Grants:IdeaLab/Network experts with users seeking expert help

Inspire campaign

Network experts with users seeking expert help

Wikipedia:Expert help
It would be very useful to implement a streamlined system that connects users seeking / pages needing expert help with experts.

Several tools for this purpose exist already but need to be improved, integrated and made more efficient.

Furthermore improving the interface between those requesting expert help and experts allows for a better integration, engagement (usefulness) and even recruitment of experts.

idea creator• Fixuture

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created on20:29, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

While experts are already present on Wikipedia and external ones are open to participation no sufficiently efficient mechanisms for optimal engagement and integration exist.

What is your solution?

Examples of such improvements are listed under the bottom section of Wikipedia:Expert help and more relevant ideas could get brainstormed.
For instance there could be an UI where users can easily set their areas of interest, expertise and profession. This could be coupled with Category:Wikipedians by profession or with WikiProjects as outlined in my suggestion here (or both). Furthermore WikiProjects could get modified for better adoption of experts as well as receive tools for recruiting them.
Also Category:Articles needing expert attention could get used to network pages in need with identified experts of these areas.

It would be good to first improve the usefulness / efficiency of experts on Wikipedia before doing outreach campaigns.
It's of not much use to get experts on Wikipedia when all they do is creating a single page and then leave / won't engage much anymore. Instead it would be way more efficient to improve the experts' contributions to Wikipedia.
Where right now it us up to the experts to "find" the areas and pages on their own we should step up having the "work" (of which there is plenty here) find the experts so that they can be as useful as possible and can get started easily.

Project goals

Making experts more useful/efficient and making it easier to integrate and recruit them.

Get Involved

About the idea creator

~25.000 edits on English Wikipedia, some programming skills

Endorsements

• I think this idea would go very well on the Wikimedia Resource Center, when we develop the features to connect Wikimedians. María (WMF) (talk) 19:16, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

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No funding needed?

Does your idea not require funding, but you're not sure about what to do next? Not sure how to start a proposal on your local project that needs consensus? Contact Chris Schilling on-wiki at I JethroBT (WMF) (talk · contribs) or via e-mail at cschillingwikimedia.org for help!