Campaigns/WikiProjects
Researching WikiProjects or other online collaboration spaces!
As part of the 2024 work on Campaign Programs and Product at the Wikimedia Foundation, we completed a series of research questions related to WikiProjects. The research was designed to evaluate the direction of software features on the wikis facilitate collaboration between experienced Wikipedia editors, in the same way that Events and Campaigns help bring newcomers and outside experts to the wikis.
Scope: We used this research project to better understand WikiProjects or similar online collaboration spaces and why they work (or don't work) for some Wikimedia communities. Not all WikiProjects work (see the Existing documentation section) and not all wikis need a collaboration structure like a WikiProject (smaller wikis allow better collaboration since there are few collaborators), but for most of the larger wikis something like a WikiProject exists (there are at least 4000 individual WikiProject-like spaces on the wikis). We designed the research process to learn what makes them work, and how they help you create collaborations on-wiki!
Results
We completed two forms of research as part of the process, first we completed general call to action for documenting experiences with WikiProjects which can be found at this subpage. After a month of data collection, we analyzed the main themes from the responses and launched a survey designed to create more clear data about the themes. We distributed the survey English, French, Arabic, Spanish and Indonesian.
You can read the full report here: on Commons. The main highlights from the results include:
- 147 editors completed a survey about collaboration on the wikis. 54 reported English Wikipedia as their home wiki, the other 93 reported other wikis.
- Respondents tended to be very experienced (both by edit count and tenure), generally reporting participating in more than one wiki and placing high value on collaboration with other editors.
- English contributors reported more value from backlog drives than non-English contributors. Non-English contributors reported more value from off-wiki activities (workshops and editathons) and writing contests than non-English contributors.
- Most respondents said that they joined WikiProjects to work on content gaps and feel like part of a community. Respondents for other collaborations highlighted content gaps, but also put emphasis on a desire to collaborate with others and find community.
- Most respondents indicated a preference for either a permanent collaboration or a few days of collaboration.
- The most common challenges identified by respondents relate to finding participants, engaging newcomers and keeping participants engaged in collaborations. This is consistent with user stories for Campaign Products tools.
- Non-English respondents were more concerned with problems related to creating projects, identifying content, and measuring impact.
The Campaign product team will integrate this evidence into the work on the features of the CampaignEvents extension, in order to serve more kinds of collaboration.
Background and Definitions: What do we mean by WikiProject or other Collaborative editing initatives?
Not all wikis have WikiProjects, and the word “WikiProject” is applied to different kinds of efforts in the Wikimedia movement. Other concepts describing collaborative editing intiatives include topical neighborhoods, topical collaboration, task forces and sometimes simply “project”. We want to hear about all of these! If you are in doubt, complete this short form. But if it helps, here is a simple definition of scope:
We are hoping to learn more about:
- Persistent collaborations with no clear, predetermined end date (though collaboration might stop)
- With an on wiki home-page or portal that acts as a community space
- Intended to help participants collaborate better to do something in the Wikimedia community as a community with shared goals (i.e. creating content on a specific topic or managing a workflow, etc)
We are not looking for examples of :
- Activities with clear endings where participation is expected to stop (i.e. writing contests or events)
- GLAM or Education projects that have a tightly agreed upon scope with a partner institution or a collaborator.
- Formal organizations like Affiliates, student groups or other “clubs” or meetup groups
Learn about other documentation
| Open this collapse box to learn more about other documentation we have reviewed! |
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Most of the widely available and documented evidence of WikiProjects working really well come from case studies largely from English Wikipedia and a limited number of examples from other larger Wikis such as French Wikipedia, or Wikidata (i.e. Government Agencies or Brazilian Law). This evidence falls into three buckets:
We are also reviewing the documentation of WikiProjects in the following places:
We have also used this query of Wikidata to explore WikiProjects on different languages and this query to see how many exist per language Wikipedia, and you can explore each wiki with this query, used on Vietnamese Wikipedia). We acknowledge that in their current state most WikiProjects may appear dormant or non-functioning for some reason. Our hope is to identify what is working about the ones that people are most engaged in, to identify what kinds of systems help people collaborate. |