Add a "good first issue" tag to identify issues that would make great first contributions

Created on 21 September 2021, almost 3 years ago

Updated 31 May 2024, 28 days ago

WAY back in the day, we did #1266380: Create a link to 'Novice' issues in the contributor links block → as a way to call out issues that were good for new contributors.

Nowadays, it seems that "good first issue" is the GitHub-standardized way to do this. Sources:

https://docs.github.com/en/communities/setting-up-your-project-for-healt...
https://goodfirstissue.dev/ - Aggregates only "good first issue"
https://goodfirstissues.com - Aggregates "good first issue"
https://up-for-grabs.net/#/ - Aggregates projects' first-time or newcomer issues based on project preference.
https://github.com/MunGell/awesome-for-beginners - Lists a project's first-time or newcomer issue label.
https://www.firsttimersonly.com/ - Initially suggested "first-timers-only" as a label.

"good first issue" is also one of the default labels used on new GitHub projects.

There is some use of these tags on drupal.org already: good-first-issue → , beginner → , so it would be good to standardize.

All new GitHub projects will probably use "good first issue", and GitHub's machine learning algorithm will only look for those issues on a project's /contribute page.
Microsoft open source projects use "good first issue".
Kubernetes uses "good first issue" for first-time contributors and "help wanted" for newcomers.
Ember (on GitHub) chose not to conform and uses "Good for New Contributors".
Some existing GitHub projects still use "up-for-grabs", "first-timers-only", and even confusingly "help wanted" to mean "good first issue" as seen on other GitHub aggregators like Up For Grabs! or awesome-for-beginners. These exist, but are probably not significant in the long term.
GitLab internally uses "good for new contributors" and "good for contributors". GitLab also tracks a user's "1st contribution".
GitLab projects must determine their own labels as GitLab does not create default labels, but default labels can be created and applied for a group (see DrupalSpoons).
GNOME uses "4. Newcomers".
Apache Software Foundation (ASF) aren't consistently labeled, but "newbie" is used the most.
Mozilla uses "good-first-bug", which is similar to "good first issue", but focused on code contribution.
Wordpress uses "good-first-bug" on its main site issue tracker, but the gutenberg project uses "Good First Issue" and "Good First Review". The gutenberg project also tracks "First Time Contributor" PRs.
(add more examples for large or popular projects or project collections)

Add "Good first issue" in addition to "Novice"

1. Discuss.
2. If agreement, figure out if anything needs to change as a result. (e.g. the "Contributor links" block on the Dashboard)
3. Do it.

A couple of places that "Novice" is referenced will need to be updated:

We may also want to add a link to "Good first issues" on the "Contributor Links" block on the dashboard (but this could be a follow-up)

(Possibly others...)

N/A, because it's a new tag, and thus previous links to "Novice" will not be broken.

N/A

✨ Feature request

Status

Needs review

Version

3.0

Component

User interface

Created by

🇨🇦Canada webchick Vancouver 🇨🇦

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Comment 28 days ago →
🇺🇸United States Kristen Pol Santa Cruz, CA, USA
This came up in the contribution feedback channel and @hestenet pointed us here. I vote for changing the Novice issue to Good first issue for simplicity and to encourage people to go beyond these after they already know how to contribute (ie discourage gaming). Thanks
Comment 28 days ago →
🇧🇪Belgium BramDriesen Belgium 🇧🇪
Coming here from the same thread, upvoting this as well as I think there is a general misconception for the novice tag.

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