Hoi,
Return on investment is in our context all too arbitrary. Ask yourself; is
investing in gender gap important but does it make the best return on
investment. At the time I invested in documenting every person who died in
Wikidata. It was a good investment because now people have taken over from
me. Now at years end they use Wikidata to know who the "famous" people are.
The question is not bang for the buck. The question is where are we weak
and how can we change this. My current project is adding information about
the nobility, the monarchs of particularly Asia. I am learning as I am
doing this and I blog about it. All the investments in students working on
Wikipedia does not make the quality of the subjects I write about better.
Many of the stuff I am involved with has a point of view that I find is
hardly neutral. It is however not the subjects students are taught.
When a chapter, a community finds that a specific area is important to
them, they should be able to do so. Their relevance and work / investment
is not to be mistaken for a provable "return on investment". Because of the
gender gap I do give more time to the women I find. That awareness is
something you cannot measure but it does have a bearing. People with proper
historic knowledge could do much more; they would study the relationship
between marriages and peace between countries when they are ruled by
monarchs. They would bring this out. At this time we do not even have many
of the important battles and wars from the past... I am not saying this is
more important but it paints the picture.
When you want return on investment, there are the things people do not care
about because it means that it changes the way things are. The best return
on investment for Wikidata is by replacing red links and wiki links with
references to Wikidata items. I dare anyone to find an argument how it will
not bring more quality to any Wikipedia.
My point is that we will only look into the things that we know and care
for and in the process forget what we do it for. Money / investment is more
of the same. I prefer that we trust more and do not measure using our own
yard stick.
NB I am into meters and metric myself :)
Thanks,
GerardM
On 10 January 2017 at 11:30, Jane Darnell <jane...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What's wrong with "return on investment"? And what is a "term of art"
> exactly? I agree with Kerry and Pine both about the frustrations, but I
> also agree with Asaf in terms of all the improvements WMF has made. The
> problem with making a yearly chapter plan is the lack of knowledge on what
> "impact" (still better than any other word) was achieved the previous year,
> making estimation nearly impossible. For the Dutch chapter, the various
> projects (WLM etc) have been able to come up with their own measurements
> over time. The problem with any new project is that there is never anything
> to base estimates on. I am a terrible estimator myself (even when I have
> pretty good data to base my estimate on), but I enjoy finding creative ways
> to measure things. Right now we are in general terrible at measuring
> project-related chapter stuff, and the stuff we are good at measuring is
> hard to share with the people who need it most (see Asaf's comments about
> active editors).
>
> Last night I had a long skype-chat with my gendergap friends in NL and we
> were plotting what we can measure now as a way of being able to measure
> impact after some (soon-to-be-dreamed-up) international women's day editing
> event in March. One of the problems with measuring edits is the need for
> anonymity that Asaf and Kerry talk about. So we need to somehow capture
> aggregated measurements, but how can we do this and how do we define a
> "gendergap-related edit"? Theoretically this is an edit made either by a
> new or existing editor -or- about a woman, and either one is prompted not
> by something random (organic growth model of Wikimedia projects such as
> Wikipedia), but specifically by something in our gendergap workgroup
> "output" (whatever that is). The return on investment (=what we get for
> giving our personal time) is the increase in such edits over time. At the
> end of the day, we need to measure "our" increase of aggregated edits
> against the "normal" increase in aggregated edits, and if we can never
> measure this, why don't we all just shut up and go back to editing? Well I
> believe that these efforts will at some point become measurable and I have
> good faith that these efforts are not just "drops in the bucket". Sometimes
> it helps to just keep trying to reinvent the wheel, and until we do, we
> keep at least a list of new and improved articles that we are sure were
> prompted by our efforts (though these are certainly not 100% of all the
> edits we have inspired).
>
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 7:52 AM, Gerard Meijssen <
> gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hoi,
>> With logic like "return on investment" you favour big over important. So
>> no, please no.
>> Thanks,
>> GerardM
>>
>> On 10 January 2017 at 07:23, Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> To clarify my earlier comment about the term "impact": this has been
>>> used as a term of art by WMF in ways that I think are difficult even for
>>> native English speakers to grasp without specific instruction in how WMF
>>> uses the term. In practice, among grantees, the term seems to be used to
>>> mean a variety of things: "outcome", "output", "success", etc. I am hopeful
>>> that we can discontinue use of the word "impact" because of its confusing
>>> and varied uses in practice.
>>>
>>> I am in favor of attempting to quantify how much return on investment is
>>> received on the money and time (including precious volunteer time) invested
>>> in and by the affiliates and the people who participate in affiliate work.
>>> I suggest using terms other than "impact" to describe these returns on
>>> investment.
>>>
>>> I share a number of Kerry's frustrations with WMF grantmaking for
>>> affiliates; some of those frustrations were factors in my decision to
>>> significantly decrease my involvement in Cascadia Wikimedians, although
>>> there were other significant factors as well.
>>>
>>> Pine
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
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