Google Code-in 2014
Google Code-in is an annual contest for 13 and 17 year old students. They get introduced to contributions which make free and open source software (FOSS) development happen.
For the second time in December 2014 and January 2015, Wikimedia was proud to be one of the 12 mentoring organizations which provided tasks that students could choose to work on. Students who complete tasks receive a certificate and t-shirt from Google.
In those seven weeks, 48 students successfully completed 226 Wikimedia tasks, supported by 30 mentors from the community. Tasks are not only about dealing with code but also about documentation, research and testing. The variety of achievements is huge:
Task statistics per week
- Pywikibot handles batches of files to be uploaded, increased its test coverage, got several components ported, and improved its ISBN validation with support for Wikidata
- Template Data was added to more than a dozen of templates, improving the editing experience for VisualEditor users
- Huggle, the application for dealing with vandalism, offers updated documentation and improved internationalization
- 18 software bugs in MediaWiki’s MultimediaViewer extension were fixed or worked on
- Kiwix, the Wikipedia offline reader for Android devices, offers a “Read Aloud” function providing text-to-speech output
- Citoid, an application to retrieve certain information, offers exporting in BibTeX format
- Several JQuery related bugs were fixed or worked on
- Several MediaWiki extensions do not use deprecated internationalization functions anymore in their code
- Dozens of inactive MediaWiki websites were researched, new 3rd party MediaWiki installations were identified
- The Wikimedia Phabricator documentation offers video screencasts, helping users to effectively use Phabricator
- …and many, many more.
It’s been satisfying (and a little addictive too) to see your changes merged into a project used by millions
, as Unicodesnowman, one of the participating students, writes.
Check out how you can contribute to Wikimedia and the list of easy software bugs to start with.
Thank you and congratulations to all the students who became part of Wikimedia and joined and supported its mission to freely share knowledge. You have done awesome work! Special congratulations to Wikimedia’s two Grand Prize Winners Danny Wu and Mateusz Maćkowski and to our finalists Evan McIntire, Geoffrey Mon and Pranav Kumar!
Thank you to all our mentors and their commitment, coming up with task ideas and spending time on weekends to work together with students and quickly review their contributions.
And last but not least, thank you to Google for organizing and running this contest, creating awareness of and interest in Free and Open Software projects. The full list of winners and finalist across organizations has been published.
