CampaignEvents/Event pathways

Overview

Many editors want more opportunities to collaborate and connect with other editors. However, it can be hard to learn about editing events in advance. If you have ever missed a wiki event that was right up your alley, an edit-a-thon on topics you work on, or a campaign focused on articles you regularly improve, you are not alone. Finding out about the right events at the right time is genuinely hard in the Wikimedia movement, and we want to help address this problem.

This page is the home of our work on Event pathways: a program run by the Connection Team, which aims to give editors more direct, personalized ways to discover events. The Connection Team maintains the CampaignEvents extension, a suite of tools that make on-wiki collaboration easier, including the Event Registration, the Collaboration List (Special:AllEvents), Invitation Lists, and Collaborative Contributions. With this new project, we want to expand our support for on-wiki collaboration by making event discovery much easier.

We will keep this page updated as the work develops, and we welcome your feedback at every stage.

The problem

Many editors are simply not in the loop about events that may interest them. In general, event discovery today largely depends on chance, already being connected to the right communities, or by actively seeking out events. If you are not already in the habit of checking certain pages (such as Special:AllEvents or certain WikiProject pages), subscribing to the right mailing lists, or interacting in certain chat groups, many events will pass you by entirely.

This creates real consequences:

Editors miss events they would have valued. An editor who has spent years improving articles on a topic they care deeply about may never hear about the edit-a-thon focused on exactly those articles, unless they happen to check Special:AllEvents at the right moment, or are already connected to the organizer's network.
Events get fewer participants than they could. Organizers put significant work into running events but often lack the tools to reach the specific editors most likely to be interested.
Existing promotion options require editors to come looking. Special:AllEvents gives events a home, but discovery is passive since it depends on editors already knowing to look there. CentralNotice works well for large campaigns, but it is complex to access and not suited to small or topically specific events. Talk page messages and mailing lists only reach people who are already "in the know."

We believe that if editors can more easily stumble upon events that genuinely match what they care about, more editors will join events, make meaningful contributions, and feel more connected to the broader Wikimedia movement.

Our approach

We are not trying to solve all of this at once. Instead, we are focused on learning from each one and building incrementally. This page documents each potential feature: what we are testing, why, what we find, and what we do next.

Feature 1: Article-based event notification

We want to begin collecting data on the articles that will be worked on during an event, and use that data to notify editors who are actively editing those same articles, connecting them to a collaborative space they may not know exists.

The worklist feature

We are currently building a worklist feature for the CampaignEvents extension. When ready, organizers will be able to list the specific articles their event will focus on, directly on the event page.

This is useful on its own, it gives participants a clearer picture of what an event will work on, and it makes event pages more informative. But it is also the foundation of this feature: the worklist is what tells us which articles are connected to an event, and therefore which editors working on those articles should hear about it.

Community members have been asking for structured data applied to worklists and editor bookmarks for years, see phab:T91902, phab:T187305, and phab:T408987 for some of that history. With this work, we also hope to take practical first steps in building such functionality on the wikis.

The worklist feature is currently in active development. We will update this page when it is available and share documentation on how to use it at that time.

How the notification will works

Once an organizer has created an event and added articles to its worklist, the feature will monitor edits to those articles. When an editor publishes a relatively significant edit to one of those articles, and that editor is not already registered for the event, a dialog will appear at the point of publication, letting them know an event is taking place that is working on that article and inviting them to join if they are interested.

A few important boundaries:

The trigger is a live edit, not editing history. Notifications are based entirely on an editor actively editing a worklist article after it has been added to the event. There is no lookback at past contributions and no profile-building. If an editor edits a relevant article after it appears on an event's worklist, they are notified; if they edited the same article before the event existed, they are not.
Notifications are only sent while the event is relevant. If an event has already ended, no notifications are sent. The feature only operates while an event is upcoming or in progress.
Joining is always optional. The notification is an invitation, not an enrolment. Editors can ignore it, opt out, or join, the choice is entirely theirs.

Imagine an editor who works on a football article. An organizer creates an event focused on sports articles and adds that football article to the event's worklist. After the article is added, the editor makes an edit and publishes it. At that moment, a dialog will appear: an upcoming event will be working on this article, and they are welcome to join.

What this means for editors

If you are an editor, here is what you should know:

Nothing changes about your editing experience right now. The worklist feature is still in development and the notification dialog is not yet live.
The dialog will only appear when you publish an edit to an article that has been added to an active event's worklist. There is no use of your editing history, and no data about you is collected in advance.
You will be able to opt out. Before any editor-facing notifications go live, we will build and document clear opt-out options. This will most likely be something that can be turned on/off in Preferences.

What this means for event organizers

If you run editing or campaign events on the wikis:

The worklist feature is being built for you. It will let you list the articles your event will focus on, and it will be useful for your own event management.
Your worklist is what makes the notifications possible. When you add an article to your event's worklist, that is what activates the connection to editors working on that article. The more completely you list the articles your event will focus on, the better the reach.

Deployment

The CampaignEvents extension is currently available across all Wikimedia wikis. Once the worklist feature is ready, we plan to make it available on all Wikimedia wikis where the extension is enabled.

The notification dialog will follow once we have gathered sufficient data from the worklist feature and are confident the experience is ready. We will share updates on this page as we get closer to that point.