On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 8:53 AM, James Heilman <jmh...@gmail.com> wrote: > The fundraiser for money has been working exceedingly well with our > number of donors increasing 10 fold since 2008. What we need now is a > fundraiser for editors. I meet well educated professionals who use > Wikipedia but have no ideas that they can edit it. We need to run a > banner with the same energy we use to raise money to raise editor > numbers. This idea has been trialed to a limited extent here > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Invitation_to_edit but the > effort did not have sufficient data crunching behind it to determine > if it works.
James, thanks for this note! The problem, as I see it, is that we know that new editors, once they attempt to make their first edit, hit an enormous number of barriers. Even if they master mark-up (which is a big IF), they're likely to fail when their edits get reverted due to lack of proper citations or other issues. We built http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:FeedbackDashboard as a way to surface what frustrations new editors have. Ignoring the noise (people who shouldn't edit or who're trying to do harm), you'll get the same issues again and again: - basic editing is very hard - communication via talk pages is very confusing - copyright issues are complicated and unfamiliar - article rejections or reverts feel arbitrary and unfair - finding the right way to upload images is complicated It's now possible to help those users with a built-in response tool, and it's possible for new users to mark these responses as helpful or not. Over time, this may surface easy ways in which the community can ease the pain of new users. (FeedbackDashboard is on English and Dutch Wikipedia and on Incubator. We're happy to install it on more wikis, but it probably won't work well in smaller communities due to lack of scale.) There are certain types of new user recruitment which do _not_ hit as many issues. One is the high-touch recruitment at universities via assignment or other means. It requires a fair amount of effort per student, but provided that the preconditions are right, those students tend to turn out high-quality work. The biggest issues have been in India where the quality of edits was much lower than hoped for. See: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program and related links -- again, there's lots of opportunity here to help these students. A second area is multimedia campaigns. While finding the right way to upload is hard when you're a new user, if you point people directly at a customized UploadWizard at Commons, the success rate is pretty high. This has been demonstrated by community/chapter campaigns like "Wiki Loves Monuments 2011" (~180,000 photos) and "TamilWiki Media Contest (~5,500 photos so far), which have brought lots of new users into the fold. I'd love to hear other successes/failures. I'm skeptical about a sitenotice/banner-focused approach until we've addressed some of the _known_ issues that new users are likely to encounter. We could shortcut things a little by focusing a lot on mentoring tools, but IMO that would be more band-aid -- we need to address the fundamental issues. Here are some of the things we're doing: 1) Steven and Maryana in the Community Department have been running tests to see if different types of warning messages reduce people's early frustration and increase their retention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_user_warnings/Testing 2) The Feedback Dashboard itself has response mechanisms, including now a "Mark as Helpful" feature for new users to quickly acknowledge whether a given response has been useful to them. 3) The Visual Editor, once completed, will hopefully reduce a huge amount of the basic usability challenges people encounter. Projects like UploadWizard help with that, as well. 4) Tools like AFTv5 potentially offer a casual entry-way into the world of editing without the risk of reversion or other negative experiences. Some users may only ever submit comments/suggestions, but hopefully some of them will also "graduate" to editing given sufficient encouragement. 5) Next we're going to experiment specifically with the mechanisms used for patrolling and creating pages. See: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Page_Triage http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_creation_workflow This is a frequent pain point both for new and experienced editors and we hope we can take some of that away by working closely with the community in reforming processes and tools. 6) After that we'll have to think about challenges like messaging (talk pages are horribly broken), identity (user profile setup), and affiliation (joining and managing WikiProjects etc.). Lots to do :) -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
