Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia Outreach
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The Outreach Project has the goal of encouraging and helping the smaller wikis to fulfil their potential. Prompted by Jimmy Wales's speech about smaller language Wikipedias at Wikimania 2010, this project aims to reach out and provide a viable communication and expansion effort, forming a mutually beneficial bond between smaller wikis and the English Wikipedia community. The Wikimedia Education Program is currently the main venue for organizing such outreach.
Smaller language Wikipedias[edit]
Smaller language Wikipedias are Wikipedias with 1,000–100,000 articles. The definition excludes wikis such as the Simple English Wikipedia, that are specialised projects rather than individual language versions. The most general goal of this outreach is to encourage the expansion of smaller language Wikipedias through advice, encouragement, and general assistance.
Activity of the outreach[edit]
The general ideas of the outreach would be as follows:
- To provide advice to smaller language wikis regarding content, referencing etc.
- To provide ideas on how to attract more editors to that specific wiki.
- To organize contests etc as an incentive to edit the wiki.
- To simply provide support and encouragement.
This advice etc. would be given to (a) willing editor(s) on the smaller Wikipedias who speak English, who could in turn then relay the information to non-English-speaking users of the site in some form, perhaps a newsletter to other users on said smaller wiki.
Participating[edit]
The first step of this outreach (after creating specific goals) would be to gather enough en-wiki users together to adopt one wiki. If a large amount of editors wish to take part in this outreach, then perhaps dividing editors into groups for specific smaller language Wikipedias would be a possibility. The specific number of editors needed to adopt one wiki, or the number in a group, would most likely depend on the size of the smaller Wikipedia and the number of English-speaking contacts on those wikis. A list of smaller language Wikipedias is currently in the process. One does not need to be bilingual to participate in the outreach, as we will be primarily communicating with English-speakers on the smaller language Wikipedia. We also need help not only with the advice and communication bits, but with help sorting out bugs and technical issues on these smaller language wikis, possibly organizing writing contests, and with strategic planning as to how to attract active editors who speak the language of the smaller wiki to the site to edit it.
Wikis to contact[edit]
- Chuvash
- Gaelic
- Malayalam
- Kurdish
- Asturian
- Those are the five smallest of the 10,000+ articles wikis with over 60 active users.
Contact[edit]
An IRC channel where this outreach can be discussed is ##wikioutreach connect on Freenode. Alternately, you may contact IShadowed here.