of languages such as PHP, JavaScript, Lua (in Templates and extensions), HTML, CSS/LESS, Objective-C and Java (in Mobile Apps), Python (in Pywikibot), C++ (in Huggle), or C# (in AWB).

Check the many development areas to contribute and choose one.

Issue tracking in Phabricator
Phabricator is where all the bugs of MediaWiki Software are reported and suggestions for new features and enhancements are given. It is recommended for the new contributors to work on the easy bugs.

Code review in Gerrit
Gerrit is the most important part of the development process. All the contributions to MediaWiki are reviewed and approved at gerrit.wikimedia.org. To help you get started, check the Tutorial or its short version.

The Code Review is mainly written for developers reviewing codes, but it can be useful for the developers submitting the code for review.

Quality Assurance
The best way to get started with Quality Assurance is browser testing because it does not require technical experience. If you have technical experience with Ruby and Cucumber you can write and run your own tests. You can also go for manual testing. Testing new features is done through manual exploratory testing of software built with continuous integration.

API
Use this tutorial to help you get started with API.

Translation
If you know languages other than English, then translate on MediaWiki. You can get articles to translate from here.

Running MediaWiki
If you want to run your own MediaWiki instance, download the last release. If you have questions, check the Support desk. And if you want to run MediaWiki in a virtual machine to hack on its code, try MediaWiki-Vagrant.