[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!

[Theo10011]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 7:36 AM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:

> That sounds like a great idea for projects where the readership and/or
> editorship is low.  On those projects, it is very likely that a reader
> with even a tiny interest in editing can be converted to a good
> editor, and they are worth the effort because they have a few rare
> qualities: they can read the language and they have found the project.
>
> Has there been any investigations in how we should use sitenotices
> (and landing pages) to maximise the chance that a reader is converted,
> where this is sensible?
>

We did try this on a couple of occasions, I believe with the Indic language
projects.

In the 2010 fundraiser, when central notice was still new, I was tasked
with trying this out with the Indic projects. We had a contribute banner
Geo-located to Indian visitors that lead to a page directing visitors to
local projects[1]. This approach might have been considered again by the
WMF India programs at a later juncture, I'm not sure what data might be
available on this. I found out the infrastructure on the small Indic
language projects was not up to par; directing visitors to help pages in
local languages, and policy pages, was much harder than English Wikipedia,
they didn't exist in some cases.

Anyway, we did not receive any positive feedback or saw any measurable
impact on the projects when this was undertaken. There might be data to
analyze related to this, but I'm only speaking from my own perspective.

I'm curious to see this approach tried on other English language projects,
as well as more languages of Wikipedia in the 100,000 article range. If
anyone is interested in investigating, this can be easily set-up on Meta.

Getting back a bit to the earlier topic, and what Sj said, I agree human
interactions are indeed valuable to building communities, but the community
is getting too large. The ratio of experienced editors vs. new editors,
enthusiasts is not proportionate, add to that the vandals, clean-up and
regular editorial work, there is only a finite amount of time that can go
towards forming personal bonds. I agree, welcoming users and having
friendly interactions is something any new user can do, but most are not
directed towards those things. While ideal, it might not even be necessary
to have such interactions in order to support the commons
goal. Incidentally, Facebook relies on automated tools, and notifications,
to engage and retain its user-base.

Regards
Theo

[1]http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/IN/Welcome