A Personal Appeal from MediaWiki Developers to new MediaWiki developers

Dear Developer!

There are over 4 million articles in the English Wikipedia alone and over 14 million photos on our sister site Wikimedia Commons. The Wikimedia Foundation who supports these projects is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world. Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

There are various reasons you may want to become a MediaWiki developer. We need people that can help support the software that helps us cope with this amount of data as well as keeping us aligned to this mission. We need people working on completely different projects [link] to ensure that we keep our codebase [link] generic and adaptable and get our bugs [link] identified and fixed. On top of this we need people to build things that inspire and educate people to help us bring free education to the world.

The code base of MediaWiki [link] is completely open source and as well as being used to achieve our mission it is being used by various organisations to manage their many data problems [citation needed].

We invite you to make use of the data provided by our various projects including Wikipedia via our api [link]. Whether you want to build an app, do a mashup or simply use our data on your website - you will find our Api Sandbox [link] a great starting point to understand how to make use of it.

Thank you!

The MediaWiki developer community

A personal appeal from MediaWiki developer Jon Robson

Dear developer, I have been working with the Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons api since the start of 2012 as an employee at the Wikimedia Foundation. We used the api to build the Wiki Loves Monuments android application. The app allowed users to locate nearby monuments in the Wiki Loves Monuments competition and via the api we were able to upload these photos to Wikimedia Commons. We have seen an influx of new users contributing to the Wikimedia Commons project for the first time and have seen some wonderful photos - I even built a slideshow using the api to showcase these. As a result we have also seen many of these wonderful photos be surfaced to Wikipedia via our wonderful editors which has brought life to many of Wikipedia's articles which looked so lonely before without any images.

Being a developer in these projects is so rewarding and I'd invite any developers to join our fold! I hope to see you soon

Jon Robson