Learning patterns/Tracking user contributions by chapter

Learning Pattern Library

Tracking user contributions by chapter

problemDifficulties in tracking user contributions by chapter.

solutionWe need to make it easier for people to capture and share what they learn when they perform mission-aligned activities. There are multiple solutions : Adding categories by chapter, tracking individual users by username, surveying community members and ask them about their contributions.

creator• Haithams

created on10 October, 2013

What problem does this solve?

Membership based chapters often struggle to track the online contributions of their members. A number of methodologies have been tried with various level of success, and various level of efforts is required by chapters or members to track member contributions.

What is the solution?

There are multiple solutions : Chapters can ask members to tag their contributions with a chapter-related tag; chapters can track individual users by username, or; chapters can also survey community members directly and ask them to report on their contributions.

General considerations

• Address this concern while planning activities (don't think about it only after the fact!).
• Technical difficulties in using tools, or writing codes.
• Privacy issues : users might be concerned about their edits and may not want to be tracked.

Examples

• WM Antarctica has been leading a number of editathons for first time users, but they don't know whether their users continued contribution after the events. They can't say or know how effective their work was, and they don't know how improve it over time (or whether to abandon it if it was totally ineffective!).
• For a Wikidata outreach project with the performing arts community, an outreach dashboard was created to track the number of edits made by participants in the workshop series. This required collecting participants usernames during each workshop. This dashboard was useful for project evaluation and it was also a good motivator for the participants.

Endorsements

• Haithams
• Fjjulien (talk) 17:13, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
• IF DIDIERIIEIEIEOEO22OOE 5.109.206.58 00:38, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

See also

Related patterns

• Calculating global metrics
• Tracking an online campaign
• Git repository for software