The description seems clear yet when I read it, I still have no idea what we would be doing in this session.. Identify pain points ? Throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks ? These things tends to get incredibly broad and vague ('better documentation')

We should make sure that we have a good idea of what input and what output this session will have.

Personal Idea for improvements:

• Gitlab's onboarding template
• Delete outdated pages and/or move them into a Historic namespace (to prevent conflicting and confusing information being mixed with the useful information)
• Write heavily interlinked tutorials and publish them separately. The hardest part of MediaWiki is learning how to write an extension that does things. How to use the database, how to use the config system etc etc. The Laravel documentation has been hugely helpful to me over the past 1,5 years as I was getting into that.

@TheDJ That makes sense - I think we can definitely add more specific goals once we start the process of building this session. Would you and/or @Tpt like to be the session leader/co-leader?

I'm not sure what to get out of this session. Quoting https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Developers/Quarterly :

New developers continue to struggle with the code contribution process. They experience more or less same set of challenges each quarter with understanding Gerrit, code-review, coding conventions, and missing documentation. [...] Former developers who were last active a year ago expressed frustrations with slow code review process.

"Reducing barriers" translates to improving those areas which are dependencies of this Epic. See for example dedicated sessions T234634: Wikimedia Technical Conference 2019 Session: On-wiki documentation & documentation as code: strengths, weaknesses, and compromises or T234660: Wikimedia Technical Conference 2019 Session: Code Health/Code Review.

In T234633#5569735, @TheDJ wrote:

The description seems clear yet when I read it, I still have no idea what we would be doing in this session..

+1, this is an incredibly important topic but also very broad. Code review, documentation and support, outreach, mentoring / training, entry points (such as the total mess of Github clones which don't even link to the correct repo, or the confusing mw.org extension templates), usability in the case of on-wiki code (Scribunto etc) are all topics worthy of their own sessions.

Onboarding thoughts (with obligatory "i am not a dev" disclaimer):

• Primary existing pages:
  • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Developers
  • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker
  • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_contribute (also lists the non-development-related areas)
• Personas: Overall, I think we need to constantly keep in mind the various demographics/target-audiences, because their needs often wildly differ from each other, with some overlap.
  • E.g. new gadget-authors -- vs -- new SRE staff -- vs -- new external-researchers -- vs -- new external wikidata collaborators
  • Past attempts at defining them include:
    • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:APaskulin_(WMF)/Docs_Personas
    • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Cloud_Services_team/Our_audiences
    • https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Growth_and_diversity_of_Technology_team_audiences#Results
    • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Product_Development/Person%C3%A6#Technical_contributors_and_software_or_content_re-users
    • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Web_APIs_hub#Personas
• Existing per-person onboarding docs examples: There are (some quite old) examples from various WMF Product/Tech dept teams. Similar to the gitlab template linked by TheDJ above. E.g.
  • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Cloud_Services_team/Onboarding_Hieu
  • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team/Onboarding (e.g. T214556: Onboarding Brennen)
  • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/Team/Onboarding
  • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group/Onboarding (historic)
• Collecting more info (pre-TechConf?):
  • I think it would be useful for other groups/affiliates/teams to share what they currently use (e.g. WMDE?)
  • It might be useful for any recent newcomers to the movement to explain what pain points they remember being specifically confused/frustrated by. (ideally right here, and before TechConf!)

Hi all, we're still looking for a session leader in order for this session to go ahead. :) Once we have one, we can proceed to narrow the scope down, perhaps splitting into subtopics based on feedback here.

In T234633#5571320, @Tgr wrote:

+1, this is an incredibly important topic but also very broad. Code review, documentation and support, outreach, mentoring / training, entry points (such as the total mess of Github clones which don't even link to the correct repo, or the confusing mw.org extension templates), usability in the case of on-wiki code (Scribunto etc) are all topics worthy of their own sessions.

Hmm, I don't think we are allowed to add new sessions after last Sunday unfortunately. :( But we could definitely split this session up into more specific subtopics. I think code review and documentation are already covered in other sessions, but the others sound like good subtopics.

In T234633#5571467, @Quiddity wrote:

• I think it would be useful for other groups/affiliates/teams to share what they currently use (e.g. WMDE?)
• It might be useful for any recent newcomers to the movement to explain what pain points they remember being specifically confused/frustrated by. (ideally right here, and before TechConf!)

Great idea IMO!

(Programming note)

Due to our inability to find a session leader(s), this session was NOT accepted and will NOT be pre-scheduled.

What can I do?

There will be approximately a day's worth of time devoted to unconference sessions at this year's Technical Conference. You are free to use that time to discuss this topic if there is interest.