By Esma Gjertsen, Volunteer Coordinator at Wikimedia UK
We organised the most recent iteration of our Train the Trainer (TtT) course in 2022 in the first week of December.
TtT trains volunteers who are keen to deliver Wikipedia editing events. Volunteer trainers are at the heart of delivering Wikimedia UK programmes. They act as community leaders and extend our work to underrepresented communities. They train new and existing editors. We currently have 45 trainers in 33 different locations across the country.
This term 15 trainers attended our course. The training equipped candidate trainers with the skills, experience and resources to deliver a standard Introduction to Wikipedia workshop. The second part of the training focused on Developing Community Partnerships. This session brought together candidate and accredited trainers and served as an opportunity to network as well as learning about how to establish connections with different communities and institutions.
Objectives
“I want to feel ready and confident to run a successful edit-a-thon.”
Candidate trainers expressed their objectives for attending the TtT as:
- Improve confidence in delivering training
- Learn how to support new editors from non-academic backgrounds
- Explore how to handle difficult questions
- Structure engaging and interesting sessions
- Approach institutions and communities
- Contribute to controversial subjects on Wikipedia
- Organise translation events
Commitments
“I will revisit the role-play scenarios to inform the outreach to museums that I’m going to do.”
Following the training, our trainers committed themselves to:
- Get in touch with their networks to scope out editing events
- Translate materials to their native languages
- Identify who to contact
- Study the TtT checklists and template emails in organising future events
- Follow up with existing contacts
- Think about how to engage better with participants after events
- Set up and promote volunteering projects
- Share learnings with colleagues
- Find framework/funding for Wikimedian residencies
- Follow more people on social media, and actually take up space
Feedback
“Really enjoyed the training, learnt a lot and look forward to putting it into practice.”
We are glad to see that our trainers had an overall good experience. We received 9 responses (60%) to our questionnaire that requested feedback for the pre-training information, training sessions, communication, training venue, catering, and online experience. All participants rated their experience 4 and above out of 5.
Introduction to Wikipedia
Developing Community Partnerships
We noted the following constructive feedback with appreciation:
- Shadowing the lead trainers to see how to set up the dashboard, the worklist, etc.
- Shorter day for especially online participants
- More time for interactive exercises such as role-playing
- Providing more context about the training content
- Interaction between the in-person and remote participants
We will strive to improve future sessions with these in mind. We will particularly pay attention to develop opportunities for bringing together in-person and remote participants, thus creating a truly hybrid experience for all.