What's Wrong With Wikipedia? How to Make Editing Fun

What's Wrong With Wikipedia? How to Make Editing Fun
Gamification Co - Concourse Exhibition Center
ON-DEMAND ONLY
We made a 7 mission gamified interactive onboarding tutorial to teach people how to edit Wikipedia in 1 hour. The journey involves badges, barnstars, challenges, and simulated interaction throughout a realistic quest to edit the article [[Earth]]. Game dynamics were used to create a sense of understanding, belonging, deep value identification, and technical proficiency. The use of games in open source and free culture online communities has great potential to drive participation. This talk will share the background of Wikipedia's editor retention decline problem, the inspiration for taking a gamified approach, a review of the design highlights, and a discussion of quantitative and qualitative data and survey analysis. The talk will end with opportunities for further future game-based portals for Wikipedia and leave time for questions about this notoriously prickly online community.

Jake Orlowitz
Wikipedia Administrator and Wikimedia Foundation Grantee, Wikipedia