Balazs, that was exactly what I had in mind: I'm interested in the "retention" rates. My experience in secondary education has returned practically zero "keepers": I will run a project or two each school year, the students will produce material under my - at times discreet, at times strict - guidance, and that's it: none of them gets hooked on the Wikipedia ideals - creating and sharing knowledge - to go on and become a regular editor. So I have to "start from scratch" each semester.

Perhaps the "competitive advantage" of the two extremes is the fact that Namibia and e.g. Massachusetts are both dedicated to learning for completely different reasons: I often use images of young learners in Africa as an example for my own pupils when they are indifferent to learning. Their eagerness to learn under the most adverse of conditions is inspiring and worth all the praise in the world. On the other hand, towns that are world-famous for their educational institutions have all the culture, manpower and infrastructure to cultivate new learning approaches such as Wikipedia. So I would imagine that these two extremes produce the most dedicated Wikipedia editors from an educational background. Those in-between need more motivation, more "open education culture" to be "injected" into their mentalities. Believe me it's not easy in Europe, and unfortunately the European Union is not helping... (speaking from the standpoint of a European citizen, in the European Year of Citizens 2013. Empowering the #1 volunteer-driven, open education platform in the world which is Wikimedia does not seem to be on their agenda, and unfortunately I am led to believe that it's because there's no profit in it).

----- Original Message -----

Sent: Monday, July 15, 2013 9:56 AM

Subject: Re: [Wikimedia Education] blog post from Namibia

I do not wish to go into more details than what I said :)

I totally understand all the risk elimination processes you use (pre-evaluation, targeted selection, etc.) and I have no criticism towards that.

You (Sophie, Tom) both have a seemingly well working educational programme(s) (or at least seems so) reaching out to multiple educational facilities in your countries. Think about reaching out to "lower levels" (none of the Wikipedias are edited by "quality people only" as of now or ever).

(Btw I would be really interested in the "keeping ratio" - how many students became regular editors from the masses you've reached - 1/8? 2/37? 1/100? 3/2637?)

Balázs