Wikipedia talk:Ambassadors/Editing Fridays

Here's my pitch for Editing Fridays, which I sent to the ambassadors Google Group:

Hi friends!

Things are going to get busy soon with the new wave of classes.

In the meantime, Alex Stinson and I have an idea we want to try out: collaborative "editing Fridays" for the ambassadors.

Editing Fridays is an idea my friend Phoebe Ayers (a Wikimedia board member and long-time organizer of real-world wiki stuff) came up with: http://www.phoebeayers.info/phlog/?p=1765 The basic concept is to take some time each week -- like during lunch or after school/work on a Friday -- to edit content. It's a common pattern that Wikipedians sort of find a niche on the project, some important kind of organizational or maintenance or helping work that they enjoy and that needs doing. (For me, it was the Signpost for quite a while.) And as they do this, digging deeper into the project, they find themselves spending less and less time working directly on articles. Editing Fridays is a conscious effort to stay in touch with the crucial content-building work of Wikipedia. It's also a fun way for Campus Ambassadors who are new to Wikipedia to get more editing experience.

One of the great joys of Wikipedia is working to build an article with other editors working on the same article at the same time. (This is the idea behind the Wikipedia Spotlight project, which was quite fun when a critical mass of people got to editing together.) So rather than just edit on our own, what Alex and I were thinking was that we could pick a block of time each week, and an important but weak article, and work on it together.

So let's give it a try this Friday. I'll be starting at around 23:30 UTC (that's about when I can sign off of my staff account and sign on with my volunteer account). I was thinking we could work on Tradition -- a broad article that's hardly been developed. And maybe it will be the beginning of a weekly tradition!

We'll start beforehand by scrounging for sources and posting them on the talk page. Then we can start hacking out a more detailed table of contents... dividing the article into nice chunks so that it's easy to work at the same time without edit conflicts. Then we'll just spend a few hours improving this article as much as we can. You can stop in any time, and if the time block is terrible for you, feel free to pitch in before or after. And while you're editing, hang out in #wikipedia-en-ambassadors. It'll be rad!

I hope to see a lot of you there. Maybe if it goes well, we can start start inviting other people to join us. This might be a cool way to get more WMF staff editing (or editing again, as the case may be).

-Sage

PS: If you plan on being there, you can sign up at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Editing_Fridays --ragesoss (talk) 04:25, 2 February 2011 (UTC)