User:K0D3R/TWA

The Wikipedia Adventure is an online guided journey, a learning tutorial, and an educational game designed to make an editor's first 100 edits a positive and encouraging experience. The game takes the user from the first rudiments of editing—registering an account, creating a user page, basic markup — all the way through to more intermediate tasks such as adding images and references and asking for help at noticeboards.

Description
The Wikipedia Adventure is a 7-mission interactive guided tour which introduces new editors to basic editing, social, and policy skills. It was started in 2011 as a script and built in 2013 as an Individual Engagement Grant through WMF.

Purpose
Learning to edit Wikipedia could be hard, frustrating, confusing, and overwhelming for some editors. The purpose of this game is to remove all of that and create a learning experience that 'curates' a person's first impressions and lessons of Wikipedia. So, rather than walk away from the site feeling like it is incomprehensible or (worse) threatening, users will graduate from The Wikipedia Adventure ready to face the challenges and opportunities of the real site and community.

Goals
One of the Wikimedia Foundation's core goals has been new editor engagement and active editor retention. The Wikipedia Adventure targets these two goals by reducing the steepness of the learning curve to joining the community. If more new editors have a better first experience with Wikipedia's concepts and mechanics, more will go on to be active editors. If those editors are prepared to deal with some of the common pitfalls of the community, then they will be more likely to remain on as productive contributors to the community.

Description
The Wikipedia Adventure is an online guided journey, a learning tutorial, and an educational game designed to make an editor's first 100 edits a positive and encouraging experience. The game takes the user from the first rudiments of editing—registering an account, creating a user page, basic markup — all the way through to more intermediate tasks such as adding images and references and asking for help at noticeboards.

Game
The game centers around the hypothetical article Earth (actually a modified form of the Simple English Wikipedia's article on Earth). Earth was selected as a focal point, because it has literally universal appeal and avoids the cultural favoritism involved in choosing a representative article that may only appeal to some readers (e.g. The Beatles or Mother Teresa).

Through a realistic but not 'live' emulated interface, the user gets to experience what happens at a real article. It begins with an invitation from another user to work on the Earth article and involves interactive tasks such as typo-fixing, identifying reliable sources, crafting writing from a neutral point of view, understanding core content policies, and even dealing with vandalism and nonconstructive edits.

Focus
The game focuses on more than just the technical mechanics of editing, infusing the script with mock interactions with simulated 'real' editors. Some of them are friendly, some are less so—and the user has the experience of learning about how to communicate in a productive and effective manner. At the heart of the game is the lesson of cooperation and collaboration, that is what makes Wikipedia work the spirit of the people who write it and that anyone can be a part of it if they learn a few basics.

Missions
Throughout each mission editors complete editing and policy challenges about Wikipedia, so that their progress in the game is matched by their progress as real editors. The ambitious goal is that new editors would not feel out of place or ignorant as they confront the actual editing environment of Wikipedia but instead would be prepared and even enthusiastic to get started.

Conclusion
As a result of this game, Wikipedia will have another tool in its arsenal to educate new users and improve their initial experience as members of the community. The game serves the many, but in a personalized way. As an online game, it scales easily and can be delivered to tens, hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people. There is no limit to the game's potential exposure; if effective, it could be a standard element of welcoming new editors across all of our 280+ languages.

It's important that the game's expansion would continue beyond the initial implementation. This would be facilitated in several ways. For one, the game's script and code are all already released under open source, 'free' licenses that permit use, adaptation, or even commercial applications. That would be essential to allowing others to build on the platform. Second, the platform itself would be designed to allow other users to build their own tutorials and modules. We hope that the editor will propose or build additional missions, and translate the game into the context or language that suits their community and niche best.