Answers/Volunteer

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First, we want to thank you for your interest in joining our mission! The Wikimedia movement relies on volunteers who generate and maintain all content on our educational sites as well as creating almost all of the policies and guidelines that govern them. They are collaborative projects, with people from all over the world bringing their skills and interests to join in the compilation and dissemination of knowledge to everyone, everywhere, free of charge. Volunteers also help develop and trouble-shoot the open source MediaWiki software we use on our sites. There is information in the sections below on how to contribute to our sites or help develop our software. If you cannot find your answer here, please check the "Help" link on the left hand side of the specific project where you would like to contribute. If doing this does not answer your question, you may wish to write to the email response team at infowikimediaorg Disclaimer: Emails to infowikimediaorg are reviewed and responded to by volunteers from our user community. Please understand that the Wikimedia Foundation cannot guarantee confidential treatment of any sensitive information you include in your message. If you would like to contribute content on our sites (click to expand or collapse) First, we want to thank you for your interest in joining our mission! Wikipedia and its sister sites rely on volunteers who generate and maintain all content as well as creating almost all of the policies and guidelines that govern the sites. They are collaborative projects, with people from all over the world bringing their skills and interests to join in the compilation and dissemination of knowledge to everyone, everywhere, free of charge. There are a number of ways you can join in. Do you like to research or write? Did you know that you can contribute content to Wikipedia and its sister sites directly? Each language project has information about contributing in the links on the side, sometimes under a pull-down title like "Interactions". Many of them have advanced tutorials. The English Wikipedia's tutorial is en:Wikipedia:Tutorial, for instance. Are you fluent in more than one language and willing to translate? See our page on translation for more specific information. Do you like to take photographs? Draw pictures? Design charts, maps or put together audio files? There is a place for you, too! Media files that you have created which have encyclopedic value and which you're willing to donate can be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, where they can be used on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects, as well as elsewhere! See Commons:Project scope/Summary for some more information on the kinds of media files that we are looking for and Upload Wizard to begin. Are you a programmer or web developer or interested in becoming one? Did you know that even the software Wikipedia uses is largely developed by volunteers? If you're interested in pitching in there, please see How to become a MediaWiki hacker. As mentioned above, most of our projects' policies and practices are created by volunteers, who can best help if you have questions about the volunteering experience. If you would like more information, you may want to visit the "help" forums linked on the left hand side of each page on our websites to learn where questions can be addressed to the community of that particular project. If you cannot find the information you seek or have other questions for or about the projects, you might want to write to the volunteer email response team at infowikimediaorg. Volunteers are available to offer guidance in many different languages. We hope you will decide to join us! If you would like to translate content (click to expand or collapse) Thank you for your interest in assisting! Wikipedia relies on volunteers who generate and maintain all content as well as creating policies and guidelines to govern the site. It is a collaborative project, with people from all over the world bringing their skills and interests to join in the compilation and dissemination of knowledge to everyone, everywhere, free of charge. The other projects we maintain are also collaborative, crowd-sourced projects that rely on volunteers. Translation is a volunteer-driven activity on our websites, just like content creation. If you want to translate content from one of our projects to another, a general approach to translation from English Wikipedia to other projects is provided at w:Wikipedia:Translate us. This approach is likely to succeed on most projects with most languages, but it's a good idea to check on whichever project you wish to work to see if there are different local processes. You can reach out to the "help" or community discussion forum on the project where you want to place the translation. These are generally linked from the side of every page. If you can't find it, you can write to infowikimediaorg for more information. Please, in that case, specify the language project where you want to work (for instance, Italian Wiktionary; French Wikipedia). If you are interested in helping to translate official documents used for management of Wikimedia projects, this work is also done by volunteers. Meta:Babylon is a good place to begin. There is a section there on getting started which includes some important links, and there is also a section on communication that tells you some of the best places to get in touch with other translators, who may be able to give you specifics about the work. We'd recommend reading the tutorial linked from the "getting started" section before beginning, if you choose to pitch in. Thanks for your interest, and we hope you will decide to join us. Disclaimer: Emails to infowikimediaorg are reviewed and responded to by volunteers from our user community. Please understand that the Wikimedia Foundation cannot guarantee confidential treatment of any sensitive information you include in your message. If you would like to tell us an idea you have for a new project or to improve an existing project (click to expand or collapse) We appreciate that you're spending time thinking about ways to improve Wikimedia. Because the Wikimedia Foundation does not create or curate the contents on Wikipedia or the other sites we manage —this work is done by a vast community of volunteers—we are not able to implement most suggestions directly by email request. Changes to existing projects, like Wikipedia, and new project approval (like new languages for existing projects or entirely new concepts for sites) come from this community of volunteers. If you want to propose an entirely new project, please visit Project proposals. If you'd like to propose that we create a new language version of an existing project, please visit Requests for new languages. If what you'd like to propose is a new feature for one of our existing projects, please share your thoughts with the volunteers at that project. There are community forums for ideas and suggestions. Most of our projects have a link on the right hand side to community discussion points, sometimes given titles like "village pump" or "cafe" or "travelers pub." For example, the English Wikipedia discusses ideas and proposals here. Just as article pages can be edited by anyone, so can these discussion pages. If you're not already familiar with how to edit our pages, the MediaWiki guide on editing can be useful. If you need further assistance, either with editing or with finding a proper home for your discussion, the community maintains a volunteer email response team who should be able to assist. They can be reached at infowikimediaorg. Please be sure to tell them specifically which project and in what language you are working on; if you are more comfortable corresponding in languages other than English, they can in many cases communicate with you in your native tongue. We hope that the community will be receptive to your idea. If you have a business proposal that is not a new project, a new language version of an existing project, or a modification of practices on an existing project, please contact businesswikimediaorg Disclaimer: Emails to infowikimediaorg are reviewed and responded to by volunteers from our user community. Please understand that the Wikimedia Foundation cannot guarantee confidential treatment of any sensitive information you include in your message. If you would like to post something on the Wikimedia blog (click to expand or collapse) Thank you for your interest in Wikimedia. The Wikimedia Foundation accepts relevant guest blogs from anyone, for instance http://blog.wikimedia.org/author/rubin16/ and http://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/03/13/celebrating-womens-day-the-wiki-way/. Posts must be on topics of wide interest to the Wikimedia movement. You can find the blog guidelines, including how to submit a draft for review at Wikimedia Blog.