Grants:PEG/WM RS/Wiki Loves Monuments in Serbia 2012/Report

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Report accepted
This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY 2012-13 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
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Compliance[edit]

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement? Yes

Activities[edit]

  • May: Contacted the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments and obtained the official public lists of monuments in Excel format;
  • June - September: Sorted the official lists into four subcategories by types of monuments and added additional data, such as missing addresses and geocoordinates;
  • July - November: Created the official WLM Serbia website, with general information about the competition and links to the lists of monuments on Serbian Wikipedia. The website was updated on a regular basis;
  • August: Uploaded the final sorted lists of monuments on Serbian Wikipedia, and structured them as required;
  • August: Contacted potential sponsors;
  • August: Designed the promotional materials, such as flyers and posters, as well as the video clip which was to be played in the public transport in Belgrade during September;
  • August: Wrote press announcement about the start of the competition, which was sent to public media;
  • August - November: Set up and regularly updated both Facebook and Twitter profiles for WLM Serbia;
  • September: Overlooked photographs which were uploaded for the competition, added aditional categories and edited IDs where neccessary;
  • October: Used the Jury tool as additional help for selection of the best fifteen photographs in Serbia, out of which ten where submitted to the international part of the WLM competition at the end of the month; Our jury process was an online one. First, the Wikipedian part of the jury (Laslo Varga from the Wikinews Serbia and Tamara Petrović, coordinator of the WLM project in Serbia) chose around 1000 photos which met the technical qualities (such as lighting, exposition, angle, no blur...). Afterwards, the main jurors (Dragoljub Zamurović - architect and photographer, Goran Malić - photographer, chroniclar and historian of photography, and Miloš Jurišić - photographer and a collector of old postcards of Belgrade) used the Jury tool to select around 80 best photos of those 1000. After that, they voted again for the best fifteen photos. As their opinions differed in many ways, it was decided to use their average points awarded to those photos, which helped us to determine the winning ones. So, basically, maths and statistics were applied to determine who the winners were.
  • November: Announced the results and information of the following exhibition of the winning photographs in the press; Designed posters for the exhibition, T-shirts and certificates for the winners, jury and sponsors and designed the layout of the winning photographs for printing; The exhibition of the winning photographs was held on November, 20th in the Cultural Centre "Nea Pangea" in Belgrade in the form of a cocktail party. Approximately a hundred people were present. The president of WMRS, Goran Obradović, held the opening speech about Wikimedia Serbia and its activities, followed by Tamara Petrović, coordinator of the WLM2012-Serbia, who presented the whole project to the audience. Two members of the jury, renowned experts from the world of photography, art and architecture, Dragoljub Zamurović and Miloš Jurišić, were present as well when the awards and certificates were given out to the winners and the first three awards for the best photographs were publicly announced. The first prize was a voucher for photo equipment in the value of 35.000 Serbian Dinars, the second was an external hard-drive of 750Gb and the third one was a USB memory stick of 64Gb. Authors of all the fifteen winning photographs were all awarded WLM T-shirts as well as a one-year subscription to the "Liceulice" magazine. A special award was handed out to the user who contributed with the most photographs and uploaded a total of 407 images. The exhibition lasted for four days.
  • December - : Preparation work for the travelling exhibition throughout Serbia. The first one will be held in February. The details will be enclosed when available.
See also: Finalists in Serbia

Project goal and measures of success[edit]

Project goal[edit]

Photographs uploaded during the month of September on the WLM competition have greatly enriched the multimedia database, specifically, with 3774 new images, which have been used mostly in existing articles about Serbian cultural monuments. However, the number of new articles on Serbian cultural heritage has started to grow significantly upon uploading the structured lists of monuments in Serbia on the Serbian Wikipedia. It is worth mentioning that for many cultural monuments in Serbia there were no images with Creative Commons licences on Wikimedia Commons before the WLM competition took place.

Measures of success[edit]

The measures of success were:

  • Number of participants

During the month of September 153 different users have uploaded their photographs to Wikimedia Commons. The majority has uploaded less than five images per user account, whereas ten users sent the amount of 100 - 407 photographs. The user with the most uploads sent 407 images. Statistical data show that, of countries that participated in WLM 2012, Serbia is in 24th place by the number of uploaders; by the number of uploaders per number of inhabitants, Serbia is in 11th place.

  • Number of images collected

There were 3774 photographs uploaded on the WLM competition. The number of daily uploads varied from 2 to 851. During the last four days over 50% of the final amount of images was uploaded.

  • Inclusion of the media

The WLM competition in Serbia was very well accepted by local media, which is shown by 63 recorded press mentions during the period of August - November:

Apart from the written press mentions, there were a few appearances of WLM team members talking both about Wikimedia Serbia and the WLM competition on local TV and radio stations as well.

Lessons learned[edit]

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

Having good organisational skills and devoted team members is the key to the success of the WLM contest in Serbia. Since it was organized in Serbia for the first time this year and in spite of joining this project four months later than other countries, we firmly believe that it was organized very successfully with better results than expected. Being limited financially meant that we had to allocate the funds in an optimal and responsible way.

It is very important to stay in contact with organisers from other countries, in order to overcome obstacles and find solutions to problems more easily. The help we received from the international team on technical and global organisational issues was greatly appreciated.

Did anything unexpected happen?

There was nothing unexpected in particular. However, the interest in supporting this project by governmental and public institutions was low. This can be partially explained by the political and economical situation in the country, which influenced the lack of sponsorships as well.

Would you do anything differently if you planned a similar project?

Since Serbia took part for the first time in the WLM contest, the priority was to build a strong foundation which is now to be upgraded in the following years. Sorting and structuring the lists of monuments properly and thoroughly required a large amount of time. However, having the lists completed, we can now focus on other things in WLM2013, such as promotion of the project in public spaces and interaction with people and potential participants.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

Both Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons were greatly enriched by this project. The quantity of new articles has grown in time and the quality of the existing ones has improved significantly.

Press mentions and media coverage lead to acknowledging Wikimedia Foundation and its projects in public, which will, hopefully, result in increasing the interest of new users.

Moreover, this project lead to interlinking Wikipedias among themselves and creating same articles in many different languages.

Reporting and documentation of expenditures[edit]

Documentation of expenditures has been received by WMF.

Did you send WMF documentation of all expenses paid for with grant funds? Yes Details of expenditures:

No Items Requested Spent
1 Design and printing of promotional materials €570.17 €360.85
2 T-shirts €175.43 €115.61
3 Prizes €657.89 €535.26
4 Event €701.75 €239.11
5 Website €78.94 €63.88
TOTAL $ 2,793.47
received
€1,314.71
bank cost and differences in the rate
=€ 1,350.00
The funds remaining from this grant may be allocated to another grant submission if it is approved: [[{{{submission}}}]].

Will you be requesting re-allocation of remaining grant funding?

Yes. We want to use saved funds for planed WLM mini-exhibition.

Will you be returning unused funds to the Wikimedia Foundation?

No. ~935€ (There were a lot of changes in the exchange rate)

Additional requests and related proposals[edit]

Will you be requesting an extension or were you granted an extension? We have the plan to hold several traveling exhibitions in the coming months. It will improve the the promotion of WLM project in Serbia. After each exhibition we would write short reports.

Please link to related grant proposals here: