Editor campaigns

This is a nascent Wikimedia Engineering project, kicking off in mid-February 2014.

Goal
Our goal is to test hypotheses about how to acquire and retain new users through campaigns, events, and groups on Wikipedia. Ideally our work will intersect with related projects by the Growth, Mobile, and Analytics teams. We will start by focusing on how to invite a group of potential editors to a Wikimedia project and then measure their progress as a cohort.

Project members

 * Andrew Russell Green, Software Engineer
 * Steven Walling, Product Manager
 * Sage Ross, from the Global Education Program and Grantmaking teams

Project background and rationale
Andrew and Sage have been working for some time on improvements to the Education Program extension. That extension exists to support classrooms that edit Wikipedia as part of the Wikipedia Education Program. Its core functionality allows instructors and students to enroll in courses, and it provides a window into the activity of students on the site. Today the extension is enabled on 10 Wikipedias and two other Wikimedia projects.

The extension contains infrastructure that is highly useful to the international Education Program, and has also been the proving ground for promising features like structured signup lists for groups of editors, activity feeds, and other group functionality. However, it has also been buggy and fragile, and uses outdated architecture that has posed a significant challenge to maintaining and improving on its functionality. This, plus its overly specific focus on education program use cases, prevents its use in wider contexts by others doing outreach campaigns.

Our conclusion is that while the Education Program extension does fulfill a necessary role in the Wikimedia ecosystem, it would require an almost total rewrite of its codebase just to support its current use cases in a maintainable way. So, we're embarking on an effort to replace the Education Program extension with a generalized set of tools and reduce our technical debt. Hopefully we will eventually be able to deprecate Extension:Education Program as largely redundant with a generalized toolset, though that day is far off.

Stakeholders and users
Key stakeholders in any replacement for the Education Program extension include:
 * Global Education Program staff and Wiki Education Foundation staff who want to monitor the program overall and monitor all courses
 * Current Wikipedia editors who want to monitor student edits
 * Students who want to complete their coursework and collaborate with classmates
 * Professors who want to manage their courses

Users for general editor campaigns functionality include:
 * All the above Education Program use cases
 * Current Wikipedia editors, staff from organizations in the Wikimedia movement, and grantees who want to run outreach campaigns and monitor their results
 * New users on Wikipedia or prospective new users, who want to join Wikipedia and participate in classes, contests, and other events.
 * Technical and product leads on related tools, especially the Mobile team which owns UploadWizard Campaigns, and Analytics which owns Wikimetrics.

If you feel like you are (or even potentially are) one of the types of people, we want to hear from you. Drop us a comment on the talk page or via email.

User experience
A campaign is an organized action to achieve a goal. An editor campaign is when one group of users invites others to participate in editing Wikipedia or another Wikimedia project. Unlike the (highly successful) media upload campaigns the Wikimedia community has run in the past, we have done typically done less well with inviting external participants to sign up and edit text content on a massive scale. Typically, number of new editors invited, new signups, and retention of editors is either hard to track or very small.