Description:
On the Editing Team, we support new and experienced volunteers working in 300+ languages with the tools they need to keep Wikipedia accurate and up to date. The team's main area of focus is the flagship VisualEditor, our industry-leading rich-text editing platform which we have been extending to serve new use cases (e.g. DiscussionTools to support on-wiki communication) and unlock new capabilities that lower the barriers people encounter when contributing to Wikipedia. The latest capability being Edit Check, an open-ended system designed to surface actionable pieces of feedback and suggestions that help volunteers improve the quality and integrity of the information Wikipedia offers.
You are responsible for:
- Improving the Wikipedia product experience by fixing bugs and implementing new functionality.
- Iterating on new features through collaboration with fellow engineers, product managers, designers, other teams, and community members.
- Writing multilingual, accessible, and performant code using Javascript and PHP.
- Building on top of the MediaWiki API ecosystem.
- Instrumenting components to monitor feature behavior and quality characteristics.
Skills and experience:
- 2–5 years related professional or open-source software engineering experience.
- Experience with object-oriented development using a scripting language (such as JavaScript, PHP, Python or Ruby). Most of our work is in JavaScript, PHP and CSS.
- Focused software engineering: you have experience of writing unit tests, and of structuring your work with version control.
- Strong written communication skills as our collaboration largely happens online, on chats, wikis, documents and tickets.
Qualities that are important to us:
- A desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access.
- An emphasis on communicating clearly in both synchronous and asynchronous channels.A strong aptitude in algorithms and data structures is essential!
- A desire to write well-documented and maintainable code.
- The willingness to participate in technical discussions, proposing solutions to technical challenges, participating in code reviews and receiving feedback.
- An eagerness and curiosity to solve technical problems, trying things out and investigating issues, and supporting the work of others.
Additionally, we'd love it if you have this:
- Experience building a rich-text editor.
- Experience working with large, legacy codebases.
- A history of editing on Wikimedia projects.
- A history of open-source contribution.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or mathematics, or equivalent experience.