[Gendergap] Emails to friends, lists to encourage participation

[Pete Forsyth]

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 9:32 PM, <carolmooredc at verizon.net> wrote:

> One thing we can all do is send letters of encouragement to women to
> join wikipedia. I don't know if there is a form letter  already used
> that we can merge ideas like the below into.  This is includes and
> expands on points I sent out to a couple of political women friends and
> womens lists - about 150 women total - as a personal encouragement.
> Underwhelming two responses so far: "good idea" and "I'm too busy." So I
> know that the letter needs work! Maybe we could have a couple versions
> linked from http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_Gap
>

I like this idea; and I want to point to some possibly relevant research.
The paper "Socialization tactics in Wikipedia and their effects" by Robert
Kraut et. al.[1] [2] studies various efforts at welcoming newcomers.

In that research, the finding is that the most effective techniques are
those that reflect an engagement with the content that the user has added;
in other words, if your "welcome" message is a genuine response to what they
did (for example, "Thank you for adding information about so-and-so's
history with such-and-such; are you aware of these other similar articles
that need expansion?") More generic welcome messages were generally
ineffective at getting people to stick around.

It may be that a "call to action" message like you suggest is effective; I
guess that's not something this group specifically studied. But for anybody
taking this on, I'd suggest that you personalize each one a little, based on
the contributor's recent edits, or the info they've put on their user page!

-Pete


[1] PDF file:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/connect/cscw_10/docs/p107.pdf
[2] Abstract on web:
http://acawiki.org/Socialization_tactics_in_Wikipedia_and_their_effects
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/attachments/20110222/aef6516f/attachment.htm