Grants:IdeaLab/Meetup Page Creation Tool

Idealab

Meetup Page Creation Tool

Tool for creating meetup pages easily

idea creator• Another Believer

designer• Olivettilly

developer• Samaldis

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created on14:13, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

See User:Another Believer/Meetups and a previous version of this IdeaLab proposal at Grants:IdeaLab/Meetup Creation Tool (and its talk page).

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

I spend a significant amount of time categorizing meetup pages at English Wikipedia by year and geographic location. Category:Wikipedia meetups once contained far too many pages and provided no trend indicators (for example, the number of meetups per year or the number of meetups in Hyderabad, India). Curious about the historical number of meetups, I created Category:Wikipedia meetups by year, along with subcategories for 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012. Similarly, I created Category:Wikipedia meetups by country to separate meetup pages based on geographic location. Meetup pages were then sorted into nation subcategories. This is a manual and time-consuming process.

Also, creating a new meetup page is not a user-friendly process, especially for new contributors. Naming conventions and page structure are inconsistent.

What is your solution?

Provide a preload template at WP:Meetup that allows users to easily create meetup pages and automatically categorize them appropriately.

This template could include:

parameters for year, location (country, state, or city), campaign (e.g. Wiki Loves Libraries, Wiki Loves Monuments, Art+Feminism, Wiki Loves Pride, etc.)
sections for structuring the page to include all the important info to include
links to helpful resources or best practices for different kinds of events

The template would be accessed via a button on the page for a meetup type or campaign (e.g. WP:Meetup, WP:Wiki Loves Libraries, WP:Wiki Loves Pride), so that each version of the template can be customized with different preloaded text to fit the type of meetup.

Goals

make it easier to create meetup pages
make it easier to identify trends within the Wikimedia movement related to meetup and specific campaigns (i.e. Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves Libraries, etc.)

Design ideas

when people enter the date and location of the meetup, have categories automatically populated into the appropriate subcategories of en:Category:Wikipedia meetups by year and en:Category:Wikipedia meetups by country
- when applicable, also automatically categorize the meetup page by campaign (i.e. Wiki Loves Libraries)
have categories intended for cleanup/maintenance, i.e. "Category:Wikipedia meetups without year" and "Category:Wikipedia meetups without location" (or similar)
users fill in parameters to indicate the time and venue of the meetup, along with goals and other relevant information
people visiting a meetup page can click on a button which says, "Sign me up!", where they can add their signature
- perhaps there is a running list of names and a display of the current number of attendees and/or interested participants
ideally, this tool set will be easily translatable for use at multiple Wikimedia projects and multiple languages; perhaps start at Meta for translation purposes
if pages are to encourage best practices for reporting or follow a template, parameters might include # participants, # articles edited, # articles created, event photos, images donated, new users created, etc.

Get Involved

Participants

--Another Believer (talk) 14:18, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
--Pharos (talk) 19:19, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
Designer I can help build the template pages as well as create files from scratch including graphics and copy. Olivettilly (talk) 10:05, 10 June 2015 (UTC)
Developer Having moved around the world a lot I am yet to find a good and reliable (and organised or even used at all), at one point living with my wife in japan for 6 months unable to work or do anything due to not being able to work on a tourist visa, I became very depressed and in need of meeting up with other people who I could socialise with.

I think building upon the wikimedia's already existing framework could benefit a lot of people like me.

I've been a software engineer, web developer and pen-tester for around 18 years now and would be happy to contribute what ever free time I have to this. Samaldis (talk) 02:42, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Endorsements

Yes! Hooray. Not sure about the details, but definitely 'creating meetup pages easily and making them findable' is a great goal. -- phoebe | talk 14:32, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Happy to see this idea moving forward, making it easier to gather Wikimedians and track events! This AddMe gadget may be a useful building block when the time comes to consider tools too. Siko (WMF) (talk) 16:46, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
Another Believer was a huge force in organizing the overbearing collection of 31 meetups that collected on the Art+Feminism meetup page. We will continue to have this challenge when we run the multi-event format again in March. If there is anyone who understands the problem, it is Another Believer. We would love to use this for Art+Feminism meetups. Theredproject (talk) 00:53, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your endorsement and kind words, User:Theredproject. --Another Believer (talk) 04:21, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

This is a great idea. I have spent some time going over event pages to mine data from editathons, and I found that while some have documented results of these events in the meet up page, others don't at all; some people include some results, others have very detailed information (like Wikimedia España, that programs a bot that captures all users involved, edits made, articles created or improved and bytes added). This is not only helpful for people mining data, but most importantly, for those who have to report back on their activities. As someone who has been in that position as well, I can say documenting the results of the event in the same page is a huge help at the end of the month / quarter (and is not an obvious idea). I think you can add some basic fields under «relevant information of the event», like: participants, articles edited, articles created, photos of the event, images donated, new users created. Looking forward to your feedback! MCruz (WMF) (talk) 20:23, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

@MCruz: Thanks for your kind words. The degree to which people document results may always vary, but this work at least makes it easier for people to create meetup pages, offer valuable resources to hosts and attendees, recommend best practices, and categorize meetups by date and location. Before much of my manual work, the category "Wikipedia meetups" contains hundred and hundreds of pages. Even worse, after doing much digging at local levels, many meetup pages were completely uncategorized. I am proud that many newer meetup pages are categorized, either because people have become more familiar with the subcategories or because they are copying previous meetup pages and amending the subcategories appropriately. Either way, it is a good thing. I appreciate your suggestion re: additional parameters to add. -Another Believer (talk) 21:22, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

I've posted this as an idea for the Hackathon this year... maybe we can get some feedback about it at least from developers. I made sure to post this page as well as the one on your user page: [1] --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 17:51, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
I totally see how helpful this tool will be. Olivettilly (talk) 10:05, 10 June 2015 (UTC)
This will be use full for evry wikimedians. Shriheeran (talk) 09:35, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

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