Language Onboarding and Development/Starter kit

Starter kit

• Concepts
• Designs
• Updates
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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T410699

Wikimedia Foundation projects Starter kit Enable new and small language communities to know what they need to get started & progress their wikis. Group: Wikimedia Language and Product Localization Team members: Srishti Sethi, Tolu Ayodele, Mary Munyoki, Eduardo Medina, Uzoma Ozurumba , Nik Gkountas; Advisors: Sadik Shahadu, Jon Harald Søby

This page documents the exploration of the concept of a semi-automated starter kit designed to help small and new language communities understand what they need to get started and grow their wikis.

Feedback and ideas for the Starter Kit are welcome on the talk page.

Problem & Challenges

Currently, there isn't a formal onboarding process for new and smaller language communities. Most communities end up discovering resources on their own and sometimes receive ad hoc guidance from global contributors. Newly created wikis often have to handle a significant amount of manual work – enabling gadgets, templates, and bots; setting up policy and governance pages; identifying essential articles that should exist on their wiki; and submitting site configuration requests.

Isn't the HotCat gadget enabled by default on new wikis? I was helping a volunteer in Ndebele (nr.wikipedia.org), and their preferences menu has no gadgets tab at all.

—WMF Staff Member, Wikimania

As a new language community starting out, one really needs to be dedicated to continue and there is expectation for so many things they need to do.

—User:Masssly, Wikimania 2025

For the Tyap Wikipedia homepage, we will appreciate support with setting it up. There had been some challenges in the process of putting it in place. We are actually, currently mimicking the Latin Wikipedia's homepage. But there seems to be some bugs or stuff making the process not finish.

—Tyap community member, Language Community Meeting, December 2025

Existing resources do address parts of this challenge, but they often overburden smaller communities with a paradox of choice — especially when many of those options may not even be relevant in their context (e.g., advanced content moderation tools). There is no single, cohesive resource that connects the different phases of onboarding, and there is currently no tool that enables a guided, automated onboarding and development journey for new and small wikis.

WMF Design Strategy research on content moderation in medium-sized Wikimedia projects also highlights administrative challenges faced by smaller wikis — particularly limited awareness of existing tools, the complexity of setting up and using essential workflows, and the difficulty of seeking technical assistance. More broadly, the WMF contributors strategy points to the fragmented experience contributors face today and recommends simplifying how we surface structured task recommendations, engage people in meaningful activities, and ensure their contributions feel impactful and visible.

Starter Kit: Solution & Components

The proposed solution of a starter kit builds on these recommendations and is designed to enable new and small language communities with the foundational resources they need to get started and steadily grow their wikis. The starter kit will act as an interim enabling layer to help smaller wikis come up to speed and move toward parity with medium and large projects, while LLMs continue to improve for low-resource languages and Wikimedia AI tools become more relevant and usable for these communities.

What will the starter kit include?

• A curated list of tools, policies, and resources compiled from usage data and community input to support content and community growth.
• Automated installation and configuration of essential tools and features, while ensuring communities retain the agency to choose and set up what they need on their local wiki.
• An activity stats, milestones, and a wiki health dashboard.
• Clear actions and pathways to collaborate with both local and global communities.

Impact and Rationale

There are 116 small Wikipedias in the Wikipedia ecosystem, supported by 197 monthly active administrators in total. Collectively, these graduated wikis have contributed 413,912 articles, representing only 5.79% of the total articles on English Wikipedia. A significant percentage of these Wikipedias are not experiencing sustained growth. Many of these wikis operate with only a few active administrators and limited local capacity, making long-term growth and governance fragile.

Over the past 10 years, 144 new Wikipedias graduated from the Wikimedia Incubator. If a similar number come online in the next decade, the number of small Wikipedias will continue to increase.

This demonstrates that small Wikipedias are not marginal, they are a growing and meaningful part of the movement’s content ecosystem. However, many launch without structured support, clear growth pathways, or simplified configuration tools. For example, a recent analysis shows that 217 Wikipedias are using the top gadgets, while 149 are missing them, highlighting a clear infrastructure gap across wikis.

The Starter Kit directly addresses these gaps, providing small Wikipedias with baseline tools, onboarding guidance, and growth pathways to help communities stabilize faster, retain contributors, and build local administrative capacity for long-term sustainability.

Target Users & Use Cases

Target users & wikis: Administrators, technical contributors, and advanced editors on new and small wikis.

Use cases:

• I want my wiki to have the HotCat gadget so that adding categories to articles is easier.
• I want to translate basic policy and governance pages (e.g., Five Pillars) from other language wikis to my wiki.
• I want to see what template options are available on my wiki to use them for creating articles.
• I want to learn about and know how to use popular tools to organize community editathons.
• I want to translate key articles or sections from other languages to help my wiki grow.
• I want to update my wiki's homepage based on the layout used by Silesian Wikipedia.

Potential Feature Set

Technical

Curated tools with semi-automated setup

A curated list of tools and resources to support content editing, moderation, organizing events, and outreach. This may include gadgets (e.g., HotCat, Twinkle), templates (e.g., Speedy Deletion, maintenance tags), tools (e.g., Outreach Dashboard, RecentChanges), bots (e.g., Citation bots, CommonsDelinker, InternetArchiveBot), and extensions (e.g., Content Translation), prioritized based on usage signals such as edit count, number of active users, number of code contributors, and number of wikis deployed on.

This feature would provide a semi-automated experience for discovering, installing, and configuring these tools, lowering technical barriers while allowing communities to opt in and retain control.

Over time, this curated list could expand to support searching and installing tools from a broader catalog, including tools previously used on Wikimedia Incubator, and surface pathways for widely adopted tools to inform inclusion in MediaWiki core.

Wiki site configuration

The current process requires communities to work with existing templates, HTML/CSS, and mobile responsiveness when customizing their wiki's homepage. Recent community feedback highlights this gap; for example, the Tyap Wikipedia homepage is currently mimicking another wiki's layout but remains incomplete due to technical challenges. An alternate approach could let communities choose from a small set of predefined homepage templates that can be imported and edited easily. These templates can support different community needs, allowing administrators to select what is appropriate for their community, such as inviting users to translate new articles or offering microtasks to improve existing content.

Another feature can automate common, low-risk tasks, like namespace translations, user rights, uploads, or logos, using a propose → review → apply workflow to handle changes without manual requests or code edits.

Protecting the homepage by default, restricting edits from unregistered users, and setting a machine translation threshold are other security-related features to consider. These baseline settings can help prevent early vandalism, reduce low-quality machine-translated content, and give smaller communities a stable starting point, while allowing adjustments as the community grows.

Content

Suggest article creation tools, such as Article guidance and Abstract Wikipedia. These tools are still under development but may be ready soon. For the starter kit, a simplified or customized version would be needed.

Support for content ideas could include: a "thousand articles every wiki should have," local communities' prioritized lists of vital articles, and essential policy and governance pages (e.g., Village Pump, Wikipedia's Five Pillars), along with guidance to translate them using translation tools.

Another feature could automate importing existing content from the Incubator into the local wiki, which is currently a highly manual process.

Activity

• A progress indicator to help communities track wiki health and growth (e.g., number of active editors, new articles created vs. deletion rate, topics of interest among readers and editors).
• A clear roadmap of steps or milestones outlining how the community can grow, such as creating a main page, reaching a minimum number of articles, forming 3 wiki projects, organizing outreach activities, along with a lightweight check-in process to acknowledge progress or milestones on community pages (e.g., reaching 100 articles or other key thresholds).
• Guidance on attracting contributors and requesting support from global contributors, such as administrators or stewards.

Open Questions & Risks

• Some features may involve complex technical implementation (template imports, homepage standardization, site requests) and would require engineering assessment for feasibility and scope.
• When is the work of the starter kit considered complete? What does a kit like this look like once mature, and how might it extend in the longer term for medium or large wikis?
• Should the starter kit be implemented as a MediaWiki extension, gadget, or independent tool? Ideally, it could begin as a tool on Toolforge, and once validated, be developed into an extension so it can be bundled with a wiki more easily, maintained long-term, and managed through structured updates.
• How many options should be exposed per resource category? Keeping choices minimal may reduce complexity, with search functionality added later if needed.
• Can the starter kit be designed for use beyond Wikimedia, including third-party MediaWiki installations?