Reflection on Cycle Two
1) What happened ?
I highlighted the poorly represented counties on the Wiki by posting a message about them to the list. That's a technique a bit like Wikipedia's 'projects' system, where areas that need work are spotlighted so that volunteers can concentrate their efforts, or just find something useful to do with themselves.
Over the course of a week there ensued a flurry of activity, but not just to those counties.
I decided to hold myself back from taking contributions posted to the mailing list and adding them myself to the Wiki. In the end, after a little prompt, some of these did make their way across, via one enthusiastic regular wiki editor.
There was some evidence of new contributors to the wiki (inexperienced formatting)
Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected.
QuantitativeDataAnalysis
QualitativeDataAnalysis
Discussion on the Wiki
My attempt to discuss how to define broad regions failed to gain any response in the time of the study.
A discussion about Saxon cider broke out on the Saxon page ( related to Yorkshire, one of the areas highlighted.) That discussion was then taken up on the mailing list.
2) What does it mean?
The exercise bore fruit in a number of ways.
A big boost for the weak areas, for the UK pub guide, for the Wiki and for the community.
Some crossflow of info and discussion is starting to happen between the list and the wiki. That's good.
With the publishing of the Camra book recently, and members disappointment with it, the value of the online guide has been demonstrated and appreciated by a wider membership.
I am in a position to be able to precipitate substantial and beneficial coordinated activity sometimes, just by starting the ball rolling with an appropriate suggestion.
From the original Objectives:
Objectives: 1) To publicise the wiki again, to solicit contributions by focussing on areas which are less well represented.
2) To try and engage others in constructive conversation on the talk pages of the wiki.
3) To resist substituting myself for the membership, that is to say, not do so many edits myself but wait and see if others will take up the slack.
1) and 3) have been acheived sucessfully, 2) not so well
maybe Wiki Talk pages are never going to be appropriate places for many-2-many discussions, which is fine, but might have implications for communities which form around a wiki - they may then need to set up a complementary mailing list , indeed Wikipedia does exactly that for the technical and community discussions.
4) What could have been done better?
Collection of the data could have been more systematic.
5) What did I learn about DAR?
That setting little project tasks for COPS can be effective.
That easing back from making wiki edits can help to devolve tasks to others.
That data collection needs to be better planned to make it less cumbersome.
6) What did I learn about this research process?
Confirmed the findings from cycle1 - the need to set a strict end point. This worked much better.
The Dilemma exposed by the chat with Linda who wanted to avoid "skewing your data" by holding back edits she might have made otherwise. It's a bit of a problem when one of your actions for improvemnet is to take some kind of "no action" in order to move others on. But that is something which facilitators are going to have to grapple with again and again.
For reflection on the process - two VoodooPads!
7) So what can I put on the DARwiki then out of this?
what I've learned about
Wiki and COPS
wiki projects
wiki facilitation
Stocks and Flows