Wikipedia:Collaboration of the week

Collaboration of the Week (COTW; also Collaboration of the Month, etc.) is a type of program intended to encourage and support collaboration on Wikipedia or similar collaborative web sites. At its core, the idea is simply to identify one or more topics (typically articles) for improvement, so that the members of a collaborative community can work together, building a sense of affiliation, getting to know one another, and achieving more substantial improvements than might be possible through individual effort. A COTW is typically administered informally by volunteer members of a WikiProject.

In c.2011, a research team at Carnegie Mellon University studied the impacts of Collaboration of the Week programs, and found them to be effective: We examined the capability of volunteer groups performing collective tasks in the context of Wikipedia. We investigated self-managing groups – Wikiprojects, and a group-goal setting mechanism -- "collaboration of the week"—that direct members to work on specified tasks. Our data contained 26 Wikiprojects and 618 collaborations. We found that group members choose to work on tasks highlighted by the group goals more than do non-members; furthermore, by working on these specific tasks, group members increase their general group-related contributions and citizenship behaviors. Our results indicate that group self-governance is a powerful and effective way to address the control/motivation paradox in online volunteer organizations.

Until 2006, there was a "collaboration of the week" program for all of English Wikipedia. Wikipedia's sister site Wikisource has several site-wide programs as well, such as the Proofread of the Month.