I met some of the Georgian editors last time I was in Tbilisi. They seem to have a very tight community, there aren't many of them but that means they are few enough that they can all work together on their "topic of the month ". Which couldn't be more different from the London meetups where some of the participants almost never interact on wiki.
As well as meetups we've also run editathon and other content focussed things in London as part of our GLAM and outreach programs. Articles like Hoxne Hoard certainly did get a lot of people editing together who had met in real life. Their retention effects will probably be different, and you can't measure that against non-participants as a base because there is also bound to be a halo effect amongst the people we invite. I know from another organisation that there are lots of people who feel happier about continued membership of an organisation that sends them interesting looking invites, even if they are currently too busy to take up those invites. So the total impact of say a backstage pass at a prestigious museum is much more than the obvious benefit to articles and retention of participants, as there will be people who feel very differently about their or indeed their partner's hobby if it involves such invitations. As for the idea that people attend meetups to do well in elections, in 2010/11 I was one of the active nominators at RFA, and I can assure you there are several editors who I've met at meetups but who have decided not to run for adminship. So not everyone attends to boost their wiki career. Only two of my seven successful nominations have been London meetup regulars (though I think there've been times when London generated similar clusters of nominations to the Wikimania one you observed). So the verdict has to be that many don't attend to boost their wiki career, and don't assume that those who do run attended a meetup in order to boost their chances of winning. It sometimes just happens that I or others take the opportunity to persuade them to volunteer to be an admin. WSC On 19 November 2012 19:44, Laura Hale <la...@fanhistory.com> wrote: > > > On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 6:33 AM, Steven Walling <swall...@wikimedia.org>wrote: > >> >> >> Making a correlation between IRL meetings and activity is difficult >> unless you do it by hand. And then there's the question of what you might >> use as a control group as a basis for comparison. >> >> > I'd assume local culture plays a role and that any group looked at would > not necessarily be usable beyond that... but for action type research, very > usable. :) > > > > -- > twitter: purplepopple > blog: ozziesport.com > > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > >
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