Submissions:2016/Investing in our Editors: How to Edit Templates in 15 minutes

Title

Investing in our Editors: How to Edit Templates in 15 minutes

Theme

Tech and Community

Academic Peer Review option

No

Type of submission

Presentation, but see note under "Special schedule requests".

Author

BU Rob13

E-mail address

burob13@gmail.com

Username

BU Rob13

Affiliation

No relevant affiliation

Abstract

In recent years, significant effort has been expended to create new tools that enable new editors to participate as part of our editing community. While these new tools are undoubtedly an important aspect of any effort to ensure the long-term sustainability of the Wikimedia projects, the Wikimedia community has largely neglected to educate editors in our more advanced tools once they arrive. Various intermediate or advanced functions remain largely unknown to many experienced editors, such as the syntax to edit templates, the MediaWiki namespace, and AutoWikiBrowser. By surveying administrators of the English Wikipedia, I intend to demonstrate that a non-trivial number of some of our most experienced editors do not feel capable of using some of these tools, even when confronted with situations that could benefit from their use.

Further, I will provide a brief tutorial on editing templates which is intended to raise the competency of experienced editors to the point where they can understand and potentially edit all but the most complicated templates. A discussion of template syntax, magic words, and parser functions will be included, but Lua modules will be excluded. This aspect of the presentation will run no more than 15 minutes. By surveying participants before and after the educational intervention, I seek to provide evidence that brief and relatively low-effort educational interventions can tap into the potential of our existing editing community. While education could never fully replace the development of new tools, it could provide another avenue to increase the editing power of our community without necessarily recruiting new editors.

The full results of both the pre-presentation survey of administrators and the surveys surrounding the educational intervention would be published on the English Wikipedia no later than early January 2017.

Length of presentation

30 minutes, but see note under "Special schedule requests".

Special schedule requests

Can not present Monday; In an ideal world, a small workspace would be available for ~30 minutes after the presentation so that interested participants can ask any template-related questions. This room could be smaller (10 should be fine). This is not vital for the presentation, but it certainly would help.

Preferred room size

25 or 50

Will you attend WikiConference North America if your submission is not accepted?

Yes, pending scholarship result

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