Wikimedia Product Development/Personæ

This is a place for the Product team to list personæ for Wikimedia users.

Editing

 * Eamon – An a dministrator editor, Eamon is mostly interested in preventing breakage to existing content and hunting down the people that break things. He wants a system that makes it easy and simple to see exactly what has changed and who changed it, so that he can intervene to undo bad edits, warn editors, and discuss edits with others.
 * Eileen – An I P (“anonymous”) editor, Eileen is aware that she can editor but not very experienced and how to edit, both technically and socially. She wants a system that can guide her into making edits, making suggestions about what is and is not OK and what she might want to do next.
 * Eliot – A l ong-form editor, Eliot makes most of contributions to the projects by way of long, complicated article creations, extensions and re-writes. He wants a powerful, comprehensive, easy-to-use editor that doesn’t get in his way as he flicks between sources and writing copy.
 * Enya – A n ew editor, Enya is just finding out how to edit and whether this is something she’s interested in doing. She wants a fast, familiar, easy-to-understand editor that makes it simple for her to find things to do and know what is right and wrong.
 * Eoan – An o ccasional editor, Eoan reads the projects a lot, editing only when he spots something obviously wrong. He wants a fast, familiar, easy-to-understand editor that helps him make quick small changes and then move on to reading without having to remember the arcane ways to make edits and what he is and is not meant to do.
 * Erin – A r eviewing editor, Erin makes small edits to content to improve it in little ways, like adding citations and flagging articles as suspect. She wants a system that lets her quickly and easily see what has changed recently and helps her do common ‘gnoming’ tasks.

Messaging

 * Norman the Nervous Newbie - Norman is knowledgeable about a topic, and he sees a mistake on an article page that he knows is incorrect. He’s not sure if it’s okay for him to change the page, so he wants to post a message on the article talk page, explaining the problem and recommending that it be fixed. He needs to feel confident posting his message -- and when an editor posts an encouraging reply, he needs to see the response.
 * Ellie the Early Editor - Ellie has just made the jump from reader to editor, and she’s made her first contributions to article pages. She’s made a good-faith new editor mistake, and another user leaves a message on her talk page to tell her about that mistake. Ellie has a clarifying question to ask, and she needs to know how to write back.
 * Donna the Debater - Donna is devoted to the truth; when she sees something on an article page that doesn’t look right, she wants to ask questions and check sources. At any given time, she’s involved in discussions on a dozen different talk pages. She needs to keep track of all of her conversations, but she doesn’t have time to waste skimming through long discussions to make sure that she’s up to date.
 * Oliver the Information Overlord - Oliver is a long-time power player on the wiki. He follows several high-volume talk pages, and he wants to keep up on everything that’s going on. He needs tools that help him sift through the noise, cutting through the boring noise so that he can zero in on the really interesting discussions.

Mobile Web
Third-party user Casual reader Power reader Casual editor Power editor
 * user who Googles to find a fact and reads Wikipedia information via Google Knowledge graph but does not seek Wikipedia out explicitly as a source of knowledge, may not even know what Wikipedia is
 * user who follows link to Wikipedia in Google to look up a fact not immediately found via Knowledge Graph (e.g. “episode summary Lost season 3 episode 2”) but does not seek Wikipedia out explicitly as a source of knowledge
 * user who follows links to Wikipedia shared via social media (e.g. Facebook or Twitter) but does not seek Wikipedia out explicitly as a source of knowledge
 * user who explicitly goes to Wikipedia (browser bookmark, iOS home screen bookmark, Android search settings, typing “Ebola outbreak wiki” into browser, etc.) as an authoritative source of knowledge
 * to look up a fact (e.g. “when was Barack Obama born?”)
 * to get an overview of a topic (e.g. “what does Standard deviation mean?”)
 * to kill time/read for fun (e.g. hitting Random or Nearby to find articles, following internal links & related articles)
 * user who creates an account (via the watchlist star to keep track of pages, the edit CTA, uploads, left nav) out of interest/wanting to be part of Wikipedia but lurks and does not contribute because she is not actively invited/doesn’t see an entrypoint
 * user who taps on last modified call to action to look at page histories and/or page issues to see when information may be missing or biased
 * user who uses the language selection feature to switch between different language projects, in order to compare articles written in different languages
 * new editor who signs up for an account in order to add/remove/modify information, fix a typo opportunistically
 * existing editor who mostly edits via desktop but occasionally contributes via mobile, too, incremental to desktop activity (e.g., on the bus with no access to laptop)
 * existing editor who switches back and forth between mobile site and desktop site on their mobile device to do more advanced editing
 * new editor who signs up for an account in order to add/remove/modify information, fix a typo opportunistically and gets hooked, makes many changes to one or more articles via phone/tablet
 * and migrates to desktop editing
 * and remains on mobile site
 * existing editor who began editing on desktop site but now primarily contributes via phone/tablet

Personas Evolving
Here is a link to a deck talking about Segmentation and Personae, and how we might move forward to evolve a set of personas from what we know currently. We will create a set of pragmatic personae as a group and then move forward to validate them with qualitative research. Once we do the research, we may decide to split up some of the Pragmatic personae or combine them, or create new ones from the learnings we gain from research. Also in this deck are links to further reading about Personae.