Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2013/Documentation/teahouse

Session: Tim Moritz Hector // The Teahouse - why and how we internationalize it

Abstract

The Teahouse project was started by fellows and employees of the Wikimedia Foundation. It provides a suitable, usable and friendly space to Wikipedia newcomers to ask questions and receive ideas about what to do and how to do it in Wikipedia. It especially addresses diverse target groups such as the elderly, people with little technical experience and women. So far, the project is implemented on the English Wikipedia, but it is planned to adapt it for the German language version as well. The session will focus on how the Teahouse can help to fill the gap between online- and offline-support and why it works particularly well for women in order to increase diversity. It will also highlight the challenges of internationalisation and discuss community-based problems in implementing it in different Wikimedia-projects.

Starting point / Insights

Teahouse on German Wikipedia

impact on enwiki

• 29% of teahouse guests are women
• Guests edit 3x more articles
• 41 participants per week
• 1098 edits per week

Challenges

• Community atmosphere
• Rules, know-it-alls, unfriendly, unwelcoming
• Technical challenges
• Wiki markup, templates internet
• Missing good support structure
• Communication between newbies and experienced users

Ideas

• Support online
• Friendly, relaxed atmosphere for newbies
• Answer all questions
• Connected to otehr newbie programs
• Technically easy to handle (no wiki markup)
• Learned a lot from teahouse initiative in enwiki
  • Keep project pages active, updated often
  • Answer questions immediately
• Show human sides of wikipedia
• Make it easy to join the community
• Technical aspects:
  • Ask question field
  • Self introductions
  • Searchable FAQ and archive
  • Tasklist with ideas for next contributions
  • Short overview about fundamental principles
• Bots used to keep things lively - invites, keep teahouse page lively

Questions / Next steps recommendations

Documenting on meta wiki so teahouse can be implemented in other languages

• Personal support
• Best practices
• Provide downloads and templates to use

Wot sure teahouse on dewiki will be quite the same as enwiki

Make sustainable:

make it a team initiative, not dependent on an individual user tests and scientific advice

Questions: It seems one of biggest contribution of german initiative is the downloads. For the bots, develop them in a way that they can be used in other projects? Aware of the problem, difficult but hope they can be copied.

a/b tests?

yes will do