Grants talk:IEG/WikiProject X/Final

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Report Accepted[edit]

Hello Harej and Isarra,

Thank you for submitting this Final Report. It's lovely to read about the careful work you've been doing to improve the work spaces for WikiProjects. I'm accepting this report now with the following comments:

  • Congratulations on the completion of the research and design phase. Based on the results of your survey, it sounds like your pilot users are finding immediate positive benefits from implementation of your design. It's a promising sign that some of your features, like the automated lists, are being adopted with little promotion. Well done!
  • I'm glad to see you're thinking about how to make it easier to "retrofit" existing projects in your renewal so that in the future your designs can be readily adopted without tailored support from your team. As you note, this is crucial for scaling. Once you're ready to scale, I'm curious how you're thinking about your outreach plan to encourage deployment to other WikiProjects?
  • Since global metrics are designed to support aggregate reporting about WMF's grantmaking programs, they are typically not very useful in demonstrating the theory of change behind any individual project. As discussed in our call today, this report is lacking sufficient measures that speak to whether or not your project has been successful in meetings its goals. You crystallized two main goals in our call today: to positively impact (1) discovery of work that needs to be done and (2) discovery of like-minded collaborators. Ideally, your Final Report should answer whether or not your project succeeded in achieving these goals and walk us through how you know one way or the other. If your renewal request is approved, it will be crucial that you design your work plan so that you can measure and report on success in your next Final Report--perhaps by incorporating some of the strategies suggested by Jonathan Morgan today. I know it can be challenging to collect the information you need to do this, as you noted, so please don't hesitate to reach out if you need further support thinking about this.
  • Your project resources archive appears to be very thorough. Thank you for diligently documenting your work, including your template messages and survey questions.
  • I enjoyed reading your learning pattern--especially this line: "Research is actually every step in development and design."  :-)
  • It's not surprising to hear that things took longer than expected nor that the amount of work that needed to get done was larger than initially expected. This is a very common challenge. I'm glad to hear that you prioritized what seemed most important so you could complete it well, rather than spreading yourself too thin.
  • Your grantee reflections are lovely. It sounds like you have both been quite intrepid about diving into previously unexplored territory and have gained new knowledge and skills as a result. Bravo! I look forward to hearing what you learn in the next phase!

Best regards, --Marti (WMF) (talk) 04:07, 3 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you.
  • Regarding outreach for scaling: Our current approach has focused on asking individual WikiProjects. Consulting with the WikiProjects in question has allowed us to make sure that what we have to offer suits their needs; WikiProjects, after all, have numerous needs. As our products mature and we develop DIY deployment kits, we can look to more generalized adoption campaigns. An obvious option would be to advertise in The Signpost, Wikipedia's internal newsletter. We will want to look into other options as well, with the goal of finding aspiring collaborators where they are.
  • Regarding measures of success: The original WikiProject X proposal did not include measures of success beyond the global metrics, and we wrote this report to mirror the original proposal. We did not have clearer goals at the time, as we first wanted to determine which problems we were best suited to solve, but we have since identified that our two main goals are to improve the discovery of article improvement/creation tasks and to improve the discovery of editors interested in the same subject. Our renewal proposal is aligned with those goals, and within the renewal proposal we have specific ways of measuring our outcomes. Specifically, one of our top priorities is developing an analytics tool that will allow us to keep track of WikiProject usage.
As we discussed, I will continue working on the renewal proposal to refine its scope; namely, to prioritize maturing our English Wikipedia products. harej (talk) 18:12, 4 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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