[Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] 2012-13 Annual Plan of the Wikimedia Foundation

[Tilman Bayer]

On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 4:37 AM, Florence Devouard <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On 7/28/12 5:58 AM, Tilman Bayer wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> the Wikimedia Foundation's 2012-13 Annual Plan has just been published at
>>
>>
>> https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:2012-13_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf
>>
>> accompanied by a Q&A:
>>
>>
>> https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2012-2013_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_Answers
>>
>> The plan was approved by the Board of Trustees at its meeting in
>> Washington, DC, at Wikimania, and previously outlined to the
>> Foundation staff and interested community members at the monthly staff
>> meeting on July 5, 2012. We were planning to publish the video
>> recording of that meeting at this point, but encountered technical
>> difficulties; the video will hopefully become available soon.
>>
>
> Slide 8 : "How are we doing against the 2012 targets"
>
> I was stopped by
>
> "The Global Education Program is now the largest-ever systematic effort of
> the Wikimedia mouvement to boost high quality content creation, with a
> projected addition of 19 million characters to Wikipedia through student
> assignements 2011-2012"
>
> OF COURSE, we all know that WMF needs to glorify what it is actually
> initiating/in charge of. And that's fair enough.
>
> But seriously... I would feel fine with us trying to claim that the GEP is
> the largest system effort to INCREASE the number of articles. It is probably
> true.
>
> But we all know that the result is... so and so. Possibly good content, but
> also lot's of crap being reverted and deleted afterwards. Claiming it is the
> largest effort to boost high quality content is not only disingenous... but
> I actually find it counter productive and a tiny bit offensive toward the
> actual community.
>
> High quality content simply does NOT come from newbie students.
Over the last years, the Foundation has been trying to base decisions
and evaluations more often on objective data and research rather than
on personal opinions and impressions.

Of course, here the term "high quality" does not necessarily mean,
say, featured content (e.g. on the English Wikipedia, featured
articles currently make up less than 0.1% of the total articles), but
instead refers to comparisons with average contributions.

Someone from the Education Program will be able to give a more
thorough overview of the efforts to evaluate its results, but for
example I'm aware of
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/19/wikipedia-education-program-stats-fall-2011/
. The quantitative method used there has its limitations, but similar
methods are employed in independent (i.e non-WMF) research about
Wikipedia in the academic literature.

Which research methodology did you use to arrive at your conclusions above?
>
> Florence
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Tilman Bayer
Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB