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.
It's also a good opportunity for people to get familiar with Labs, and
maybe help out with a current project that does something MediaWiki
related.
I expect that we'll get a lot of people with some
PHP experience but who
have little experience with, say, Git and Gerrit.
Getting enough of the basics of Git/Gerrit to push in code is easy
enough that people can really focus more on coding.
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.
Don't forget about opportunities for volunteer operations work as
well. People don't necessarily need to hack on MediaWiki. If they want
to fix operations things, that's doable as well.
- Ryan