User problem:

Organizers do not have a way of easily tracking contributions and then reporting on impact of their organized activity on the wikis. This means that it is harder to share the successes and challenges and learnings of their organized activities, and it is harder to motivate people to join their activities due to unclear understanding of the impact.

Background:

One of the most important tasks related to organizing events on the wikis is tracking and reporting on impact. For events that focus on contributions, this means tracking contribution data, such as: the number of articles created, the number of articles edited, the total number of edits, the number of photos uploaded, etc.

Contribution data is important to many people. It is important to the event organizers and event stakeholders (such as grant officers, partner institutions, host venues), since it gives them an understanding of the impact of their events, their successes, and their gaps/challenges to address in the future. For the prospective participants, they can see impact reporting of past events, which can help motivate them to join future events. For event participants, it can help them feel like their work and time was valued, since they understand the impact of their individual contributions and the impact of the event overall.

However, there is no easy way to track contributions that are in the scope of an activity on the wikis. There are many external tools to track contributions, and different wikis & campaigns use different tools. However, many of these solutions pose challenges, including: they are off the wikis, they do not work well for tracking the contributions of experienced editors, and/or they can be hard to use.

This has made us wonder: Is there a simple, first stab that we can take at tracking contributions in organized activities? This first stab would focus on making it easy for organizers to know which contributions are within the scope of an organized activity.

How we would like to improve the situation:

• We would like to develop simple, light-weight methods for indicating which contributions are in the scope of an organized activity, which could be done in the following ways:
  • Perhaps organizers can create a worklist and assign articles or have articles claimed by participants
  • Perhaps participants can specify if a contribution is under an organized activity when publishing an edit

• This could be complemented by ways to surface to contributors, and especially moderators, that a certain contribution is from an organized activity, such as:
  • Tagging edits in RecentChanges, watchlist, contribution history as being a part of an organized activity (we will know the activity name, date, and other details if it is through event registration)

Some things to consider:

• We have some other teams that are thinking about how organizers can create and manage basic worklists (cc @PWaigi-WMF & LPL team). We would not want to duplicate efforts. What is reusable from their current and potential future work?
• Perhaps it is easiest to start with a way to modify the editing experience to mark an edit as within scope of a campaign/organized activity, but we would need to talk to the Editing team about this.
• Tracking contributions is a part of the storytelling organizers do to communicate the impact of their aan inctivities. How can we provide an experience that tells a story? That can inspire or motivate contributors? That can help us more easily surface gaps and challenges to address?

Post-MVP questions:

• What if a contributor is not registered for an activity via Event Registration (since it isn't really an activity that would use Event Registration), such as the 'Add a fact' experiment? However, there may still be interest in tracking their contributions (for example, Add a fact is using the hashtag tool for tracking). Is there a way they could use this new experience instead, and it could be marked as 'Other'? for collaborative activity? Would this be too messy and unreliable, data-wise? Would this be something that would be worth it for us to consider including?