Wikipedia:Geo-targeted Editors Participation

Geo-targeted Editors Participation is a pilot project within the scope of Editor Growth and Contribution Program aimed at experimenting with new ways to increase participation of editors on English Wikipedia from underrepresented geographies where the most likely contribution language for editors is English.

Background

This project is based on a few assumptions concerning the targeted geographies:

1. People in the targeted geographies are educated mostly in English, but their native tongue is not English
2. There is a high readership to English Wikipedia from the targeted geographic compared to other language versions.
3. Editors from the targeted geographies are underrepresented on English Wikipedia
4. Some countries have high readership on English Wikpedia but are underrepresented as editors.

In this pilot project, we have picked the Philippines, where an active editing community already exists, and where a reader survey has shown that being pointed at things to do would drive more people to edit.

If this pilot succeeds, we shall iterate and deploy this contribution campaign elsewhere.

Goals

• Develop viable strategies for getting more active editors from a Global South Anglophone culture, beginning with an initial pilot aimed at editors in the Philippines

Hypothesis

• Providing people with geo-culturally specific calls to action and activities to contribute to, along with explicit reference to a resource like the Teahouse, will encourage them to make more edits

Research

Readers

• 93,200 page views/hour from the Philippines (0.819% of total EnWp visitors)

Editors

• Active (5+) editors on ENWP from the Philippines: ~400 live graph
• Very active (100+/month) on ENWP from the Philippines: ~48 live graph

Survey

We ran a survey targeting the Philippines in the period between 9th and 16th January 2012. 1382 responses were received. The full results can be found here.

Key findings:

• 81% of readers know that they can edit Wikipedia.
• 86% rate their English proficiency to be more than "good."
• Only 36% of readers had actually attempted to edit Wikipedia.
• Main reasons for not editing given include:
  • Didn't know what to edit (38%)
  • Editing interface difficulties (26%)
  • Not interested in editing (22%)
• Main requests for support from editors or potential editors include (multiple selection was enabled):
  • Having specific easy tasks to do on Wikipedia (63%)
  • Having friendly coaching from expert users (48%)
  • Having easier help pages (42%)

Framework

We divide the user workflow into these three parts:

1. Invitation
2. Landing pages
3. Online Support

Invitation

Inviting new editors from the targeted regions will be done using Geonotice, targeted for Philippines IP addresses. The message and design of the invitation is to be customized for the Philippines to make the invitation most appealing for the target audience.

Two different banners will be run:

1. Targeting readers: banner invites them to create an account or to log in using their existing account to learn about contributing. (those who would do so would then see the banner below.)
2. Targeting logged-in users: banner guides interested users to a customized landing page where they can learn more about editing and get support customized to their region.

Landing page

Similar to the invitations, landing pages are also designed and customized to fit the target country.

The purpose of the landing page is to enable newcomers to participate in Wikipedia as smoothly and quickly as possible. Landing pages should therefore link to easy-to-understand editing tutorials, easy things to do for beginners, easy ways to get help and/or ask questions (i.e. brief explanation of and link to the teahouse).

Contents of the landing page can be updated manually or automatically by specialized Bots in order to reflect the most updated contents, in particular in “things to do...” section.

Suggestions for the landing page

• Things to do
  • Stubs to expand, by theme/topic
  • Contribute a free photo
  • Copy-edit
• Socialize
  • Create your user page (userbox)
• Ways to get help
  • w:WP:Teahouse

Online support

During the pilot project, we would like to engage existing community volunteers from the target geography to assist new editors.

Tasks include:

• Participate in developing geo-targeted portal (design that speaks to PH)
• Hosting in the Teahouse
• Monitor the talk page for questions about the project (minor)

Mockup Design

• 
  Ask to create a user page
• 
  Create a user page
• 
  Add a userbox to a user page
• 
  Help & Start editing

Metrics

We plan to ask users to register their usernames for the purpose of collecting metrics. Once the usernames are registered, we plan to follow on number of edits and number of newly articles of the registered users during the pilots.

Timeline

The proposed timeline for planning, designing, and executing the pilot program is as follows:

proposed timeline.

Outcomes and learnings

From January to March 2013 WMF staff planned and executed an experiment aimed at attracting new contributors from the Philippines. Geo-targeted banners invited readers in the Philippines to a portal that encouraged them to edit Wikipedia article stubs on Philippines-related topics. This report summarizes our methodology and analyzes the outcomes and learnings from this experiment.

This experiment ultimately did not result in increased contribution to articles by new editors. However, we do believe there are learnings from this experiment that could be useful for future experiments to build on. Read more details in the full experiment report.