Hello Danese,
I appreciate your advice and insight to how Wikimedia works. Neritocracies
can be very nice, as well as the opportunity to work and learn while doing
something that I feel is important. I may not be incredibly useful at this
point but I suppose that will be the learning part.
Thanks again,
David
On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Danese Cooper <dcooper(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
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
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