[Wikimedia-l] Quarterly reviews of high priority WMF initiatives

[Maryana Pinchuk]

On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 1:08 PM, ENWP Pine <deyntestiss at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Tilman,
>
> Thanks, it's great to see the momentum here in Mobile Contributions.
>
> Was there any discussion about how to convert the "selfies" uploaders and
> people who sign up for the watchlist
> feature into more active contributors? This seems like an opportunity to
> make progress on what I think should
> be the #1 WMF-wide priority right now, which making progress on the active
> contributor statistics.
>

Yes, those "selfies" are a very fascinating user group :) It's pretty early
in the game, but I think we can already make some statements about the
kinds of mobile web users we're seeing trying out our features: they're
very international, very new to the Wikimedia ecosystem, and very excited
to be a part of Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, they don't quite know how to
contribute yet, but this is a good problem to have! Far better than needing
to convince completely uninterested users to contribute or malicious
vandals/spammers to stop.

There are some elements of targeted education that we're planning on adding
to the UI to help: we've built a mobile friendly upload contributions view,
and we'll be adding on a lightweight mini tutorial for new users who have
never uploaded to Commons before (an early mockup
here<https://www.dropbox.com/sh/oqgwmlwlpdwhff3/FrXZvJJTMK#/>).
But the tiny mobile screen is just not conducive to long information-dense
tutorials like the desktop UploadWizard, so I think the most successful way
of "educating" new mobile web users is simply to guide them directly to the
kind of work that needs to get done, and to make it as painless and
rewarding as possible for them to do it.

That's why we created the one-step "lead image upload/add to article"
workflow for articles with no images, and why we're working on a Nearby
view that lets users see all the articles around them that could use an
image. This takes all the guesswork out of what kinds of images are
appropriate to upload, a problem that the "selfies" appear to be acutely
afflicted by :) It also provides a constant source of more stuff to do. I
think as long as we continue to build crystal-clear, new-user-friendly, and
intrinsically valuable workflows, we'll have a much easier time converting
some of these curious one-off users into productive contributors.

-- 
Maryana Pinchuk
Associate Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org