When the developer portal is launched, it will provide a single point of entry to the resources needed by people who want to get started as developers or new contributors. There are frequent posts to wikitech-l (and maybe other lists) in which new contributors are asking how to get started, and some human has to manually reply with links. We discussed at one point in the Developer Advocacy meeting that we could setup some of these email lists to auto-reply to posts with a link to the relevant resources, thereby hopefully reducing some of the burden of responding and ensuring that those in search of help get a pointer to resources immediately. We should pursue doing this as part of launching and communicating the dev portal's existence.
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So you are thinking about an email bot that does some sort of sentiment/content matching to messages on wikitech-l to reply with a "go to the dev portal" template response? What sort of inputs do you imagine it looking for?
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Nothing that fancy, just maybe updating the auto-welcome message and the wikitech-l list description to link to the dev portal. Copy of meeting notes from 12-02-21 on this topic:
- [nothing urgent] AK: Can we remove the wikitech-l list from our GSoC profile both 2021 & 2022? If yes, how? Phab task? Edit a doc? https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/archive/2021/organizations/5270263742070784/ See the "Gsoc 2022 contribution" thread on wikitech-l@ why this is broken: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/WLWWZCNNFCIJIUYKFXZBS562Y3J5ZDZT/ Plus I get about 3 emails per day to wikitech-l-owner@ with "Kindly help me to get started" because people do not read any descriptions. There's docs at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/Administrators (if we follow them).
**SRR: Do you have a stock email that you can send redirecting them to the links?
- AK: Sure, but that doesn't solve the underlying problem that people don't read anyway. :D We already updated https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/ ...
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That seems reasonable. It also seems different than the "auto-reply to posts with a link to the relevant resources" goal stated in the description here. "Auto-reply to posts" reads like a request for NLP or at least keyword based message processing which is why I wanted to probe for more specific ideas on implementation.
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Changed this task to capture updating automated welcome messages that link to specific docs and which we may want to replace with links to the Dev Portal when it is launched. This includes the automated welcome messages on lists like wikitech-l, but also the messages you see when you first login to platforms like Zulip (see screenshot, this currently links to "how to be a MediaWiki hacker", "how to get started as a new developer" and more).
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- For changing welcomebot, see also T298502.
- For changing the GSoC org info, see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/Administrators/Organization_Application
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@TBurmeister About the ZulipBot, how about the following as a welcome message:
Welcome to Wikimedia Zulipchat. Here are a couple of resources on getting started:
- Developer Portal - Explore core Wikimedia technology, open source projects, and opportunities in the technical community to get involved.
- New developers guide - choose from open source projects that offer mentoring for new contributors, and find suitable first tasks.
You can join the #technical-support channel to get technical help related to Wikimedia projects. Feel free to ask any questions on #general!
Type !help for a full list of available commands.
Once we are happy with this message, I can file a task around this for the bot maintainer to look at.
About updating previous GSoC pages, we will not be able to do that as they have been archived by Google. For future, what is your proposal to list as an alternate contact for Wikitech:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/Administrators/Organization_Application#Contact%20methods?
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@srishakatux: The first URL should instead be https://developer.wikimedia.org/ . I'd replace "core Wikimedia technology" with "Wikimedia technology". I'd also replace all "open source" with "free and open source". I'd capitalize "choose".
I guess Google requires to offer an email address.I don't have better ideas than https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/ (meh) so I'm wondering again how to rephrase / update info on https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
Could we replace the "mailing list" URL with https://developer.wikimedia.org/ ?
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Sounds good! The welcome message update is a work in progress. About the GSoC website, I realized we have stopped giving the link to the Wikitech mailing list since this year, and we only include a link to Zulip as the preferred method of contact. So, I think we are good here: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2022/organizations/wikimedia-foundation. But, yeah, outreach programs pages need a review, and wherever we point people to other links to explore contribution areas, it needs replacement with the Developer Portal link. I will now file a separate task around this.