Submissions/KISS new editors

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2015 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this July.

Submission no.: 2028

Title of the submission: KISS new editors

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)

Presentation

Author of the submission

Rebecca Cotton, Southpark

E-mail address

mail@silura.co.uk, southpark@wikipedia.de

Username: Rebecca Cotton, Southpark

Country of origin: Germany

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

For most new editors to the Wikimedia projects we don't know where they come from. Organised recruiting of new contributors to the Wikipedia projects so far has almost always been costly and rarely scaled.Most often organised efforts focused on offline activities and face-to.face meetings They involved rooms, volunteers, people who care and as a first step had to bridge the offline-online gap. There has to be a way to keep recruiting simpler, involving less organisation, less volunteer time and a starting point that is already online. Maybe there is inspiration in the wider world outside the Wikimedia projects?

In 2015 Wikimedia is not the only organisation any more that cares for healthy online communities and tries to recruit new editors. So we checked out what the world out there does to recruit the masses. Crowdsourcing grows more common and more successful all over the world. Inspired by crowdsourcing efforts used in many contexts we want to do some easy, lean, light-budget testing on whether recruiting methods that work for other organisations may also work for Wikimedia projects.

In 2015 we will go where potential editors are: online. We will try to reach many people using little resources in a way as simple as obvious; we will post some targeted ads on Facebook, maybe Google and other smaller channels.

To evaluate these efforts and to do some A/B testing We will also have an on-wiki landing page with a small survey for the "arrivals" and all the necessary Links to get the people set up for becoming new authors in the Wikipedia and other Wikimedia-projects.

In this talk we present our results, and discuss our approaches.

Recruiting new editors is not only of interest for us and should work in this way across cultures and continents. If you are interested in pitching in, helping us to set up landing pages, contribute data to similar projects, or just donate to the project contact us!

Track

WikiCulture & Community

Length of session: 30 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

I will try, but it depends on getting a scholarship.

Interested attendees

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