Hi Bill,
On Sun, 2015-11-01 at 22:22 +0100, Bill Morrisson wrote:
I want to contribute to Wikimedia's opensource projects. I am a newbie in PHP and MySQL(just started learning the language 8 months ago) and had in mind in contributing to the organization as soon as I am comfortable in the languages. I would like to contribute in PHP and looking forward to learn javascript on the go with other projects as well. I would love to hear from wikimedia if there is anything I can do first.
Great! Thank you for your interest!
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_contribute%C2%A0is an overview of all the many ways how to contribute to Wikimedia. As you state that you are interested in hacking, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_hub%C2%A0 provides a high-level overview of MediaWiki development for hackers. It also links to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker for starters. If you are looking for some "easy" bugs to work on, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Annoying_little_bugs%C2%A0 is also linked from that page. It offers some queries for bug reports in Wikimedia's issue tracking system.
Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions!
Looking forward to your first patch contribution!
Cheers, andre