Hi all,
We are glad to share that a new tool, Starter Kit
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_Onboarding_and_Development/Starter_…>,
is now available for new and small language Wikipedia communities!
If you are working to grow a new or small language Wikipedia, this new tool
may be useful to you. Starter Kit brings together guided tasks, tools, and
resources to help new and small language Wikipedia communities get started,
monitor their progress, and collaborate with the broader Wikimedia
community. The tool is currently hosted on Wikimedia Toolforge and is
designed for Wikipedias with fewer than 50,000 articles.
Some Starter Kit tasks can be completed by autoconfirmed contributors,
while more advanced tasks require administrator, interface administrator,
or translator rights.
Past community discussions and research have repeatedly identified
challenges in establishing and growing new and small language Wikipedias.
Research from the Languages Onboarding Experiment 2024
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Languages_Onboarding_Experiment_20…>
found that graduating wikis more quickly from the Incubator does not, by
itself, guarantee that a new wiki will grow. The research recommended
improving support for new wikis through better onboarding resources and
more automated ways of enabling essential tools.
Earlier work through the Small Wiki Toolkits
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Small_wiki_toolkits> project also
developed resources and supported technical capacity-building for small
wikis. Starter Kit builds on these learnings by exploring how parts of wiki
setup can be automated and supported through guided workflows, reducing
technical overhead while communities focus on developing content, policies,
and local participation.
Over the past few months, through a series of community office hours and
meetups, 53 contributors from 46 wikis tried Starter Kit, with more than
half of the participants holding administrator rights. Contributors
completed 24 Starter Kit workflows, generating approximately 77 on-wiki
contributions. These included importing infoboxes, customizing Main Pages,
translating interface messages on Translatewiki.net
<https://translatewiki.net>, categorizing articles using the HotCat gadget,
and adding Five Pillars policy pages.
Participating communities included Fon, Ganda, Tyap, Fula, Karekare, and
Igala Wikipedias, among others. At the time of the pilot, most
participating wikis had fewer than 5,000 articles.
We would love for more communities to try Starter Kit. You can follow the
guidance in the user manual
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_Onboarding_and_Development/Starter_…>
and share your experience on the project talk page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Language_Onboarding_and_Development/Sta…>.
Your feedback will help shape the next iteration of the Starter Kit.
If you would like us to host a remote demo for your user group or local
community gathering, we would be happy to join. We will also be at the Language
Diversity Conference in Ghana
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_Diversity_Conference> from
October 2–4, 2026. We hope to see some of you there!
You can learn more about the background, how Starter Kit works, and how
communities have been using it so far in this Diff blog post
<https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/09/18/introducing-starter-kit-for-new-and-s…>
.
Cheers,
Srishti
On behalf of the Language Onboarding and Development
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_Onboarding_and_Development> &
Starter Kit project team
Srishti Sethi (she / her)
Senior Developer Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>