Grants:Project/Rapid/SuperHamster/Wikipedia Asian Month 2018: Preparation
Wikipedia Asian Month is an annual online editing event occurring every November, all month long, since 2015. The edit-a-thon asks participants to create and/or improve articles on Asian topics.
In the past three years (2015, 2016 and 2017), over 20,000 quality articles have been created in more than 50 language editions of Wikipedia. The event helps improve Wikipedia's coverage of Asian topics, which is lacking on several language versions of Wikipedia. The event also encourages participants to learn more about Asian topics, particularly ones they may not be familiar with; the event mostly requires participants to write on topics from countries other than their own.
Last year's grant funded materials and resources that helped make the event possible. As the event continues on a global scale, with the goal of growing, this preparation grant is requested to fund preliminary organizational work and outreach prior Wikipedia Asian Month in November.
Project Goal[edit]
In order to repeat and improve the success of the previous Wikipedia Asian Month, we have following goals for the preparation stage.
- Onboard more than 10 team members on the international organizing team.
- Outreach to 65 Wikimedia Projects include Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikivoyage
- Outreach to 300 community members, offline event organizers, and general participants
- Achieved through outreach at conferences, online, and various affiliate activities.
- Outreach to at least 10 Wikimedia Affiliates for co-operation
- Promote Wikipedia Asian Month at Wikimania 2018, WikiConference North America 2018, and various other regional meetings and activities
- Draft a universal guide of the Wikipedia Asian Month and its sister projects, translate into at least 5 languages
Project Plan[edit]
Activities[edit]
During the preparation stage, following activities will be taken:
- Build a full-size international team and provide necessary training to the new leaders
- We are looking to have 10-12 people on our international team, with half of them having no or little experience of community leadership on Wikimedia movement. The latter goal is to help encourage new Wikimedians, and to allow our current leadership to practice training users. Through the training and communication with the team, we are expecting at least 3 of them are able to handling a part of organizational affairs of the WAM in following years and play a bigger role in his or her own communities. This will also help the sustainability of the Wikipedia Asian Month with new members constantly join the team and learn the experience.
- Outreach to WAM friends, active editors on each projects and community leaders through Wikipedia Talk page, Email, Social media and face to face meeting to solidify the community of the WAM.
- Start a new Wikipedia Asian Month User Group in order to create a cohesive community and better organize our efforts. This would strengthen our brand and establish an identity and ecology for participants to identify with. This would also give us more leverage for cohesive communications and potential external sponsorships.
- Draft and translate a universal guide for everyone involves into the WAM.
- Communication is a challenge for international events due to language barriers. An universal guide translated to at least 5 language that covers most part of the event can make cross-wiki communication and training much easier for both organizers and participants. If the universal guide works as we expected, we are looking to get more participation from various language versions of Wikipedia.
- Conference/ Event promotion
- We have a display at the Community village of Wikimania 2018, and 3 members of the team will be there to promote Wikipedia Asian Month during the Conference. We will also have presence at WikiConference North America 2018 in Columbus, Ohio.
- We will promote WAM by providing a short presentation about WAM by audio to various events in Wikimedia Movements
Impact[edit]
- A full-size international team of WAM that run smoothly and improve the sustainability of WAM
- More Wikimedia projects (goal is >50) on-board
- Training to at least 6 new community leaders
- Promotion at 5 events
Resources[edit]
- International Team
- Local Organizers: To be determined; last year's event had support from dozens of volunteers.
Resources requested:
- Note: We have funds remaining from WAM 2017's grant and would like to apply them to this grant.
- T-shirts for organizers and outreach coordinators: $350 (include global shipping)
- Stickers & Pins: $200 (includes shipping)
- Conference Outreach Material: $200 (Wikimania and other regional conference, events)
- Social Media Advertisements (Facebook, Twitter): $50
- Translation of the universal guide: $250
- We will attempt to find volunteers, but would hire translators if needed to ensure professional-level translation of materials.
- Infrastructure: $100
- We currently use tools like AirTable, Google Drive, and a custom data server to support the event. We're budgeting for infrastructure in the event we need to pay for more services (AirTable membership, G-Suite subscription, etc.).
- Bank Transfer Fees: $40
- To cover international transfer fees for any payments and reimbursements.
- Unforeseen: $120
Total: $1,310
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