Topic on Talk:New Developers/Flow

It looks like some of this has been addressed in previous discussions but whatever.

I just really don't like the "Choose a software project" section and the page. It makes it seem as if those are the only projects you can contribute to. The section should probably be renamed to "Featured projects".

Something the page doesn't handle well is helping developers who want to contribute to Wikimedia projects like Mediawiki Core or one of the sister projects like Wikidata or Commons and their tools. This page doesn't give them any information on how to do that. I think this is really important because on the Main page the link for "Start coding for a Wikimedia project" literally goes to this page and developers should anticipate to learn about Wikimedia projects they can start contributing to.

Also, some of the projects listed do not use a programming language or framework the developer is familiar with so they will likely consider not contributing to them.

I think we need to organize the page in a way that gives a much broader and in-depth overview of all the projects you can contribute to across Wikimedia so that users can find what they're looking for or something to work on.

I think How to contribute may be more aligned with your ideas for broad introductions to the Wikimedia FOSS ecosystem than this page.

@BDavis (WMF) Okay, then shouldn't the "Start coding for a Wikimedia project" on the Main Page link there instead?

The link is intended to target folks who are just starting their journey into Free and Open Source software development and looking for a guided path. Terse bullet lists are not ideal for providing deeper context, but on How to become a MediaWiki hacker (which is the 3rd bullet point on the Main Page 'Develop and extend code' section) we explain a bit better I think with "The main path to get started with Wikimedia development is to contribute to Wikimedia projects that offer mentoring." Maybe we should be talking about how to better phrase "Start coding for a Wikimedia project" to help set expectations of the linked content?

You may also find a review of MediaWiki/Homepage improvements 2018 and Talk:MediaWiki/Homepage improvements 2018 to be helpful in understanding why certain links were prioritized over others at the time of the last major overhaul of the Main Page.

Agree with this and the MediaWiki project (that is MediaWiki core) should have a special, highly visible place there:

It's linked at the MediaWiki-wiki-page and from the bottom of pages that run on MediaWiki like Wikipedia (bottom of the page Developers->Choose a project lead to here). Developers would anticipate to at least also learn about the MediaWiki project they can start contributing to. Instead of a dedicated tile for it at the very top, there's only a small link buried under "Additional resources".

This needs to be fixed asap WMF! And somebody should undo this revert for the above reasons. The rationale given at the revert is invalid also because of the above reasons, because "New Developers" doesn't necessarily refer to people new to coding but to people new to coding MediaWiki and Wikimedia projects, because it's important to include no matter the difficulty, and because there are many first good tasks even for MediaWiki core. I'd like to avoid reverting it myself / readding MediaWiki core and I explained this many times already.

Yep. Totally think MediaWiki Core needs to be on this page in some form.

"New Developer" shouldn't mean people who are just learning how to code. In fact, I really don't think any Wikimedia development project is suitable for a beginner developer. We do not have the documentation present on this site and projects simple enough for completely new developers to even think about contributing to without learning 5+ other technologies (Git, Docker/Vagrant, Node.JS, PHP, etc.)

Instead, we should think of "New developers" as people who have coding experience with a little or a lot of experience and are willing to learn new technologies according to their experience. I'm a "New Developer" myself and I picked up how Core and PHP works over the course of 3-5 days without ever working with them before. MediaWiki is suitable for me as a "New Developer" because I have 5+ years of coding experience and can understand the project and language structure of MediaWiki and PHP because I have worked with projects and languages similar to them before.

"The following projects offer resources, mentorship, and are looking for new developers to contribute to them." -- this is why MediaWiki core is not listed on this page. I empathize with folks like @Prototyperspective and @Lectrician1 who would like this to be different, but it is not. We have asked many times in many ways over the last 6 years for one or more Foundation teams involved in MediaWiki core to provide support for new contributors. There is nobody doing this work now and to our knowledge nobody planning to do it in the future.