Thanks for the comments, LiAnna.
An issue that someone mentioned to me is that many academics choose not to
edit Wikipedia articles because editing Wikipedia is far less beneficial to
their careers than publishing academic articles and books. There may be
some benefit to academics from having their articles and books cited in
Wikipedia, but that is different from editing Wikipedia unless they add
their own articles and books as citations or have someone else do that on
their behalf (which I would discourage them from doing directly, although
recommending relevant articles and books on talk pages and disclosing any
potential COI could still be a net benefit so that other editors can
evaluate their recommendations). I am curious about how you were so
successful in recruiting academics to volunteer for this program. Can you
comment on that? It would be nice if academics and universities are
starting to feel that contributing to Wikipedia is valuable for academic
careers and/or as public service that they wish to encourage.
On a related subject, I will mention that to my surprise, some universities
now award scholarships to undergraduate applicants for e-sports. One would
think that extensively contributing constructively to Wikipedia, whether by
applicants for admission or by academics, would be viewed much more
positively by universities than participating in e-sports, but to my
knowledge no universities have made such a decision. If you know of any
change in academia about the value of editing Wikipedia articles by
applicants for undergraduate or graduate admission, I would also be
interested in hearing about that. Perhaps admissions policies are a
potential area in which the Wiki Education Foundation could lobby
universities to make changes. I realize that this is a tangent from the
subject of encouraging academics to contribute content themselves, but I
thought that I would mention this as a related topic of interest.
Thanks,
Pine
(
)
On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 9:49 AM, LiAnna Davis <lianna(a)wikiedu.org> wrote:
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 (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Education_
Foundation/Wikipedia_Fellows_pilot_evaluation#Adapting_the_pilot),
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:
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
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Education mailing list
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_______________________________________________
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https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
_______________________________________________
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https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
--
LiAnna Davis
Director of Programs; Deputy Director
Wiki Education
www.wikiedu.org
_______________________________________________
Education mailing list
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