Hello,
I agree with what Sage said about limited success in recruitment in any event targeting new users. My experience is that the fastest way to recruit new regular contributors is for them to enter a one on one mentoring and collaborative relationship with an experienced Wikipedian. They can enter this relationship either by being found and invited after they are identified doing something on Wikimedia projects, or by proposing a partnership with them when they themselves come to Wikimedia projects looking for a partnership. There are a lot of potential new collaborators to be found and developed in this way, but processing them takes either a tremendous amount of work from a single Wikipedian acting alone or a communications manager to create a list of contacts and a plan for staying in touch with them over time. In my opinion, anyone who took a communications role to manage contacts in this way should be paid staff, because the responsibility and workload are great. By default, most people seeking to become more engaged are never invited to do so and become lost contacts. I regret this loss because it is mostly a failure to connect community volunteers with people seeking mentoring, and not a lack of mentors. Any Wikimedia community group which could begin to track and manage requests for support would be building a valuable contact list.
Editathons and public outreach events can deepen the engagement of established Wikipedians but have a low rate of conversation from new users to engaged users. The usual figure passed around is 2-5% conversion, and I think those numbers are generous because those figures typically mean something like "makes 5 edits three months after the event" which is not worth noting. Editathons can be good for getting content onto Wiki (rarely - it usually does not work),, converting the organizer of the editathon from a newer user to a more engaged Wikipedian, or soliciting geographically local contacts for the one on one mentorship which I just described above.
I am a fan of community outreach models which minimize the work burden on the volunteers who organize them. Something manageable for a small group of people, in my opinion, is a regular monthly meetup which can be replaced with a special event any time someone steps up to request to organize one. So for example, if some institution has a staffperson who wants to engage more deeply, they can be primed to host an editathon. That editathon becomes the event for the month, and that staffperson gets more engaged to join the meetup team, but it is hard to expect any new user who joins the editathon to convert to become an engaged user, and the chances of actually having stable useful content contributed at a typical editathon by new users is rather low too without thoughtful experienced planning.
I like Pine's idea of having events to train multiple new editors at once but I do not recall seeing that work in practice anywhere ever. I have seen a lot of people try. Institutional partnerships work when someone inside the institution becomes a Wikipedian and converts their colleagues, and I still think that is a fruitful outreach path.
Everything that Peaceray says is a viable agenda for grooming potential new contributors assuming that they have already committed to learn, and are a step beyond casual exploration. He is especially correct about the breakdown of interests - some people will only care about some topical field and will contribute excellent information in that field, but not want to learn more than necessary about Wikimedia infrastructure, while a different demographic will be more interested in the infrastructure and technical execution than any topical focus.
yours,
On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 1:01 AM, Raymond Leonard < raymond.f.leonard.jr@gmail.com> wrote:
I think that we need to engage editors & to be consistent in our follow-up.
In October, we had the largest monthly meetup that I have been to. We did not have a one in November because several of us did a panel at Mako's class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Program:University_of_Washington/Interpersonal_Media_%28Fall_2014%29 instead. In December, we teamed up with the 3rd Monday Techno-Activist folks for the year-end holiday party instead of a meetup. In January, we did meet on a 2nd Tuesday, but at UW, not the café. In hindsight, I realized that anyone used to Café Allegro & not likely to travel elsewhere would have not attended our meetup for three months. I am not implying that we need to meet there every month since we have UW's schedule to consider, but we should consider our schedule at Café Allegro.
I thought of few things as a result of the 'I Love To You': Critical Wikipedia / Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon. Next time, & thereafter, we should have CWUG flyers & a means to join our user group. We could not have done that in time for this event, but we can do it going forward.
The event begged for a follow-up. Since ten groups co-sponsored the event, it is unclear who owned this. I would like to work collaboratively with someone on either the Draft:Feminist Hackerspaces or the Women Writers' Suffrage League articles. However, none of us created a contact list to coordinate those interested in editing these articles further.
I agree with Sage here in that “bringing newcomers into the online wiki community (after) local outreach events” is the hard nut to crack. I think that we may be able to engage editors by doing two types of “deep dives”:
- Topical
- Going beyond the basics
The first entails topic-specific editing sessions or following up on previous edit-a-thons. Maybe that means a series of meetups or organizing a focus group, perhaps with an experienced Wikimedian who is willing to take part. Examples include art & feminism, GLAM, or regional interests, like the list being drafted at http://cascadia.wiki/List_of_Cascadia_topics
The second is sharing our expertise. Most teaching edit-a-thons don't go beyond the basics. Maybe we need some “200” level sessions where we explore further into one aspect of Wikimedia/Wikipedia, like:
- how to add images & galleries to articles
- infobox templates
- citation templates
- Commons, how it works, & how its licensing differs from Wikipedia
- what are namespaces & how they function
- other language Wikipedias, & the how & what of translating articles
- other Wikimedia projects, for example, Wikivoyage, Wikidata,
Wikispecies, etc.
- what exactly are WikiProjects & what are their templates doing on an
article's talk page?
This list is neither meant to be exhaustive nor exhausting, but a springboard. Maybe we can encourage casual editors to go beyond the occasional, casual edit by showing them what is possible.
Yours, Peaceray
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 11:54 AM, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
If the point is to demonstrate that we have an organized volunteer community (in order to get funding to do the projects we really want to do) then I think we'd be better off focusing on outreach to active Wikimedians instead.
We know that we *don't* know how to really bring newcomers into the online wiki community via local outreach events — this is the big unsolved problem for every chapter and user group. So building up our nominal volunteer base via events that we know don't really work, just so that we can reach the participation numbers that WMF is looking for, seems like putting the cart before the horse. I suggest that we'd have a much easier time if we started by refining the planning work we've done so far into a concise vision for where we want to go, and then using that to recruit active editors in our region. "Here are the big things we want to do, and what they will mean to you." (Press credentials! Wikimedia-in-Residence opportunities! Hanging out with other editors to talk shop and complain about everything that's wrong with Wikipedia!)
To the extent that we can "develop a volunteer base" by doing things we already want to do, that's great. But I don't want to plan our activities around chasing metrics; that leads down the same well-trodden path that so many other ineffectual chapters have already gone down.
-Sage
On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
If the plan is to have us focusing on developing a volunteer base, I
think
that natural places for us to start would be UW (including UW libraries, archives and museums), the Seattle Public Library, and the King County Library System.
To that end, how would people feel about making some of our editing workshops more externally focused on training new editors, probably
with the
use of VisualEditor from the start? For example, we might consider
having
one social unconference type meetup like we have had at Cafe Allegro
each
month, and one outreach-focused editing training and editathon
combination
event at an institution that is well placed for recruiting.
I am also thinking that we could have one event each month in Seattle,
and
one event each month on the eastside, with the locations alternating
for the
unconference-social and the workshop-edititathon.
We could also try a variety of focuses for the workshop-content
contribution
events. For example, instead of or in addition to content improvements
on
English Wikipedia people might be interested in photo uploads or
editing for
Commons, technical events such as the CDSW events, or subject-matter
focused
events such as highlights of particular subjects at libraries or
museums.
What do you think? I'm brainstorming ideas here. I think some variety
would
be good, but if we're also interested in recruiting new long-term contributors then we might also want some continuity, so I'm trying to
find
the right balance, especially with our limited volunteer resources. If
we
expand our volunteer base then it will be easier for us to have a
broader
range of events.
I'm cc'ing Alex and WMF Evaluation here to see if they have suggestions.
I'll incorporate everyone's input here into the revised draft goals and budget. Some of the tasks that we had originally planned for this year
may
be moved to next year since WMF is unwilling to fund them this year.
Thanks,
Pine
This is an Encyclopedia One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of our past, in which we must delve The well of our future, The clear water we must leave untainted for those who come after us, The fertile earth, in which truth may grow in bright places, tended by
many
hands, And the broad fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward knowing
how
much we do not know. —Catherine Munro
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