[Events] "Learning from our mistakes"

[Sumana Harihareswara]

Thanks for the reply, Lukas.  I appreciate the TODO list you gave!

I thought it might be useful to talk about a few things the Wikimedia
movement has done to try to be friendlier to new editors:

* We're working on the new "Visual Editor" -- if you create an account
on en.wikipedia.org and log in and turn it on in your preferences, you
can try the beta version right now.  That will make editing WAY easier
for new folks -- they won't have to learn wiki markup.  It's going to be
default on English Wikipedia by July 1 2013.  Until then, the wiki
markup cheatsheet might help:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cheatsheet

* The Editor Engagement team
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editor_engagement has launched
"Getting Started" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GettingStarted
. "We've unveiled an experimental interface, provided to
newly-registered Wikipedians immediately after they sign up. By
encouraging users who otherwise don't have an idea where to get started
to try simple editing tasks like fixing spelling and grammar, we hope to
grow the community."

* I don't know the specific timing on this, but I think
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article are better
than they were when I last looked for them.  They're suitable for
participants working on their own or in a group setting.

* The "New Pages Feed" on English Wikipedia has been changed to indicate
when the person creating an article is really new to Wikipedia, to make
it easier for other editors to correct them nicely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPagesFeed

* There are some best practices linked to from outreach.wikimedia.org
including some tips on running "edit-a-thons" and workshops.
https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Model_projects/Edit-a-thon_How-To
is reasonably good. https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bookshelf has
some other useful materials.

So if any of you have been thinking about leading a wiki editing
workshop, you could do one soon if you're willing to get participants to
turn on the Visual Editor in their preferences, and if people are just
going to do spelling/grammar improvements.  Or you could plan on holding
some in July or after!

Thanks,
Sumana Harihareswara



On 02/15/2013 12:24 PM, Lukas Blakk wrote:
> Interesting.  Reminded me of when I tried (rather unsuccessfully) to get a wikipedia editing workshop going. It didn't really spark the kind of participation I might have hoped for and I, too, was not aware of so many of the intricacies of Wikipedia culture on the back end.  I blogged about that experience here: http://lukasblakk.com/occupedia-women-contributing-to-wikipedia-the-first-of-many-such-events/
> 
> I've never found time since then to return to that idea, sadly, and went back to my comfort zone of teaching programming and web hacking.
> 
> -Lukas
> 
> On Feb 15, 2013, at 9:10 AM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 
>> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/14/wikipedia-education-program-sweden/
>>
>> "This is the reason to why I will dedicate this blogpost not to success,
>> but to failure, or mistakes, call it what you will. But this is what has
>> not really worked and what mistakes we have done here in Sweden."
>>
>> They've learned some lessons about how to do outreach workshops.  One of
>> them: expectation management.
>> -- 
>> Sumana Harihareswara
>> Engineering Community Manager
>> Wikimedia Foundation
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