Ok, I think I got it. Your program aims content creation only (regardless
of editors), those editor engagement projects are solely focusing on editor
recruitment (regardless of the content created) and Mina aims both content
creation and editor recruitement somewhere in between.
Was this your original aim, or you simply dropped somewhere on the way the
user recruitment part?
Cheers,
Balázs
PS: The Namibian program is much more similar to Mina's than yours.
2013/7/15 Everton Zanella Alvarenga <everton.alvarenga(a)okfn.org>
Because of Mina's comment, just adding bellow some
of my conclusions on
the education program.
2013/7/15 Mina Theofilatou <theoth(a)otenet.gr>
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.
1. *This education program is not about bringing new contributors to
Wikipedia in the short term*: if we regard the profile of who
contribute to Wikipedia, which is a volunteer work, and how school tasks
are generally assigned to students, where they need to proove they learned
somethings from what was taught, according to our results only a few
students can become active Wikipedia contributors. On the other hand...
2. *This education program is about improving the Wikipedia quality
and retaining professors to support the sharing of free knowledge and
Wikimedia projects*: improving the Wikipedia quality may be understood
in many different ways and this should be more clearly define for the
program as a whole. Although we can have high quality content of specific
fields of knowledge when the Wikipedia assignments are successful, this may
not be what will have the biggest educational impact on potential readers
for a *educational* project. To mobilize and empower the next
generation of human-knowledge generators, we should retain professors after
participating of the program that can understand: 1. the importance of
freely sharing online educational resources of high quality; 2. how to set
Wikipedia (Wikimedia?) assignments on their courses - having in mind the
benefits for students and for the readers of the content that is supposed
to be created. It is important to realise that*Wikipedia is not a cause
*, open educational resouces with high quality is and Wikipedia have
to be seen as one possible tool.
From
here<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Brazil_Program/Reports/wep-general#L…
.
Comments welcome.
If we want bring editors, most of our focus should be targeted at online
strategies - for instance, the editor engagement
projects<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editor_engagement>seem to have some
good things. I made some comments about that whislt
discussing the planning for the catalyst program in
Brazil<http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Programa_Catalis…
.
For short, Wikipedia is an online community. And offline activities won't
bring the desired goals that the strategic
planning<http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic…
a few years ago.
Comments about that also welcome, mainly if you disagree.
Tom
--
Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
OKF Brasil - Rede pelo Conhecimento Livre
http://br.okfn.org
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