Edit Wikipedia Week
What is Edit Wikipedia week?
edit
This is a worldwide event scheduled to take place tentatively the week of December 3, 2007. It is hoped that this will become an annual event.
Everyone should be involved in helping to stage a bunch of "Edit Wikipedia Week" events during that week. The idea is to stage outreach events around the world designed to encourage people to participate in the projects.
The events can be practically anything – big or small. You can speak about the projects at a local school; get yourself booked for a television appearance; talk to a local photography club about contributing to Commons; organize a marathon weekend of translations; recruit new people to help you launch a WikiProject, or even just teach your dad how to edit. Anything that you think will improve the projects: the idea is to reach out to people who don’t edit, and encourage them to make a contribution.
Edit Wikipedia Week is intended to be an experiment. The premise is that anyone can organize an event for Edit Wikipedia Week, and it can take whatever form makes sense to them. Nobody needs permission: feel free to just participate.
There are no fixed rules, except the following:
- Spread the word as you see fit in your language community, local chapter, project, family etc.
- Make sure to record the ideas that are developed in your language community, local chapter, project, family etc. hereafter.
- Start your own language Edit Wikipedia page week as you see fit to promote and monitor the ideas.
Share your efforts
editHere is a section where you can share your efforts to spread the word about the Edit Wikipedia Week.
- English Wikipedia: Call from David Gerard on wikien-l Appeal to not bite the noobs, on Administrator's noticeboard
- Promotional posters (in english): designed by User:Mushii, from Spanish Wikipedia.
- High-res:
(here) | (Spanish version) | (Nederlands version)
- High-res:
Events scheduled
editHere is a section to record what kind of events/initatives you or people you know have taken for the Edit Wikipedia Week
- Reed College: An open Wikipedia workshop is being organized on campus using a computer lab to introduce new editors. Date to be decided still. Dmcdevit 06:31, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
- University of Maryland: Maryland's chapter of Alpha Phi Omega will use the CSS labs on December 5th from 6 - 8pm (would like to get dinner at 7pm, college students are guaranteed to come when food is involved) for an Edit Wikipedia session. Wikipedia, Wikiversity, Wikinews, and other projects will be presented. If you're especially familiar with a certain project, live in (or are traveling to) the area, and would like to help out, let me know on my talk page. I'll start an event planning page here: Edit Wikipedia Week/Maryland. Jussenadv 17:24, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
Ideas for events
editWhether you intend to hold an event or not, you can help others by adding some ideas for events here. More specific ideas are more likely to come to life...
- Editing tutorials (at school, college, work, or even home)
- You might not think it's possible in your home, but if you've wireless and you get people to bring their laptops...
- Talks about Wikipedia's work, how it works, challenges it faces, how people can help
- Workshops about finding, evaluating, and adding sources to articles
- Free culture debates (add motions for discussion here)
- Contact your local library and propose the staff a presentation of Wikipedia
- Contact your local university and propose a workshop for teachers
Alternative ways you can help
editIf you can't help at or organise an event you can still work on this experiment. Print out some posters, and hit your local coffeeshop with Internet access. Other candidates for posters are University noticeboards and restaurants in the areas surrounding faculties.
If you're not a student or member of a college's staff you may not be able to commandeer a computer lab and do an evening session. Perhaps you could aim to get a local cybercafe to let you put up some posters and you and a couple of wiki people could help people get the basics of editing in a session there. In such a case they'd pay for the Internet access - all you might need to do is go to CafePress and get a T-shirt so they know who to ask.
Why Wikipedia?
editThe event is focused on Wikipedia, because it's our biggest and best known project, and therefore most likely to generate interest among the media and general public. That doesn't mean we couldn't hold similar events for Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikisource, or any other WMF project. One idea on the implementation of this would be to set up edit.wikipedia.org, which would redirect to pages in the local Wikipedias. Each of those pages would also refer back to the ongoing fundraiser with a little info-box (something along the lines of "There are different ways to help Wikipedia...").
Sources
editTo prevent new editors being disappointed by having their edits reverted, an ideal place to have such an event would be a public library. When teaching people how to edit, show them how to source the info they add (after sandbox edits) before they save their first edits to a namespace page.