Dear Ravi,
1.Tulu Wikipedia outreach programs and outcome:
Please look at the work plan here and the stats mentioned –
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge/Draft_Work_plan_J….
Pay little attention to these numbers (excerpt from the work-plan above)-
The current stats, as of March 2014 stands like this:
· 147 articles including categories, templates, and talk pages.
· 31 total number of editors; including those who have done just one edit.
· 8 editors with more than 10 edit counts.
Now please take a look at the stats at this page -
http://tools.wmflabs.org/pathoschild-contrib/catanalysis/index.php?title=Wp…
<http://tools.wmflabs.org/pathoschild-contrib/catanalysis/index.php?title=Wp%2Ftcy&cat=0&wiki=incubatorwiki&listpages=on#distribution_201404>
&cat=0&wiki=incubatorwiki&listpages=on#distribution_201404. I am extracting
the same data for current –
· 284 articles including categories, templates, and talk pages.
· 41 total number of editors; including those who have done just one edit.
· 18 editors with more than 10 edit counts.
These figures definitely point to the fact that the workshops are not wasted efforts.
These changes have happened in just one month. In the stats page you may also notice that
Tulu Wikipedia was almost dormant from Sep 2009 till April 2014 with some occasional
activity spikes in between. Let us hope the new set of editors who have come in will
actively keep contributing to Tulu Wikipedia. Optimism is not a bad idea after all.
2. Wikipedia in UG education program at Christ University Bangalore:
It is true that a spike can be seen in the stats for Kannada Wikipedia. But the program
will be continuing this year also. Students will continue to write for Kannada Wikipedia.
This academic year they will also add content to Kannada Wikisource. I have personally
interacted with many students. There are quite a good number of students who are
passionate about enriching Kannada language and bringing latest knowledge into Kannada by
way of adding articles to Kannada Wikipedia. Nurturing those students will help not only
Kannada Wikipedia but also Kannada language and people in general. Again, I would
emphasis, let us be optimistic.
Thanks and regards,
Pavanaja
From: wikimediaindia-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikimediaindia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ravishankar
Sent: 17 May 2014 16:40
To: Wikimedia India Community list
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Outcome of CIS work in Kannada Wikipedia
MarHey,
Any community member here from Kannada Wikipedia?
I would like to understand the outcome of CIS work there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-10-02/News_…
lists one of the lessons learned as follows:
//Single-session, general-audience outreach has negligible impact everywhere (for example,
just giving a single talk about Wikipedia to whoever shows up—the conversion rate to
editors is tiny, and yet we keep doing it".//
(Do give a full read of that whole section 1.3 Lessons learned)
Yet, CIS seems to be repeating sich negligible impact outreach programs many times in
March and April 2014. This includes Tulu workshops where there is active editor community
at all.
To quote Asaf again:
//So just what has the Foundation learned about the criteria for funding successful
activities? Bartov first talked about a fundamental prerequisite:
"The sine qua non of most programs is a core of self-motivating active editors. Most
of the things you want to do, most of the things chapters in the global north are doing,
depend on this core. It can be as small as four or five people, but those people need to
be actual active editors ... who edit because they like it, they enjoy editing Wikipedia
or Commons, they get it, and they are inherently committed to our principles like NPOV;
not people who are editing because there's a contest on and they want to win the
laptop.
"Where that core doesn't exist, it's very hard to deploy any other type of
program. If you want [a GLAM partnership] with the National Museum of Cameroon ... how are
you going to deliver on what you promise the museum if you don't have local editors
who will do the work – write the articles, show up to meet the curators. So this is the
big, big challenge for which we don't have an answer: how do you grow such a core ...
in a certain country? ... we're now cautious about active investment where there is
not an active community—although it's still possible if you give us a really great
idea."//
The only outcome of such initiatives seem to be PR material like this:
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/wikipedia-tap…
where Pavanaja quotes as follows:
//There was a significant increase in the number of editors after 500 students of Christ
University, Bangalore, were trained in editing at a workshop held in January this year.//
And when you look at Kannada Wikipedia stats, the user activity has returned to
pre-education programme levels within a month
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaKN.htm
So, I would like to understand why the wheel is getting reinvented again and again with an
insane budget besides documented evidence of WMF's learning on this.
Stop doing paid outreach.
Ravi