[Wikimediaindia-l] Notices on Tamil Wikipedia

[Srikanth Lakshmanan]

Hello all,

Untill July, Site notice in Tamil Wikpedia used to give only prominent links
to Fonts / typing tutorial / Village pump. Occasionally when
meet-ups/workshops happen, we would announce them. We thought to put this
system into good use and we are already seeing positive results.

Starting July we introduced "Please correct errors, you too can edit". There
was a significant jump in anonymous edits in the weeks that followed. After
discussions, we planned to showcase faces of Tamil Wikipedia.

The idea was to put a notice featuring a picture, brief profile on editing
topics and suggesting one to start creating articles[1]. The short profile
showcased the diversity of editors across region / age / interests.Putting
faces of Tamil Wikipedians into sitenotice was not a big effort since we
already had profiles of people featured on main page. We just needed to
summarize them into a couple of lines. We have got atleast 10-15 new
contributors (> 50 edits and continuing) through this exercise. One editor
who came in after this drive is editing prolificly and already has 2000
edits now in ~ 2 months and is now being featured on the main page :) We had
more new users signing up as registered users. We roll over 4-5 banners over
a parser code during each campaign, so that people dont get the same banner
all the time.

Now we have separate notices for logged in / anonymous users. While
anonymous users get "Contribute" campaign with faces of tamil wiki with
Anonnotice[2], logged in users get messages about policies / help pages /
talk pages / DYK etc with help of Sitenotice[3]. DYK nominations has seem a
jump off late with 100+ entries coming in from contributors who didnt know
about it after the notice. We plan to introduce policies of Wikipedia slowly
through these notices, so editors who come in are aware of them. At present
we lack extensive help pages, and plan to expand them as part of this
exercise which will also improve help pages coverage in parallel.

There was a posting related to same on the list way back in Nov / Dec 2010
regarding Contribute Indic campaign[4] central notices by Salmaan, We find
these localized notices too work well and might be a good idea for other
Indic wiki's to try it out.

[1] http://defn.me/r/ta/2gav
[2] http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediawiki:Sitenotice
[3] http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediawiki:Anonnotice
[4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Contribute_Indic

-- 
Regards
Srikanth.L
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