The fundraiser for money has been working exceedingly well with our number of donors increasing 10 fold since 2008. What we need now is a fundraiser for editors. I meet well educated professionals who use Wikipedia but have no ideas that they can edit it. We need to run a banner with the same energy we use to raise money to raise editor numbers. This idea has been trialed to a limited extent here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Invitation_to_edit but the effort did not have sufficient data crunching behind it to determine if it works.
I tend to agree. At times of Fundraising, public interest grows noticeably. People have been asking me aobut the banners almost every day for the last few weeks. (A few times they even asked me whether they are going to see a personal appeal from Amir Aharoni soon.)
I don't think that i ever saw a focused "personal appeal + photo" banner that asks people to edit instead of asking them for money. I did sometime see graphical banners in Wikipedias in various languages that invite people to edit or participate in writing contests. Something like this is happening in the Tamil Wikipedia now ( http://ta.wikipedia.org/ ). I don't know how effective it is - it's worth checking.
2012/1/2 James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com
The fundraiser for money has been working exceedingly well with our number of donors increasing 10 fold since 2008. What we need now is a fundraiser for editors. I meet well educated professionals who use Wikipedia but have no ideas that they can edit it. We need to run a banner with the same energy we use to raise money to raise editor numbers. This idea has been trialed to a limited extent here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Invitation_to_edit but the effort did not have sufficient data crunching behind it to determine if it works.
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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Hello,
In principle it is a nice idea. But it is extremely diffcult to "edit" (to make substantial contributions) so such an initiative should be accompanied by more than a simple appeal...
Kind regards Ziko
2012/1/2 Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il:
I tend to agree. At times of Fundraising, public interest grows noticeably. People have been asking me aobut the banners almost every day for the last few weeks. (A few times they even asked me whether they are going to see a personal appeal from Amir Aharoni soon.)
I don't think that i ever saw a focused "personal appeal + photo" banner that asks people to edit instead of asking them for money. I did sometime see graphical banners in Wikipedias in various languages that invite people to edit or participate in writing contests. Something like this is happening in the Tamil Wikipedia now ( http://ta.wikipedia.org/ ). I don't know how effective it is - it's worth checking.
2012/1/2 James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com
The fundraiser for money has been working exceedingly well with our number of donors increasing 10 fold since 2008. What we need now is a fundraiser for editors. I meet well educated professionals who use Wikipedia but have no ideas that they can edit it. We need to run a banner with the same energy we use to raise money to raise editor numbers. This idea has been trialed to a limited extent here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Invitation_to_edit but the effort did not have sufficient data crunching behind it to determine if it works.
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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I would pitch it as a simple appeal to edit the Wikipedia article on your hometown (or home neighborhood if you're from a big city).
In my experience, something like this has been attractive to a very broad spectrum of people, and gives them a nice "in" as a place to get started.
Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos)
On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Ziko van Dijk vandijk@wmnederland.nl wrote:
Hello,
In principle it is a nice idea. But it is extremely diffcult to "edit" (to make substantial contributions) so such an initiative should be accompanied by more than a simple appeal...
Kind regards Ziko
2012/1/2 Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il:
I tend to agree. At times of Fundraising, public interest grows noticeably. People have been asking me aobut the banners almost every day for the last few weeks. (A few times they even asked me whether they are going to see a personal appeal from Amir Aharoni soon.)
I don't think that i ever saw a focused "personal appeal + photo" banner that asks people to edit instead of asking them for money. I did sometime see graphical banners in Wikipedias in various languages that invite people to edit or participate in writing contests. Something like this is happening in the Tamil Wikipedia now ( http://ta.wikipedia.org/ ). I don't know how effective it is - it's worth checking.
2012/1/2 James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com
The fundraiser for money has been working exceedingly well with our number of donors increasing 10 fold since 2008. What we need now is a fundraiser for editors. I meet well educated professionals who use Wikipedia but have no ideas that they can edit it. We need to run a banner with the same energy we use to raise money to raise editor numbers. This idea has been trialed to a limited extent here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Invitation_to_edit but the effort did not have sufficient data crunching behind it to determine if it works.
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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--
Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland dr. Ziko van Dijk, voorzitter http://wmnederland.nl/
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On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 1:16 PM, Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com wrote:
I would pitch it as a simple appeal to edit the Wikipedia article on your hometown (or home neighborhood if you're from a big city).
In my experience, something like this has been attractive to a very broad spectrum of people, and gives them a nice "in" as a place to get started.
Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos)
Big cities usually work a lot better than small towns or medium sized cities, where inclusion of local places are often reverted due to lack of assertions of notability.
English Wikipeidia user Chzz inspired an essay that I host, for new users strictly looking to edit: < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan/Butterfly%3E
We use the essay to reference people trying to create or edit articles that they have a conflict of interest with to get them started editing Wikipedia as an encyclopedia instead of a motivate-driven platform.
Keegan Peterzell, 03/01/2012 08:41:
Big cities usually work a lot better than small towns or medium sized cities, where inclusion of local places are often reverted due to lack of assertions of notability.
English Wikipeidia user Chzz inspired an essay that I host, for new users strictly looking to edit:< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan/Butterfly%3E
We use the essay to reference people trying to create or edit articles that they have a conflict of interest with to get them started editing Wikipedia as an encyclopedia instead of a motivate-driven platform.
I hope you're not using it even for cities.
Nemo
@Amir.
Thanks for citing Tamil Wikipedia here. Actually it was a GREAT success in Tamil Wiki. We got many talented editors & thousands of new registrations.
Actually I am not mentioning the number here but people got to know that "what Wikipedia actually is! & the community behind the project"
Once again "It's a successful project in Tamil Wikipedia". :)
*$U®¥∩* http://goo.gl/RoMyo.com http://FirefoxSurya.blogspot.com http://about.me/suryaceg
On 3 January 2012 13:42, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Keegan Peterzell, 03/01/2012 08:41:
Big cities usually work a lot better than small towns or medium sized cities, where inclusion of local places are often reverted due to lack of assertions of notability.
English Wikipeidia user Chzz inspired an essay that I host, for new users strictly looking to edit:< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan/Butterfly%3E
We use the essay to reference people trying to create or edit articles
that
they have a conflict of interest with to get them started editing
Wikipedia
as an encyclopedia instead of a motivate-driven platform.
I hope you're not using it even for cities.
Nemo
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On 1/3/12 1:41 AM, Keegan Peterzell wrote:
On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 1:16 PM, Pharospharosofalexandria@gmail.com wrote:
I would pitch it as a simple appeal to edit the Wikipedia article on your hometown (or home neighborhood if you're from a big city).
In my experience, something like this has been attractive to a very broad spectrum of people, and gives them a nice "in" as a place to get started.
Big cities usually work a lot better than small towns or medium sized cities, where inclusion of local places are often reverted due to lack of assertions of notability.
I agree cities are probably better, but I don't think that's really the best place to start editing Wikipedia either, because it's an area where it's really easy for new users to mistakenly think that they should write content based on their personal experience rather than on sources. We can try to explain that, but the nature of the subject matter imo makes it more likely to be an issue. The sources there are often particularly problematic as well, with a lot of good info tangled up with tourism/boosterism type sources.
The smoothest new-user editing experience, from what I can tell, tends to be source-first rather than topic-first: someone who's interested in Byzantine churches, for example, and has in front of them a quality book on Byzantine churches, will (I think) usually have a good experience creating new articles on individual churches that cite that book (the most common road-bump here is that their articles may get tagged as orphans).
One possibility could be to rotate subject-specific "how to get started" appeals. Something like: "Interested in architecture? [Pithy appeal that links to brief, newbie-friendly info on how to contribute on the subject of architecture]"
-Mark
I agree cities are probably better, but I don't think that's really the best place to start editing Wikipedia either, because it's an area where it's really easy for new users to mistakenly think that they should write content based on their personal experience rather than on sources.
What do you think about libraries? ^^
przykuta
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Przykuta przykuta@o2.pl wrote:
I agree cities are probably better, but I don't think that's really the best place to start editing Wikipedia either, because it's an area where it's really easy for new users to mistakenly think that they should write content based on their personal experience rather than on sources.
What do you think about libraries? ^^
FWIW, this was actually the focus of the Seattle Wikipedia Loves Libraries event:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/seattleWLL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_Seattle
Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos)
Full support here!
2012/1/3 Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Przykuta przykuta@o2.pl wrote:
I agree cities are probably better, but I don't think that's really the best place to start editing Wikipedia either, because it's an area where it's really easy for new users to mistakenly think that they should write content based on their personal experience rather than on sources.
What do you think about libraries? ^^
FWIW, this was actually the focus of the Seattle Wikipedia Loves Libraries event:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/seattleWLL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_Seattle
Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos)
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Hi Amir,
I think this will be every effective. We should try this idea.
Thanks, naveenpf
On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 10:59 PM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
I tend to agree. At times of Fundraising, public interest grows noticeably. People have been asking me aobut the banners almost every day for the last few weeks. (A few times they even asked me whether they are going to see a personal appeal from Amir Aharoni soon.)
I don't think that i ever saw a focused "personal appeal + photo" banner that asks people to edit instead of asking them for money. I did sometime see graphical banners in Wikipedias in various languages that invite people to edit or participate in writing contests. Something like this is happening in the Tamil Wikipedia now ( http://ta.wikipedia.org/ ). I don't know how effective it is - it's worth checking.
2012/1/2 James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com
The fundraiser for money has been working exceedingly well with our number of donors increasing 10 fold since 2008. What we need now is a fundraiser for editors. I meet well educated professionals who use Wikipedia but have no ideas that they can edit it. We need to run a banner with the same energy we use to raise money to raise editor numbers. This idea has been trialed to a limited extent here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Invitation_to_edit but the effort did not have sufficient data crunching behind it to determine if it works.
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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I fully agree! h
Am 02.01.2012 17:53, schrieb James Heilman:
The fundraiser for money has been working exceedingly well with our number of donors increasing 10 fold since 2008. What we need now is a fundraiser for editors. I meet well educated professionals who use Wikipedia but have no ideas that they can edit it. We need to run a banner with the same energy we use to raise money to raise editor numbers. This idea has been trialed to a limited extent here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Invitation_to_edit but the effort did not have sufficient data crunching behind it to determine if it works.
The fundraiser for money has been working exceedingly well with our number of donors increasing 10 fold since 2008. What we need now is a fundraiser for editors. I meet well educated professionals who use Wikipedia but have no ideas that they can edit it. We need to run a banner with the same energy we use to raise money to raise editor numbers. This idea has been trialed to a limited extent here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Invitation_to_edit but the effort did not have sufficient data crunching behind it to determine if it works.
Data in the file from 2011-01-26 is not too good
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ENnewEditors.jpg
Look at December 2011 -> in the file <7k, on the site >7k:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm
Nov 2011 = 6734 now. These stats are not stable - last month is always the worst.
But invitation to edit is good idea. In pl wiki it works well. The last edition (http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:10_prac_na_10_lat_Wikipedii invitation by anonnotice only) gave us in July 2011 more active editors:
http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/pl/activeusers/365
Compare with ja, it, nl, sv, ru or es wikis
http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/ja/activeusers/365
http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/it/activeusers/365
http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/nl/activeusers/365
http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/sv/activeusers/365
http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/ru/activeusers/365
http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/es/activeusers/365
These actions work well for a month. We ask readers for improve articles (the quest must be specific -> What do we need to do / how could you help us)
Przykuta
One simple idea I had (personal capacity, etc etc) - we stick lots of banners at the top of the article saying "this has X problem! Be careful!". Would it be possible to have them appear differently to say, anonymous IPs, and display a more friendly message encouraging the users to register and deal with the problem themselves, linking to a guide focused on that specific tag (an "unreferenced" tag would lead to a "here's how to add references to articles" short guide, for example)?
On 2 January 2012 21:24, Przykuta przykuta@o2.pl wrote:
The fundraiser for money has been working exceedingly well with our number of donors increasing 10 fold since 2008. What we need now is a fundraiser for editors. I meet well educated professionals who use Wikipedia but have no ideas that they can edit it. We need to run a banner with the same energy we use to raise money to raise editor numbers. This idea has been trialed to a limited extent here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Invitation_to_edit but the effort did not have sufficient data crunching behind it to determine if it works.
Data in the file from 2011-01-26 is not too good
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ENnewEditors.jpg
Look at December 2011 -> in the file <7k, on the site >7k:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm
Nov 2011 = 6734 now. These stats are not stable - last month is always the worst.
But invitation to edit is good idea. In pl wiki it works well. The last edition (http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:10_prac_na_10_lat_Wikipedii invitation by anonnotice only) gave us in July 2011 more active editors:
http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/pl/activeusers/365
Compare with ja, it, nl, sv, ru or es wikis
http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/ja/activeusers/365
http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/it/activeusers/365
http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/nl/activeusers/365
http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/sv/activeusers/365
http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/ru/activeusers/365
http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/es/activeusers/365
These actions work well for a month. We ask readers for improve articles (the quest must be specific -> What do we need to do / how could you help us)
Przykuta
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On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 8:53 AM, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
The fundraiser for money has been working exceedingly well with our number of donors increasing 10 fold since 2008. What we need now is a fundraiser for editors. I meet well educated professionals who use Wikipedia but have no ideas that they can edit it. We need to run a banner with the same energy we use to raise money to raise editor numbers. This idea has been trialed to a limited extent here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Invitation_to_edit but the effort did not have sufficient data crunching behind it to determine if it works.
James,
thanks for this note! The problem, as I see it, is that we know that new editors, once they attempt to make their first edit, hit an enormous number of barriers. Even if they master mark-up (which is a big IF), they're likely to fail when their edits get reverted due to lack of proper citations or other issues.
We built http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:FeedbackDashboard as a way to surface what frustrations new editors have. Ignoring the noise (people who shouldn't edit or who're trying to do harm), you'll get the same issues again and again: - basic editing is very hard - communication via talk pages is very confusing - copyright issues are complicated and unfamiliar - article rejections or reverts feel arbitrary and unfair - finding the right way to upload images is complicated
It's now possible to help those users with a built-in response tool, and it's possible for new users to mark these responses as helpful or not. Over time, this may surface easy ways in which the community can ease the pain of new users. (FeedbackDashboard is on English and Dutch Wikipedia and on Incubator. We're happy to install it on more wikis, but it probably won't work well in smaller communities due to lack of scale.)
There are certain types of new user recruitment which do _not_ hit as many issues. One is the high-touch recruitment at universities via assignment or other means. It requires a fair amount of effort per student, but provided that the preconditions are right, those students tend to turn out high-quality work. The biggest issues have been in India where the quality of edits was much lower than hoped for. See: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program and related links -- again, there's lots of opportunity here to help these students.
A second area is multimedia campaigns. While finding the right way to upload is hard when you're a new user, if you point people directly at a customized UploadWizard at Commons, the success rate is pretty high. This has been demonstrated by community/chapter campaigns like "Wiki Loves Monuments 2011" (~180,000 photos) and "TamilWiki Media Contest (~5,500 photos so far), which have brought lots of new users into the fold.
I'd love to hear other successes/failures. I'm skeptical about a sitenotice/banner-focused approach until we've addressed some of the _known_ issues that new users are likely to encounter. We could shortcut things a little by focusing a lot on mentoring tools, but IMO that would be more band-aid -- we need to address the fundamental issues. Here are some of the things we're doing:
1) Steven and Maryana in the Community Department have been running tests to see if different types of warning messages reduce people's early frustration and increase their retention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_user_warnings/Testing
2) The Feedback Dashboard itself has response mechanisms, including now a "Mark as Helpful" feature for new users to quickly acknowledge whether a given response has been useful to them.
3) The Visual Editor, once completed, will hopefully reduce a huge amount of the basic usability challenges people encounter. Projects like UploadWizard help with that, as well.
4) Tools like AFTv5 potentially offer a casual entry-way into the world of editing without the risk of reversion or other negative experiences. Some users may only ever submit comments/suggestions, but hopefully some of them will also "graduate" to editing given sufficient encouragement.
5) Next we're going to experiment specifically with the mechanisms used for patrolling and creating pages. See: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Page_Triage http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_creation_workflow
This is a frequent pain point both for new and experienced editors and we hope we can take some of that away by working closely with the community in reforming processes and tools.
6) After that we'll have to think about challenges like messaging (talk pages are horribly broken), identity (user profile setup), and affiliation (joining and managing WikiProjects etc.).
Lots to do :)
On 1/3/2012 3:08 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
The Feedback Dashboard itself has response mechanisms, including now a "Mark as Helpful" feature for new users to quickly acknowledge whether a given response has been useful to them.
Not disputing that the talk page system might have bigger issues, but it strikes me that adding "Mark as Helpful" specifically to user talk messages could be a good addition as well, assuming that the current implementation indicates the feature has a positive impact.
--Michael Snow
On 1/3/12 3:30 PM, Michael Snow wrote:
On 1/3/2012 3:08 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
The Feedback Dashboard itself has response mechanisms, including now a "Mark as Helpful" feature for new users to quickly acknowledge whether a given response has been useful to them.
Not disputing that the talk page system might have bigger issues, but it strikes me that adding "Mark as Helpful" specifically to user talk messages could be a good addition as well, assuming that the current implementation indicates the feature has a positive impact.
The "Mark as Helpful" functionality was actually implemented as its own extension rather than a subset of the Feedback Dashboard with precisely this intent in mind (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mark_as_Helpful)
We didn't want to lock the widget into only working on FBD responses; we think it might be useful to explore its effects on the quality of our help pages, for instance, or even possibly revisions themselves.
Of course, the feature may not actually work at all or have so little impact as to be negligible.
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