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_and_notes

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-taps-students-for-kannada-content/article5824580.ece

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

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