Editor campaigns

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

Background and goals
Our goal is to test hypotheses about how to acquire new users through inviting users to join a campaign, event, or group on Wikipedia. We view this work as fitting within the framework of new editor acquisition and activation by the Growth team in 2013-14, i.e. how we get potential new editors to sign up and make their first edits to Wikipedia. This also intersects with related projects by Mobile, Analytics, and other teams, as well as future work on structured profiles and Affiliations (i.e. an interest graph and WikiProject support).

Project members

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

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 a particular topic on Wikipedia or another Wikimedia project. People already run many types of editor campaigns on Wikipedia, though not all of them target new users per se. Examples include edit-a-thons, writing contests, editing workshops, college courses through the Global Education Program, and WikiProject collaborations such as backlog drives, collaboration of the month or week, etc.. (There are also extremely successful media campaigns such as Wiki Loves Monuments, though we are considering these as out of scope for this project.)

All the examples above involve a few basic elements, such as choosing a list of things to do, creating a place for people to join and these find things to do, inviting people, providing them instructions and help, and reporting on the progress of the group. Most of these campaign types are also conducted within a limited time period, though they may happen on a recurring basis as well.