New Developers/Featured Projects

This page provides information for project maintainers who would like their project to be listed on New Developers.

How to become a featured project recommended to new developers

If you maintain a Wikimedia technical project and are looking for more contributors, working with newcomers can be a fun and rewarding way to grow your project and the community -- at the same time! To effectively welcome newcomers as contributors to your project, you should be able to provide the following:

Mentoring

• You help new developers with their first steps in joining our community - finding tasks to work on, reviewing their code, pointing to relevant resources, etc.
• You are ready to contribute to building our community of developers and learning together. In return, you become an experienced and successful Wikimedia developer!
• You communicate that you are not available anymore when you realize that you do not have enough time for mentoring anymore.

Tasks

• You maintain a list of microtasks suitable for new contributors. These tasks should not take more than 2-3 days to complete. If your project uses Wikimedia Phabricator, this could be a link to tasks tagged as #good_first_task. Medium-level tasks that would take 2-3 months, are interesting and engaging enough, could be the first good projects for newbies. These tasks should be easily identifiable with a specific label or tracking via Phabricator columns.
• You regularly update this list of tasks and add new tasks when applicable.

Documentation

Your project has a landing page (either on mediawiki.org or in your repo) that contains:

• A project description
• Information about the programming languages used in your project
• Contributing guidelines or expectations
• Steps a new contributor must follow to set up their development environment
• Links to additional developer documentation, including
• Contact information for mentors, and recommended communication channels
• Links to microtasks (e.g., which tasks can a new contributor work on after setting up their development environment?). This could be a column on the workboard of a Phabricator project, some tag for tasks in GitHub or Sourceforge, or a wiki page that you regularly update.
• Links to a roadmap (e.g., which direction your project is heading or which next tasks or areas developers could work on?). This could also be a column on the workboard of a Phabricator project, some tag for tasks in GitHub or Sourceforge, or a wiki page that you regularly update.

Get listed

Everything in place? Great! If your project meets all the criteria of a featured project, you can list it under New_Developers#Choose_a_software_project.

Thanks for making our community bigger and more diverse!

See Also

• meta:Technical Collaboration/Onboarding New Developers (part of WMF's Annual Plan 2017-2018)
  • 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.