New Developers/Featured Projects

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

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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

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  • 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

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  • 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

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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

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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

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