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

[John Vandenberg]

On Jul 30, 2012 7:18 AM, "Tilman Bayer" <tbayer at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> 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/

Ive asked for more info at

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikipedia_Education_Program_evaluation#random_sample

> . 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.

Do you have links to any relevant studies of the GEP?

--
John Vandenberg