ESEAP Conference 2018/Program/Community Outreach

Speaker(s)

Takashi Ota (Wikimedians in Kansai), Joseph Figueras Ballesteros, tbc

Length (min)

60

Audience / Target group

everyone, particularly Wikipedians/Wikimedians who would like plan and attract more people to come on their Wiki events

Session Format

Every speaker has 15 min presentation, followed by 5 min Q&A.

Description

Sharing talks on how to plan and attract people to come to your Wiki events.

1. Wikimedia in Kansai - How to help new local contributors to join and write articles: Inviting new contributors is always a difficult but important issue for Wikimedia. In this presentation, Takashi Ota will introduce “Wikipedia TOWN”, a one-day photo-walk and edit-a-thon combined event, which is getting popular in Japan. In a typical Wikipedia TOWN event, librarians plan the event in advance few months before (note that most librarians are not veteran Wikipedians), select article topic(s) to be created in the event, prepares WiFi network (if not always available) as well as materials like reduced prints of newspapers, invite veteran Wikipedians as a lecturer to teach rules and manners on Wikipedia such as not violating copyright law, advertise the event to potential participants. On the event-day, participants will walk to the sites of potential article, take photos, then come back to a library and edit new articles. This event movement is getting popular in the Japan’s library society past four years, and is expected getting more popularity over next years. This way of invitation is a key to invite not only computer nerds but someone who already have local knowledge in to the world of contributing Wikipedia.
2. Conducting a successful edit-a-thon: A presentation about the personal experiences of Jojit Ballesteros, veteran Wikimedian and Wikipedian, about conducting an edit-a-thon. It discusses the typical edit-a-thon and recommends the proper way to organize it. It also shows some of the challenges that an organizer might encounter when running the event as well as best practices on planning and executing an edit-at-thon. Jojit also lists down all of his past edit-a-thons, which he facilitated and provides list of other information about edit-a-thons.

Desired Outcome

Inspiration & more participants look for starting new events on their local community

Documentation

Conducting a successful edit-a-thon

Wikimedia in Kansai - How to help new local contributors to join and write articles