At risk of not quite answering the question:
To keep our editors properly, we should make the software sufficiently reasonable and flexibly to automate routine work people encounter...
I couldn't get started at Wiktionary or Wikibooks easily due to my lack of linguistic or librarian background, and lack of tools to make elementary edits within such project scope — tools anyone can edit, using a standardized flexible framework, unlike the existing 'gadgets' which are so easy to break and difficult to write in a way which is easy to maintain, and share so little code.
On Fri, 7 Mar 2014, at 19:35, Charles Andrès wrote:
TLDR:transform the thank you campaign after the fundraising in a "Thank you campaign: became an editor"
Following a really nice discussion of the swiss mailing list, I had a look in the statistics here: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm
First, as unfortunately expected I notice the decrease between january 2013 and 2014, but in the second time I've been surprised by the increase in january 2014 comparing to december 2013.
I first thought the large press coverage of the "decline of Wikipedia" had an effect to motivate new editors, but when looking to these charts http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/new_editors
I notice that every winter we have these increase of editors , most probably due to the fundraising campaign.
But unfortunately, like for Wiki Loves Monuments effect, this increase of new editors during a month is not enough to invert the tendency http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors
It has been discussed several time in the past, but I guess we should do it again, how can we turned the fundraising campaign in a massive outreach campaign?
I have two leads, the easy one and the complex one :-)
The easy one would be to add to the thank you message an invitation to join/meet/take information about users-group, thematic organisation or chapters. This move may help to improve the retention by a face to face approach.
The complex one would be to develop a system to invite people to contribute in specific article.
The main point would be to transform the thank you campaign in a "Thank you campaign: became an editor" The idea is to display a banner inviting the reader to edit wikipedia. the concept is the following: identify the categories of the page currently displayed select three articles in these categories with a template “expand” or similar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Empty_section http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Expand_section http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod%C3%A8le:Section_vide_ou_incompl%C3%A8te displayed a message like: You can also help Wikipedia by expanding an article, here are three articles that need your help, if you want to know how you can help, click on the topic you like : article from category one article from category two article from category three (or random category) after the reader click on the article, send him to the section to expand: in edit mode, with a banner explaining the basics of editing or with visual editor displaying a banner explaining this mode after publication of the article, a thank you banner, explaining how to register, with a link to the create an account page
I start a page on meta to see if this idea can be discuss/expand/improved/deployed https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CH/outreach_fundraising_campaign
Thanks for your comment or your help, you can also took my idea , change it totally and turn it in something doable! :-D
Charles
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