Use eye-catchers to attract attention

Recommendation

Attract visitors to your booth by using eye-catchers.

Eye-catchers are a good way to attract event attendees to your Wikipedia booth. And the more visitors you attract, the more likely Wikipedia's/Wikimedia's attendance at the event will be a success. Nothing is as frustrating as people passing by and not paying attention to you and the other Wikipedians at your booth.

The recent changes feed projection is an eye-catcher that proved to be very effective in the past. The idea behind is that it's human nature that movement attracts attention. This is especially true for booths at events. There's a JS version at Wikistream; the following instructions explain how to show full RC information.

For setting up a recent changes feed projection you'll need the following:

Requirements:

1. a computer with internet access and an IRC client installed on it
2. a projector and a projection screen

This is how you set it up:

1. Start your IRC client.
2. Connect to irc.wikimedia.org
3. Type "/join #<name of the channel>" for the changelog you want to display, e.g. "/join #en.wikipedia", "/join #de.wikipedia" etc.
4. Enlarge the window.

Advanced option (multiple channels in the same window; side-effect: demonstrates the diversity of Wikimedia's projects and languages):

1. Install the Irssi IRC client on your computer. Irssi is able to display multiple channels in the same window.
2. Connect to irc.wikimedia.org
3. Type "/join -window #<name of the channel>" for the changelogs you want to display, e.g. type "/ join -window #en.wikipedia" and then "/ join -window #de.wikipedia" to merge the English and the German Wikipedia's recent changes into a single feed. A list of the biggest Wikipedias can be obtained from https://www.wikipedia.org.
4. Enable Irssi's full-screen mode (probably F11). Right-click to also hide the menu-bar.

Listen to Wikipedia example (2 min)

Other eye-catchers include:

• LiveRC (recent changes, but with many colours; only one wiki in a single window);
• Commons images loop (experimental tool by Magnus Manske);
• main page, articles on the city or the event where you are or "vip guests" (useful if there's no internet connection);
• Wikipedia vision;
• Wikipulse (edit speed on some Wikimedia projects) and Wikimedia projects edit counter;
• webcam on passer-by with an engaging caption (example);
• Erik Zachte's animated version of his main page gallery - 111MB download for offline presentations
• WLM images stream
• Wikirandom random page from random project and random language, with auto update option.
• Show me the way, from our friends of OpenStreetMap: a feed of updates on the globe
• Listen to Wikipedia
• Map of edits to Wikipedia, like Wikipedia vision above
• Play feature of the Wikidata vizualisation at Life of artists

OpenStreetMap:

• Open https://demo.f4map.com/ , select your position, enable the snow!

Other:

• Referata list of other visualization tools
• 15 data viz projects

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1. helpfull, but need more eye-catchers substitutesMahitgar 07:15, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
2. Nice eye-catchers, Really helpful --Stephenwanjau 18:07, 6 November 2011 (UTC)
3. Love it. Anthere (talk) 16:38, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

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