The core question, one must ask if one wants to improve outreach is how
much effort one wants to put in because, remember,every action takes effort
& preparation & most importantly follow up. Obviously, all this effort will
have to be shared and encouraging and motivation of outreach volunteers
needs to be done to encourage them to take up all aspects of outreach.
If the will is there, the way is open. There are lots of hints online now
thanks to those of the Community who so painstakingly took the trouble to
write down all these aspects.
Conversely, it is good news, because the success of outreach can now be
seen to be a matter of effort. Lots of work WILL give dividends.
Motivation of outreach volunteers however remains core to the issue.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
------------------------------------------------------
On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 4:13 PM, Hisham <hisham(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Feb 18, 2012, at 3:52 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan wrote:
On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 17:12, Nitika <ntandon(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
The following is a post I've put up on the
India Program page on meta
regarding outreach (Please see:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:India_Program/Outreach_Programs).
Please do comment on the page itself; I'm posting it on this mailing list
only to make sure it doesn't slip your attention.
Bumping up to grab attention. I know there are many folks with years of
outreach
experience on the list. Can you please comment on the talk page?
(Or even here, I could do the job of copypasting!) It is important to
discuss, get perspectives / approaches towards outreach right since we
would spending a lot of time,energy, donor money on this and its essential
to design them well so we could make it effective and better.
Slightly related :-
<shamelessplug>
http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Digital_Outreach_and_Ph…
</shamelessplug>
Bumping right back to get attention since this is such an important topic.
Here are 10 questions that we need answers for and the India Program team
is grappling with
1. Do we know what is the right profile of audience for an outreach
session? (tech or non-tech / students or professionals / age group /
language group?) We must avoid shooting in the dark and that's the only
way that the current conversion rate of <0.1% (my guesstimate) can be come
more reasonable.
2. How do we draw the right balance between giving them enough
information during and outreach session that the feel adequate to
successfully edit but not too much that they get intimidated and run off?
3. Can we make sure that ALL workshops are not theory sessions but
that everyone has a computer in front of them and can actually do very
basic editing - like creating a user name and making 5 edits, even if they
are not particularly complex. Theory will get us nowhere. This also has
implications on the maximum number of attendees as well as our not doing
sessions where all we have a box to stand on and give random gyan.
4. What can we do to make sure we stay in touch with newbies post the
session. We have to figure out an efficient way of reaching out after the
workshop because their heads will be full of doubts once they actually
start editing. Also, once they have been "warmed-up" by the workshop, we
must gently nudge them read up more and click on edit.
5. How can we anticipate the inevitably teething up issues for newbies
and proactively address them - in the outreach and in the post-outreach
contact. I'm wildly generalising but I fear I might be right that we
already know the typical problems newbies. .First of all, they want to
create brand new articles - instead of looking at incremental improvements
to existing articles. Secondly, especially on en-wp, they find it
difficult to figure out what topic to work on because "everything is
covered fully" - which we know is not the case. Thirdly, they stumble on
notability, NPOV and MoS. Fourthly, they find referencing tedious.
Fifthly, some mess around and find vandalism fun. Sixthly, something like
notability isn't immediately clear to them because one often approaches
things with a insular frame of reference. Can we address clinically
address these in workshops?
6. How do use social networks effectively - but not get drowned in
them. fb is a great way of attracting users to workshops or photothons -
but is a terrible place to discuss policies. How do we get the right
balance?
7. Specifically for Indic languages, how do we make sure that we have
relatively less rigid and comprehensive policies (which work for en-wp with
tens of thousands of editors - but is totally impractical when we have <50
editors which is the case for all but 3 Indic communities.)
8. Specifically for en-wp, how do we provide some kind of additional
support on encyclopedic writing in English - especially given that English
is not a native language. Would having newbie English editors from India
as part of some kind of a group with experienced English editors from India
(who would therefore be intimately familiar with the linguistic challenges)
to support them make sense and is it practical? (While I write this, I am
also acutely aware that we can't right a lifetime's education of a newbie -
but can we make useful baby steps?)
9. Is there a way we can get existing editors who might not be
confident of their public speaking skills - but are great 1-on-1 - to adopt
newbies and have mini workshops on an individual basis? (I know this is
inefficient - but it affords them a chance to contribute in outreach as
well and over time, I am confident that many will gain the self-assurance
to handle larger audiences.)
10. Lastly, and most certainly not the least, how do we measure the
impact of every single outreach session, analyse the reasons for success or
otherwise? How do we disseminate these learnings to the community?
Have posted these on the page Logic referred to
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:India_Program/Outreach_Programs
<shameless-re-plug>
http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Digital_Outreach_and_Ph…
sounds
like a fantastic session to attend!
</shameless-re-plug>
hisham
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