On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Atul Agrawal <adi.mdkk2(a)gmail.com> wrote: I've been collecting a few links at http://www.mediawiki.org/?oldid=651991#MediaWiki_reference that might be useful for newcomer developers to get a first overview of various components of the MediaWiki universe. Let me know if those are helpful to you and what you think is missing from that list. Bear in mind that it's a work in progress, though. --Waldir ps - while you're at that page, if you find some interest in any of some of the bugs I've listed in the "easy" part of the "Potential bugs for hacking sessions" section, I'd love to help you go about fixing them.

Thanks for the pointer. My main concern with that page and most documentation on mw.org (and the reason I started a personal list, so I could quickly find the stuff that matters to me) is that it's too massive, with too many links (as you noted yourself) and too much stuff highlighted, and I honestly feel a little overwhelmed reading it, finding myself following links only to find out that their target doesn't provide the information at the abstraction level that I expected. I'll speculate a little, and suggest that the root of this disorientation happens due to not separating reference docs from tutorial docs, from what I'll call "guided overviews", and allowing each of these to clearly assume one of those identities. The list I've been putting together comprises reference docs, essentially index-like material that one can look up whenever one needs information on a specific part of mediawiki; There isn't much done in this regard. Brion once started a page which he called "Module registry<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Modular_registry_of_components&g…s>", in 2009, which looked promising but it wasn't updated since. Tutorials should be mostly aimed at absolute newcomers: very short, and with a rather gentle learning curve; i.e., they should not introduce too many concepts too fast, nor assume a lot of previous knowledge. modular, interconnected compoments should be described in separate pages and hyperlinked so budding developers can RTFM, choose-your-own-adventure style. Currently very little of the docs fit that goal. Guided overviews are like Wikipedia articles: long, descriptive and mostly sequential texts describing an important component of the mediawiki infrastructure, such as the skinning system, or the messages API. I actually am not sure about the usefulness of such long guides, since newcomers will have a hard time following them, and experts will likely benefit more from index-like reference material. Maybe they should be broken down into interconnected bite-sized tutorials. I just came up with these categories, so there are probably many flaws to this analysis, but at a glance this seems like a good-enough overview of the state of our docs and what (in my humble opinion) needs to be done. Maybe my position won't be shared by many, but I'll be content if it causes some discussion about what overall strategy we need to implement to improve MW docs (which is undeniably considered important: let's not forget it's bug #1). --Waldir On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 10:14 PM, Quim Gil &lt;qgil(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 3:39 PM, Quim Gil &lt;qgil(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: Agreed. Yes, that makes sense, though we need to think about how the pages in the Manual namespace would fit this arrangement. Other developers' opinions (seasoned and newcomers alike) would be quite valuable to prevent wasted effort due to overlooking details like these. Also, I agree that it would be best to have this discussion at Talk:Developer hub. Perhaps copying this thread there (or linking to the mailing list archives) would be a good idea, to provide context. --Waldir

On 02/26/2013 01:23 AM, Atul Agrawal wrote: We have many different software projects, and what to read depends pon what bugs you want to fix. Why not choosing first a project or a bug that interests you, and then learn about the pieces involved as you try to fix it? We can help you find a first bug. What is your area of interest? -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil

Atul, one of the fun projects that has been sitting on my backburner is to implement errors and warnings localization for the Web API. The project would involve some planning, figuring out translation framework, and later - converting all API modules and extensions to use it. As a result, all clients, including mobile, will be able to report errors to the users in their native language. I am not sure how GSOC supervision functions, but I will definitely be involved with the implementation. This is slightly bigger than a bug fix, but should be fairly independent from everything and will give you good exposure into internals as well as javascript and other clients. On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 11:20 AM, Atul Agrawal &lt;adi.mdkk2(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On 02/26/2013 08:29 AM, Yuri Astrakhan wrote: Everything starts with you (and any other potential mentors) adding yourself to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013#Mentors :) -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil