I suspect that a program of global recognition of newbies at Wikimania is too fast and too soon. It is a very big jump from making a few edits on a website to winning some global award, an award that only new editors qualify for.
We have thousands, possibly tens of thousands of good faith new editors who do a few edits, and then usually go away, sometimes returning years later.
Better in my opinion to have programs with them that scale, and are an appropriate interaction for someone in an early stage of their wiki career.
On the main page of English Wikipedia we have a Did you Know? section with snippets from several new or greatly expanded articles. Over the years I have nominated several new articles by new editors.
This is something that could scale. On English alone we have thousands of DYK hooks each year, hundreds of those could be from newbies.
Regards
Jonathan/WereSpielChequers
Hi Marc,
After our big success in the Dutch Wikipedia, and also the success of our German colleagues, we thought of organising and shortly analysed the situation and we came to the conclusion that it's mostly a scale problem. In other words, tech support is needed.
We are very much aware of the delicacy it has.
I think however that it should not focus on only one person/project as there are certainly multiple each year that should get attention. To me it would sound better if there will be a video shown with the largest and/or most successful projects of the past year so that we all can learn and get inspired by all those successful projects.
Greetings,
Romaine
Op maandag 18 januari 2016 heeft Marc A. Pelletier <
marc@uberbox.org> het volgende geschreven:
On 2016-01-17 11:21 PM, Romaine Wiki wrote:
At the same time I sense something important is missing. I miss in the large plenary sessions the attention for specific users and their projects that are of most value for the movement.
Yes, and no. I agree with you in principle (that is, the plenary sessions tend to have too little focus on direct volunteer impact), but that is not something that is missing by design but by lack of an actual session to present.
I made a presentation on the featured speakers track in London that was all about specific users and projects and it was very enthusiastically received - by the programme committee and the audience - so it's clear that there is desire to have such presentations. But they first have to be proposed (please do so!).
That said, one idea I had been toying with for 2017 was to have an award ceremony for the most impactful volunteers of the (2016) year - kinda like Jimmy's Wikipedian of the year award, only selected by the community and with a much wider scope. It's only half-baked, because it's a really complicated and delicate thing to do *right* (who picks, how are nominations made, how to avoid neglecting the non-english-Wikipedia contributors, etc). If it can be made to work right, I'd make it a big focus of the closing ceremony. And probably try to find where Philippe found the actual physical barnstars to give out. :-)
And I'd very much like this to become a yearly thing; not just a one-off for 2017.
-- Marc
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