Contributing feedback

[winny-]

I wanted to share a brief contributor perspective, in case it’s useful.

I spent some time looking for ways to contribute (both code and content), but I couldn’t identify a clear onboarding path or a scoped way to apply time safely. Without guidance on what kinds of contributions are wanted, or how to align effort with project needs, it was difficult to assess whether work would be useful or accepted.

I did reach out on IRC a couple times, didn't get a response.

Because of that uncertainty, I decided not to pursue contributing further, simply to avoid the risk of investing time in the wrong direction.

I’m not asking for changes here — just documenting the experience in case it helps inform future contributors’ expectations.

[rgaudin]

Thank you @winny- ; that's helpful but hardly actionable. Would you mind giving a few additional info? What's your story? kiwix is a galaxy of projects. What were you using and how? What was your frustration of motivation to have you consider contributing? What were you imagining contributing to?
Then where did you go? What website or location? Where did that lead you to? Where did you find the IRC details and what made it look like the proper way to contact?
Who were you expecting to get in touch with?

Sorry I know it's a ton of question but it would be very useful because we're suffering from survival bias: we're only in contact with those who managed to get to us, essentially defeating that communication issue.

[port19x]

Thank you @winny-, it's indeed useful.

@rgaudin let me make it more concrete / actionable.

On Github you usually put contribution information in a contributing.md file.
For a large project such as yours, it makes sense to have a dedicated webpage or repository for it.

A baseline of things to include, or link to, would be:

• How to report bugs
• How to request features
• How to request catalog expansions
• How to contribute catalog expansions
• Link to support forums / discussion groups, such as IRC/Mailing Lists
• Link to a code of conduct / policy documents if applicable
• Setting expectations: mostly about how eager you are to expand the scope of the program and of the catalog
• It also makes sense to link to socials and a donation portal here

Since you ask for a personal use-case, I'm dissatisfied with the categories in the catalog/library.
More concretely, I'm bothered by Devdocs cluttering up the "Other" category.
Imo Devdocs should be their own category, prepping also has enough resources to warrant its own category, tho it's harder to define.
On the other side of the spectrum, why does IFixit, a single resource, have its own category?
Same for Mooc, Phet, Psiram.

Please direct me to where I can raise this issue appropriately.
I'm even willing to draft a more workable taxonomy/categorization scheme.

[rgaudin]

Have you looked at the website, specifically https://hub.kiwix.org/? I think it answers most of your concerns.

High-level issues that concerns strategic decisions or simply stuff that spans across multiple repos is handled in overview repos (also for openzim and offspot).

For your Catalog concern, open an issue in openzim/overview. You may want to take a look at https://github.com/openzim/content-classification-system and https://wiki.openzim.org/wiki/Content_strategy.

[port19x]

Thank you!
The hub does indeed answer most of my concerns, and I hope also the concerns of @winny-