Community Capacity Development/Tamil 2016/Wikidata analysis

Abstract

This page presents a comparative analysis of pre-training versus post-training survey responses about on-wiki technical skills conducted in the Tamil Wikipedia community in India on May 4th 2016, in the context of the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Capacity Development pilot project.

This analysis is restricted to only responses about the Wikidata sessions.

47 responses were received for the pre-training survey and 23 for the post-training survey.

Familiarity with Wikidata

Respondents were asked about their familiarity about Wikidata before the training and after the training.

The corresponding pre-training survey questions are as follows:

I don't know anything about Wikidata	I've heard of it, but never really tried it or understood what it is for	I understood the general idea, but I don't use it	I use Wikidata to link articles across languages (interwiki), but I don't understand it beyond that	I understand semantic data, and I contribute directly to Wikidata, adding labels and filling values in properties for items I know about	I understand semantic data, and I contribute to the Wikidata ontology (e.g. through proposing new properties) as well as to individual items

Interest in Wikidata training versus outcome of training

Pre-training

Majority of pre-training survey respondents indicated high interest in learning about Wikidata.

Post-training

Upon completion of training, most respondents again indicated strongly that the training sessions on Wikidata was useful.

Contribution metrics

As of July 27th, and since the training (Apr 30th-May 1st 2016), the tracked 25 attendees:

have contributed 198684 edits to Wikidata.
195466 of those edits are by one individual(!), so the rest put together have contributed 3218 edits.
14 of the attendees are still making Wikidata edits as of July 2016.

Suggested conclusions

From the results of the post-survey overall and this analysis, the following conclusions are suggested:

Very little familiarity with Wikidata existed among Tamil contributors before the training.
Those who used it at all, used Wikidata to achieve the interwiki functionality only.
The training was appreciated and welcomed.
The training was found engaging and clear.
The training was successful in the short term, in that it brought a majority of the trainees over the unfamiliarity barrier and got them interested in contributing linked data on Wikidata proper, and generated declarations of interest in pursuing Wikidata contribution long-term.
approximately half the attendees have become regular Wikidata contributors. One attendee has become a major Wikidata contributor, with nearly 200,000 edits.