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 and are interested in more contributors? Awesome! Here is some information which should help you and us:

Mentoring

 * Your project will be promoted in all our developer events and outreach programs. Your mentoring activities increase travel opportunities to events inside and outside the Wikimedia movement.
 * 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

 * 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 featured project:
 * Offers a basic project description and information about the programming languages used (e.g., your project page on mediawiki.org).
 * Links to developer documentation (e.g., which steps do a new contributor have to follow to set up their development environment?)
 * Offers mentors and their contact information 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!