Grants:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Ukraine/2018/Program story for Midpoint report
Program story[edit]
Local Cultural Heritage and Notable People: Article Contest for Libraries[edit]
Description: Article contest focusing on notable personalities, culture and local heritage sites. A short-term article contest overlapping with GLAM and Education programmes. Contest included three competitions:
- Best article - recognizing 10 most quality articles
- Best work in improving - rewarding 5 users that contributed more than others to existing articles
- Most active library - for 3 library teams that helped to promote the contest and engaged many participants
Goals: Increase and improve content, educate and motivate librarians, engage new editors.
Timeline: March 19-25. It was not connected with any special event or date. The idea was proposed in the end of 2017 during community discussion on 2018 activity plan. The dates were chosen by the team.
Target Participants: Librarians and library patrons. While #1Lib1Ref, the annual campaign where librarians add references to improve Wikipedia, was announced for May, there were no volunteers to support it and both contest organisers and librarians themselves were skeptical about its potential for success. We thus decided to run an on-wiki writing contest with different design.
Promotion: We used social media to reach new users and inform the community. Contest's partners Ukrainian Library Association and Junior section of Ukrainian Library Association put the invitation in their newsletters and social media. Facebook group Wikipedia&Libraries was launched not long before the start of the contest. 2 presentations and 7 wikitrainings were given before and during starting period. Those covered 6 regions of Ukraine. According to Pageviews Analysis main contest page and 3 subpages (Rules, Tips, Participants' Reports) came up together with 7 739 views in March only.
Scoring/Judging: Experienced Wikipedians were invited to act as judges. A wikitable with the list of articles was set to collect scores from 4 judges. Each articles had to be reviewed by at least one judge. They were divided between them proportionally. Final article rate was computed as (article size in bytes)*(average of scores)/1000.
Outcomes: The contest resulted in 213 new and 72 improved articles. 115 librarians and library patrons from 45 localities joined the contest. The most popular subject choices were biographies, (more than 200 articles), followed by notable architecture monuments (about 50). Some participants also uploaded files to illustrate articles but this was not tracked as it was not a target.
Team: 3 volunteers with project manager support were coordinating the contest. 4 more volunteers organised wikitrainings in their localities.
Prizes: online shops certificates and wikisouvenirs. Also a Certificate of Appreciation was delivered to all libraries that participated.
Feedback: While collecting delivery information from participants we asked them for comments and suggestions. Selected ones from ca. 55 gathered:
| “ | The contest was interesting and fruitful, it was a good opportunity to get profound acquaintance with Wikipedia and start creating articles. We would like guides for participants to be more detailed, since it has not been understood for the first time, where we need to leave information on our input. | ” |
| “ | The contest turned out to be very interesting and useful, librarians for the first time took part in this kind of competition. We were among those who improved the information about the city's prominent figures to make it accessible to everyone. We will take part in the next contests with great pleasure. | ” |
| “ | It is interesting to work on creating articles for Wikipedia, but unfortunately we were not able to add photos in our team's articles, despite the fact that we have more than once reviewed video about Wikipedia editing that you sent us. | ” |
| “ | Thank you for organizing the competition, I find this experience interesting and useful for libraries, a good opportunity to share information about our locality. Unfortunately, there were few participants in our region. The hard thing about the contest was that Wikipedia has many rules that editor need to be aware of before the start. Perhaps this stops librarians. On the other side, there were enough information materials on editing in my opinion. For the next competition, it might be helpful to host a webinar or create an advert. I think the key to the library's participation is to conduct a wikitraining on spot - in the libraries. | ” |
| “ | The contest gave me personally a lot of new skills in researching and writing an article. I wish there were more such competitions, as they encourage the search for new information and they should last longer. | ” |
| “ | We recommend to advertise the contest more widely and make competing period longer, engage educational, academic and cultural institutions. In perspective the contest may be held when marking some anniversaries and national celebrations, and also be more topic-specific. | ” |
Retrospective: Contest achieved pleasing results and proved that choosing library staff as target audience is a fertile ground for producing original content, closing thematic gaps, enriching encyclopedia with information based on sources not accessible online. At the same time such contest should provide profound educational part and participants support.