Interactive Wikipedia Tutorials

This page concentrates rough ideas (as well as pointing to existing efforts) for taking an interactive and/or comics and/or gaming approach to delivering Wikipedia tutorial-level training.

Discussion should take place in the Discussion page; let's keep this page a clean record of consensus and concrete information.

The Vision

Sarah:
- "I have heard that Wikimedia has "games" (for lack of a better word) that people can play at outreach events. I'm just curious where information on these is at - the types of things I'm thinking of are editing games (no clue how this would work...but...), bug fix games (i.e. we can have fake broken bugs and have people fix those bugs and test them), or whatever."
- "For example, if I have a Wikipedia lounge or booth set up at a conference, I can have a series of cool "Wiki games" on a laptop for people to play around with. These could be simple things related to making simple edits (c/e, misspellings, a sexier fun version of Dabsolver), or people who are into MediaWiki and stuff like that - or could be. i.e. have a collection of "broken bugs" that people can "fix" in the game or have them break and then fix the bugs...or whatever (not live bugs, but...simulated)."

Asaf:

"I have dreamed about it -- in my mind I called it "Wikipedia Bootcamp", with the idea of a Khan-Academy-like carefully-paced progression of bite-sized learning units and accompanying drilling, on both pre-prepared sample material ("is the following paragraph NPOV?", "Among these five options, pick the most appropriate encyclopedic phrasing", etc.) and (in more advanced stages) on live Wikipedias (in careful collaboration with an interested WikiProject, for instance)."

Stephen:

"The language guessing game (https://www.gitorious.org/wikipedia-guesslang) and x-degrees of Wikipedia have been very popular at the Wikimedia booth at Maker Faire, but we are still looking for games that actually encourage contributions to a wiki."

Gayle:

I met Alex Peake of Code Hero who apparently had a conversation with one of our board members about using something similar to his really awesome game "Code Hero" around helping people learn to edit Wikipedia. I can follow-up. I'm very interested in this for onboarding new folks who come to work with us who weren't originally community members.

Oren:

I have a parallel idea which I wrote it up for the fellowship proposal: Wiki Coach I'd be glad for any comments on it's talk page.

However I think that the proactive nature of such a coach would be be enhanced by Gaming The System - creating a social game mode of operation for the coach. This would be branded as WikiTopia and it would have its own feed a sub page in each user's space. The user would be given missions to do with instructions on how to do them.

Social games require both completing solo goals (content creation) and social/collaborative tasks (community based) for success. In a Wikipedia context there are numerous tasks in both domains. Some examples

More individual:
- Improve 2 articles from C to B in 2 projects.
- Create [level]*2 new articles.
- Categorize 15 articles (Introducing hot cat)
- Add citations to a page with no/single citations.
- Wikify afc article with no links
- Grade an ungraded articles.
- Propose articles for creation
More Community:
- Send [level]* 3 wiki love to article collaborators.
- Grade an editor.
- Upgrade an ungraded article in a project XXX.
- Revert Vandalism
- Tag a document with various editorial problem tags.
- Request an Article For Creation.
- Adopt a deleted page in the incubator.

Different tasks can be graded graded and assigned as users complete prior goals. This would create a fast track for introducing users to some of the undermanned areas of the community. (Based on back-log in say AfC, AfR, EfR or To participate in project based ). There is a very broad range of activities that only core community members are involved with. While the game nature of the agent should maximize user engagement & motivation the coaching aspect would compensate the havoc these new users would create. The game could also challenge users who go up a level to work with and improve work of even newer editors.

Of course leader boards, merit badges and sharing bonuses would be used to further enhance participation.

Existing efforts

The Wikipedia Adventure (plan only)
Derrick Coetzee's class (link?)

Interested in working on this

List of people interested in contributing time and skills (any skills) to accomplish this, please sign below: