Learning patterns/Cultivating interest among the editors during activities

A learning pattern forvolunteer management

Learning Pattern Library

Cultivating editor from activities

problemEditor retention, follow up and awareness

solutionUnderstand new editors' interest, suggest part of your activity that fits into their interest and help them learn

creator• Pavan santhosh.s• Saileshpat

created on10:05, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

status:DRAFT

What problem does this solve?

To cultivate editors out of a group of individuals who has different interest is difficult to deal with. This situation often arises in conducting Wikipedia Workshops and offline edit-a-thons with a heterogeneous group. In events where organisers have an activity or a theme and they might find it even difficult to create interest among the participants.

What is the solution?

While creating theme for Edit-a-thon consider creating a broad theme. Have discussion with your participants and understand what they love to do, what are those things that excites them or where they are very good at. Figure out where their interests and skills fit into your theme. Help them to understand their interests in our themes and engage them according to their affinities and skills in various aspects of theme. Conduct a feedback session where they could say what all that they wanted to learn after having an experience of editing in project under their interest. Train them in those tools/aspects that fills their knowledge gaps.

Things to consider

• Survey: Start discussing with participants and get to know about their interests
• Orientation: Identify aspects that identify the participants, better to do it according to individual interests and help them understand how awesome this activity is.
• Cross evaluation: Create activity in which participants evaluate each others work and help them understand gaps in their learning.
• Advanced training: Use their interest as hook and help them learn advanced topics in editing and contributing.

When to use

• Telugu Wikisource workshop to Andhra Loyola College Students: Workshop is mainly aimed to make students learn about proof-reading in Telugu Wikisource. But proof-reading is tedious and not-so-funny task to do. So, by learning individual interests of students we suggested books that they find interesting in Telugu Wikisource to proof read. Also separated entire proof reading and formatting activity into several small tasks and also students into different capable/interest groups, And made them work on their strong/interesting aspect first. Later the text which was proof read & formatted was cross checked by the other groups. Finally activity picked momentum and student wikipedians went on to proof-read more than 2000 pages for next 40 days.

See also

External links

• Wikimedia Polska's approach to countering volunteer burnout through volunteer tracking, recognition, mindfulness, fun and cultivating a community culture of care, as shared during Wikimania 2021
  • Session overview from Wikimania 2021 Program
  • Fairly detailed etherpad notes on session