Grants:IEG/Wikipedia meets Open Help

status: completed

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project:

Wikipedia meets Open Help

idea creator:

Sbouterse (WMF)

project contact:

sboutersewikimedia.org

participants:

Wikipedia Help page improvers, Answer-servers, and other user-friendly Open Helpers, signup here!

summary:

Let's send a team of Wikipedians to Open Help Conference to do a sprint improving WP's help pages and systems.

created on: 04:52, 10 April 2013‎

OUTCOMES

A team of 4 Wikimedians went to Open Help 2013! You can read about what we learned in our blog post and the Participation Support report.

Original project idea

Open Help Conference is June 15-19 in Cincinnati Ohio, USA. The conference has a strong focus on open, attendee-led discussions, and the other half is spent on presentations and demos. After the conference, multiple teams stick around for three days of sprints.

What if we sent a Wikipedia team? During the sprint days, we might decide to work on Wikipedia help pages, Teahouse improvements, or something else depending on the interests of the team.

Participants in need of funding to attend will apply to the Participation Support Program to cover travel costs.

Project goals

share how Wikipedia does open help with others working on open source projects
bring new inspiration and learning back to Wikipedia about what else is going on in open source help world
improve aspects of Wikipedia and MediaWiki's help systems in a 3-day team sprint

Work sprints

For the 3 sprint days, we're considering focusing on 2 key areas (note: subject to change based on inspiration at the conference itself):

Sprint area 1

Improvements to Wikipedia Help Project's volunteer engagement systems

guidelines for new volunteers
manual of style
templates to reuse
badges to acknowledge participation

Anticipated impact

By building stronger processes and systems for engaging volunteers on the Help Project, we hope to increase the number of people improving English Wikipedia's Help pages. This ultimately contributes to improving the new-editor experience, since many new editors rely on help documentation.

Sprint area 2

Improvements to Teahouse and MediaWiki Greeter's Program's participant engagement systems

Teahouse wishlist - page & process improvements to engage more people to build and test new Teahouse improvements
MediaWiki greeter’s program - framework improvements for this new Teahouse-inspired program to engage new MediaWiki contributors

Anticipated impact

By building stronger processes and systems for engaging new Teahouse builders, we hope to increase the number of volunteers involved in Teahouse upgrades. This will ensure that Teahouse stays strong and vibrant and can continue to help boost new editor's participation and retention on English Wikipedia for years to come.
By building out processes and systems for the MediaWiki greeter's program, we hope to increase the number of greeters who participate in the program, and facilitate a better experience for new MediaWiki greeters.