At work I spent the last weeks mostly working on preparing Wikimedia’s move from Bugzilla to Phabricator which successfully happened last weekend after ~7 months of planning (worth another blog post) and preparing Wikimedia’s participation in Google Code-in (GCI) 2014 (specific steps are listed in the corresponding task in Phabricator). Eventually, Wikimedia got accepted by Google as one of the twelve Free and Open Source organizations taking part in GCI.
GCI is a contest for 13-17 year old students and starts on December 1st. Students are offered tasks that should take an experienced contributor (knowing the toolchain and infrastructure) up to four hours. Tasks can be about code, documentation, QA, training, outreach, user interface and research. Wikimedia has a central planning and information wikipage.
Last year Wikimedia ended up with 273 tasks, 46 students, and approximately 30 mentors in GCI. The results were above our expectations (as I was initially sceptical if Wikimedia had enough resources). Based on the common questions that students had we improved our onboarding documentation for new contributors (not only GCI students) and our instructions for GCI mentors. Hence Wikimedia is better prepared than last year: So far we have approximately 200 tasks available (not all of them will be available to students immediately) and 24 mentors. Still we need way more tasks and mentors for the next six weeks!
Become a mentor!
If you are active in the Wikimedia community, have that small task on your To-Do list that you haven’t managed to work on yet, and can imagine mentoring a student: Check out our mentor’s corner, register, and create your task!
