It is my great pleasure to announce a new program being launched in
the Wikimedia Foundation’s Global Development department and a new
member of the team: Haitham Shamma has been engaged as program
consultant for the Editor Growth and Contribution Program. Pending
approval of the U.S. immigration visa process, we intend to bring
Haitham to San Francisco, full-time, as Contribution Research Manager
in the coming months.
Haitham is joining the Wikimedia Foundation in order to support new
editor growth on small-to-medium sized Wikimedia projects, and the
Editor Growth and Contribution Program is a new program being launched
at WMF to focus on the on-wiki needs of these projects. Haitham will
be partnering with the community to design, test, and implement online
programs to attract and retain more editors in these language
communities. The program aims to increase the number of active editors
on Wikimedia projects by working with the community to understand the
online needs of each project, and taking a data-driven approach to
implement solutions based on these needs. The pilots and programs
on-wiki that the Editor Growth and Contribution Program will use in
order to encourage new editors are intended to serve as a complement
to off-wiki outreach activities already underway in other teams.
WMF is really excited to be working with Haitham because he has been a
very active Wikipedia editor for several years and has an extensive
technical background in research and experimentation. Soon after he
began editing Arabic Wikipedia, Haitham began implementing systems and
tools to support editors and improve the quality of the Arabic
encyclopedia. He has a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering
and a master’s and PhD in Precision Engineering. As a volunteer in
the Arabic community, he has recently been helping with WMF’s Arabic
Language Initiative. Haitham speaks English, Arabic, and Japanese, as
well as some German, French, and Chinese. He’s also no stranger to
MediaWiki, C++, Java, Python, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Haitham will be beginning his work with the Arabic Wikipedia
community, and based on what is learned there, he’ll be moving into
other languages and geographies soon. The Editor Growth and
Contribution Program will be connecting with the Fundraising team to
build contribution campaigns that encourage readers to become editors,
taking lessons learned from fellowship projects and the new Editor
Engagement Experiment team’s work, and partnering with each target
language community to figure out what approaches work best to support
editor growth in a given language, culture, and size.
Some initial documentation and FAQs about the program are being
developed on meta wiki:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Growth_and_Contribution_Program
We’re looking forward to everyone’s input and feedback there.
Meanwhile, please join me in welcoming Haitham!
--
Siko Bouterse
Head of Community Fellowships
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
sbouterse(a)wikimedia.org