Greets all. Id like to begin contributing, in a technical fashion to wikipedia, and this seems like the place to start.
At heart, Im a sysadmin, but to start out (especially in isolation), the best way seems programming work on mediawiki. Be it squashing bugs, or implementing new features, Id like to help. Unfortunately, while Ive contributed some content, Im not overtly involved in wikipedia: thus I dont know if on Sourceforge bugs are really bugs, and RFE are wanted by more then one person - I don't want to waste anyones time by working on things that wouldnt be accepted. Thus, I ask: what would be some tasks that I could cut my teeth on?
Jeff Warnica wrote:
Greets all. Id like to begin contributing, in a technical fashion to wikipedia, and this seems like the place to start.
At heart, Im a sysadmin, but to start out (especially in isolation), the best way seems programming work on mediawiki. Be it squashing bugs, or implementing new features, Id like to help. Unfortunately, while Ive contributed some content, Im not overtly involved in wikipedia: thus I dont know if on Sourceforge bugs are really bugs, and RFE are wanted by more then one person - I don't want to waste anyones time by working on things that wouldnt be accepted. Thus, I ask: what would be some tasks that I could cut my teeth on?
Speaking as a non-technical person, it would be comforting to feel that someone is patrolling the bug report pages on the various projects. Much of what appears there may not be bugs at all, but what do the rest of us know about that? Sometimes it may just take reporting that it's being looked at or letting us know what we were doing wrong. If it's reported that it's being looked at and is still there after a month, then the fact that it's still being looked at needs to be noted with a date again. For some of us looking at that page is like watching the hourglass icon during a download, and wondering, "Has the time come to just re-boot?" :-)
Ec
Jeff Warnica wrote:
Greets all. Id like to begin contributing, in a technical fashion to wikipedia, and this seems like the place to start.
At heart, Im a sysadmin, but to start out (especially in isolation), the best way seems programming work on mediawiki. Be it squashing bugs, or implementing new features, Id like to help. Unfortunately, while Ive contributed some content, Im not overtly involved in wikipedia: thus I dont know if on Sourceforge bugs are really bugs, and RFE are wanted by more then one person - I don't want to waste anyones time by working on things that wouldnt be accepted. Thus, I ask: what would be some tasks that I could cut my teeth on?
Please join the #mediawiki channel on irc.freenode.net. If you're prepared to keep an IRC window open in the background and check it occasionally while you do other work, you can use your sysadmin skills immediately by offering advice. This also allows you to start building trust with the other developers, which is very important if you want to obtain shell access at some later date. On IRC we can also give you programming advice.
Fixing bugs is great too, but it's really better if you do both. Many bug reports we get are not really repeatable in a test installation, and can only be fixed by mucking around in the live database.
Sourceforge is a good place to look for bugs, and Brion does a lot of work categorising them and clearing them. There are also numerous locations scattered across the wiki where bugs are reported. These fall into two categories: community pages like the village pump, where users complain about problems to each other, and bug reports pages, which are often created by users without making them known to all the developers. And then of course if you're a well known developer, you'll get bug reports directly via email and IRC.
-- Tim Starling
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