The Wikimedia Foundation was one of the twelve mentoring organizations taking part in Google Code-in 2014, our contest introducing 13 to 17 year old students to working in open source communities. Below, Andre Klapper shares the accomplishments of several students who participated with Wikimedia during the contest.
The Wikimedia Foundation was proud to participate for a second time in Google Code-in. 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. Those 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 MediaWiki extensions do not use deprecated internationalization functions anymore in their code
- The Wikimedia Phabricator documentation offers video screencasts, helping users to effectively use Phabricator
- …and many, many more.
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.
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.
We welcome more contributions to help improve our free and open software. Check out how you can contribute and our list of easy software bugs to start with.
