What we try to do in Malayalam community generally:

1. We have a Wikipedia / Wikimedia Handbook (some 80 pages in Malayalam language format: sub-A4 Ref: http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:HB ) that was compiled a few years ago. By now, it's somewhat outdated particularly because it doesn't touch the visual editor or wikidata topics. We are desperately looking forward to update it at the earliest. The handbook contains a detailed introduction to open knowledge, WM project concepts and copy right issues, very descriptive notes on most of the essential editing skills, details on Commons uploads etc.

We find that the fresh editor retention rates are much better when they are supplied with a pulp copy of this hand book.

2. In addition to this, we also used to hand out a rather thicker quick cheat sheet with the most essential wiki markups and simple templates. Many fresh users keep this sheet near to their workstation or in the laptop bag as an instant reference.

3. During most editathons, we set up a particular topic that is readily connected to the attendees in some way and a list of such articles to be worked upon (created new or improved existing ones). This approach motivates the new editors to continue working out further upon those articles even later in the following weeks. We make them feel sharing some ownership for those topics.

4. If there is an opportunity and privacy is not an issue, we try to talk out loud/announce about the event through social media and also mention some of the work accomplished by those new users in our social media groups. Such simple acts often encourages the new user to stick onto the learning and improving process.

5. Every time a new user is created in mlwiki, a bot adds a welcome message to his/her talk page (eg. https://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sportsfan_1234 ) . The message contains a concise help capsule and direct links to additional help pages.

6. The check-list idea you mentioned seems great! We are going to test it out very soon! Thank you, Romaine!

regards,

-VP

On Thu, 31 Jan 2019 at 19:50, Romaine Wiki romaine.wiki@gmail.com wrote:

Hi all,

A few days ago we organised an edit-a-thon in what we had participants write about important women.

With most edit-a-thon we start with a group of people that know Wikipedia, but are fully new to editing on Wikipedia. We usually start with an introduction, which includes telling about:

• Do not copy paste from other sources, but write in your own words.
• For all facts sources need to be added.
• Link keywords to other articles in Wikipedia.

and some more things...

The participants usually do their best, but usually also forget something. Like for example that a participant forgot to add a source for a sentence.

In our recent edit-a-thon we tried something new: besides the presentation given and the handout of some instructions, we also created a checklist for the participants to use at the end of their writing so they did not forget anything.

That gave us better results than what we have got with similar groups in the past.

This leads me to my question: when you organised an edit-a-thon, what kind of cheatsheets, tricks, ... do you use so that the articles of participants have a higher quality? (Or that they are more inspired/enthusiastic, more aware, ..., etc)

Good examples?

If we can share those, we all can learn from good ideas and examples!

Thanks!

Romaine _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe