Leveraging Wiki Platforms for Academic Conferences Using the Future Directions Forum as a Case Study

Project Goal

The impact of the Wiki projects and community has reached most of the world albeit with uneven access and development. This reach enabled a vast amount of people to access information for free. The Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology’s Future Directions Forum (hereafter referred to as “the Forum”) brings a similar impact through the delivery of professional development resources, designed to serve the needs of students and early-career scientists. We seek to connect the Wiki community and the Forum to create a platform to spread free psychological science without barriers for the wider public.

The inaugural Forum took place in 2017 to provide resources and information to early-career scientists and students and showcase trends in Evidence-Based Practice in Clinical Psychology. The heart of the forum involves the importance of free and accessible psychological knowledge and leverages various platforms to disseminate the Forum information for free (Wikiversity, Youtube, and the Science Framework). The Forum offers open source material in the form of archived videos of workshop and research presentations, which can all be found on YouTube. The Forum has collaborated with Helping Give Away Psychological Science (HGAPS) since 2017 to disseminate the information from the Forum via Wikiversity by summarizing the content covered at each Forum meeting on Wikiversity. This free dissemination of the Forum’s content provides a touchstone for early career scientists who may not have the means to attend the conference. Since 2017, the collaboration between the Forum and HGAPS has given us over 2,000 page views on Wikiversity. As the number of initial views indicates, there is demand for the quality information presented at the Forum. However, due to the infrequency of the updates on the pages and the lack of cohesiveness of the pages, the number of views decreased over time. Through the use of edit-a-thons on Wiki platforms, the Forum seeks to create a cohesive and user-friendly look that results in creating a Forum template while updating the Wikiversity pages with the most relevant and useful content information from the Forum.

The Forum also plans to add a template for conferences that provides others on Wiki the ability to hold their conference and disseminate free research or instruction. This corresponds with another grant awarded to HGAPS by the Association for Psychological Science. This grant aims to make a conference “tool-kit” for conferences to have a template for making their materials free to access on platforms such as Wiki. This current grant would serve in the reverse manner allowing us to create a “tool-kit” to connect Wiki platforms with conferences. Overall, our goal is to partner with Wiki to bridge the gap between Wiki and psychological science. In doing this, we need to create more experts from inside of the Wiki community who are well versed in psychological science. For over five years, the Forum has had great success with extensive support from the largest psychological association (The American Psychological Association) The first meeting of the Forum in 2017 was innovative as it was the birthplace of the idea connecting psychological conferences to Wiki. This grant would bring together the conference team with experienced editors from HGAPS and the wiki community to continue making psychological science accessible.

Our goals for this project can be summarized as follows:

Update current Forum pages and pages related to keynote speakers
Create a tool-kit for future conferences to use
Recruit and train new editors
Increase the editing skills of current editors
Engage audiences with the content available from the Forum
Reduce skepticism and bias towards Wiki-based platforms by proving curated, high-level content psychological science on the platforms

History of the Forum

The Forum started in 2017 by User:Adelosreyes, and he continues to chair the forum each year. The Forum aims to provide a “tool box” for the early-career scientists and students offered by professional development team (User:Eyoungstrom) while showcasing future directions in Evidence-Based Practice by the experts in the field (2017 Keynote; 2017 keynote Evidence Based Assessment) as well as up-and-coming researchers. The inaugural Forum took place at University of Maryland, and after the collaboration with the American Psychological Association, the Forum moved to the current in-person meeting location at the Spire Event Place at the American Psychological Association in Washington D.C. The Forum has constantly attracted over 70 attendees in in-person meetings due to the physical space limitations, and once moved to the virtual platform due to the pandemic has had a reach of over 400 registrants each year. With the Forum managers, including User:Hokuno and User:Ncharamut, the Forum constantly innovates by adding new workshops each year to address unique needs for early-career scientists and students, as well as constantly reevaluating attendees experience to better engage with the attendees as well as post-forum content dissemination. The collaborations with HGAPS and Wikiversity seem like the natural next-steps to increase Forum engagement with this population.

Project Plan

Activities

Tell us how you'll carry out your project. Be sure to answer the following questions:

1. Are you doing one editathon or training or a series of editathons or training?

Our goal is to hold both a series of editathons and a series of training sessions. The training will go through two different phases. The first goal will be to provide training to the Forum managers, who have an in-depth knowledge of the Forum, in order for them to become Wiki editors on how to use Wiki. Training conference managers to be Wiki editors will allow us to translate the knowledge of the conference into quality of the content on the Wikipedia page. Additionally, we aim to improve experienced Wiki editors’ knowledge on psychological conferences in order to maintain this partnership between the Forum and Wiki. Through the second goal, we will produce a conference template that is easy to understand and easily accessible by sharing this on Wikiversity. Through training, Forum managers will be guided on how presenting conference information on Wiki platforms using the tool-kit can be maximized, giving individuals a platform for spreading knowledge to a global audience. The editathons will be a combination of experienced editors, so we can improve the presence of the Forum Wiki pages, as well as training new editors in how to effectively edit Wikiversity pages following the provided template. This way, editors can directly update the content of the Forum on Wiki platforms efficiently and improve existing pages while new editors can be trained on how to do this. Through training and editathons, we will build the Wiki community and disseminate information on a far grander scale.

2. How have you let relevant Wikimedia communities know about this proposal? You are required to provide links to on-wiki pages to inform these communities about your proposed work. Examples of places where this can be done include community discussion pages, affiliate discussion pages, or relevant project talk pages.

The Forum has built a media presence over the years through various platforms including holding an in-person Forum and virtual Forums over Zoom, and posting Forum-related content on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. However, there is no formal channel to solicit feedback from the community. This grant will allow us to create a formal and efficient communication channel through leveraging the talk pages on Wiki. Through the continuous improvement of this page, we will use the talk pages here and on our subpages to keep our community updated on the changes we plan to make. Using these platforms, as well as continuing to build our presence on Wikiversity, we will effectively reach Wikimedia community members.

We have notified Wikimedia communities on the following talk pages:

Talk: JCCAP FDF

Talk:H-GAPS User Group

Talk:WikiProject Psychology

Talk: Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology

Talk: Wikiconference North America

Talk: Wikipedia & Education User Group

Talk: North Carolina Wikipedians

3. How will you let participants know about the edit-a-thon? In what ways will you be communicating with them?

We will be utilizing the network of the HGAPS user group for our participants. We will let them know through HGAPS channels such as Slack, Zoom meetings, email lists, and Wiki through Wiki talk pages.

4. Do you have experienced Wikimedia editors to lead the event? Please provide links to the usernames of these individuals.

Yes - via HGAPS

User:Eyoungstrom

User:Logan520 (Logan was an original editor on the Forum pages starting in 2017)

User:Emmagch (Emma was an original editor on the Forum pages starting in 2017)

User:Magnolia321 (this user is a current HGAPS intern who is working hard to learn Wiki editing)

Additionally, we have editors who, while not experienced in Wiki editing, are well versed in the Forum and will help contribute to the content on these pages.

User:Ncharamut (Natalie is on the planning committee for the Forum and was a student presenter at the first Forum in 2017)

User:Adelosreyes (Andy is the Chair and creator of the Future Directions Forum)

User:Hokuno (Hide is the Coordinator and Manager for the Future Directions Forum)

5. Do participants have the equipment or skills needed to participate and contribute high-quality content? If not, how will you support them?

As the series of events will take place both in-person and virtually, the editors and participants will meet through the use of Zoom. The participants will be required to have their computer and stable internet; however, a meeting location could be provided through the academic institution as part of the students’ organization. We have extensive experience running hybrid meetings (multiple weekly meetings since August 2021) through various organizations, with over 100 participants. We have a cadre of editors with basic through intermediate editing skills, and a set of instructions and "how-to" materials created through this grant and pre-existing materials, as well as offering training sessions as previously noted. We also have an extensive infrastructure on Google Suites for nonprofits (@HGAPS.org), which we will utilize as a way of gathering input from content experts and other stakeholders with no prior Wiki editing experience.

6. How will you engage participants after the event(s)?

We will engage with participants over email and online communication tools after the series of training and subsequent editathon take place. The use of these communication strategies will allow us to disseminate updates and measure returning views on pages. We will also ask that they follow HGAPS social media platforms which regularly post updates about projects affiliated with HGAPS. Additionally, we will sustain engagement after the events by rewarding editors who contribute beyond the events at the 1 month and 3 month follow up time points.

7. Are you running any in-person events or activities? If so, you will need to complete the steps outlined on the Risk Assessment protocol related to COVID-19. When you have completed these steps, please provide a link to your completed copy of the risk assessment tool below:

We will primarily hold our events online via Zoom and communicate via email and slack channels. However, we will have some hybrid events as HGAPS holds hybrid meetings on Thursdays from 6-8 pm Eastern Time Zone. These meetings have relied on video conferencing since March 2019. HGAPS has begun meeting in person again and takes COVID precautions by requiring mask-wearing and social distancing. Additionally, we will follow all COVID-19 guidelines put forth by the local and state governments as well as the institution in which the events will take place. This includes mask wearing, social distancing, and hand washing/sanitizing. We plan to have at least one breakout room in our hybrid meetings dedicated to this project at those meetings. Additional events will be held completely online.

8. Is there anything else you want to tell us about this project?

HGAPS has created Standard Operating Procedures that serve as teaching aids to promote responsible and effective editing on Wiki platforms as well as informed consumption of materials on Wikimedia. We welcome any feedback or suggestions to these procedures including how to improve them, what skills we should add, and how this information should be shared more broadly on Wiki platforms. The proposed budget is in line with a series of grants HGAPS has received from professional organizations such as the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, the Society for Clinical Psychology, and the CODAPAR program of the American Psychological Association. Additionally, HGAPS has held edit-a-thons in the past and the editathons associated with this grant will be held with a similar structure to ensure efficiency. The Wiki Rapid Grant is the best funding mechanism for this project because of the quick nature of review and authorization so we can fix the FDF pages on Wikiversity before next year’s FDF in June. The Wiki Rapid Grant is also especially helpful in terms of raising the visibility of HGAPS and its external partnerships within the Wikimedia community, and hopefully attracting benevolent expert editors to help accelerate the growth of technical skills within the HGAPS User Group.

Impact

How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include the following targets:

Targets

Number of events: 2 edit-a-thons with HGAPS team members from both UNC and UMD
Number of participants: 15+ contributors and attendees per edit-a-thon
Number of new editors: 5 new editors
Number of articles created or improved: 1 new article created, 20+ articles improved
Views: increase views within 6 months of launch

We also will add at least one FDF page under the HGAPS page pile on Wikiversity, where we will be able to track views using the Massview tool. We will look for changes in views after boosting the information via HGAPS and affiliated societies' social media and email listservs. We have noticed spikes in traffic coinciding with events such as conferences where we are presenting HGAPS and Wikimedia, which typically have raised the baseline level of traffic to those pages.

Resources

What resources do you have? Include information on who is organizing the project, what they will do, and if you will receive support from anywhere else (in-kind donations or additional funding).

Fiscal sponsor: HGAPS.org 501c3

Editing support: H-GAPS User Group

Zoom access from UNC-Chapel Hill Chapter of HGAPS

G-Suites for nonprofits, Google Analytics from HGAPS.org 501c3

Bookkeeping, accounting, distribution of funds managed by HGAPS.org 501c3

What resources do you need? For your funding request, list bullet points for each expense and include a total amount.

Wages for template/tool-kit creators: $2,040 ($20 per hour x 3 creators x 34 hours)

Wages for trainers: $720 ($20 per hour x 3 trainers x 12 hours)

Gift cards to virtually buy lunch for editathon participants: $600 ($20 for 15 participants x 2 events)

Incentives for sustained editing: $500 (1st prize $100, 2nd prize $50, and 3rd prize $25 at 1 and 3 month follow-ups after last edit-a-thon = $175 x 4 "contests")

HGAPS merch for milestones completed in editor training: $300

Fiscal sponsor administrative fees (including access to Google Suites for Nonprofits platform and analytics): $832 (20% final budget)

Total: USD $4,992

Helping Give Away Psychological Science/996 Conference Rapid Grant