User:CFCF/sandbox/mrdtest

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's first 3 months.

Summary
In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far. The main point of the project has been to get the ball rolling with the community. We have translators and we have content, what we more than anything need is more people getting involved in the project from Wikipedia's side.
 * Analyzing the situation

To do that it has been necessary to analyze what needs doing in the project, and then looking into how to best teach people how to get involved in the project.

The past 3 months have meant:
 * Finding problems/barriers involved in:


 * 1) Assessing content


 * 1) Integrating translations


 * 1) Templates
 * 2) etc.


 * Working on solutions by:


 * 1) Teaching and informing people about the project
 * 2) Making pages easier to edit

As the project will continue after the 6 month period focus has also been placing on: The last points are not necessarily possible to automate completely, but by at least looking into the specifics we can tell what needs work from people and what we could try to solve technically.
 * 1) Creating guides
 * Preparing for future technical solutions:
 * 1) Automatic template fixing
 * 2) Automatic link fixing
 * 3) Automatic tracking

Methods and activities
How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

''Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

Starting off I got in touch with a number of the communities where integration of translated articles onto target Wikis had been slow. Through discussion and providing some basic tracking structure on for example Polish and Dutch Wikipedias the ball got rolling.
 * Getting community engagement

One of the big issues identified was how difficult it was for a new user to get involved with the project. As with any complex project it takes time to get oriented, and I realised there was too little material that would help. For this reason I started building guides for Community organzing, Assessing content, Integration, Template installation, and more. The goal was not to create anything that perfectly gives advice on how to proceed on certain Wikis, but more general guides, that in turn can be expanded & translated by others that come along.
 * Guides

The guides required significant research, both finding and trying to solve problems before I could write anything. To do this I had to go through a number of Wikipedias and find both unique and general issues (of which there were many). Some of them had simple solutions, while others required new approaches, and getting the help of programmers Pl template bot (very much in alpha) or template designers: Simplified infobox who contributed to the project in various ways.
 * Solutions

Efforts have also been made to census the editors and has resulted in a list of all editors who have made more than 10 edits on any medical article, in any language. This list will be used to try and recruit new editors to the project.
 * Census

With the solutions and the material that has been produced so far I hope to user the following 3-4 months to get rid of all the articles that were stuck in the pipeline, as well as trying to engage new editors in the project by spreading the guides and introducing new editors to the project.

Midpoint outcomes
What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?


 * We've decreased the number of failed integrations, and are moving towards more community engagement in Wikis where we've had trouble before.


 * New focus area - Simplified articles The project has increased in scope by focusing on short 4 paragraph articles in many different languages. This has greatly benefited from work to ensure template and citations can be easily imported to small Wikis.

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.
 * The Medical Translation home page has been through an extensive over-haul and is hopefully easier to navigate and more accessible.


 * Roles - It should be easier for an editor to find something within the project they can help out with. While not perfect, it should be possible to help both with the technical side as well as the knowledgable side.


 * We're currently working, and are some way along in moving the progress pages off Wiki to something more managable. As the project has expanded it is no longer possible to use Wikipedia for spreadsheets. With a few thousands of links, and no very easy way to automate this it will take a little while, but will bear fruit in being much easier to edit and maintain.

Finances
''Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.''

''Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.'' Funds were spent very close to what was planned.

We're slightly under budget for when it comes to material, but other expenditures have followed projections.

Learning
''The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.''

What are the challenges
''What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.''
 * Too few editors

This is the major problem in the project, and the one we're trying to solve. It isn't as straight forward as simply asking new people to join, because there is no shortage of willing volunteers. The problem is that for an editor to join the project they've needed to fix everything from templates to tracking to disambiguating medical terms – a very rare breed of editor.

At the time I joined the project there was a very limited number of editors working on a global scale as well: James Heilman was and is still the one doing most of the work. There are didicated editors and numerous examples of good community engagement, for example the Persian Wikipedias so we know we can get editors who see the project as more than a one off job.

I've identified the following problems that might have caused the lack of editors.
 * Steep learning curve

I've spent significant time working to improve the learning curve, with guides as well as roles. With the guides it is possible to get a good idea of what is needed, and by signing up for roles it is possible to choose to help with what you are best at. You are no longer expected to do all the work yourself.
 * Misinformation

One of the causes of community opposition lies in the failure of previous translation efforts. Older projects have utilized both machine translation as well as little or no quality control pre and post translation. This means it takes effort to get information about our project out there, and it requires Our goal has not been to replace previous content or to align all the content on Wikipedia to what we deem appropriate. Instead we aim to provide various Wikis with

One of the reasons behind this has been how we've been providing content to Wikis. Due to the lack of editor.
 * Community opposition

Certain communities have opposed translation on principle. While an easy way to solve this would be do simply forgo translating into these languages it seldom seems to be what is best for the community as a whole. Often I've found that a vocal minority expressing dislike for translations trumps a larger number of users who are very happy to work with translations. Community opposition is one of the most difficult challenges as it makes it hard to reach out to those that could contribute to the project.


 * Keeping the global perspective

Focusing on the Polish or Dutch Wikipedia where there have been issues when integrating content is very time-consuming, and may not yield the gains that giving 10 other projects that time would. We may move away from certain Wikipedias if integration progress is very slow.

What is working well
Getting people interested is easy, and by giving them precise tasks they know they can handle, and see are having an impact has been great. One of the best ways to get new editors involved has been by looking for interested community organizers. Working together with the Wikimedia Foundation Chapters has proven successful, as they have previous experience or community organization and are also happy to get involved with the project.

Next steps and opportunities
''What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points. If you're considering applying for a 6-month renewal of this IEG at the end of your project, please also mention this here.''
 * Outreach


 * Messaging
 * Active users
 * Chapters

My hope is that I can expand upon what I've done in the past 6 months and to continue and expand the outreach work I've done. We need to get more editors, and I think we have a platform now that allows us to do so.
 * Clear programming tasks

The project will continue after this 6-month period, and my hope is to be able to continue contributing. I will likely have less time to manage the project on a daily basis, though it may still be necessary, but more than anything we will need to get programmers involved in creating simple to use tools that automate or simplify steps involved in the project.

Grantee reflection
''We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an IEGrantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?''