Grants:Project/Nattes à chat/Let's fill the gender gap through community building/Final

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Welcome to this project's final report! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from the grantee's project.

Part 1: The Project[edit]

Summary[edit]

In a few short sentences, give the main highlights of what happened with your project. Please include a few key outcomes or learnings from your project in bullet points, for readers who may not make it all the way through your report.

We organized regular meetings in Geneva and sponsored projects tackling gender gap issues. The biggest challenge after our previous experiences training newbies was to successfully engage the senior wikipedian community to participate, which was achieved, and to get new contributors to get acquainted with grant mechanism and project management. The community helped us to work on building the main project page to make it become a kind of platform informing on initiatives, events and activities related to the gender gap. We helped new wikimedians to set up local groups by sharing our experience, and sponsored on twitter, face book and mainstream medias the activites of the project. One learning is that combining online editing with face to face meeting is crucialto generate interest and participation, as well as cooperation across languages and and projects.

  • regular meetings in Geneva (once a week on monday over lunchtime)
  • regular travels to other events
  • engaging the wikipedian community on the main project page
  • organizing editathons and courses (Art+Feminism, one editathon in the Marguerite Durand feminist library in Paris, one course in Sion)
  • engaging new contributors in the wikimedian movement by giving regular information on grants, chapters and wikimedian events (francophone wikiconvention in Strasburg, Glam on tour Fribourg, Atelier des ssavoirs minoritaires)
  • contributing to building cooperation and cross wiki support with other projects tackling with the gender gap (Wililoveswomen, Women in red, Wikidonne, Wikimujeres, wikiwomen user group, Ateliers Femmes et féminisme, wikimatrimoine)
  • helping new geographical groups (Sion, Paris, Grenoble, Nantes, Montpellier, Lausanne, Poitiers) by providing support and advice
  • participating to online events and helping to organize one with Wikiloveswomen and Women in red
  • reporting transparently all activities on the main project page (creation on an interractive map with all events listed, setting up an evaluation tool of articles, informing about all published, translated and modified articles)

Project Goals[edit]

Please copy and paste the project goals from your proposal page. Under each goal, write at least three sentences about how you met that goal over the course of the project. Alternatively, if your goals changed, you may describe the change, list your new goals and explain how you met them, instead.

Project Impact[edit]

Important: The Wikimedia Foundation is no longer collecting Global Metrics for Project Grants. We are currently updating our pages to remove legacy references, but please ignore any that you encounter until we finish.

Targets[edit]

  1. In the first column of the table below, please copy and paste the measures you selected to help you evaluate your project's success (see the Project Impact section of your proposal). Please use one row for each measure. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please include the number.
  2. In the second column, describe your project's actual results. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please report numerically in this column. Otherwise, write a brief sentence summarizing your output or outcome for this measure.
  3. In the third column, you have the option to provide further explanation as needed. You may also add additional explanation below this table.


  • Having contributors starting a project of their own on wikipedia would be the best
  • Having contributors interested in keeping up regular meeting points to discuss the issues they are facing on Wikipedia


Planned measure of success
(include numeric target, if applicable)
Actual result Explanation
Increasing number of contributors retention in the Lake geneva region 58 contributors participated throughout the year in the Geneva Lake region these contributors stem from the let's fill the gender gap project, the Art+Feminism events in the lake Geneva region, and the wikimidis. They do not necessarily join as participants on the main project page.
Achieving 5% of retention on the Let's Fill the gender Gap project (the first project totalling 70 participants) 23% of retention (and 10% of retention of very active contributors 7 have contributed during the first month of 2018). Among the top ten contributors (edits ranging from 214 to 16 669) 7 are now transmitting their knowledge, either by giving workshops, holding wikipedian meetings or have written online ressources. & are chapter members, 3 have created their own local gatherings. To calculate the retention rate, we tracked the users who continued to edit in 2016, 2017 and 2018 (considering even one edit as a sign of continuation). The 10% active contributors continued editing throughout the years, and also contributed in January 2018. Then we looked at the contribution level and saw that the people who continued regularly also were the ones who had the most edits. So we can basically say the target was achieved. In fact we have achieved a little more on a regional scale as 7 contributors locally in francophone Switzerland are now active doing events and new local groups of their own (a local group in Sion, a thematic feminism group in Geneva).
Achieving 10 regular new contributors per year on the project page we started on january 1 2017 with 23 online registered participants (13 from Switzerland) and finished with 125 on december 31, 2017 (32 from the Lake Geneva Region in Switzerland). Among these 32, 7 new 2017 contributors in Geneva trained during the events are contributing on a regular basis of a minimum of 5 edits a month in average, and 14 also stemming fron the geneva Lake region were contributing actively on Wikipedia before (of which 10 from the previous workshops and 4 external senior contributors who joined in the mean time) The most active and regular contributors from the Lake Geneva Region (among which the top seven stemming from the first workshops in 2015-2016) are those who come to regular events and travel outside to meet other wikimedians (events, chapter members, attendants of Wikimania and Wikiconvention). They do not stem from punctual events such as Art+Feminism Geneva (which tend to attract general public and journalists once per year and produce massive result in one shot in terms of numbers of edits and not in term of regular contributors), but are the ones coming to the wikimidis and having attended the workshops to learn how to contribute. These data were compiled on a xls sheet, we used wikiscan to count contributions, and the regular updating of the project pages to be able to analyse the results.
  • Making the Wikipedia movement visible locally by organizing one event per month in average and a minimum of 2 trips (one to France and one to Switzerland)
regular meetings every week + 9 events organized two IRL editatons organized (Art±feminism Geneva 2017 and Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand), two courses organized in Sion, one online contest with WikilovesWomen, a conference on harassment at the francophone wikiconvention 2017, three courses organized with a local alternative library, a wiki picnic in Nantes). Trips to Lyon (Atelier savoirs minoritaires), Paris (Art+feminism in september and Margurite Durand Library), Strasburg (francophone wikiconvention), Fribourg (GLAM on Tour), Vienna (European lesbian conference), Bern (Magnus Manske workshop and National library events), Montpellier (Montpelibre), Geneva (two sans pages gatherings in april and december). with the wikimidis we are well over one event per month in Geneva, we also organized events elsewhere, and did much more travelling than expected due to the success of the project in other locations.
  • Translate articles written during the Let's Fill the Gender Gap Project and notify Women In red
results visible here, 78 articles translated in Catalan (21), English (29), Italian(6), German (2), Spanish (7), Hungarian(9), Russian (2). Some work done in Gujrati has not led to a published article. geneva is an international city and we have people willing to contribute but not fluent in French. So we decided to get them to translate...
Expanding the project to create a French Women In Red page achieved well over our expectation with 128 registered participants on the project page and major implication of participants on the discussion page, on creating logos, an interractive map and evaluation tool. Ressources for new contributors have been organized through cooperation with the francophone Wikimooc project. travelling and participating to other projects, added to media coverage and facebooking + tweeting new articles and activities has led to the project being promoted quite successfully and attracting senior contributors as well as new ones.


Story[edit]

Looking back over your whole project, what did you achieve? Tell us the story of your achievements, your results, your outcomes. Focus on inspiring moments, tough challenges, interesting antecdotes or anything that highlights the outcomes of your project. Imagine that you are sharing with a friend about the achievements that matter most to you in your project.

  • This should not be a list of what you did. You will be asked to provide that later in the Methods and Activities section.
  • Consider your original goals as you write your project's story, but don't let them limit you. Your project may have important outcomes you weren't expecting. Please focus on the impact that you believe matters most.

We started from a very local project in Geneva and expanded it in a truly francophone project with people setting up new local groups in Nantes, Sion, Paris, Grenoble and maybe in the future Poitiers, Montpellier and Marseille. we also started as a group of newbies and were able to engage the senior community around the project page, something we found hard to achieve in the first project. this prompted us to "go out and reach out to them" instead of waiting for them to come to us, which we did by privileging offline meetings and attending of events. We used the knowledge from other groups (Women in Red, Art+Feminism, chapter implication) to design a platform which would advertize any intitiative around gender gap issues to promote discussion and interest, and share events. We can say that the level of engagement we managed to foster online around gender gap issues (137 participants to this date on the project page) has far exceeded what we wanted to achieve! We also showed that one can work across languages while locating a project page on one wiki, and it is a good way to go as we are a global movement and should not stop our activities at a given frontier in a truly global movement. We also managed to get local female contributors participate in the grant process to enable them to gain more autonomy in the future, promoting a dispersed from of leadership. The fact that the project les sans pagEs has generated a good media coverage and prompted other female contributors to start initiatives elsewhere is also something we are happy to have acheived.

Survey(s)[edit]

If you used surveys to evaluate the success of your project, please provide a link(s) in this section, then briefly summarize your survey results in your own words. Include three interesting outputs or outcomes that the survey revealed.

Other[edit]

Is there another way you would prefer to communicate the actual results of your project, as you understand them? You can do that here! I have compiled data of my own on a xls sheet to be able to have a clear picture of the impact of the project, looking at levels of contribution for each pseudos stemming from the first project.

Methods and activities[edit]

Please provide a list of the main methods and activities through which you completed your project.

  • building notoriety of the project on social medias (Facebook, Twitter)
  • building the project page to attract participants and engage the online community by publishing regular news about our activities (interractive map of events, news ect..)
  • buildung up press coverage
  • regular face to face meeetings in Geneva (once per week)
  • participating to and organizing events (Paris, Grenoble, Nantes, Montpellier, Lyon) to foster interest in the gender gap resolution
  • organizing a conference on harrassment at the francophone wikiconvention in Strasburg
  • organizing and participating to a women in red and Wikiloveswomen contest by trasnlating articles
  • training new contributors to the Wikimedian movement so that they get to know about grant processes and wikimedian ressources
  • meeting and supporting new groups to help them launch their own meetups in 2018

Project resources[edit]

Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Even if you have linked to them elsewhere in this report, this section serves as a centralized archive for everything you created during your project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

  • Project page les sans pagEs
  • interractive maps of organized events
  • photo wall of created articles
  • Newsfeed about the project containing a written uptdate (in French) for each event:
  • Twitter handle les sans pagEs
  • Face Book page
  • Art+Feminism Geneva 2017 project page in Strasburg
  • conference on harrassement at the francophone Wikiconvention
  • organized workshop (conference + editathon) at the feminist library Marguerite Durand in Paris
  • online contest with Wikiloveswomen and Womne in red about african feminists see here on the anglophone page
  • press coverage for 2017 is available here:
    • Léa Polverini « Les "femmes en rouge" de Wikipédia, l'histoire d'un vide encyclopédique » sur Slate, le 18 janvier 2018.
    • Alban Elkaïm « Ils organisent des ateliers d'édition sur Wikipédia » sur StreetPress, le 20 décembre 2017.
    • Magali Philip « Médias: rendre wikipedia plus féminin » sur RTS, le 27 novembre 2017.
    • Louise Hermant « Wikipedia·E, des marathons d'édition contre le sexisme sur Wikipedia » sur Les Inrockuptibles, le 19 novembre 2017.
    • Christine Siméone « Le journal de 19 h » sur France Inter, le 15 octobre 2017.
    • Christine Siméone « La revanche des femmes est en route » sur France Inter, le 14 octobre 2017.
    • Wikipedia, où sont les femmes? France Culture, 30 septembre 2017.
    • Revue de presse CLAFVD, 25 septembre 2017.
    • Eh Wikipedia, elles sont où les femmes?, Nova 25 septembre 2017.
    • Reportage de la Wikimedia Foundation : Natacha Rault: Taking a feminist approach  to Wikipedia’s gender gap, By Ruby Mizrahi, Wikimedia Foundation, Samir Elsharbaty, Wikimedia Foundation, September 1st, 2017.
    • Écrire l’Histoire collectivement, sur Wikipédia, avec les edit-a-thons, Histoire engagée, Anne-Valérie Zuber, 23 mars 2017.
    • Pratiques, Crépidules, 14 mars 2017.
    • Des femmes sans pages, UQUAM, 8 mars 2017.
    • Art+Féminisme, Libradio, mars 2017.
    • L'Université d'Angers se lance dans la féminisation de Wikipedia, Esther Paolini, 8 mars 2017.

Rencontre brunch avec Angela Marzullo, CPG, 4 mars 2017.

    • Une formation Wikipedia pour rendre les Valaisannes plus visibles, Le Nouvelliste, 6 février 2017.

Pas à pas, les femmes deviennent plus visibles sur Wikipédia, 24 heures, 7 février 2017.

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 took enough risks in your project to have learned something really interesting! Think about what recommendations you have for others who may follow in your footsteps, and use the below sections to describe what worked and what didn’t.

What worked well[edit]

What did you try that was successful and you'd recommend others do? 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.

  • Your learning pattern link goes here

What didn’t work[edit]

What did you try that you learned didn't work? What would you think about doing differently in the future? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • Trying to be transparent is a challenge and has to be carefully matched with the risk of some people being hastled, especially when it comes to mentionning financial questions.
  • With the growth of the project, the amount of needed communication can grow rapidly and be very demanding.
  • We would send documentation in a zip file and scan the invoices straight away to gain time for reporting.

Other recommendations[edit]

If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please list them here.

Next steps and opportunities[edit]

Are there opportunities for future growth of this project, or new areas you have uncovered in the course of this grant that could be fruitful for more exploration (either by yourself, or others)? What ideas or suggestions do you have for future projects based on the work you’ve completed? Please list these as short bullet points.



Part 2: The Grant[edit]

Finances[edit]

Actual spending[edit]

Please copy and paste the completed table from your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed the actual expenditures compared with what was originally planned. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided to explain them.

Expense Approved amount Actual funds spent Difference
Project staffing initial request 5000 CHF 824
Communication initial request 500CHF 911 411 CHF for that line of expense
Travel initial request 4000 CHF 4047
Logistics initial request 6000 CHF 4568
Total 10.051 CHF corresponding to 10.000 USD 10347 296


Remaining funds[edit]

Do you have any unspent funds from the grant? Please answer yes or no. If yes, list the amount you did not use and explain why.

  • No

If you have unspent funds, they must be returned to WMF. Please see the instructions for returning unspent funds and indicate here if this is still in progress, or if this is already completed:

Documentation[edit]

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grantsadmin(_AT_)wikimedia.org, according to the guidelines here?

Please answer yes or no. If no, include an explanation.

  • yes

Confirmation of project status[edit]

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

Please answer yes or no.

  • we did our best... Sometimes late in filling out report.

Is your project completed?

Please answer yes or no.

  • yes

Grantee reflection[edit]

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on what this project has meant to you, or how the experience of being a grantee has gone overall. Is there something that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed, or that you’ll do differently going forward as a result of the Project Grant experience? Please share it here! Working on this project has been fun, challenging (and exhausting) due to its success. We would never have dreamed about triggering the community to publish and participate so much. We really enjoyed the support and collaborative work with Women in Red, Wikiloveswomen. Establishing links with Wikimujeres, Wikidonne made us feel part of a community working collaboratively towards solving a portion of the gender gap problems. When we were told by a prominent member of the community that this project was one of the most active on the francophone Wikipedia, we all felt very surprised (and happy). What is rewarding is to see other groups being set up in different locations, and chapters launching new intiatives around gender gap issues. Personnally I was deeply moved when coming to the Wikiconvention in Strasburg, I saw that WMFR employees had added the Women in Red logo on the stickers listing all the wikimedian projects. I think this was the best reward (as we never expected it!) of the year.