Grants talk:Simple/Applications/Shared Knowledge/2018/H2

Questions from SAPG

Questions from Siarus1074 / Kai

• Thank you for submitting your application. It gave me the opportunity to learn about the incredible work you are doing. I am really intrigued by your education program, expeditions, editing challenges and Wiki Loves Contests. Also, I think the Wikibeer are wonderful programs. I have a few questions I hope you can help me with.

Education

• In your education section, you mention making lectures to share with other schools. Do you mean videos to share or developing a script for physical location outreach to these schools (aka going to each school and talking)? Can you clarify this?

So far, our practice is to go directly to schools and give lectures to students. We have plans to make short videos (as we did for uploading images on WIkimedia Commons) for editing on Wikipedia, but we need time for that. After that, we can use these videos for educational purposes among others as well.

• I read you are currently only working with one school but potentially have 2 more schools that you will be working with. You have pretty high numbers for your SMART goals. To strengthen the application, I was wondering if you could provide metrics for last year's participants, new users, and new pages?

In 2017, we had 51 participants with 45 new users, who edited a total of 98 articles with many of them exhibiting high quality. The number decreased compared to 2016 because of the lower number of students enrolled to secondary education due to change of country’s educational system, namely, a shift from eight-year to nine-year primary education (many affected students choose to leap over a school year, which negatively reflected on the number of students from the affected generation).

Editing Challenges

• In this section you wrote, there was an "increase in content quality and substantial improvement in filling content gaps on many underrepresented topics." I was wondering if you could expand upon this?

The editing challenges are aimed at filling content gaps on the Macedonian Wikipedia, as we miss a lot of articles in different topic areas. One such challenge this year was the editing contest on the topic “1000 articles that every Wikipedia has to have”, which ultimately resulted in an improvement of the Macedonian Wikipedia in the global ranking for five places or nearly 5% increase in quality.

• • Can you provide examples of these underrepresented topics?

The topics covered with our editing challenges are either linked to some current events, historically important events or holidays (e.g. medal winners at the 2018 Winter Olympics, Fabergé egg) or topics of local interest for which we were supplied with references literature by our former Wikipedian in residence at the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts (e.g. rivers in Macedonia, archaeological sites in Macedonia). Occasionally, we use the editing challenges to take part in global editing initiatives, such like the World Mime Day Wiki edit-a-thon.

Crossed out content

• I noticed your content came from your strategic plan for the proposal (which makes sense) and there were areas and numbers crossed out for the proposal. The numbers seems to be lower on the proposal than the annual strategic plan. Can you share why the numbers have decreased?

The content in the grant application that was stricken has come as a result of the budget cuts that had to be made in order to adjust it to the recommended amount for funding and it was also followed by decrease in the projected metrics as nothing measurable could be achieved any more from the cancelled projects. This year’s annual plan, however, does not reflect the changes made to the grant application because we plan to spend the 10% contingency fee on projects from the plan. -- Македонец (talk) 06:19, 16 May 2018 (UTC) & Shared Knowledge

Again, you are doing engaging and interesting programs. Keep up the good work. I look forward to hearing from you. Siarus1074 (talk) 00:20, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

Question from Philip

Hello dear Shared Knowledge, thanks for your application :-) Looking forward to reading about your adventures this year and next year!

• Expeditions
  • Too bad the WikiExpedition in Northern Greece didn't happen :-( - is there something other affiliates might be able to learn from the challenges you faced in trying to organise this event?

Actually, Pavlos Stamos, a user that Toni Ristovski met during CEE Meeting in Warsaw last year, contacted me regarding this expedition, so it is possible to happen after all during 2018. We are quite open and we always talk about expeditions with other countries. However, we had some content provided from Northern Greece from last year as one our member of the community went and took images in expeditionary way from several places of the region, but nevertheless that does not reach the important goal and purpose of cross-border affiliate cooperation, and we believe during 2018 we will realize the WikiExpedition in Northern Greece together with our colleagues and Wikimedians according the original plan and idea. Additionally, we have a quiete good learning pattern on Meta regarding expeditions. We ask Liridon from Wikipedians of Albanian Language to be part in one of our expeditions, as they can learn about as well. We are also in constant communication with Wikimedia Serbia (as early as 2016) for joint cross-border cooperation in a manner of a joint WikiExpedition or WikiCamp which can also happen as a pilot project in the second part of 2018.

• • I'm curious as to how you measure the volunteer hours for your metric. Do you use a specific system in order to count them?

Yes, we have specific system for volunteer hours, and it depends from activity to activity, but usually depends of duration of event, number of participants, duration of online activity and off-line activity. We definitely need to create Learning Pattern, or proper presentation on upcoming conferences about this metric.

• • Did you see any overlap of participants of your WikiCamp 2017 and your expeditions in 2018?

We just came from a Wikiexpedition this weekend and yes, one girl which participated on last WikiCamp, took part in this expedition, so we have one female photographer after one year. She was happy to join, as well another girl from same WikiCamp, which was unavailable this weekend, but we have regular contacts with these two girls.

• GLAM
  • So if I understand your report from April correctly, you've folded GLAM into a broader partnerships program? Does this have to do more with opportunities outside the GLAM world or are GLAM institutions more difficult to convince?

As we started to have more and more activities with external partners, we thought that it will be nice to have Partnerships. Usually, other external partners outside GLAM are more easily to include in our projects, as government institutions answer too slow and have big bureaucracy. These partnerships involve wineries, breweries and private companies as well as other organizations such as foundations, NGO's, interest groups (ex. Slow Food etc.) that were eager to collaborate on the Wikiwine, Wikibeer, Wikirakija and Wikiindustry projects. Since these do not fully fall within the GLAM sector, we thought it would be better to expand the programmatic area to Partnerships.

• Editing challenges
  • The SMART goals seem fine, I'm just curious if you have thought of other metrics that might give you more information about the state of your community, for example how many new users actually stay on after the editing contests.

Yes, we need analysis for this topic, and we definitely need to find a number of users which stay on Wikipedia after editing contests. Additionally, along with this analysis we need to make proper plan for volunteers, how to connect with them and to remind them to stay active after some event. There are few new users who started editing by participating in our previous editing contests and their activity is still evident. We also have good communication with last participants of WikiCamp as we mentioned earlier.

• Staff
  • How you distinguish between paid and volunteer hours of your staff?

So far, we did not have any problems regarding this. For example, when they participate on edit-a-thons they have a role of Wikipedians.

• • How have the regular meetings with board and staff been conducted and how do you split the responsibilties in your organisation?

Once a month we have a meeting between Board members and Staff, where we determine tasks and responsible persons regarding upcoming activities and projects. Usually, all tasks that need to be done in person or during working hours is responsibility of our employees. - Македонец (talk) 06:43, 16 May 2018 (UTC) & Shared Knowledge

Please don't hesitate to ask for clarification if any of the questions look confusing :-) Best, Philip Kopetzky (talk) 19:22, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

@Македонец: Thanks for your replies! Looking forward to your learning pattern on measuring volunteer hours :-) Philip Kopetzky (talk) 21:02, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

Questions from User:Shangkuanlc / Liang

Hello there, it was nice to meet you in person in Berlin last month, Toni & Mario. Very special annual plan with a lot of own features in your proposal, I love your style! Here is my questions:

Education

• Have you used any online tools for better manage the volunteers and aggregate the impact, such as the event tool outreach dashboard? If yes, what are they, it would be nice you can name a few for me to better understand. If no, would you ever consider to use those tools

We are not using as we want, as we face difficulties in many cases when we want to see a statistics for some event. On example, experienced user can be part of some activity and for that period of time, he/she can write articles regarding that activity and articles outside of that activity, but dashboard does not make difference between this. But, as Mario this year have a chance to learn more on Learning Days at Berlin Conference for these tools, we can give once again a chance.

Editing Challenge

• I am also wondering the answer of yours about Kai's question "what are the underrepresented topics". Do you want to improve the topics related to Medicine? If so, I would suggest you to go Wikiproject Medicine/Translation task force for a thousand high quality english articles with only few hundred words to translate. I have done this in Taiwan and this translation project is still active since we launched it in 2014. Now we have translated over 400 articles from English into Chinese. I checked Macedonian language, only 12 out of 1000 articles have been translated, so it might be an opportunity to collaborate with the Translation task force team so you can achieve this goal easier.

This is very good idea, thank you for your suggestion. - Македонец (talk) 06:44, 16 May 2018 (UTC) & Shared Knowledge

Thank you in advance for the reply! --Liang(WMTW) (talk) 04:10, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Simple APG committee recommendations

Committee recommendations

Funding recommendations: Shared Knowledge is a returning applicant, and they have requested 13,715 EUR for 6 months. We recommend funding Shared Knowledge in the amount of 13,715 EUR for 6 months, including funding for both of their part-time staff positions. While we continue to have concerns about the size of Shared Knowledge’s staff relative to the size of the community and potential for impact, we recognize that Shared Knowledge has been continuing to grow more strategic and effective and that their staffing arrangement appears to be working well for the time being. We liked that Shared Knowledge is experimenting with providing top-level program insights about their achievements, in addition to the more detailed activity reports that they have always excelled at providing. We want to see what improvements their staffing model can help them achieve in the next 6 months, in order to better understand whether or not it will be sustainable in the long term. We encourage Shared Knowledge to continue to build cross-border partnerships, as was attempted with a WikiExpedition in Northern Greece for example. Despite the success of WikiExpeditions, there is still room for improvement in terms of outcomes vs. costs involved with organising a WikiExpedtion. We hope that Shared Knowledge remains stable and well-positioned for impact over the next 6 months.

Strengths identified by the committee: See recommendations above.

Concerns identified by the committee: See recommendations above.

On behalf of the committee. Philip Kopetzky (talk) 08:24, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

WMF decision

Approved. 13,715 EUR for 6 months (includes contingency). Congratulations! Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 18:38, 25 May 2018 (UTC)