[Wikimediaau-l] Chapter activity ideas

Tue Jul 29 10:00:49 UTC 2008

Hello!

Some nice ideas there

I do like the idea of video tutorials, editor challenges, and looking at
grants. Nick Jenkins also has a lot of good ideas too: usability, school
textbooks, australian fauna and flora project, tourism (we could just get
more photos of tourist spots. No POV there :) ), photo timemachine, etc.

One thing I'd like to shoot down in flames is the "Certificate of
Appreciation". I can see it backfiring badly -- After years of contributing,
you finally get acknowledged by an automatic offer for the chance to pay to
be sent a generic certificate saying "thank you for clocking up x number of
edits" that you can hang on the wall and having people ask "what the hell is
that?". I could see that actually making someone feel ... well... miserable.
And instead of feeling like they're contributing for the greater good,
they'll feel like they're contributing for meaningless bits of paper -- and
once you've got it, why continue?

Ok that's maybe overstating the point. But, yes, it would be good to give
contributors more feedback and more often. There's a good talk on applying
computer game principals (i.e. fun) to user interaction, that I think would
be relevant to this:
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3493.html (mp3 download or
flash audio)

Perhaps awards could be given by a panel who hunt out the top 3 or 10
contributors in various areas and topics. Yes, it'd be a lot more work, but
there would be some actual appreciating going on. I think an award like that
would be a lot more CV worthy too.

Anyway, lots of good ideas, and that's my 2 cents. :)

Peter Halasz
(User:Pengo)

On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 4:53 PM, Brianna Laugher
<brianna.laugher at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> So, thinking about this stuff kept me awake last night. All the little
> cogs in my brain were churning very busily! I hope by writing it down
> I can get some more restful sleep tonight. :)
>
> I hope everyone can see from my list below that there is huge scope
> for members to drive most of the items below.
>
> OK, so... Stuff we can do!
>
> * "Editors Challenges": hold regular competitions/contests for
> creating and improving Wikimedia content. These could be for
> Australia-related content, or just for Australian/member editors. They
> could be focused on a particular project. There could be themed ones
> like "Greatest improvement to an Australian town/suburb article" or
> "Best brand new article developed within 2 weeks". or "Best
> improvement to MediaWiki.org documentation" or whatever. lots of
> possibilities.
>
> * "Australian content portal": we should start a cross-project portal
> that highlights high-quality Australia-related content from all
> projects. (portal.wikimedia.org.au ?) Eventually I'd like to see this
> develop into a "Wikimedia Australia Live Content CD/DVD" or something
> similar. Lots of work in sorting and assessing and actually improving
> content. Esp. hook into Australian curricula too.
>
> * Blog! ( blog.wikimedia.org.au ) Not sure if this needs justifying,
> but it's a great way to communicate to members, potential members, the
> wider Wikimedia community and also the wider Australian community. I
> was thinking one thing that might be nice would be little "interviews"
> with longstanding Australian editors, about their Wiki*edia
> experience, favourite articles, disputes, memories,   that kind of
> thing.
>
> * "How to contribute to Wikimedia CD/DVD": For this I would look for
> specific funding. But it would be cool to create/collect and collate
> introductory "How to contribute" style manuals for each of the
> projects, screencasts, video, who knows... Maybe also
> audience-specific stuff, like for schools, local community history
> groups, businesses/orgs who want to know how they can interact with
> the article on their group.
>
> *? I thought of this last night, maybe encourage "Wikimedia Editors
> Clubs" in schools/universities? like enable local groups that are
> extremely light-weight on the admin side.
>
> *? "Certificate of Appreciation" scheme... so I thought of this last
> night too. Let's see what people think. Lots of people spend a lot of
> time contributing to Wikimedia, and you typically learn/utilise useful
> skills in doing so, but it's not something that sits easily on a CV
> (thinking of high school/uni students here). So, maybe we could
> develop a scheme where on request we perform some semi-automatic
> analysis of a user's contribs, and create a "Certificate of
> Appreciation" that mentions the generic skills typically gained, and
> highlights strengths of that user's contribs (eg attained admin, has
> FAs, dispute resolution). We could then email this nice summary to the
> user and they have some useful phrases to use in their CV about their
> Wikimedia involvement. Or, for an administration fee (discounted for
> members :)), we could print and laminate such a certificate and send
> it to the person, + a listing on the website.
> There are lots of caveats and details to work out (like, a block
> record probably disallows you from using this, and maybe there should
> be a edits/time threshold), but at its base I think it may be useful
> as a "bridge" of formal recognition between the Wikipedia world and
> the "real" world. I just remember when I was a uni student, I spent a
> *lot* of time editing Wikipedia and it kinda sucked that I couldn't
> really put that on my CV. :)
>
> *? Maybe offer more generic MediaWiki services to companies, groups
> etc? I think there is a certain amount of scope, not heaps, for us to
> promote MediaWiki and wikis as a generally useful tool rather than
> only for Wikimedia. I think that way because the first step to
> becoming comfortable contributing to Wikimedia is becoming comfortable
> with wikis as a general tool, and the second step is becoming
> comfortable with MediaWiki specifically.
>
> Organisational/administration stuff that's important:
> * (AGM)
> * Setting up the basic website, making it look less like the MW
> default would be nice...
> * Setting up the members DB and joining procedure, incl. payment handling
> * decide what we want WRT state branches
> * hopefully helping to institute more regular meetups. events
> calendar! (Germany has multiple meetups every month, or maybe even
> every week, which is pretty amazing)
> * start to explore funding/grants options more seriously
>
> feedback and other ideas welcome...
>
> Brianna
>
> --
> They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
> http://modernthings.org/
>
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>
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