Language Onboarding and Development/Starter kit/Updates

Starter kit

Updates

Updates for 2026 are listed below.

3 July 2026

Wikipedia Starter Kit Dashboard MVP Demo Video

A plan to gather feedback on the Starter Kit from selected administrators and communities was developed: T428121. Potential participants included administrators who had actively participated in an earlier pilot to test one of the Starter Kit's initial features for main page customization, along with 25 active administrators from approximately 22 wikis. An example of the outreach message shared with administrators from the selected communities is available here.
Outreach efforts continued throughout the month with follow-up messages encouraging contributors to share their feedback. So far, three contributors from the Nias, Igala, and Tyap language communities have provided feedback. Follow-up conversations are ongoing to better understand their experience using the Starter Kit and gather more detailed suggestions for improvement. Their feedback will help us understand which parts of the Starter Kit are most useful, how effective the current guided tasks are, and what additional support would be valuable for onboarding and developing new wikis.
Based on the issues identified during testing and the feedback received so far, work is underway to improve the Starter Kit experience. This includes unifying Starter Kit UI elements into a shared component and design token system, simplifying the main page customization workflow, adding impact dashboards to assess the Starter Kit, and surfacing required user permissions for essential tasks.

5 June 2026

Overall, the Starter Kit Main Page customization feature was tested with three communities: Tyap, Jju, Fula. Feedback from the communities was largely positive, particularly around the ease of setup and the reduced time required to configure a homepage. Contributors noted that tasks which previously took days or weeks could now be completed in about an hour using the Starter Kit. Communities especially appreciated that much of the HTML and CSS was already in place, making it easier for contributors without strong technical backgrounds to configure their Main Pages. Suggested improvements have been summarized at T420075.
Starter Kit Dashboard MVP was presented at the May 29th Language Community Meeting by User:NGkountas (WMF), & User:ToluAyod. User:Kambai Akau shared their experience using the Starter Kit to customize the Main Page for the Jju and Tyap language communities.
Starter Kit MVP is nearing completion: T420073. Testing rollout is planned for June 8th. Work has focused on the remaining pieces, including pending deployments, bug fixes, and testing. The MVP Dashboard will cover a set of six essential tasks (T422214), an Activity & Growth component (T423407), and a Community & Collaboration component (T423409).
Planning is underway to gather feedback on the Starter Kit Dashboard MVP from selected administrators and communities. Their input will help identify which parts of the Starter Kit are most useful, how well the current guided tasks work, and what additional support would be valuable for wiki onboarding and development (T428121).

4 May 2026

Kicked off work on the Activity & Growth section of the Starter kit dashboard, focusing on expandable cards that track wiki health and progress toward key milestones. An initial demo has been created, including active editors and article count metrics. Exploration continues on adding metrics such as new article count, deleted article count, top reader topics, and top editor topics.
Started community testing T420075#11751563 for the Starter Kit Main Page customization feature. Administrators from more than six communities, including Tyap Wikipedia, were contacted to validate the feature in real wiki environments. Tyap Wikipedia successfully tested the feature, published it to their Main Page, and shared feedback on the deployment process.

7 April 2026

Drafted an internal technical plan covering goals, workflow, and implementation for the pilot phase. The current approach includes a Vue 3 frontend, a Node.js + Express API backend, a lightweight SQLite database, OAuth 1.0a for authentication, and deployment on Toolforge.
Presented the Starter Kit designs at the monthly Language Diversity Hub meeting to gather feedback on how it can best support new and smaller language communities. Overall, the response was very positive, and it was encouraging to see interest in how this could support language onboarding. Some of the feedback included making the selection of focus areas for main page customization even more intuitive, thinking through multilingual considerations, being mindful of policy translation challenges, and exploring ways communities can track growth through relevant metrics.
An initial list of 11 wikis has been identified for testing the main page customization feature: Tongan, Central Kanuri, Nupe, Obolo, Southern Ndebele, Tigre, Mossi, Kusaal, and Pannonian Rusyn: T420075. These wikis represent a range of smaller language communities where the feature could be useful. Common issues include mobile responsiveness, missing or thin content, and design layout problems. The list was generated by reviewing the Incubator site creation log and includes mostly wikis created between 2023 and 2026. Additional conversations with the Language Diversity Hub considered communities currently participating in their mentorship program, such as Tibetan and Fulfulde. These communities will be approached for testing on April 13.
Starter kit is currently being prepared for localization and added to Translatewiki.net. All user-facing strings have been extracted into i18n: T421456, T422182. Work is ongoing to address remaining bugs and UI/UX issues for the main page customization feature: T420418.
In parallel, an initial wiki health framework and metrics for the starter kit were designed, with main page customization metrics mapped to this framework: T422571.

6 March 2026

In Q2 last year, we began exploring the concept of a Wikipedia starter kit, a language lifecycle sensitive approach that will provide Wikipedia administrators with essential tasks, tools and resources for growing a language community. Over the last few weeks, we achieved a significant milestone in brainstorming potential designs at a team offsite, and refining those to create mockups for the starter kit dashboard and a main page customization feature. This weekend, we had an opportunity to share more about this work at the Language Community meeting more about this work and engage attendees in discussions around the designs. Summary of the feedback received included:

What language communities liked

“This starter kit looks amazing.”
“I like the Wiki health dashboard.”
“Glad to see the starter kit coming to life. It will now be easier for new language contributors to contribute in the Incubator more effectively.”
“Page creation is simpler with the kit.”
“I think it was great, especially how it will make it easy for people to customize their wiki homepages, which is quite difficult to do manually.”

Suggestions/questions

“Mostly homepage customization is limited to interface admins only, but if it’s open to everyone, it could lead to absolute vandalism.”
“If a user has to use this tool, they need to know what they need so the user can focus on the content, minimizing the steps used.”
“I like the policy pages, but how would it allow mass editing?”
“There is this design pattern that is used in Wikipedia; maybe the tool can match those colors.”
"Is the Starter Kit being functional for alternative writing systems (e.g., RTL scripts)."
“HotCat is one important gadget that helps to add categories. This is the main one I would like to see added.”
“It would be great if the Starter Kit is mobile-friendly.”
“Is this ok to use in the Incubator, especially when the language project is still small?
"Adding tools in the starter kit for example Capacity exchange tool"