Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Growing the wiki spirit in Turkey, 2022/Midpoint Report
Report Status: Accepted
Due date: 2023-01-15T00:00:00Z
Funding program: Wikimedia Community Fund
Report type: Midterm
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General information[edit]
This form is for organizations receiving Wikimedia Community Funds (General Support) or Wikimedia Alliances Funds to report on their mid-term learning and results. See the Wikimedia Community Fund application if you want to review the initial proposal.
- Name of Organization: Dijital Bilgi Derneği
- Title of Proposal: Growing the wiki spirit in Turkey, 2022
- Amount awarded: 49020 USD, 720000 TRY
- Amount spent: 447978 TRY
Part 1 Understanding your work[edit]
1. Briefly describe how your strategies and activities proposed were implemented and if any changes to what was proposed are worth highlighting?
- The project follows four tracks as planned.
Students Edit Wiki Projects program was successfully implemented at two levels: university and secondary school. At university level, among others, this semester we collaborated with a university in Kayseri for the first time and this collaboration where all 3rd year students were introduced to Wikipedia in a compulsory course and where an online presentation was followed by a face-to-face visit is likely to set a good model for future education partnerships. Another important education activity to highlight was a series of Wikipedia presentations in Northern Cyprus. This small state recognized only by Turkey has 25 universities with students from 114 countries. Through presentations at 3 of them, we unexpectedly reached a very international audience, mainly from African countries. Thirdly, the first university wiki club was established in Istanbul and Üsküdar University Wiki Club held their first meeting in October. In Growing the Content Program, Turkic marathon contest was not made as the community decided not joinin this international contest this year; the thematic edit-a-thon activities were made as planned and we were glad to see that civil society organizations’' willingness in partnering with Wikimedians in contributing Wikimedia projects for raising awareness about their field of work. An event that required a lot of time and energy was the Wikidata Istanbul Conference in October. This event is organized by Turkic Wikimedians User Group; but as the host-country wikimedians, our user group members put a lot of time and effort for this event. We believe this event served very well to bring the local community together and therefore it was an important part for the Stronger Community Program. As a result of talks with our prospective museum partners; our fourth program (Open Culture Partnerships Program) is expected to produce events in 2023 around the Museums Week.
2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you feel are being effective in achieving your goals?
- Thematic edit-a-thons organized in partnership with civil society organizations to write one specific article help producing well-referenced and high quality articles especially about those concepts that individual Wikimedians may find difficult to write about; and provide a good starting point to fill a knowledge gap on a topic in a wiki project as well as encouraging newcomers.
How to organize such a thematic edit-a-thon? First, talk with the partner, discuss what they would like to share with the public, what knowledge or which perspective is missing in the wiki project according to them. Make a list of articles that need to be created or improved; decide one or two articles (i.e “Artistic freedom”, “Active citizenship”, “Climate change anxiety”...). Make a list of recommended references and draft the outline of the article. Finding and inviting participants is on the partner; training them on editing is on the Wikimedians. The training should include explaining and discussing the basic principles and followed by a short presentation on Visual Editor. The participants work in groups on each subtitle (one group works on the definition, one about the "history", etc) on their sandbox. Groups stay in touch and continue their work after the event for 10-15 days or more; second or third meetings are held if required. The groups' work are checked, combined and moved to the main article by wikimedians. Do's and don'ts: Please make sure the training is about the principles of editing not about technical stuff. Do not expect pages of content being produced by the participants; some participant's only contribution might be fixing small errors; and those are very valuable contributions as well. Prepare a wiki-page to inform the community about the event, the contributors and articles involved. Do inform your partner about how much work produced, how many times the articles are being read, and how other contributors improved the article after their work.
3. What challenges or obstacles have you encountered so far?
- The number of training events and presentations we organize in universities increases every year; considering we have 166 universities in Turkey, we still have a lot of places to reach. We do have two people giving all the training. We need to train new trainers for making those presentations. Although we started to have some young Wikimedians come to events to support; we could not build a trainers pool yet.
We have difficulty in distributing our press releases. We have a small list of media contacts and send media releases directly to those contacts. This method was insufficient to share the good news that w 20 award winning photos of International Wiki Loves Earth Contests included 6 photos from Turkey! We are considering using a release distribution service.
4. Please describe how different communities are participating and being informed about your work.
- We know that the Turkish wikimedia community is willing to be informed about the activities of the user group on wiki-environment. Therefore; we create a specific wiki-page about our edit-a-thons, explaining what is the purpose, with whom we are partnering with, the usernames of the participants including new members, the list of the articles worked, the recommended references page (Example:https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikipedi:WMTR/Vikimaraton/M%C3%BClteciler_2022). We also share the information on our presentations at education institutions on a wiki page. We list the name of the courses, number of students attended, if the partnership includes students-editing, also the list of usernames included (Example: https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikipedi:E%C4%9Fitim_Program%C4%B1/Etkinlikler/3).
VikiSalı (WikiTuesday) meetings is another way of announcing the events to the community, and discussing the activities. Those online meetings are open to anyone but mostly attended by user group members. We use tr.wikimedia.org address to share the meeting notes with everyone. We prepare detailed notes so that anyone reading them can be aware of the announcements and learn about the discussions being made (Example:https://tr.wikimedia.org/wiki/VikiSal%C4%B1_Bulu%C5%9Fmalar%C4%B1/2022-12-06) We are well aware that the active editor community may not involve people from different social groups in the society and therefore they may not be able to reflect every perspective. One of the purposes of our activities is bringing different people with different experiences and perspectives. For this aim, we partner with different civil society organizations who have capacity to reach participants from diverse backgrounds. We undertake training those new participants about how to share their knowledge and perspectives on wiki projects.
5. Please share reflections on how your efforts are helping to engage participants and/or build content, particularly for underrepresented groups.
- In Turkey, Wikipedia is a very well-known platform as a knowledge source. However, in every place we make an activity about Wikimedia projects, we see that wiki editing is a very new concept for participants. Our efforts bring a new perspective to look at Wikimedia projects for the participants. In every event, we see excitement coming from this fresh perspective.
We are aware that such excitement is not transformed to active-editing or any other way of contribution to Wikimedia projects right away. Our first aim is to show how to read Wikipedia more critically. Gaining new reading habits (i.e using inline clean up tags or using discussion pages) first make participants more critical of wiki projects. In events where we ask participants to fill a pre-event and post-event survey; we saw that the answers for “how reliable you think Wikipedia is” question change at the end of the event and the participants see it as less reliable! That’s because they learn that Wikipedia is a user-generated source only with our efforts. We see our efforts produce participants' engagement when an event-chain is built (i.e WikiGap participant invite us to make a health topics related edit-a-thon, participants of that event invite us to a course in her university...) One important case where our efforts clearly produced very concrete results is Uskudar University where a student wiki-club formed. That’s a result of us having the Wikidata Conference there and working with volunteer students.
6. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What have you learned so far about these areas during this period?
- We wanted to find out relevant courses for Wikimedia assignment activity. We had an opportunity to test one. At Abdullah Gul University we worked with the Center for Enhancement of Learning and Teaching; and presented Wiki Editing at GLB 301 Sustainability Course. This course gave the opportunity to make a presentation to all 3rd year students and then work with a small group for a wiki-based project. Our approach was leaving students free about their contributions and support when they need it, but we saw that we must try giving students pre-determined tasks.
We wanted to find out how to support the creation of a Wikipedia Club in a university. We are glad with the establishment of a wiki club at Üsküdar university. We saw that encouraging students is not enough; it is also important to work with other actors in the university. Because we organized a Conference in that university, we had been in touch with many departments (extracurricular activities department, IT department, academics...) Having people from different departments get familiar with our work and goals was important.
We made presentations to teachers in some secondary schools. We saw that it is not possible for teachers to come up with ideas to integrate them into their courses when they are learning for the first time that wiki projects are user-generated. We thought maybe first we try to find a way to reach those secondary school teachers who are already familiar with wiki-editing.
7. What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your work?
- We see that our efforts put a bug in the ears of the participants; and results are coming not necessarily at the and of the events we organized but by time. There are still a lot of ears we have to reach; we’ll continue this work. We want to increase the diversity of topics of our edit-a-thons. Because Turkey is on the way to the 100th Anniversary of the Republic; we would like to find partners to get high quality articles about the Turkish Republic.
Part 2: Metrics[edit]
8a. Open and additional metrics data.
| Open Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Museum professionals survey | It’s a survey intended to be conducted at presentations/trainings/edit-a-thons organized with the participation of museum professionals. The aim is finding out the attitudes of museum professionals about sharing knowledge on open platforms and their perception of Wikimedia projects. | 10 | 48 | The analysis show that the participants' perception of Wikipedia before and after our events may change positively or negatively: for those participants who perceive Wikipedia as a knowledge source where everything is correct the perceived reliability decreases as they learn it is user-generated content; whereas for those participants who thinks Wikipedia is static like traditional encyclopedias the perceived reliability increases as they learn how it is updated continuously. | We conduct pre-event and post event survey at our wiki editing workshops/presentations. The surveys have closed and open ended questions. Please find a sample report produced by the date collected from pre-event and post event survey of and event at uploded document (in Turkish): 20221015-PreSurvey-postSurveReport.pdf |
| Student feedback form | Feedback form designed for collecting data from university students who submitted Wikipedia assignments (or contributed to other Wikimedia projects as a course requirement) during 2022-2023 term, on the level of their satisfaction from their assignments on Wikimedia projects and their thoughts on the assignment.We would like to compare the results taken from different schools, different types of activities. | 50 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Additional Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities | Participants who continue to participate in WMTR projects since last year. | 300 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities | Organizers of WMTR activities who continue to participate after activities.Partn | 5 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability | Partners of thematic-edit-athon + partners of Education activities + GLAM instution partners | 15 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors | Feedback received from participants via forms. | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Diversity of participants brought in by grantees | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of people reached through social media publications | followers at Twitter + followers at instagram | 4200 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of activities developed | Biweekly community meetings + Thematic-edit-athons + Wikidata birthday event + writing contests + editing contests + talks at partner organisations + presentations/trainings at educational instutitons | 48 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of volunteer hours | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
8b. Additional core metrics data.
| Core metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | The number of participants who will take part in all WMTR projects and programs.
Participants of VikiSalı meetings + participants of Thematic edit-a-thons + Participants of university students + participants of WLE contests + Participants of Wikidata Birthday + |
1200 | |||
| Number of editors | Number of editors who will contribute wiki projects at WMTR activities.
Participans of editing and photo contests + participants of thematic edit-a-thons |
500 | |||
| Number of organizers | Number of WMTR members oversee the activities of the programs. | 8 |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | New/improved articles | 2000 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Wikimedia Commons | New images | 2000 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Wikidata | New/improved items. | 2000 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
9. Are you having any difficulties collecting data to measure your results?
- We do not necessarily know how many participants create a user account or re-activate their account after our presentations. Lastly we made a presentation to Engineering Faculty students of a university and there were almost 400 students listening and asking questions. We see such large presentations as an opportunity to introduce the idea of contributing Wiki projects. We can not collect data in most of the presentations. We can only report the number of activities and approximate number of participants. We can get the list of usernames and collect more data only if we work with an instructor, or student club to organize a more structured work. Presentations open the way to organize such events in the future.
10. Are you collaborating and sharing learning with Wikimedia affiliates or community members?
- Yes
10a. Please describe how you have already shared them and if you would like to do more sharing, and if so how?
- We work in close collaboration with Wikimedians of Turkic Languages User Group and share our learnings with communites speaking Turkic languages with the help of this user group. One example was our presentation in the Wikimania Baku Meet up in August. We joined the event online and shared our events and learning from those events.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimania_2022,_Baku_Meetup,_13_August#/media/File:Wikimania_2022_Baku_meetup_online_participants_1.png
We also shared our learnings with the Cee community with a lightening talk at CEE meeting 2022 event : https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2022/Programme/Submissions/Trying_New_Forms_of_Wikipedia_Assignments:_Experience_from_Civic_Responsibility_Project_Course
11. Documentation of your work process, story, and impact.
- Below there is a section to upload files, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, e.g. communications materials, blog posts, compelling quotes, social media posts, etc.). This can be anything that would be useful to understand and show your learning and results to date (e.g., training material, dashboards, presentations, communications material, training material, etc).
- Below is an additional field to type in link URLs.
Part 3: Financial reporting and compliance[edit]
12. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.
- 447978
13. Local currency type
- TRY
14. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.
- Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
- Provide links to your financial reporting documents.
Our total spending is 447.978TL = 24.492 USD
15. Based on your implementation and learning to date, do you have any plans to make changes to the budget spending?
- No
15a. Please provide an explanation on how you hope to adjust this.
- N/A
16. We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being a grantee has been so far.