Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Make it easier for users to find others to help in collaborating on writing articles

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Checking top authorship of related articles

One could ping currently active editors in the edit history of related articles. One can also view the stats of these pages and ping the editors who are in the top % by text authorship.

However, usually it is the case that people who'd like to or can contribute somewhere find your page and not vice versa – this is done for example by adding a wikilink to it in other pages, adding it to the see alsos of related pages, and so on. People will see your addition with that article they don't know about in their watchlist and/or will see it in the article. In addition one can add hatnotes like these: Template:Expand. Prototyperspective (talk) 20:25, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

That's true, mainly for already existing articles that one may expand. However, when it comes to new pages and making a series of articles (i.e. "Fishing industry in..."), it's quite difficult to bring traffic to those pages and to find people who may assist you in writing that/those page(s). Additionally, adding an expand template and linking a page may not bring as much traffic as wanted/needed, especially for pages/topics with not much traffic, so it's not a guaranteed method to seek help in writing an article(s).

As for pinging active editors, that's definitely a good way to bring attention, although again, it's more difficult for nonexistent pages. SonOfYoutubers (talk) 22:46, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

Invitation Listsː a feature that could help with this request

Hello @SonOfYoutubers & @Prototyperspective, thank you for sharing and/or commenting on this this wishǃ My name is Ilana, and I'm a part of the Campaigns team. I would like to introduce to you both to the Invitation Lists feature, which is a part of the CampaignEvents extension (an extension built by my team).

With the Invitation Lists tool, you can generate a list of people to invite to an activity, whether it's an event (like an edit-a-thon) or a small-scale collaboration with one or two people. The way it works is that you create a list of existing articles (up to 300 articles) on a wiki. Then, the tool looks at the list of articles to generate an invitation list of users, based on the the following criteria: the bytes they contributed to the articles, the number of edits they made to the articles, their overall edit count on the wikis, and how recently they have edited the wikis. You can then choose to reach out to the people in the invitation list via their user talk pages, email, or any other contact mechanisms you have available. You can find a demo video to learn more about how it works.

If this tool interests you, you can request to have the CampaignEvents extension enabled on your home wiki. If the extension is enabled on your wiki, the Invitation Lists tool (along with the Event Registration tool) is available to any user on the wiki that has the Event organizer right, which is controlled by local wiki admins (see an example of Event organizer right documentation on Meta-Wiki).

Meanwhile, the Collaboration List (formerly called the Event List) is available to all users on a wiki, if the CampaignEvents extension is enabled. The Collaboration List (see example on Meta-Wiki) is another way for people to discover events and collaborations that interest them. It features a global, automated list of events that use Event Registration, along with WikiProjects on a local wiki. This means that, if you used Event Registration for a collaboration that you organize, you could also promote the collaboration to interested parties via the Collaboration List.

I am happy to answer any questions you may have about Invitation Lists, the Collaboration List, or the CampaignEvents extension overall. Thank you again for proposing and/or commenting on this wishǃ IFried (WMF) (talk) 21:29, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

@IFried (WMF) Sounds like a great idea! I have a couple questions, mainly if this will be applied outside of wiki projects and integrated into Wikipedia as a whole? Another question is if this will, in the future, also include non-existent articles. Currently, as stated, it says that you create a list of already existing articles to generate a list of users, but, in the future, would it be possible to mix in both non-existent and existing articles, or even solely non-existent articles? From what I understand, this would complicate the tool since it generates a list of users based on the list of articles given, and so I assume that this would require alternative methods to create a list of users, but would it be possible? Again, thank you for the suggestion, I hope this advances past beta and becomes integrated. SonOfYoutubers (talk) 04:15, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

Hi @SonOfYoutubersǃ The CampaignEvents extension is available to any Wikimedia wiki that would like to enable it. Right now, it is currently enabled on multiple Wikipedias (Arabic Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia), Meta-Wiki, and Wikidata. Also, Indonesian Wikipedia recently voted to enable it, so it will be on that wiki soon too. If you would like the extension on your local wiki, you can follow these instructions for how to request it.

As for your question about including non-existent articles in the Invitation Listː This could be challenging, since the way the feature works is that it looks at the edit history of existing articles to see who made significant contributions to those articles. However, there is definitely a work-around that you could use to create an invitation list to work on a non-existent article. Here's howː You can create a list of articles that are similar to the article(s) you want to create (and you could use tools like the List-Building tool to do this). So, for example, let's say you want to create an article about a French singer from the 1970s. You could create a worklist of other French singers in 1970s (that already have articles on the wiki), and then you could see which usernames come up in the Invitation List. You would also see a link to the user pages of each person in the Invitation list, so you could look at their profiles and contribution history to get a better sense of whether they're a good candidate to invite. I hope this information helps, and I am happy to answer any more questions you may haveǃ IFried (WMF) (talk) 19:08, 20 November 2024 (UTC)