Public outreach/Academy/Goals

Goals

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  1. Increase the scientist's understanding of the English Wikipedia (established practices and procedures)
  2. Encourage the scientists to help improving Wikipedia's quality
  3. Enable the scientists to contribute to Wikipedia
  4. Increase Wikipedia's credibility
  5. Establish a content partnership with our partner

Increase understanding

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Wikipedia is well-known for being an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. However many people may have little more information than that, or worse - misinformation about the project. The goal of Increasing Understanding of agency employees is aimed to educate them about the mission of Wikimedia and the principles behind Wikipedia and how it works. In addition, Wikipedia has developed a very complex system of quality management, of policies, rules and communication that can be daunting to new contributors. Our objective is to explain some parts of this complex universe: e.g. the system of quality management (that is –from my experience with prior Academy events– what scientists are most interested in) and some of the core principles ("no original research," the reason Wikipedia itself is generally not cited but instead the sources are cited, etc).

Indicators and Measures of Success

Indicator Measurement
75% of participants/respondents indicate a positive awareness of WP Pre & post event survey

Encourage participation

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Some of the scientists already showed interest in participating, but others certainly need more encouragement. Our survey will hopefully give us an answer to the question how much encouragement is needed. Several ideas for encouraging sustainable participation have already been developed. Participation is not limited to edits only. It may include Meta-level work on medical and health projects, advising and reviewing articles, participation in discussion groups and other activities.

Indicators and Measures of Success

Indicator Measurement
75% of participants/respondents understand the importance of contributing to WP Pre & post event survey
Participation rates of 20% @ 3 months user name activity / newsletter activity
Participation rates of 10% @ 6 months user name activity / newsletter activity
Participation rates of 5% @1 yr+ user name activity / newsletter activity
Artifacts of event enable broader participation best practices are used with other groups

Facilitating the first steps

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Starting to edit in Wikipedia takes more familiarity than we have time to offer in this event. Teaching the scientists how to get a user account, how to use a Wikipedia signature, how to communicate with others, how to cite sources, etc. will be our objective for the "Wikipedia basics" workshops. Depending on how many scientists create accounts/ have accounts prior to the workshop, we may offer a more advanced track for a portion of participants.

Indicators and Measures of Success

Indicator Measurement
95% of participants create an account Sign-in reconciled with new user accounts
40% of participants/respondents indicate confidence in editing Post-event survey

Increase Wikipedia's credibility

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Recent studies have shown that Wikipedia's credibility is significantly lower in anglophone countries than elsewhere. Wikipedia Academy events are a big opportunity to change Wikipedia's perception both in the general public and in academic circles.

Indicators and Measures of Success

Indicator Measurement
85% of participants/respondents indicate a positive view of WP's credibility Post event survey
__# of non-negative press stories on the event or relationship Communications dept stats
Any referrals to/invites from other highly credible organizations or agencies Meta:Public Outreach

Begin to Establish a content partnership

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Wikipedia Academy events offer a big opportunity to get to know each other better. Face-to-face contacts create trust – and trust is one of the preconditions to establish content partnerships. This is a minor goal of the event. The objective is simply to start building the relationship.

Indicators and Measures of Success

Indicator Measurement
Identification of agency's point of contact for content partner relationship Report from Mathias Schindler

See also

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