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Op-ed

Operation successful, patient dead: Outreach workshops in Namibia

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By Peter Gallert
Peter Gallert (Pgallert) has been a Wikipedian since 2008. He has done Wikipedia outreach work in Namibia since 2012. A lecturer at Namibia University of Science and Technology he also conducts research on the relationship of Wikipedia and indigenous knowledge, which has made him a frequent guest at Wikimedia conferences.

Workshops—at least mine—don't work

Some attendees of a Wikipedia workshop in Opuwo, Namibia.

I have done many small outreach workshops in Namibia. Once I could not get sufficient accounts created and Internet access was too slow, another time we lost an entire day to a power outage and the attendees had little use for Wikipedia editing skills. On many other occasions something was wrong with the organisation, the workshop was too short, the computers too few, the venue too hot, et cetera.

This time everything was right. I had four half days instead of two or three, allowing for plenty of technical help, explanation, and revision. I had the right participants – teachers, a translator of indigenous languages, an employee of the local Teachers' Resource Centre and one of a local tourist information, plus some people that explicitly wanted to attend, and that knew about Wikipedia at least in theory. Everyone was informed in advance, thanks to a local community activist who, for a small fee to cover his expenses, phoned after everyone and negotiated time and duration. Internet access was stable and reasonably fast, there were enough computers, and I even got my accountcreator right back without hassle after it had been removed shortly before.

From previous workshops I know that English Wikipedia is not an ideal place to practice. Although Namibia's national language, English is no Namibian's native tongue, and English Wikipedia's 1001 rules make a basic introduction difficult. Some participants are embarrassed to write in English in public and under supervision, fearing that they might make a mistake. Editing in Otjiherero on the Incubator on the other hand has a lot of advantages: Participants can write about whatever they wish, as there are just a few dozen existant articles. It doesn't matter for now that spelling in this indigenous language is still a matter of academic dispute, and if an article like this is slightly promotional, that's not the end of the world.

And yes, we were reasonably productive, not by the quantity of produced content but by its variety. Participants wrote short articles and categorised them, sent messages to each other, helped an Incubator regular to translate a template. They found and linked pictures on Commons and even started a deletion request there. Alas, before my car left town editing dropped to zero, and no single edit has been performed on Wp/hz ever since. Which is, in a nutshell, the story of all my outreach in Namibia. Operation successful, patient dead: A well-run workshop resulted in exactly zero new editors, zero subsequent edits, zero subsequent picture uploads. What I did get, however, were several SMS messages from attendees, asking to have such an enjoyable workshop again soon!

Wikipedians are a tiny minority

Building on anecdotal evidence, outreach workshops have not been successful anywhere. Some simple number crunching gives you one idea why: English Wikipedia has attracted about 3K very active editors (100 edits/month) and some 30K active editors (5 edits/month), out of 1.5 billion speakers of that language. Per million speakers, this is about 2 very active and 20 active editors. Proportionally, Somalia has more doctors than the world has active Wikipedians. There are more professional chess players in the world than very active Wikipedians. Wikipedia is a hobby of a tiny minority.

Otjiherero has roughly 250K speakers. Applying above statistics to it there might, or might not, be a future very active Wikipedian amidst them, and there should be about five potential active editors speaking Otjiherero. I haven't found them yet. Which is no wonder as, with 5–20 participants per workshop, it would require 2,000 workshops to skim 10% of the speaker base, and thus have a 50% chance of finding one of the five.

I am convinced by now that recruiting Wikipedia editors by offering a workshop nearby is a terribly ineffective measure. We always easily get funding for such initiatives, and we might do them for the publicity. But to increase our editor base there is hardly any method less successful than running workshops.

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  • This article is the second place in the last week or two that I've seen mention of the number of active Wikipedia editors. I'm interested in learning more about that. Where are these numbers coming from? What is the best way to verify them? PS Thank you for the article, my friend. An insightful read! Bobnorwal (talk) 03:26, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Peter, thank you for your work in outreach and for this article. You probably have a similar success rate as most other workshop providers, or editathon sponsors (assuming you define success as recruiting future very active editors). Is this really "the worst possible method?" I'm not sure, but I don't know any better recruitment method. We do need to try some different methods, perhaps brainstorm to come up with different methods. Purely online methods might work, but probably not in Namibia. Photo uploading might be an easier way to attract interest and I'm sure there is no surplus of Namibia photos at Commons. Perhaps new editors just come to Wikipedia on their own when they are ready? Maybe, but you are helping by letting people know (maybe at 2nd, 3rd, or 4th hand) that new editors are wanted and needed. University Wikiclubs have been used in several places. There's a definite need to come up with several new approaches and just keep plugging away. Thanks again. Smallbones(smalltalk) 04:36, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Really interesting. Peter, thanks for being so honest. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 08:15, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • This experience is not unusual. Some things we've learned in NYC: For a single isolated workshop the goal should be to help people understand WP by hands-on practice, not to produce content or inspire people to become active editors, but a series of workshops in which people can develop can produce more lasting results. It also helps very much to work with a predefined group who already know each other and have a purpose compatible with WP, and it helps to have people some of whom already edit WP. not just to teach but to produce some articles of their own. And it is very useful to have preselected articles to start or improve. and provide reference material that will be pertinent. DGG ( talk ) 11:19, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thank you, Peter, for your extraordinarily frank and insightful exposé. Living and working here in Thailand on outreach, I'm very much aware of the challenges you are faced with even though Thailand is probably in many ways very much more developed than Namibia. It's always been a pleasure meeting you and discussing your projects over the years - maybe we can work together on one of them one of the days. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:42, 23 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Just to add something I've found frustrating as a grant reviewer on Meta over the years: many workshops/editathons seem to have spent too much time showing participants how to create articles, rather than how to edit them (and indeed in many language-WPs, how to improve translated articles). We have zillions of stub-articles in all languages, and I've been present at an editathon where a deletion notice has been slapped on a participant's new article during the session—not very good for morale. I think the WMF, and possibly affiliates, could add great value to our spending on meetups by publishing material on how to structure and run them. Producing good material beforehand is essential (like exercises in referencing, and extracting paraphrased material from a reliable source or two, which needs to be rather stratified in a workshop). It's really hard to design a good workshop. Tony (talk) 10:38, 23 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks for the candid report. So far as I know, the common wisdom is that no one has identified an outreach method which results in a conversion rate of more than 2% turning participants into regular Wiki contributors. Most outreach programs have lower conversion rates. In New York City in 2015 and 2016 there were 100 public wiki meetups and perhaps 30 private ones. On this scale of outreach we are recruiting new regular contributors, but many of those first attend multiple events and many people have only become regulars after considering it for 2 years. Getting institutional partnerships has been key for us, and nowadays, most events have a nonprofit partner who advertises the event to their own community and brings them in as participants. The labor investment in all of this is huge, and I worry that it is not efficient or the most productive use of time, but there are probably 50 people in the city who have organized more than 3 events so at least the labor is dispersed. I struggle to imagine how outreach can work on a smaller scale without dependable, regular, workshops that are well attended and well supported by 10 major institutions. The administrative burden on presenting any event is huge and I think throughout the Wiki community, there is a misjudgment in perceiving that event organization is easy even for a person acting alone when actually it is time consuming and challenging even for teams of professionals.
Personally I would like to see more funding being used to build minimal community infrastructure in underserved regions. There is a cost to organizing volunteer events and recruiting volunteers, and it might happen that the cost of outright paying an organizer to present regular events could be less than the price of recruiting a volunteer. Time is urgent also and wiki is generally underrepresented in Africa. If someone, perhaps a librarian at the Namibia University of Science and Technology, could be funded part-time to assist in presenting Wikipedia events 4-6 times a year, then I think the regularity of that service would give more people time to think about contributing to Wikipedia. When an organization puts its own reputation at stake to make a wiki event successful, then it is more likely to be successful, and having staff involvement in the actual organizing is the best way to get institutional buy-in. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:27, 23 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm a fan of editathons, providing we get back to the original idea of editathons as a meetup focused on improving or creating articles, ideally with experts on hand. They are effective ways to get existing editors to show each other quicker ways to do things, they can generate quality content - some of the relationships established at the British Museum editathon in 2010 have been very longlasting, and over six years later that editathon is still generating featured articles. What we didn't predict was the effect on editor retention, six and a half years later the nine established Wikipedians who took part in the 2010 British Museum editathon are all still active - that's a better retention rate than we get even by making people admins. Outreach editathons are a nut we've failed to crack, but that's been known for a while. ϢereSpielChequers 21:53, 23 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Excellent write up. Yes figuring out how to recruit long term editors is sort of the holy grail of Wikipedia. In Montreal during the medical pre conference we will be having a talk by a new Wikipedian (just recruited this year and making more than 100 edits a month her first three month). She will be discussing her experience of joining the community and becoming an active editor.[1] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:44, 25 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Editathons here in NYC often have a theme of some underrepresented group of people. Most people indeed, thus most potential editors, are members of such groups, but the result is a concentration on new biographies. Such articles are subject to the harshest scrutiny. With experienced help, first-timers can get over the hurdles of notability and reliability. They come away cheered by their success, but feeling that they need expert guidance to make any progress. I wish I could recommend cutting their teeth on an easier kind of editing. Jim.henderson (talk) 01:38, 26 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
When I run edit-a-thons, I never recommend new biographies but instead old books. An editor's time can go much further by paraphrasing a section of a book for an article that won't be deleted (because a book has been written about the subject or subtopic). The activity of paraphrasing CVs and primary sources only to have the work deleted is doubly despiriting—we set editors up for failure by going for "gaps" (all so someone can compare a category count en masse) rather than quality. czar 21:18, 26 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oh. We are often in a library so we can use its books to look up our bio subjects. No. Write about the book. Or about one of its topics, when it's about some little subfield of botany or Indonesian art or whatever, especially when it mentions a particular practitioner who is the focus of our interest even though not the focus of the source. It finally dawns on me; thanks. Jim.henderson (talk) 15:43, 28 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • First, let's review the money line: "I am convinced by now that recruiting Wikipedia editors by offering a workshop nearby is a terribly ineffective measure. We always easily get funding for such initiatives, and we might do them for the publicity. But to increase our editor base there is hardly any method less successful than running workshops." Do the powers that be notice? Do they care? Are they good stewards of donor dollars? We shall see. That said, I really believe that Wikipedians are born, not made. That sounds ridiculous on the face of it, but it is really true: it takes a mother a couple of hours to give birth to a geek or a nerd and a lifetime to raise one. There has been precious little study about who the Very Active Editors are in real life, partly because of a careless attitude on the part of WMF, who historically has viewed the 10,000 or so core volunteers across all projects as more or less disposable and replaceable "power users," partly due to Wikipedia's profound (and I think misplaced) aversion to delving into real life identities, even in a data-protected way. What I believe to be true is this: core volunteers are older than many people think they are (median age: middle 30s running all the way to the 70-years-old-plus crowd). They share a commitment to education and the educative process. They are not afraid of learning the fairly simple mark-up language that we use and are not overly deterred by the lack of a true What You See Is What You Get editing process. They tend to work alone or in small groups. They tend to be subject experts about one or a few things, although willing to branch out into other fields to improve the encyclopedia and contribute to Something Greater Than Themselves. They are a precious commodity, a limited set of individuals. There are additions and subtractions to the core over time, to be sure, but growth is an organic process that is difficult to rush. WMF should start figuring out who we are, should start figuring out what we need, and should start making retention of its core volunteers a top priority rather than worrying overly about the fact that these people tend to have have white skin or penises or are middle class or live in cities and towns of the industrialized world. End transmission. —Tim Davenport, caucasian, M, 55, Corvallis, OR USA /// Carrite (talk) 23:49, 28 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    • Yes, Wikipedians are born, not made, but the task remains to find them and to show them that this is what they are born to do. In my case (a mediocre computer professional who, however, managed to make a living from it since the 1990s) it took 7 years from Wikipedia's birth until I clicked 'edit' for the first time... hard to say how often I have used Wikipedia before without really knowing what it was. I find it perfectly reasonable that someone far away from the computer and Internet business might not have realised that Wikipedia is for them to edit. And, I found it in my mother tongue and only later moved to English due to the hostile atmosphere at de. The chance to bump into one of the 80-something OtjiHerero articles on the Incubator is pretty much zero. So what I was attempting to do with my workshop was searching for pretty much what you described, Carrite, educators, life-long learners, subject experts. But that is not enough. How do I find the 'Wikipedia gene' without probing the entire population? --Pgallert (talk) 20:02, 29 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • You're improving the future of Wikipedia. Even if edit-a-thon attendees don't becoem active editors, they have knowledge that they can and likely wil pass on to others. Most are now most concerned with earning a living wage and supporting their families. How many of us started by making an occasional IP edit to fix punctuation or spelling, then singed up for an account that was rarely used and finally became active? Look at the activity timelines of the recent and current group at WP:RFA. What may look like a failure now may be the spark that brings a person back in a few years. Patient's not dead, just busy with other aspects of life right now and into the near future. Hold out hope for them years into the future. DocTree (ʞlɐʇ·ʇuoɔ) WER 21:03, 3 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Very interesting article and the conclusion is in line with what I have after running dozens of courses in Norway. Lots of good comments about what can be done, but what about difference in editors per million speakers? They vary widely, even among countries close to each other, like Norway (66) and Denmark (38). Neither does it seems that money helps, then Germany (28) should have had a better ratio than the Nordic countries that only recently got functioning local chapters. Ulflarsen (talk) 15:39, 15 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
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