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Wikimedians in Thailand/The 2014 dtac Project

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The 2014 dtac Project refers to the collaboration between Wikimedians in Thailand and dtac, the mobile phone operator in Thailand that initiated between May and August 2014. The collaboration aimed to have the employees of dtac to create new articles or improving existing articles in Thai Wikipedia, and is part of the larger corporate social responsibility (CSR) project of 100,000 merit hours of dtac

Description

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dtac previously collaborate with Thai Wikipedia on the project "Wikipedia Zero", to which the data charges on browsing Wikipedia will be waived. To enhance collaboration and to expand the role of the users to become contributor, The dtac Project was initiated. The project is divided into three phases:

  1. Discussion and pilot project
    • December 2013, the project was discussed during the launch event of "Wikipedia Zero".
    • Between March and April 2014, User Taweetham (talk · contribs) led the discussion on possibility to have dtac employees involved in the voluntary project by contributing to Wikipedia, which was favorably received at the launching stage. The head of CSR division and the project coordinator were trained on the basic understanding of Wikipedia guidelines and instructions on how to edit, in order to train further employees who is interested in joining this project
  2. Workshop and Training
    • The workshop and training has been initiated for a total of 11 times, between 12/20/2013 and 08/11/2014 (details). Participants for each session are recorded here, in addition to contributions and/or draft they made. To ensure smooth transition and transparency, V(g) (talk · contribs) (then-administrator) stationed in permanent basis for two months (June and July 2014), with other volunteers such as the aforementioned User Taweetham, B20180 (talk · contribs), Tinuviel (talk · contribs) and Nullzero (talk · contribs) joining the workshop in selected dates
    • The team collected feedback from users and difficulty on formatting the article and threshold for calculation of merit hours, which leads the third phase of the project, Mass Translation. The CSR department also boost the participation by honoring users with outstanding results in its promotional material inside the office
  3. Mass translation
    • To ensure that the target were achieved (roughly 10,000 hours), a mass translation were initiated by using the specially-developed tool by Nullzero, Let's Translate to ensure that the translated experience resemble the Word-like format, whereas other volunteers in Wikipedia will help reformat those articles to WikiMarkup

Participants

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With participated users registered to the project outlined in this user list, roughly 100 users

Analysis

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The project received attention from Telenor (the parent company of dtac). The following table list the statistics of the project

Month (2014) Pages created Total edits Bytes changed
February 2 8 5,979
March 37 152 170,545
April 46 230 329,821
May 13 113 273,048
June 51 311 757,540
July 37 697 930,395
August 39 574 667,255
September 5 82 9,631
October N/A 46 302,164
November N/A 8 22,429
Total (all namespaces) 230 2,221 3,468,807 (net)

A further analysis indicated that out of 103 users participating (96 of which is new users), only 51 users make at least 1 edits on the project, 19 users of which edit the page within the first 44 minutes of their registration. The final edit of these users were recorded on 8 November 2014.

Despite two articles in this collaboration were listed as Good Articles, and another listed in the DYK section, there were some articles that require rescue by Wikipedia volunteers, as shown here. As of July 4, 2015, the number of articles requiring rescue is 57, approximately 25% of all pages created in this project. Some users raised concerns about whether the similar project would end up being a backlog to volunteers in the future (see, inter alia, the Wiki Loves X competition organized by Wikimedians in Thailand)

We also note a great contributions from non-community members, Nattawan (dtac) and Carolynne (WMF). There were very helpful during the course of the initiative However, they have left dtac and WMF, shortly after the conclusion of this project.

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