(Crossposted)

Hello everyone!

As many of you may remember, the Program Evaluation and Design team invited program leaders, including many of you, to voluntarily participate in our first Data Collection Survey. Thank you for your participation! As a pilot survey, it has provided us insight into what you are tracking regarding data in the programs you implement, and how we can better support you in order to evaluate the impact your programs are making.

We have been looking at that data for our current focus programs: edit-a-thons, Wikipedia editing workshops, GLAM content donations, on-wiki writing contests, Wiki Loves Monuments and other photography initiatives. When the survey closed, we had responses from 23 program leaders from around the world, who reported on 64 total programmatic activities. Our team also collected data from 54 additional programmatic activities, to fill out areas where we had gaps in reporting.

We're excited to announce that we have our first draft report ready for you to. It includes data reported and collected about edit-a-thons:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Programs:Evaluation_portal/Library/Edit-a-thons

We evaluated the impact edit-a-thons are having based on their goals, which often include the creation of content on wiki, and the recruitment and retention of new editors. This report is not final and we would like to improve it over time. Since this is our first time doing a report like this, we want your feedback.

After you take the time to read the report, we would like your feedback on the talk page about:

• Whether the report is understandable and written in a way that makes it useful to you
• What kind of information you would like to see more of / less of
• What we could do to improve the collection of data (e.g. would you rather like to send us your cohort data and let us do the analysis? – this might help with reducing your workload)
• Any other feedback you have.

Secondly, we want to know if program leaders have more impactful or better quality data than is reported here. We had a lot of great data come through, but, we also know, with 26 edit-a-thons being reported, there are a lot more out there doing this specific kind of event. So please tell us:Can you do better than is reported here? This is a chance to brag and celebrate the work you've been doing, but didn't perhaps get a chance to report during this first survey. We can't wait to hear back from you!

So, in case you have run an edit-a-thon that you think was more successful than any other edit-a-thon already included in our report, please send a quick email to sarah@wikimedia.org and I will follow up with you on the next steps.

Over the next couple of weeks we'll be publishing additional reports, using your feedback. Thank you so much for your time and contributions. And if you need anything, feel free to email me or contact me on wiki.

-Sarah