Talk:Editor campaigns

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 However, it has also been buggy and fragile, and uses outdated architecture that has posed a significant challenge to maintaining and improving on its functionality.

Despite these helpful features, the extension's interfaces focus on classroom use cases, prevents its use in other contexts, such as edit-a-thons, contests, and workshops. 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 as part of a contest or campaign. Typically, the number of new editors invited, new signups, and retention of editors is either hard to track, very small, or primarily composed of hardcore Wikipedians. This is in large part due to a lack of tools that make it easy to invite newcomers, show them what needs doing, and help them keep in touch with others.

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. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   04:22, 13 February 2014 (UTC)