CentralNotice/Request/2018 Wikivoyage month

2018 Wikivoyage month edit

Central Notice Settings

What is the campaign duration?
  • 1st February 2018 → 28th February 2018
Which projects will you be targeting?
  • WP, WV, Commons
What languages will you be targeting?
  • de, en, es, fr, he, hi, it, ru, pt, pt-br, uk, zh
Do you wish to show banners to Logged In users, Anonymous Users or Both? Do you want to target users with a specific number of edits or average monthly?
  • Both

What countries will your campaign target?

  • All

Banner/Campaign Diet:

  • Moderate visibility to avoid a too large influx of new editors

What is the purpose of Campaign? How will you measure the success of the campaign? edit

Description - promote the edit-a-thon dedicated to the 5th anniversary of the Wikivoyage launch as a WMF project

Metrics - number of new Wikivoyage editors, number of listings added to Wikivoyage, number of new articles at Wikivoyage

Why is Central Notice important for this project?

  1. Wikivoyage relies on first-hand travel information. The edit-a-thon is designed in such a way that readers are invited to make small contributions and tell about their recent travel experience. Reaching as many readers as possible is crucial for the success of the project. A simple notification in Wikipedia will not suffice, because only a smaller group of frequent Wikipedia editors will be involved. In contrast, the broad dissemination via the Central Notice ensures that resources of the community, including financial input of local chapters and individual volunteers, will be spent efficiently.
  2. Wikivoyage heavily uses new software features, such as page banners and dynamic maps (Kartographer), that are only scarcely used or even not yet available in other Wikimedia projects. The edit-a-thon guidelines explain the usage of these features, which will help to promote them among potential users.

What banner(s) will you use? What will be your landing page? edit

Banner text:

Local coordinators:

Discussion edit

Does there really need to be a CentralNotice for this? CentralNotices are quite disruptive, and we have them going pretty much non-stop. --Yair rand (talk) 06:05, 8 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yair rand, Wikivoyage seeks to collect first-hand travel information, so we want to reach, once in 5 years, a broader audience. The edit-a-thon is primarily designed for new users who can only be reached via the central notice. We do not ask for a high-priority banner like fund raising or steward elections, so it should not be disruptive. --Alexander (talk) 08:33, 8 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
All CentralNotices are disruptive. Having such a notice one in a while wouldn't be that bad, but there's pretty much a constant stream of notices advertising editathons and such. Spanish Wikipedia currently has one running for the "Antarctica month", English Wikipedia is about to get another banner for "Wiki loves Earth", everyone was dealing with "Wikipedia Asian Month" through November, and the only reason that we've had so few recently is because we also just had the fundraiser dumping banners everywhere, and now they're running the "thank you" banners at the same time as trying to get people to fill out surveys, go to the merchandise store, follow them on Twitter and Facebook (how on earth is that even allowed to be in a banner?) and subscribe to their newsletter. w:Banner blindness is presumably through the roof. Unless this one is more important than all the other full-audience campaigns that will take place January through April, it shouldn't go up. If it is more important than all the others, every other one needs to be opposed. --Yair rand (talk) 22:51, 8 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I would be happy to respond to queries related to this particular banner campaign, its motivation, implementation, and metrics. If you think that there are too many banner campaigns in general, this problem should be discussed elsewhere, perhaps as a site-wide RfC. --Alexander (talk) 23:05, 8 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, we already had one of those in 2011 on that very issue, with the result being that individual non-fundraising banners are subject to consensus. I was just bringing up the general state of banner overuse to try to explain why I think that banners shouldn't be used unless really necessary. As much as I'd like to have some more users editing Wikivoyage, I have to   Oppose using the CentralNotice for this. --Yair rand (talk) 23:34, 8 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yair rand, you say that the central notice is not necessary in this case. What other way would you propose for Wikivoyage to reach not only Wikipedia editors, but also the bulk of people who come to read Wikipedia? --Alexander (talk) 23:39, 8 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I must say, I find the reaction somewhat confirms the perception that some at WMF or some at some WMF projects see Wikivoyage as the "red headed step child". To my knowledge this is the first time in our five year existence as Wikivoyage as part of WMF that we ask for such a thing, yet the reaction is thus. It somewhat saddens me. Let's hope there are other voices, too.... Hobbitschuster (talk) 23:09, 9 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Hobbitschuster, I would say that anyone not involved in the organization of this edit-a-thon, including Wikivoyagers, should simply go ahead and express their support explicitly. After all, this is a central notice request for Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikivoyage. The oppose vote above does not represent most of these projects. --Alexander (talk) 23:20, 9 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Well that said, I   Support a central notice. Hobbitschuster (talk) 23:29, 9 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I know that is not a vote, but I want to say that I strongly   Support the request for a central notice. First of all is very useful to attract new potential users and also to let web-surfers know that wikivoyage exists. Yair rand perhaps too many request made you think to approve only essential centralNotice banner requests, but I think that promoting a wikimedia project on its 5th birthday (not every month, not every year, once in five years!) is very useful and correct even if, as you pointed, not necessary. --Lkcl it (talk) 19:26, 10 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Strong   Support for the central notice. As I've experienced in the past, many Wikipedia contributors and users have never heard about Wikivoyage - an official sister project. The central notice is the only to get some attention as a sister project. -- DerFussi 17:59, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Links to local discussions edit

Central Notice Admin comments edit

@Atsirlin: So I have no fundamental issues with this campaign in principle. Some points:

  • Campaign Scale: Given that we do not want to overwhelm the wikivoyage communities with new editors I agree with your suggestion to keep this at a lower level than usual campaigns. This will lower the impact to the target projects and reduce disruption. I'd suggest something along the lines of 10% - 20% of reader traffic, 2-3 impressions resetting every 6 days.
  • Notice to projects: Would you mind notifying all the target wiki's on their village pumps linking to this discussion?
  • Timing: You mentioned on my talk page a preference for 1.02-28.02 I'm not aware of any clash so these dates should be good, though campaigns can come about last minute but with the options mentioned above we should be good.
  • Local Coordinators: I'd like to commend you on having local coordinators for this campaign. It's vital for large footprint global campaigns like this.
  • Landing Pages: The English landing page looks excellent and I would highly suggest you use this as a template for the other languages.

Seddon (WMF) (talk) 06:36, 11 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Joseph, thanks for your feedback!
  • Campaign Scale: sounds good. I guess it should be possible to adjust the diet already in February if we see that too few or too many people are coming.
  • Notice to projects: we are working on that.
  • Landing pages: some regional specifics should be taken into account, and not all landing pages can follow the same template, but we will make sure that the way of presentation and the amount of information are the same.
--Alexander (talk) 08:09, 11 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Joseph, I think we are ready and would be grateful for creating/enabling the banners. --Alexander (talk) 08:10, 29 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]