[Wikimediaindia-l] Notices on Tamil Wikipedia

[Bala Jeyaraman]

>>.Putting faces of Tamil Wikipedians into sitenotice was not a big effort
since we already had profiles of people featured on main page.

To elaborate on this, Tamil wikipedia has a separate section called
"Wikipedian profile" (loose translation) in the front page, updated every
two or three weeks. This project is the brainchild of Ravishankar and is one
of the major homegrown success stories in Ta wiki. It has been ongoing since
Oct 2009 and around 40 wikipedians have been featured so far. In the profile
we feature a few lines about the wikipedian - his background, interests and
his significant contributions etc (with photo if the wikipedian featured is
willing to supply one).

The past profiles are in this page : http://tawp.in/r/1eyn

These have come in handy while preparing the Sitenotices, which essentially
say "This guy is from X and contributes to Y topics. You can contribute on
your favorite topics too"

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:38 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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>
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