Hey all wikitech peeps,
In helping organize the upcoming Wikimania DC Hackathon, I wanted to ask if there are particular categories of work that people with fairly limited experience could do that would have a meaningful impact.
For example:
* Updating extensions to work with the latest version of MediaWiki
* Testing extensions so that we can update mediawiki.org pages about the extension's compatibility with different MediaWiki revisions
* Converting user scripts into Gadgets
* Convert templates into Lua (but seems lower-impact than some of the above because Lua scripts aren't deployed very many places yet)
* (Only applicable to attendees who mntain an extension) Teaching maintainers how to move extensions from the wiki into things that live in Git and are updated through Gerrit
I'm especially interested in tasks where there's a lot of work to do -- that way, people can be given lots of hands-on things to do that can provide practice to help people be more comfortable with tools like git and gerrit, or more comfortable with the MediaWiki hooks, or where the task gives people a reason to install MediaWiki on their own machine. Additionally, it's important the task meaningfully contributes to the project, so people feel the value of what they're doing.
I expect that we'll get a lot of people with some PHP experience but who have little experience with, say, Git and Gerrit.
Also, if you'll be at the Wikimania DC 2012 Hackathon and want to help mentor people through any of these, reply as well.
Other ideas welcome. I'll be collating these over the next few days, and then trying to pick the ones with the highest probable impact based on the attendees. One warning: this is intended just as a research question for now. I can't promise that I'll focus a portion of the hackathon on your particular suggestion. But I do aim to stay in touch as the planning progresses.
-- Asheesh.