2019:Community Growth

Community Growth

Leaders

Verena Lindner (WMDE)

Marshall Miller (WMF)

Bence Damokos

Christine Domgörgen (WMDE)

Jonathan Morgan (WMF)

Benoît Evellin (WMF)

Sailesh Patnaik

People in our movement have been working hard to make Wikimedia communities sustainable by recruiting and retaining newcomers to the projects. Wikimedians have been running local events, evolving our software, and working to improve the processes and culture on our wikis – but we still have a long way to go. In this space, we will come together for discussions, presentations, and workshops that address these questions:

• What is and is not working around attracting and retaining newcomers?
• How should Wikimedia activities evolve to help communities grow and flourish?
• How should our technology and culture evolve to help new populations to come online, participate and become community members?

We want voices from as many parts of the movement as possible to discuss experiences from their projects, findings from research, and results from affiliates’ and project leaders' work. We want to translate that learning into ideas and best practices that Wikimedians can bring back to their communities.

This space is related to five United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, with their icons shown on this page. To read more about the goals, see this page.

The questions of how to find new contributors and how to keep them involved in the Wikimedia projects have been challenging our movement for over ten years, starting with a steep decline in active editors in 2007.^[1] During this time, different communities have tried many approaches to growing contributors, some of which have succeeded and some of which have not. These approaches include both offline programming, such as edit-a-thons; online programming, such as the French Wikipedia Forum des nouveaux; and technology changes, such as the Guided Tour extension.

When we talk about newcomers, there are a few important terms:

• Recruitment: identifying people who are interested in contributing for the first time.
• Activation: the moment when someone makes their very first contribution.
• Retention: when contributors stick around and continue to contribute over time.

Over the years, we have collectively learned a great deal about newcomers and their needs, and developed programming and technology to address them. Here is a selection of relevant information:

• Wikimedia Foundation New Editor Experiences research project
• Wikimedia Foundation Growth team
• Wikimedia Deutschland activities around recruiting and retaining new editors (in German)
• CivilServant's Wikimedia studies (Gratitude prompts and Retaining newcomers)
• French Wikipedia "Help and Welcome project"
• Wikimedia Hungary Editor retention program
• The English Wikipedia Teahouse project

We are looking for proposals that fit into one of the categories below.

• Recruitment, activation and retention: online and offline strategies, case studies, considerations, and research.
• Technology work: software tools for engaging and educating newcomers.
• On-wiki engagement: techniques for mentorship, teaching, and keeping newcomers involved from on the wikis.
• Off-wiki engagement: programs, events, and communication for training and keeping newcomers involved in the off-wiki world.
• Newcomer experiences across projects and cultures: research and experience reports around what it's like to be a newcomer and interact with newcomers in different wikis and languages.
• Supporting diversity: how to evolve our contributor communities to better reflect the diversity of our global readership.
• Learning from outside our movement: research and lessons on newcomers from other types of online and offline communities outside the Wikimedia movement.
• The future of newcomers and editing: how will our beliefs about newcomers and our technology around editing need to change in the future as more new people come online and get involved?

1. ↑ https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfaker/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/halfaker13rise-preprint.pdf

Friday 16 August

[edit | edit source]

Building	Juristernas hus
Room	Montalcini
13:00	Introductory Panel: Challenges and approaches to Community Growth
13:30	What we know about newcomers and how to nurture them Marshall Miller, Benoît Evellin, Martin Urbanec
14:30	Break
15:00	Building organizations for growth: Wikidata in India, Wikimedia Armenia, Wiki Women for Women Wellbeing, and Wikimedia Sweden
16:30	Events? Competitions? Engagement? CentralNotice is your friend David Strine, Joseph Seddon
17:00

Building	Juristernas hus
Room	Montalcini
Space	GROWTH
9:30	Campaigning for growth: WikiFundi, Women in Red and Caucasian collaboration Florence Devouard, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, Mehman Ibragimov and Oleg Abarnikov
11:00	Break
11:30	Onboarding and Retention: Hungarian and French Wikipedias Trizek, Samat
12:00	Encouraging the spirit of new editors - A structured approach to mapping onboarding efforts Christine Domgörgen, Verena Lindner
14:00	Technology for Growth: future of mobile editing Olga Vasileva, Alex Hollender, Jess Klein, Ed Sanders, Peter Pelberg
15:00	Technology for growth: tools and experiments from Scribe and CivilServant Lucie-Aimée Kaffee, Hady Elsahar, Nathan Matias, Julia Kamin, Max Klein
15:30	Break
16:00	Lightning talks: growth ideas to take home
17:30	Please join the Poster session in the Allhuset.

Questions? Comments? Write them here!

I wonder weather we dont forget for old users and their retention, in the run for newbies. Also old users creates the community and they could have same approch as newbies. If we will not be taking care of old users, who will take care of newbies in the future? Juandev (talk) 20:36, 28 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Juandev, thank you for your question and sorry for the late reply. This is definitely an important aspect of Community Growth and we would welcome sessions about this topic as well. --Christine Domgörgen (WMDE) (talk) 07:14, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. I just discovered this project, and wondered if I'm in the right place?

I am trying to find volunteer contributors who would be interesting in improving an existing Wikipedia page with a C-class quality rating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWG_plc

If here's not the right place, does anyone have any recommendations for where I could seek help? 212.161.91.6 13:58, 12 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi User:212.161.91.6 -- this is the wiki about Wikimania, the Wikimedia movement's annual conference. If you're interested in working on that article, you are welcome to start editing it yourself by clicking its edit button. If you're looking for collaborators, one place to ask is at WikiProject Corporations, which is a group of editors who like to edit about corporations. Let me know if you need any more help! -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 02:40, 13 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]