MediaWiki templates are wiki pages to be included in other pages. Templates can take arguments, allowing editors to create special types of content like infoboxes, banners, and more. Originally, templates were written wikitext with parser functions, mimicking the functionality of a very basic programming language (but requiring advanced skills to get smart results out of them).

This problem has been solved allowing templates to rely in modules written with Lua, a proper programming language: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua. Now we have many wikitext templates waiting to be rewritten in Lua. Take one and rewrite it! See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lua/Help and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Lua_for_beginners .

Translate https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Other_date to Lua and build testcases comparing both versions. Expand ISOdate_extended function in https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Module:Date/sandbox to allow calling of the lua version from that function based on simple English (or language independent) expressions. If successful the result is likely to be called from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Information and https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Creator and might be used on majority of files on Wikimedia Commons.

Students are required to read Wikimedia's general instructions at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in_2014#Instructions_for_GCI_students first.