Grants talk:IEG/Editing Maithili Wikipedia/Final

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

Hi Biplab Anand, and thanks for preparing the final report on your project to teach and train students in the Saptari district in Nepal on editing Maithili Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Projects. I am very sorry we have not reviewed this final report since it was submitted to us in March 2017, over two years ago. This has largely been due to shifts team roles and organizational needs around movement strategy that required our team to shift focus away from some core duties around grants. That said, two years is still is not an acceptable amount of time to wait for review from our team, and I'd like to provide some comments and feedback now:

• Congratulations on reaching and exceeding some your goals around outreach and working to achieve more than 15 active editors on Maithili Wikipedia. Encouraging active editing can be very challenging to do in community engagement. That this Wikipedia project began with 1 active editor, then increased to 10 during the midpoint of this project, and resulted in over 20 active editors at the conclusion of this project is an important achievement and shows your approach to engaging with students encouraged them to edit beyond this project. I also want to point out that, at the time of this writing, there are now over 30 active editors on Maithili Wikipedia.
• Thanks very much for taking the time to capture several images of the students participating in your programs. Between the contest, WikiEducation Program, and training session, it's helpful to see the different kinds of students participating in the project, and the resources you used to teach or present information. It's worth pointing out, for example, that you were able to use the laptop and projector in some cases, and other times you were using a whiteboard to teach about concepts and programs related to Wikimedia Projects. That you and other volunteers were able to be versatile in your presentations based on what resources were available is a valuable and appreciated skill, and allowed you to provide this information broadly.
• It is good to hear that participating students were enthusiastic about the purpose of Maithili Wikipedia and the larger movement. You wrote that Most of our participants did not have a Wikipedia account and did not participate in any article creation or improving, and I want to emphasize that your engagement with students who did not end up editing was still likely beneficial from a readership perspective. I checked out the monthly pageviews on mai.wikipedia.org during the period of your events between January - September 2016, and there were substantial increases in pageviews during this period.
• I wanted to follow up on comments that Mjohnson (WMF) made on your midpoint report (see here) concerning the quality of articles created or improved. I found this list of articles related to the project, and there are some examples of articles that have quality issues. For instance, जर्ज डब्लु बुस is a biography for a former President of the United States but there is no text in the body of the article, and it is mostly written in English. The article on लिग नेपाल शान्ति एकता पार्टी is a single sentence that contains no references. I know that not all articles are like these ones, but it is not good practice to create articles that lack important components, like references and an article body, which are important for both readers and other editors. In future events, please shift your focus toward building higher quality articles, even if this results in fewer overall articles created. If possible, could you also provide some examples of the best articles that came out of this project?

Thanks very much for your engagement with students in Nepal to learn about and contribute to Maithili Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. This report is approved, but please respond to my question above when you are able. The remaining funds will be reallocated toward this grant proposal if it is approved. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:55, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

Thank you very much I JethroBT (WMF) for approving the grant request. Well, This was my first grant project, where I learned a lot from the students and about the offline Wikimedia activities. As you see, After this project I was involved in Mission 10 project and then I have totally shifted my mind towards growing reader- Promotion of Maithili Wikipedia. Through my upcoming project I'll try to engage more readers as well as editors to Maithili Wikipedia. Thanks--Biplab Anand (Talk) 06:05, 28 July 2019 (UTC)