Project:New contributors


 * For the path to attract and welcome new contributors, see Contribution path.

How to keep track of volunteers and connect them with interesting activities?

This problem is structurally common to other Wikimedia and open source projects. Just change "technical contributors" with "editors" or "MediaWiki / Wikimedia" by the name of your favorite piece of free software. There is no ready made solution we know of. A standard MediaWiki based development would benefit the Wikimedia movement and would also help MediaWiki as a tool used by free software and open content communities.

We are defining a proposal to a level where a rough production budget can be estimated, in order to consider the possibility of subcontracting the implementation.

The problem
We have problems in the whole contribution cycle:


 * Lack of global profiles identifying contributors
 * One contributor = many usernames from MediaWiki/Wikimedia, Gerrit, Bugzilla, Mailman, IRC...
 * User profiles are plain text, relying on manual updates.
 * Lack of semantic data e.g. location, skills, interests, projects...
 * Lack of common memory about contributors
 * Personal lists maintained (or not) manually by various people.
 * Difficult to promote activities to the right people
 * Every time we start almost from scratch.
 * We lack ways to broadcast selectively by topic.
 * Social media and community communication channels are ok but too broad.
 * Manual pokes in user Talk pages don't scale, are unequally effective and are not trivial to follow-up.
 * Difficult to connect new volunteers with a first task
 * It's not trivial to arrive and find a task by yourself.
 * We don't know how many newcomers never dare to ask.
 * Those who ask find that it's not easy to get started.
 * It's not easy to give a task to someone landing with a vague request in an email.
 * Most probably the memory is lost after a few weeks.
 * Difficult to find peers and stay in touch
 * No way for contributors to find who is interested in XYZ and discuss with them.
 * Same problem: spam wikitech-l, hope to find people through Discussion pages...
 * Groups are supposed to help but group creation and membership is heavy.
 * Difficult to find inactive contributors and follow-up
 * We lack the metrics to find out who was active but not anymore.
 * English only
 * Potential communication and activities in other languages are even more disconnected.

Contributor profile

 * Ideally MediaWiki user profile, extended.
 * Based on Extension:SocialProfile?
 * Optional fields
 * Gravatar?
 * Location
 * Languages
 * Interests (mapped to contributions areas)
 * "Looking for a task"
 * "Willing to learn"
 * "Skilled & offering help"
 * OSS projects involved
 * Social media handlers.

Project maintainers interface
For project maintainers to interact with contributors.


 * Identifying established project contributors & roles.
 * Publish tasks for contributors tagging them by interests, location, language...
 * Send notifications to contributors interested in XYZ.
 * Seeing who signs up for an event.

Automatically generated info pages
Based on data from user profiles and projects.


 * Project pages
 * Members
 * Related interests e.g. programming languages.
 * Accepting transcluded descriptions, statuses...
 * Lists of users by project, location, language, interest...
 * All the better if multiple selection criteria is possible e.g. Barcelona AND JavaScript, Lua + Willing to learn.
 * Lists of participants in events.

Contributor profile

 * Fields automatically updated.
 * MediaWiki stats.
 * Gerrit stats.
 * Bugzilla stats.
 * Labs stats.
 * Mentoring to / Mentored by
 * Showing mentors & entees (in a wide sense)
 * Badges
 * Project membership.
 * Remarkable tasks completed.
 * Participation in events.
 * Contact me
 * Email from other members.
 * Localizable (is it already?)

Project maintainers interface

 * Confirming who participated in an event + special badges.

Automatically generated info pages

 * Lists of top contributors based on stats e.g. top code reviewers of the month.