Learning patterns

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A collection of solutions and effective practices in the Wikimedia world.

Learning patterns are a simple way to document an important lesson. They explain how to reproduce a successful strategy for executing or evaluating an activity, such as running an edit-a-thon, or how to run a survey.

In a bit more detail, a learning pattern is (1) a guideline that provides advice on how to do something and (2) a template with clear title and consistent format so people can quickly find the information they need when they browse through the library of learning patterns. If you've been involved in a Wikimedia activity, you've probably learned some valuable tips, tricks, advice, or considerations about what works and what doesn't for that kind of activity. You can read more about learning patterns and this project here on the Wikimedia blog.

See disclaimer.

I need to make an event page, for a contest or something else.

You're going to give a workshop on how to edit Wikimedia projects or going to get students in a school or university to edit for the first time. Take care: no more than six people will be able to create their own accounts from the same IP.

Student contributions are being reverted or deleted, or student accounts have been blocked.

You want to make the people attending your event relaxed, excited, and ready to work together.

Some people write a lot in their forms but they sometime miss their personal contribution

A conference call is coming? You know it’s gonna get boring? Here are a few ideas to spice things up, avoid oversharing, and make sure no one gets heard.

The pattern aims at providing future Wikimania participants with tips on how to prepare for the conference.

Spaces on Wikipedia can sometimes be intimidating to newcomers who are afraid to jump in.

Editing Wikipedia is not easy for new comers, and they are embarrassed when they realized actual Wikipedia-editing is different from what they thought.

This pattern is an outcome of organising Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2018 and observing other conferences registration process.

Everything has gone horribly wrong! Panic! Don't tell anyone, and maybe the problem will go away!

Volunteers are very enthusiastic to organize and host activities, but may not be very interested in providing an activity report and metrics after the event is done. Activity reports for each activity are necessary in order to produce reports required as part of the WMF's grant process.

Edit-a-thons can become training events, without accomplishing much.

To run a successful event on site, time, tasks and resources need to be managed well. It is however impossible to know everything by heart.

Media contributions are most valuable when they are integrated into Wikimedia projects.

You need to measure your project's output according to the global metrics specified by the Wikimedia Foundation.

It is difficult to track new user registrations that come from a specific event or online campaign.

Difficulties in tracking user contributions by chapter.

If people misunderstand your survey questions, they may not answer them the way you intended.

Post-event surveys are a great way to gather feedback and contact information from participants; but people get distracted and often don't fill them out.

Even promising ideas with detailed project plans and broad appeal can fail to achieve their goals if what they produce is not useful and relevant to the right people.

Psiquiatric patients tend to abandon the editing course and you may feel frustrated.

You want to coordinate an editing workshop or course with patients at an institution.The project may be delayed due to possible interferences.

This is intended for small projects that need to grow and need to attract new users.

You need to select mental patients for your course.

Groups of volunteers doing Wikimedia activities may become overwhelmed and demotivated by the amount of administration work that is required to be done to sustain their activities.

Clear agreement between the partners about the intended impact of the project creates a helpful focus to direct programme’s efforts. Having broad and flexible objectives is a strength of a programme, but not at the cost of unclear expectations from both partners.

Since 2013, the small team of WikiFranca dedicated to the coordination of the International Francophone Contribution Month, is made up of only one person! How to manage not to drown in all the discussions, requests and global coordination when you are alone?

How to fully centralize and internationalize a gadget

You have a large corpus of data that you want to migrate to Wikidata, and you want to do it right.

Good proposals and reports are more than sheer facts and numbers, they tell stories which make people understand what's great about your work.

Many wiki communities do not have formal organizations, and do not have designated spokespersons, who are professional, or at least experienced, in communicating with media.

Paper books are endangered, these days!

Projects that require a lot of preliminary work before they can start, or depend on many external factors, easily get bogged down and may fail to achieve their goals.

Wikimedians in residence working in isolation, with no standardised support

Students or workshop participants are making copyright violations.

You don't have all the skills or knowledge needed to accomplish your project alone.

You need developers to work on a Wikimedia grant proposal

There is a giant gap between countries of the global south and those of the north when it comes to producing south-related free content.

Geeks are the people who are obsessed with specific interest and are potentially very good wikipedians. What makes them excited in volunteering for wikipedia.

Volunteer Wikimedians sometimes don't manage to get their message across or the leave the best possible impression at meetings with decision-makers.

Wikimedia has communities of supporters who are not necessarily of the work carried out by organisations they support.

Finding new volunteers who understand the fun in Wikipedia Editing and can involve in movement is not an easy task.

In most of the theme-specific training activities, participants don't get enough time to understand and practice the concepts or tools discussed. This will have a negative effect on the overall outcome of the event or a project.

In several workshops you may find mixed audience, which is actually a hindrance towards conducting an advanced-level workshop smoothly.

Understanding the shared goals of an external organisation and Wikimedia can be very helpful to understand how they can work together

Digital library of india is a big online books repository for indic languages. But it's not well categorized and the metadata is not easily found in search engine queries or even in that website's queries also.

Several topics concerning your country do not yet exist in Wikipedia? You could create them yourself, but it's a colossal job and you could have it for years ... maybe even centuries!

How to get notices out to as many potential editors as possible

It is difficult to start a conversation with strangers during large conferences.

Cultural institutions are one of the most important partners for the Wikimedia movement. Sometime, the role of the cultural institutions is passive; we approach their heritage and they invite us to perform activities, but, how can we make organizations become active?

When Wikimedia chapters decide to hire staff, the question arises who is responsible for what. Unclarity can lead to problems, frustration and conflicts.

How do we get all democratic political data into Wikidata?

Dealing with multiple versions of software or components of it can easily become messy

Often times, especially in the case of Indian languages, the major road block in recruiting new editors is in language input.

Issues of race, gender, and sexuality representation among Wikipedia editors

You have just discovered that an edit you or a trainee have proudly made is being unfairly attacked by other user(s). Soon enough you get embroiled in the discussion and can't resist retorting the accusations.

Some outreach events are not used for (first-time) Wikipedia editing on-site because a short amount of time and other circumstances seem to be disadvantageous for this kind of immediate Wikipedia experience.

How to count and track edits in activities where users improve wiki projects

Using Twitter for your chapter or affiliate's social media outreach?

An editor is reluctant to contribute because they are unsure whether their idea is helpful or not.

Senior citizens represent a large and ofter very educated part of our society, yet are underrepresented among Wikipedia editors and attempts to reach to them bring special challenges.

Creating a new biographical article is very intimidating for new editors.

With workshops one of the key points to retention is being able to assist participants. Another is being able to identify the impact of an event, this provides a method to accurately capture usernames.

Words can't always convey the most fun/successful/important aspects of an event.

Posters are meant to be glanced at, pointed at, and talked about—not read like a book.

Infographics can be a great way to make sense of complex data and share it with the public. Creating an infographic with a designer is a task, which has to have a plan and tips to create solid infographics to be kept in mind.

You want to improve the software that runs Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects

Coordinating developers who are not Wikimedians

The Wikimedia movement has a large variety of assonant terms which mean different things but they are confusing and mysterious for the majority of humankind.

Taking care of children while attending a conference is difficult.

During conferences, it may not be possible to provide stage-time to all participants who want to talk.

Many wiki communities do not have formal organizations, and do not have designated spokespersons, who are professional, or at least experienced, in communicating with media.

Digital policy is insufficiently represented in the German election campaigns and discussions.

Many projects, programs or whole grants start accumulating dozens of receipts to be paid out to various people. At some point this gets confusing and your accountant will go crazy.

You are digitizing records from an archives to upload to Wikimedia Commons

Many editing events are way too big and are less effective because of this.

Newbies attending edit-a-thons are not motivated by a single event. They do not sustain their interest levels if they are not motivated further.

Engaging and retaining productive Wikimedia contributors is as important as recruiting new ones.

If your Wikimedia event is open to international visitors you never know which country they will be from. Don't assume that everyone is travelling on a EU passport.

How can we arrange travel in a cost-effective way?

The knowledge of marginalised communities is the knowledge of the majority of the world. How can we best support these communities to bring their knowledge onto Wikimedia projects?

Often people come up with "Wiki Loves" initiatives and face problems regarding planning, and understanding the scope and potential of the campaign.

Even impactful projects may look unimpressive if the project team sets unrealistic goals, or doesn't develop some way to measure their progress ahead of time.

Wikipedia faces the challenge of including more women editors . This situation involves creating spaces in our programs for women to be part of them. The evaluation through gender perspective is essential .

Wikipedia faces the challenge of approaching properly the gender gap issue in terms of its content.

How to make Wikimedia events instructionally guided

Many emerging communities or communities are confronted with the problems of engagement, motivation or how to retain their members; here are some orientations, result of experience

Publishers on YouTube have the option of publishing their material under a CreativeCommons-Attribution 2.0 license.

With limited resources, the wisdom shared during conferences remain limited among the participants only as it is practically hard to live broadcast or record everything. Similarly, smaller Wikimedia communities cannot have a wider engagement with potential readers and contributors.

Video is still relatively rare in articles on Wikipedia. It could potentially enrich the encyclopedia and make it more attractive to younger audiences.

You want to upload videos to Wikimedia Commons

Some conference participants need rest, sleep or personal time.

When developing communications materials it is important to give a balanced portrayal of men and women, not only in terms of quantity but also in terms of quality.

Al desarrollar materiales de comunicación, es importante ofrecer una representación equilibrada de hombres y mujeres, no solo en términos de cantidad sino también en términos de calidad.

During outreach events, there is a tendency that the mentor gives too much information to the newbies. This makes newbies overwhelmed.

Tips about preparing grant' financial reports from the perspective of user groups or individuals.

Tips about preparing the report of project activities from the perspective of user groups or individuals

Promoting and spreading awareness of the work done by students as a part of the Education program

You want to start a new education program and you don't know if you need to start with a pilot or with an entire program.

For the students who can code but don't possess writing skills

Attending an event can be overwhelming, and it is easy to forget what you did, who you talked to and what sessions you attended.

I attended a training session held at Wikimania for members of grants advisors/ adjudicators

Recruiting advisors, course creators & writers, collaborators for a diversity and inclusion project.

You have an awesome idea for a project or activity, but it will only succeed if enough of the right people participate.

Understanding Wikipedia, Wikimedia and their communities is challenging. We can start building understanding by having anyone writing 5 articles for Wikipedia.

The Program & Events Dashboard is a valuable reporting tool, but implementation is sometimes inconsistent when working with a large number of organizers or events.

Nuances in a new program deviated from expectations during the workshop and our plan for it

All Social media accounts of Wikimedia projects aren't handled by professionals, sometimes it is difficult to engage followers of your projects twitter and share your work through one tweet.

You've attracted newbies to your program or event but you don't know how to motivate them to stay as editors.

Many people are not admired and encouraged adequately for their successes at workshops and conferences.

How can you learn from other’s who have experience in doing a project you are about to start (and know almost nothing about)?

Managing the resources from large content donors are often difficult.

It is hard to know the photography preferences of the participants at conferences.

A brand new user has no idea on where to start editing, and might start with something that is very hard.

Technical innovation, in a popular area

You planned an awesome event or activity, but too few people showed up, or no one found out about the awesomeness afterwards.

The pattern presents several ways filling content gaps on Wikipedia.

Making a multi-day editathon

Sometimes what we are trying to teach does not get the attention it should to have a result.

Public Broadcasters and the Wikimedia movement to a large degree exist with the same purpose in mind: educating and informing. How can they collaborate?

Most training and recruitment sessions, or Wikimedia clinics, have an acute way of training new recruits or even people who have a fair knowledge of WIkipedia and its sister projects.

This Learning Pattern provides pointers on what to do when your plane is delayed or cancelled on your way to a Wikip/media event.

You are running an event and you want to invite Wikimedians.

The Wikimedia Conference is an annual conference for Wikimedia affiliates, the Wikimedia Foundation and its committees. In the past, there have been complaints by newcomers, that integrating into this conference has become difficult.

Allow audience to browse multiple threads of interest in a physical conference?

Some people do not feel welcome at events because of previously having a hostile encounter at a similar event.

Conference sessions are often planned at the last minute with little consideration for goals, expected outcomes, audience preparation, or follow-up.

Wikipedia is a key resource for anyone curious about astronomy. Therefore, ensuring there is quality and accurate astronomy information on Wikipedia in many languages is critical.

How to successfully prepare and process batch upload using the tool Pattypan

You're organizing a conference, and you think everything is too easy. That's no fun, right?

Bringing Wikipedians at a common place regularly.

Gender and global diversity benefit our conferences! But it's not easy to get a diverse line-up of speakers. Interesting people might be too shy to apply, or too unexperienced in writing a good proposal.

Offering best practices on how to go about hiring an ED for your organisation and what you should look out for.

New users of Wikipedia often need to search for introductions in a very time-consuming way and are unable to find a solution on help pages quickly. To support them with guided tours, we aim to describe in this learning pattern how guided tours for new users can be created in cooperation with the community and with minimum effort by engaging the help of an external service provider.

How can you tell if students or workshop participants understand and are using skills you have taught them?

People like to have some time to socialize with one another after a long day of events.

You run a social media account, but how do you maximize its effectiveness?

Without assigned roles, sometimes important tasks don't get done.

It can be hard to anticipate challenges experienced by a partner organisation. Those unplanned barriers can throw up barriers to the success of the project.

Having a breakthrough, tangible case study early enough in a partnership project is a powerful facilitator to generating additional support for the project to carry it forward. A successful case study project helps to illustrate the aims of a project.

The projects within Wikimedian in Residence programme - such as a mass image upload - presupposes a range of conditions, for example internal copyright knowledge, clean databases, digital skills.

How to ensure that the role of governance – mainly that of the board of trustees – is clear to everyone or who is or wants to be involved, and to optimise efficency

To function well, a board needs to understand what they are responsible for doing for the organization, and individual members and key office holders should also understand their roles. If these are not documented in a central location, roles may not be clear, or members may disagree about who is responsible for what. If board members do not agree on responsibilities, important tasks may be neglected and conflicts may arise.

Every new wiki page, starts with 1 watchlister (the author). It is hard to attract collaboration at an unknown destination.

Promote photo contests and events to reach new users.

Digitising books and archives often requires expensive scanning apparatus not available everywhere. This pattern provides alternate methods.

How can you use Wikipedia in libraries to facilitate digital information literacies?

Public libraries and Wikipedia both are devoted to freely expanding access to information for all. However, the majority of US public library staff do not edit Wikipedia and 80% of US public libraries are small and rural, which means there are few opportunities to meet Wikipedians locally. How can an online training program effectively meet the learning needs of US public library staff new to Wikipedia?

"It’s always the same few people doing things": the core community of Wikimedians engaged in group activities or organizing events stays rather constant.

The amount of content that a project has contributed to a Wikimedia project can be hard to measure.

Nobody likes note-taking for the rest.

Conferences can be effective tools for solving problems; but they usually have little real impact.

Did your work increase the motivation of contributors? How do you know?

The pattern explains the process of creating portals on Wikipedia.

Newcomers at editing events may be afraid of 'breaking' Wikipedia, or getting in trouble for editing.

Create consistency in reporting

Finding sponsors for Wikimedia projects

When collecting usernames for in-person events for data analysis on Wikimetrics, it can be tricky to gather all of the participants' usernames.

We need to train people to contribute to Wikimedia and in general, the trainees will be adults. The only experience many volunteer trainers have is from when they were being taught as children. The result is that the remembered practices (good or bad) of their teachers will often be what they draw upon when they are training other adults. Those approaches may not be appropriate or effective..

For teachers, a Wikipedia writing assignment is much more work than other writing assignments. They have to double check the content of the article, grammar, spelling and the validity of the sources.

The pageviews data files use their own project codes with several formats.

During conferences, it is good to conduct a poll to know what the participants are thinking.

Producing free knowledge outside the Wikimedia projects in a word of all rights reserved.

It is often impossible or very difficult to know the community that a country wide chapter is founded to support.

Education programs should evaluate trainees, trainers, methods and education program itself, or they are not acceptable education, nor can evolve.

Accurately conveying both the objective (subject-matter, technical) and subjective (social, emotional) gist of an event to a potential attendee is challenging, especially in written. This makes it especially hard to engage underrepresented audiences.

Social media is a widespread medium with millions of users. Dovetailing its large userbase to promote native language and promoting openly-published content like the Wikimedia content is a great way to grow reader base.

How can I enable Wikidata for an infobox on my language's Wikipedia without writing all the Lua scripts from scratch?

It is very important to collect and store personal information carefully.

You want to improve coverage of historic topics

You identify a government agency (at any level) with high-quality content that would benefit the Wikimedia projects.

How to effectively produce videos and upload them on Wikimedia Commons with low bandwidth

How do you create editable charts and graphs on Wiki pages?

How can two chapters organize parallel on wiki writing contest about each other’s countries in order to build a closer relationship between two chapters?

The pattern aims at providing organisers of expeditions with detailed guidelines for efficient conducting of expeditions.

You need volunteers to support a program online or offline.

You worked hard on a project you believe in, but no one seemed interested in what you made or wants to carry your work forward.

You want to run a survey for your project. Free online survey tools usually only provide limited functionality, and better tools usually cost money.

While organizing an online Editathon, often it is difficult to track the numbers of articles created, articles created by number of participants, the total number of bytes added and many other problems.

You want to organize information in the form of a portal

Sometimes it may happen that during a museum photothon some exhibited items were photographed multiple times, while others remained uncovered. Here is a simple idea how to avoid this situation.

When a resource you created has multiple wiki pages, and you use a navigation bar, contributing translations can become hard.

Low women participation in Wikipedia projects is known all over the world. There is less participation of women as well as less content related to women. Many languages are spoken in and around Mangaluru, Karnataka, India. Enriching these language Wikipedias and bringing more women into Wikipedia activities have to be achieved .

We need to make it easier for people to capture and share what they learn when they perform mission-aligned activities.

How can someone find patterns in the Learning Patterns Library that are relevant to his or her project?

Some services requires customized operating system environments or extensive computational resources beyond what is available in the toolforge environment.

The Wikimedia New York City chapter was supporting an increasingly diverse array of ambitious and challenging projects and events, and it became apparent that in order to support these activities properly, we needed a more cohesive strategy to manage them and report on their progress to chapter funders.

環景相機的架設位置和傳統攝影機不同,在舉辦維基演講或其他活動的時候,要在什麼地方架設這樣的攝影機最為適當?

When should an author pay open access fees for wiki research?

Offer prizes that contest participants want to win.

More and more members of the community are parents

Inviting international delegates to an event, some of them are required to obtain a visa (sometimes even more due to a stop over in a country) in order to be able to travel and attend the event. Visa applications require careful preparation and a profound knowledge of the relevant processes and requirements behind it. Being not well prepared or informed about these facts, problems may arise. Occasionally, it happens that the invited guests experience obstacles in the visa application process or can’t even attend the event as a result of their visa request denial.

You want to get into the habit of writing documentation on a regular basis

You need to write a new technical tool and there are already similar but unsuitable tools in existence.

How can someone arrange safe and cost-effective international travel?

Workshops and lectures for educators are traditional and in some point useless. Specially because these learning spaces don’t establish links between assistants or generate educational products. Most importantly, they do not generate a commitment to an education issue or present solutions to the educational realities of the attendees.

Activities and proposals between the Wikimedia Education Programs and schools are usually punctual and an exceptional. It is possible to generate different strategies to promote a stronger and more relevant relations, to inspire long term projects and experiences.

Transferring an experience like the design, implementation and evaluation of an education program is not always an easy task: what we share and how we do it, to make it a valuable contribution to a program that is starting or wants to be strengthened in some aspect.

How can Wikimedia contributors do outreach at a non-wiki academic conference?

Wikimedia project participants need a way to document what they do and why they do it.

Reaching out to high schools and generating interest.

You want to bring brochures, training guides or other materials to an event, but you don't have any yourself.

How do you know if your education program is successful?

It can be hard to write a good report on complex projects in which multiple people are responsible for individual activities.

You set great contest goals, now all you need is strategies to achieve them!

Legal practices for surveys differ around the world

You conduct a photography contest like Wiki Loves Monuments several years in a row. Over time, how can you keep up or even intensify volunteer engagement?

What do educators need to learn before using Wikimedia in course.

Inexperienced users often upload to Commons uncategorized, poorly described and then abandoned stuff, which remains invisible and unutilized for ages.

Some programs were not tailored to the local volunteers' needs and wants and became ineffective.

A low-cost solution to effectively promote an event to all readers on your Wikipedia

Reaching users for a survey using CentralNotice can be daunting

There are many excellent resources for teaching with Wikipedia. But for feminist non-Wikipedian instructors limited by time or skill, it's not always feasible to devote time to including content editing in a course syllabus. What other ways can feminist non-Wikipedian instructors can use the encyclopedia in their instruction?

As an education program leader, how do you manage course pages, facilitate community engagement with students, monitor user contributions and evaluate your program?

Imagine the awkward situation when after announcing the winners in a contest for encyclopedic photography, fake photomontage images are detected among the winners. Ooops!

Volunteers and staff don't always work together effectively

Which scalable solution can we use to teach new contributors how to contribute to Wikimedia project?

What can you do to plan for success when teaching students to contribute to Wikimedia?

New editors or students are making many mistakes with Wiki markup.

Student and educator user pages, articles, edits or content are being deleted.

The Wikimedia Foundation requests "global metrics" reporting when providing grant funding for Wikimedia outreach. Learning to report global metrics is its own skill set, as is making this data locally relevant.

You want to organize a Wiki Loves Monuments contest, but it is difficult to obtain documentation of cultural heritage sites.

How to calculate four global metrics needed for WMF grant reporting

Wikipedia has content gaps.

Finding or creating the right illustration for our Wikimedian press releases or publications in blogs or social networks, is sometimes intuitive and natural, while in other cases can be really challenging.

Your community has good photographers, but they need better equipment.

Strategies to achieve goals to integrate photos from projects and contests into Wiki projects.

Many nonprofit organizations keep insurance as a way to manage the liability they assume as an organization.

Providing the best resources for your institution to learn about Wikipedia

You want to check student contributions for errors or monitor their progress on an education program assignment.

How do you get students interested in contributing to Wikimedia projects as part of a course?

Edits, files, and bytes contributed and other metrics may not totally represent the significance of content contributions that involve creating or improving many pages.

It is easier to demonstrate impact if you can show who participated, or benefited, from your work.

You need to represent the potential impact of your outreach project on the growth of the Wikimedia movement.

How to easy organise a photo tour

You do not know if you need to work with the Ministry of Education in your region.

How to plan an enjoyable and effective Wiki expedition.

How to plan an aerial photography project.

Drafting the programme for the annual 3-day edition of a relatively large-scale regional event, such as the annual Wikimedia CEE Meeting, can be a daunting task.

How can safe and cost-effective automobile travel to events be arranged?

You want to start an education program, but you are not sure what kind of educators and students you should work with.

Do you want to learn more about someone's perspective and experiences? Have you ever conducted an interview only to find you've very little usable information at the end?

Sweepstakes, contests, and giveaways have strict legal requirements

In group projects, there can be frequent, detailed discussions. However, you may also find yourself frequently needing to revisit or otherwise remember those the discussions, which can cause loss of time and productivity during meetings or your own time.

The community is having frequent problems with students or new editors.

Sometimes, the audio-visual apparatus fails to work and the participants spend a lot of time to make it working.

You host an edit-a-thon and no one knows what to work on.

Participation hasn't increased in the past seven years.

Conferences often bring together people who have not met each other before and so it may be difficult for them to start interacting and contribute to the programmatic goals of the conference.

The crowdfunding campaign for the German Culture Hackathon Coding da Vinci did not reach its financial goal.

How to evaluate student contributions to Wikimedia for a grade or mark.

How to change Wiki Loves contests to maintain volunteer and participant interest.

How do you keep all your ducks in a row to organize an edit-a-thon?

This learning pattern gives guidance on how to find information about writing a legal disclaimer. This is not legal guidance, but information instead about how to obtain legal guidance.

I do not know if I should make a work list for an editing contest.

I want to pick a writing contest topic that will be popular with new or existing editors.

Building enthusiasm, initiative and promoting a project

Community members are reverting student edits or deleting user pages.

Are you a medical educator? Want to work with your students on adding quality medical content to Wikipedia and don't know how to get started?

Wiki Takes ... is free content generation with some cultural and social extras.

It can be difficult to find information about the accomplishments of Wikimedia organizations for somebody not already familiar with those organizations.

There is no organization of historical images according to year, ethnicity or other categories related to historical interpretation on Wikipedia.

During the experiences developed in the long distance course, «Puentes entre las culturas escolares, digitales y libres» (Bridges between school, digital and free cultures) made in 2014 and 2015 we found the difficulty of engaging and supporting teachers in the course and in editing articles on Wikipedia.

Find data from past surveys

Involving newbies to editing Wikipedia

What you learn from your survey, and how you can use that knowledge, depends who you ask (and how many people respond).

Make audiovisuals material it ́s not only hire a designer or editing a video. This work has several layers of analysis that should be considered. In many cases do not take notes of this and the goals are not fullfilled.

What do you do with data from Wikimedia projects or research?

Your organization needs to grow or you are trying to work out a strategic plan but you have trouble establishing priorities for development.

Volunteers are the lifeblood of every project, hence the need to retain them for future projects.

How can we evaluate outcomes of particular programs as compared to their costs?

Follow up with the individuals, strengthening of existing Wikipedians, and reaching to Wikipedians at a very short time is very difficult.

Survey questions often ask for ordered responses, but it can be hard to think of them on the spot

Banners are not the only way to reach users quickly on-wiki

Expanding MT coverage with Wikipedia-relevant translations

Best practices for Using QuickSurveys tool

Userpage or user page is used to organize your important details to remember, such as user languages, userboxes, etc. It formerly used as sliding, enabling users to scroll accurately between the skin.

Education uses work sheets for teaching in schools

Introductory presentations to Wikipedia can be confusing as many new things have to be said

Some people in important positions would not read their email, miss important information, and create inconsistency and confusion.

I want to promote an event to new audiences.

New editors are discouraged by old users' interventions and (secondary) cannot organize their work with ease. Less computer-literated people have a hard time trying to contribute.

Slow access through help for immediately needed stuff

How to keep course information organized in a central, public space so educators, volunteers and the community can identify student work?

It can be time consuming and even difficult to track the use of photos and other media created through program activities.

How to make the most out of Wikimedians travelling to events for the wider community and how to overcome the limitations of written reports.

It is difficult to carry out evaluation and sharing because of language barriers

Managing a survey project can be difficult

How can we use Google Calendar to track of how many hours we have spent on a project?

I want to know the best way to track contest submissions.

Most of the world doesn't know Wikipedia and what is about.

Unlike Wikis, tools are maintained by fewer people – the platform change very quickly and tools will no longer function.

Users can spend a lot of time on surveys and get survey fatigue

It can be hard to know if a survey is ready

Local groups need a clearly identifiable meeting place to organize actions.

Many education programs have a closed proposal that do not include the teacher's own experiences and context, but expect them to apply certain practices any ways.

It can be confusing how to do qualitative analysis for surveys

To ensure there is a continuous conversation with the community about changes in processes by maintaining communication.

MediaWiki pages are static, but interactive group workspaces work need to be dynamic.

At different points in a process you need to get different kinds of information from participants.

Get experienced photographers to continue to contribute quality images after photo contests have ended.

Some outreach program leaders manage to make a long time impact on many outreach participants where some fail to understand why their hard work did not paid for.

Staying connected to volunteer editors and potential volunteers can be a challenge, especially if there is a lapse of time between events.

Basic issues and major discussions within the communities cannot be solved productively by the means available to the individual, and often prove to be unfruitful and frustrating. It is impossible to compensate those social dynamics with classic support methods, solely addressing material and organisational needs.

Participants are not motivated to contribute throughout the duration of a month-long edit-a-thon

Mutual experience and shared learnings are key to practice our culture of sharing. Given the sheer variety of international target groups and communication channels, how do we best get the word out about our publications?

How can safe and short-distance travel to events be arranged?

Your GLAM partner wants to know how the media they have shared are being used.

We need to engage more undergraduate and graduate level students to edit Wikipedia.

Having over 10,000 submissions in a photo contest is great, but selecting winners is tricky

You are organizing a hack-a-thon and you want participants to share their work

Recruiting inexperienced newcomers for open source software development projects is valuable, but it is a great risk if you don't know anything about the person yet.

Tulu Wikipedia started as an incubator project in 2008, there was some activity in 2008-09 and remained almost dormant till 2014. It needed to be made live.

Non availability of reliable resources in Telugu language, especially online, related to Telugu Language, Culture, Social and Political Aspects

In India, the university students are expected to submit a report as part of their classroom assignments as paper work. However, the reports, post evaluation, never get published anywhere.

We all know PR editing happens on Wikipedia. How can we reduce the amount, and impact, of it?

Some groups, organizations, or projects want to develop longer term plans to guide them toward their long term goals

The members, gathered in local groups, may have difficulty maintaining a group dynamic when not related to a specific action.

Image banks sometimes tile large images to safe on server load. In order to get the full resolution image on Wikimedia Commons, these tiles need to be recombined

Find the right people and tools to judge a writing or photo contest.

How can we persuade the general public to contribute?

There were very few articles related to women's studies and gender. In order to generate quality content, one of our institutional partner followed peer reviewing process and expert feedback from the faculty to create a quality article.

Getting access to Qualtrics

We have multiple communication channels

How can safe and cost-effective rail travel be arranged?

Introduction for beginner-level developers new to the Wikimedia sphere

Proofreading large amounts of text is a very demanding task. The process should be planned intelligently and operate in an "always learning" mode.

Prioritizing articles when we are trying to improve quality is tough task. Especially when there are many articles and volunteers think that they should spend their time in improving most prior article to the project.

Surveys are great tools for collecting data, but caution should be taken when asking people for their information

Whenever you make a project, you are expected to produce a report, but it is boring and when you finish the project you just wish to do something else.

Problems may come up when using Wikimedia in education.

When working in a team project, sometimes team members do not have the same overall idea for how the project should proceed, which might lead to a loss of overall direction

When working on a project with a team, it can take a lot of time to work on various documents when only one person is writing them.

To reduce the amount of future transition issues while a Project is currently being built

How to plan a course, camp, workshop or other multi-session program that will teach students how to contribute to WIkimedia projects.

Help beginners to rejoin the volunteer photographers community

New editors who are just learning to use Wikipedia benefit from a collaborative environment.

Surveys involve data, which may involve laws

Co-animate training on free licensing and on co-construction of knowledge through the Wikimedia projects to high school students.

You are planning an event and want to work with another organization to provide prizes, promotion or support from subject experts.

Steps to follow while organising a photowalk for Wikimedia Commons.

While it is important for students to be integrated into Wikimedia movement, a generic orientation programme does not serve the purpose.

Orientation programme for WEP activity usually involves a large crowd of 150-200 students.

You want to start an education program and are not sure how to find educators to collaborate with.

OER creation using Wikibooks. Creation of free content textbook using Wikibooks

You have a project idea that you believe is powerful but you don't have all the skills to make it real.

Many affiliates send volunteers to Wikimania. But can we ensure - espcially in smaller communities - that we don't only sent the same people every year.

If you dealing with small human capacities so you want to address several different target groups at once.

You are interested in measuring a WikiProject's activity to determine how active it is as a project, or to determine its potential to become an active project.

How can we facilitate a range of people contributing to publicity for an event and monitor their effectiveness?

It can be difficult for all-volunteer organizations to create an annual report each year at the time it is expected.

How not to lose the overview over your tech-pool.

Wikimedia affiliates addressing the same language community can lead to internal and external nebulosity and confusion.

Organising meals during conferences

You want to resolve a disagreement between a student or educator and a Wikimedia community member.

To get the most out of an event, people need to understand what they hear and what they read.

Often during panel and round table discussions, there is a lot of discussion that essentially becomes pointless and/or directionless.

Often, emails and text-messages are insufficient to attract volunteers. Some volunteers will say "yes" at first, but do not actually come at the D-day.

Wikimedia organizations, and sometimes other organizations and individuals responsible to the movement, need a way to show what they spent and received during the year.

Wikipedia can be effective used as a rich resource for authentic texts for translation classes. Trainee translators can choose and translate their preferable texts from Wikipedia.

Groups, organizations, and project leaders may find it difficult to summarize an entire year's worth of work in an annual report.

It is sometimes hard to get local sponsors or partners to support one's activities and projects

I need to connect proposal and report reviewers to relevant learning patterns.

New articles written by students or educators are being deleted.

You come across an idea or concept that doesn't have a learning pattern

How do we go about lobbying in competition with an enormous lobby?

In group projects, there can be frequent, detailed discussions. However, you may also find yourself frequently needing to revisit or otherwise remember those the discussions, which can cause loss of time and productivity during meetings or your own time.

There is a lack of a framework for supporting the volunteers and enabling mutual information sharing and collaboration.

Involving communities in a survey

Chapter workplans are developed by a small group and may not be representative of what is really needed

Is an online survey the right choice to solve a problem?

Increase editor retention after a project or program ends.

You have a limited budget and want to host your event in a public place.

How to improve quality, increase user retention or reach more participants through photo contests and events.

Articles written by students or new editors can be low quality.

Translation content - especially in groups - is an effective way to build Wikipedia content. Finding gaps can be tricky if you are not familiar with a particular subject, and identifying priority areas to translate helps direct this work.

Sometimes you need or you are asked to write an agreement with a GLAM or another institution to partner with it on the Wikimedia projects.

You need to recruit your first paid employee, or a valued volunteer who will help your organization with specific tasks. You need this person to understand their role, and you need the organization to understand what they are doing too.

It can be easy to dive into arguments with out truly listening to each other

You don't know what the best messages and strategies are to speak to an educator about using Wikimedia in the classroom.

You need to have good practices in place before you take on the responsibility of paid staff or contractors.

WMF has been conducting site visits as part of their due dilligence reviews over the past few years. However, apart from the formalities these visits are agreat opportunity to showcase the work of affiliates and adressing grant making challenges on both sides.

How to teach primary students how to position their own pictures to improve Wikipedia articles.

You want to organize Wiki Love Monuments or Wiki Loves Earth for the first time.

Wikipedia face the challenge of including articles that refer as much cultures as possible, properly.

Reaching out to an audience which is not yet part of your community (e.g. game developers and designers) can be challenging, but has great potential to enlarge your existing community.

In many remote schools far away from the big cities, the Internet connectivity is not good. Especially if many people connect at the same time. Educational editathons seeking to value local histories, so to realize them in these cities is essential to create installed capacity with the local people. In many cases, the geographical distance is big, so have a trip by the WMAR Staff or volunteers is something that we can do once or twice, I have to be an important and complete experience where we can detect potential ambassadors to enroll.

The more effective we collaborate in our organizations or project teams the more impact we can create with the available resources. Kaizen is a low-threshold approach achieve this.

Often specific training are not enough for teachers to generate projects with Wikipedia in the classroom with good results.

Education proposals aimed often teachers, but students are valuable allies to motorize and actively accompany the Wikimedia projects in the classroom. Young people are active users of Wikipedia, recognizing its value as a reference, so that the interest of teachers in captivate their attention is already guaranteed. On the other hand are, students are great communicators of values and ways of Wikipedia.

Effective organizations and groups need funding for program expenses and operating expenses, but aren't able to undergo the rigorous FDC process.

A campaign on Wikimedia Commons has two goals: first, it is about generating easier access to photos of a certain institution or theme; second, participants of the campaign already have the category added to the photos they upload and can easily find all their files grouped in one place.

Sometimes government and governmental bodies will propose policy and legislation that will have negative impact on the Wikimedia projects and free and open knowledge.

Storytelling about the work of your organization / group

The Wikimedia movement is lacking new contributors, how can we solve the challenge of finding new users

This pattern is intended to help User Groups in selecting appropriate delegates for Wikimedia Conference.

Training women to participate in Wikipedia

Many new but promising editors encounter that one of their articles gets marked for deletion.

Cuando se hace un concurso online para crear artículos en Wikipedia, las evaluaciones suelen ser muy dispares y subjetivas

Sometimes we don't know how to match our projects with our existing volunteer community. We all lack volunteers when projects get deeper or bigger. How to deal with this?

It is often impossible or very expensive to get information from an entire population

Multi-day conferences and hackathons have a lot happening, and it can be easy to get swept up in it and not get enough sleep. This then devalues the subsequent day(s) of the event, which is bad.

How to avoid typical rookie mistakes when hiring your first staff.

Making good SMART program objectives is hard at first!

How to better prepared the participants for the notability and verifiability guidelines during gender gap bridging events.

Sometimes forms are incomplete because applicants and grantees can't answer a question that doesn't apply to them or their situation.

Women represent 9–20% of the Wikipedia editing community worldwide. It can be isolating and difficult for women to know how and when to call attention to the problem, and how to promote gender diversity on WIkipedia.

Wikimedia affiliates often face the organization of many events in a very short time.

After a software release and its spreading, users start to interact with it and rapidly they come up with many precious ideas. According to circumstances there are better ways to provide a channel for collecting them.

Featured Articles are some of the most difficult to improve for new editors because the pages are already high-quality.

During a conference, the facilitator’s toolbox ensures that the facilitator has all the tools they need. It may contain items for the facilitator's own use or items that the conference participants may need.

Even with an Oxford degree, I don't feel qualified to edit.

Community discussions are an important tool for progress and decision making in our movement. In order to be productive, they usually require a discussion facilitator, who makes sure the discussion progresses as planned. What makes a good facilitator? What are some do's and don'ts for a successful facilitation process?

You need to extract a clean list of usernames from a wiki page

You do not want to lose your time in formatting the table and copy/pasting section that come from the proposal or a previous report

In large conferences with over 100 participants, it is not always possible to meet all participants and encourage conversations with all people. It is possible that one misses meeting people she/he intended to meet.

It is hard to remember all the variables involved when planning an event and even harder to assess how they will impact on one another. Leaving things out of the planning jeopardises success and creates more stress too.

Writing project evaluations can be challenging if you cannot quantify what the outcomes of a project mean.

When lists of moments don't have coordinates, they can't be projected onto a map

If you are moving around internationally, don't underestimate the need for local knowledge.

Making the process of applying for grants more appealing and attractive.

Simple guidelines for obtaining data about in-kind resources of events

You want to encourage participation on Wikipedia to remediate systemic biases in Wikipedia's coverage

Non-Wikipedian experts are often interested in Wikipedia, but don't have the time to commit to editing. This learning pattern proposes a concrete way of engaging them

How can you explain Wikipedia to a group of people without any Wikipedia experience by letting them write a Wikipedia article?

When organizing a series of editathons, especially with mostly new editors, it is crucial to have their feedback in order to improve the methodology or approach according to the needs and comments of participants.

You want to plan an editing or writing contest.

You are a Wikimedia Education Program manager/volunteer and you wish to collaborate with new high-schools, but it can be time consuming and the quality of outcome is at question.

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Expos and other such events have a lot of exhibitors competing for attention and most potential visitors to your booth will have little knowledge of Wikimedia projects beforehand.

We need to increase the amount of direct donations we receive every year

Existing projects have strange, complicated requirements. Users can be highly resistant to change. Problems are complicated.

How to establish a long-term relationship to our donors in fundrasing and to convenice them to become regular donors

How to create a meaningful mission statement that your most important stakeholders can identify with.

Creating a machine translator for your language

The best programs focus on one or two realistic goals and have clear measures of success.

dealing with concern authorities to take required permissions in order to get some valuable resources or to conduct programs or some other institutional partnership issues.

How to generate a proposal for training on issues of digital culture and en:open educational resources

I need to send a prize, mini-grant or item to someone living in a different country.

Editor retention, follow up and awareness

Not many in the Wikimedia community are well aware of running queries or even using tools to acquire different kinds of data-points.

Every project – under all rights reserved or with an open license – is required to credits its authors, partners and sponsors.

Burn out for multi-location edit-a-thon organizers

The learning curve for creating articles is far too high.

You don't know how best to organize and share localized or translated training and outreach materials with students and other educators.

You are designing an outreach program and would like to address the needs of the online community

Newbie biting is a major problem over Wikimedia movement and it reduces retention of newbie.

You want to set up or improve an editing contest scoring system.

I don't have enough time to score, judge and track contest submissions manually.

Streamlining the user experience for non-Wikipedians

Wikipedia is not well accepted in education

Find some easy ways to teach people and encourage to contribute into Wikimedia/MediaWiki

What to do if you are in an activity (workshop, editathon, etc.) and there are problems with the Internet connection

There are many parts to communicating surveys

Survey takers want to know - what will you do with their data?

Demand for a program may exceed the resources you have available.

Smaller wikis need relatively less maintenance efforts, but after longer periods of community inactivity, it becomes gradually more difficult to detect – and clean – fermented vandalisms, copyvios and other unwelcome stuff.

You are an instructor and you want to teach your students about Wikipedia

How to create a single document/book from multiple wiki pages

In large conferences, the participants do not get to meet people who have similar interests as they have.

How can we connect GLAM partners and community members?

Sometimes, users in a photography project forget to categorize their photos as belonging or generated through the project

You need to make sure that you don't accidentally leave important questions out of your survey.

Appreciation of voluntary work is an important factor in keeping people motivated.

Appreciation of voluntary work is an important factor in keeping people motivated.

Appreciation of voluntary work is an important factor in keeping people motivated.

Appreciation of voluntary work is an important factor in keeping people motivated.

The percentage of participants in one-time editing workshops, who continue to be active in editing six months after the conclusion of the workshop, is extremely low. Oftentimes, new editors cease thei

How can safe and cost-effective air travel be arranged?

We're trying to find new ways of financing projects

How can organizers arrange accomodations at meetups in a cost-effective way?

It has always been a problem to cultivate new editors for Indian language Wikipedia projects as Indian languages are complex, and so are the input methods as learning the same is mostly not part of the school syllabus in India. Encyclopedic writing, Wiki markup and guidelines with an added layer of linguistic and language input complexity has been a bigger obstacle in cultivating new editors.

To run a successful event on site, time, tasks and resources need to be managed well. It is however impossible to know everything by heart.

The Wikimedia movement has a large variety of assonant terms which mean different things but they are confusing and mysterious for the majority of humankind.

You want to improve the software that runs Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects