New Developers/Featured Projects

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

Background
In 2017, the Onboarding New Developers program was proposed as an approach to broaden Wikimedia's developer base. Beforehand, efforts to outreach to potential new Wikimedia developers were solely based around beginner tasks (with no clear mentorship defined) and outreach programs limited in time. Both approaches lacked a sustainable, long-term path for growth and retaining involvement.

How to become a featured project recommended to new developers
You maintain a Wikimedia project, are interested in more contributors, and would like to take part in Wikimedia's Onboarding New Developers program?

Awesome! Here is some information which should help you and us:

Projects

 * Your project will be promoted in all our developer events.
 * You offer a short description what your project does and link to more information (e.g. your project page on mediawiki.org). Your description allows new developers to judge whether your project fits their interest area and which knowledge (programming languages, technology) and knowledge levels you recommend.

Mentors

 * You help new developers with their first steps joining our community - finding tasks they can work on, reviewing their code, and pointing to resources (documentation, communication channels, places) and information whenever useful.
 * You provide information on how you can be contacted.
 * You are ready to contribute to building our community of developers and learning together.
 * Working with new developers contributes to your public path as an experienced and successful Wikimedia developer.
 * Your mentoring and activity in Outreach programs also increases travel opportunities to events inside and outside the Wikimedia movement.

Tasks

 * A list of microtasks suitable for starters (which would take newcomers 2-3 days; if your project uses Wikimedia Phabricator this could be a link to tasks tagged as #goodfirstbug) and medium-level tasks (2-3 months) which are interesting and engaging enough and could be first good projects for newbies. (This should be one "static" link so you can tag such tasks in your task tracker instead of manually updating the wiki page.)
 * You regularly update this list of tasks and add new tasks when applicable.

Documentation
Your featured project
 * offers a basic project description and information about the programming languages used.
 * links to developer documentation - which steps does a new contributor have to follow to set up their development environment?
 * offers mentor and mentor contact information and recommended communication channels.
 * links to microtasks - 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 which you regularly update.
 * links to a roadmap - which direction is your project heading and which next tasks or areas developers could work on. Again, this could be a column on the workboard of a Phabricator project, some tag for tasks in GitHub or Sourceforge, or a wiki page which you regularly update.

Get listed
Everything in place? Great! Please either edit New Developers and add your project yourself, or create a task in Phabricator so we will add it.

Thanks for making our community bigger and more diverse!