Talk:MediaWiki Product Insights/Contributor retention and growth

Please increase MediaWiki development capacity further

It's great to see there was a goal of increasing the number of developers for MediaWiki core. However, I don't think this should be considered done now or that the small increase comes even close to being sufficient or reasonable. MediaWiki core is the key software of the Wikimedia projects, especially the largest ones, the Wikipedias. I think most Community Wishlist items are about changes to it and the same may be true for phabricator issues overall but I haven't checked. In any case, issues that are best solved in MediaWiki core are probably the most impactful and important ones. Many major issues have been open for 5 or even over 10 years and when things are implemented it's usually many years after this has been requested.

However, when considering all the things that could be done to increase development capacity, not much has been done. Please consider these possible measures:

• MediaWiki core is undermentioned and tucked away at place interested people would be looking to get started. At the bottom of every Wikipedia page in the footer there is a link "Developers" and if one goes through it to find the info page about "Contribute to Wikimedia open source" one eventually lands at the New Developers page. However, that page tries to make devs waste their time on unimportant niche tools and projects and does not even mention the key software, MediaWiki, "Choose a software project". No matter how difficult it is to develop MediaWiki it should still have a card there because for example very experienced devs or devs only interested in MediaWiki may also land at that page and even if it's very difficult that doesn't mean new people can't join it and implement some good first bug with sufficient motivation.
• A quite short video on YouTube that explains everything people need to know to get started developing MediaWiki would be very helpful as well. From downloading Visual Studio Code to pulling some git repo to picking a good first bug to whatever else people do to get started. It could also name some interesting Wishlist proposals people could implement to make them see which things could be possible and that there are things they could do that are quite motivating.
• Hiring more developers for WMF. There has been frustration with how WMF spends its money which is largely spent on intangible unimportant and/or inefficient things rather than tangible impactful technical development that is core to the Wikimedia projects. See for example here or here or here etc. I also think money is largely wasted and WMF has so many millions that it clearly has the resources to hire more people, especially in places where the income is not as high as in Silicon Valley / the US.
• A relatively long-term banner above software or programming-related Wikipedia articles for volunteer devs. They would point to a campaign with things like leaderboards, badges, gamification, internal attention, possibly external reporting, prizes (maybe also anonymous bounties), and prioritized weighted issues. The simple version would look similar to this and would have a table of volunteers sorted by numbers of code issues implemented with a sortable column of total story points (sum of e.g. difficulty and/or importance per issue) of implemented issues during the campaign. Top 30 volunteers for example could get some prize money, some certificate, and/or a verified badge for e.g. their user page. It's simple, doesn't cost money (except a small amount of money if there are indeed prizes etc), and makes development engaging and fun. Real-world hackathons may be fun but it's unlikely to be an efficient way to actually get new MediaWiki devs at scale – I think such a virtual longer-term campaign would be much more effective. If this is not the place to propose this, please let me know where else.

All those Wishlist surveys and e.g. technical needs surveys are nearly pointless if things never get implemented. This also inhibits innovation as before implementing innovative new projects like this it may often be easier and/or more important to first implement what's needed in MediaWiki core. For example, take a look at the audio file player – it's hopelessly outdated and can't even skip back 10 seconds when listening to a spoken Wikipedia audio all of which for example contradicts this strategy direction. Most goals have some element or requirement of technical development and the current capacity is not even enough to fix major bug-like problems in time like the dysfunctional interactive charts. It's great to see there apparently was some progress in increasing MediaWiki development capacity but it's not enough by far even if it was a durable success. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:07, 24 September 2024 (UTC)