Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Tochiprecious/Imo State Wikimedia Projects Awareness and Edit a thon/Report

Report accepted

Hello Tochiprecious, thanks for submitting this report. I recognize all the challenges you faced due to COVID-19 and cancellation of in-person events. I also appreciate your willingness to modify the event format and run the planned events online. I reviewed your report and have a few questions that I would like you to respond to:

• I checked two Outreach Dashboard links and the contributions of the participants, and noticed that the majority (if not all) contributions are done by you and Onyinyeonuoha. In the report, you mentioned that other participants were having difficulties. Could you please elaborate on this, explaining why only the organizers contributed to the Wikimedia projects?
• I also noticed that the first link to the Outreach Dashboard is broken. Could you please fix that?
• While for the first three events you have used the Outreach Dashboard, you haven’t done it for the 4th and 5th events. How did you track participants’ contributions to the Igbo Wiktionary?
• I’m interested in learning more about the challenges you faced in running the events online. Are these issues still relevant for your current online events? Have you overcome some of the connection and participation issues?
• Could you please add the usernames of the winners to the report? How do you feel about awarding expensive prizes for the events where most of the participants were not quite active?
• I’d also like to learn more about the Igbo Wiktionary. Are there any active community members who edit there outside of special events and contests?

I am accepting the final report and expense documents, but I’ll look forward to your responses. Thanks again for your contributions to the Igbo Wikimedia projects and community! Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 13:24, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

Dear DSaroyan (WMF), thank you for your questions.

• Onyinyeonuoha was also one of the participants. When there are projects, I usually add my own contributions and update it in the WhatsApp groups to encourage others to participate. Most of the participants, because it was their first time contributing to Wikimedia projects, they encountered a lot of difficulties which made some people give up on contributing. At a point I had to put out the steps to contributing to Wiktionary in the WhatsApp group.
• I'm sorry about this. I will check the link again and fix it.
• I used the outreach dashboard for the first event as it was more of an introduction and I wanted to get the number of participants. The second event, I it for the Igbo Wikipedia training, for the third event which was supposed to be Igbo Wiktionary, I had challenges selecting Igbo Wiktionary. I had to add Onyinyeonuoha as a facilitator to help me fix it from her side as I felt it was a network issue. I later learnt it was because Igbo Wiktionary was still in the incubator so it doesn't reflect on the Outreach Dashboard hence I opted for meta.
• Sincerely running the event online with new editors was quite a major challenge. Some didn't have the patience for trying again after not getting it right the first time. At a point I had to keep reminding them with the step by step guide on how to add words to Igbo Wiktionary as I opted for this because it was much easier for new editors compared to Igbo Wikipedia. I announced in the group that anyone who makes any input in the Igbo Wiktionary should drop the words in the group to enable us count them: otherwise, it won't be recorded. They followed this instruction that's how I was able to track their inputs. Reporting my own inputs in the WhatsApp regularly was way I felt I could encourage them.

For the current ongoing event, yes it was a challenge but I already learnt some lessons; this time, after the training, I had to put up a powerpoint presentation, uploaded it on google drive and shared the link on the contest page so anyone can access it. Through the WhatsApp group, Oby Ezeilo and I were also guiding some people who were new to contributing. Although some people still dropped in the process, I realized that when there's a prize attached to something, people tend to work more. This time we got over 200 articles even though it was 100 article challenge and I didn't even have to contribute. We also used created a meta page where the participants added the articles they created under their usernames because we noticed that Outreach Dashboard also measures inputs you've made from other sources not just for a particular contest. I learnt this from other Wiki contest and we decided to replicate it. It's been such a great learning curve but there has been improvements too. In the current contest, we also used an excel sheet to score the articles.

• Thank you, I will add their usernames to the report. I don't feel great about it but because it was already said, I had to meet up with it despite the low participation but in our current contest, the participants really battled to achieve their goals.
• Aside, contests and special events, yes there are other users who add to the Igbo Wiktionary because one of the goals was to bring out Igbo Wiktionary from the incubator and we needed constant activity in the Igbo Wikitionary to get approval for this. We received good news last weekend that the Igbo Wiktionary has been approved to leave the incubator.

Thank you very much for your support Tochiprecious (talk) 20:47, 22 December 2020 (UTC)