Talk:Learning and Evaluation/Evaluation reports/2013/Editing workshops

The email I sent out about this!

[pardon the cross-posting]

Hi everyone! (Important areas bolded for people who are TL;DR types[1])

As you may remember, the Program Evaluation and Design team here at WMF has been doing evaluation of programmatic activities in the movement - with your help! THANK YOU!

We have released our next reporting page about our current focus programs on meta about WORKSHOPS. We appreciate everyone's participation so far, and we've made improvements to the edit-a-thon page based on your feedback, including bolding highlights for those of you who seeking a high level view of our ongoing reporting.

A third page is now on meta, and ready for improvement and commenting. It's the WORKSHOPS page, which provides information about: Program basics and history Response rates and limitations Reported data evaluation Priority goals as chosen by program leaders How much budget and time goes into planning workshops What participation is like at workshops Recruitment, retention, and replication details. Next steps (tool building, requests, support, etc) Feel free to improve and make edits on the talk page. And of course, if you are a program leader/chapter that implements workshops and your data isn't represented, please contact me to submit your data.

You can visit this new page here:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Programs:Evaluation_portal/Library/Editing_workshops

We hope you find this report inspiring and helpful.

Our next report we'll post will be about GLAM content donations. I'll send another email out about that soon.

Happy evaluating, and be sure to visit us on Facebook[2]

SarahStierch (talk) 23:00, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/TL;DR [2] https://www.facebook.com/groups/programevaluation/

"Average": Median or mean?

Hi, I think it would be helpful to state explicitely in the text whether you are talking about the median or the mean when reporting average values. The way it is presented now, we can only guess that you are reporting the medians by looking at the footnotes that state a different value for the mean. If your reports are cited elswhere without quoting the footnotes, this information is lost, and people might get it wrong. --Beat Estermann (talk) 07:41, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Hi Beat Estermann! Thank you so much for your suggestion. We considered using the 'mean' and 'median' terms in-text, however, to make the text more readable and user friendly for everyone, regardless of their statistical background, we felt that it might be better to leave these specifics in the footnotes. But I do see your point about "guessing" the median; I'll see what we can do about incorporating this into the footnotes. Let me know if this answers your question or if you have other comments! --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 20:30, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Pre- and post- workshop surveys

Thanks for the report!

Re: the suggestion of having Pre- and post- workshop surveys -- I think that is a great idea. We often use these as a library workshop evaluation metric (library workshops often have the same challenges, of reaching a small number of people and being hard to evaluate). Has anyone developed sample surveys? if so, can we please share? This kind of thing is a lot easier if there's a simple survey that we can all use without having to create one from scratch every time. -- phoebe | talk 00:12, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

Hi Phoebe! Glad you like the idea. In the next week we'll be requesting people to share surveys that they already have been executing, in order to learn more about what the community is already doing and asking, and to also provide reviews of surveys for program leaders who request it. We will also be sharing those surveys, as it is possible. For example, we have already shared one example of a WikiMetrics opt-in form that Wikimedia DC has developed, and we hope others will replicate it. We'll be announcing that request for collection next week. After we're finished with reporting (we still have four other evaluation reports to provide and don't have the capacity to start multi-tasking tool development and reporting) we will then be proceeding. User:JAnstee (WMF) will be leading the process, and she'll have a better idea of how that process will take place. I'm glad you're interested - and eager! Thank you! SarahStierch (talk) 01:36, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

Hi Phoebe. Just an update - we have put out our "call for surveys" today - if you have any to share, please let me know :) You can read it here. SarahStierch (talk) 00:05, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

A lovely idea. Thank you for collecting these. –SJ talk  20:29, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Data offer

Just a notice for further incarnations of this type of report: I volunteer to report on our workshops in Namibia. We have a somewhat detailed break-down of expenses, and we record user names and contributions. Just contact me on en, same username. --Pgallert (talk) 20:17, 24 April 2014 (UTC)