In this post, we introduce Starter Kit, a new tool that brings together guided tasks, tools, and resources to help new and small language Wikipedia communities get started, monitor their progress, and collaborate with the broader Wikimedia community. The tool is being developed by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Language Onboarding and Development initiative.
Background and related work
When a language community graduates from the Wikimedia Incubator, a new Wikipedia site is created for it, as illustrated by this recent Phabricator task for creating the Runyankore Wikipedia. As part of this process, the wiki receives a set of language configurations and services, such as Content Translation, Parsoid, and Wikidata integration, that support essential workflows including reading, editing, translating content, using APIs, and analysing contributor activity.
However, creating the site is only the beginning. For a language Wikipedia to develop and grow, its community also needs essential on-wiki tools, features, processes, and policies that help contributors create and moderate content and build a functioning community. This setup may include customizing the wiki’s main page, enabling gadgets such as HotCat, creating a community village pump, importing infoboxes and templates, creating new essential articles or translating essential ones, and developing policy and help pages.
Community discussions, research reports, and on-wiki documentation have repeatedly identified challenges in establishing and growing new and small language Wikipedias.
A report on content moderation in medium-sized Wikimedia projects examines how communities with limited capacity develop moderation processes and adapt policies and practices from Wikipedias in related or neighbouring languages.
The Language Diversity Hub’s report, Barriers experienced by contributors to small language versions of Wikipedia, examines the challenges faced by underrepresented language communities. These include technical and language-technology barriers, such as limited input methods and a lack of grammar- and spell-checking tools.
Research conducted by the Language Onboarding and Development initiative reached a related conclusion. The Languages Onboarding Experiment 2024 explored whether fast-tracking languages through the Incubator would help accelerate their growth. It found that graduating more quickly does not, by itself, guarantee that a new wiki will grow. The research recommended improving support for new wikis through better documentation, onboarding resources, and more automated ways of enabling essential tools.
From 2019 to 2022, a project called Small Wiki Toolkits developed resources for teaching technical topics, supported capacity-building efforts, and helped contributors develop small wikis. However, the experience exposed another challenge: how can technical capacity-building become scalable, rather than merely possible? The Starter Kit has introduced an innovative solution to this challenge: automating parts of the wiki setup process to reduce the need for extensive technical training while allowing communities to focus more on developing content, policies, and local participation.
How Starter Kit works
Starter Kit provides contributors to new and small language Wikipedias with a guided pathway through essential onboarding and development tasks, tools, and resources. It is currently hosted on Wikimedia Toolforge and designed around the needs of Wikipedias with fewer than 50,000 articles.
Starter Kit currently offers six tasks. Three can be completed by autoconfirmed users, while the remaining three require additional permissions, such as administrator, interface administrator, or translator rights.
Starter Kit began with one primary design question:
- How might we prioritize actions that strengthen the foundations needed to set up and develop new and small wikis?
This was followed by three secondary questions:
- How might we reduce the manual work required to set up and develop new and small wikis?
- How might we help communities understand the progress they are making?
- How might we facilitate connections and collaboration between their members and experienced Wikimedians?
The current design responds to these questions through three main components:
- Essential Tasks: Provides step-by-step guidance for completing six essential tasks, including translating the Five Pillars policy page, translating core interface messages on Translatewiki.net, and adding categories to articles using HotCat.
- Community and Collaboration: Helps communities connect with contributors and specialists through the Capacity Exchange (CapX) platform, recruit native-language speakers, and find relevant global teams and networks.
- Activity and Growth: Provides an overview of indicators that can help communities track the wiki’s activity and development. These include active editors, topics attracting the most readers, and newly created and deleted articles. A visual timeline also shows the wiki’s progress toward selected article and administrator milestones, up to 50,000 articles and 10 administrators.
Impact so far
The Starter Kit team has been organizing pilots, hosting office hours, and participating in community meetups such as the African Wikimedia Admins Space to introduce contributors to the tool, support them in completing the available tasks, and gather feedback to inform its next phase of development.
Between May and August 2026, 53 contributors from 46 wikis tried Starter Kit. More than half held administrator rights. During this period, contributors completed 24 Starter Kit workflows, generating approximately 77 on-wiki contributions.
Some noteworthy contributions include the import of 26 infoboxes across the Fon, Ganda, Tyap, Fula, Karekare, and Igala Wikipedias as well as the customization of the main pages of the Jju, Fula, and Tyap Wikipedias. Together, these seven wikis represent language communities across the African continent. At the time of the pilot, most had fewer than 5,000 articles, with Fula Wikipedia being the exception at approximately 20,000 articles. Contributions also included the translation of 17 interface messages on Translatewiki.net, the categorization of 9 articles using the HotCat gadget and the Five Pillars policy page to 3 wikipedias.
During the pilot, several contributors applied for and obtained administrator rights to try features requiring additional permissions. On some small wikis, administrator rights are granted temporarily, and contributors must reapply when they expire. With only a handful of active contributors, these communities may also find it difficult to gather enough participation for community consensus.
Feedback received so far has been positive. One community member who tried the main-page customization feature shared:
“It took me days to configure and customize the Tyap Wikipedia’s homepage initially, but with the Starter Kit, it took me just about an hour to completely configure and customize the main page. Had this been present a long time ago, one wouldn’t have stressed a lot in the past.”
Another contributor testing the same feature highlighted how the tool could make this work more accessible to people without a technical background:
“The HTML and CSS codes provided by default is one of the features I found most useful because it bridges the barrier and ensures inclusion of users with zero background in coding and programming languages to be able to create their local wiki homepages stress free. Also the interface is friendly and the whole process is easy, self explanatory and direct.”
A community member also reflected on the importance of making templates easier to access:
“When editors who have contributed to English Wikipedia choose to contribute to their local wikis but don’t find templates similar to those on English Wikipedia, they can quickly lose interest. Their articles end up with many missing templates, and they eventually return to English Wikipedia. Creating these templates can also be a lot of work, especially for editors who don’t know how to create them in the first place. It is often difficult to find simplified documentation on how to create templates, and some templates may require extended user rights to create or modify. But thanks to the Starter Kit, we are gaining more insights and making it easier to address some of these challenges.”
What’s next
We invite both autoconfirmed contributors and contributors with advanced rights to try out Starter Kit. You can follow the guidance in the user manual and share your experience on the project talk page. Your feedback will help shape the next iteration of Starter Kit.
If you would like us to host a remote demo for your user group or local community gathering, we would be happy to join you. We will also be at the Language Diversity Conference in Ghana from October 2 to 4, 2026. We hope to see you there!
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