Research:Wikipedia Primary School SSAJRP programme/Wikipedia

Wikipedia Primary School SSAJRP programme Timelines & progress

English Wikipedia edit

The main page for the project at en.wp is en:Wikipedia:WikiProject South Africa/Wikipedia Primary School. It shortly describes the research project and invites to contribution in 3 different areas:

  1. creating articles;
  2. reviewing/improving articles before a version is sent to experts for their review;
  3. improving articles after the experts'review has been published on the related talk page.

Editors are also welcome to browse the current full list of articles in search of inspiration about the next article they want to work on :) As outlined below, the articles are suggested in batches (each of them lives in a page which is then transcluded where needed).

The process was launched officially on English Wikipedia in November 2014, with the creation of the main project page and of the related ones. Program pages there are regularly updated with calls to action.

  • The first request was about article creation, and invitations to engage were posted on broad, general talk pages, like the ones for South Africa project/portal or for articles creation. One of the two articles was created after our appeal.
  • In December 2014 instead the first batch of articles for review went out. Notices were published on each article's talk page.
  • In February 2015 the first reviews by experts were uploaded to Commons; the community was notified through the relevant articles' talk page. Soon, users who edited those articles in the past may be individually notified in their talk pages.
  • At the end of February 2015 a second call for community reviews was published. This time, in addition to each article's talk page, 38 wikiprojects closely related to the article's topic were notified. Two mailing lists received the invitation to join the project's efforts. User:ThurnerRupert commented that simple.wikipedia should be involved in the WPS project.
  • In mid March yet another call for community reviews was published. Due to the (hopefully temporary) unavailability of a key tool for the study of an article's history, xtools-articleinfo, a planned approach to reach directly major contributors to an article was discarded. As usual, wikiprojects' talks were notified (1, 2), and some commenters on one article's talk page were pinged (1).
  • In April, OTRS tickets were granted and 3 new reviews were published on the related articles'talk pages.
  • More reviews were published in early May.

Community engagement approaches edit

  • In addition to the notice in the articles' talk pages, very active editors/commenters of those articles could get a "ping" on those very same pages.
  • Consider involving mailing lists (Wikimediaza, African Wikimedians) re: improving articles as soon as experts' reviews are available. Maybe a monthly/bimonthly update with a list of things editors can work on?
  • It may be time to plan further engagement on the English Wikipedia as well, if we consider the project as thriving at this point.
  • Consider engagement at simple.wikipedia and Afrikaans Wikipedia. (All the other South African languages were considered as well, but their Wikipedias are just too small to expect meaningful engagement from a message there, regardless of whether one uses the Village Pump or a sitenotice.)
  • Evaluate engagement via social media.

Related articles edit

Credits edit

  • Erica Litrenta led the program part related to the English Wikipedia, mainly communicating new calls for articles or reviews, until October 2015.
  • Florence Devouard is leading the program part related to the English Wikipedia, mainly communicating new calls for articles or reviews, from October 2015 on.