Grants:PEG/User:DrMel/Wiki Edit-a-thon Work Parties

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Project & Event Grants

Wiki Edit-a-thon Work Parties

Make wiki editathons fun and easy enough that anyone can host them, on any theme of their choice.

targetEnglish, Simple English & Spanish

strategic priorityIncreasing Participation

start date1 June

start year2015

end date31 May

end year2016

budget (USD)750 USD

grant typeindividual

creator• DrMel

contact(s)• Melissaganus@gmail.com

created on01:25, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

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Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

Extensive research shows that women tend to prefer social activities and volunteering over more solitary work. We want new editors, especially new female editors, to be ongoing members of the community, not just one time contributors. How can we make it easy and attractive for them to be part of this? How can we make it more fun?

What is your solution?

Edit-a-thons are social experiences, and give people a chance to interact with each other, collaborating to make improvements. Why not make it easier for anyone to host edit-a-thons on any topic area of their choosing? If the steps for organizing and successfully getting through an edit-a-thon were easy to share, we could recruit students, especially women, to try out the steps and help us refine the models. We have a team in San Diego ready to work with English and Spanish speaking communities.

Goals

During the first half of 2016, we plan to host three wiki editathons, focused on topics in applied psychology, especially those that relate to helpful concepts and knowledge for Improved quality of life. As part of our editathon process, we want to continue development of a "best practices" guide for others who want to host their own editathons on topics of their choosing. We expect to engage people in our local San Diego and Southern Californian communities for face-to-face meetups, and simulatenously include people from other locations on specific editathon dates. We intend to pay special attention to recruiting female participants. We also expect to work with speakers of other languages, especially Spanish. And we intend to pay special attention to the development of wikipedia Simple articles that can be contributed to and more easily read by the ESL community.

Get Involved

Participants

• Volunteer I can help set up and run edit-a-thons. Rocky92591 (talk) 17:29, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
• Volunteer Outreach to community groups and helping to coordinate events, along with assistance in translation into Spanish language. Quimby19 (talk) 01:23, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
• Volunteer Volunteer recruitment, engagement and coaching DrMel (talk) 05:43, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
• Volunteer Southern California Edit-a-Thon volunteer coaching assistant Tinkermen (talk) 19:24, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Endorsements

• Wikipedia is a good project. I want to see more people benefit from it. By organizing such events, more is shared and gained. Ruftas (talk) 10:28, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
• Endorse. Rocky92591 (talk) 17:28, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
• To expand the base of knowledge from underrepresented groups such as low-income, immigrant and refugee women. They represent an untapped source of information filtered through border and global perspectives. Their experiences serve as examples of female led resiliency strategies and tactics in male dominated cultures. Quimby19 (talk) 01:22, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
• Endorse. Dr. Mel has proven her-self to be a wonderful volunteer facilitator & mentor to those seeking to learn how to become involved with Wikipedia in the San Diego & Orange County areas, both of which are in need of greater support and participation through collaborative efforts. Tinkermen (talk) 20:12, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
• I am involved in it. Swedam (talk) 17:31, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Project plan

Activities

We intend to host an ongoing set of wiki edit-a-thon demos, engaging students and other members of the community in learning how an editathon work party can come together and be a meaningful social event. We intend to leverage a Pay It Forward model, helping our participants figure out how they can host their own editathon work parties.

Budget

We would like to request $250/event for our next three wiki editathon events, for a total of $750. We are spendthrifts and are actively seeking inkind donations to minimize costs. If we are able to underspend the $250 per event, we can use any remaining funds for an additional event or return whatever is unused.

Community engagement

For our local meetup efforts in Southern California, we can recruit from schools and communities in the San Diego and Los Angeles areas. Beyond our area, we can also recruit online through our internship program, inviting people from around the world to develop their skills as not just wiki contributors but also editathon organizers.

We have surveys already set up as step-by-step guides for helping people walk through the first steps of learning how to edit wikipedia, and giving us key information as they go (user name, articles edited, reflections about their experiences). Sample of survey used for Arts+Feminism can be viewed at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/UCI-ArtFeminism

Sustainability

Our goal is to develop a "How To Host Your Own Wiki Editathon" article that can be shared and improved on by others who want to try this approach. We intend to continue recruiting and hosting editathons throughout the year.

Measures of success

Through our surveys, we expect to collect numbers of participants, including number of women, and their intentions to edit again, and to organize their own editathons. We also expect to circulate our How To guide for ongoing review and improvements.

We plan to host at least three wiki edit-a-thon meetups over the summer of 2015, then continue monthly for as long as we can sustain. Our goal is to cultivate a group of regular participants and recruit new members in as often as possible, using word-of-mouth, meetup.com and other platforms, as visible in our communities as possible. We also have virtual volunteers spread around the world and intend to include them virtually at those edit-a-thon meetups. Each meetup costs us approximately $250 in food and other events expenses. For this grant, we can volunteer our labor and cover any other costs through inkind donations and our own resources.

We will collect and report on each of our events, including:

• Total # of participants
• # of female participants
• # of return participants
• # of new users
• # of articles created or improved
• # of good and featured articles created or improved
• # of participants editing 3 months after the event
• # of participants who are active editors (5 edits/month) 3 months after an event, and
• qualitative feedback on what they did and how they felt about the experience, including their suggestions for improvement

Through our microvolunteer challenges on [skillsforchange.org] We are working to identify existing high traffic psychology, neuroscience and learning-related articles on en.wikipedia.org and then move to making sure they have adequate representation on simple.wikipedia.org and es.wikipedia.org. We are also planning to show participants the methods for moving articles to Good and Featured status, hoping to have at least one Featured status article by the end of the summer.

We also hope to be able attend wikimania in Mexico and share our results to date.

Project team

Current team includes DrMel (talk) 05:34, 1 April 2015 (UTC), rocky92591, Quimby19 - we are currently working together to develop QoL-x.org - a nonprofit educational project in which we look for opportunities to engage people in activities that can help improve quality of life for themselves and those they care about. Contributing to wikipedia is an excellent example of a QoL-x experiment that has proven to help people feel like their research work is more meaningful, so we are encouraging every volunteer in our program to learn at least the basics, and hopefully go on to teach others.

Community notification

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