Wikimedia Conference 2014/Documentation/21
21 Let’s make better mistakes tomorrow
aka "Let's fail better in the future!"
Speaker:
- Asaf Bartov (WMF): an unsuccessful pilot program at WMF (the “Geonotice pilot” in the Philippines)
- Tim Moritz Hector (WMDE): Experience from grant projects: Mistakes made, lessons learned and what we do better now.
- Eva Lepik and Kaarel Vaidla (WMEE) will present "Don't try this at home" from the CEE meeting 2013.
- Cristian Consonni (FDC member)
tl;dr: Plan carefully, state your goals, communicate precisely and don't rely on a single person, that's the advantage of a community. Give volunteers sufficient support and guidance. Don't be afraid to fail, fail better. Share your experience!
Notes
[edit]Wikimedia Eesti
[edit]
- Vision conference
- Conference was planned including among others Estonian president
- key note speaker was unable to attend -> conference had to be postponed three times
- Lesson learned: Do not rely on a single person
- Grant application
- Was 'under construction' for several months
- Collided with subsequent application
- Lessons learned: Actually read your grant application. Communication is key. Grant applications are not purely formal
- Public Workshop
- scheduled at popular museum
- Attendance: six people (and the museum's cat)
- Lessons learned: Facebook likes are cheap
Wikimedia Deutschland
[edit]- Which grant program should I apply for - guide the applicant
- Too bureaucratic - guide the applicant
- Who should I talk to? - Clear responsbilities
- Stringent documentation/communication
- Make sure to include individual applicants into the community
- Make decisions transparent (e.g. by letting the community decide; forming committees)
- give support to the volunteer on evaluation
- How do we support larger community driven projects?
- Money alone does not make for a good project! Provide for comprehensive and individual support.
Wikimedia Italia
[edit]- Success/failure depends on perspective.
- State your goals, invest in strategy, plan carefully.
- Have a backup plan.
- Do not be afraid to fail! But: Report failures so other projects (and the FDC) can learn from them.
Philippines / WMF
[edit]- Blog post about that https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/07/02/english-wikipedia-editor-pilot-philippines/
- growing Wikimedia in the 'global south'
- usage of geo-targeted central notice to reach out and improve WP's coverage of the Philippines
- show people how to create accounts and edit -> actually worked, new accounts were created and users managed to add userboxes
- second banner encouraging people to creating new pages (support through help page or teahouse)
- result: not a single mainspace edit was achieved!
- Lessons learned:
- Inviting contributions to a low-risk space (in this case, the user’s own page) and surfacing a simple task (creating a page about yourself) with good step-by-step instructions did encourage people to edit.
- Inviting contribution by surfacing geo-targeted article stubs was not enough to motivate or help users to make their first edits to an article.
- Providing suggestions via links to places users might go for help did not appear to sufficiently support or motivate these new editors to get involved.
- WikiProjects can be great sources of curated content.
- Keep on failing! Fail better! Share your experience!
Questions/Remarks
[edit]- Redefine contribution! Fixing typos counts too.
- Check out Grants:IdeaLab
- also check out en:Wikipedia:GettingStarted !
- It *does* suggest articles needing spelling corrections!