TED conferences/TED speakers challenge/Lessons learned

The TED speakers challenge was set to run from 6 June 2016 to 6 July 2016 and due to Wikimania and end-of-school vacations, probably did not get as much community attention as it might have had it taken place earlier in the year. A last-minute decision on the 6th to extend the challenge by one week was surprisingly successful, possibly because Andy & Jane were able to talk about the challenge at Wikimania.

That said, with 150 new articles spread over 45 language Wikipedias, the concept of a writing challenge to encourage multi-lingual re-use of content based on existing lists has proven its worth yet again. As a first step to summarize some findings about how this challenge was setup and how the results reflected expectations, this page tries to collect concepts and issues and how they were dealt with.

Expectations

It's hard to make estimates for writing challenges, but based on previous results run internationally, an estimate of a few hundred new articles was made. The points system took some time to agree on, with the emphasis being on inclusion (Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Commons contributions could earn points) and though only 12 languages were initially included in the data donation, no effort was made to restrict the challenge to those languages and in the end three more languages were added. The tracked languages have translated labels in their TED talk items, but didn't include any data for their speaker items. Beforehand, Andy & Jane linked TED talk items to speaker items and tried to create labels for speaker items in as many languages as possible. Improvements to Wikidata speaker labels, which is needed for many languages, was not a candidate for points. Though points were included for raising articles to a certain quality level, it was already known and discussed that this is a slippery slope as quality is widely different among subjects and Wikipedia language projects.

Without stating it explicitly, rough expectations were that the numbers of new articles would be contributed according to the size of various Wikipedias, with English leading, as the prizes are books in English. On reflection, it would have made more sense to include prizes that were not books in English, such as T-shirts or coffee mugs. Also, since English already had well over a thousand articles of the 1700 or so speaker articles, it also makes sense that it would be more difficult to create new articles in that language. Beforehand lists were created per language, with all languages included that had already enabled the ListeriaBot user account, enabling easy list updates. For tracked languages that had translated TED talk labels, the Dynamic lists feature was used to enable users to browse talks on Wikidata in their language.

Results

Birthplaces of TED speakers

Bubble chart of occupations of TED speakers

Main page: TED conferences/TED speakers challenge/Data

Some basic numbers:
New articles created = 162
Articles translated = 76
Articles improved = 12
Number of participants = 22
Number of languages = 47
Photos added = 576
Referenced statements added on Wikidata = 191

The winners are selected based on self-reporting of points. As is common in writing challenges, a healthy competition took place among lead participants. The list of winners is on the Data page. A total of 47 language Wikipedias took part and of the selected 15 languages that were included in the data donation, only 12 ended up with new articles. It is unknown whether the Listeria lists (see lists per language) were actively used or whether participants just randomly selected articles to write based on looking up their favorite TED speakers. In fact it is still unknown whether participants were TED fans or not! About a third, or 55 of the 150+ created articles were in the tracked languages. Since the tracked languages included mostly large Wikipedias it would seem that translated TED talk labels had little to no effect on participation. Also worth noting was a comment by a German speaker that German Wikipedia doesn't lend itself to writing challenges in general because of pending changes, which means the participant must wait for such changes to be approved before counting them and no one working in such a challenge wants to wait.

Regular updates on challenge progress could not take place for all facets of the competition as the points system was a bit complex. New articles, a measurement made easy through the "Site statistics" feature of the Mix-n-Match tool, was monitored and posted on the Data subpage of the competition. The updates were also posted with a link in Twitter and Facebook and this seemed to help attract participants throughout the challenge. The languages page was designed to allow participants to browse both the list of speakers as the list of talks. Participant Papuass ran a query to track down articles about female speakers with the most interwikilinks without an article in their language Wikipedia. Presumably articles with the most interwikilinks are also the most notable and therefore the easiest to create new articles for.

It is unknown how many participants saw the posted status updates or whether they were influenced by it. This feature measures the number of articles per language of a dataset, and comparing these over time with the start position led to some interesting results in terms of #new articles vs. percentage of coverage increases per language Wikipedia.

Top ten Wikipedias with new articles created during the competition (several tied for 10th place)

wiki	Tracked?	Language	#articles 6 June	#new articles	Total	%increase
ukwiki		Ukrainian	151	23	174	15.2%
hywiki		Armenian	53	20	73	37.7%
enwiki	Y	English	1161	17	1178	1.5%
lvwiki		Latvian	60	12	72	20.0%
fawiki	Y	Farsi	251	11	262	4.4%
nlwiki	Y	Dutch	297	10	307	3.4%
ruwiki	Y	Russian	305	5	310	1.6%
scowiki		Scots	45	5	50	11.1%
tgwiki		Tajik	12	4	16	33.3%
dewiki	Y	German	521	3	524	0.6%
arwiki		Arabic	201	3	204	1.5%
plwiki	Y	Polish	244	3	247	1.2%
shwiki		Serbo-Croatian	75	3	78	4.0%
bnwiki		Bengali	67	3	70	4.5%

Top ten Wikipedias with a starting #articles greater than 100 with the highest increase in coverage during the competition

wiki	Tracked?	Language	#articles 6 June	#new articles	Total	%increase
ukwiki		Ukrainian	151	23	174	15.2%
fawiki	Y	Farsi	251	11	262	4.4%
nlwiki	Y	Dutch	297	10	307	3.4%
ruwiki	Y	Russian	305	5	310	1.6%
arwiki		Arabic	201	3	204	1.5%
enwiki	Y	English	1161	17	1178	1.5%
plwiki	Y	Polish	244	3	247	1.2%
nowiki		Norwegian	177	2	179	1.1%
cawiki		Catalan	187	2	189	1.1%
hewiki		Hebrew	212	2	214	0.9%

Top ten Wikipedias with a starting #articles less than 100 with more than 1 new article resulting in the highest increase in coverage during the competition

wiki	Language	#articles 6 June	#new articles	Total	%increase
hywiki	Armenian	53	20	73	37.7%
tgwiki	Tajik	12	4	16	33.3%
lvwiki	Latvian	60	12	72	20.0%
scowiki	Scots	45	5	50	11.1%
uzwiki	Uzbek	19	2	21	10.5%
bnwiki	Bengali	67	3	70	4.5%
shwiki	Serbo-Croatian	75	3	78	4.0%
srwiki	Serbian	78	2	80	2.6%
tawiki	Tamil	81	2	83	2.5%

Pageviews of TED article per language Wikipedia

Using the pageviews api for "langviews" you can see how often the article about TED itself was read during the challenge, which gives an indication of the popularity of TED as an organization overall. Using the English Wikipedia article for and looking at the dates as of 7/12/2016 results in the date range 6/23/2016 - 7/12/2016. These are the results per language, which show significantly more interest in English than in any other language:

#	Language	Page title	Pageviews	Average
Totals	56 languages	38 unique titles	93,760	4,688 / day
1	en	TED (conference)	39,809	1,990 / day
2	ja	TED (カンファレンス)	10,164	508 / day
3	es	TED	7,222	361 / day
4	fr	Conférence TED	5,199	260 / day
5	de	TED (Konferenz)	4,534	227 / day
6	ru	TED (конференция)	4,217	211 / day
7	zh	TED大会	4,033	202 / day
8	ko	TED	3,384	169 / day
9	pt	TED (conferência)	3,382	169 / day
10	it	TED (conferenza)	2,163	108 / day
11	tr	TED Konferansları	1,804	90 / day
12	fa	تد	1,246	62 / day
13	ar	تيد (مؤتمر)	1,152	58 / day
14	pl	TED (konferencja)	1,143	57 / day
15	nl	TED (conferentie)	1,126	56 / day
16	vi	TED (hội thảo)	524	26 / day
17	sv	TED (konferens)	407	20 / day
18	he	ועידת TED	368	18 / day
19	hu	TED (konferencia)	276	14 / day
20	cs	TED	213	11 / day
21	uk	TED (конференція)	196	10 / day
22	da	TED (organisation)	163	8 / day
23	fi	TED	152	8 / day
24	sk	TED	84	4 / day
25	no	TED (konferanse)	82	4 / day
26	ca	TED	78	4 / day
27	el	TED (συνέδριο)	64	3 / day
28	bg	TED	51	3 / day
29	th	เทคโนโลยี การบันเทิง และการออกแบบ	42	2 / day
30	ro	TED (conferință)	41	2 / day
31	zh-yue	TED (會議)	40	2 / day
32	ps	ټېډ	30	2 / day
33	hy	TED (համաժողովներ)	29	1 / day
34	hr	TED (konferencija)	26	1 / day
35	simple	TED (conference)	26	1 / day
36	lv	TED	23	1 / day
37	sr	ТЕД (конференција)	22	1 / day
38	lt	TED (konferencija)	19	1 / day
39	af	TED	17	1 / day
40	bo	TED	16	1 / day
41	kk	TED конференциясы	16	1 / day
42	hi	टेड (सम्मेलन)	15	1 / day
43	mk	ТЕД (конференција)	15	1 / day
44	gl	TED	15	1 / day
45	bs	TED (konferencija)	14	1 / day
46	sl	TED (konference)	14	1 / day
47	et	TED	14	1 / day
48	be-tarask	TED	12	1 / day
49	eo	TED (konferencoj)	12	1 / day
50	be	TED, канферэнцыя	11	1 / day
51	ml	ടെഡ് (സമ്മേളനം)	11	1 / day
52	scn	TED (cunfirenza)	11	1 / day
53	sq	TED	10	1 / day
54	is	TED (ráðstefna)	9	0 / day
55	tt	TED (конференция)	7	0 / day
56	ta	ரெட் மாநாடு	7	0 / day

Links to TED.com

Using Quarry it is possible to find links out of a Wikimedia project to an external website, in this case TED.com. Example is here Links from English Wikipedia to TED.com.

Language	Count 9 March	Count 21 July	Query URL
en	2591	2695	http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/7963
de	212	219	http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/7964
es	207	218	http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/7965
fr	266	270	http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/7966
it	136	144	http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/7967
nl	117	126	http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/7968
ja	229	237	http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/7969
pl	127	135	http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/7970
ru	163	178	http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/7971
sv	61	69	http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/7973
vi	53	58	http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/7974

Social media outlets

Social media posts were added to facebook and twitter through various personal feeds using the hashtag #TEDwiki. Many more tweets and fb posts were made without the hashtag however. Specific aspects of the challenge were posted such as the Sparql query on birthplaces of TED speakers. No post was made at the official Wikipedia facebook page however, though any Wikimedian can make requests for posts there through the message facility. An announcement post made by TED was reposted to the facebook groups Wikidata+GLAM and GLAM-Wiki Global. Though the hashtag was posted on the challenge page and users were encouraged to use it in edit summaries, this was clearly not communicated well and only one user in fact used it , see Wikipedia edits by hashtag. Perhaps it is still early days for hashtag use in edit summaries?