Hi,

Google Code-In (GCI) will soon take place again - a contest for 13-17 year old students to contribute to free software projects.

Wikimedia wants to take part again. Last year's GCI results were surprisingly good - see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in_2013

We need your help:

1) Go to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in_2014#Mentors.27_corner and read the information there. If something is unclear, ask!

2) Add yourself to the table of mentors on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in_2014#Contacting_Wikimedia_ment... - the more mentors are listed the better our chances are that Google accepts us.

3) Please take ten minutes and go through open recent tickets in https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org in your area of interest. If you see self-contained, non-controversial issues with a clear approach which you can recommend to new developers and would mentor: Add the task to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in_2014#Proposed_tasks

Helpful Bugzilla links: * Reports that were proposed for GCI last year and are still open: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=ALL%20whiteboard%3Agc... * Reports marked already as "easy": https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_st... Could you imagine mentoring some of these tasks?

Until Sunday November 12th, we need at least five tasks from each of these categories (plus some less technical beginner tasks as well): * Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code * Documentation/Training: Tasks related to creating/editing documents and helping others learn more - no translation tasks * Outreach/research: Tasks related to community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions * Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality * User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

Google wants every organization to have 100+ tasks available on December 1st. Last year, we had 273 tasks in the end.

Note that you could also create rather generic tasks, for example fixing two interface messages from the list of dependencies of https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38638

Thank you for your help in reaching out to new contributors and making GCI a success again! Please ask if you have questions.

Cheers, andre

PS: And in a future Phabricator world, Bugzilla tickets with the 'easy' keyword will become Phabricator tasks with the 'easy' project.