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