June 9: Help Wikipedia test some software, and get involved in their community (no programming required)
Wikipedia software developers are working on a new “Article Feedback Tool” which sits at the bottom of every article in Wikipedia. On June 9, you can help test the latest version (before it gets rolled out to all of Wikipedia!) just by showing up for chat and following instructions. It’s free, entirely on-line, requires no programming, and will let you make a difference in the software that runs Wikipedia.
Details
The Wikimedia Foundation wants people to test that the newest version of the Article Feedback Tool works properly. It is hosting a chat session where anyone, with any degree of programming experience, is invited to chat about the tool, follow a detailed test plan to see if the tool works as designed, and report issues (e.g. by filing bugs) where it doesn’t work.
The Article Feedback tool is a box at the bottom of every Wikipedia article, designed ‘as an “on-ramp” to engage readers to contribute to Wikipedia — and become editors over time’. You can read more on the main event info page.
In this event, you spend an hour or two chatting online, you get a lot of insight into how a part of Wikipedia works, and you get to see how bugs in Bugzilla drive activity in the open source MediaWiki software that powers the encyclopedia.
The event will be led by veteran quality assurance engineer Chris McMahon, and has a clear test plan to keep the event focused.
To summarize:
WHO: Anyone who can read/write English and wants to test software just before it gets deployed for all Wikipedia users
WHERE: The main MediaWiki chat room, #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net (we will send instructions on using IRC to people who sign up)
WHEN: June 9, 10 AM US/Pacific; 1 PM US/Eastern (Convert to your time zone)
MORE INFO: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Testing_June_2012
SIGN UP: http://smarturl.it/afd-qa
Once you sign up, we’ll email you essential information on setting up your computer for IRC chat and with important dates to maximize your impact.
The event is co-sponsored by OpenHatch, which means we’re helping with publicity (like this blog post)!