Improving Contributor Onboarding and Issue Tracking

[ankitsharma101]

Improvement Description

Hi everyone,
I recently started ramping up to Theia in preparation for GSOC 2026, and I wanted to share a few observations.

I started where the README tells new contributors to start: "find an issue to work on." However it seems the lists are not really maintained:

• It points first-time open-source contributors to the "good first issue" label. Right now there are only 2 open issues with that label (out of ~1,440 open issues in total).
• It points people new to Theia to the "beginners" label, which is completely empty.
• For going further, it links to the help wanted list as "a good list to start." That one has around 200 issues, but almost all of them are from 2024 or earlier, so as a newcomer it's hard to tell what's still relevant.

I further combed through the issues for the GSOC proposal but there are some difficulties:

• Labels, types and titles are inconsistent. For example some bugs are labeled as "bug", some have "type: bug", some just mention "Bug:" in their title. Some bugs don't have any of these markers.
• Many issues have no labels at all.
• There are 17 epics, but they don't seem to link all relevant tickets.

I think some of these parts could be improved going forward, for example with more structured issue templates with auto-labeling, the triage process could explicitly check for "good first issue" and "beginners" labeling, epics could maybe be tracked in boards, etc.

cc @JonasHelming

[github-actions[bot]]

Hi @ankitsharma101, thanks for starting this discussion! 👋

The Theia community will take a look soon. In the meantime, you might find helpful information in:

• 📖 Theia Documentation
• ❓ FAQ
• 💬 Previous Discussions

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