Greetings Wiki Loves Monuments list members,

We really appreciate all your interest in this report. We regularly seek program leader input to interpreting the data and developing next steps for learning from case examples. This applies to volunteer program leaders and grantees and we encourage continued participation in this shared learning effort. All our channels are open for you to choose how to reach us. The goal of our team and our reports is to serve movement partners, so we want to make sure we’re hearing and responding to your main concerns about this year’s iteration of the Evaluation Reports.  

That said, a lot of this thread seemed to be based on misunderstandings. We wanted to clear some of them up, particularly around the report’s background and inputs:

(1) Data collection efforts

Several people in this thread have asked how we gathered the data that we used in these reports. We got data from the voluntary data collection survey[1], grant reports and their linked event pages, blogs or supplemental reporting, and by using  online tools that are also available to the community[2]. This year’s project was first announced in September with a clear outline of the metrics sought. Data collection and input of metrics was open September through December initially and then extended through February. The extension to February was to extend direct reporting inputs two months longer to allow for grantees, whose program data were first mined from their grant reports, time to connect us to specific program leaders to fill in the gaps [3], as well as last call to the community along with our published list of identified programs January 2015.

(2) Data limitations

Some people in the thread have been concerned about the limitations of the data. We agree that we should be transparent about this, so each report has a special page that reviews the limitations of the data captured. Importantly, the Wiki Loves Monuments evaluation report is part of an expanded folio of the beta reports [4] modeled and discussed last year. As a set of reports we present overall limitations to the reporting and issues with data access across each program [5] in the overview of the reporting [6]. In those sections, we explicitly present the response rates of program leaders who reported directly, for Wiki Loves Monuments, that portion is 39% who program leaders which report directly.

(3) Diversity of goals

The issue of diverse goals for programs is also included among limitations overall and highlighted on the Wiki Loves Monuments limitations page [7] where we point out that, yes, eight different goals were selected by at least 50% of those reporting directly.  These reports are part of a discovery process with which we have engaged in on-going dialogue about challenges with metrics for quality, tools accessibility, tracking and privacy issues, issues with valuation across different socio-economic contexts, varied interests and foci, and other complexities of measuring impact across the movement. We will continue to have those conversations as we look to improve measurement strategies for understanding movement-wide efforts and impact.

(4) Over-simplification

Some of you were also concerned about over-simplification, and that nuance is lost when writing simple summary statements such as  “The average Wiki Loves Monuments contest …”  “...hurt ... to see.” We wrote these TL;DRs explicitly in response to feedback on the beta version of these reports last year. When we proposed the summaries then, we were told that would be appreciated. Truthfully, these can be really painful statements to have to write because we know they are, by definition, over-simplifications. However, we made that compromise in order to make the information accessible to many different audiences of readers.

Importantly, rolling up metrics across several different points of program implementation is a difficult task. By definition it sacrifices complexity, as does developing easy to digest snip-its of information that are requested by so many who are inundated by information in their inboxes.  So, yes, if you want the details, please skip them and read the more detailed narrative, or use them to help guide your interest to where you wish to read more deeply, there is a lot of data to wade through, we have worked to make it as accessible as possible. We have tried to format in a linguistically and visually consistent fashion to make these different reading routes available, but differentiated, for different reader preferences. Please feedback on how this is working and continue to share potential solutions as we are always open to improvements.  

This email does not answer every question raised on the thread; since we expect some of these questions will be asked again in the future we have outlined the most important questions asked, and answered on the report talk page [8].  Please let us know if we have overlooked any and join us there so that we can continue the discussion and have the information documented in a central location in order to use it in future strategy.

In behalf of the Learning and Evaluation team, thank you for your time and participation in learning together.

Sincerely,

Jaime Anstee

Links:

[1] Data Collection Announcement and Blog Announcement

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Evaluation/News/Round_II_Announcement

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/09/24/quantitative-versus-qualitative-more-friends-than-enemies/

[2] Tools (Wikimetrics, GLAMorous, CatScan, Quarry)

http://tools.wmflabs.org/

[3] Evaluation Reports (beta)

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Evaluation/Evaluation_reports/2013

[4] Blog on “Filling in the Gaps”

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/01/29/fill-in-the-gaps/

[5] Overall reporting limitations and data access

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Evaluation/Evaluation_reports/2015/Limitations

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wikiEvaluation/Evaluation_reports/2015/Data_access

[6] Reporting Overview (If you are new to the reports and evaluation initiative we suggest starting at the Important Definitions page and working your way right through the other tabs to answer your curiosities:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Evaluation/Evaluation_reports/2015/Important_definitions

[7] Wiki Loves Monuments report limitations

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Evaluation/Evaluation_reports/2015/Wiki_Loves_Monuments/Limitations

[8] Wiki Loves Monuments evaluation report talk page

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:Evaluation/Evaluation_reports/2015/Wiki_Loves_Monuments

________________________________________

Jaime Anstee, Ph.D

Program Evaluation Specialist

Wikimedia Foundation

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!

https://donate.wikimedia.org