For this year’s Google Code-in software development contest, Wikimedia developers mentored young students to contribute to our free codebase. Here are last year’s winners. Group Photo by M4tx, licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0
The Wikimedia Foundation was proud to participate for a second time in Google Code-in, an annual software development contest for 13 to 17 year old students. In this program, young students are introduced to free and open source software (FOSS) projects and invited to make practical contributions.
Between December 2014 and January 2015, 48 students successfully completed 226 Wikimedia tasks, supported by 30 mentors from our community. The foundation was one of the twelve mentoring organizations selected by Google. Students who completed their tasks will receive a certificate and t-shirt from Google. And finalists will be invited with their parents to visit Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Google Code-in tasks include not only code development, but also documentation, research, and testing — leading to a wide range of achievements:
- Pywikibot (Python Wikipediabot Framework) now handles batches of files to be uploaded, has increased its test coverage, ported several components, and improved its ISBN validation with support for Wikidata
- Template Data was added to more than a dozen 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.
We welcome more contributions to help improve our free and open software. Check out how you can contribute and the list of easy software bugs to start with.
Thank you and congratulations to all the students who joined Wikimedia and supported its mission to freely share knowledge! Special kudos to Wikimedia’s two Grand Prize Winners: Danny Wu and Mateusz Maćkowski — and to our finalists Evan McIntire, Geoffrey Mon and Pranav Kumar! The full list of winners across all organizations can be found here.
“It’s been satisfying (and a little addictive too) to see your changes merged into a project used by millions”, said Unicodesnowman, one of the participating students.
We also wish to thank all our mentors for their generous commitment: we are especially grateful for the time they spent on weekends, coming up with task ideas, working with students and quickly reviewing 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.
Andre Klapper, Bugwrangler, Engineer Community Team, Wikimedia Foundation
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