I do agree that keeping public education on our minds year-round would be ideal. Should we create a larger, more well-defined team that works on topics year round? Maybe 4 different teams for the 4 different international observance days? (Water, Toilets, Hand-washing, Menstrual Health) Deadlines do work for me. The evidence: most of what I did on Wikipedia was done in the two days before 22 March.

We do have to accept that this is volunteer work. We want to make it easy for people to move in and out based on what works for them. For example, one person said, "After spending my whole day on WASH, I'm probably not going to volunteer my evenings for WASH, too." A few weeks later, though, she dug into one article she knew a lot about and ended up having fun making it better.

Dear Elisabeth,

Thanks for your efforts and excellent work regarding the Wikipedia articles. But I do not see this as a campaign, it should be an ongoing process and it would be nice if we could attract more young colleagues. At least to encourage them to contribute more actively and to help them learn how to do it. So, for the next World water day, may be we should just summarize what has been done during the past year.

Best regards,
Roumiana

Dear all,

World Water Day came and went - and left its mark on the view rate statistics of the associated Wikipedia article about World Water Day (tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en....ages=World_Water_Day). See screenshot - the data is for three years of view rates and the red arrow points to World Water Day of last week:



The day does generate lots of additional attention: 27,000 people went to Wikipedia on 22 March to find out more about World Water Day. This is slightly more than last year. The graph also shows that the attention is short-lived, hence the very pronounced peak.

Thanks to everyone who followed my call to help with the ten Wikipedia articles before World Water Day. We didn't have a massive turn-out this time * but I'd like to thank in particular Roumiana Hranova who gave several very targeted inputs and Marcos von Sperling who has provided expert content on other articles lately, too (and of course Diane Kellogg, my buddy on this ongoing mission).

If you ran events for World Water Day and have nice photos to share, please still send them to me, as I could include them in the Wikipedia article - ready for the next spike of viewers next year!

Kind regards,
Elisabeth

* I wonder why the lower turn-out, any particular reason? The LinkedIn group that we started for this purpose (www.linkedin.com/groups/10371678) had 14 members but no activity apart from posts by myself and Diane. Perhaps we didn't advertise enough. Perhaps people here on the forum don't get so excited about World Water Day. Perhaps people simply have no time or motivation to contribute to Wikipedia. Perhaps limiting it to 10 articles put people off. Any thoughts?

No, sorry that doesn't help (but thanks anyway), as I was looking for photos about World Water Day celebrations for the World Water Day article (and they have to be under an open access licence).

For the Wikipedia article on Nature-based solutions, I already found some good photos within Wikimedia Commons. I have used them now to illustrate the article on Nature-based solutions:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature-based_solutions

There was plenty of photos to choose from which is great. E.g. this one:

Dear Elisabeth,

may be this link will help
thewaternetwork.com/article-FfV/nature-b...at1kokuRvkvRAnfCcdDw

Regards,

Roumiana

A quick littly request: do you have any photos of World Water Day activities from last year which you could share? I'd quickly like to add some newer photos to the Wikipedia article on World Water Day which will see a spike in views tomorrow on 22 March, on World Water Day (hence the urgency).

The current four photos are OK but are a bit old now and haven't been changed since last year, so I would like to add some new ones. See here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Water_Day

This is the current image in the lead - I think we could do better:



If you have any photos that are either your own or are available under an open access licence, and you'd like to see them included in the Wikipedia article, please do send them to me ASAP (e-mail address below). The photos should should activities or events that took place to mark World Water Day, anywhere in the world.

Thanks,
Elisabeth

P.S. Diane and I are currently busy improving the text of the article as well. If you have suggestions or comments, do let us know. Last year, the view rates spiked at over 25,000 for this article. Who knows whom we might reach and inspire by this....

Hi all,

I'm currently working on improving the Wikipedia articles on ecosystems and nature-based solutions:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature-based_solutions

Both are OK but not yet great. E.g. they are difficult to understand for laypersons (low readability).
I'm feeling a bit lonely with this work though - anyone out there who feels like helping me? Even just by pointing out what the main weaknesses of the articles are?

Regards,
Elisabeth

Hi Elisabeth,

thank you! My Wikipedia user name is Sam3091 I have also sent the request to join the Linkedin group.

Happy editing to everyone!

Regards,
Samuela

Dear Samuela,
Welcome to the team! What is your Wikipedia user name?


Dear all,

I have done some further analysis on the current quality of the ten Wikipedia articles that we have chosen - in order to point you to the current shortcomings.

This list shows articles ranked by total score (from lowest/worst to highest/best) where the maximum achievable score would be 13 *:

- Nature-based solutions 6.6
- Antimicrobial resistance 6.9
- Ecosystem 6.9
- SDG 6 7.0
- Sustainable Development Goals 7.0
- Water pollution 7.7
- Fresh water 8.2
- World Water Day 9.2
- Gastroenteritis 10.5

* The total of 13 is made up like this: a maximum of 4 points for readability, 2 points for illustrations, 3 points for comprehensiveness, 3 points for sourcing and 1 point for formatting.

When I order the articles by quality of their leads, the ordering looks like this (8 is the maximum number of points for the lead; this is composed of 4 for readability, 1 for illustrations, 3 for comprehensiveness):

- Nature-based solutions 1.0
- Water pollution 1.7
- Resource recovery 2.0
- SDG 6 3.0
- Fresh water 3.5
- Antimicrobial resistance 3.7
- Ecosystem 4.0
- World Water Day 4.7
- Sustainable Development Goals 5.0
- Gastroenteritis 6.7

Finally, this is how it looks when ordered by number of views per day:

- SDG 6 20
- Nature-based solutions 21
- Resource recovery 78
- World Water Day 398
- Antimicrobial resistance 590
- Fresh water 789
- Sustainable Development Goals 2983
- Ecosystem 3121
- Gastroenteritis 3570
- Water pollution 5003

Are you now itching to get going to improve these? Please feel free to get started. We'll re-assess these scores again one month from now. Let's see how far we get together.

Any questions? Put them into this thread or into our LinkedIn group: www.linkedin.com/groups/10371678

Regards,
Elisabeth

Hello, thank you for accepting my request!

My name is Samuela and I am PhD student. My work topics are wastewater treatment and nutrient recovery so I would be happy to work on articles related to water pollution, wastewater, resource recovery or wetland. I'll try to increase the readability of those articles as well as the lead.

This is the first time as an editor but I'll try to do my best!

And here are the two things that I recommend focusing on when improving Wikipedia articles:

(1)

Improve the readability of the article, which means: making it easier to understand for a lay person. Aim for someone at the end of highschool as your reader. You can use this wonderful website (the Hemmingway App) to find the flawed or difficult parts of the article (just copy the text that you want to improve into the middle section of this page:

www.hemingwayapp.com/

The website will then point out to you where the weak points are, e.g. very long words, long sentences, passive voice etc.


(2)

Improve the lead section of the article. The lead is the bit that comes before the table of contents. It is meant to be around 4 paragraphs long and it is meant to be a summary of the article. Often it is too short and not actually a good summary of the entire article. I suggest that the lead should be at least 500 words long. The lead is like the abstract in a scientific paper, or like the executive summary of a report.

Getting the lead into good shape is so important as it's the first thing (and often the only thing) that people read. It may also be used by digital assistants like Alexa and Siri. Of the lead, the first paragraph is most important. And of the first paragraph it is the first sentence that is super important.

Wikipedia describes what a good lead is meant to be like here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section

Happy editing!
And if you don't want to edit in Wikipedia directly, the second best choice is to mark up the text in a Word document and ask someone else in the team to make the edits in Wikipedia.

Thanks for your time!

Elisabeth

P.S. If you want to go even further than the third thing to work on is the references: check that all references are still up to date, and insert new ones that are missing. Even if they are your own publications don't be shy to add them too if they are appropriate to be cited.

Thanks for your support, Diane!

For those interested in joining us, I have now set up a little LinkedIn group so that we can communicate more directly with each other. You can join the group here: www.linkedin.com/groups/10371678

Having the new LinkedIn group just means there is another option to collaborate and ask questions. You can continue to use this thread here on the forum or move across to the group (if you are a LinkedIn user) and communicate there. Whatever you prefer is fine by me!

If you are keen to get started but don't know how, you could also read this Wikipedia Meetup page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Sanitation_Wikipedia/2
We had set up that page for World Toilet Day last year. I haven't updated it yet but the information given there is still very applicable to our new drive (only that we had selected 70 articles that time, and now we have selected only 10 to make it more manageable).

Regards,
Elisabeth