Grants:Project/FLG/History of Quebec and French-speaking North America 2020-2021/Midpoint

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Report accepted
This midpoint report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2019-20 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.



Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learning from the first half of the grant period.

Summary[edit]

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

  • A little behind schedule on some goals due to major changes at the management of the FLG, the Covid19 pandemic and the fact that the foundation was closed during one month for a summer break shortly after the beginning of the proposal, but we are putting all our energy into completing important projects before the end of January 2021.
  • So far, very good ratings from participants who answered our 4 post-event surveys following our training events on August 14-16, November 11-26 as well as December 3.
  • In accordance with our grant proposal regarding our goal to assist at least 3 new history teachers in the steps needed to bring student contributions to Wikipedia, Wikisource or Commons in the classroom.
  • We are about to upload several long video documents, including a video tutorial to Wikipedia in three long parts of around 25 min each.
  • So far, we had strong commitments from the Faculty of Human Sciences of Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and a partnership with the CEFAN, a research chair of Université Laval (Québec City).
  • Our training events in November and December allowed us to involve specialists who will be able to contribute to the improvement of content on Wikipedia in relation to their field of research.

Methods and activities[edit]

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.


Online training on Wikipedia by the Lionel-Groulx Foundation on December 3, 2020.

In the continuity of the first grant of the project "History of Québec and French-speaking North America" and taking into account the findings following the achievements in 2019-2020, the team dedicated to wikimedia projects at the Fondation Lionel-Groulx proposed realistic objectives for this second grant. In addition, these objectives must be in accordance with the mission of the foundation. Finally, we had to deal with exceptional circumstances for the achievement of these objectives during the first 6 months of the grant (see the subsection below dedicated to the challenges).

During the first 6 months, we achieved several important objectives and we have started several steps. We organized 4 training events (one in August, two in November and one in December) and we organized 2 training events in January 18 and 25 involving 3 professors from Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and Université Laval. Morevover, we produced a 3-part long video tutorial on Wikipedia and several short videos which we plan to release during January. Finally, Mathieugp and JBouchez represented the Fondation Lionel-Groulx as a major partner during the event La Grande Wikiphonie three times during October 2020. (Initially set to occur on March 16, 2020, the event was postponed due to the COVID-19 crisis.)

  • During August, we organized two online meeting with potential partners. One with Nathalie Léger, Director of the Professional and Social Action Service at Centrale des syndicats du Québec, a union organization partner of our first grant and the other one with several members of C-Femmes, a group of women of the Fédération histoire Québec which federates 270 history, genealogy, heritage societies, museums and other organizations working in the field of history and heritage in Quebec. Both organizations are set to propose training events to Wikipedia in 2021, in partnership with Fondation Lionel-Groulx.
  • We involved the Historians Advisory Committee of the Fondation Lionel-Groulx in order to find specialists in the academic field who could participate to our online training events.
  • In the continuity of our methodology during the previous grant, prior to each event, we proposed lists of relevant articles to improve in accordance with the selected theme. As before, the lists were sent to the registered participants alongside our own suggestions of newbie tasks to improve the articles.
  • We continued to use the Programs & Events Dashboard made by the Wiki Education Foundation in order to monitor data related to the edits and other actions of participants.
  • Using Framaform from Framasoft, a free-software based online service, we continued to sent a survey few days after each event in order to collect the comments of the participants and their degree of satisfaction (please see the poll results for each event in the section below).

Midpoint outcomes[edit]

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

Online training events[edit]

Production of video tutorials and webinars[edit]

  • We did not choose the option to record live training events because we discovered that we were not satisfied with the results of our live tests early in August 2020. Consequently, and to be on track with our objectives, we opted to produce pre-recorded video tutorials on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource in addition to the already planned pre-record short videos (6). We are confident that we will achieve our goals despite the additional efforts and time required by the prerecorded option. We are also certain the end result will be vastly superior to our early disappointing live tests.

The video tutorial dedicated to Wikipedia is made up of 3 distinct but complementary parts, each lasting about 25 minutes. All 3 parts allow people who do not have knowledge of Wikipedia to acquire the basics to start editing the online encyclopedia and join the Wikipedia community. Those videos tutorials are particularly relevant during the pandemic because they give us the opportunity to reach people across Quebec, but also throughout the entire Francophonie. We therefore have a very important viewing potential. These tutorials and webinars will be uploaded to Commons and the Fondation Lionel-Groulx's YouTube channel. We will promote the tutorials via all our platforms (site, newsletters, social networks) and with the support of our partners in history, archives and heritage, education, and the scientific community (for instance, BAnQ, Wikimedia Canada and Acfas). Below are 2 screenshots of the first part of the tutorial on Wikipedia.

The recordings of the tutorial will not be uploaded to Commons or YouTube by the time this report is submitted, but on demand we can provide a restricted access to the files if the Wikimedia Foundation review team wants to see them.

Plan de la première partie du tutoriel de formation à Wikipédia - Fondation Lionel-Groulx
Plan de la première partie du tutoriel de formation à Wikipédia - Fondation Lionel-Groulx
Plan général du tutoriel de formation à Wikipédia - Fondation Lionel-Groulx
Plan général du tutoriel de formation à Wikipédia - Fondation Lionel-Groulx

Finances[edit]

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

Yes, so far we have.

The Wikimedian in Residence contract for the year 2020 was signed by the previous chief executive officer of the Fondation Lionel-Groulx before the grant was obtained by the Wikimedia Foundation. Compensation was retroactively increased last October to partially close the gap, while respecting internal pay equity. The management of the Fondation Lionel-Groulx will contact you to provide you with more information.

Learning[edit]

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges[edit]

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • Shortly after the start of the grant, important changes took place within the Fondation Lionel-Groulx with the appointment of a new person in management following the retirement of Pierre Graveline at the end of March 2020. On June 29, 2020, Myriam D'Arcy officially took office as chief executive officer of the Fondation Lionel-Groulx. During this period of 3 months, the board of directors had to lead the foundation. In addition, the resurgence of the Covid-19 pandemic in Quebec has changed some of our plans, even though we were prepared for certain eventualities. For example, the restricted conditions of access to libraries, both at Bibliothèques et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) and university libraries, made it more difficult to prepare training events. (Not all secondary sources are not available online.)

What is working well[edit]

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

  • The pandemic has favored the organization of sessions in universities, which will be continued in the second half of the grant since our workshops are a great way to liven up academic life, while the options are limited by confinement.

Following certain findings from the first grant of the project History of Quebec and French-speaking North America, we have implemented a strategy aimed at mobilizing specialists, such as university professors or researchers, in order to better organize and make their involvement in our project more efficient and sustainable. Here is our related learning pattern :

Next steps and opportunities[edit]

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • During the second half of the project, we plan to redouble efforts to reach more specialists in the academic field : lecturers, professors and graduate students. At the time of publishing this report, we have organized one major Wikipedia trainings on January 18 (Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières) and planned another one on Jaunary 25, 2021 (Université Laval). Those two training events together involved around fifty students and are certain to produce a good number of new or improved articles.
  • We plan to publicize our educational video content with the help of our partners and the Francophone Wikipedian community.
  • We will train more new wikimedians among professional or amateur historians, history teachers and students. We plan to reach at least 45 people during the next 5 months.
  • We plan to organize between 5 and 7 training events, if everything goes well.

Grantee reflection[edit]

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an grantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

This second grant for the History of Quebec and French-speaking North America project started in a very different context from that of the first grant. The first containment measures to fight the Covid19 pandemic hit Quebec in the middle of March 2020. When the Fondation Lionel-Groulx launched its activities during the summer, municipal and university libraries had been idle for several months with significant restrictive measures, which forced us to change many of our methods of organizing events. In addition, since spring 2020, we can no longer organize face-to-face events. In this context, we have succeeded in continuing to organize online events, Wikipedia obviously lending itself very well to this new reality. However, we have to deal with all the technical problems that this situation implies, such as poor internet connections for some participants or simply the overload of bandwidth during certain hours of the day, since a lot of people are teleworking. Despite this situation, we consider ourselves lucky to be able to continue to carry out this project, in particular with key players from the academic and cultural milieu.

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