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@gmail.com Date: 5/23/18 7:07 PM (GMT-08:00) To: Wikimedia Education education@lists.wikimedia.org, Pine W wiki.pine@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-wikiped...
(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@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@wikiedu.org Date: 5/22/18 9:51 AM (GMT-08:00) To: Wikimedia Education education@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_...
I also put together a short blog post about it: https://wikiedu.org/blog/2018/05/22/wiki-education-publishes-evaluation-of-f...
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@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education _______________________________________________ Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education