Thank you Yuvi for putting efforts in new contributor outreach!
Let me plug in the thoughts and discussions we have got in a similar direction so far. Back in January Ross (CCed) had the same idea and we started discussing until I enourage him to move to wiki pages & here for further details. Also, let's start applying the lessons learned with the 'Wikitech contributors' debate.
On 04/07/2013 03:11 AM, Yuvi Panda wrote:
I came across http://www.whatcanidoformozilla.org/ today, and proceeded to register whatcanidoforwikipedia.org :)
Why not doing exactly the same but on mediawiki.org directly? All the effort put on promoting a brand new site could be put instead in promoting mediawiki.org in a new, fresh way.
Why not use the technologies we are already developing? like
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStarted https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour
We would become their users, we would help testing and improving them. The effort you are putting contributing code on this new project could be put instead in patches to those extensions, better CSS and look & feel for our site, etc. Producing and eating our own dog food.
Why not improving mediawiki.org pages making them friendly to newcomers instead of creating content from scratch that would point to the same mediawiki.org pages that we would need to improve anyway?
For example, no matter how nice your page on Lua is, the users clicking it would still land on
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua ....
Thoughts on what to put there? I cal already think of the following languages to put up:
- PHP
- JS
- Lua
- Python
- Java
- Obj-C
- 'Design'
This recollection is exactly the same work we are calling "One ontology" at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:New_contributors#One_ontology
Why not creating http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:New_contributors/One_ontology , move this list there and continue defining more categories on that page?
I'll start a wiki page sometime to collect content, and then spend some time writing the code - we can even fork the original site's code and use it.
Yes please, start a wiki page documenting this effort that I hope becomes the same effort that we want to put in mediawiki.org. URL suggested:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:New_contributors/What_can_I_do