// the find
firstcontributions/first-contributions
🚀✨ Help beginners to contribute to open source projects
A practice repository where beginners make their first open source contribution by adding their name to a Contributors.md file via a fork-and-PR workflow. It's aimed at people who have never submitted a pull request before and need a zero-stakes environment to practice the mechanics. Available in 70+ languages.
- Multilingual coverage is genuinely impressive — 70+ language translations of the main README means it reaches people who would bounce off an English-only tutorial.
- The auto-merge workflow for PRs is a smart implementation detail: beginners get feedback quickly without maintainers manually merging thousands of trivial name additions.
- Supplementary docs cover real workflow scenarios (rebasing, squashing, resolving merge conflicts, stashing) so there's somewhere to go after the hello-world PR.
- GUI tool tutorials for GitHub Desktop, VS Code, IntelliJ, GitKraken, and Sourcetree acknowledge that not everyone lives in the terminal, which is appropriate for the audience.
- The actual contribution is adding your name to a file — it teaches the git mechanics but nothing about reading code, understanding a codebase, or writing a meaningful change. The gap between 'I made a PR here' and 'I can contribute to a real project' is enormous and mostly unaddressed.
- Translation docs are inconsistently maintained — some languages have full coverage of supplementary material, others have one or two files from years ago. There's no obvious signal to readers about which translations are current.
- With 107k forks and continuous auto-merging of name additions, Contributors.md has become a massive file with tens of thousands of entries, which is functionally useless as a contributors list and slightly absurd as a teaching artifact.
- No validation or CI checks on contributions beyond basic merge conflict detection — nothing stops people from submitting junk, duplicate names, or malformed entries, so the file quality is entirely a function of good faith.