Africa Wikimedia Technical Community

Africa Wikimedia Developers Project  (AWMD)

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 AWMD.  Growing developers for tomorrow.

 A project which seeks to start a developer community on the African continent and to encourage more developers to volunteer for the Wikimedia Foundation. Our mission is to create an enabling ecosystem for developers who are willing to learn and build new skills in the open space through volunteering as developers for the Wikimedia Foundation.

=Do you want to get involved?=

There are several ways you can get involved in becoming an Africa Wikimedia Developer. Are you from the African continent, tech inclined and interested in open knowledge? If yes, join the community via african-wikimedia-developerslists.wikimedia.org. Kindly follow the steps below to acquaint yourself with skills that is required in our community.

Step 1: Learn how to code in PHP

 * Firstly, some PHP programming skill is required, as its the programming language used to build MediaWiki. Knowledge about Composer is very useful since it's a dependency manager for PHP packages, as this might come in handy when you start hacking on MediaWiki. Also, a focus on Object Oriented (OO) programming paradigm is recommended as MW is OO based.


 * Checkout a few PHP books below;


 * Beginner: OO PHP programming Tutorials, Introduction to OO Programming with PHP, OO programming with PHP and PHP online reference.


 * Intermediate: PHP advanced and OO programming and Learning PHP Design Patterns. Also, you can use the PHP online reference mentioned in the beginner section.

For more information, you can find PHP programming book on Wikibooks too.

Step 2: Wikimedia's Code Review(CR) and development platform

 * Gerrit is the name of the Code Review(CR) software in Wikimedia and it's the heart of the software development process. It's almost impossible to do software development in Wikimedia (in a standard way) without using Gerrit. Create an account on the Gerrit Website and get Developer access. You can also have a look at the Gerrit Tutorials on how to setup Gerrit on your PC.


 * Note: You are not expected to know all these in 1 day. Take your time and take it slowly, you will know it with time :).

Step 3: Familiarize yourself with Phabricator

 * Wikimedia uses an open source development platform called: Phabricator, it is mainly used for project management, software bug reporting and request for features. It's not that complicated to use and you can login to Wikimedia's phabricator using your MediaWiki account.


 * Phabricator has a lot of functionalities but as a developer, the functionalities you will mostly used are focused on; creating tasks, resolving tasks, uploading files, feature request etc. So, we don't expect you will learn all of Phabricator's functionality (except you want to). We will focus on what we need for a start and keep learning as time goes. Note: For project management, you can look at this documentation about Phabricator in Project Management.

Step 4: Bonding with the Wikimedia developer community

 * There are of course many different ways to bond with the developer community in the Wikimedia Movement, but the fastest and most comfortable way for most developers is on IRC. Wikimedia has so many IRC channels and the particular channel for developers is: . This is a starting point and on this channel, you can introduce yourself and make your interest known to the community and wait for a while, be rest assured that someone in the channel will guide you or react to your message. You can also ask technical questions on the channel and someone might answer you or point you to resources that will enable you find the answer(s) to your question(s).


 * Note: There are many individuals on the channel and your messages are broadcasted to over 100 people at the same time so please be mindful of what you put on there. You may read How to Ask Questions the Smart Way by Eric Raymond to inform the kind of questions you put out there.

Step 5: Configure MediaWiki locally and get started!

 * It's a great thing you are at this step and we recommend you do step 2 before doing this as they are highly interlinked to each other. MediaWiki can be installed following this this docs and after this, it will be available locally and you can also see how to clone the MediaWiki Core in the Gerrit Tutorials in Step 2. After mastering all the first 4 steps, developing on MediaWiki will be relatively easy so we recommend that you take your time and master the first 4 steps before diving to this last step.


 * Happy hacking on MediaWiki!!!

=Further resources=

For more information about getting into MediaWiki development and even more on other Wikimedia related projects, you can checkout the link below;
 * New Developers path into the Wikimedia movement.

=Contact us=

You can reach us through african-wikimedia-developerslists.wikimedia.org or for quick reach, you can join us on IRC here:, you will always see someone around :).

 You can also join the discussion on our talk page. Get more updates via our Facebook & Twitter