Grants:IEG/Comprehensive and wiki-like training pages

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eligibility and selection criteria

project:

Comprehensive and wiki-like training pages

project contact:

biosthmorsgmail.com

participants:

grantees: User:Biosthmors

summary:

The four en:WP:Trainings are slideshows that are difficult to edit. Four new pages will be created to show all successive slides on one page through transclusion.

engagement target:

English Wikipedia

strategic priority:

Increasing Participation

total amount requested:

40 USD

2013 round 2

Project idea

The four en:WP:Trainings are slideshows that are difficult to view and difficult to edit because they are tucked away into templates. I propose making four pages which display every template so that all slides have the capability to be edited from one page with transclusion. A comprehensive view will ease review, discussion, and potential edits. It will hopefully inspire new approaches, such as allowing an easier platform to derive fast-paced narratives for high-quality and short video training tutorials.

Project goals

I want to transform highly-formatted and segmented training material into a more wiki-based platform to enable editing, discussion, review, and the elucidation of potential video tutorial narratives.

Project plan

Scope:

Scope and activities

I will locate the Wikipedia space for each editable slide to transclude them one into a single page. I will do this with each of the four trainings to create four comprehensive wiki-like training pages.

Tools, technologies, and techniques

This should be easy.

Budget:

Total amount requested

$40 USD

Budget breakdown

Why $40? The $40 amount is not important. It could be $10 or $20 if you wish. Personaly, I think having an accepted grant will be a powerful motivator. I hope to eventually say that "I was entrusted with community money and I made Wikipedia a better place because of it". I see this desire as a natural one that builds upon Maslow's hierarchy of needs, given my passion for Wikipeda. I am also motivated by deadlines, and I have too many unexplored ideas about how to improve Wikipedia that go unaddressed. Why an IEG? An accepted grant will allow me to collaborate with the team here, to build relationships, and to deliver a structured product to the community. I also hope to use my experiences with the IEG team to use as material at a Wikimania 2014 talk.

Intended impact:

Target audience

The internal Wikipedia editing audience is one target audience because the plan is to catalyze the improvement of training material by engaging that community. I personally find it very difficult to analyze the content of the training modules in their currently segmented format. The eventual target audience is the thousands upon thousands of newcomers will benefit from efficiency gains from the potential edits and videos inspired by a new format to present the training modules. This alternative format will enable editing and viewing through scrolling up and down a single page instead of one having to view each slide individually in segments.

Fit with strategy

This proposal seeks to improve participation rates by creating a platform to potentially improve, definitely analyze, and definitely inspire future on-boarding activities and ideas. It will hopefully make the current training material more accessible (if potential benefits are identified). It also seeks to facilitate any potential improvements of said materials by making them more wiki-like. A holistic view of all the content will also enable a platform to ease analysis of the "big picture" that the modules are trying to teach. Having one page could also enable editors to extract exciting and fast-paced narratives for training videos geared towards new editors (a future IEG project, perhaps?) These anticipated improvements (ease of editing and a comprehensive-viewing capability), combined with the potential expanded uses for the material seeks to increase participation by enabling better introductory material for Wikipedia.

Sustainability

The pages will remain for the community to use, analyze, and benefit from.

Measures of success

The comprehensive pages themselves will be the main measures of success. If consensus is formed and edits are made to improve the slides based upon the creation of these pages then that will be all the more better. A reduced number-count of slides inspired from analysis might be a measurable benefit by reducing the time required for training. If individuals are inspired to create video tutorials from comprehensive pates then that would also be a measure of success, as would any future projects these pages inspire.

Participant(s)

I, Biosthmors, am the sole grantee. I am interested in increasing participation rates in Wikipedia by making improving training material. You can see my recent re-design of en:WP:Your first article, for example. You might also see the edits I've made to en:Help:Cheatsheet. I have been active with the Education Program since Fall of 2012, and I am an Ambassador (Campus, Online, and Regional) for the program. I like designing course pages with professors and TAs (see here for a recent example). I meet with professors and TAs on Skype to support those projects. I am also active with en:WikiProject Medicine and Wiki Project Med.

Discussion

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