Topic on Talk:Growth/2023

Notification of request for incremental grant funding

4
Pine (talkcontribs)
MMiller (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Thanks for letting us know, Pine. I will check it out and get back to you!

MMiller (WMF) (talkcontribs)

@Pine: I read your proposal; thank you for letting me know about it. I've definitely heard from multiple communities that videos can be useful, and I remember at Wikimania hearing that videos had had particular success in the Arabic community. Why do you think there have not yet been successful videos in English? Are there particular approaches that you're going to take in your videos that you think will make yours strong? Our team is interested in figuring out how best to communicate the difficult-to-understand concepts behind the wiki.

Pine (talkcontribs)

Hi @MMiller (WMF):, I have been somewhat surprised that no one else (that I know of) has produced videos for English Wikipedia or Commons in recent years. I can make a few guesses about why others have not done so. Generally, English Wikimedians in particular seem not to spend a lot of time writing help documentation (although the Teahouse and IRC get plenty of use for live help) and my guess is that whatever factors result in so few English Wikipedians working on documentation are closely related to the factors that result in lack of volunteer time spent developing help videos. One factor could be that because ENWP and Commons have extensively developed policies and procedures, therefore significant thoughtful effort is required to write and present information about them in an organized, coherent, and accurate manner. Developing high quality videos from start to finish is an activity that requires a lot of time for both planning and execution, and my guess is that many Wikimedians prefer to spend their time on objectives that are achievable with much less time spent on planning. Another factor is that videos are often linear while the nature of workflows often involves tree-like decision structures, so significant thought is required to decide which workflows to depict in videos and how to address the decision points in the workflows.

Two of my hopes for the videos that I produce are that (1) videos will be easier and faster for new contributors to understand than text explanations, especially when those text explanations are spread across multiple pages or require detailed examination of documentation, and (2) that experienced Wikimedians who volunteer their time with helping newbies and doing quality control will find that the videos save time because the experienced Wikimedians can refer newbies to my videos instead of writing text explanations, or can write shorter text explanations if those explanations are accompanied by my videos.

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