Grants talk:PEG/UG TH/Wiki Loves X in Thailand 2015/Report

Hi Athikhun.suw and Taweetham. Congratulations on completing this project - you should be proud of exceeding your goals for images and articles created and engaging so many new users, and for getting so much in kind support from partners. It is great that you were able to complete the translation and implementation of the Wikipedia Adventure in Thai. We look forward to hearing whether you find it helpful for training new users. Although the writing contest did not go as well as you had hoped, it sounds like you have learned several important lessons and have a plan for how you will make the next Wiki Loves X contest more successful. We have a few questions about what your community would like to do in the future as a result of the project.

• Does anyone on your team have plans to become admins to prepare for future projects?
• We are glad to hear that meetups and editathons have been useful for your community, and that you would like to continue them in the future.
• You mention more than once that it would be helpful if more members of your community had different skills - what kind of skills and expertise would be helpful? Do people seem interested in learning these skills?

thank you for completing this report before the due date so that we could review it along with your new request. Please hold on to the THB60,232.42 left from this project while we review your application for WLX in Thailand 2016. Cheers, --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 22:12, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for your approval, Kacie.

1. Our team member(s) are interested to nominate themselves for sysop at an appropriate time. The current rule at the Thai Wikipedia is that the account must be at least one-year old. I should not reveal further details at this point as it is too premature.
2. Meetups and editathons were possible because of WMF, partners and community member support. We are grateful for that and will continue to host the activities. We are quite new to this area of this activities and, in the future, we may make furthur changes to the structure (location, format, length, date/time, etc.) to maximize impact/outcome.
3. We need a wide range of skilled volunteers. The spectrum includes,
   1. English: so that more people can write grant proposal/endorsement/report and learn from the rest of the global movement both online and in person.
   2. Technical knowledge: Many of our members joined the movement at the introduction of VisualEditor. While it seems that they can almost edit everything but there are several more layers of things to understand just to make a perfect job. Wiki markup is a must and running scripts/bot/AWB/tool server is optional for specific operations. Hackathon is a good way to learn this, we always solicit information for people from Thailand to apply for Wikimedia Hackathon Scholarships.
   3. Leadership/Partnership/PR/Management: Our movement is working as a loosely connected team. The team is dynamically growing and is in constant interaction with external partners. There are different expectations by different parties and we need to accommodate/manage them properly to meet priorities/goals. Wikimania/Wikimedia Conference may be helpful and we try to get different people to attend the conferences.

   Our people are interested in learning these both by themselves and on our daily work. However, most of the time, we learn it the hard way while doing our job. We acknowledge the effort by WMF for grantees to learn both success and mistake stories and participate in the program. We also apply for scholarships to attend conferences. However, not all applications are granted. Our user group timeline show precise time-stamped records of what was applied for and what was granted or not granted.

--Taweethaも (talk) 00:54, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Hi Taweethaも , thank you for writing such thoughtful replies to my questions. You might consider organizing a few workshops for members of your community to learn some of the skills you think are most important. Are there people in your community who have any of those skills and could teach others? If not, we can discuss other ways to find training materials that could be translated to Thai, or find another ways to support you in this skill development. --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 22:01, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Hi Kacie!

1. Thank you for your offer. Our movement is still fairly small to make a formal event just for our own workshop/training. However, we can combine this with our meetups and all activities that we have opportunity to exchange.
2. Currently, I do the training for all the three areas. I help the Thai Wikimania grantee on his English. Athikhun.suw and Pilarbini were practising mediawiki category and pywikibot with me yesterday and will soon put this knowledge to a good use. On the management side, Athikhun.suw is transitioning to a leading role in the Thai movement and I have my full support for him. Please see his grant proposal for further information/discussion on how we can use the grant to develop our volunteers.
3. If you have good materials for us to study, please kindly direct us to the resource. Thai Wikipedians can do the translation from English to Thai. Matching our volunteer translators with high-impact materials is also another challenge for us. This is why we would like to offer alternative measurement to volunteer contributions.

--Taweethaも (talk) 00:03, 14 May 2016 (UTC)