Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Notices on Tamil Wikipedia
Hi Bala, Srikanth Thanks for the report on the site notice experiment. Initially, we started tracking the new editors manually at http://tawp.in/r/2gk8 and within 6 days noted 14 new editors. This is quite unusual from a Tamil Wikipedia perspective. Meaningful edits from new contributors come only once in a while before this. We also tried a signup notice for anonymous users and it almost tripled daily signups. We have done numerous outreach meetups, PR initiatives and have come to a conclusion that this is the best way to get new editors with least effort. It is easier to sell Wikipedia's philosophy to people who already use and visit us. [Analogy: Selling fries to people buying burgers :) ] People are unaware that there is a community behind Wikipedia and this exercise perfectly highlights the human element. By showcasing editors from various backgrounds, new editors can feel at home comparing themselves to the existing editors. This also sends a message that the community and the contribution is valued very much and helps to motivate both existing and prospective contributors. Having this in the site notice will be a constant reminder and we have also seen people long inactive get back to editing. The regular meetups are useful in strengthening the existing community and for general lobbying / branding of Wikipedia amongst various networks like academia, press and the government. Regards, Ravi On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 7:34 PM, Naveen Francis navee...@gmail.com wrote: Bow to beautiful mind behind this. Can you we do the same thing in Social media (facebook page) ? Will it be helpful for Indic Languages ? http://www.facebook.com/WikimediaIndia Thanks, Naveen Francis On 12 September 2011 18:07, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.org wrote: On 12 September 2011 17:19, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com wrote: Gah! we haven't done a systematic recording as we werent prepared for it (we werent sure how this thing would turn out). If you would accept eyewitness/anecdotal impressions, the following happened: (Take with many pinches of salt and heavy skepticism) This is really interesting stuff. Thanks, Bala. Thank you. Best, Gautam ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Notices on Tamil Wikipedia
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@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 ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Notices on Tamil Wikipedia
Would love to see the data - particular sitenotices to spikes in contributions. Gah! we haven't done a systematic recording as we werent prepared for it (we werent sure how this thing would turn out). If you would accept eyewitness/anecdotal impressions, the following happened: (Take with many pinches of salt and heavy skepticism) 1) The first if you see an error, correct it anon notice sort of doubled anon edits. It is a small base number, so i dont think we can infer anything statistically from this - every day about 10-15 anon edits used to happen in Ta wiki (out of a total 600 manual non-bot edits). It increased to around 30-40 a day when this notice was up. 2) The this guy edits X, you can edit too campaign has increased the number of editors who have made 1 edit in the past 30 days from 200-210 to 250-260 3) The nominate your article for DYK has gained five new DYK contributors with nearly 50 new dyk nominations in three weeks. (Earlier it was a ghost town, with only two-three of us involved in DYK maintenance). 4) Again by my impression we are suddenly seeing new persistent contributors - not driveby's - people who stick around beyond the first experiments and who actually ask questions and try more and more new things. If i were to hazard a guess, we have gained about 5 new contributors in the past month alone who have done more than 100 edits. On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 5:05 PM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote: 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@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 ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Notices on Tamil Wikipedia
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:38 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.comwrote: 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. --cut-- Thanks for sharing. I am glad to see the effectiveness of Wikipedian Profile and other initiatives In Telugu we featured Wikipedians in the form of an e-interview in our newsletter/e-zine TeluguWIki, which helped only to a limited extent as the e-zine does not have regular periodicity as per design. Cheers Arjun ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Notices on Tamil Wikipedia
On 12 September 2011 17:19, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com wrote: Gah! we haven't done a systematic recording as we werent prepared for it (we werent sure how this thing would turn out). If you would accept eyewitness/anecdotal impressions, the following happened: (Take with many pinches of salt and heavy skepticism) This is really interesting stuff. Thanks, Bala. Thank you. Best, Gautam http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Notices on Tamil Wikipedia
Bow to beautiful mind behind this. Can you we do the same thing in Social media (facebook page) ? Will it be helpful for Indic Languages ? http://www.facebook.com/WikimediaIndia Thanks, Naveen Francis On 12 September 2011 18:07, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.org wrote: On 12 September 2011 17:19, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com wrote: Gah! we haven't done a systematic recording as we werent prepared for it (we werent sure how this thing would turn out). If you would accept eyewitness/anecdotal impressions, the following happened: (Take with many pinches of salt and heavy skepticism) This is really interesting stuff. Thanks, Bala. Thank you. Best, Gautam http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
