New Developers/Featured Projects

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.

This page provides information for project maintainers.

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 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 #easy) and medium-level tasks (2-3 months) which are interesting and engaging enough and could be first good projects for newbies.
 * You regularly update this list of tasks and add new tasks when applicable.

Documentation
Your featured project provides a landing page which
 * offers a basic project description
 * offers mentor information
 * links to microtasks
 * links to developer documentation
 * links to a roadmap

Roadmap

 * You provide some perspective which direction your project is heading and which next tasks or areas other developers could work on. 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.

Thanks for making our community bigger and more diverse!