Talk:Wiki Education Foundation/Annual Plan 2017-18 (draft)

Inviting comments and questions through May 28, 2017

Wiki Ed staff are soliciting Wikimedia community comments and questions on our draft. We're doing so this year based on conversations with members of the Simple APG Committee. As you can see in our plan, Wiki Ed intends to enter the FDC process this fall. During the review process from the Simple APG committee this spring, committee members raised concerns about a lack of opportunity for comments on Wiki Ed's draft annual plans. While we always publish our board-approved annual plan on our website, we haven't offered a draft for comments in the past. In an effort to be more transparent and respond to the Simple APG committee's feedback, I've posted the draft of the annual plan on Meta and invite comments and questions from the broader Wikimedia community on the this talk page. Comments made prior to May 28 will be taken into account when Wiki Ed staff prepare a final version of the plan for the board to vote upon.

As with all nonprofits, our board is the final decision-maker on our annual plan. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:07, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Fees for service

Hello, thank you for sharing this proposal. It seems to me that much of the support that WEF provides to students and instructors, if WEF was unavailable, would be done by faculty and staff at the institutions where these classes take place. Has WEF considered instituting a fee for service model? It seems to me that the institutions are effectively getting free staff time from WEF if WEF isn't charging fees for service, and to me it seems a bit unfair for institutions to offload their expenses to WEF in this way without compensating WEF. Furthermore, if WEF instituted a fee for service model, then WEF would likely have adequate financial resources to hire the necessary support staff to keep up with requests from institutions which are willing to compensate WEF for its staff's time. So my impression is that WEF should be relying less on donations and more on fees for service. How would you feel about changing your funding model to that approach? --Pine^✉ 02:06, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Pine, thanks a lot for your input. We're actually planning to explore the fee-for-service model. First conversations have shown that universities aren't generally opposed to this idea. Best, --Frank Schulenburg (talk) 05:12, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

To elaborate a bit on Frank's answer — while we agree with you that fees from universities are crucial for our financial success, we also want to ensure that we aren't turning classes away because the individual instructor's institution isn't interested in Wikipedia. As Frank said, our initial conversations have indicated some institutions are, and that we could fit into the subscription model already used for Blackboard/Canvas or TurnItIn. But we wouldn't want to turn down an instructor whose university won't pay for Wiki Ed's services; we still want to support that class, make sure they're following our best practices, etc. As you know, classes operating without contact with us often don't go through our assignment design help, don't take our trainings, don't read our brochures, and don't fully understand Wikipedia's guidelines, and then students unwittingly cause damage to the encyclopedia that requires volunteer time to clean up. We don't want this to happen. As we explore this model, we want to ensure we can still provide support to all classes who want to work with us and follow our best practices; for the fee-for-service model, we'd likely charge for some as-yet-undefined additional level of support while continuing to ensure all classes in the US and Canada working on the English Wikipedia can get our base level of support. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:09, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments. --Pine^✉ 19:16, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Authorship highlighting

How is this done? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:19, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood: You can see more about it in this blog post; Sage (Wiki Ed) can answer any technical questions. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:11, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 16:28, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Final version now available

Thank you to all who commented on the draft! Our board approved a final version of the Annual Plan a their June meeting, and that version is now available on our website. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:31, 29 June 2017 (UTC)