We have been trying to engage the international development community in working with crowdsourcing of content in a wiki around water issues, https://akvopedia.org It hasn’t been very successful.
I have seen efforts around using a StackOverflow model to get engagement, but it hasn’t been successful.
The way we ended up getting content varied. We convinced those that had content to allow us to republish it in wiki suitable format. We hired an editor to do a lot of the work. We built in content publishing in the Akvopedia as a way to publish results from programmes.
It is interesting how reluctant a group of professionals can be at contributing, despite it being an appreciated source. We hear from UN organisations HQ in New York that when they get new staff they send them to the Akvopedia to read up on the subject. We know thousands of people read the content, from all over the world. I meet people at conferences that used the resource.
We specifically licensed the content to be portable to the Wikipedia, but the Wikipedia editors we have encountered are not very helpful when trying to move content over or linking content. The exception has been some content we have managed to get onto Wikiversity. But even there we met some resistance.
I think it is really important that we try different methods to spread this type of information. Something will stick at some point I am sure. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for sharing your experiences on this. I hadn't heard of Akvopedia before, so it's new to me.
Agree that finding the right solution that sticks: is read by many, consistently kept up-to-date and gets the level so detail correct/unbiased is difficult to do.
We're trying our best to do our version of this work. It's reaching some people, but we can always do more/better. It's really helpful to hear experiences/responses from elsewhere which we can learn what works and doesn't.
I have seen efforts around using a StackOverflow model to get engagement, but it hasn’t been successful.
The way we ended up getting content varied. We convinced those that had content to allow us to republish it in wiki suitable format. We hired an editor to do a lot of the work. We built in content publishing in the Akvopedia as a way to publish results from programmes.
It is interesting how reluctant a group of professionals can be at contributing, despite it being an appreciated source. We hear from UN organisations HQ in New York that when they get new staff they send them to the Akvopedia to read up on the subject. We know thousands of people read the content, from all over the world. I meet people at conferences that used the resource.
We specifically licensed the content to be portable to the Wikipedia, but the Wikipedia editors we have encountered are not very helpful when trying to move content over or linking content. The exception has been some content we have managed to get onto Wikiversity. But even there we met some resistance.
I think it is really important that we try different methods to spread this type of information. Something will stick at some point I am sure. Keep up the good work.