Project Eclipse : Project Proposal

Problem
Wikidata is a new project lead by the  German Chapter of Wikimedia, Wikimedia Deutschland. Wikimedia Deutschland performed the initial development in creating the Wikidata. Wikidata’s main objective is to provide a centralized access to the structured data and manage them. In order to do that Wikidata needs a large number of voluntary contributors. Wikidata has not yet gained a large recognition in the community which results to the lack of contributors. So the main problem which lies here is that Wikidata is not yet known and understood enough by the community.

Purpose
The purpose of this project is to make more people aware of wikidata and get more contributors. Moreover we should be able to motivate the current contributors to contribute more.

Scope
The outreach campaign should be reached throughout the world and throughout all the ages. In the current context social media campaign is the best solution for spread the word about wikidata. But we can’t stop only from there. We have to facilitate new contributors and encourage them to join and contribute by providing proper and complete guides.

The outreach campaign should be carried targeting two different type of contributors : coders, non coders. In the first phase the primary target should be University students. They are the ones who are more familiar with the open source community. With the programs like AISEC and IEEE the university students are networked throughout the world. So it will be easy to spread word about wikidata among them. Then we can start to target other coders using the social media.

Wikidata contributors so not necessarily need to be coders. So we should target the non coding community as a second step. For that social media campaign will be very effective. through social media we can make the others aware that the open source community is not only meant for coders. It can use other sort of contributions as well

Methodology
At the beginning i would like to have the project divided into two main categories

1. Improving Documentation

2. Social Media Campaign

These two aspects of the project have an equal impact because one will be useless without the other. Priority will be given to improving documentation because if the documentation is bad, newcomers will face difficulties in getting started. This may lead to demotivation and leaving Wikidata. To avoid that before the social media campaign documentation should be improved.

As a further enhancement for this project we can find a way to reward the active contributors who has done a worthwhile contribution. Further more we can have a feedback system to get feedback from the users about the user experience.

Improving Documentation
Documentation should be improved such that the new contributors can easily find a direction and start contributing. It should be easy for members to start contributing in another area which they are familiar with. But our prime target should be the newcomers. If we make the documentation suitable to be understood by a newcomer then it will be suitable for any user.

Considering new comers there are several use cases that we should handle :

''' 1. Someone to open source culture finding something that he/she can contribute

2. Someone who has registered wikipedia and want to know where to get started with contributing

3. Someone who just registered and know the choice of contribution but need a suggestion of something easy to start with

4.  Someone who has completed few edits and wants some more interesting things to work on.

''' We have to have a structured getting started guides with the guided tour extension which is discussed in the project chat page. Just using the guided tour only wouldn’t work. So in order to fulfill all user requirements we should have a set of good basic FAQ’s like what is wikidata? and that sort of very basic questions.

Having a proper post registration landing page at the email confirmation would be very useful for a user just registered. This landing page will have guided tours and getting started documentation covering every aspect of the contribution categories.

We have to increase the number of new users as well as increase the registered users contribution by giving them a direction. For this aspect rewarding contributors and getting their feedback  might be a good idea.

Social Media Campaign
Main target of the social media campaign is to spread awareness about Wikidata. This should be done through Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook Campaign
The current Facebook page of Wikidata (https://www.facebook.com/Wikidata) has only 1093 likes to this moment. First we have to increase the likes of the page to make awareness. Because we can count a one like as a one new person who came to know about Wikidata. To increase the likes we have to make the page more eye catching. Here is some ideas to make this page more interesting.

1. Have some interesting posts with photos/memes.
Regarding the current fb page we see that it is updated frequently but the posts are not very interesting and getting a very low count of likes. What I suggest is having posts with photos because they tend to catch the eye when you browse through your homepage. Example would be as follows:

2.  Having some videos or presentation posted in the page
Similar to photos videos are also tend to catch the eye when you browse through your home page. It will make this page more interesting. A video on what wikidata does and how we do it would be ideal as a start. A Sozi presentation will be also nice in this context.

These photos and videos should be sharable in the sense that when someone sees this he/she should think that i should share this item with my friends. This is the best marketing the wikidata can get. As we see current wikidata posts are not shared by anyone. If we have more interesting posts, non interesting posts will also get a good attention.

Another possible way to make more people aware of this would be get help from other wikimedia foundation pages. As we can see pages like Wikipedia (https://www.facebook.com/wikipedia)  have a large fan base of 1.4 m. So we can make a small introductory video or photo about wikidata and share that in those pages inviting to wikidata would be a large boost for the current status of the wikidata page.

I would suggest to start an open facebook group along with the wikidata page where people can have discussions and have their problems posted. Although this can be done in wikidata this page will be more focussed on providing getting started links to the newcomers and helping them to get a grip of wikidata. This should be a platform where contributors help other contributors. Although the mailing list has the same purpose, the Facebook group will help to guide the total newcomers to become contributors.

Twitter Campaign
Support the Twitter posts with URL’s to Facebook posts. These Twitter posts should be short and interesting. We can have Facebook to ask the people to follow up with our Twitter account.

Use Twitter as a question and answering platform where people can ask questions and have them answered immediately

Overall Campaign
Taking the overall campaign we can boost our fan base by having Wikidata editathons focusing interesting topics which are suitable for that time. For example for women’s day we can have a editathon regarding women. We can use the social media to spread the word about these editathons in an interesting way.

Rewarding Contributors
If we can have a rewarding system like we can thank the best contributor of the week by sharing his name on our social media pages people will tend to make more contributions and be active. But the selecting process should have a unbiased criteria. The contributions should be worth while. This is the hardest part to implement in this idea. Wikidata already has a thanking system. This should extend the thanking system and thank them in public as a better motivation.

According to the contributor’s active status we can post a badge in their user pages. For example if someone is active and doing a good worthwhile contribution for 100 days continuously we can have a badge to thank and motivate the contributor.

Taking Feedback from contributors
Having a feedback mechanism to get the users idea about the user experience in Wikidata  will be useful when making future improvements on Wikidata documents.