Whose Knowledge?/Resources/Tracking contributions
If you're running a series of Wikipedia editing events, and want to track participation or content improvement over a certain period of time, you might want to try the Wikimedia Outreach Dashboard. This page will walk you through basic setup and some tricks we've learned, using Dalit History Month as an example.
Setup
[edit]The Wikimedia Outreach Dashboard is one way to track what your participants are doing at editing events. These instructions will walk you through dashboard setup for those organizing a series of editing events, like Dalit History Month.
New campaigns
[edit]If you’re doing a series of events that aren't already part of another campaign (like Dalit History Month), you’ll want to first create a new campaign, and then have each event be a program in your campaign.
Start here to create your campaign first
New programs
[edit]Once you already have your campaign, you can create programs with different sets of participants for each event you're organizing.
For example, with Dalit History Month 2017, we already have a campaign, so you can just start from the main campaign page here:
Dalit History Month 2017 Campaign
- Click "create program" then "create new program"
- Give it a unique name for this event (example: Dalit History Month 2017 is the overall campaign, but each editing event needs it's own name and its own program).
- Make your start and end times the hours of your event (or maybe the 24 hours surrounding it). if you don't create start and end times, then edits that people make to pages about ice cream next week will also be counted as part of Dalit history :)
- Choose your default language to be whatever language you think most participants will be writing articles in. If 2 or more, just pick 1 and we’ll fix this later (see important note on multilingual events below)
- Save!
- Then click "edit-details" to add any co-organizer ("facilitator") user names, and edit other details as needed.
- Your program will give you a url. You can have participants at the start of your event all go to this URL and click to join.
- If users forget to join the program page during the event, but you have a list of usernames who attended, you can still add them afterwards.
- Click on "editors" in the menu , then click the "participation" button and click "add multiple editors at once"
- put in their usernames.
- then go back to home. click "schedule data update" - this will make sure the next time the system runs updates, it will look for content created by the users you just added. check back the next day and you should see their contributions.
Important notes
[edit]Multilingual events
[edit]If people are creating content in more than 1 language, that's great! But you’ll need to tell the system to check in each additional language :(
- To do this, click “Articles” then scroll down.
- Click “add an available article” and enter an example of just 1 article in the language that you want the system to look for. For example, if you enter the name of a Punjabi article you want people to create, this will now tell the system to look for all edits made by your participants in Punjabi (this really isn’t ideal, but it is a workaround we've used until the toolmakers build in better multilingual support).
Privacy
[edit]Your dashboard will show a list of usernames who were present at a particular event, because you've either had people join, or added them afterwards. These usernames will be public to anyone with the link. So if security is an issue for your community, there may be some instances where this is not the right tool for you. At a minimum, we suggest making sure any listed participants who are potentially vulnerable are using anonymous usernames, and give consent to be included in the dashboard.