Attracting new talent to our projects - Wikitech-l

Gabriel Wicke

1 Jan 1 Jan

1:22 a.m.

Perhaps some fun HTTP headers <http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/08/15/fun-and-unusual-http-response-headers/> ? Gabriel On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 4:19 PM, Jon Robson <jrobson(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

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Recently on https://developer.mozilla.org/ I noticed an easter egg when you pop open the JavaScript console. <snip> "Interested in having a direct impact on hundreds of millions of users? Join Mozilla, and become part of a global community that’s helping to build a brighter future for the Web." <snip> I'm curious how successful this is but I wonder if we did the same whether we might see some new contributors popping up? Why don't we have a similar message linking to our mailing list / phabricator instance / mediawiki.org homepage? Thoughts? _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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Eran Rosenthal

6:18 a.m.

Just to mention (Yuvi Panda idea): http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/348122 On Thu, Jan 1, 2015 at 2:25 AM, Jeremy Baron <jeremy(a)tuxmachine.com> wrote:

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On Dec 31, 2014 7:22 PM, "Gabriel Wicke" <gwicke(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

Perhaps some fun HTTP headers <

http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/08/15/fun-and-unusual-http-response-headers/

See also https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T70982 -Jeremy _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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MZMcBride

4 Jan 4 Jan

5:30 a.m.

Jon Robson wrote:

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Recently on https://developer.mozilla.org/ I noticed an easter egg when you pop open the JavaScript console. <snip> "Interested in having a direct impact on hundreds of millions of users? Join Mozilla, and become part of a global community that’s helping to build a brighter future for the Web." <snip> I'm curious how successful this is but I wonder if we did the same whether we might see some new contributors popping up?

Vaguely related: <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T22281> ("MediaWiki needs more easter eggs").

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Why don't we have a similar message linking to our mailing list / phabricator instance / mediawiki.org homepage?

We have a "Developers" link at the bottom of MediaWiki-generated pages (index.php?title=) that points to <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/How_to_contribute>. There's also talk of building a dev.wikimedia.org (cf. <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T67074>), though I'm still not sold on the virtue of creating yet another portal for developers and other tech-minded people. Additional discussion is here: <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Dev.wikimedia.org>.

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Thoughts?

Adding easter eggs sounds like a fairly strange recruitment tactic, but I don't see any harm in trying it out and seeing what happens. It's not totally clear to me what problem we're trying to solve here (if any). It's also not completely clear to me whether you want to recruit for the Wikimedia Foundation specifically or for the Wikimedia movement. Depending on the specifics, certain solutions might be more or less appropriate. MZMcBride

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Nikolas Everett

5 Jan 5 Jan

4:55 p.m.

On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 11:30 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:

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Jon Robson wrote:

Thoughts?

Adding easter eggs sounds like a fairly strange recruitment tactic, but I don't see any harm in trying it out and seeing what happens. It's not totally clear to me what problem we're trying to solve here (if any). It's also not completely clear to me whether you want to recruit for the Wikimedia Foundation specifically or for the Wikimedia movement. Depending on the specifics, certain solutions might be more or less appropriate.

I think the best thing for recruiting for MediaWiki (the open source project) is the extraction portion of the Librarization <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Library_infrastructure_for_MediaWiki> project. Breaking MediaWiki into parts will get it used in more places and the more people that rely on it the more people will contribute to it. Making reusable PHP libraries as opposed to services is doubly good at getting contributions because the people that will be integrating with them will also be PHP developers so they'll be reasonably quickly able to contribute. My expertise doesn't really extend beyond the open source project so I won't guess at ways to recruit for the movement or the foundation. Nik

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Jon Robson

6:27 p.m.

(and this is my current thinking for an experiment in mobile - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T85815 - feel free to move conversation over there if this interests you) On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 9:21 AM, Jon Robson <jdlrobson(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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I think in my spare time I'll write a patch to test easter eggs in the console out in the mobile world and see if we get any bites (bites being phabricator patches/new users on bug reports etc). Will report back any findings. On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 7:55 AM, Nikolas Everett <neverett(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 11:30 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:

Jon Robson wrote:

Thoughts?

Adding easter eggs sounds like a fairly strange recruitment tactic, but I don't see any harm in trying it out and seeing what happens. It's not totally clear to me what problem we're trying to solve here (if any). It's also not completely clear to me whether you want to recruit for the Wikimedia Foundation specifically or for the Wikimedia movement. Depending on the specifics, certain solutions might be more or less appropriate.

I think the best thing for recruiting for MediaWiki (the open source project) is the extraction portion of the Librarization <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Library_infrastructure_for_MediaWiki> project. Breaking MediaWiki into parts will get it used in more places and the more people that rely on it the more people will contribute to it. Making reusable PHP libraries as opposed to services is doubly good at getting contributions because the people that will be integrating with them will also be PHP developers so they'll be reasonably quickly able to contribute. My expertise doesn't really extend beyond the open source project so I won't guess at ways to recruit for the movement or the foundation. Nik _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

-- Jon Robson * http://jonrobson.me.uk * https://www.facebook.com/jonrobson * @rakugojon

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