2019:Community Growth/Old helping new helping old: cross-wiki collaboration

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This submission was presented as a lightning talk.

Community Growth/Old helping new helping old: cross-wiki collaboration

Description

We often attempt to classify wikis into three "stages of life":

A young wiki, which needs content and finds its hardest challenge getting new content from users (safely, easily),
A middle-aged wiki, whose greatest challenge is keeping readers and editors up to date with rapidly changing content, and
An elderly wiki, which already has all the most valuable content and finds its hardest challenges to be maintaining its quality and getting its content securely to users.

There are different technical tools for these three ages of wikis, and different schemes for growth, which I expect will be covered in other sessions in this space. Communities tend naturally to aggregate around a specific "age"; for example, recent changes patrol and the Kiwix offline reader both have "elderly" communities.

What I would like to discuss in this session is "cross-generational" interactions between wiki ages, focusing on ways that wikis or content areas at different stages of growth might help each other. For example:

A single wiki might have content in all three ages: Medical information on English wikipedia is "elderly", while articles about low-bandwidth regions of the world (and diverse topics) is "young". Breaking news or Olympic results create "middle aged" content. What are ways in which processes and tools intended to help one "age" can help or impair other "ages"?
A "young" low-article-count wiki in a local or minority language can co-existing with an "elderly" majority or trade language wiki. How can we leverage the content from the young wiki to fill diversity gaps in the elderly wiki, while allowing the content from the elderly wiki to seed articles in the young wiki?

Tools such as Content Translation have made some initial steps toward addressing this latter question. I hope to personally contribute further ideas about tools which can help bridge cross-wiki divides, and spark conversation about the social and community issues involved in such work.

Relationship to the theme

The organisers of the community growth space believe that the space will address the following Sustainable Development Goals:

9 Industry, innovation and infrastructure
10 Reduced inequalities
11 Sustainable cities and communities
16 Peace, justice and strong institutions
17 Partnerships for the goals.

This session will address the conference theme — Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals — in the following manner:

Protecting and assisting "elderly" wikis is part of SDG #11, "Sustainable cities and communities", as expressed by the target: "Strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage".

Assisting "young" wikis is part of SDG #9/10, "Innovation" and "Reduced Inequalities".

But the focus of this session is SDG #17, "Partnerships for the goals." The aim is to figure out ways to facilitate young/old, North/South, SDG#9/SDG#11 collaborations in growing our wikis.

Relationship to the space

The organisers of the space and the community have identified a number of topics they wish to address in this space. Please explain how your proposal its into these topic areas.

As a reminder, the proposed topics are listed at 2019:Community Growth

This session will address the topics of the Growth space in the following manner:

This session will include both discussion of the topic "Newcomer experiences across projects and cultures" as well as "Retention of old users" (as suggested by Juandev) -- and importantly how not to pit these goals against each other but allow them to co-exist. From my personal experience I can contribute on the topic "technology work" -- discussion of specific tools that could be built to facilitate cross-wiki interaction -- but I hope the session discussion is broader and includes community strategies and campaigns as well.

Session outcomes

At the end of the session, the following will have been achieved:

I hope we will create a shortlist of initiatives to advance "intergenerational" collaboration on our wikis, and specific individuals or communities committed to undertaking these and reporting back. I hope to publicize the shortlist created in order to increase awareness of intergenerational collaboration in our projects.

Session leader(s)

C. Scott Ananian

Session type

Each Space at Wikimania 2019 will have specific format requests. The program design prioritises submissions which are future-oriented and directly engage the audience. The format of this submission is a:

Workshop to identify and try to solve problem
Roundtable discussion forum
Panel discussion

Requirements

The session will work best with these conditions:

Room:

A small classroom, or seating around a large table would probably work well.

Audience:

Around ten people. It would be helpful to have a range of experiences with wikis of different sizes and ages.

Recording:

As a participatory session, a single fixed-location camera might have trouble capturing all the participants. But there are certainly some room layouts where this could work.

Time requested:

30-45 minutes.

Relationship with the organisers of the space

The organisers of the community growth space wish to provide any necessary support to presenters and participants that they may need and also wish to have an active role in shaping the content of the space to maximise the benefit of all attendees. Please let us know if you would appreciate any help, and if you consent to constructive suggestions from the organiser team that would allow the largest amount of people to share and benefit from each other's contributions.

I would be interested in receiving help in shaping my submission: YES
- In particular, I would need the following type of help or advice:

If this is done as a panel discussion I would be interested in help finding appropriate panel members.

I consent to the organisers of the space contacting me to discuss alternative ways to present my knowledge (for example, merging two proposals into a common presentation, a panel debate instead of a lightning talk, etc.), or ways to modify and improve my proposal (for example by ensuring a gender diversity on panels) : YES
If my proposal is not selected for a presentation, I would be interested in presenting my proposal in the form of a poster in the Community Growth space: YES
I consent to my proposal being proposed to organisers of other spaces if it would be a good cross-over topic or if it fits better into the other space's scope: YES