Hi Pine,
You're exactly right that we spent a lot of staff time and thus expense on
this first round because it's a pilot -- to be able to put an extensive
report together like this, we needed to devote a LOT of staff time to
tracking everything that happened. Those learnings are invaluable in a
pilot program, and are now helping us actively work to scale up the impact
without significantly adding to the expense. As we note in the "Adapting
the pilot" section of the report (
),
we're experimenting with a wide variety of ways to run Fellows cohorts over
the next year in order to see how we can get more impact without
significantly adding staff time (and thus costs) to the mix. This model is
exactly the same one we followed with our Classroom Program -- a lot of
individual attention to instructors and students at the beginning so we can
garner learnings from what exactly happened in the program, then
experimenting with ways to successfully scale the impact without scaling
the costs at the same rate (back in 2010, we had about the same number of
staff supporting a program with 200 students a term as we currently do
supporting 8,000 students a term).
In terms of funding, we didn't have restricted grant funding for the
Fellows pilot, meaning funding for it came from a variety of the
institutional and individual donors who provide us unrestricted general
operating support for our work, including Wikipedia Fellows. Our
development director sees lots of potential for funding future rounds, and
we're actively working on securing funding so we can scale the program,
increasing its impact while making it more cost effective. I share your
hopes for this program, and think it has the potential to, as you put it, "be
successful, financially sustainable, and cost-effective in the medium to
long term." :)
LiAnna
On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 10:40 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As I wrote in my previous email, I get the impression
that this program
was relatively expensive compared to the number of content contributors
(who in this case are academics). I am keeping in mind that this was a
pilot, and that initial planning and the first iteration for many programs
like this require some one-time expenses and some debugging. My guess is
that for future rounds WikiEd can make the program be more efficient, and
that this will be a work in progress.
This program is not without financial costs, both for the pilot and for
future rounds. I return to the questions that I asked LiAnna in my previous
email: who funded WikiEd's expenses for this project, and what thoughts
does WikiEd have regarding how the project can be scaled up in a way that
is more efficient in terms of cost per participant?
I am hoping that WikiEd has a reliable funding source for the next round,
and that WikiEd is currently planning how to increase the
cost-effectiveness.
Stepping back to consider the larger problem of too few knowledgable
volunteers supporting too many novices throughout the wikiverse, I get the
impression that WMF is spending increasing amounts of money on training and
one-on-one help for technical and content contributors, both by directly
funding WMF employees and by providing funds to grantees. I anticipate that
the trend will continue, and I am anxious to see it be effective in
increasing content contributor longevity, content quality, content
quantity, diversity of contributors, and measues of community health. I am
glad to see WikiEd working in this domain with academics, and I would like
for this program to be successful, financially sustainable, and
cost-effective in the medium to long term.
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
-------- Original message --------From: James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com>
Date: 5/23/18 7:07 PM (GMT-08:00) To: Wikimedia Education <
education(a)lists.wikimedia.org>gt;, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re:
[Wikimedia Education] Evaluation report on Wikipedia Fellows pilot
Pine, why would you be concerned about the cost-effectiveness or
sustainability. This program looks great to me, except for the
mismatch between needs and recruiting.
On that point, there is an alternative to
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/files/
2015/09/figure-1-wikipedia-open-access1.jpg
(Beyond expanding it from the sciences to the humanities and ranking
it by the damage quality issues do to society for each topic.)
Which is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7cHxlGgEt4&t=46m
Math is the most valuable topic for donations. I'm interested in
suggesting improvements to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frobenius_manifold
On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 6:59 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi LiAnna,
Thank you for this report. Increasing the number of good-faith
contributors to
Wikipedia is always nice to see. I believe that at least a
few people in WMF, the affiliates, and the long-term volunteer population
have been interested for many years in increasing the number of academics
who contribute to Wikipedia.
The program sounds like it was relatively labor intensive on the part of
WikiEd,
and the number of academic participants was small. Who funded
WikiEd's expenses for this project, and what thoughts does WikiEd have
regarding how the project can be scaled up in a way that is more efficient
in terms of cost per participant?
I would like to see this project scale up, but I am concerned about its
cost-effectiveness and financial sustainability.
As you probably know, I am continuing my development of training
materials,
primarily videos, for new Wikimedians, although the audience
that I have in mind is more typical of ENWP's volunteer population instead
of being focused on the specific interests and mindsets of academic
contributors.
Regards,
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
-------- Original message --------From: LiAnna Davis <lianna(a)wikiedu.org>
Date: 5/22/18 9:51 AM (GMT-08:00) To: Wikimedia Education <
education(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: [Wikimedia Education] Evaluation
report on Wikipedia Fellows pilot
Greetings, all!
At the beginning of 2018, the Wiki Education Foundation ran a 3-month
pilot
to engage academic experts (mostly professors at
universities in the
U.S.)
to improve English Wikipedia articles related to
their areas of
expertise.
We're pretty happy with how the pilot turned
out -- we had some great
improvements to articles, and, more importantly for a pilot, we learned a
*lot* about how to run a program like this successfully.
The team that worked on it put together this extensive evaluation report
on
what we did, what we learned, and what the
outcomes were from the pilot:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Education_
Foundation/Wikipedia_Fellows_pilot_evaluation
publishes-evaluation-of-fellows-pilot/
We already have calls for applications out for additional cohorts to
begin
in June, and we're eager to learn even more
from future iterations of the
Wikipedia Fellows program. I hope sharing our learnings like this can be
helpful for other education programs in the Wikimedia movement who might
also be interested in engaging subject matter experts to edit.
We're happy to answer questions on this list or on the talk page of the
evaluation report on Meta.
LiAnna
--
LiAnna Davis
Director of Programs; Deputy Director
Wiki Education
www.wikiedu.org
_______________________________________________
Education mailing list
Education(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
_______________________________________________
Education mailing list
Education(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
_______________________________________________
Education mailing list
Education(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education