Hi David (and Wikitech-l), You've seen Aryeh's thoughtful answer to your question, but I thought I'd expand a bit on the topic of student involvement...
We *love* to have students get involved in Wikimedia engineering, but like most open source communities there is a requirement that you "show up" and do some good contributing before we start rolling out the red carpet much. This is because we are very leanly staffed and don't have a lot of spare time to mentor. My advice is to find an area to contribute (looking as Aryeh says at bug lists and other places where wants are recorded), ask (and later answer) questions on mail lists and gradually work your way up the meritocracy. We *do* have paid contracts with some of the best student engineers to encourage them to continue to contribute during their schooling. There are several of those students on this list. Many of them have told me that contributing to Wikimedia projects is the more interesting than most of the work assigned them for coursework, and we really like to see that spark of recognition that what we're doing is important, impactful work. All of them started out finding their way into the project and gradually building reputation until we felt fairly confident of the quality of their work and also that they are rewarding for us to work with (eg we like engineers who work well with others). There is no magic shortcut...showing up is the only way to do it. Cheers, Danese Cooper CTO, Wikimedia Foundation On 7/21/10 10:57 AM, David Breneisen wrote: > Ahoy there, > > My name is David Breneisen. I was referred here by James Alexander. I'm a > Comp. Sci. student at George Washington > University and have had an interest in open education web development for > the last few years. I thought that I might be able to offer technical > services for the Wikiversity development/maintenance while getting some > experience working on larger, "real," projects. > > I also hope to see if it is possible to do a more formal summer internship > after this school year with Wikimedia, and thought it > would be nice to get used to the overall manner in which Wikimedia > design/development goes. > > Regards, > David Breneisen > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
