Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Wiki Loves Monuments 2023 in Serbia (ID: 22215795)

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

Hello Nter25, and thanks for your proposal to organize WLM 2023 in Serbia. Here are my comments and questions:

• I appreciate you've been able to get support from other communities members and the chapter around this manner of organizing and running the campaign. Thank you for this outreach and engagement with communities in Serbia.
• The capacity of your team appears to be smaller compared to the previous year's proposal. Last year, the campaign was supported by a team of at least four persons including yourself. The current proposal contains a smaller team of two people, along with some volunteer support. Do you see any risks in your capacity to plan and implement the campaign activities in the proposal?
• The cost of maintaining the WLM website developed last year (600 EUR) seems somewhat high to me, especially because the budget to both create and maintain that website last year was 1100 EUR and was expected to be a one-time investment. I'd like to understand better the various costs associated with this maintenance-- could this information be provided? (e.g. web hosting, renting a domain, updating security keys, licenses, and uploading new content.)
• Is there any information available to show how many people are used the website for the campaign last year, and what they used it for?
• While content outcomes were good last year, participation in the campaign last year in Serbia was relatively low compared to expectations. What will you be doing differently to support better outreach and participation in the photo competition and edit-a-thon this year?

When you're able, please respond to my questions here on the talk page. With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 06:21, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Dear I JethroBT (WMF),thank you for your questions and support.

• We listed the other volunteers, because at the time of submission we were forming a team and waiting for certain confirmations. Actually, this year we expect to have a larger team of at least 6 people, so we have no concerns in terms of capacity. Part of the work has been prepared and we are just waiting for the confirmation of the grant, in order to start the official implementation. We can't wait to start the project :)
• You're right, we paid for the design, configuration, production and installation last year and those are one-time costs. We will continue to use the site and the existing conceptual solutions so that this year we do not have those costs and that is the reason why the budget has been reduced. Also, in the past years, we took care of these costs, which were paid several times lower than the market price, which we wrote about.

However, there are items that require expenses every year. Hosting and domain, which currently cost around €120. Optimization, license updating, database cleaning and site repair are in the domain of administrator services. There is also regular maintenance, spam protection, technical support, etc. We do not have professionals with those experiences in our team and we have to do these services either with the help of a professional or with the help of a provider. In addition to these technicalities, the site is being updated with customized instructions and content for this year's campaign. Optional prices from our provider are Hosting RSD 9150 + VAT, Domain RSD 1950 + VAT, Site Admin support RSD 2400 for 30 min (or if we decide to hire a person, it can be a fixed price with a different contract for 6 or 12 months support). Optional are WHOIS with price of RSD 600 and SSL certificate (Essential SSL) RSD 3900 for main domain or RSD 15900 (Wildcard SSL) for including support for sub-domains. The installation of the certificate, if purchased from the hosting provider, is free. If purchased from the other side, the price of installation from our provider is RSD 4000 + VAT. VAT is 20 %.

Here, too, we are trying to find a person who will do it for cheaper and with quality, with the security of data from the site. Although many things are done on a volunteer basis or with minimal costs, we have to pay for certain services, as it is usually paid for at higher prices in some wiki projects/movements. We would like to mention that in addition to the main site, we also had a site for the jury tool (ziri.wlm.rs).

• Statistics for the period August-December 2022: Number of visits 34,489; Pages 165,025, Hits 1,001,059. Top locales: Republic of Serbia, Russian Federation, United States, Montenegro, Germany, Albania, Sweden, etc. In addition to the page about the project itself, the most visited pages are the pages that show step by step how to create an account, rewards, and how to participate. A large number of people used the site via mobile devices, which is in favor of how the site configuration and data should be clear and accessible to users and adapted to both PC and mobile devices. We are very proud that the site is accessible and adapted to mobile users. If we had only used the presentation on Commons, it is likely that certain templates would not work in the mobile view or the information would be more difficult to find.
• Thank you for agreeing that the content results last year were good. We organized the competition after several years of break and bearing in mind that there were big organizational problems with the organization of the competition in 2016, it was a real challenge to organize the project last year. There was too much of a pause to make statistical predictions, which was reflected in the targeting of certain figures and metrics in relation to expectations. We managed to attract a certain number of people and institutions who supported us in a short time. What we could not influence was that September last year was extremely rainy, that it was impossible to take photos for more than 2/3 days (in some places even more) and that people practically barely had ten days to take photos. These are natural disasters that were not expected, but we tried again and made efforts to have good results and (success metrics in image collection of 88,2% and writing articles 570%) and in the final Global list, we had the best ranking so far, in the history of WLM im Serbia. Also, a very small number of days were free for project promotion and work on pre-competition activities, because we did not know if we would receive a grant, and we were waiting for confirmation before any public promotions. Then we used days to create a website in a short period of time and start the campaign. As you know, this year we wanted to start the promotion much earlier and apply for an earlier round of the cycle, but due to finances and changes in the Rapid Grant, we waited for the first release. Now we are waiting for the decision on the grant, so as soon as the decision on the grant is made, we will start the campaign and activities dedicated to promotion. Every single day is very important to us because the project will start soon, and we want to start the promotional campaign as soon as possible. We will use social media to target people, and to bring projects to new users. We are working on new promotional content for campaigns. Also new we will create interactive maps with geo-locations of monuments to help people in finding them. As soon as a decision is made regarding the grant, we will be ready to launch media and promotional campaigns on various platforms and work on the interest of the target groups. We have implemented certain ideas for the WLE campaign this year and we are quite satisfied with the success, so we will apply them to the WLM as well.

If you have any other questions or need additional clarifications as to why we need web infrastructure and its maintenance of it, let us know. We are waiting for your decision and can’t wait to start working on WLM 2023! Nter25 (talk) 18:47, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

@Nter25: Thanks for this helpful context around last year's outcomes, as well as your outreach planning for this year's campaign. I understand that some circumstances outside of anyone's control that diminished overall participation last year. It's also great to learn more about how the website is being used, and that it is accessible for mobile users. I've approved the proposal, but also want to acknowledge a few things:

• The overall investment for the event is fairly high for WLM campaigns in the Wikimedia movement. This somewhat understandable given that it is being individually organized that there are separate costs of website maintenance, but it will be difficult to invest more in the work you are doing in the context of Rapid Funds. In future proposals, you may need to carefully consider how best to allocate funds across different needs in future campaigns.
• Is it possible to consider the use of jury scoring tools that already exist in the movement, such as Montage, rather than maintaining a separate tool? Are there any limitations in Montage that make it impractical to use?
• Furthermore, we are less likely to support full funding for events where participation is limited, especially where competitions are involved with substantive prizes. Low participation in contests is a problem for a few reasons, among them that 1) Contests are less competitive when the pool of participants is lower (and sometimes, prizes tend to go to the same individuals) and 2) even if content-related outcomes are higher than expected on Wikipedia and/or Commons, it's not sustainable to rely on these outcomes on a small group of contributors (e.g. what if someone can't participate?).

With that said, I'm grateful you are organizing the campaign for this year, and appreciate you effort in preparing this proposal. Good luck with WLM in Serbia this year! I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 16:38, 14 August 2023 (UTC)