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Grants:Project/Rapid/LDTC Wikipedians/Language Page Editathons 2018/Report

< Grants:Project | Rapid | LDTC Wikipedians/Language Page Editathons 2018
Report accepted
This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2017-18 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Goals

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Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went? Overall we met all our goals and were happy with the project! Doing 3 separate editathons definitely built confidence in our fellow student linguists and also reinforced the idea of disseminating research to the public through widely available tools such as Wikipedia. We had a core group of dedicated linguists who attended our events, and though we wish we reached more people, the momentum is there to do future events.

Outcome

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Please report on your original project targets.


Target outcome Achieved outcome Explanation
3 events 3 events Jan 2018, Feb 2018, and Sep 2018
25 unique individuals over the course of 3 events 17 unique individuals who made edits, some others attended but never made it to the editing stage We tried to attract new people by putting up paper flyers and sending out e-flyers, but we mostly got our core group of linguistics graduate students. The first two editathons were held at CoffeeTalk's meeting room. We had the third editathon in the Hawaiian and Pacific collection of UH Manoa's Hamilton library, in the hopes of attracting more students. We thought more students might come if the event were on campus, and the library resources were available to them.
15 participants per event 1st editathon 11 editors - 2nd editathon 5 editors - 3rd editathon 15 editors We only kept track of editors. Some other people attended but were very new to Wikipedia and ended up just exploring Wikipedia rather than making edits. The first editathon followed just a few hours after the Hawaii missile scare, so maybe some people were still recovering and didn't want to come out and edit Wikipedia articles. The third editathon had to be rescheduled by one week due to Hurricane Lane. As for the second editathon, it was mid-semester, so possibly the grad students were just too busy at that time. We tried to encourage undergraduates and non-linguists to attend, but were mostly unsuccessful in these efforts. We did have some people participate remotely, which was great. Overall we are happy to have a core group of committed linguists come to most of the events, and the fact that we have spread them over a few months helps grow momentum for this project.
5 new editors 7 new editors Hooray!
15 articles created or improved many (around 40) articles created or improved some people chose to do small edits to many pages, while others made many edits to a single page; it just varied. All the newer editors were quite proud of themselves after completing their first edits, and experienced members were happy to learn new techniques like map insertion or making tables.
10 repeat participants 9 repeat participants We are quite happy that 4 of the repeat participants attended two editathons, and 5 of the repeat participants attended all three editathons.


Learning

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Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

  • What worked well? We tried two different venues, and both were good, for different reasons. (Some people preferred the more lively coffee shop environment and a chance to socialize off-campus; others preferred the quieter library environment with library resources.) People expressed happiness with the atmosphere, resources, and refreshments. Since many of our participants had edited before, we were able to split between groups of people who could mostly work independently, and those who needed more assistance.
  • What did not work so well? Hosting the February editathon was not good timing. When polled in January, eleven people expressed that they would attend an editathon in February, but actually only a few came. Thus we cannot rely on graduate students' RSVPs during the middle of the semester.
  • What would you do differently next time? We would work with interested instructors to offer extra credit so that we could get more undergraduate participation. We would also ask potential participants ahead of time what languages they are interested in, so that we could obtain resources especially for them. (We did obtain some grammars for Pacific languages from the library beforehand, which some participants used.)

Finances

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Grant funds spent

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Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on. We spent about $439 on food and beverages for the three events. We used the remainder to tip baristas and pay for parking.

Remaining funds

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Do you have any remaining grant funds? No.


Anything else

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Anything else you want to share about your project? Nearly everyone expressed that they learned something new and had a positive experience. Please see other summary reports at http://ling.hawaii.edu/ldtc/wikipedia/2018editathons/

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