Grants:Project/Rapid/Western NC's 3rd Holocaust preservation Edit-A-Thon/Report

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


Goals[edit]

We had a great event, we had about 48 people come out to the event. This included students, faculty and staff. I was very happy to see that two department heads of Humanities and Sociology came out to see what this event was about. I also fielded many questions from faculty in understanding more about Wikipedia in the classroom so that was a soft goal of mine for a few years now.

Outcome[edit]

Please report on your original project targets.


Target outcome Achieved outcome Explanation
30-40 48-50 We had an outstanding turn out from student, faculty and administrators (as well as some repeat visitors!). It honestly might have been more, but it was hard to consistently get a head count as I was running around constantly. We had very good promotion of this event this year from our school which I think really helped!


Learning[edit]

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

  • What worked well? - We had an outstanding turn out and a lot of content added to the site on a large percentage of the articles that students and some administrators helped out with. I have spoken to a few of them and they were really enthusiastic that they were able to add something to an article about such an important topic of Holocaust Survivors. Frank and I were able to more through the room and help almost everyone who had questions about editing and such. With the extra cratering we had, we donated it all to local homeless shelters and abused women's shelters in our community so nothing was wasted. We also, as I usually hope to do, came in under budget for this event by $148.29 which I will be returning to you all.
  • What did not work so well? - I'm actually super angry about this because I just found out during reporting that not a single edit was logged in our outreach dashboard that we created (https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/campaigns/western_ncs_3rd_annual_holocaust_preservation_editathon/overview) I have absolutely no idea why this technology failed us because I created it, posted it and helped at least 30 people log into the dashboard. But there is nothing!!! I noticed that it did not seem to be tracking my changes during the event, but I had to move on because of constant flow of people and just figured it would update after a short delay (which it sometimes does). I have no idea why this did not tack my changes, but there really isn't much I can do at this point sadly. I will have to figure out what happened and how to make sure it works correctly next event.
  • What would you do differently next time? - Honestly, I almost needed a third person to help with an event this size. It would have been nice to have someone take better pictures, find out what was wrong with the dashboard, etc etc. But we did the best we could with only two people. I've handled quite a few 40+ person events, and they usually are super hard to manage with just two people. That being said, this is more a problem of success than failure.

Finances[edit]

Grant funds spent[edit]

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.

Travel:

Hotel $199.67

Mileage $432.10

Total Travel $631.77

Catering: 710.69

Drinks/supplies (not included with catering): 24.25

Total Expenditures: $1,366.71 (148.29 under budget on this grant)

Remaining funds[edit]

Do you have any remaining grant funds? 148.29 Returning the funds to you all shortly.

Remaining funds from this grant have been returned to WMF in the amount of US$148.29.


Anything else[edit]

Anything else you want to share about your project? I only had time to take one picture, this does not represent the number of people that came out, but we were swamped from the moment it began, and unfortunately this was during a lull when one class was leaving and another was coming in: https://ibb.co/VS115h1