Topic on Project talk:New contributors

Thank you very much! All the input received this week has been very useful to bring the proposal to a new level.

CHANGES

This will be an experiment on a side, not touching mediawiki.org.

• No content migration.
• No change in current workflows.

We are flexible with the development priorities.

• The sequence at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Wikitech_contributors#Development is flexible.
• Speak up! (in the discussion page, please)

Prototyping one small feature at a time.

• Defining the problems we want to solve beforehand.
• Evaluating the results before building more features on top.

Community evaluation based on results and lessons learned.

• This experiment will propose changes to mediawiki.org only if/when clearly positive results can be demonstrated.

Hopefully this addresses the majority of concerns.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Thinking it further maybe we should change the sequence proposed here even more radically.

I believe the analysis of the problem is right, and nobody has contested it. The divergences come with the solution proposed.

I have put the attention on structural changes and the software needed for them. I believe the vision is right, and the more I read about E2 & E3 projects & roadmaps I can see that we are basically in the same path. I thought that we could take some shortcuts while those teams deliver the real thing but there seems to be a minority agreeing on this. Fair enough, and probably rightly so.

Let's look at the areas that can be improved in our current sites, then:

• Content and design of mediawiki.org & wikitech.wikimedia.org homepages and the main venues for contributors.
• Good templates offered for user profiles, events, projects.
• MediaWiki / Bugzilla / Gerrit / Wikimedia Blog integration, with a common ontology and content aggregation.
• Full use of Extension:GettingStarted.
• Full exploit of the possibilities of Echo and Flow.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Even more changes: this is now Project:New contributors. If you care about new contributors please watch this page, join the discussion and contribute ideas and work.

This is not about a specific implementation proposal anymore, neither about Wikitech alone. This pages and whatever subpages we need is where we discuss and collaborate way to be more effective reaching to new contributors and connecting them to new tasks.

I still need some time to fully edit the main page but I hope you get the idea.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.