Training/For trainers

This is a draft, in progress. It is not yet a product of consensus.

Experienced Wikimedia volunteers who share their skills are vital to Wikimedia UK's mission to support free knowledge. This page has advice and resources to help volunteers run training events.

Why train?

• You can improve Wikipedia and the other projects more by mobilising a room full of people than by working on your own.
• It is an environment where your experience is appreciated, and where you can convey and demonstrate the community's values of free knowledge and good faith collaboration.
• Training events can be memorable and fun, and can start off mentorships, friendships and working relationships.
• Training can help to identify usability issues with Wikipedia and its sister projects, which can be fed back on-wiki.
• Events that expand and diversify the contributor base can attract favourable publicity, which in turn draws in more contributors and partner organisations.

Pitfalls to avoid

• If you already a good presenter, and used to meticulously preparing what you are going to say, you may look at a three hour training slot and wonder how you will fill up all that time. However, a session that looks very simple on paper can take a lot of time to do well. A single goal such as "get everyone in the room to upload a file" can take a big chunk of time, and the more people in the room, the more chance there is for someone to lose track and get left behind. In training, the challenge is to pare down the content to focus on what is useful to the audience, and what they can not just carry out but practice repeatedly until they feel confident. If things do move more quickly than anticipated, and you are sure that people are keeping up, set an on-wiki activity with a clear goal.

• When some learners have lost track, it is understandable why they might not shout it out to the whole room. Hence the trainer at the front of the room can get a false impression that everything is going quickly and smoothly. By frequently asking for questions or comments, you can make it easier for learners to raise problems. This is also why it is very useful to have colleagues who can wander round the room and give individual help.

Training isn't just about enabling people to do things, but also helping them see things, such as the story told by a contributions record.

• Looking at the same screen, an experienced user and newcomer do not see the same things. An experienced wiki user will open up an article history and see a series of edits from top to bottom, with particularly active users and acts of vandalism clearly identifiable. For someone seeing it the first time, it is a baffling screenful of letters and numbers. For example, it is not obvious that "diff" and "hist" are short for "difference" and "history". Thus, trainers can easily get the impression that they've already shown something when the audience have not yet seen it. Similarly, experienced users might think of a task as involving two or three steps when novices see eight or nine different actions or decisions. Perhaps the biggest challenge in training is to put your experience aside and see things from the learner’s perspective.

• It may be true in a more mundane sense that newcomers see something different from what you see. Have you enabled the gadget that shows quality assessments under the title of each article? Have you tweaked your CSS? If you’ve been a Wikipedia contributor for years, it's easy to forget these customisations, and to point out something that the audience can't see on their own screens. Some trainers maintain a separate account with default settings especially for training.

• Don't fret about all the possible questions you might be asked. If someone asks an obscure question, showing them how to find out for themselves will be a more valuable learning experience for them than being told an off-pat answer.

Syllabi and resources

• Basic Wikipedia training for complete newcomers, to introduce basic editing
• Improving Wikipedia training for new editors who can handle basic editing, to get them creating or overhauling articles
• Basic Commons training for users with digital media such as photographs, to get them sharing files through the Wikimedia projects

Campus Ambassador training

Campus Ambassadors support Wikipedia educational projects, working in co-operation with a subject tutor/lecturer so that learners acquire subject knowledge and wiki skills in parallel.

A good trainer

1. Is respectful and professional with event hosts, trainees and colleagues
2. Is accessible

   a) Conveys an appropriate amount of information for the length of session

   b) Explains potentially confusing acronyms or terminology as they are introduced

   c) Concentrates on what a beginner needs to know, rather than unnecessary detail

3. Is responsive

   a) Checks that the pace is appropriate for the audience

   b) Solicits and answers questions

   c) Tailors training to the audience's interests

4. Is engaging

   a) Conveys that contributing to Wikipedia and its sister projects can be worthwhile and rewarding. There is no requirement to convince everyone in the room.

5. Seeks to improve

   a) Actively solicits and considers feedback from attendees and colleagues. This includes the use of an evaluation form.

Meeting the criteria: some suggestions

1. Respectful and professional:

• Set clear expectations of what learners will get from the session, at the outset and - if possible - in advance through an email.
• Face towards people when talking to them, so that they can read your body language (and lip-read if they have hearing difficulties)
• Don't give all your attention to the most vocal people in the room.
• If you have difficulty hearing a question (for example due to the speaker's accent), ask them to repeat or rephrase it, restate the question yourself and ask if you have understood it correctly.

2. Accessible:

• Try one-to-one training with a complete newcomer.
• Help at another trainer's session and see what learners have difficulty with.

3. Responsive:

• If the audience share a subject interest (e.g. a local history group or a scientific society), look at relevant Wikiprojects or Featured Content before the session to get examples of relevant articles or media files.
• During the session, frequently check that everyone in the room is up to speed. As well as asking the audience general "Okay so far?" questions, ask specifics like "Do you feel that you know how to reply to someone who posts on your talk page?" If someone has accomplished a task, that's not a guarantee that they can do it in future.
• Don't over-plan: be prepared to deviate from your plan of the session if you sense the audience would benefit from it.

4. Engaging:

• Think about your own positive experiences as a Wikimedia contributor, or talk to colleagues.
• Use impressive statistics about Wikipedia/Wikimedia's impact and success. Check the Wikimedia UK blog, Foundation blog or on-wiki newsletters for topical facts and figures.
• Use videos, slides and posters from the Outreach wiki or from past Wikimedia UK events.
• Keep things interactive: don't present for too long. The syllabus pages above have ideas for activities.
• Celebrate the learners' contributions. For example, at the end of the session get each person in the room to briefly say what they have improved or worked on. Remind them that the wider public will benefit from their work.

5. Seeking to improve:

• Make clear to the audience that, like any trainer, you are looking to ways to improve, and that it is okay to raise questions.
• Encourage learners to send you messages privately or on-wiki.

Further reading

• "Preventing and resolving problems": advice for university teaching assistants, some of which is relevant to training.