The power of trivia exists in many ways on Wikipedia. One way, trivia about obscure topics, is something Wikipedia is well known for with articles about various cartoon characters and the like. Another way is via trivia within articles about standard topics such as information about some celebrity eating at a cafe in Small Town, USA. This type of trivia is discouraged, often deleted, and often gets re-added later. But we’re trying to write an encyclopedia, so technically it shouldn’t be in the pedia.
Another, and encouraged form or trivia, is through the Did You Know program that encourages article creation and massive expansion with the reward of featuring the article on Wikipedia’s main page. Trivia is encouraged via the “hook” that is usually an interesting (i.e. trivial) bit from the article. Although a spot on the main page is not in the class of honors such as a Nobel Prize, it is a nice reward, and leads to many extra page views for the article. For instance the Alvin T. Smith House in Forest Grove was featured last March and received 5,000 hits the day it was featured on the main page, which is a bit more than the 5-10 per day it usually gets.
Last year, WikiProject Oregon had 153 DYKs, or just under one every two days. That’s pretty good, and a decent increase from 2007. This year, my hope is we can get it to once every other day, or about 183. Right now, through 18 days we 10, so we are on pace.
January 18, 2009 at 11:59 am
Thanks for the recap. I’ve been thinking of doing a 2008 recap — we accomplished so much last year, it’s hard to know where to start! I like your approach of a “mini recap” — much more manageable!
Other things I’m impressed by:
* we went from 5300 articles to 7200 Oregon-related articles
* we got a whole lot of articles promoted to to “Good article” status, more than doubling the number (under 23 to 47 articles).
* the “Collaboration of the Week” program, (started and maintained by you) really took off
* we got more connected outside Wikipedia, through the Portland WikiWednesday, the Oregon Encyclopedia outreach project, the Legislative Counsel action, etc.