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What makes a good editing campaign?
There are new campaigns all the time, e.g. Wikipedia:The 50,000 Destubbing Challenge recently, or small ones within small WikiProjects or groups of editors, and surely there are better and worster ways of running them.
Technical tools to measure/track the campaign's effects. wp:DAILYDISAMBIG documents progress from about a million bad links down to just a couple thousand in 2019.
How onerous is participation. Is the campaign requiring or calling for more effort in administrative matters than is worthwhile? Is the campaign itself obscuring/obfuscating/undermining actual good editing?
Visual representation helps. See wp:NRHPPROGRESS, an example where maps show progress.
Reference/guidance support to participants. Associated FAQ-type references.
Maybe kindness matters? Consider wp:KINDNESSCAMPAIGN
Right degree of recognition of editors?
- Some campaigns seem to have been all about recognition, only, deserved or not / false praise.
Wikipedia:Kindness Campaign/The essential role of recognition in volunteer communities
- Some campaigns have awards. People can do crazy stuff for tiny rewards; what motivates them cannot be the tiny rewards.
Some campaigns are small. E.g. just at one WikiProject, with a relatively small active membership, where the members announce at the project page itself or some subpage (which everyone "watchlists") what they've done.
Some campaigns have effect of rewarding bad behaviors, rather than the behaviors purportedly promoted. Can block out or destroy other campaigns.
What about negativity, bullying, other bad acting that can come in. Just ignore the spoilers, or overwhelm them with love? How differentiate vs. sincere/productive/helpful criticism?
Many/most campaigns have a naive positive spin in their inception, which can be an attractive quality. Avoiding coverage of negatives can be deliberate and intelligent; who wants to join a party that is full of downers, not fun.
Social functions of campaigns.
Some delay, reflection, due consideration before launch? Once launched, cognitive dissonance too great to respond to basic criticisms?
Technologies:
- WikiProjects are important; most WikiProjects are fundamentally an organized editing campaign. WikiProjects that are dead-ends. Heading off dead-ends. WikiProjects that work well.
- Simple worklist-based campaign of a few editors, who watchlist the work page. Use
strike-throughor
Done to check off items completed.
Invitations/initial marketing. Think about funnel model. IIDSSM, wp:HSITES launch.
Newsletters/continuing support.
Sunsetting. Explicit provision for sunset. Unfortunate persistence of some campaigns. Wonderful persistence of some.
Some great campaigns (subjective):
- What wp:MILHIS does.
- What biology/species coverage campaign does.
- wp:DAILYDISAMBIG
- What is the big regular campaign about weight-measured writing contributions, number of GA, FA achievements, etc.
Some campaigns that could have been better, and how (subjective):
- Unfortunate destruction of a bunch of small campaigns: what happened when WikiProject United States took over / killed numerous state-level campaigns.