Grants talk:Project/Rapid/The Africa De-stubathon/Report

Report accepted

Dear Dr. Blofeld,

Thank you for this grant report, and apologies again for the delay in our review. We're happy to accept this report as complete. I wanted to congratulate you on exceeding your target of projected improved articles for this project! It was especially interesting to see the breakdown of number of editors for each bracket of improved articles in your metrics, and to see the level of engagement from these participants. Do you have any methods of following up with or getting feedback from the participants on their experience with this contest? I am curious to see how incentivized or intrinsically motivated these participants were, and whether that would help inform your plans on distributing awards in the future. Your upcoming Project Grant proposal also lends itself in part to the outcomes of this project in addressing stubs at a much larger scale. While this may be too soon to think about, I was wondering if it's possible at some point to begin assessing the quality of these improved articles along with filling content gaps? You mentioned this a little in the report, but it would be interesting to know if you think future participants would want to focus more on that aspect of article improvement.

All of this to say, this was an intriguing initiative! Best wishes on your upcoming projects, and thank you for your work for the movement! Morgan Jue (WMF) (talk) 23:00, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

@MJue (WMF): Hi Morgan, thanks. Yes, the comments about the contest were extremely positive. It clearly motivated editors to produce a massive amount of content. I can ask a few people to post here on their experiences if you like, but there's some comments in the endorsements at the bottom of my new proposal on the great support I have in running them. I think the 2000 big target percentage bar helped too. I knew it was going to be a big challenge but we did it! Yes, the new proposal will be the development of all types of contests for a range of topics. While a lot will focus largely on Destubbing, as we have a huge number of stubs, they can vary from basic sourcing improvement, core article contests getting articles to GA, "debloatathons", which would be clearing up bloated, poorly sourced articles and improving readability (a big problem on high traffic articles), and even new article creation contests, particularly for women to try to get us up to 20% women bios much quicker than projected. Some contests I intend to design will focus on quality improvement, and measuring the quality (GAs produced etc) would be a central theme for that. For instance see Women in Green, a contest could be designed to get core articles on important women up to GA status and the number of GAs produced the goal. Cheers.Dr. Blofeld (talk) 10:41, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

If you don't mind my chiming in here...I was a semi-active participant in the Africa destubathon. (More of an observer than anything else, to be honest.) I have to say, I was impressed not only with the level of interest it generated, but with the quality of work that resulted; it exceeded its goal on the last day, which I definitely hadn't expected to see. That's the kind of thing we could use more of, and I think it serves as a wonderful model of the sort of things we can do if we put the right time, effort, and monetary consideration into them. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao (talk) 17:02, 15 March 2017 (UTC)