VVIT WikiConnect/Activities/Wikimedia Experience Survey 2019

Context

The Wiki-club started forming with the first ever edit-a-thon in college in September 2017. Though we are working and based in an educational system, have several workshops and skill-building activities for students, the work and our plan are not the regular Wikipedia Education Program, which has definite learning objectives. Though club functions as an extra-curricular aspect, it has produced several editors who are actively contributing to various Wikimedia projects. Following the suggestion from Tito (CIS-A2K), we have launched and completed to survey to understand how the entire experience of being involved with Wikimedia has been to these active editors. MNavya and Nivas10798 led the project, and took the support of Esh77 to design the survey. Twelve students participated in the survey—Asrija1, B leelasai, Eswar Prabhat, Mekala Harika, MNavya, Naga sai sravanth, Nivas10798, Sreemanognyan, Sri Lekha Pathakamuri, Sriram ishnudatta, Sumanth699, and SuswethaK. Though the list of respondents was made public, the responses will be kept anonymous. Binary responses were ignored.

Survey demographics

Gender

Length of participation in the Wikimedia projects

Hours spent per week contributing to the Wikimedia projects

Insights and responses

What are the areas of interest that made you invest time for editing on your favourite Wikimedia project?

• Generally I would like to explore new places and temples, as a result I know about a few places in depth. During the IMLD Edit-a-thon the topic temples and towns attracted me and from them, I have the interest in developing those items and loved to contribute to Wikidata which is my favourite Wikimedia project.

• The concept of free knowledge movement is what drives me to contribute to Wikimedia and it's sister projects and I mostly contribute to Wikidata because it is easier.

• I mostly contribute to Wikidata. My areas of interest to contribute more to projects is Geography and historical places.

• I prefer to edit the articles related to military personnel and science topics sometimes.

Please rate your collaborative skills after involving in Wikimedia projects

To what degree do you feel that you have improved your skills due to your interaction with Wikimedia projects?

Describe the skills you feel you had improved while interacting with Wikimedia projects

• By continuous interaction with Wikipedia and it's sister projects I gained a lot of knowledge in the topics I contribute, Manual Of Style to be followed while creating different articles in en Wikipedia, speaking skills through mentoring the sessions and also I lost my stage fear to maximum extent.

• The way I explain a topic to my friend, way of observing the things, my speaking skill all started to change because of interacting with Wikimedia projects and fellow editors.

• Interacting with others and skills for life.

• Gained knowledge and communication skills.

Tell us three things (the best) that you've learnt by contributing to Wikimedia projects, and why

• By contributing quality content to Wikipedia my Writing skills are improved, Speaking skills have been developed by being as a mentor for the workshops and lastly I've got the experience of organising events by continuously organising workshops.

• That articles are written after good research done, collaboratively and that most of them are reliable. I am a better team member than I was before contributing to Wikimedia because of several discussions I had with other club members. Learning to be accountable for my own work!

• I have improved my speaking skills by interacting with others and also improved to see the things in broader view.

• Learned to observe a situation in a neutral way (NPOV). Know before you write/speak (a good knowledge is required when you write an article is what I understood).

• Team work. Interaction with the guide. It even improved my coding skills in programming languages like HTML, PHP0

Are there any reasons that lower your motivation or inhibit you from contributing to Wikimedia projects?

There weren't any notable reponses to this question. It had mostly been "No".

To what degree would you say participating in Wikimedia projects has had a positive effect on you?

To what degree were you motivated for editing on Wikimedia projects?

In what way did your motivation to involve in projects influence your learning? Please share your experience

• As a part of being one among the coordinators the presentations are mandatory during the workshops, from the beginning, I used to have stage fear but that affected me by making the sessions confusing and lag. To overcome it, I practised a lot and then gave the presentations. This is only because of my motivation.

• My motivation was my learning interest and friends.

• Regular meetups with other Wikimedians in the club and participating in campaigns and projects.

• It is a collective effort. Sometimes my friends motivate me. Sometimes it is because of my personal interest in a topic. Sometimes it becomes a mandatory thing when you have to give a demonstration on a topic.

• I got to know about famous personalities while I was editing English Wikipedia. Even I am using Wikipedia to solve a few of my assignments.

• I have referred many articles during the search of content for my article, I have learnt to learn things fastly which also helped me in my education.

Have you taught contributing to Wikimedia to anyone else?

How did that experience of training others help you?

• With the experience of knowledge sharing with others I got a chance to test my knowledge, by clarifying the doubts sometimes I also learned many things which I am not familiar with.

• It helped me a lot actually! You actually get to learn many things by trying to answer the doubts others ask you!

• By training others I actually learnt new things to explain them easier.

• While training others, they come across some doubts which I never experienced and solving their doubts make me learn new things.

• I helped few participants in Wikidata workshop in editing. Editing Wikidata is easy compared to Wikipedia but the presence of mind is very important for editing. Finding the correct source is also important. While training fellow mates I understood how to find a correct source.

Highlights of the survey

• 65% of the survey respondents spend less than four hours a week contributing to Wikimedia projects, and the rest spend more than four hours.
• More than 85% responded that their collaborative skills highly improve after being involved in Wikimedia projects (rating 4 and above).
• More than 68% of respondents were happy to notice a lot of improvement in their skills (rating 4 and above), while 8.3% felt that they had only improved their skills very little.
• 25% of respondents agreed to the statement that participating in Wikimedia projects had a positive effect on them. About 58% of volunteers rated above 4.
• 50% of respondents claimed that they were highly motivated to edit Wikimedia projects (rating 4 and above).
• There weren't any notable reasons that lower motivation or inhibit from contributing to Wikimedia projects.