Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Wikipedia Nashik Meetup & Workshops/Report

Wow! Nice work on this report. We loved seeing the beautiful photos of your events, and all of the people involved. Links to the news stories are nice too, it seems like you got a lot of good media coverage for your project. Congratulations also on the support you received from your institutional partners. We really liked how you got people involved with the different sister projects at your event. There are a lot of opportunities to contribute to Wikimedia in English and Marathi, besides just Wikipedia. It will be interesting to see if any of the event participants become active on any of the sister projects.

Your team clearly put a lot of time and work into this initiative, and it paid off with some important media exposure for your community in Nashik. It seems like you learned some useful lessons about (1) the number of events you were actually able to organize in just a few months; and (2) what your expectations should realistically be for getting new people to edit as part of a series of workshops like this. With so many participants in your events, it must have been difficult to support all of the new users. We've seen in many cases that workshops like this have not been successful in getting articles created or improved by new editors, so you will want to think about that when you set goals for future events. It sounds like you are thinking about organizing some more targeted events that are specifically about editing for more experienced users, so this might be a more fruitful approach.

Congrats also on spending under budget. We'd hope to fund another project in your local community to make use of these remaining funds, if you can submit a request soon. Otherwise they will need to be returned to WMF or a designated organization within India.

Best, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 21:25, 14 February 2017 (UTC)