TLDR:transform the thank you campaign after the fundraising in a "Thank you
campaign: became an editor"
Following a really nice discussion of the swiss mailing list, I had a look in the
statistics here:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm
First, as unfortunately expected I notice the decrease between january 2013 and 2014, but
in the second time I've been surprised by the increase in january 2014 comparing to
december 2013.
I first thought the large press coverage of the "decline of Wikipedia" had an
effect to motivate new editors, but when looking to these charts
http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/new_editors
I notice that every winter we have these increase of editors , most probably due to the
fundraising campaign.
But unfortunately, like for Wiki Loves Monuments effect, this increase of new editors
during a month is not enough to invert the tendency
http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors
It has been discussed several time in the past, but I guess we should do it again, how can
we turned the fundraising campaign in a massive outreach campaign?
I have two leads, the easy one and the complex one :-)
The easy one would be to add to the thank you message an invitation to join/meet/take
information about users-group, thematic organisation or chapters. This move may help to
improve the retention by a face to face approach.
The complex one would be to develop a system to invite people to contribute in specific
article.
The main point would be to transform the thank you campaign in a "Thank you campaign:
became an editor"
The idea is to display a banner inviting the reader to edit wikipedia. the concept is the
following:
identify the categories of the page currently displayed
select three articles in these categories with a template “expand” or similar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Empty_section
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Expand_section
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod%C3%A8le:Section_vide_ou_incompl%C3%A8te
displayed a message like:
You can also help Wikipedia by expanding an article, here are three articles that need
your help, if you want to know how you can help, click on the topic you like :
article from category one
article from category two
article from category three (or random category)
after the reader click on the article, send him to the section to expand:
in edit mode, with a banner explaining the basics of editing or
with visual editor displaying a banner explaining this mode
after publication of the article, a thank you banner, explaining how to register, with a
link to the create an account page
I start a page on meta to see if this idea can be discuss/expand/improved/deployed
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CH/outreach_fundraising_campaign
Thanks for your comment or your help, you can also took my idea , change it totally and
turn it in something doable! :-D
Charles