Workflow of the Taghreedat-Wikipedia editor project

Within the scope of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Editor Growth and Contribution Program, the Taghreedat^[1]-Wikipedia Editors project was piloted on the Arabic Wikipedia over four months between 1st June and 30th September 2012. The key idea was to attract new editors from among the followers of Taghreedat’s Twitter account, provide them with the proper training via online means (e.g. mails, tweets) and guide them through the basic steps of editing Wikipedia by requesting them to perform simple tasks on Wikipedia.

This pilot project concluded in a full study report showing the following key learnings:

• Social media channels, such as Twitter, could be very powerful in attracting new enthusiastic editors to Wikipedia.
• Sending emails to new editors with specific tasks, along with tutorials from the contribution portal, prompted a high rate of them to edit Wikipedia pages.
• Coaching new editors on various Wikipedia editing techniques using a step-by-step approach resulted in converting a considerable portion of them into repeated editors.
• On the average, editors who signed up under this program edit more often than other new users. This might be an early indicator that a project like this could make a meaningful contribution to the community of active Wikipedians.

Total number of edits made by Taghreedat volunteers on Arabic Wikipedia, along with the daily average of edits in each stage of the program.

The figure on the right plots the total number of edits made by 745 users who registered in this program (around 695 of them did not have a Wikipedia account before), showing an increase from 629 edits made before the program started, to 3410 edits by the time the report was prepared. The major milestones which contributed to the increase in the number of edits can be noticed when users started registration, and when users responded to the tasks of creating their userpages, wikifying articles, and categorizing them. The figure also shows the average number of daily edits, remarkably increasing from 7.8 edits/day during the registration stage to 36.3 edits/day at later stages of the program. This demonstrates the effect of more users joining the program since it has started, and that they are doing more edits as they become more familiar with Wikipedia editing.

About 43% of these registered accounts didn’t make any edits during the pilot program. On the other hand, about 20% of the participants made more than 4 edits. Considering that each task requires about one edit, it appears that a considerable portion of the users made further contributions, beyond just performing the tasks given to them.

Comparison between emailed users and average users by their number of edits

In order to understand the significance of these results, we compared the participants in this program with the aggregate of all users on Arabic Wikipedia categorized by their number of edits. The figure on the right shows that while only 1.7% of all users made more than 10 edits, 6.3% of the participants in this program did. In contrast, while 89.8% of all registered accounts on Arabic Wikipedia have never made any contribution, only 42.6% of the participants in this program remained inactive after registering.

As the number of registered users in this program increases, it might become difficult to coach, communicate, and collect data using the manual methods which we are utilizing in the current pilot. We are aiming at building an automatic system that offers a step-by-step training for interested users, while monitoring their performance, and collecting feedback from them.

Notes

1. ↑ Taghreedat, a non-profit Arabic digital content community building initiative, has launched the Arabic Wikipedia Editors Program which targets regular Internet users and train them (both online & offline) to become editors on Arabic Wikipedia. Taghreedat’s Twitter account has currently more than 100K followers.

Haitham Shammaa, Contribution Research Manager

This post is available in 2 languages:

العربية  • English

In English

Snapshot of the Contribution Portal main page (Arabic)

Within the Wikimedia Foundation’s Editor Growth and Contribution Program, the first phase of a new contribution portal project was piloted on the Arabic Wikipedia over four weeks between 18th June and 17th July 2012. According to a preliminary analysis, it appears to have a positive effect on the ratio of new editors who make contributions to Wikipedia.

The key idea of this first phase was to create a page with a simple design in order to test the overall concept, while monitoring the ability of new users to perform various simple Wikipedia tasks relying merely on reading visualized tutorial pages. The portal was named Bawabatu Almusharakah (Arabic : بوابة المشاركة), which is literally translated as “Contribution Portal” or “The Participation Gateway”. It is meant to evoke a space which provides help as well as an being an entrance point for newcomers to Wikipedia, enabling them to contribute to its contents and share the knowledge they possess, while collaborating and communicating with existing Wikipedia community members.

Tutorial showing first steps in creating a new article, starting from the search box (Arabic).

The design of this phase of the contribution portal consisted simply of a main portal page leading to visual help tutorials. The main page of the portal starts with the question “What would you like to do in Wikipedia?”, followed by six buttons each listing a possible answer (create a new article, user page or redirect, fix a typo, add a reference, or post a user talk page message), and linking to a corresponding step-by-step tutorial page. For the first test of the concept, we tried to keep the page design as simple as possible to avoid any visual distraction. We also aimed to use as little text as possible in order to quickly guide visitors to their target page without requiring much time for reading. (more…)

Campus of Médéa University

As part of the Arabic Language Initiative, I had the chance to visit Algeria in the last week of April, where I had the privilege to speak to students at Médéa University (Médéa Province) about Wikipedia and invite them to contribute to it.

With a size of almost 2,400,000 square kilometers, Algeria is the largest country in Africa and the Arab World, and the tenth-largest country in the world. Algeria has about 4.1 million internet users (12% of the total population of 35 million), however they contribute only 0.08% of the total global edits on Wikimedia projects. While the official language of Algeria is Modern Standard Arabic, French as the ”de-facto” co-official language is still widely used in government, culture, media, and education due to the country’s colonial history. This fact can be clearly noticed in the readership numbers of Wikimedia projects in Algeria: While 52.2% of Wikimedia traffic from Algeria went to French language pages in the first quarter of 2012, Arabic language traffic shared only 30.7%. Having said this, the share of Arabic language traffic has almost doubled in the past three years, from only 17.0% back in mid 2009.

In particular, I could feel the passion for reading and adding content to Arabic language Wikimedia projects during my visit to Médéa University, where I delivered a lecture about contributing to Arabic Wikimedia projects, followed by an editing workshop over two days organized by Dr. Fareh Abdelhak. The introductory lecture laid out the current situation of Wikipedia contributions from Algeria, and a few thoughts on how Wikipedia works, and why is it important to contribute new content to Wikimedia projects. The lecture ended by giving the attendants (about 130, most of them students) a homework exercise: To think of one person they respect and one of their famous quotes, in addition to translating a topic from the English or French Wikipedia or writing an article based other sources that does not exist on the Arabic Wikipedia. Later on, I was informed that the students posted a report in Arabic about the lecture, and shared the homework on Facebook, so more interested people would be able to join the workshop on the next day.

Students attending the editing workshop at Médéa University

Although Friday was a day off at the university, about 30 students managed to come in the morning to attend the editing workshop. Unfortunately, since most of the university facilities were closed, we couldn’t use the PC rooms and provide every student with a PC. However, this situation did not preclude students from joining the workshop using their private portable PCs, where each group of 3 to 4 students had to share one PC with their colleagues.

The session started by registering a user account on the Arabic Wikiquote. Wikiquote was chosen as a start for two reasons, first to raise awareness about Wikipedia’s sister projects, and secondly in order to enable students adding content directly in their first edits without much interference from the larger Wikimedia community. Most students managed to register an account smoothly, and we started adding pages with the texts that most of the students had prepared as their homework. After students had learned the wiki basics on Wikiquote, we moved to the Arabic Wikipedia to start adding new articles there.

The workshop session resulted in creating 8 new articles on Wikipedia and 10 new pages on Wikiquote. At the end of the workshop, most of the students answered positively to a question on whether they will continue to add content to the Arabic Wikipedia. Indeed, in the evening I noticed that some of the students who attended the workshop went back to the Arabic Wikipedia and Wikiquote and continued improving their previously added articles, and also added new content. Later on, I received a message on my discussion page saying “When we meet next year, I will have already created a number of pages that exceeds yours!”… I really wish you will!

Haitham Shammaa, Editor Growth and Contribution Program consultant