The [Wikipedia Education Program](https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program) helps professors and students contribute to Wikipedia as part of coursework. The current [Education Program extension](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Education_Program) provides features for keeping track of the institutions, courses, professors, students and volunteers involved in this. However, the extension has several limitations and will be largely rewritten. Help is needed to design and build new software to support both the Education Program and other related activities, including topic-centric projects and edit-a-thons.
This project offers tons of opportunities to learn about different facets of software development. There's work to be done right away on UX, flushing out details of requirements, and architecture design. On this last point, a fun challenge we'll face is creating elegant code that interfaces with a not-so-elegant legacy system. Another challenge will be to create small deliverables that are immediately useful, that can replace parts of the current software incrementally, and that can become components of the larger system we're planning.
Student developers eager to dive into coding tasks can also take bugs on the current version of the software—much of which will remain in production for a while yet. In doing so, they'll practice their code-reading skills, and will get to deploy code to production quickly.
- Skills: PHP, Javascript, CSS, HTML, UI design, usability testing, and object-oriented design
- Mentors: Andrew Green, Sage Ross.