Project:New contributors

How to attract volunteers and connect them with interesting people and activities?

The problem
We have a problem engaging volunteers and motivating them to stay. The amount and complexity of documentation, tools and channels is so overwhelming that even we have a hard time following it all. Because we're in the shadow of Wikipedia, we could generate massive interest from tech-friendly users, and we could offer them suitable technical tasks. In reality, we miss many newcomers, and our community efforts don't scale.

In more detail:


 * Wikipmediawiki: what you need to know as a tech contributor is spread out over 3 or more wikis...
 * Plain text identification: it's 2013 and our user profiles consist of a textarea.
 * Memory in spreadsheets: all we have are lists of contributors maintained (or not) manually by various people.
 * Inefficient mass promotion: every time we start almost from scratch, unable to selectively reach target audiences.
 * Inefficient personal promotion: manual pokes in Talk pages + emails from those spreadsheets won't get you far.
 * Difficult to propose a first task: it's difficult for us - imagine how it is for new volunteers alone. After 1-2 attempts, they're gone.
 * Difficult to find peers: "ask in wikitech-l or #mediawiki" is not the answer.
 * Difficult to contribute a first patch: our code review process and wait times can be demotivating for first time contributors.
 * English only: all of the above only gets worse when writing English is not your strength.

The solution

 * Better landing pages for contributors, including
 * http://mediawiki.org and http://wikitech.wikimedia.org main pages.
 * How to contribute and the pages linking directly from there.
 * Developer hub and the pages linking directly from there.
 * Cutting edge use of projects developed for onboarding new Wikipedians: Account creation user experience, GettingStarted, Guided tours.
 * Also for subscriptions and notifications: Echo & Flow.
 * Encouraging users to define their interests through subscriptions and user profiles.
 * Thematic nodes aggregating key information around popular topics.

We are the MediaWiki experts and we can iterate fast eating our own dog food. We have a tradition of beta testing new developments and helping out polishing tools by using them.

Current tasks
Goals to be completed. Check the /Roadmap/ for more ideas.

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A collection of essential pages for new contributors.

The majority of new potential contributors end up in a small collection pages. Let's identify them and agree on common minimum standards.

Help: check Category:New contributors and categorize any essential page you are missing.

"Developers" link to footer of Wikimedia wikis
A link to How to contribute from the footer of all pages in Wikimedia sites.

As a way to catch potential technical contributors reading Wikipedia etc and let them know about possibilities to contribute their tech skills.

Help: be the one submitting the Gerrit changeset. It's ripe.

/One ontology/
A common vocabulary to categorize items across all our tools.

Call it categories, keywords, topics, tags, metadata... What we need is one set of words applied consistently to wiki content, helping to connect related people, nodes, projects, tasks and events.

Help: list contributors' activities, programming languages and free software / knowledge that are relevant to our community.

Improve Developer hub
A landing page for developers reflecting all the activities, beyond MediaWiki core and extensions.

There have been many discussions about revamping this page but so far it has registered little changes. We might be losing potential developers getting stuck here.

Help: edit the page, removing not so essential links or adding development areas not mentioned. Lead the refresh.

MediaWiki.org Main Page tweaks
A homepage refresh to reflect the diversity of projects, technologies and opportunities for contributors.

A lot of discussion and work was done but got stalled. The problem is still there, still growing. It needs to be revisited.

Help: be the one restarting this activity.

Merging GitHub pull requests
Implement a way to merge GitHub pull requests into Gerrit.

The Wikimedia code repository is mirrored in GitHub but we lack a process (with regards to our main workflow with Gerrit) for how to handle pull requests if/when they come in.

Help: FIXME.

Ongoing activities
Never stop. Watchers and more help is always welcome.

How to contribute
A landing page for all technical contributors.

All the types of activity must be reflected here. All the essential pages for contributors should be linked from here.

Help: improve or translate the page.

Social media
Reaching out to the friends of your friends.

Promoting news and activities in Twitter, Facebook, Google+, identi.ca and app.net. Keeping manual sync with Project:Calendar and Template:MediaWiki_News.

Help: follow, like, share and propose interesting content to be distributed.

Possible projects
A list of projects waiting for takers.

Includes featured project ideas with community buy-in and a mentor available. Complemented with Annoying little bugs.

Help: list new possible projects and easy bugs.

Mentorship programs
Bringing selected new contributors from 0 to 100.

Coordination of activities for Google Summer of Code, Free and Open Source Outreach Program for Women and similar initiatives.

Help: give a hand to applicants and interns. Mentor. Connect us with new programs.