Even these answers would be interesting for me. Hope we get them soon.
On 2 Jun 2012 11:04, "Anirudh Bhati" <anirudhsbh@gmail.com> wrote:On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 1:04 AM, Anirudh Bhati <anirudhsbh@gmail.com> wrote:Noopur, thank you for posting the report. I have a few questions for the India Programs team which I have listed under, would appreciate if you could respond:1. How do you plan on scaling the Social Media pilot beyond your own networks?
The Social Media Pilot does not run on our personal networks. However, given the interstitial nature of social networks, we might have mutual friends with people. Otherwise, most of these participants are people from previous outreach sessions and users who had 'liked' our various pages and activities but did not know what to do after that.
Coming to the scaling bit, even outside the current network, I welcome you and all other Wikipedians to help us spread the word and even add a few friends of yours who might be interested in learning about Wikipedia. The next steps are to reach out to interest groups on social networks, such as - and this is purely by way of example - groups that are interested in railways or modern Indian art, etc and see if the profile of members of these groups is such that there might be potential new editors and explore if we can generate curiosity in these members to join our group.
The work that has been done on Odia and already done (at least building the group, if not the more methodical approach to encouraging new editor) on Kannada point to the potential of interest groups. Kannada - for instance - already has 2000+ members. In both these cases, they drew members from people who were active or interested in language interest social groups (in these cases, the interest is the language itself.)
Additionally, social media is being used in various ways by communities across India including the Assamese, Bengali, Tamil and Malayalam and we want to observe them, how they reach out to people, what works and what doesn't before we make more interventions.
2. Do you believe you can effectively create a mechanism for recruitment of editors through this project in a manner that justifies the cost and time involved? I am asking this because I noticed that you make serious attempts at trying to convince users to edit Wikipedia pages.
There is a fine difference between convincing people to edit Wikipedia and going that extra mile to help them out. In my humble opinion if these are users who have previously liked various pages of ours and activities, the former is already achieved. However, if they lost interest or simply saw no new activity happening on the page, it is useful to tell them we are doing something new. Unlike physical outreach, we are able to resolve internet issues, barriers of consumption, familiarity and individual engagement. Remember how Anirudh and I answered Commons queries for the Ahmedabad photo walk? I am happy to say that of those we actually ended up meeting 2 (correct me if I am mistaken) long term editors.
The major effort I put into social media was analysing the way the various Facebook pages were functioning, what were the challenges & opportunities, how we could construct a set of guidelines and walking community members through these guidelines - which I detailed out as part of a very specific nearly 20 point plan here (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Social_Media#Process)
3. How many hours per week do you spend on the Wikipedia support group?
As is with the pervasive nature of social media networks and the stuff we do on them, there is no way you can tell the actual time spent. I also answers queries of people on Saturday and Sunday just because I want to help and that doesn't depend on my office timings. Similarly, as explained earlier, mentors come in and go out depending on their schedules. Going further though, we'd love to scale it to a point where only mentors can handle the group and actually make meaningful relationships with new editors. I invite you as well to join in as a mentor and would love to have a Skype call with you.
Just to give you a sense of what all is happening on Communications simultaneously - I have worked on Wikipatrika, supporting the Malayalam conference, the Assamese 10th anniversary, the Kannada 10th anniversary, the Nepali 9th anniversary as well as stories that we have published for the Tamil media contest, the Gujarati Wikisource (and Indic Wikisources in general), a profile of Netha, press for Wiki Pune club AND worked on social media. Of course, needless to mention that I also work on the monthly reports, press updates, twitter/FB updates, build press contacts for English and Indic languages in various states and solicit press partnerships. I am not sure if you know but, Harsh has been trying to get a series of outreach sessions going in Ahmedabad and I've been trying to get him school/college participation and even proposed starting a Wiki club in Ahmedabad. Similar for Hindi, a few Hindi editors have written to me offlist to see how they could utilize social media platforms more effectively too.
To Hisham and the rest of the India Program team: I am still waiting for answers to these questions. They were asked with seriousness, and they deserve your serious consideration.
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