 Okay, great. So we see our videos now, but will we see our slides as well? Ah, here we go. Great. Okay, hello everyone and welcome to our session today. Our session is called Can We Interest You in Trying Something New Together? How We Introduce to New Software Feature to Editors through a Community-Driven Campaign on German-Speaking Wikipedia. My name is Lena and I'm a Product Manager at Wikimedia Germany. I'm the Product Manager of the Technical Wishes Project, which is a project that develops media Wiki software, which is the software that runs Wikipedia. And with me today is my colleague Johanna, who is our Community Communications Manager. And we brought with us today a case study about a challenge that we experience quite often in our work, and we'd like to talk about how we try to overcome it. So first of all, we'll talk about this problem that we've been encountering, then we'll look into how we plan to solve it. Spoiler here is that it was through a campaign. We'll also talk about how communication played a role in all of that, and then we'll look at the results. So did we achieve what we hope to achieve? We also think there will be time for questions later. So if you have anything, just put them in the chat and we'll go through them at the end. So first of all, the problem. For this, we'd like to take you on a bit of a thought journey. So imagine this. Imagine you made something really cool. Maybe you organized an event, maybe you did an analysis, maybe you created a tool or something completely different. And imagine that you actually want everyone on your Wikipedia to know about it. You're writing maybe little announcements or pieces for your village pump and some other pages, but there are hardly any reactions there. And maybe you're worried that no one will actually look at the thing that you made. And this has certainly happened to us and the Technical Wishes Project. And what you can see here on the slide in the graph is the amount of people that commented on our latest feature releases on German Wikipedia. So you can see there's sometimes no one commented. And the maximum we got is that eight people commented. So that feedback rate is pretty low. It could, of course, mean that what we released is absolutely perfect and there's no need for feedback. But that's probably not it. So unfortunately, with feedback rates like this, for us as a software team, it can be difficult to understand how many people actually saw the feature, how many tried it out and how they experienced it. And in general, we do actually want everyone to know about the new features coming from our team. And we want to get feedback from as many different types of people as we can so that we can improve the features. But, you know, as you know, there are many, many really cool projects out there, important announcements going out, and it's hard to get people's attention just because the sheer amount of information that is out there. And we've noticed that usually the people who do end up giving us feedback are people who are experts, more experienced users that know us and know our projects and not so much newer editors or people new to our project. And we do also want feedback from those groups of people. Yeah, so we thought today, we'd like to share some, like share how we tried something new, hoping to change all that, and to give you a bit of a backstory. In June this year, we gave the German Wikipedia a pretty cool feature that's called cartographer. I guess some of you know that already. A cartographer is a media wiki extension that allows you to add maps to wiki pages fairly easily. And we as a team cannot take credit for cartographer. That feature has already existed on most other wikis before, but not on German Wikipedia. So what we did was to make it usable on five wikis that didn't have it yet, including German Wikipedia. And yeah, it's a pretty cool feature. So we wanted people to get excited about it. And yeah, how would we get there? Click. Yeah. So in the past, we mostly announced software changes, stuff that we did in our projects with text announcements. And for this, our hypothesis was maybe just reading about a new feature and then trying it out on your own is not very attractive to some or most people. So we thought we'd try something else. We thought what sounded more promising was a space where people could, first of all, learn how the feature works, try it maybe even together with others, and also support each other in doing so. So for the first time ever in our project, we made a campaign for a software feature. And the idea of this campaign was that people would get more maps to German Wikipedia together. So it was actually not a competition about who makes the most maps or makes the best maps. Instead, it was about having this collaborative space about exchange and community. And ideally in this space, if you participated, you would see the cool maps that others made and get inspired. You would show off the cool maps that you made also. And you would gather with people who are interested in cartographer with others, see maybe is there someone else who struggles like me or has overcome some struggles and might help me when I run into a problem. So yeah, we planned this campaign. Of course, we also set some goals when we wanted to achieve with that. Those were basically the two main goals. First of all, we wanted people to know cartographer exists now on your wiki. That announcement should not just be drowned in the general flood of information. And then we didn't want people just to know that existed, but to actually start using it. So basically to start creating maps with cartographer on German Wikipedia. And then as a second goal, we also wanted to hear feedback from the folks using it. Is it working for them? Any improvements needed? Which ones are most important? So our campaign centered around these three pillars that I had mentioned before, learn how, try to use it and support each other. And yeah, let's see how we did that. Starting with the second one, try it. That's how we did it. This is actually a screenshot from the campaign page. And at the heart of that campaign was a community generated list. I hope you can see it. I feel like really look at the screenshot at the bottom of that page. There's a list with color indicators and icons to see the status of the maps that have been added. So basically here, people could add maps to that list. They could add maps that they had already finished or maps that they were currently working on to make that more transparent or sometimes people could also add requests for maps that they wanted others to create because they really wanted that map, but they didn't know how to get there. And at the top of the page, you see there was a counter. We were hoping to make it more motivating for folks to try cartographer. If they saw all, there are only so many finished maps. I want to get to kick this number off or maybe there are so many cool maps already. I want to be one of the people who made maps here. That's about the try it. Then of course, you can only use cartographer if you know how to use it. So we made an extra pane dedicated just to learning how cartographer works. That was a fairly comprehensive page. We made an overview of all the existing documentation and put a lot of effort into structuring it for hopefully easy access. That's like this table of contents here trying to give a little overview. We made a few how-to videos to give people an easier introduction to the software also for folks who like maybe more visual approach. And then we collected some examples of code for copy and pasting to make it easier to get started. Yeah. And then we had this last aspect support each other. Maybe you're wondering why should the community support each other if you're the tech team behind making this feature available. But we as the technical wishes team aren't actually map experts. I mean, we've worked on making cartographer available. So from the research we did, obviously we know some things, but the real map experts are in the wiki community. So we were hoping with this campaign that contributors would support each other to achieve that. We prominently added a forum to the wiki page where people could just ask questions, report problems, discuss anything around cartographer maps that they felt necessary just to discuss. And yeah, it's basically just a simple talk page. But yeah, we hope to basically inspire people to use that forum by putting it there. And then last but not least, not one of the three pillars, but just as important, maybe we wanted it to be fun. We wanted people to enjoy the campaign and to want to make maps basically and from previous conversations with community members, especially with those who are fairly new to our project, to the wikis in general. We know that the typical wiki page with its design and huge amounts of text can be quite overwhelming actually. Maybe you remember that yourselves from when you started working on the wikis. So we added some colors and other fonts, some visuals and videos to our page. And we also gave the whole campaign a name that was a bit more fun than usual. So we called it Kartensaison. Kartensaison is a wordplay on the German term Gartenaison, which means gardening season. But Kartensaison means maps in German. So basically Kartensaison means map season. And it is sort of means planting maps in German Wikipedia, which is what the campaign was about. So yeah, a bit fun and also quite fitting. And yeah, speaking of reaching more participants and visuals, we also added alt text for accessibility for people who are using screen readers. And we would like to encourage you all to do the same or keep doing it. You're already doing it. Yeah, so that's what the campaign could do and was supposed to do. But how would people even know that it existed? And they could be a part of it. As mentioned before, we wanted as many people as possible to become aware of that cool thing that was now out there. So we had a pretty big communication effort. And a few months earlier, actually, we had a workshop with a group of editors from German Wikipedia. And several of them were pretty new to the Wiki projects or more on the casual editing side. And yeah, we learned a lot about what they struggle with when it comes to announcements. So wanted to share that with you here. Check if I'm still, yeah, I'm still on the right slide. That's great. Yeah, so here are the five biggest problems basically that people talked about and also sort of agreed on that they are big problems. And the first one is that announcements are usually too long. If I am a person who can only dedicate a small part of their day or week or month to Wiki work, I do not have time to read all those long announcements. And then the second part is that announcements can be pretty boring, especially visually. So if I'm reading only text, I'm not feeling super invited. At least that's true for a lot of people. And the third point is that maybe also because of all the text, it can sometimes be hard to figure out what am I actually supposed to do here? What is the call to action? Am I supposed to read just read something or notice something or actually do something? So the wish was that it should be desired, should be visible at first glance, what is actually expected of me. If not, maybe I'll just ignore that message completely and just move on. Then overall, announcements have a tendency to be a bit dry. So of course, depending on the topic, it makes sense to have more of like a matter of fact tone. But in general, people said they feel much happier to participate in something if it seems like that something might be fun, they might enjoy it themselves. So it will be cool if announcements would also transform that. And last but not least, if I'm not that type of editor who visits the village pump frequently, I will probably miss that something's even going on. So yep. We did a few things differently on our announcement for this campaign to try and improve that. And here's the announcement that we used for this campaign. And what you can see here is that we tried to make the text more readable. So you can see, well, we cannot actually see that because you don't know the previous announcement, but maybe you will believe us that the text is shorter. I mean, I was admit could still be much shorter, but yeah, we're taking baby steps here. The text is structured into lists to make it more readable and also usually in our announcements, we want to give some additional information about our project and where to give feedback and that is still here, but we've put it into a smaller font at the bottom to give also the text bit of hierarchy. Then you've probably spotted the call to action already. It is very easy to find because it is a super visible button. And overall, the announcement is not so boring anymore, I would say at least. Clearly, there's more than text now. At the top right side, we added a playful video teaser, which is a cute animation where maps are growing like flowers and there's like spring like music in there. It sort of sets the mood for the campaign already. And apart from that, we also added a few more images to show what cartographer actually is and to help people assess if that's, this announcement is even interesting to them and they want to look into it. And yeah, I mean, maybe you're wondering, why are you even talking about that? That is like common sense. We all know that. And I guess also most of that was known to us already, but yeah, from experience and also from looking at most announcements that we see on the wikis, also from others, I think it's a good thing to remind ourselves of all of this every once in a while. So yeah. And then there was one last problem that we tried to fix with our announcements, which was about this whole, I missed the whole thing, basically, people who are not very active on village pumps, etc., would not even take wind of what was going on. So for this project, we tried two different things. First of all, we did some research and thought long and hard, which wiki projects within German Wikipedia would actually have a particular interest in adding maps to their articles. So we reached out to them and alerted them that they now have the school new feature to use. One of them, for instance, was the wiki project for small countries or the wiki project botany and several others. And then we also ran a banner. For campaigns, banners are not unusual at all, like wiki loves earth, wiki loves monuments, wiki love love, they all have their banners, which makes sense. But to advertise a software feature, that was a pretty new thing. So yeah, we were excited to see how that would turn out. Yes. And so this is now the last part of our case study, which is looking into the big question, did it work? Did we achieve what we hope to achieve? Go to the next slide. Yeah, so just a recap of what we were hoping to achieve with the campaign. We wanted people to know that cartographer exists and we wanted them to start creating maps with it on German Wikipedia. And then particularly, we wanted a broad range of editors to start using cartographer. And we also wanted to get feedback on cartographer to understand what's working for people, what needs improvement, where are the biggest problems. So next slide. So we were happy to see that people did try cartographer and more than 1800 maps have already been created with cartographer on German Wikipedia to date. So that's since June of this year. And that's a pretty high number considering that maps are not needed, let's say on every article. But there is a caveat here. We don't know for certain how many of these maps can be attributed to the campaign. So what we do know is that about one tenth of the maps were registered on the list of the campaign page. And we had 71 people who were doing that. But it is possible that some people used our campaign or the resources we offered to make a few maps with cartographer and then register them in that list. But didn't want to repeat that process of registering them for the subsequent maps that they worked on, because we did get some feedback partway through the campaign, that this was also a bit of additional effort to list them there manually. And it got a bit tiresome after some time. And it may also be that they saw the announcement or the banner and the resources we offer and didn't see a benefit in listing what they were doing on the page, but we're still using the resources to create maps. And both of these are fine with us, of course, because ultimately our goal was to get people to use cartographer and not necessarily to be involved in the campaign. And there's no easy way to find out what really happened there. But and if people use the campaign as a stepping stone, but we still felt it was interesting to see what people did register their maps in the campaign. So here we go. So to us, it looks like registering maps in the campaign seemed especially appealing to people with less than 1000 edits. And that group made up 43% of the people who added maps to the campaign. And that's the first red ish bar you see on the graph there. And the green bars are people who commented on cartographer in the forum or on the talk page of our help page. And and yeah, you can see there's also quite a lot of people from that great group of people with less than 1000 edits, but the most actually came from the group of editors with 1000 to 10,000 edits. And that's quite an interesting insight. So even if the number of people who registered their maps on the campaign page was only a small percentage of all the maps that were added to German Wikipedia, it seems like the campaign at least motivated people with a relatively low edit count more than others. And what about feedback? We got lots of feedback. So 44 people gave feedback. And here you can see the graph from the beginning, which maybe answers the question that was put in the chat about the access there. As you can see, yeah, we had a much bigger number of people giving us feedback than we usually do on our features, which is great. But feedback is also a tricky thing. So, you know, there are many places where feedback can be left. And since cartographer was an existing extension, many things had already been reported on places like fabricator or other help pages or the extension pages. And we also knew from the outset that cartographer had some issues, some of which we hope to solve, some of which we might not be able to solve as a team. And that was understandably also a bit of a disappointment to hear for editors trying it out for the first time and encountering those issues. So that did require a bit of expectation management and a lot of coordination to make sure that we weren't re-reporting issues that already had open tickets and things like that. But still, getting this feedback and even getting feedback that existed already was helpful for us ultimately to understand what the biggest issues are for the German-speaking Wikipedia community. And that is crucial for our next steps where we plan to make some improvements to the cartographer extension. And that would also be rolled out to all Wikis. So ideally, all Wikis will benefit from our work there. So that brings us to conclusions. I see we, yeah, they're already on the screen. So in general, we'd say that the campaign was a success. Lots of map were created in the end. We got lots of feedback. The participants that joined the campaign supported each other. And we gained some valuable insights also in who we reached with this campaign. But it does seem like the campaign was not equally useful for all groups of editors. So it seemed particularly beneficial for editors who haven't been editing a lot yet. And we also wanted to highlight that, as people who run campaigns themselves know, this was a lot of work to put on. And if you do want to run a campaign, reserve lots of time for filing bug reports and answering questions and all that jazz. And we also realized that if we did this for every product that we work on, it would end up being overwhelming and also lose its kind of wow effect. Can just imagine how many banners that would result in. But there is some good news. We also wanted to share some general takeaways that we think can be applied beyond campaigns. So one is that announcements maybe can be more interesting. They have more structure, more visuals and a clear call to action. And some fun is always nice. Give your project pages some more color, some more visuals, less text. Invest a bit of time in understanding which groups might be particularly interested in your news and target them directly. And invest in a good collection of helpful resources to share to get people started. So that's, I think, it and we can have a look at questions in the chat. Yes, Johanna. Yeah, thanks a lot. I've scanned the questions in the chat from that interface that I have here. Unfortunately, I only see the most recent ones, but I've noticed every now and then that especially Jan asked a lot of questions. Thanks for that. I was wondering, looking at the time we have like two and a half minutes left, more or less. If maybe you could add or like ask out loud the most important question that you would have on your mind, looking at or trying to look at Jan in particular. If there is one, otherwise we would really like to know if you think this is an approach. Yeah. I think I see some questions as well from before. I remember maybe I can briefly answer some of those as well. That would be great. Thank you. Maybe I'm in a different setup. I have multiple screens open. So I think I can see the previous ones. But so there was one question about whether making this international might have been useful. And I just wanted to say that we did think about that as well, about doing it both in German and in English on the international level. But in the end, it was both a question of our main target group. So who were we trying to get interested in cartographer? So as we said, cartographer was already available on most other wikis. It was actually only, I think, four wikis that didn't have it yet. And German Wikipedia was one of them, our five. And so we decided to focus on German Wikipedia also because of just a matter of time and energy, because making it available in multiple languages would have required more effort. But you're right that potentially on that level, we would have had more supporting editors who are familiar with cartographer. But we have also gathered input from the international communities on what we should work on. So it will flow into what we prioritize in terms of improvements. So we're not only looking at German Wikipedia users. And then there was a question about whether the Kattenwünsche were competing with the Kattenwerkstatt or it was complementary. And we also notified the Kattenwerkstatt about the campaign and asked them for their input on it. So yeah, we can say that from our perspective we saw it as complementary. And the Kattenwerkstatt still is necessary because they work on maps that are far more complex than what cartographer, for example, can produce. So yeah, very much complementary from our perspective. And if I can add, we also reached out to them before we actually started the campaign, because we knew that they had more expertise in the whole map making sphere. So we wanted to hear their thoughts before we actually kicked off the whole thing. Yeah. And Jan, thanks for putting the questions in the etherpad. Yeah, we will have a look at them and then reply there. We have officially run out of time. Thanks a lot, everyone, for joining the session. And yeah, if more questions come up, please do put them in the etherpad and we will have a look. Also, if you have answers to these questions here, we would also still be very interested in hearing your thoughts.