Program/Write an article for Wikipedia Birthday: how we organised Wikimarathon in Ukraine and how to try this at home
- Format
Poster
- Keywords
- community development
- community support
- content
- editing campaign
- edit-a-thon
- event
- offline campaign
- online campaign
- outreach
- participation
- Wikipedia
- Wikiflashmob
- Wikimarathon
- When and where
- Friday 20 July, 20:00 - 21:30
- Plenary hall
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- Presenter(s)
- Topic area
- Relationship to theme
Participation & representation
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Abstract
Since 2014, we are organising an event called Wikimarathon or Wikiflashmob which is based on a simple idea: we encourage as many people as possible to write an article to Wikipedia on the occasion of Wikipedia's anniversary. This idea was born in 2013 and actively promoted by Ihor Kostenko and we have already organised five editions since (from 2014 to 2018).
Our Wikimarathon is a mix of online and offline campaigns.
- Online, we encourage as many active Wikipedians as possible to write articles on that day. Our main goal is reaching is many users as possible. This includes people who didn't edit Wikipedia for a while - and we are glad that some of them come back indeed. This also includes people who usually don't write a lot of articles but do other things, like writing templates- and many of them add one more article on that day.
- Offline, we are organising outreach events to encourage newbies and people interested in Wikipedia to write their first article. This started with just 4 events in 2014 and expanded to over 50 events this year. We try to support as many local organisers as possible, and we receive more and more requests from very different groups: experienced local organisers, local Wikipedians who want to organise their first ever outreach event, or GLAM and education partners who want an event in their library, archive or school.
In the end we sent small souvenirs to all participants to motivate them to contribute further, and our Wikipedia gets on these days some 3-4 times more articles than usually and sets record high number of active users.
We think that it is an interesting experience (and an exciting challenge!) than can be reproduced in other communities and we intend to share our experience and lessons learned.
Outcomes
1) Participants will learn lessons from our experience than can help them in organising their own editing campaigns or edit-a-thons 2) Some participants who get inspired will learn how to organise something like this with their community (and may even reproduce it next year)
I can't add wikilinks on EasyChair and I don't know where to put the links let them be here:
- https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia_Ukraine/2017/Program_story (basis for this presentation);
- https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Вікіпедія:Вікімарафон_2018 (event page)
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