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[Epic] Code Stewardship: Add contributing documentation to all RG-maintained projects
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Description

The Reader Growth team maintains roughly a dozen projects. A list of these projects can be found here:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Readers/Reader_Growth/Maintenance_Levels_and_Responsibilities

Right now, most of these projects are categorized as "maintenance status: pending" until we determine how much support we can realistically provide for each one.

As we settle on a support level for each project, we should ensure that each repository includes a CONTRIBUTING.md document that reflects the support level we provide. The corresponding doc from the Reader Experiments extension (added here) can be adapted for use in these projects. If a project is going to be decommissioned, we should make that clear instead.

This task was spun out of T401435. We may want to wait until we've clarified the support level for a given project before creating contributor documentation for it.


The markdown file will use this general outline:

# Project/Extension Contributing Guide

## Welcome

### Overview

### Community engagement

## Contributing

### Code of conduct

### Bug Reports

### Proposals and feature requests

### Code contribution

#### Before you start

#### Environment setup

#### Troubleshooting

#### Best practices

#### Contribution workflow

##### Fork and clone repositories

#### Issue management

#### Commit messages

#### Submitting patches

#### Releases

#### Text Formats

Event Timeline

egardner renamed this task from Code Stewardship: Add contributing documentation to all RG-maintained projects to [Epic] Code Stewardship: Add contributing documentation to all RG-maintained projects.Nov 21 2025, 7:36 PM

Are these efforts aligned with the content strategy for developer documentation and its locations, and has the Documentation Team been involved in this?

@Aklapper

  1. Are you referring to this style guide: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Documentation/Style_guide or something else? I'll review the style guide and any other helpful docs that you recommend.
  2. I haven't pinged the Documentation Team. Is it necessary to involve them to complete this work?

I refer to concepts which context is located where. IIRC there have been discussions in the Documentation Team which "developer onboarding" content should be in repos versus putting content on-wiki and linking to on-wiki content from within that repo, and it would be great if efforts were aligned across the organization.

Hi all, @lwatson this task looks great! I love the template you've added and the doc in the example patch. Keeping this information in a CONTRIBUTING.md file in each code repository is definitely a best practice for information about making code contributions. Here are a few suggestions:

  • "Ground rules" is an idiom and may not be easily understandable by everyone. I'd suggest just using "Code of conduct" as the heading since that's the contents of the section.
  • To help with discoverability for users coming from the wiki, I'd suggest adding a link to the CONTRIBUTING.md file on the wiki page for each codebase (for example: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ReaderExperiments), such as:
== Contributing ==

To submit a bug report, request a feature, or make code contribuitions, see the [[gerrit:plugins/gitiles/...|contributing guide]].