[Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia India Program Trust

[Erik Moeller]

On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 11:04 PM, rupert THURNER
<rupert.thurner at gmail.com> wrote:
> to get a feeling about the size, the number of readers, contributors, and a
> trend in it, i tried to find the india country statistics on editing and
> reading:

The major program initiative undertaken by Hisham's team so far is the
India Education Program. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Courses

So far there's been a pilot program, which uncovered lots of serious
issues with the quality of content contributed by the participating
courses. This is now driving further iteration of the program, as it
should.

The pilot very much built on, and was informed by, the lessons learned
in the Public Policy Initiative, which was the largest and most
successful student engagement program ever undertaken in the Wikimedia
movement (!). Both the India Education Program and the PPI have been
led by Frank Schulenburg, who is an experienced and accomplished
Wikipedian.

> at the same time, another part of the world, a foto competition, no trust,
> no consultants, no KPMG involved, but a lot of volunteers and chapters. it
> gave 160'000 images for wikimedia commons, in one month. and, 30% new
> contributors. [2]

WLM is a wonderful project, one which WMF actively supported (most
importantly by improving Upload Wizard to directly support the
management of the upload campaigns). It really is credit to all the
people who developed it, and built on the lessons from last year's WLM
in the Netherlands.

It's also a photo competition, which by its very nature is a very
different kind of program than something like the IEP, with very
different risks and opportunities. It's easy to compare apples and
oranges and say "those apples are rotten, my oranges are so much
nicer". But they are very different fruit entirely. :)

I don't think anyone is served by stereotyping people or programs.
We're all pulling towards the same goal. That doesn't mean constantly
patting ourselves on the back, but let's focus on the the substance of
the work rather than on peddling stereotypes about ignorant
consultants and "outsiders".

-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

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