Grants talk:IEG/Senior Citizens Write Wikipedia/Midpoint

On «most of meaningful names are now taken and they need to fill in the data several times before succeeding. This is demotivating», do you think fixing bugzilla:71744 would help? --Nemo 07:53, 7 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe, partially, but the warning is not the real problem. I do not see a clear solution for the problem as a whole - the problem is that you have to come up with a really original name now to be able to register. There is probably no solution to this. --Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 11:50, 11 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

high contrast[edit]

Do you think that offering a high contrast Wikipedia skin (bigger font size, inverted colors, etc.) would help senior-citizen editors? Maybe folks at Accessibility could help? Just an idea. See Manual:Gallery of user styles. Fgnievinski (talk) 18:32, 25 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure. I think that few of our participants have problems with this. Also they can always change the font size if they want to. --Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 16:33, 1 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Report accepted, with feedback[edit]

Hi Vojtěch Dostál,

Thanks very much for this thorough midpoint report! As I accept it today, I'm posting some thoughts:

I'm so glad to see that you're tracking edits already, thanks for sharing preliminary results from these workshops. Good to see that the Education Extension & Wikimetrics is working well for you.
I appreciate that you've broken out article space edits from other edits in your discussion of outcomes for far. In any charts you include for your final report, I would encourage you to do the same there, separating out edits for article space there as well. I can see how tracking all combined makes sense when attendees first begin, as many first edits are in user and talk, of course, and also that we'll want to understand impact to articles more clearly at the finish :)
Also curious to hear more about this network of retired professors as you begin to experiment with that, and looking forward to seeing results of the social media campaign in your final report.
Great to hear that you're stopping less-efficient aspects as you learn more, and I really appreciate you sharing what hasn't been effective. If you decide that there is something more impactful in this project where you would like to transfer unspent funds from less-impactful areas (for example, moving funds set aside for promotional materials over instead to spending more for someone's time/travel for in-person recruiting, as this appears to be more effective than leaflets so far), I would gladly approve such changes. Please just use the button provided on your finances page to request this change, in that case.
Really appreciate you sharing your challenges - I'm sure many can empathize with these issues! In terms of variable abilities of participants, I wonder if you've had any success in adding additional tutors to help you in the sessions, where more individualized help is needed for different level participants? Offering regular courses for advance participants & office hours seems like a smart solution to this as well - looking forward to hearing how that goes too in future.
Providing categories for participants to make simple fixes (wikilinks etc) sounds smart, and good to know that some of your participants are interested in this. I can see the need for tools that make tasks like this easier to find in Czech Wikipedia...perhaps a potential next IEG project for a developer to take on in future? ;)
Glad to hear you're finding rewards in working with the participants! I can well understand how stressful the burden of deadlines can be, and appreciate you putting time into this report, which was very well done and enjoyable to read.
Given that you've had a few delays at the start of this project, would an extension for your current timeline (moving you final report date out by a couple of months, say) be useful? If so, please do create your timeline page and use the button there to request an extension. If more time helps you succeed, that is something we can easily provide.

Congratulations on what appears to have been some very busy and productive months so far!

Best wishes, Siko (WMF) (talk) 23:00, 16 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

(@Vojtěch Veselý) @Siko (WMF) Thank you for your feedback. To put it blunty, we are totally excited about this senior outreach program and believe that it will soon be superior to the university outreach program (which isn't that bad either, the Czech Republic has one of the best education programs in Europe). I will write a blog post for the WMF blog on why I think senior citizens are a success. We are definitely going to expand, add more instructors. And yes, we will need additional funding for these instructors, be it from WMF or a different donor. In fact, that's why we indicated we would like to ask for grant renewal (can you confirm that a renewal would not be out of question here?). In the meantime you can have a look at the graph of edits done by our students (1) and our new logo (2).

(1)
(2)

--Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 17. 12. 2014, 17:06‎ (UTC)

Heartwarming![edit]

What an interesting midpoint report and it is so heartwarming to read that students are editing from home! That is an incredibly successful outcome that I have not encountered from edit-a-thons with newcomers. This was a great thing to read, keep up the good work. Jane023 (talk) 20:27, 30 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Jane023 :-) --Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 08:46, 3 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Looking forward to hearing more[edit]

@Vojtěch Dostál: I really enjoyed reading about your accomplishments so far in your recent blog post. Thanks for sharing! I am particularly curious to know more about your Facebook results. It sounds like you'll be sharing more details in your final report, but I wanted to make sure you could cover the number of actual participants that came from Facebook campaigns. It's good to know that it seemed to target females in the specified age ranges, but it would be great to know if that resulted in people attending workshops (or how it compared to the in person outreach you conducted). And perhaps any practical advice you would pass on about Facebook campaigns (using specific text or other calls to action, images, etc.). Thanks! Tighe Flanagan (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 15 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you @TFlanagan-WMF: for your attention to our program! We will make sure the Facebook campaign is well covered in the final report. Facebook is not an all-solving platform for reaching out to the potential participants, but we have some information about senior citizens who learned about us via Facebook, and will have exact data once we complete a survey among the participants (the survey will include a question how the participants learned about us). --Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 19:01, 15 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]