Project summary:

Many people edit alone on the wikis, but many people also collaborate. Whether through edit-a-thons, campaigns, contests, backlog drives, or WikiProjects, people come together to work on topics and tasks that they care about.

However, it is often hard to see the impact of these collaborative activities. For this reason, the Connection team plans to create a new way to display collaborative contribution data on the wikis. This way, collaboration can be more engaging and rewarding, which we hypothesize can increase on-wiki collaboration and editor retention.

For more details, visit our project page.

User problems:

Organizers do not have a way of easily tracking contributions and then reporting on impact of their organized activity on the wikis. This means that it is harder to share the successes and challenges and learnings of their organized activities, and it is harder to motivate people to join their activities due to unclear understanding of the impact.

Participants do not have an easy, standardized way of tracking and sharing the impact of their work on the wikis. This makes collaborative events feel potentially less rewarding or motivating to participants.

Background:

One of the most important tasks related to organizing events on the wikis is tracking and reporting on impact. For events that focus on contributions, this means tracking contribution data, such as: the number of articles created, the number of articles edited, the total number of edits, the number of photos uploaded, etc.

Contribution data is important to many people. It is important to the event organizers and event stakeholders (such as grant officers, partner institutions, host venues), since it gives them an understanding of the impact of their events, their successes, and their gaps/challenges to address in the future. For the prospective participants, they can see impact reporting of past events, which can help motivate them to join future events. For event participants, it can help them feel like their work and time was valued, since they understand the impact of their individual contributions and the impact of the event overall.

However, there is no easy way to track contributions that are in the scope of an activity on the wikis. There are many external tools to track contributions, and different wikis & campaigns use different tools. However, many of these solutions pose challenges, including: they are off the wikis, they do not work well for tracking the contributions of experienced editors, and/or they can be hard to use.

This has made us wonder: Is there a simple, first stab that we can take at tracking contributions in organized activities? This first stab would focus on making it easy for organizers to know which contributions are within the scope of an organized activity.

Project requirements:

For the MVP, we would like to develop a simple, light-weight method for indicating which contributions are in the scope of an organized activity. It will work in the following way:

• T400719: We create a database structure to store edit-to-event associations. In other words, an edit can be associated with an event - and only one event.
• T402353: In the UI, we determine which events qualify for collaborative contributions. For these events, organizers can choose to enable collaborative contributions. This is so that we can reduce spam and the potential for abuse by only allowing it for some events.
• T400953: Registered participants can indicate if an edit is a part of the event after they publish an edit.
• T400722 & T402211: We create a new Contributions tab to display this data.

Out of scope:

This is meant to be a simple first MVP of the solution, so many things will be out of scope. The out of scope work that may happen in the future is documented in T400951.