Proposed in Community-Wishlist-Survey-2016. Received 28 support votes, and ranked #57 out of 265 proposals. View full proposal with discussion and votes here.
Problem
WikiProjects are small and often newcomers do not know about them. I think one could improve WikiProject participation by increasing the users of WikiProjects by suggesting WikiProjects for users.
Who would benefit
WikiProjects and newcomers
Proposed solution
WikiProjects basically equal domains of interest - if there are still sufficiently large domains of interest without a WikiProject, it should probably be created by someone or some group (or at least requested to be created). So my suggestion is:
- When new users register on the site, they getting some suggestions for WikiProjects to join. Those first suggestions would be very general, suggestions of things many people are interested in. My suggestion would be 5-10 WikiProjects like WP Football, WP Novels, WP Internet, WP Harry Potter, WP {country of the user}, WP Economics, WP Plants and WP Film to get them started by picking at least one. Many websites have something similar; Reddit suggests some subreddits and Twitter some people to follow. There should also be a non-intrusively visible option to efficiently search for a topic of interest (completion-suggestion for cleartext search, way to search via a category system [[[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiProjects_by_area | w:Category:WikiProjects by area ]]], not just the names of the WikiProjects but boxes with the WikiProject icon [proper icons should become mandatory for WikiProjects], ...)
- Once they're editing their edits can be analyzed - the most basic analysis would be to count the WikiProjects on the respective edited pages, so later suggestions could be personalized to the user. (Note: the algorithm can be improved by considering extra info such as which edits caused someone to thank the user for it and how much text was added, etc.) Furthermore, as the WikiProjects they've joined have related WikiProjects, these can be used for the suggestions as well.
Technical details
Time, expertise and skills required
- e.g. 2-3 weeks, advanced contributor, javascript, css, etc
Suitable for
- e.g. Hackathon, GSOC, Outreachy, etc.