Project:New contributors

'''After the feedback received we are re-purposing completely this space (more). 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 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.
 * 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 betatesting new developments and helping out polishing tools by using them.

Activities
Ongoing work. Check the /Roadmap/ for more ideas.

"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.

/One ontology/
A common vocabulary to classify 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.