Re: [Wikimedia Education] Evaluation report on Wikipedia Fellows pilot

[Pine W]

Thanks for the comments, LiAnna.

An issue that someone mentioned to me is that many academics choose not to
edit Wikipedia articles because editing Wikipedia is far less beneficial to
their careers than publishing academic articles and books. There may be
some benefit to academics from having their articles and books cited in
Wikipedia, but that is different from editing Wikipedia unless they add
their own articles and books as citations or have someone else do that on
their behalf (which I would discourage them from doing directly, although
recommending relevant articles and books on talk pages and disclosing any
potential COI could still be a net benefit so that other editors can
evaluate their recommendations). I am curious about how you were so
successful in recruiting academics to volunteer for this program. Can you
comment on that? It would be nice if academics and universities are
starting to feel that contributing to Wikipedia is valuable for academic
careers and/or as public service that they wish to encourage.

On a related subject, I will mention that to my surprise, some universities
now award scholarships to undergraduate applicants for e-sports. One would
think that extensively contributing constructively to Wikipedia, whether by
applicants for admission or by academics, would be viewed much more
positively by universities than participating in e-sports, but to my
knowledge no universities have made such a decision. If you know of any
change in academia about the value of editing Wikipedia articles by
applicants for undergraduate or graduate admission, I would also be
interested in hearing about that. Perhaps admissions policies are a
potential area in which the Wiki Education Foundation could lobby
universities to make changes. I realize that this is a tangent from the
subject of encouraging academics to contribute content themselves, but I
thought that I would mention this as a related topic of interest.

Thanks,

Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )

On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 9:49 AM, LiAnna Davis  wrote:

> Hi Pine,
>
> You're exactly right that we spent a lot of staff time and thus expense on
> this first round because it's a pilot -- to be able to put an extensive
> report together like this, we needed to devote a LOT of staff time to
> tracking everything that happened. Those learnings are invaluable in a
> pilot program, and are now helping us actively work to scale up the impact
> without significantly adding to the expense. As we note in the "Adapting
> the pilot" section of the report (
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Education_
> Foundation/Wikipedia_Fellows_pilot_evaluation#Adapting_the_pilot),
> we're experimenting with a wide variety of ways to run Fellows cohorts over
> the next year in order to see how we can get more impact without
> significantly adding staff time (and thus costs) to the mix. This model is
> exactly the same one we followed with our Classroom Program -- a lot of
> individual attention to instructors and students at the beginning so we can
> garner learnings from what exactly happened in the program, then
> experimenting with ways to successfully scale the impact without scaling
> the costs at the same rate (back in 2010, we had about the same number of
> staff supporting a program with 200 students a term as we currently do
> supporting 8,000 students a term).
>
> In terms of funding, we didn't have restricted grant funding for the
> Fellows pilot, meaning funding for it came from a variety of the
> institutional and individual donors who provide us unrestricted general
> operating support for our work, including Wikipedia Fellows. Our
> development director sees lots of potential for funding future rounds, and
> we're actively working on securing funding so we can scale the program,
> increasing its impact while making it more cost effective. I share your
> hopes for this program, and think it has the potential to, as you put it,
> "be
> successful, financially sustainable, and cost-effective in the medium to
> long term." :)
>
> LiAnna
>
>
> On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 10:40 PM, Pine W  wrote:
>
> > As I wrote in my previous email, I get the impression that this program
> > was relatively expensive compared to the number of content contributors
> > (who in this case are academics). I am keeping in mind that this was a
> > pilot, and that initial planning and the first iteration for many
> programs
> > like this require some one-time expenses and some debugging. My guess is
> > that for future rounds WikiEd can make the program be more efficient, and
> > that this will be a work in progress.
> > This program is not without financial costs, both for the pilot and for
> > future rounds. I return to the questions that I asked LiAnna in my
> previous
> > email: 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
> 

Re: [Wikimedia Education] Evaluation report on Wikipedia Fellows pilot

[LiAnna Davis]

Hi Pine,

You're exactly right that we spent a lot of staff time and thus expense on
this first round because it's a pilot -- to be able to put an extensive
report together like this, we needed to devote a LOT of staff time to
tracking everything that happened. Those learnings are invaluable in a
pilot program, and are now helping us actively work to scale up the impact
without significantly adding to the expense. As we note in the "Adapting
the pilot" section of the report (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Education_Foundation/Wikipedia_Fellows_pilot_evaluation#Adapting_the_pilot),
we're experimenting with a wide variety of ways to run Fellows cohorts over
the next year in order to see how we can get more impact without
significantly adding staff time (and thus costs) to the mix. This model is
exactly the same one we followed with our Classroom Program -- a lot of
individual attention to instructors and students at the beginning so we can
garner learnings from what exactly happened in the program, then
experimenting with ways to successfully scale the impact without scaling
the costs at the same rate (back in 2010, we had about the same number of
staff supporting a program with 200 students a term as we currently do
supporting 8,000 students a term).

In terms of funding, we didn't have restricted grant funding for the
Fellows pilot, meaning funding for it came from a variety of the
institutional and individual donors who provide us unrestricted general
operating support for our work, including Wikipedia Fellows. Our
development director sees lots of potential for funding future rounds, and
we're actively working on securing funding so we can scale the program,
increasing its impact while making it more cost effective. I share your
hopes for this program, and think it has the potential to, as you put it, "be
successful, financially sustainable, and cost-effective in the medium to
long term." :)

LiAnna


On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 10:40 PM, Pine W  wrote:

> As I wrote in my previous email, I get the impression that this program
> was relatively expensive compared to the number of content contributors
> (who in this case are academics). I am keeping in mind that this was a
> pilot, and that initial planning and the first iteration for many programs
> like this require some one-time expenses and some debugging. My guess is
> that for future rounds WikiEd can make the program be more efficient, and
> that this will be a work in progress.
> This program is not without financial costs, both for the pilot and for
> future rounds. I return to the questions that I asked LiAnna in my previous
> email: 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 am hoping that WikiEd has a reliable funding source for the next round,
> and that WikiEd is currently planning how to increase the
> cost-effectiveness.
> Stepping back to consider the larger problem of too few knowledgable
> volunteers supporting too many novices throughout the wikiverse, I get the
> impression that WMF is spending increasing amounts of money on training and
> one-on-one help for technical and content contributors, both by directly
> funding WMF employees and by providing funds to grantees. I anticipate that
> the trend will continue, and I am anxious to see it be effective in
> increasing content contributor longevity, content quality, content
> quantity, diversity of contributors, and measues of community health. I am
> glad to see WikiEd working in this domain with academics, and I would like
> for this program to be successful, financially sustainable, and
> cost-effective in the medium to long term.
>
> Pine
> ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
>
>
>  Original message From: James Salsman 
> Date: 5/23/18  7:07 PM  (GMT-08:00) To: Wikimedia Education <
> education@lists.wikimedia.org>, Pine W  Subject: Re:
> [Wikimedia Education] Evaluation report on Wikipedia Fellows pilot
> Pine, why would you be concerned about the cost-effectiveness or
> sustainability. This program looks great to me, except for the
> mismatch between needs and recruiting.
>
> On that point, there is an alternative to
> http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/files/
> 2015/09/figure-1-wikipedia-open-access1.jpg
>
> (Beyond expanding it from the sciences to the humanities and ranking
> it by the damage quality issues do to society for each topic.)
>
> Which is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7cHxlGgEt4=46m
>
> Math is the most valuable topic for donations. I'm interested in
> suggesting improvements to
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frobenius_manifold
>
> On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 6:59 PM, Pine W  wrote:
> > Hi LiAnna,
> >
> > Thank you for this report. Increasing the number of good-faith
> contributors to