Strategic Planning

Proposal:Funneling multilingual readers and editors based on geographic and topical cues

Status (see valid statuses)

The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

This proposal is associated with the bolded strategic priorities below.


  1. Achieve continued growth in readership.
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation.
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation


Summary

A number of small and growing wikis suffer from obscurity and lack of reach even when a large number of potential readers/editors do visit bigger projects like the English Wikipedia. The idea is to channel them toward the smaller wikis and convert them into editors there, if they are interested.

Proposal

  1. During page visits to a large wiki project like the English Wikipedia or the Polish Wiktionary, run an IP-based geo query to see if the user comes from a typically multilingual country like India or Switzerland.
  2. Also, look at the category of the page. If it's something like "Meitei people", chances are the user is interested in the Manipuri Wikipedia, for example.
  3. If the above cues indicate so, surface a non-intrusive banner at the top of the page indicating that there is a Manipuri Wikipedia and ask if the user will like to be prompted for Manipuri article suggestions. If the user checks that option, remember the choice.
  4. Whenever the same user visits any article, query if Manipuri Wikipedia has an article on the topic with a rating of good or above. If yes, suggest the user to read/improve that article.

Motivation

In my personal experience, I have come across a number of native Tamil speakers who regularly read and contribute to the English Wikipedia, but are not aware that Tamil Wikipedia exists. In fact, during my first few months of editing the English Wikipedia, I too did not know that there was a Tamil Wikipedia. Also, we came to know (by casually looking at the page view stats) that readers/editors came to Tamil Wiki articles from the English Wikipedia main page "In the news" articles. I have also seen a number of Tamil speakers editing Tamil-related articles in the Deutsch and Espanol wikipedias as well as wiktionaries.

Key Questions

The basic premise outlined in the motivation section should probably be validated by studying the stats as well as by running experiments.

Potential Costs

References

Community Discussion

Want to work on this proposal?

  • Sundar (I will not be able to commit much time to the project at present, but can support if other interested editors take the lead.)

See also

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