Year of Science 2016 – a new model for Wikipedia outreach

The Year of Science was a 2016 Wikipedia outreach campaign managed by the Wiki Education Foundation with funding support from the Simons Foundation. The campaign had several goals, including developing science articles on Wikipedia, recruiting scientists as volunteer Wikipedia editors, promoting discussions about the culture and impact of Wikipedia in the scientific community, and integrating more science themes into existing Wikipedia community programs.

It is easy to say that the Year of Science was one of the biggest and highest impact campaigns which the Wikipedia community has produced to date. Previous campaigns rarely lasted more than a month, and campaigns rarely include multiple events in multiple cities or recruited so many participants. It is unprecedented for any Wikipedia campaign to bring so many discussions to professional spaces, but Year of Science included talks and workshops at academic conferences throughout the year. The very brand and idea of a “year of science” was provocative to see in circulation around Wikipedia, and pushed the community’s imagination of what is possible.

The campaign will have its own outcome reports and counts of progress. 2016 just ended so these are not available yet. When they come out, they will describe the counts of how many people attended workshops and registered Wikipedia articles to add citations to academic journals. With Wikipedia being digitally native, so many metrics are available. That part of the impact can be measured quantitatively. Beyond that I am confident that the social outreach changes the cultural posturing in science to Wikipedia, which I think is overdue to change. Right now, Wikipedia is riding a 10+-year wave of being the world’s most consulted source of science information. Assuming that Wikipedia survives into the future, I think people might look back and wonder when Wikipedia’s influence as a popular publication was recognized, and this Year of Science campaign might be cited as one of the first examples of professional Wikipedia outreach into a population of people who still had serious reservations about acknowledging Wikipedia at all. It was a risk to do Year of Science in 2016; 2014 or before would have been premature considering Wikipedia’s reputation then. Although things are better now, things are changing quickly and every year outreach like this is becoming easier to conduct and more likely to have a high impact with less effort.

I am pleased with the campaign outcomes. From a Wikimedia community perspective of wanting to keep what worked and spend less time repeating the parts which were less effective, the campaign could be criticized, but I do not think the criticism should detract from celebrating everything that everyone accomplished. Most parts of the program were successful, and I expect that other stakeholders will publish to describe those parts. For the sake of anyone who might want to do similar projects, I will review the challenges.

Metrics are incomplete
The Wikipedia community values transparency. However, many people in the Wikipedia community stay in digital spaces and underestimate the difficulty of doing outreach away from the keyboard. The Year of Science tracked as much of Wikipedia engagement as is routine to track in outreach programs, but from anecdotes, I know that much and perhaps most data was not captured. There are various reasons for this. One reason is that Wikipedia’s software is nonprofit and rooted in the late 1990s, whereas commercial websites have all the advantages of being state of the art and intuitive to use. Wikipedia’s clunky interface and infrastructure is a barrier to getting users to agree to the lamest parts of Wikipedia, like volunteering for metrics tracking. In platforms like Facebook, every aspect of people’s lives are tracked routinely with single clicks, but in Wikipedia, there are social options to preserve privacy and then technical limitations even for people who are sharing what they do. The idea for metrics tracking in a program like this is that if someone volunteers to report to a campaign organizer which Wikipedia article they edited, then we ought to be able to track that. For a campaign like this, we actually need to be able to track hundreds or thousands of participants. What happens in practice is that for various reasons, this tracking connection is difficult to make in Wikipedia for reasons which are not present in other organizing platforms. This is simultaneously a problem, and an intentional choice with its own rights-preserving benefits, and a social situation on which to reflect. Something that came out of this is development of the Programs & Events dashboard. I think that the P&E dashboard could prove to be of the most significant innovations to Wikipedia in its entire history, because the dashboard is the first effort to provide a system for collecting media metrics reporting the impact of Wikipedia. When stories about Wikipedia communication metrics are told, then I think the Year of Science should be remembered as one of the second-wave driving forces in the development of the concept.

Some experiments failed to develop
In typical wiki-fashion, the beginning of the campaign was treated as a call for all sorts of sub-projects. Should the campaign include a contest, a newsletter, collaborations with 10+ ongoing Wikipedia initiatives, and formal partnerships with respected science organizations? As it happens, Wikipedia is an improvised project which changes quickly depending on participant interest. When a few people want something, they start to create it, and some kinds of communication which worked well for offline activism – like newsletters – can seem slow in the age of Internet. Wikipedia does have some newsletters, but just in the same way that The New York Times publishes online first and only puts yesterday’s news in the latest edition of their paper publications, things like newsletters for digital communities can have low relevance for people who are living the experience. The Year of Science campaign ambitiously listed a range of projects, but many never materialized, and things that did not seem important in the inception of the idea became important months later. Insiders of a campaign often hesitate to definitively strike an idea which is not progressing, but for this campaign, I think some of the ideas which were raised in the beginning looked quite dead to both Wikipedians and science professionals who might have checked the campaign page. Wikipedia has trouble managing timed campaigns, because it is difficult to crowdsource the management of projects which must happen on a schedule. Wiki-style editors will not be bold enough to go into a campaign space started by another and tell them that they need to abandon certain halted projects, and the leadership of a campaign might not be able to recognize when enough time has passed to declare an initiative dead. By the end of the year, the campaign page accumulated some distracting cruft. Anyone replicating the campaign should plan in advance how to introduce new ideas to stay current and how to kill off paused concepts to prevent being overburdened. I would recommend by making modest promises in the beginning, introducing supplementary projects without prior announcement as a bonus rather than in fulfillment of a commitment, and not advertising any non-essential feature or service as ongoing and dependable until and unless that feature has already been provided in several iterations over a period of time.

No centralized forum
The idea of a centralized outreach campaign in Wikipedia is a little crazy. Wikipedia was imagined from its founding as a crowdsourced project in which any individual can contribute information, and other people can spontaneously organize to review and manage it according to rules which are developed by consensus. At no point in Wikipedia’s history has there been much concept of centralized leadership or even support. With Year of Science, there were outreach events in every way possible targeting individuals who would do anything, including editing articles, providing review and suggestions, developing the Wikidata database, or joining conversations. Beyond individuals all sorts of organizations external to Wikipedia participated, including conference teams, universities, social groups, and professional societies.

Although there was a campaign landing page to orient anyone to the Year of Science concept, the Wikipedia community is not accustomed to anticipating the existence of this kind of central campaign or using such forums provided by a campaign as a way to connect to sponsored support services. In some ways, Wiki Ed as an organization provided staff support for the outreach by setting up some basic infrastructure to make the campaign possible. Things that any traditional off-wiki outreach campaign would imagine to be essential – like logos, basic text instructions, sign-up sheets, reporting queues, designated talk pages, and some points of contact – are not aspects of Wikipedia community culture which the wiki community expects to exist in the wiki campaigns which have been successful to date. There is a cultural mismatch in what a science professional would expect to exist in a social campaign and what the wiki community imagines should exist. The organizers of the Year of Science campaign imagined the campaign landing page to be a bridge for this, and it was, but the concept of a traditional community entry point has not developed in the wiki community to a point which permits two-way communication between the Wikipedia community and people communicating in other ways. This is not a problem unique to Wikipedia, as people not familiar with communication in YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or any other digital community platform have trouble moving messaging into and and getting comments out of those platforms as well. With Wikipedia, the paths to communication are less developed, and the Year of Science pushed to test what was possible.

For future campaigns, as outreach becomes broader, there could be more notice of what central services are and are not available. The Wikipedia community will tend to anticipate that there is no central service; off-wiki communities will tend to expect that there will be. Both communities will have challenges grasping the reality which is in the middle of these expectations. The centralized support which is available should be ready to promote services to those not expecting them, and preemptively match the support requested by off-wiki communities to what is available.

Take aways
Let’s do it again! The very precedent of the Year of Science is good for me in my medical outreach, because the credibility it generated gives me more of a foundation to to go further. This kind of campaign could be repeated globally in all languages for a year, or anyone could modify the concept to be local in one language and for a shorter time if that suited them. I would like to see more science themed campaigns. I can imagine other people exploring campaigns with themes in the humanities, for trades and labor, by geographical interest, for content types like datasets, or for engagement types like translation. I expect that now that this has happened, the next campaign organizers will be more informed going into the project now that the risk has been taken.

This entire experience also marks one of the first times that content sponsorship has been provided, albeit in the wiki way. It is not at all orthodox right now for anyone to fund wiki development, but not only did Simons Foundation do this, but they even let it happen in the wiki way: with invitations for any person or organization to contribute and to share the information which was important to them, as a volunteer, and without any promotional agenda.