Hi LiAnna, Thank you for this report. Increasing the number of good-faith contributors to Wikipedia is always nice to see. I believe that at least a few people in WMF, the affiliates, and the long-term volunteer population have been interested for many years in increasing the number of academics who contribute to Wikipedia.
The program sounds like it was relatively labor intensive on the part of WikiEd, and the number of academic participants was small. Who funded WikiEd's expenses for this project, and what thoughts does WikiEd have regarding how the project can be scaled up in a way that is more efficient in terms of cost per participant? I would like to see this project scale up, but I am concerned about its cost-effectiveness and financial sustainability. As you probably know, I am continuing my development of training materials, primarily videos, for new Wikimedians, although the audience that I have in mind is more typical of ENWP's volunteer population instead of being focused on the specific interests and mindsets of academic contributors. Regards, Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) -------- Original message --------From: LiAnna Davis <lia...@wikiedu.org> Date: 5/22/18 9:51 AM (GMT-08:00) To: Wikimedia Education <education@lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: [Wikimedia Education] Evaluation report on Wikipedia Fellows pilot Greetings, all! At the beginning of 2018, the Wiki Education Foundation ran a 3-month pilot to engage academic experts (mostly professors at universities in the U.S.) to improve English Wikipedia articles related to their areas of expertise. We're pretty happy with how the pilot turned out -- we had some great improvements to articles, and, more importantly for a pilot, we learned a *lot* about how to run a program like this successfully. The team that worked on it put together this extensive evaluation report on what we did, what we learned, and what the outcomes were from the pilot: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Education_Foundation/Wikipedia_Fellows_pilot_evaluation I also put together a short blog post about it: https://wikiedu.org/blog/2018/05/22/wiki-education-publishes-evaluation-of-fellows-pilot/ We already have calls for applications out for additional cohorts to begin in June, and we're eager to learn even more from future iterations of the Wikipedia Fellows program. I hope sharing our learnings like this can be helpful for other education programs in the Wikimedia movement who might also be interested in engaging subject matter experts to edit. We're happy to answer questions on this list or on the talk page of the evaluation report on Meta. LiAnna -- LiAnna Davis Director of Programs; Deputy Director Wiki Education www.wikiedu.org _______________________________________________ Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education _______________________________________________ Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
