Great :) I'd be really interested to know whether
people continued to
edit after the workshop if you could share.
To try answer Heather, the article
count went from 125, which it has
been stuck at since at least November 2011, to 131 during the class, and
there has only been one substantial edit from any of the participants on
the weekend (a new article, increasing the count to 132) since the
workshop, so the answer seems to be no.
The workshop was 2 hours, and, briefly, we hoped to teach creating a
user account, creating or editing (via translation from English) an
article, adding links, adding a picture, and I wanted to add interwiki
links to the list as well. Everyone created or edited an article, and
most, if not everyone, added links, though only some could create a user
account due to IP limits, and very few got to adding an image or
interwiki links. Douglas goes into more details in his post.
It's more complicated to add links in Xhosa than in English due to the
way prefixes are used in the language, so quite often an article may
exist, but the link doesn't point to it, and there are already duplicate
articles for this reason.
There is still such a barrier with basic computer use, that I found a
substantial portion of the class was showing people how to maximize and
minimize windows, how to open a new tab or window, etc, and I got the
sense that there wasn't always a real understanding of why the various
steps were being performed, which reduces the chances of them being
repeatable outside of the class.
The one article that was created afterwards is an orphan, with no
incoming or outgoing links.
There was a lot of enthusiasm, so hopefully having a followup quite soon
will keep the interest and momentum going, but I would expect there to
be not much sustained activity as a result of the workshop alone.
--
Ian Gilfillan
www.greenman.co.za