Grants talk:PEG/WM AM/Wiki Camp 2015/Report

Request

Hi dear Alex and Kacie. We have just finished the WM AM 2014 Report. Is it possible to give us time till October 16 to manage to finish the Camp report as well? Thank you--Lilitik22 (talk) 04:46, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Hi Lilitik22 , as discussed by email on 9/29 we approve the request to extend the report for WikiCamp until October 16th. --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 18:58, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

Report approved

Hi Lilitik22. We are very sorry it has taken so long to review your report. We appreciate the time and effort put into reporting and apologize that we have been delayed in reviewing and commenting. We are consistently impressed with WMAM's Wiki Camps! You've developed a successful model for engaging young editors by making editing fun : ) The WMF staff (Asaf and Anna) who were lucky enough to attend came back excited about all the work that you are doing.

The report is approved, but we would appreciate your review of our comments below and response to our questions.

1. Thank you for listing the roles and responsibilities of the organizing team. It's really helpful to understand how the work was divided and how many volunteers were involved. It is obvious that all of the team's preparatory work, especially around planning the workshops, creating article lists, and compiling resources were key to such a successful camp.
2. Do you know why Geoteam CJSC wanted to be involved with Wikimedia projects? Did they see it as corporate social responsibility-type project?
3. How did you decide on the themes for the workshops?
4. It's very impressive that the campers came from 14 different cities and villages of Armenia, as well as from Lebanon and Georgia. You noted that there were campers from places where there are no active editors. In these places, how did the individuals become involved in editing Wikipedia and how did the organizing team and WMAM connect with them?
5. One of the lessons learned was around managing the Group Leaders. What was the role of the Group Leaders? It is definitely important to set out expectations well before the planned activity.
6. I remember last year it was challenging for the campers who contributed in Western Armenia to create high quality articles. Did you see improvement in this area?
7. Now that it's been more than 6 months since the camps, can you provide metrics on retention of editors and their involvement in other activities?

Thank you again for this detailed and informative report and for all your work on Wiki Camp! Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 02:40, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Dear Alex Wang (WMF), thank you very much for your kind words. It motivates us to continue working on our projects with great enthusiasm!

1. Geoteam did not want to be involved with Wikimedia projects. They run several social development projects in different regions of Armenia so one of their projects was to support advanced students from those regions to attend an education summer camp. They were looking for such a camp and as WikiCamps are already well-known education camps in Armenia, they easily found us.
2. Themes are mainly connected to the resources we have. If we have free digitized sources which can be easily transformed and rewritten as articles we try to include them in the themes list. Other themes are chosen based on the articles: for example such articles which can be easily translated from English or Russian, are not very large, etc. After each camp, there is a section in the assessment survey, where participants choose which themes they mostly liked. Based on the results we choose themes for the next camp.
3. There are several ways they could become involved:
   1. Reading/watching our activity in the media and connecting us on Facebook or Twitter
   2. With the help of their friends who attended our projects
   3. With the help of their teacher who attended our teacher training seminar
   4. By chance and later becoming active editors (as of participants supported by Geoteam)
4. The role of the Group leader is to manage the group activity, supervise group members, ensure security and participation in the camp activities. Based on the lessons we learned we changed the structure of the camp this winter, increasing the number of volunteers. The main difference in the structure of the camp were team supporters. In order to help group leaders to coordinate their teams we chose 2 experienced campers for each group who helped their leaders in inner organizational issues.
5. Yes we did. Last year Western Armenian participants were younger and they were not well skilled in the literacy. This year participants were 16-19 year’s old and knew the language very well which helped us a lot to create articles with higher quality. Also these students were the best editors of the WikiCamp Lebanon who were chosen to attend Armenian WIkICamps.
6. By the end of January 2016, 52.4% of all participants were editing in wikiprojects (mostly wikipedia and wiktionary). 9 participants are organizing local events in their communities.--Lilitik22 (talk) 12:32, 14 April 2016 (UTC)