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@wikimedia.org