Looking to grow its global reach, the Wikimedia Foundation engaged Reboot to understand the experience of editors to Czech and Korean Wikipedias and better engage and sustain their contributions. This research informed the development of Wikimedia’s product and organizational strategies for the next fiscal year. This project developed out of the Audience Research strategy process, where knowledge on editors was identified as a key gap for the foundation.

DESIGN RESEARCH

To build Wikimedia’s capacity for research, Reboot worked closely with a small, multi-functional team from the foundation throughout this project. Our research team thus included a product developer on their Editing team and a design researcher, supported by members of their Audience Development and Community teams. We worked with them to establish a research framework prioritizing lines of inquiry, defining research methods, and establishing respondent targets. This framework then guided the development of outreach strategies to respondents, operational research trackers, and interview and observation scripts.

Research in South Korea and the Czech Republic sought to understand how the following factors support or inhibit Wikipedia contribution: new editors’ characteristics, behaviors, and motivations; perceptions of and engagement with local Wikipedia communities; and product functionalities and tools.

Reboot led two-week research sprints, supported by two Wikimedia team members and two local researchers and translators, in each country. Research activities included:

• Qualitative interviews with new and experienced editors, with a total of 64 interviews conducted across the two sites

• User observations of editing tools and processes, captured by video for the product team to diagnose technical issues and improvements needed

• Observations of offline community activities, such as editing trainings and edit-a-thons

• Expert interviews with comparable local online and offline communities, to better understand local context and community norms

SYNTHESIS

In-country and post-research synthesis sessions focused on defining different types of editors and identifying opportunities for product improvements from their experiences. We found that editor retention is defined by an editor’s characteristics and motivations, their perceptions of Wikipedia, and how they learn to edit, face challenges, and find help. (Read the full research report.)

We then categorized editors by their motivations to contribute to Wikipedia, and developed six user personas. These personas capture: i) background characteristics which influence their comfort with editing (e.g., technology assets and habits, past writing experiences) and interest in Wikipedia; ii) their key goals and challenges in editing; and iii) how their motivation changes over the course of an editing journey based on which enablers and inhibitors they face. Each user persona was based on patterns across research respondents. A sample of these personas are below:

Strategic Recommendations

Research surfaced many opportunities for improving the editing experience. Reboot facilitated the Wikimedia team to set criteria for and prioritize between these opportunities. Recommendations thus focused on product features and strategic approaches which would be most feasible to implement, within Wikimedia’s current capabilities and community culture, and which addressed editors’ greatest needs and challenges. The Wikimedia team chose to focus on helping new editors better understand Wikipedia’s processes and norms and providing progressive learning opportunities to new editors as they built their editing skillset. These recommendations not only informed the product team’s new projects, but were also reflected in the foundation’s three organizational priorities for 2018.

Read more about the Wikimedia Foundation's New Editor Experiences project and its most recent developments.