[Wikimediaindia-l] Notices on Tamil Wikipedia

[Gautam John]

You know, this is pretty awesome. It's an idea I hadn't even thought
of till I read it here.

Would love to see the data - particular sitenotices to spikes in contributions.

Thank you.

Best,

Gautam
________
http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html




On 12 September 2011 16:38, 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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