Pre-university students contribute to Wikimedia in Google Code-in 2017

Google Code-in is an annual contest for 14–17-year-old students exploring free and open source software projects via small tasks in the areas of code, documentation, outreach, research, and design. Students who complete tasks receive a digital certificate and a t-shirt from Google, while the top students in every participating organization get invited to visit Google’s headquarters in California/the United States.
For the fifth time, Wikimedia was one of 25 participating organizations, through offering mentors and tasks.
Many students also summarized their experience in Google Code-in in blog posts, expressing why the contest is a helpful opportunity to get to know free and open source software development.
To list only some of the students’ achievements in the many different software projects and programming languages that the Wikimedia community uses:

• Several students took incremental tasks to learn about the Lua programming languageused on Wikimedia sites
• New help pages explain how to use the VisualEditor to create complex links and how to use the extension to thank other users for the edits
• Several students learned how to create simple on-wiki user scriptsin JavaScript
• The Android mobile application for Wikimedia Commonsreceived screenshots in several languages and their Play Store texts added to our translation platform
• The Android mobile application for Kiwix, an offline reader, offers an improved language selection and warns users when opening external content
• In the Wikipedia mobile application on Android, a long press on find in the page up/page down arrows now advances to the first/last match
• Code quality was improved by replacing deprecated code and function calls in numerous projects, adding more tests to several Wiki Education Dashboardsoftware components and enabling automatic detection of style errors in PHP in a number of MediaWiki extensions
• Huggle, a desktop application to deal with vandalism on Wikimedia sites, got new languages incorporated and its documentation is now on a single page
• MediaWiki’s action APIoffers a parameter to filter revisions based on a tag
• Pywikibot, a Python library to automate work, received numerous code improvements and can now detect when it is run in the Wikimedia Toolforge hosting environment
• MediaWiki’s Timeless skin received several updated screenshots on Wikimedia Commons
• MediaWiki’s Notification extensionoffers improved accessibility for the Help tooltip and background color contrast
• Wm-bot, an IRC bot to send automated messages to IRC channels, received a @restrictcommand
• Strategies to improve event participation were researched

… and many, many more.

We would like to congratulate our winners Albert Wolszon and Nikita Volobuiev, our finalists David Siedtmann, Rafid Aslam and Yifei He, and our many hard working students on their valuable contributions to make free knowledge available for everybody. We hope you enjoyed the experience as much as we did and hope to see you around on Internet Relay Chat, mailing lists, tasks, and patch comments also after the end of this edition of Google Code-in. A list of all winners across participating organizations is available.
We would also like to thank all our mentors for their commitment—the time spent on weekends, coming up with task ideas, working together with students and quickly reviewing contributions, and for providing helpful feedback for potential improvements in the next round.
Last but not least, thanks everybody for your friendliness, patience, and help provided.
Wikimedia always welcomes contributions to improve free and open knowledge. Find out how you can contribute.
Andre Klapper, Bug Wrangler, Developer Relations
Wikimedia Foundation

Graph by Andre Klapper, CC0.