Translations:Learning and Evaluation/Evaluation reports/2013/Edit-a-thons/89/en

Edit-a-thons are popular! They are the most commonly reported program by program leaders who responded to our survey - we were also able to easily pull additional data on 26 more to fulfill some areas where we were missing data. 28 program leaders reported 26 edit-a-thons, making them the highest reported program in this first round of data collection.
Edit-a-thons have four priority goals with a primary focus on increasing contributions, skill sets, recruitment and perceptions about Wikimedia projects.
Many program leaders aren't tracking participant usernames which makes it a challenge to track retention and contributions of participants. We hope through improved program design, tools, and sharing among program leaders of what works to track usernames, we can make this a standard for edit-a-thons.
Most program leaders are tracking budget and donated resources, but most aren't tracking staff and volunteer hours which are also two critical inputs for evaluation. We aim to work with program leaders to make tracking hours - staff and volunteer - easier.
Edit-a-thons rely more on donated resources than any other reported program with meeting space being the most commonly donated resource.
Participants average 3 pages of text each out of all of the reported events which averages out to almost 24,000 characters per event by all event attendees.
Edit-a-thons are productive for generating decent amounts of content regardless of size or cost, but the more participants, the more the content produced. This shows that edit-a-thons are successful at content production.
Budget size doesn't appear to have an effect on the amount of content produced; events with small budgets can be as equally productive as events with large budgets. We also learned that having staff support, doesn't necessarily suggest a more productive or impactful event.
Events with lots of new editors can be just as productive as events with lots of experienced editors

Out of 328 new editors who attended the reported edit-a-thons, three were retained 6-months after the event. Experimentation with edit-a-thon series, surveying, follow-up and more pro-active program design is worth trying to learn more about how these events could possibly retain new editors - or we might see a change in the primary goals selected by program leaders.
Qualitative research shows that having edit-a-thon series and more frequent events with follow up, and improved training, could potentially help retain new editors afterwards, which we learned through interviews with new editors who did not edit after they attended (and edited at!) an edit-a-thon. We hope to work with program leaders to experiment with these ideas, and support them in evaluation.
Early indicators show that experienced editors might edit more on average during the event than they do in an average day. They also appear to edit more on average after the event than they did before the event. We plan on researching this further to learn more about the impact of edit-a-thons on experienced editors.