Create 2019/Pacetrack: A Tool for Slick and Simple Wikipedia Campaigns: Submissions:2023/WikiJournal

This submission has been designated as a lightning talk at WikiConference North America 2019.

We will present Pacetrack, an open source tool to help people track and display the progress of their Wikipedia-editing campaign.

Pacetrack focuses on a simple concept: lists help people make progress. It is useful to make a list of work, set a limited amount of time, and track progress towards the goal. Wikipedia already has Wikiprojects that cover broad topic areas of ongoing work. Wikipedia also has focused events like editathons, that make progress on set of articles over the course of a few days. A campaign is a concept that fits right between these long-standing traditions on Wikipedia. A campaign is broader than an editathon but narrower than a Wikiproject. Campaigns have a limited time frame and defined scope, so you can tell when it is finished or when it has reached its goal. These limits help you turn general ambition into specific achievements. Pacetrack is a tool that aims to make it easier for people to visualize the great work that goes into their campaign.

The tool is based on discussions and a hackathon project from Wikicite 2018.

In our presentation, we can review some of the lessons we took from past campaign efforts we have seen on Wikipedia. We can also talk about the technical design of Pacetrack. Finally, we can review some of the areas for future development. Attendees will have an opportunity to learn about the software and provide feedback.

We hope that Pacetrack can enable people to learn more about successful Wikipedia-editing campaigns. As people define the goal and scope of their campaigns, we may be able to see what elements help and motivate strong participation. Most importantly, we hope that visualizing the progress of a campaign will make it easier for people to organize efforts around improving the free availability of information on topics they find interesting, important, or fun!