Submissions/Digital Outreach and Physical Outreach

From Wikimania 2012 • Washington, D.C., USA

This is a rejected submission for Wikimania 2012.

Submission no.

12

Title of the submission

Digital Outreach and Physical Outreach

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)

Presentation

Author of the submission

Srikanth L

E-mail address

srik.lak@gmail.com

Username

User:Logicwiki ta:User:Logicwiki

Country of origin

India

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)

Member, Wikimedia India Chapter, Tamil Wiki Community

Personal homepage or blog
Abstract (please use no less than 300 words to describe your proposal)

This presentation aims to share my experiences in doing Physical and Digital outreach.

I have been talking offline about Wikipedia for sometime now trying to reach out to more people.In Tamil Wikpedia Physical outreach sessions have been conducted since 2009(informal ones since 2007) by various community members across the world where-ever Tamil diaspora exist.Physical outreach include outreach through stalls at events,talks at larger meet ups / conferences,Introduction to Wikipedia at Wiki meetups, Workshop/Wiki Academies at colleges. Since mid 2011,Tamil Wikipedia is also running a Banner Campaign to get more readers into the community.Apart from banner campaign,digital outreach using facebook was observed to be a key factor in getting huge participation for the Media Contest.

Outreach mainly serves 2 purposes,

  • A)Telling people Wikipedia exists (in your language)
  • B)Please edit.

While Physical outreach does best to convey A to people who are outside online world and use internet only when they need it, it does attract little success in getting people to edit (or atleast from what I have seen). Below is analysis of various parameters useful to consider while doing outreach.

Sharing ways to do outreach:
Offline : Talks at events / conferences, stalls, wiki-meetups, workshop/academies at educational institutions.
Online : Sitenotice, Social media, Featured feeds, Mashups

Resources:
Offline : Logistics, Cost, Time
Online : Network, Geekish know-how, Time

Best practises:
Offline : Pitch, engaging talks, connecting with audience
Online : Eye ball catching, KISS,

Bottlenecks:
Offline : Metrics, Replication is tough, Outcomes
Online : Campaign management, Newbie mentoring.

Positives:
Offline : Personal touch, Networking, Publicity
Online : Replicable, Measurable, Scalable

Metrics:
Offline : Attendence, Signups and edits rarely happen :(, 2% conversion rate at maximum
Online : Pageviews, Signups, Edits.


Track (Wikis and the Public Sector; GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums); WikiCulture and Community; Research, Analysis, and Education; Technology and Infrastructure)
GLAM and Outreach.
Length of presentation/talk (if other then 25 minutes, specify how long)
25 Minutes
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Depends on Scholarship.

Slides or further information (optional)

Updated soon

Special request as to time of presentations (for example - can not present on Saturday)


Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with four tildes. (~~~~).

  1. Sodabottle
  2. Naveenpf
  3. Tinucherian 14:35, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Hisham 10:37, 23 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Nitika.t 10:56, 23 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  6. sounds interesting--Juandev (talk) 15:30, 26 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Haxpett (talk) 23:24, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Carolmooredc (talk) 20:10, 16 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Amir E. Aharoni (talk)
  10. Zellfaze (talk) 16:09, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  11. Beat Estermann (talk) 00:03, 20 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  12. I have done 10+ physical outreaches and the conversion rate is zero percentage ! On the other hand, we have tried some on site outreach measures within Tamil Wikipedia and found the results encouraging. This is an important observation as we can't affort over spend our resources on physical outreach alone. Looking forward for this presentation online as I won't be able to attend Wikimania 2012--Ravidreams (talk) 11:03, 20 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  13. --C.R.Selvakumar (talk) 19:33, 22 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  14. --Deepon (talk) 08:55, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  15. Add your username here.