QUIM GIL: My name is Quim Gil.
I work with Wikimedia foundation as technical contributor
coordinator.
Wikimedia is the movement that develops Wikipedia, but also
many other projects like Wikimedia commons, Wiktionary,
Wikiquote, Wikidata, and so forth.
We care about free knowledge, spreading free knowledge
for everybody.
We are definitely one of the largest repositories
of knowledge of the world, and that
requires plenty of open source projects.
So yes, we run a lot of software in the back end.
This year's Summer of Code was very special,
because we went from nine students to 19.
And that was great.
But at the same time we were a bit scared.
Can we handle that?
But the results were pretty amazing.
So we are really happy about the experience.
And also, we are very happy about the small detail, which
is important, which is seven of those students were women,
which was a very different scenario
than any previous years.
So when you do this big jump, basically doubling
the number of projects that you are taking,
you really need to get organized in a different way.
You need to be more systematic.
You need to rely on a lot more on the mentors themselves.
Each theme must be more autonomous.
But we kind of manage.
We set this rule that every project
needed to have two mentors, for instance.
They turn out to work pretty well.
We also put our bet in using the regular community channels
for support, for deployment.
In this way, just after a few weeks,
our Summer of Code students were not Summer of Code students.
They were just regular members of our community using exactly
the same channels as the rest of us used.
There's so much work to do.
We could have Summer of Code every season
if we could just handle that.
What we're interested in promoting more
in future additions is, well, everybody knows Wikipedia.
And, of course, Wikipedia is our champion project.
But precisely because of that reason,
we get a lot of attention from the Wikimedia foundation,
but also from many contributors.
We have many other projects that are just as important.
As I said before, like Wikimedia commons, or Wikivoyage,
they are quite specialized and they also have software needs.
We want to help them more.
We helped them already in this round.
But we really want mentors and students
to put their focus on these other projects.
Because they need a lot of love, and they have great communities
that would help anybody stepping in.
If you want to see something improve in Wikipedia, if you're
missing something that should be there, all we do
is open source.
And actually for us, code is also text
that anybody can edit.
Step in.
I think we are a great community.
We are really friendly.
And actually, any little change that you can contribute
is going to be seen and used by millions, literally.
The core software that runs Wikipedia
is developed with PHP.
And this is the main language we use for many projects.
However, we have many opportunities
for JavaScript projects in the form
of plug-ins that could be used for improved
musical notation, for instance.
Or improve math syntax.
Or you can also help, like helping Wikimedia
support better media formats.
It is all about increasing the diversity
of free content, free media that Wikipedia users could just use.
Go check mediawiki.org.
This is the mediawiki.org.
This is the site where we coordinate
all our technical activities.
We have a page called how to contribute,
which describes the many different areas.
Because, really, we have from JavaScript gadgets
that someone could code on a weekend
to deep pieces of infrastructure that are running our servers.
I mean, in between you have many different projects for
designers, testers, documentation.
We have about 500 regular contributors
and about 2,000 contributors in total.
And there's really hundreds of software projects there.
There's a chance for almost any type of free software
contribution.
We have former students that are in the community.
We have former students that are mentors.
We have former students that are now employees of the Wikimedia
foundation or on other Wikimedia organizations.
This year, we had a student that,
right after the evaluation, was already
starting to work as full-time developer
in the project she was working on.
Yes, we are not participating in Summer of Code
for-- to hire developers.
But of course, it's a possible path.
And well, it shows the possibilities
that great students might have in our community.
MALE SPEAKER: Great, all right.
That sounds great.
QUIM GIL: Good.