Small Wikipedia Community Sustainability/ActionPlan

Want a bright future for your nation and its culture? Take it into your own hands — start contributing into Wikipedia in respective tongue and teaching others!

“	[T]he time has come when ... a language has become only a tool, another means of expressing reasoning patterns. ... A language that continues its development is usually being used in all areas of life. Excluding the language from use in some field of human activity, be it some specific scientific discipline or a type of artistic pursuit, an industrial or services sector of economy, i.e. from generating more reasoning patterns, is blowing an irreversible damage that promotes language death. ... It's very important to aspire towards such a state of things, when any news are expected to be expressed by that specific language means.	”
— Gaynulla F. Shaykhiev

“	There is a lot of work to be done: it is estimated that in order to cover all human knowledge, an encyclopaedia today should have over 100 million articles.	”
— Wikidata: the new Rosetta Stone

“	So what's the conclusion [from 1% rule]? Only that you shouldn't expect too much online. Certainly, to echo Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come. The trouble, as in real life, is finding the builders.	”
— Charles Arthur

To implement any of the tasks below, we need to attract more motivated volunteers, help them master the Wiki-Way & respective tools.

So priority goes to such tasks that increase:

• Readership of respective Wikipedias
• Intraproject activity
• Language Communicative Value

Attractiveness

• Visual
  • «Picture of the day»
  • «Multimedia of the day»
• Informational:
  • «On this day / This month»
  • «Universal infobox» — Modules and Templates to use Wikidata elements within existing infoboxes
• Values:
  • Clear understanding of linguistic & related cultural identity
  • materials about past, present and future
  • Neutral point of view
  • thematic, gender, ideology, cultural etc. kinds of diversity

Improving ease of discovery

• Search engine optimization (let's help Yandex and Google to tell others about content we have)
  • связность
    • Article creation and updating is clearly important, but without intraproject and interwiki-linking of existing pages (categories, articles, templates) they won't be found by neither human, nor a bot. This is also important for improving such SEO indicators as PageRank regarding results in respective languages.
  • Main housekeeping tasks
  • additional aspects (Russian)
  • Categorization - for navigation & related topic articles discovery
  • placement of navigation templates
• Increase content utility

1. Basic article stub with interwiki - an element of multilingual glossary
2. Longer stub with interwiki - an element of multilingual encyclopedic dictionary

Supporting participant and community development

• Promoting welcoming and collegial environment on and off wiki (expectation)
• Setting up intra-wiki reference system with links to RuWiki & Meta-Wiki reference materials
• Existing WLR Outreach newsletter – regular preparation & delivery + develop subscription possibility
• Organize regular Wikimeetups
• Support creation of Wikimedia user groups per each language edition of Wikipedia and their evolution into Wikimedia thematic organizations - discuss possible project roles
• Promoting active participation in Meta-Wiki activities and making it more multilingual
• Helping Wikipedia and its sister projects in the incubator
• Interface translation - not only for convenience, see Mandela quote above

Communicating existence & importance of respective Wikipedias

Cheetsheet

Let the community know

• Internal communications
  • Project newsletter
  • Wikimedia Russia in respective languages - PageTranslation
  • Wikimedia RU website in respective languages – PageTranslation? (Project in Russian)
  • Wikipedias in the languages of Russia in respective languages - PageTranslation?
  • Cheatsheet, Wikipedia & other leaflets and posters in respective languages – translation and regular distribution.
• External communications:
  • Language-specific social media – regular well planned posts (advice)
  • Russian Regional Mass-media in Russian (list) and respective languages (list) – regular well-prepared press releases (advice)

Engaging existing readers to participating in respective Wikipedias

• Systemic work on achieving, improving and effectively communicating engaging team spirit among existing participants of the project
• On-wiki recognition of constructive contribution, some examples
• Using CentralNotice system for engagement
• Promoting use of Wikipedia environment in Education
• Article writing competitions with prizes and recognition (list in Russian)

See also

• Small Wikipedia Community Sustainability/Tables