Just a brief note on the 8% retention rate of a pilot that is not yet two months old and has the potential for significant further refinement and improvement. This is a high retention rate based on data I've seen on general outreach events, where the rates of conversion to editing are very low (generally well below 5% in the analysis we've been doing in India since January), as many people have discussed on this list and elsewhere. The Wikipedia Education Program, where students have a rather deep introduction to Wikipedia, has seen a retention rate of only 4% after the end of the course.[1]
On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 8:09 PM, Gautam John
<gautam@prathambooks.org> wrote:
On 30 May 2012 18:27, Theo10011 <
de10011@gmail.com> wrote:
> I won't do it actually. As memory serves, WMF has never used Social media,
> or hired one of those "social media experts".
other specific locales, right? So long as it ties in to specific
outcomes that WMF and WIP have lined up for the larger program - in
this case, visibility for Wikipedia and driving new editors.
This is something which has been discussed previously on Wikimedia related lists - Wikimedia projects and other social media networks are dissimilar services with a completely different purpose around communities. It goes without saying that they attract different sort of contributors looking to achieve different goals. I will not go on to further elaborate and reduce this to an academic discussion but will just conclude by saying that working on our projects is not akin to a social media experience and that it is highly unlikely that we will successfully leverage social media oriented programs to harvest contributors for our projects in a way that justifies the financial costs involved.
Wikipedia has sufficient visibility on the Internet around the world and in India. I am opposed to spending the community's considerable monetary resources to run facebook groups for training newbies. As Salmaan expressed earlier, there are better qualified and trained individuals with substantial Wikimedia experience around the world suited to experiment with newer frontiers.
On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 8:09 PM, Gautam John
<gautam@prathambooks.org> wrote:
There always are and sitting on the outside, it's hard for me to
justify one over the other. That said, have the metrics they reported
and based on the numbers Anirudh posted point to an engagement level
that is on par with, better or worse than for the casual drive by
editor? If better, than, IMHO, the question is whether that
acquisition cost and time worth it over the medium term.
I think there are likely to be positive outcomes of extended intervention with local communities in most cases. Here, it is not so apparent since the period of engagement with the community was limited. We find that the fantastic news about the increased activity among the Assamese Wikipedians is mainly a result of bot-like editing and creation of numerous redirects. However, I am not so pessimistic about the whole idea of engaging smaller Indic language projects, This can work specially with a proper Wikipedian like Shiju taking the lead, however, the projection of instant results like the email sent by Hisham suggests is not believable. Therefore, the question around acquisition cost and time is an important factor which should be carefully examined.
On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 7:54 PM, Arun Ganesh
<arun.planemad@gmail.com> wrote:
These platforms can easily extend the social collaboration that goes on in wikipedia to an extended audience if done properly. What i think would be useful way of measuring these things is to release statistics monthly on the number of retweets or shares that could indicate the actual reach of these outreach efforts. Util then however, this is nothing to boast about.
This is a fair suggestion, Arun. I'd think user experience is something which can be enhanced through engineering and software development rather than the current way of implementation.
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?
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.
3. How many hours per week do you spend on the Wikipedia support group?