Hi Rob - off the top of my head I don't have suggestions for promotion of events in smaller US cities, however I would say that the Wikimedia Public Policy Initiative has had great success working on Wikipedia outreach on campuses around the US (at an experimental level - outreach.wikimedia.org).
I would have to disagree that there was a lack of publicity. In fact I'd say we've never seen more international coverage of Wikipedia and the anniversary, particularly in the US. see http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage for some examples
And many of those media hits did direct listener/readers to ten.wikipedia.org, and we had more local level media requests to know 'what was happening here' etc
I'm also pretty sure that the very, very visible site notices around the world and specifically the US for logged in users went to tens of thousands of Wikipedians in the US alone.
I don't think this is an issue of lack of media interest or impact. I think it has more to do with the basic challenges of organizing events and volunteers - two things I've been doing for a number of years, and I can attest to the challenges.
I would point to Canada as being in a similar example of organizational challenges. Wikipedia use is probably about the highest per capita on earth in canada, and we have a pretty large community of editors, but very few events took place. I expect there are similar challenges there, and as a Canadian I'm personally very keen to understand the barriers and to figure out how to work past those.
I do share your concerns and interests though - hopefully there are other suggestions here to bring forward.
jay
On Jan 18, 2011, at 5:58 PM, Rob Schnautz wrote:
Hi,
All this talk about hugely successful events in places like India and Italy has got me wondering, since I haven't seen many successful events in the U.S. mentioned-- only in a few very large metro cities (San Francisco, MIT, and NYC). It seems to me that the other wikis must have had some advantage here; not sure what it was.
I, for one, got so used to clicking the X button in the pledge drive banner hundreds of times per day that I stopped reading the banner. The same happened when the post-pledge-drive banner was up. Following that, there was a new banner, but it took me a few days to realize this was a new banner. This new banner was my first clue any events were even going on, and it was too late by that point to really organize anything.
There were no more than 40 states which attempted to hold events. These amassed to around 50 events, but most of them (from what I could tell) were merely callouts to see if anyone was interested in doing something, usually with no more than five respondents if even that many. The only ones that appeared successful at all were very large metro cities. Taking these facts into consideration, most American Wikipedians would have needed to travel several hours to get to an event that was most likely no more than a small group get-together, and much further to get to an actual large celebration.
A quick check on the National Public Radio (NPR) website returns zero stories about Wikipedia festivities, other than brief mentions that Wikipedia was turning 10-- no parties or conferences were mentioned at all. This radio station is devoted to providing full up-to-date coverage of news on national and global issues, and I find it surprising reporters didn't even mention the kite-flying parties in India.
Considering Wikipedia is one of the most heavily-used sites in America, I'd say that we've got some problems here with publicity, event organization, and possibly even spirit.
Anyone have suggestions on how to improve future events in America, particularly in small metros? (Obviously having events planned more than two weeks before the event would be one improvement!)
Thanks! Rob "Bob the Wikipedian" Schnautz
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