Talk:Language Onboarding and Development/Starter kit

Feedback and ideas for the Starter Kit are welcome on this talk page!

Feedback on deploying the Starter kit on the Tyap Wikipedia

Greetings, Language Onboarding and Developers! Here is my feedback:

• Time taken: It took me days to configure and customize the Tyap Wikipedia's homepage initially (I am yet to finish it), but with the starter kit, it took me just about an hour to completely configure and customize the main page. Had this been present a long time ago, one wouldn't have stressed a lot in the past.
• Discovery: What I discovered was that everything has been made so easy compared to what one may find in the English Wikipedia or any other. They have been made for just anyone who wishes to deploy this kit to their Wikipedia with ease.
• What more could be captured: Taking a look at the existing homepage for the Tyap Wikipedia (which would soon be switched to the new),
  • One would see a box where new articles could be added with ease, which could be added to the starter kit.
  • Another thing is that the Tyap Wikipedia finds it important to capture other Tyap dialects in its Wikipedia. Hence, in the middle of the header, one sees where Tyap dialects are represented, whose links would lead to categories related to the dialects (later on, there would be pages developed for each, which would act as embassies for each of those dialects). We find this very important for our community's progress in language documentation and equal representation.
• Confusion points: I never really felt stuck, confused, or unsure about what to do next during the event of configuring and customizing the starter kit template because everything seemed quite easy. The only place where I didn't know what to do was when I was earlier trying to deploy the same in the Jju Wikipedia and could not, but @UOzurumba (WMF) explained to me that I had to have admin rights to do so. Hence, I decided to go over to the Tyap Wikipedia, where I have admin rights, and it worked! The developers of this kit totally blow my mind, I must confess. Thank you!!!

-- Kambai Akau (talk) 20:32, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

@Kambai Akau Thanks a lot for taking the time to try the Starter Kit tool and for sharing your valuable feedback with us. Also, kudos for successfully publishing the main page. :)

I will pass your ideas on to the team, and we will reflect on how we might incorporate them - specifically the suggestion to include a box to search for or add new articles, as well as a way to represent other dialects of a language.

For now, you can absolutely copy and paste the content from the older templates into the new source of the main page if you would like, and let us know if you need any support with that. For continuing to build on the main page and editing content in the templates created by the Starter Kit, you can refer to the new templates here: https://kcg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa:Nta%CC%B1mpi%CC%B1let_starter_kit. Cheers! User:SSethi_(WMF) 20:42, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks indeed, @SSethi (WMF). I will contact you in case I need support with anything regarding the main page. Warm regards, Kambai Akau (talk) 23:05, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

Feedback on using the Starter Kit to configure and customize Fulah Wikipedia homepage

Dear Language Onboarding and Development Team, I have tested the Starter Kit Tool and below I shared my experience and thoughts on using it:

• The time it took to configure and customize your Wikipedia initially, and the time it took now with the Kit.

Previously, it took me some weeks to set-up the Fula homepage to what it now looks like but with this Starter kit tool I found it easier because the codes were already in place and I was able to customized the homepage in less than one and half hour although I am experiencing network challenges by the time. I believe the time taken wouldn't be that much had it been there was good internet connection.

• The things you find most useful while configuring it.

The HTML and CSS codes provided by default is one of the features I found most useful because it bridge the barrier and ensure inclusion of users with zero background in coding and programming languages to be able to create their local wiki homepages stress free. Also the interface is friendly and the whole process is easy, self explanatory and direct.

• Tell us anything important to your language Wikipedia or your community's goals that you felt the configured main page templates were able to or unable to capture.

I think everything is captured except that in our current homepage template we have a section for video and audio files which are not included here.

• The step in the configuration process where you felt stuck, confused, or unsure what to do next.

None. However, I feel that there is need for either a pop-up notification or a whole page with a brief guidelines/how-to-do information for users because I have a feeling that despite it's simplicity not every user (especially those from newly approved languages) can get it right at one go. Also, there is need to provide it in different languages expecially to engage communities from areas of the world where English is less spoken/not part of their official languages.

Overall, this is one of the most useful tool ever developed in the Wikimedia movement and its usefulness can never be overemphasized. It is truly an important tool that would solve the existing challenges various communities are experiencing when creating homepages. De-Invincible (talk) 19:22, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Hi @De-Invincible! Thanks a lot for trying out the Starter Kit tool and for sharing your valuable feedback with us. I’m curious if you were able to publish the final main page changes on your local wiki.

At the same time, if you are already satisfied with the current shape and form of your wiki's main page, you might probably not want to take the final step of publishing the main page changes via the Starter Kit tool. Looking forward to your thoughts! User:SSethi_(WMF) 19:12, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Hi @SSethi (WMF),

Thank you so much for involving me and my community in this important project. Yes, we adopted this final main page changes on our local wiki and have published it because we found this having a more cleaner and modern look for our local wiki. Thank you once again for the priviledge and we are looking forwards to more future engagements. De-Invincible (talk) 09:38, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Thank you @De-Invincible! I can now see the changes on your main page. These changes look great! Let us know if you need any help with making further changes to the main page. User:SSethi_(WMF) 20:18, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Feedback on deploying the Starter kit on the Jju Wikipedia

Greetings, Language Onboarding and Developers. Here is my feedback regarding the Jju Wikipedia:

• Time taken: Completely configuring and customizing the the main page with the starter kit, as in the Tyap Wikipedia, took me just about an hour to do.
• Discovery: The process was easy, although configuring the starter kit in a language Wikipedia would require one with knowledge of the language or one working with those having knowledge of the language.
• What more could be captured: Just as in the Tyap Wikipedia, there would be need to add the article creation feature so that new editors would not have to struggle to find where to create new articles.
• Confusion points: Having gotten previous experience with the Tyap Wikipedia.

-- Kambai Akau (talk) 23:24, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

@Kambai Akau First, congratulations on receiving the admin rights for Jju! And, thank you for taking the time to try the Starter Kit tool on Jju and for sharing your valuable feedback with us. Also, kudos for successfully publishing the main page. User:SSethi_(WMF) 17:31, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! @SSethi (WMF). Kambai Akau (talk) 23:24, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

Feedback on deploying the Starter kit on the Nias Wikipedia

I understand the purpose of this Starter Kit and it can be very helpful for many people. Unfortunately we cannot deploy it on niawiki:

1. There is no an automatic translation available in Nias language, so it doesn't have more value than copying the text directly and translate it.
2. The first obstacle is the infobox and other templates which are not always available on niawiki. And there is no button/mechanism to automatically import the templat (at least I haven't seen it when I tried it). So in the end doing it manually is straight forward.

BTW unless Wikipedia provides universal templates that can be deploy to other languages automatically, this will not work (although technically it should be possible to separate the template id, which would be the same in all languages, from its template name, which can be different in each language [I'm thinking of Wikidata]). Anyway IMHO reinventing new templates in each language is only waste of resources, if they are already available in enwiki. So there is a strong case for finding a way to make the template modular (by separating the id from its name).

It would be helpful for us to provide that list of 1000 basic articles as it is, so that we can use it to translate the articles manually. Thanks. Slaia (talk) 10:48, 12 June 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for trying out the Starter Kit tool and for sharing such thoughtful and valuable feedback!

I completely understand the frustration of landing on the Content Translation tool when machine translation support is not available for your language. In that situation, the workflow can indeed feel more cumbersome than helpful.

Regarding infoboxes and templates, there is actually an advanced-level task in the Starter Kit that helps with importing infoboxes, which you may find useful: https://starterkit.toolforge.org/import-infobox-tool

But I do agree that the broader “universal templates” issue is very real. The goal of the Starter Kit project is not specifically about templates themselves, but rather about bringing together essential tasks, resources, and tools into a more guided and automated onboarding experience for smaller and emerging Wikipedias.

We are also hoping that if there are successful approaches to solving the larger template portability problem, Starter Kit can build on top of them and integrate with those solutions as a platform (for example: T424197). Thanks again for taking the time to test the tool! User:SSethi_(WMF) 09:21, 13 June 2026 (UTC)

Feedback on deploying the Starter kit on the Igala Wikipedia

Thank you for inviting me to test the Starter Kit Dashboard. I really appreciate the effort being made to support newer and smaller Wikimedia communities. Overall, I found the tool helpful and easy to explore.

Several sections of the Starter Kit stood out for me. The activity and growth tracking features are particularly useful because they make it easier to see how our wiki is developing over time. Having this information in one place can help to better understand our progress and identify areas where more support is needed.

I also found the Community Connections section valuable because smaller Wikimedia communities often need guidance from more experienced contributors, and this feature can make it easier to connect with people who can provide support, advice, and technical assistance when needed.

Another feature I liked is the section for translating or creating essential articles. For new editors, finding articles that need to be translated or created can sometimes be challenging. Having these recommendations readily available provides a clear starting point and helps contributors begin making meaningful edits more quickly.

One suggestion I have concerns the mentor list. Instead of having a curated list of mentors, it might be helpful to allow users to view all registered usernames. This would give people the flexibility to reach out to contributors they already know, have worked with before, or simply admire within the Wikimedia movement.

Looking ahead, I would love to see the Starter Kit offer more guidance or automation around creating important templates, identifying content gaps, and recommending articles that need to be created or translated on language Wikipedias. These are areas where many smaller communities need support, and such features could make a significant difference.

Overall, I think the Starter Kit Dashboard has a lot of potential and can become a valuable resource for emerging Wikimedia communities. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to test the tool and share our thoughts. AgnesAbah (talk) 11:48, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

@AgnesAbah Thank you for sharing your valuable feedback and comments. Regarding your suggestion about providing more guidance and automation around creating important templates and recommending articles to create or translate, we already have a couple of tasks on the Starter Kit Dashboard that relate to this feedback. If you have any specific examples or ideas on how these could be improved, that would be incredibly helpful. Thanks again for taking the time to review the Starter Kit and share your feedback! User:SSethi_(WMF) 02:13, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

Feedback on the trial of the Wikipedia Starter Kit Dashboard in the Tyap Wikipedia

Having tried using the Wikipedia Starter Kit Dashboard, I will like to commend the efforts of the he Language Onboarding and Development initiative in developing this tool to aid admins perform essential tasks on their respective small Wikipedias.

I like the Recruit Editors & Native Speakers note under "Community & Collaboration," where one can share the message on Telegram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, where one can recruit native speakers to to join the project. The "Essential Tasks" section looks awesome as well, and I was able to translate the article A̱sukuru using the "Translate or create an essential article" tool.

I have not been able to explore deeply enough, but from the few observations I made on the dashboard, I noticed that:

1. The tracking of the "New Editors" and "Articles Created Vs. Deleted", seem to be lagging and may need to be purged. However, the "Next milestone" counter seems to be working perfectly well!
2. I cannot be able to installing HotCat to add categories and completely install Infoboxes due to the need for importing CSS files as well, on the Tyap Wikipedia, which would require one with interface admin rights to be able to do that. I have placed a request for a one-time access to be able to deploy the CSS files but don't know if I will be given. It will be good that in the future, these files could be importable automatically into small wikis, or there could be a button to request for CSS files to be imported on the Wikipedia Starter Kit dashboard to make it easier for stewards to perform the other functions remaining.

I will also request that if possible, the Wikipedia Starter Kit dashboard could be made to have local keyboards like the one Amire80 developed for the Tyap language (i.e., the Tyap tilde), to make typing of text in other languages easier.

These are my few observations for now. Thanks! -- Kambai Akau (talk) 20:26, 28 June 2026 (UTC)

@Kambai Akau Thanks a lot for trying out the Starter Kit and for sharing your valuable feedback and suggestions! It is great to hear that you were able to translate an essential article.

I'm curious to learn a bit more about your experience. Did you use Content Translation, or did you write the article from scratch using the wiki editor? If you used Content Translation, how was your experience? Also, how helpful was the guided flow for the essential task around creating or translating an article?

Could you also say a bit more about the lag you noticed with tracking new editors and articles created vs deleted? What exactly did you observe? From what I know, the dashboard currently isn't able to pull statistics for the most recent month, so that may be why you're not seeing the latest metrics.

That's a really good point about the permissions needed for infoboxes. We'll also try to make it clearer in the interface which permissions are required to complete the different essential tasks in the Starter Kit. We'll look into the automatic imports idea as well.

Your point about keyboards is super interesting too. Could you share a bit more about what you mean by making local keyboards available? Is the idea to make typing easier while using the Starter Kit itself? If so, how do you imagine that flow working for a specific task, given that the actual editing actions happen on the local wiki, where the keyboard is already available? User:SSethi_(WMF) 20:20, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

Feedback on using the Stater Kit on the Batak Toba Wikipedia

This is administrator of Batak Toba Wikipedia.

Relating to this stater kit that you have mentioned through your message before, I have tried to access and use it. Here is my opinion on this Stater Kit:

• in general, this stater kit has quite integrated to the several applications which useful for developping Wikipedia such as Translatewiki, so I do not need to open the new tab to access that application;
• there is an automatic translation from the other language to Batak Toba, but the result of automatic translation is terrible and sometimes weird for the speaker of Batak Toba. That is why, our community do not recommend the automatic translation;
• this stater kit would be use more effective, if there is a room to access the improtant template, and sub-template (?), which can be adopted to the each Wikipedia in regional and/or traditional language; and
• I think this Stater Kit need to add the feature to find and replace the certain word which is not written correctly based on Batak Toba orthography for more than one article.

Overall, there is something that need to be considered is the Stater Kit should be easy to access and use, so it will be helpful the administrators.

I think that is all from me

Thank you for your attention. Gazartashlomo0907 (talk) 00:30, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

@Gazartashlomo0907 Thank you for trying out the Starter Kit and for sharing such detailed feedback!

I understand the frustration with automatic translation - if the output isn't natural for Batak Toba speakers, it adds work rather than reducing it. That is really helpful to know.

Regarding templates, there is actually an advanced-level task in the Starter Kit that helps with importing infoboxes, which involves adding important templates to the wiki: https://starterkit.toolforge.org/import-infobox-tool. I would be curious to hear whether this addresses what you had in mind, and whether surfacing more templates in this way would be helpful for your community.

On the find and replace question - I would like to understand this better. Is there a specific tool you currently use to correct orthography across multiple articles on your wiki? Knowing what is already in your workflow would help us think about whether and how something like that could be integrated into the Starter Kit. User:SSethi_(WMF) 08:26, 1 July 2026 (UTC)