Thanks for looping me in Anna. The post was actually written by one of our volunteers in Egypt, so I can't take credit here.

We use "bytes" because that's how edits are measured on mediawiki and on wikimetrics. Bytes themselves can be rather meaningless, but give us an indication about the size of an edit, or more generally, about student activity. We also can convert bytes into more meaningful measurements like words and printed page equivalents. Since Arabic script is more complex than Latin script, we divide the raw byte total in half and then divide that by 4.5 for average word count; we divide the raw total by 2 and again by 1,500 to get the printed page equivalent (or simply divide the raw number by 3,000 if just looking at Arabic script bytes).

In the context of the Wikipedia Education Program, we have reported out on bytes but always try to give context to that number. The 7 million number is meaningful term-over-term to show activity (and students in Egypt monitor number of bytes to see who the top contributors are, so it has meaning locally in some sense), but may be more meaningful if converted to:
* 2435 pages
* 4.9 reams of paper
* 811,806 words

Hope that helps!
Tighe

--
Tighe Flanagan
Manager, Wikipedia Education Program
Wikimedia Foundation
+1.415.839.6885 x6880
tflanagan@wikimedia.org
education.wikimedia.org


On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 9:57 AM, Anna Koval <akoval@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thanks for mentioning that, Charles. I'm looping in Tighe Flanagan, who's not on this mailing list, for his input. He's not only the author of the blog post in question, he's also our Arab World Education Program Manager. :) 
Anna 

Anna Koval
Manager, Wikipedia Education Program
Wikimedia Foundation


On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 12:31 AM, Charles Gregory <wmau.lists@chuq.net> wrote:
Just regarding the second tweet, I don't know if "fall" or "autumn" is the preferred usage.  It also has northern hemisphere bias (which might be fine, being about Egypt, but it's something I easily notice!)

7 million bytes - is there a reason we don't say megabytes?

Regards,

Charles (User;Chuq)
Hobart, Australia



On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 2:11 PM, Carlos Monterrey <cmonterrey@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi all,

Here's the proposed SM for todays blog post regarding Ain Shams Wikipedia Education celebration. 


https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_media/Calendar#June_3

Egypt's Al-Alsun celebrates four terms of successful work on Wikipedia

  • f/g: Two years ago Egypt’s Ain Shams University launched the Wikipedia Education Program, becoming one of the first three institutions in the region to do so. Since then, Arabic Wikpedia has experienced steady and incremental growth, with students contributing over 7 million bytes of information in the 2013 fall term alone.https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/06/03/al-alsun-celebrates-four-terms-on-wikipedia/
-- 
Carlos Monterrey
Communications Associate
Wikimedia Foundation

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