Grants talk:Project/Rapid/WLX in Thailand 2017/Report

Reallocation request approval

Hi Athikhun.suw. Apologies for the delay in reading your report. The reallocation request is approved. Please update the outcomes of the two projects on this discussion page when they are over. We'll be providing comments on the rest of the report in the next week. We really appreciate how detailed it is! Best, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 17:39, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Report comments

Hi Athikhun.suw. Thank you for all your and the team's work to complete this report and manage all of the projects. It's great to read about the different activities and how the group is developing year-to-year. The report is approved and I have a few comments/questions below:

1. I really enjoyed reading the academic paper on the education program. This stood out to me: "It is encouraging to see that the overall student contributions were more than double the class requirement, and a few students not only continued to contribute to Wikipedia online but also volunteered in other events of the Wikimedia movement. However, as the retention rate of users is usually extremely low, it may be premature to draw a conclusion regarding the retention rate from this small pilot study." The fact that students are editing beyond their required assignments is interesting and I wonder if this is the case with other education programs. The conclusion I can draw as that they regard it as fun and interesting, not just mandatory. Hopefully this will lead to greater retention in some areas.
2. It's also great to hear that some students from pact programs are now serving as mentors!
3. I'd be interested to hear more about the potential partnerships you are considering for next year (or maybe this is in your new proposal). Many communities find partnerships with organizations outside the movement, but aligned with a certain topic area, to be very productive and inspiring.
4. We understand that your goals around WLE and WLM are focused on image uploads and not on writing/improving articles. However, the photos submitted in Thailand are so amazing and of high encyclopedic value. Currently those photos are not being used very much on the Wikimedia projects (6% use rate for WLE and 1.5% use rate for WLM). It would be great to think about ways to increase use next year -- whether through an article contest around those photo contests or editathons, etc.
5. Thank you for sharing that the offline meet-ups have been supportive in terms of building a strong community. This is something we always assume but it's nice to hear confirmation of what the value is of meeting face-to-face.

Thank you again for all your work and we look forward to reading the new proposal. Best, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 19:51, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

@AWang (WMF) and Athikhun.suw: Thank you very much for your encouraging comments. There are a combination of factors why students contributed much more than the requirement. The requirement was set low at first but we warned students that content may be removed by other editors. Last term, we raised the minimum requirement and it was a reasonable challenge for them to reach the target. Most of them exceeded the target by only 10-20%. --Taweethaも (talk) 00:59, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

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