On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 4:37 AM, Florence Devouard <anthere9(a)yahoo.com>

> On 7/28/12 5:58 AM, Tilman Bayer wrote: >> >> Hi all, >> >> the Wikimedia Foundation's 2012-13 Annual Plan has just been published

>> >> >>

>> >> >>

>> >> The plan was approved by the Board of Trustees at its meeting in >> Washington, DC, at Wikimania, and previously outlined to the >> Foundation staff and interested community members at the monthly staff >> meeting on July 5, 2012. We were planning to publish the video >> recording of that meeting at this point, but encountered technical >> difficulties; the video will hopefully become available soon. >> > > Slide 8 : "How are we doing against the 2012 targets" > > I was stopped by > > "The Global Education Program is now the largest-ever systematic effort

> the Wikimedia mouvement to boost high quality content creation, with a > projected addition of 19 million characters to Wikipedia through student > assignements 2011-2012" > > OF COURSE, we all know that WMF needs to glorify what it is actually > initiating/in charge of. And that's fair enough. > > But seriously... I would feel fine with us trying to claim that the GEP

> the largest system effort to INCREASE the number of articles. It is

> true. > > But we all know that the result is... so and so. Possibly good content,

> also lot's of crap being reverted and deleted afterwards. Claiming it

> largest effort to boost high quality content is not only disingenous...

> I actually find it counter productive and a tiny bit offensive toward

Over the last years, the Foundation has been trying to base decisions and evaluations more often on objective data and research rather than on personal opinions and impressions. Of course, here the term "high quality" does not necessarily mean, say, featured content (e.g. on the English Wikipedia, featured articles currently make up less than 0.1% of the total articles), but instead refers to comparisons with average contributions. Someone from the Education Program will be able to give a more thorough overview of the efforts to evaluate its results, but for example I'm aware of

. The quantitative method used there has its limitations, but similar methods are employed in independent (i.e non-WMF) research about Wikipedia in the academic literature.