Hoi,Return on investment is in our context all too arbitrary. Ask yourself; is investing in gender gap important but does it make the best return on investment. At the time I invested in documenting every person who died in Wikidata. It was a good investment because now people have taken over from me. Now at years end they use Wikidata to know who the "famous" people are.The question is not bang for the buck. The question is where are we weak and how can we change this. My current project is adding information about the nobility, the monarchs of particularly Asia. I am learning as I am doing this and I blog about it. All the investments in students working on Wikipedia does not make the quality of the subjects I write about better. Many of the stuff I am involved with has a point of view that I find is hardly neutral. It is however not the subjects students are taught.When a chapter, a community finds that a specific area is important to them, they should be able to do so. Their relevance and work / investment is not to be mistaken for a provable "return on investment". Because of the gender gap I do give more time to the women I find. That awareness is something you cannot measure but it does have a bearing. People with proper historic knowledge could do much more; they would study the relationship between marriages and peace between countries when they are ruled by monarchs. They would bring this out. At this time we do not even have many of the important battles and wars from the past... I am not saying this is more important but it paints the picture.When you want return on investment, there are the things people do not care about because it means that it changes the way things are. The best return on investment for Wikidata is by replacing red links and wiki links with references to Wikidata items. I dare anyone to find an argument how it will not bring more quality to any Wikipedia.My point is that we will only look into the things that we know and care for and in the process forget what we do it for. Money / investment is more of the same. I prefer that we trust more and do not measure using our own yard stick.NB I am into meters and metric myself :)Thanks,GerardMOn 10 January 2017 at 11:30, Jane Darnell <jane023@gmail.com> wrote:What's wrong with "return on investment"? And what is a "term of art" exactly? I agree with Kerry and Pine both about the frustrations, but I also agree with Asaf in terms of all the improvements WMF has made. The problem with making a yearly chapter plan is the lack of knowledge on what "impact" (still better than any other word) was achieved the previous year, making estimation nearly impossible. For the Dutch chapter, the various projects (WLM etc) have been able to come up with their own measurements over time. The problem with any new project is that there is never anything to base estimates on. I am a terrible estimator myself (even when I have pretty good data to base my estimate on), but I enjoy finding creative ways to measure things. Right now we are in general terrible at measuring project-related chapter stuff, and the stuff we are good at measuring is hard to share with the people who need it most (see Asaf's comments about active editors).Last night I had a long skype-chat with my gendergap friends in NL and we were plotting what we can measure now as a way of being able to measure impact after some (soon-to-be-dreamed-up) international women's day editing event in March. One of the problems with measuring edits is the need for anonymity that Asaf and Kerry talk about. So we need to somehow capture aggregated measurements, but how can we do this and how do we define a "gendergap-related edit"? Theoretically this is an edit made either by a new or existing editor -or- about a woman, and either one is prompted not by something random (organic growth model of Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia), but specifically by something in our gendergap workgroup "output" (whatever that is). The return on investment (=what we get for giving our personal time) is the increase in such edits over time. At the end of the day, we need to measure "our" increase of aggregated edits against the "normal" increase in aggregated edits, and if we can never measure this, why don't we all just shut up and go back to editing? Well I believe that these efforts will at some point become measurable and I have good faith that these efforts are not just "drops in the bucket". Sometimes it helps to just keep trying to reinvent the wheel, and until we do, we keep at least a list of new and improved articles that we are sure were prompted by our efforts (though these are certainly not 100% of all the edits we have inspired).On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 7:52 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:Hoi,With logic like "return on investment" you favour big over important. So no, please no.Thanks,GerardMOn 10 January 2017 at 07:23, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:To clarify my earlier comment about the term "impact": this has been used as a term of art by WMF in ways that I think are difficult even for native English speakers to grasp without specific instruction in how WMF uses the term. In practice, among grantees, the term seems to be used to mean a variety of things: "outcome", "output", "success", etc. I am hopeful that we can discontinue use of the word "impact" because of its confusing and varied uses in practice.
I am in favor of attempting to quantify how much return on investment is received on the money and time (including precious volunteer time) invested in and by the affiliates and the people who participate in affiliate work. I suggest using terms other than "impact" to describe these returns on investment.I share a number of Kerry's frustrations with WMF grantmaking for affiliates; some of those frustrations were factors in my decision to significantly decrease my involvement in Cascadia Wikimedians, although there were other significant factors as well.Pine
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