Grants talk:PEG/User:Kipala/Swahili wikipedia longtime editors' meeting and workshop/Report

This is still a draft - somehow fished out of this extremely complicated mess of instructions... Kipala (talk) 20:52, 2 April 2015 (UTC)Reply

Draft is over. Now for review.Kipala (talk) 12:14, 27 May 2015 (UTC)Reply

WMF Comments edit

Hi Kipala. Thank you for this report and your work on the project. We're happy to hear that meeting your fellow long-time active editors was a valuable and energizing experience! It's also great to know that the students were so engaged during the sessions, especially considering the change in the language of education to Swahili in the coming years. Hopefully they will come to see editing Wikipedia as a way to support their studies and engage with creating content and knowledge that is widely used. We have a number of comments/questions on the report and look forward to your response:

  1. We're sorry to hear that Wikimetrics was difficult and you were not made aware of the IP account limit prior to the event. We hope to do better in making grantees aware of available tools.
  2. We can understand it was difficult to get feedback on the current state of content on the Swahili Wikipedia from teachers for a number of reasons. It sounds like the best way to overcome this would be to do a written survey and to allocate more time for this sessions. Are there other ways you can get this feedback in the meantime from your readers?
  3. Low tech literacy is definitely a challenging issue, but it sounds like you have ideas on how to address this in future workshops, including different sessions for different levels of experience. In terms of keeping students engaged and editing after the workshop, what other ideas do you have if there is not the possibility or resources available to create a wikiclub?
  4. We're sorry to hear about Ricardo's health problems. Hopefully he has healed well. If he was able to start the wikiclub in May, please provide an update on progress.
  5. Learning Patterns are created by volunteers and based on experience and evidence. They're short and helpful resources that can be used when planning events/projects. May folks find them useful and we ask grantees to either create new patterns based on their grant experience or endorse ones that were relevant to their project (this helps us understand their usefulness). If you do not want to create one, you can endorse 2 patterns. I would suggest that you endorse at least the Six account limit pattern.
  6. The remaining funds have been received by WMF. Thank you.

Best, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 21:53, 30 June 2015 (UTC)Reply

Sorry for late response. That comment came right before my summer break and thats why I did not respond then. And then - it was in the background...
1.I hope the same for use of wikimetrics. It will be helpful if you point to the foreseeable problem with new applicants (and not let it rest somewhere in the find print - if it is there by now, I believe there was no hint when we prepared)
2. I agree with the proposal in the comment.
3. Riccardo did start the club after his operation; I hear from him, that they had several interruptions because of powercuts and internet breakdowns
4. I still struggle to get the idea of a "learning pattern" (is it my limited English or just the question of specialized insider slang??) - and what the point of "endorsing" one of these lists is?
as for the "Six account limit pattern" I agree that this mentions a valid problem. The decisive step in my experience would be to point to this problem before a workshop, especially if someone new goes for that. I would propose to give automatically step-3-authority (with a time limit) to everybody doing a workshop. Step 1 is ok, practically can be a problem if the people preparing are not the local web admins; and if something goes wrong one may have to switch spontaneously to some reserve IP.
I see a "Learning patterns/Workshop size" - definitely touching a problem we had when the large numbers overwhelmed us to some extent. Of course in the beginning we were not sure if we would get enough teachers and students on their day off and so we did not discuss in preparation how to sort/ send people away. Thats how all signals were set on "green" and than we could not pull the brakes any more.

Hope this will do? Besides I feel like doing another event, in that case taking more time for Tanzania travel and be able to go to more than 1 school. That depends of course if the foundation is willing to fund travel cost again. We do have the problem that our team structure means that available instructors are outside Tanzanina, but the market is mainly inside Tanzania. Kipala (talk) 21:46, 10 September 2015 (UTC)Reply

Just FYI: It's possible to gauge further development indirectly from the Wikipedia Statistics cf. here. A number of users seen active there have started either around our March weekend seminar or when the club became active in May, e.g. Enock John, Jocktan Thobias, Kelvin Agapith, Franck Sylvester and Goodheart Moses (and probably half a dozen others as well). While progress is slow, it is obviously there! Fwiw, --Baba Tabita (talk) 06:31, 19 October 2015 (UTC)Reply
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