New contribution type: help projects adopt standard beginner-friendly labels

[thomasnemer]

Problem

Many open source projects don't use GitHub's default "good first issue" label, which hurts discoverability for new contributors. Some projects use alternative labels like E-easy, help wanted, beginner, easy, low-hanging-fruit, starter, etc. Others have no beginner-friendly labels at all.

This affects syld contribute issue, which queries for good first issue — projects without this label return no results even when they have beginner-appropriate issues.

Proposal

New contribution type: "label"

Add a new syld contribute label (or similar) contribution type that suggests helping projects improve their discoverability by:

1. Proposing adoption of standard labels — For GitHub projects that lack a "good first issue" label, suggest opening an issue or PR to the project proposing they adopt GitHub's default label. This helps the wider ecosystem.

2. Cross-provider investigation — Research whether other forges provide similar mechanisms:

   • GitLab: Does it have a default/standard beginner label?
   • Codeberg/Gitea: Any conventions?
   • SourceHut: How does it handle this?

3. General discoverability improvements — Beyond labels, suggest other discoverability improvements like:

   • Adding a CONTRIBUTING.md
   • Adding topic tags to the repository
   • Adding a FUNDING.yml

Improvements to syld contribute issue

In the shorter term, consider:

• Supporting a configurable list of beginner-friendly labels to search for
• Auto-detecting beginner-friendly labels by scanning a repo's label list
• Showing a helpful message when no "good first issue" label exists (e.g., "This project doesn't use the 'good first issue' label — consider suggesting they add one!")

Context

Discovered while implementing #94 — syld contribute issue --project curl/curl returns no results because curl/curl doesn't use the "good first issue" label despite having beginner-appropriate issues.

[thomasnemer]

Related: the enrichment pipeline now validates whether CONTRIBUTING.md exists before storing the URL (see #96 follow-up). Projects where the file is missing get a message suggesting that creating one would be a great first contribution.

This ties into the broader discoverability theme here — projects missing standard beginner-friendly infrastructure (labels, contributing guides, etc.) represent contribution opportunities themselves. We could surface these as a dedicated suggestion type alongside the label adoption idea.

[thomasnemer]

A more generic form for this type of contribution is "metadata improvement" => if any of the information we scan for is not present or available, a possible contribution is to make it available. For example, let's say we're using project A, this project A doesn't declare it homepage through the package manager we used to install project A, so we can't fill our homepage column for this project and leverage it. A possible contribution the user can make is to contribute to project A in a way it declares its homepage in the package manager the user uses.=, this will be a virtuous circle.