Hi
Understanding how to contribute in MediaWiki is essential to new bees. Here is the MediaWiki page : https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_contribute
I found very interesting thing for Mozilla : http://www.whatcanidoformozilla.org/
This is very useful stuff with localised in many languages.
Can we do the same thing by converting our How to contribute page into some interesting way and user friendly so that new contributors may find very easy way to kick start.
Two ideas there
1. Create Extension
2. Separate Website (I guess Yuvi has already bought Domain whatcanidoforwikimedia)
If this idea is good then it may become GSOC project.
Thanks Harsh
Hi Harsh,
On 02/17/2014 08:46 AM, Harsh Kothari wrote:
Hi
Understanding how to contribute in MediaWiki is essential to new bees. Here is the MediaWiki page : https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_contribute
I found very interesting thing for Mozilla : http://www.whatcanidoformozilla.org/
This is very useful stuff with localised in many languages.
Can we do the same thing by converting our How to contribute page into some interesting way and user friendly so that new contributors may find very easy way to kick start.
Two ideas there
Create Extension
Separate Website (I guess Yuvi has already bought Domain
whatcanidoforwikimedia)
3. Guided Tours
See the long discussion we had some time ago at http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-April/068166.html
If this idea is good then it may become GSOC project.
It is an interesting project for a newcomer, yes. However, regardless of the technical approach it requires more copy writing and design than coding. I don't think it qualifies as a GSoC project, but it could be an OPW candidate, especially if we include polishing the landing pages we point to with such tool/site.
Good goals but I think you're doing several things wrong here. 1) Attempts to pose this as an external tool. Not many people who visit the wiki will ever learn about the external website. You're effectively opening a new contributors influx channel while not making the life of people who reached Wikimedia project as readers much easier; they still lack orientation as to what they can do for a project. 2) Excessive focus on the "getting in" part of the contributor life-cycle. There really is too much routine in editing articles today and it hinders current work by making things too complicated, slow, unintuitive. I tend to encourage focus on the "I am editing, but it is inefficient" part of the work. It is very very very under-developed.
As such I would encourage that you look at the wiki layout and editing tools closer and come up with something, like a user dashboard perhaps, with 3 sections ('my tools - prefs, watchlist', 'my pages - user page, talk page, contribs', 'getting started - <whatever you fancy here>').
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org