New Developers/Featured Projects

This page provides information for project maintainers who would like their project to be listed on New Developers.

How to become a featured project recommended to new developers
If you maintain a Wikimedia technical project and are looking for more contributors, working with newcomers can be a fun and rewarding way to grow your project and the community -- at the same time! To effectively welcome newcomers as contributors to your project, you should be able to provide the following:

Mentoring

 * You help new developers with their first steps in joining our community - finding tasks to work on, reviewing their code, pointing to relevant resources, etc.
 * You are ready to contribute to building our community of developers and learning together. In return, you become an experienced and successful Wikimedia developer!
 * You communicate that you are not available anymore when you realize that you do not have enough time for mentoring anymore.

Tasks

 * You maintain a list of microtasks suitable for new contributors. These tasks should not take more than 2-3 days to complete. If your project uses Wikimedia Phabricator, this could be a link to tasks tagged as #good_first_task. Medium-level tasks that would take 2-3 months, are interesting and engaging enough, could be the first good projects for newbies. These tasks should be easily identifiable with a specific label or tracking via Phabricator columns.
 * You regularly update this list of tasks and add new tasks when applicable.

Documentation
Your project has a landing page (either on mediawiki.org or in your repo) that contains:
 * A project description
 * Information about the programming languages used in your project
 * Contributing guidelines or expectations
 * Steps a new contributor must follow to set up their development environment
 * Links to additional developer documentation, including
 * Contact information for mentors, and recommended communication channels
 * Links to microtasks (e.g., which tasks can a new contributor work on after setting up their development environment?). This could be a column on the workboard of a Phabricator project, some tag for tasks in GitHub or Sourceforge, or a wiki page that you regularly update.
 * Links to a roadmap (e.g., which direction your project is heading or which next tasks or areas developers could work on?). This could also be a column on the workboard of a Phabricator project, some tag for tasks in GitHub or Sourceforge, or a wiki page that you regularly update.

Get listed
Everything in place? Great! If you are interested in listing your project, create a task in Phabricator with a title “Make project X a featured project on mw:New Developers” and tag it with #Developer-Advocacy. We will take it from there :)

Thanks for making our community bigger and more diverse!