Grants talk:Project/Rapid/BrillLyle/Her Girl Friday Women Journos Editathon/Report

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Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)[edit]

BrillLyle Thanks for your report on this editathon organized by Her Girl Friday and Wikimedia NYC. Apologies that it has taken a while to finally review your report-- we've received your expense documentation from Pete. Here are my comments:

  • Great to hear this event was focused on newer editors, and that there was an active effort to encourage folks to start new accounts. Having run some editathons myself, I fully understand this difficulty in getting new editors to consider registering. It was also prudent to setup the skillsharing session with Heather for participants, and I'm glad to hear there was a lot of training on Wikidata tasks. :)
  • Journalists can be pretty tough to write about in terms of finding sources about them, so I think the effort made to create Soledad O'Brien is important to recognize. The focus on infoboxes as another way to improve article content is interesting and not one I've seen before, but because of the benefits for Wikidata and the fact that infoboxes provide high-level summaries of various topics, I think it's a neat approach to developing content.
  • Your documentation around social media promotion is impressive; this is a good example of how to do social media work well, as it's clear you were able to bring in a lot of groups to broadcast your events. The Instagram post seemed to particularly catch peoples' attention. I agree that a schedule would be good to prepare for next time, so that expectations are clearer for partners.

I understand that not all the goals were met, but I think there a lot of good and important successes that came out of this project. It's great that the new editors who did participate were taught broadly about our projects -- both Wikipedia and Wikidata -- and were able to contribute in ways that benefits multiple projects at once. I think the topic area on journalism is a challenging one and one that you've been able to make quality contributions toward as a result of this project. I think the prospect of editathons focused on creating summary material through infoboxes is also interesting, and something worth repeating in other topic areas as well. This report is officially accepted. Thanks for your work! I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 23:41, 12 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]