Reason

GettingStarted was originally written to support new Wikipedia users; it has been superseded at that task by GrowthExperiments and has recently been undeployed from Wikimedia (T235752). There's a cost to any extension, especially complex ones, as they make refactoring MediaWiki core (something that's been happening a lot lately) slower, so if no one needs it, we should archive the extension.

For now this task is just to gather feedback from affected wikis. (WikiApiary lists 10 such wikis, but per T292651 it doesn't seem reliable.)

To-do list

• This task
  • Add maintainers of that extension/skin as subscribers to this task (if they have no apparent Phabricator account, notify them on-wiki or via email if possible and note it here).
  • Add Phabricator project <#ProjectX> as a tag for this task, and remove MediaWiki-extensions-Other/Other-skins as appropriate.
• On-wiki documentation
  • Archive documentation on mediawiki.org (provide URL): replace page contents with {{Archived extension|last revision id before archiving|task=T######}} (for extensions); replace T###### with this task's number.
  • If documentation page was translatable, remove <translate>, visit Special:PageTranslation, and click "remove from translation" (if you don't have the translation administrator right, ask a user who does).
  • Update Wikidata item (provide URL) associated with documentation page
    • add statement Abandonware (Q281039) to instance of (P31) together with qualifier start time (P580) = the YYYY-MM-DD date that you decided to archive extension/skin (generally per edit history)
    • add qualifier end time (P582) = the YYYY-MM-DD (same date as above) to instance of (P31) = MediaWiki extension (Q6805426)/MediaWiki skin (Q21996535)
• Phabricator
  • Mark all Phabricator tasks for the extension either Declined or Invalid. Add a comment pointing to this task when doing so for reference.
  • Archive Phabricator project <#ProjectX> for the extension/skin.
  • Edit Phabricator project <#ProjectX> description for the extension/skin with a link to this ticket.
• Translatewiki.net/translations
  • Remove from translatewiki.net (groups/MediaWiki/mediawiki-extensions.txt
• Configuration/tests/integrations/etc.
  • Remove tests in integration/config (zuul/layout.yaml).
  • Remove manifest/other references from mediawiki/vagrant if they exist.
  • Remove from https://doc.wikimedia.org/cover-extensions/ if present (requires Continuous-Integration-Infrastructure shell user to delete directly from the server).
• Repositories
  • Empty repository, leaving only the README indicating the repo is archived, and referring to this task by URL.
  • Remove from mediawiki/extensions (along with in .gitmodules).
  • Mark the repository read-only in Gerrit (also edit description to prepend "[ARCHIVED]" and a reference to this task): https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/admin/repos/mediawiki%2Fextensions%2FGettingStarted,general
  • Deactivate the Diffusion repository for the extension/skin: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/EGST/
  • Delete the GitHub mirror: https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-GettingStarted