Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Pgallert/ICCCS editathon

Latest comment: 7 years ago by Pgallert

Hi Pgallert. Apologies for the delayed response on this request. We have been reviewing your grant-funded work more holistically in order to better understand how this project fits. We are very interested in and supportive of your work to document the need for and benefits of oral citations on Wikipedia. This work is very much in line with our commitment to building an encyclopedia that is representative of all of the world's knowledge. However, funding one (or two)- off editathons for very small languages has not shown to be very successful in recruiting new editors. While creating a new Wikipedia can be seen as quite easy, it can also be very demoralizing to type away into an empty Wikipedia for a long time without knowing if anyone is actually using or reading it. This obviously happens as new Wikipedias are created, but we do not believe it is an effective use of limited grant funds. We will decline this proposal, but will also add more comments about potential projects we'd like to discuss with you on the original oral citations grant report. Best, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 19:55, 14 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Hi Alex! While I understand your response I am also disappointed in two ways: I'm told via email that I should order T-shirts locally, now it looks like I'm paying for them, too. I could have given a conference T-shirt (without Wikipedia logo) to the participants instead. And the guys from the blog tell me that my observation that workshops don't work cannot be published because the Foundation is financing them. Not mine though :( --Pgallert (talk) 20:34, 14 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
Hi Pgallert. I'm sorry you're disappointed and I can understand the reasoning. I don't remember suggesting you order t-shirts for this event and generally don't recommend spending funds before a project is approved. In regards to the blog, I think the general message and learning from your outreach workshop experience should definitely be shared. We fund things all the time that are not successful and want everyone to learn from them. I'm not sure who is telling you it can't be published because we fund workshops. This shouldn't be the case. And we are learning from these experiences as well, funding less one-off workshops or editor trainings and encouraging people to organize multi-event trainings over a period of months with a robust online mentorship plan in between in-person meetings. We have seen these to be a more successful model for engaging new editors. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 21:54, 14 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
Hi Alex, I have emailed you the relevant conversations. Can you please point me to some documentation where editor recruitment was achieved? Thanks, Pgallert (talk) 13:59, 17 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
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