Grants talk:PEG/UG TH/WLX in Thailand 2016/Report

Hi Athikhun.suw. Thank you so much for this very detailed grant report! It's great to read about all of the activities, your successes and challenges. Congratulations on organizing such a large and diverse number of projects over the last year. It's exciting to see how the community is developing and that you will be planning on continuing this activity in 2017. We are happy to approve this report with the following questions/comments:

Monthly meet-ups are a great way to keep offline connections strong and develop relationships within your community. We're happy to hear that they have been a good way to network the community.
We look forward to your assessment of the education program in terms of the more useful measures you mentioned in the report. Please keep us updated with your findings.
It sounds like having more people in your core organizing team with diverse skills, as well as admins, would be very supportive. What are your ideas for recruiting these people?
You mentioned that some volunteers burn out or get demotivated and that is of course unavoidable sometimes. However, it's a good idea to think about ways to prevent this in future. For example, not taking on so many projects or making sure there are enough people organizing an event to share the burden. While it is work to organize these activities, it should still be fun! : )
In terms of retention of new editors, where there specific projects where you saw this was low? Education programs in general see fairly low retention rates and that is why it is a not a great measure of success. Instead, we focus on the quality of the content students produce. It is unlikely that after their course is over, that they will continue to edit. For other activities, creating a regular time to connect in a social atmosphere has been more successful in getting new editors to stay engaged in the projects. For example, the monthly meet-ups, or a series of workshops or editathons.
The photos from WLE and WLM are amazing as always! However, the usage rate is very low (1.28% for WLM and 5.9% for WLE). We typically see around 15% for the average photo contest and 25%+ is really good. It would be great to add an element to the contest that focuses on photo integration. You could offer a prize for the most number of photos used on Wiki projects or the most number of articles written. You could also hold a writing contest after the photo contest is over. It would be sad not to see all those beautiful images in articles!
Regarding the underspend, if your new Rapid Grant request is funded, the remaining funds will be deducted from that grant.

Again, thank you for all your community's work in organizing these activities. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 04:19, 7 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hi Alex. Here are responses to your comments.

Ideally, it would be nice to recruit more volunteers working as part of the organizing team. Online engagement never was a problem but offline involvement remains a challenge. If we had more volunteers working offline, we'd be able organize larger meetups, editathons or even a regional conference. You know it's always nice to aim a little high. :)
As far as the education program is concerned, Taweetham and I we wrote up our 2-year experience as a research manuscript which has already been submitted for publication in an academic journal. We will keep you updated.
I agree that retention rate of new users are low. Quality and quantity wise, those are of high quality. Student's contribution between 2014 and 2015 was comparable to around 78 pages of texts and 64 pages of photo, assuming 3,000 bytes per page and 5 photos per page. We, however, have not tabulated the 2016-2017's results just yet but I believe that until now it'd be equivalent to around 150 pages of text. Some of the uploads were high quality videos of chemical reactions, please see example here
To increase the usage of photos from WLE and WLM, we plan to count photo contribution as part of our future writing contests. Let's see again see how things go.

Cheers, Athikhun.suw (talk) 06:30, 8 April 2017 (UTC)Reply