Grants:IEG/Increase Awareness of and participation in Indic language Wikipedias in Colorado/Midpoint

This project is funded by an Individual Engagement Grant

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's first 3 months.

Summary

Report created from notes kept as the project progressed

• Response to the project meetings/editathons has been erratic.
• 1-2 editors has continued to edit consistently.
• Most editors seem to be losing interest because of unfamiliar/unwieldy

Methods and activities

• Three pronged approach (chosen based on empirical evidence of individual interest expressed to the grantee)

• Canvassing/word-of-mouth during community events

I requested time (5-20 minutes) at formal community gatherings to talk about Wikipedia/Wikimedia in general and about the project I was conducting in specific. Following that, I encouraged listeners to attend a Thursday evening session or set up a smaller/individual session for introduction to editing.

• Weekly edit sessions with prospective and regular editors

Every week, usually on Thursdays, I conducted hour-long (or more) edit sessions where prospective and regular editors were invited to learn and practice their editing skills. During these sessions, I introduced Indic language typing methods (phonetic, inscript, third-party tools) then demonstrated basic editing using both Visual Editor (where available) and old-style markup editing. After 1-2 sessions, the user(s) was/were introduced to slightly more advanced markup and concepts (templates, categories, etc.)

• Selective individual follow-up

Where needed, I followed up with individual editors to speed up or slow down the pace.

Midpoint outcomes

• Listeners seem enthused at the idea of crowd-sourced knowledge sharing and collaborative editing.
• Lots and lots of questions about the veracity or reliability of information in all projects.
• Editors with background in teaching or literature (even as avid readers) seem to be catching on faster than others.
• Editors get frustrated at the editing interface. Most are used to MS-Word-like (or similar editor) interfaces. Even Visual Editing seems daunting to users with little computing background.
• Frustration at edit-reversion or similar experience averted with proactive coaching.
• There is still some doubt about the "why." - What purpose does it serve to have this type of 'heap of knowledge'? If I have Google, why do I need this?

Finances

The funds were not spent per plan. While some costs were incurred for outreach (printing, display, etc.), zero dollars were spent on Food, as the participants provided food for every meetup. Giveaways and competition are planned for second half.

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges

• Frustrated at the editing interface. Most are used to MS-Word-like (or similar editor) interfaces.

• Introduced 'offline' editing. Typing it up in MS-Word or similar editor, then copy-pasting into mediawiki interface along with any markup.

• Doubts about the "why." - What purpose does it serve to have this type of 'heap of knowledge'? If I have Google, why do I need this?

• Answered the questions as appropriate but this needs a bigger/better campaign from "reliable" sources. One editor justifying/rationalizing/explaining doesn't seem to cut it.

What is working well

• Visual Editing seems is easier than straight markup.

• Even as there's some difficulty to adapting to VE, it seems to be much easier than straight-markup editing.

• Frustration at edit-reversion or similar experience averted with proactive coaching.

• Your learning pattern link goes here

Next steps and opportunities

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points. If you're considering applying for a 6-month renewal of this IEG at the end of your project, please also mention this here. This section created from notes kept during the project

• More focus on horizontal outreach - e.g. bring a friend to edit sessions, send a message to another editor on your home wiki
• Introduce editors to progress reports/stats about their own contribution to encourage a little competition.
• Continue canvassing

• Extension to be considered only if there's significant pickup in participation/outcome/results.

Grantee reflection

The application process was smooth and intuitive. Marti was very helpful in guiding and coaching about the grants process as well as typical project timeline.