User:Sandaru/Welcome to labs/Project Proposal

Problem
Wikimedia Labs is a platform to volunteer and experimental development. It is a two part project Dev Labs and Tool Labs. The problem is Wikimedia labs currently face some difficulties in matching new contributors with existing projects. Also their documentation for newcomers needs improvement as well.

Purpose
Purpose of this project is to have a complete set of newcomer getting started documentation set with complete project landing pages for a each project. Therefore when a new comer comes he/she has a directed guidance to find what are the existing projects and how to contribute to them or how to start a project from scratch.

Scope
The scope of this project is improving all the documentation in Wikimedia Labs. This includes Getting started documentation and all the project pages.

Methodology
As an initial contribution for this project I have made an document on Reviewing main page and getting started page which can be found here. Reviewing Main Page and Getting Started Page

I hope to divide this project in two sections which needs to be executed in parallel.

1. Improving Getting Started Documentation

2. Completing project documentation in each project

1. Improving getting started documentation
Getting started documentation plays a major role in the open source community. Having a complete set of getting started documents will help newcomers to find a direction to contribute to the community. In Wikimedia labs there are two main type of newcomer use cases:

1. Random helpful volunteer who just shows up out of nowhere wondering 'what is this and what is this good for'?.

2. Specific user on a mission who shows up with a particular project in mind.

We should consider these two use cases and come up with a getting started page which supports each of the use cases.

One specific drawback I see in the Wikimedia Labs documentation is It doesn't have an FAQ page. Along with the getting started documentation we should have a FAQ page with set of common questions for newcomers or wikimedia labs users.

For newcomers to start volunteering he/she should find a project which suits his/her ability. In the other case when someone comes with an idea he/she should be able to find whether that idea is already implemented in a project. In order to achieve this we should have a complete project pages with descriptions.

2. Completing project documentation in each project
Currently the labs documentation contents comes from various sources. Some of it is automatically generated and some of it is written by staff and volunteers. If we have a clear template for every project then it would be easy for volunteers or staff to organize the contents and complete the documentation.

For that porpose first I would come up a template discussing with the mentor and then we have a community discussion on that template. After getting the ideas for the community we can the revised template can be sent to the projects to change their documentation. As the internship period is 13 weeks we should start this in the community bonding period. Then I hope to go through the project documentation of each projects preferably 14 projects a week and communicate with the project members and help them complete their documentation. This would result in completing the documentation of all the projects hosted in the labs hopefully at the end of the internship period.