 to move up front a little bit, I feel a bit lonely here. Yes, feel free to come up front. Don't worry about it, I won't buy it, I promise. Thanks all for being here. I know that I'm between you and the very coolest projects of Wikimedia, so I'll try to keep it brief. But I didn't have enough time to make it very brief. But I'll try, I'll do my best. I want to talk to you a little bit about, if the slides go forward. Over the past decade, Wikimedia Netherlands has organized many programs to get more volunteers involved in the Dutch Wikipedia. And one of their goals was to get these people involved, but you also write articles, et cetera. But as they organize these activities, they found again and again the challenge that it's hard to keep these people embedded in the community and to keep them sticking around. As I was in the transition before my PhD program, they reached out to me and they asked me, like, can you help us write some kind of manual for these people to help them settle a little bit better? So before we start with the content of that manual and what I would like to discuss with you, I would like to recognize a few small print issues. I know that every community is different. And my experiences are mostly based on the Dutch Wikipedia community. I realize that the needs of this manual are very tailored to our specific situation and that in your situations, you may look at very different requirements. And while I'm describing why things may not work for that particular situation, it is within this context. And I know that they're written with the best intentions and they're written for many different audiences. So just to get that out of the way, I know that I'm oversimplifying things a lot. So with quite a few years of editing experience under my belt, I thought it would be not too hard to, and explaining many times to people how Wikipedia works, I thought it would be pretty straightforward to write that down and have some kind of manual ready for people. It's a little bit harder than I hoped and that is why I wanted to share a few of those speed bumps and all of those brick walls that we run into with you. Some of these challenges that these news people actually run in every time. So first of all, let's go back to this manual. It turns out that the many pages of documentation somehow don't seem to do the trick and there's a few issues with them. First of all, there are so many of them. Somehow, someone probably wrote down the answer to whatever you're looking for and it's somewhere but good luck finding it. Even if you find the page, it usually focuses a little bit too much on the experience of the people who write it. It's the complexities of the rules. This is really not that simple. There are all kinds of exceptions and it tries to write usually the help page for every audience at once. For example, have you recently tried to find an explanation on how the deletion process works on your Wikipedia? There you go. That's first question, deletion of what? Well, deletion of articles, for example. A good explanation of how the deletion article works is hard to find, is hard to explain because the process is usually very complicated and very nuanced. But at the same time, now try to find that article while navigating from the main page as if you're a new user. You're just clicking on links and you're trying to find that page. Sorry, are you happy to answer your questions at the end? Yeah, but that makes it a little bit. So if you try to navigate to those pages from the main page, you'll see that it's a whole new Wikipedia game, which is much harder even to get to. So the initial goal was to make life easier for people who took the effort to follow a workshop. It's people who already took that first step and who tried to get in touch with writing on Wikipedia. But it also should work for people who are new to Wikipedia. With a modular structure, we hope that we could accommodate both groups and rather than help them use the guide as they are editing Wikipedia, rather than having to read through the whole thing before they make their first edit. How to recipes and intangible examples should help to make this happen. And in the end, the goal was to at least help the vast majority of editors to get through their first 500 edits without major trouble. Step one in that was, of course, to take a look at what kind of information do we already have available? What kind of information are people presented with? And if they managed to find the page Welcome for Newcomers in the Dutch Wikipedia, that is already quite something. And then you look at this page and you see that they explain some rules on what are the mores, what are the behavior that is expected of you. But many of those rules include a lot of links and that are supposed to explain, as we do in Wikipedia, what these concepts mean. And before you know, you go down the rabbit hole and you spend many hours trying to read and understand these rules and you're nowhere further. You still have to make that first edit. But at the same time, some of these rules are apparently overly vague. For example, one of the rules in the Dutch Wikipedia was, write as encyclopedic as possible. Without any clear explanation of what that means, just try to write encyclopedic. Well, especially with the younger generation, that is maybe not a statement that is as obvious as for some other people here in this audience. But also, it had this little remark. By the way, there's much discussion about layout. Keep that in mind. Then how should we deal with that? So that is the kind of information that's really hard to digest for newcomers. So what should they do with this information? The help pages are often focused on the source text editor. They don't have any of the visual editor interfaces. They don't have any of the buttons that are currently active. And this was especially visual when I checked what was the last edit on this page. It turns out that 99% of that page was actually written last in 2014. You may realize that the editor has changed a little bit in that time. Also, many of our pages focus on what people should not do. Don't do this, don't do that, don't do that. We don't give them very often easy recipes of what they should do. Maybe this is different in other Wikipedia's, but at least in Dutch Wikipedia, that is something that's really missing. So in our manual, we try to tackle that and we try to at least give people some, I mean, this is a selection of some of the clear step plans. One, two, three, four, five, just follow this recipe. It may not be the maximum you can get out of the rules of Wikipedia, but at least you'll be more or less safe if you follow these guidelines. Give people a right way of doing things and don't focus too much on what they should not do. And then we also came across some of the little gems that are hidden in our treasure of outreach wiki, meta wiki, comments wiki. We have much outreach materials available and this is, for example, one of the things we came across, which is a very helpful overview of an article that was written first and what is wrong with it and why it could be better and underneath an alternative version of what is better and why it is better. I'm not sure if you can actually read it from over there. It looks out of focus from here, but I hope you can. This is from the editing Wikipedia brochure. Very helpful and we thought, well, or I thought, let's try to make something similar on the Dutch Wikipedia, but then you come into another challenge. It's actually harder than you think to find a good article or better said, a decent article because if you wanted to be useful in this kind of context, you have to make sure that it's not too long, it's not too short because if it's too long, there's no way you're gonna be able to print it in some kind of PDF. If it's too short, it's gonna look ridiculously short, like, oh, is this the best example they can come up with? It has to have good sources, it needs to be layouted very well and at least personally, I like to make sure that these articles are not written just for the manual. It has to give a realistic picture of what an article in Wikipedia looks like and not what it looks like in my perfect dream world. So this is actually pretty tough and it's hard to find articles that you can make all these examples with. Next challenge is trying to explain to people how they should do these things. So you can tell them, like, click on this and that button, but then people have to look in the screens and it's not as easy for everybody to find the button they are looking for. So what we did is we created some appendices, some additional materials where we clearly point out, like, these buttons are located there and this is what they mean, what they actually do for you. It's one of the approaches possible, but there, of course, are many other ways. But as a Wikipedia, I never consciously realized that actually we have this huge maze of buttons and pages that we navigate through on a daily basis because we know our way. But maybe the toughest is that we are contradicting ourselves all the time. One specific example is that we love to, well, we love to write essays, we love to write help pages, we love to explain how things work, but then these pages are dumped somewhere and we put some little template on it, this is not an official rule, you may have seen them and people are still expected to behave by it. But then after a few years, those pages are not used anymore, they're not maintained, the editor who wrote it may be retired and somehow it gets lost in history, but they're still findable for newcomers, they're still easy to access usually. So I found, for example, this page that explained that really the best way to give references is to use the Harvard notation style and in my history as a Wikipedia, I must admit that I have not seen this, I'm not sure why it is. So I have not seen the Harvard notation style actively in use in any article in the last five or six years. Maybe it was very popular in the beginning before footnotes became a thing, but apparently it turns out that there is a very small mini-universe in the Dutch Wikipedia that still uses it and that's systems biology. Some people actively use it, they maintain that page explaining how it works and they still have the text on it that says, well, this is the most obvious way and this is the most common way to describe your sources. And then it becomes very hard for newcomers to understand, well, that's actually written by someone who is active in that very small biosphere and then how do you do that in other pages? So when you're writing these things, you have to struggle with this and that is why we came basically to the conclusion it's the best way to write as a PDF. And what happened is that after writing this manual, the manual was actually watched like about 1500 times over three months, which was a very nice result. And it was so much in demand that a publisher was interested in publishing it as a book for the bookshops, for the libraries. So it's gonna be published under CCBuy, which is wonderful. And the royalties of it go to Wikimedia Netherlands. It's not gonna be a huge publication, but at least it gives you quite a bit of exposure because if this ends up in every library and people can understand a little bit about how to write a Wikipedia, if they're interested, who knows where that goes. Thank you very much and I'm happy to take any questions or suggestions. So the text is written as published under CCBuy because Wikimedia Netherlands pre-shorted that way. I'm happy to oblige. I don't particularly mind. The images are under CCBuy as a. I have a hard time seeing who raises their hand, so do it clearly. Yes, sorry. Oh, he asked whether I could show them a link. Yes, I will put this presentation on the Wikimedia page and then everything is in there. Go ahead. So apparently they thought that 1500 downloads over three months was interesting enough for them to publish this. I must say they publish a lot of books that are in the same sphere of how to do this and how to do that or how does something work. So this fits in their scope as a publisher. It's not a fiction publisher. So he mentioned that he faced a lot of the same experiences over time. Of course, you're more than welcome to use the same structure. I'm happy to talk with you further. Of course, do realize every community is different and the needs of every community will always be different. In the back there. Okay, so the lady asked if there is a specific way of referencing. That depends on the community. So every language does this differently. The food notes that are most commonly used, I think. But I'm not here to have an opinion on that. I just noted that the one method that I never see was mentioned in the help pages as the most prominent method. And that was definitely not the correct interpretation. Does that answer your question? There are style guides. And the style guides differ from language to language. So English Wikipedia does things in one way. Dutch Wikipedia does things in another way. In the Dutch Wikipedia, there is no official way of doing it that may be different in English or in other languages. Okay, one last question over there. So there are two questions. One is, can you see the impact? And the second one is, are you gonna change the help pages? So for the first one, I think that it is, I mean, you can see how many times a file has been opened or how many times it has been downloaded. So you can see that. There is not a clear way to know how much impact it has had. So I don't know that. You could probably do research into it but I think the override of that research is more than what you get out of it, this is the point. The second question of, am I going to change the help pages? No, I'm not. People are welcome to reuse my materials if they want to take up that task, but I do realize that the help pages serve perhaps a different purpose than this manual because this manual is written in a way not to be comprehensive, but it's written in a way to show people this is one way to do it that is safe. If you follow these rules, you're gonna be fine. Nobody's gonna bite you. But the rules on Wikipedia, the help pages on Wikipedia typically have its purpose to explain exactly how far you can go. You can do, you can go this far and not any further. So they serve a different purpose. I do realize that. I think if one quick question and then we are gonna wrap up. This is about, it depends on what size you print them on but I think on, yeah, so on A4 equivalent, it's about 60, 70 pages depending on what you count and what you don't. Yeah, and it's in modules. So there is one module about writing. There's one module about what is a good article. There's one module about behavior on Wikipedia. So you could also say like, I only want to take this module and only look at that. Okay, thank you very much. Then I would like to give the word to the next speakers. Thank you.